As part of the the SLAM lab course (taught by Prof Davies), I was part of a team working with Nokia to look into how can Nokia win the hearts and minds of developers in US.

We came up with the following presentation which followed the lessons taught by Tufte. We kept the information parallel in space and highly dense. This paid off in many ways and our entire team was converted to being followers of Tufte. The initial 5/10 minutes of the presentation are hard when you have to explain the layout and what we did and how it mapped into the super graphic but once that was done we get a solid 1-1.5 hours of  discussion and free information exhange around the crux of the problem during which the entire content is right in front of us. We presented this to some of the VPs at Nokia and it was well received (both the content and the presentation format).

Presentation apart, the recent developments has me concerned about the future of Nokia. One of the important messages we tried to communicate to them in 2009 was that they should have a platform thinking across their various phones. Since then, our Nokia point of contact has moved onto to other things and Nokia has adopted a platform instead of solidifying their own. One comparison I drew during the final presentation was that Nokia in many ways is like Apple during the late 90s (an old aging platform, lack of developer interest, no momentum behind it’s products, a strong loyal fan base) but with many upsides (large market share, reasonably profitable and in the early days of the segment it is facing problems in). Nokia has time to fix things but it does not have time to not be agile. Nokia has amazing hardware design skills within the company and some of the best manufacturing logistics. The cultural issues ingrained within the company might have driven such a drastic step to go with Windows but it is not clear if it was worth not having a platform to own. The dominant design for smart phones will standardize soon in terms of hardware to a point where higher megapixels and faster processors will not be a competitive advantage but the platform will. With continued subsidies in US market for handset purchase will insure that consumers will not care beyond a certain threshold for hardware quality (this would be different in other markets where Nokia is strong but most cell phones do not have a life cycle beyond 3 years), thus quicker product life cycles and newer features will play an important role which gets harder when one has to co-ordinate software life cycles across companies. Also, this life cycle will be shared by various manufacturers.

Apple decided to kill the old platform it had and acquired a new platform via NeXT acquisition but the investment paid off. Nokia should have acquired Palm (if they did not want to continue with Symbian but I have a feeling that these decisions were not overlapped in time). I think these are early days in the smart phone / portable device platform war and there will not be a single winner in this platform war (unlike the desktop wars). One thing is guaranteed, times ahead are interesting and Nokia will provide entertainment one way or the other.. (Hopefully Nokia will come out strong)

Coming back to the presentation.. we broke the problem of winning the hearts and minds of developers in US by segmenting the developers out  into sub groups

1. Hobbyist

2. Individual developers

3. Companies focused on revenue from sale of apps

4. Companies focused on their market reach via apps

We then enumerated broadly where their hearts and minds are focused at. One thing which clearly emerges is that the relevance of the business of the writing apps and finance ROI gets more significant as you move across developer segments. The platform richness does not matter as much (remember that this was the time when some folks thought having python on Nokia phones will make a huge impact). We then showed the position for Nokia along the various focus areas in US and other markets. Another important aspect which comes across is that  in US for smartphones, Nokia is in the early adopter stage and it should attack the problem similar to how a startup would trying to sell it’s products with only early adopters.

We then went on to draw the relation between the various focus areas and the ideas which Nokia could pursue. This shows how interrelated the problems for Nokia are and how Nokia would have to focus on all fronts equally. One point to note is how Nokia faces a chicken and egg problem with market share in US (and thus market reach for apps) and the lack of apps or developer focus. Apple did face a problem similar where no one was focused on their platform to develop applications, Apple went on to develop a whole lot of apps on their own. Nokia does this with maps and some other apps but needs to have a much broader effort, either to create incentives for companies to write apps for them or write the apps on their own.

We made the presentation by interviewing in person and emailing mobile developers, conducting surveys and online research. We did not have any access to internal Nokia data nor did we sign a NDA.

Team Members: Samir Sawant, Ashok Dhiman, Sahar Hashmi, Andrei  Akaikine and myself (Ritesh Shukla)

SLAM lab presentation

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