| |||||||||||||
Going AndroidGoing AndroidPosted Oct 14, 2012 12:29 UTC (Sun) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784)In reply to: Going Android by man_ls Parent article: The story of Nokia MeeGo (TaskuMuro)
Nokia had a lot of expertise around making hardware, even at the smartphone level, but the article indicates that much of this was unnecessarily tied up by the Symbian faction, meaning that substantial cooperation appears to have been denied to the Linux faction within Nokia. That by itself explains why various hardware problems always seemed to recur with the Internet tablets and why Nokia spokespeople kept telling customers that they couldn't expect Free Software drivers and that they should consider themselves lucky with what they were given.
What we see in this story is probably commonplace in businesses where one product line, responsible for a lot of earlier revenue, is rapidly going out of date but where those in charge of that product line dominate the resources and refuse to relinquish them, insisting that they are "part of the solution". I imagine it was similar with Solaris within Sun Microsystems when customers told the company that they had to modernise their OS distribution and/or provide GNU/Linux in the product line-up: things like OpenSolaris, Sun's Linux distributions, and various modern tools all probably faced internal opposition from the factions insisting that the golden age would return and on their particular schedule, too.
Symbian, competitive in the form of its predecessors in an age when they offered features lacking from certain desktop operating systems, was getting a renaissance from the availability of Qt across all Nokia's platforms, but that was merely a measure to dull the pain of working with it in an age when there are fewer limitations on what you can deploy on a mobile device. Sadly, that helped prolong the mindset that Symbian might be the only answer to the company's problems and thus prolonged the turf wars that undermined the introduction of a viable successor.
Nokia's main problem appears to have been incompetence in management, thus squandering many of the advantages of being a large organisation with access to substantial resources.
(Log in to post comments)
Going Android Posted Oct 14, 2012 23:06 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] What we see in this story is probably commonplace in businesses where one product line, responsible for a lot of earlier revenue, is rapidly going out of date but where those in charge of that product line dominate the resources and refuse to relinquish them, insisting that they are "part of the solution". Yup. Typical reaction to Distuptive technology. Textbook example, in fact. The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution explain how to solve it: you create separate, semi-autonomous division - prefarably not all that close to the HQ of the old company, then give it some legal support (plus small initial startup capital). This is how PC was born (do you know why it was named IBM model number 5150? that's because it was supposed "successor" of IBM 5100 which was designed in a traditional way and, of course, totally bombed in market). Nokia was unable to do that. Elop did this part of the strategy right. What it did totally wrong is immediate abandonment of everything else. Instead he should have praised Sybian and gave it money and his total support. Probably positioned WP7 phones as phones for the emergent (for Nokia) markets (like US) and kept hyping Sybian elsewhere. Nokia's main problem appears to have been incompetence in management, thus squandering many of the advantages of being a large organisation with access to substantial resources. It's the opposite, in fact. It was too effective in suppressing useless development which had nothing to do with the needs/wants of Nokia customers. Please read the The Innovator's Dilemma. Please. Successful, properly run companies suffer from disruptive technologies, not the incompetent ones (incompetent ones lose much earlier).
Going Android Posted Oct 15, 2012 9:42 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Yes, thanks for yet another rant and the usual list of recommended reading links. I don't think I disputed that disruptive technologies threaten successful companies, but maybe you already wanted to tell us this anyway and were looking to get it off your chest at the first opportunity.
I also like the way you redefine management incompetence and failure to execute to be effective management in a politicised culture so that burying projects under layers of time-wasting is actually seen as an effective way of focusing the company on its priorities. (Never mind that such projects, run correctly, should actually have been the top priority for the company.) I'm sure such management practices appealed to various Roman Emperors and to the average despot, but objectively it is an incompetent squandering of an organisation's resources and ability to compete at a level its size would suggest.
What will be of most interest to historians and business theorists is how a previously successful organisation whose recent success was supposedly founded on its management structure entered a period of decline and inaction. And we're talking about a company that was making stuff like cables and rubber products for most of its history, so you can spare us the lecture about disruption.
|
|||||||||||||