The Morning Chew

What’s Next for Nokia?

Here’s the problem: Hardware Rules at Nokia. The software is written by the software groups inside of Nokia, and it is then given to the hardware group, which gets to decide what software goes on the device, and the environment in which it runs. All schedules are driven by the hardware timelines. It was not uncommon for us to give them code that ran perfectly by their own test, only to have them do things like reduce the available memory for the software to 25% the specified allocation, and then point the finger back at software when things failed in the field.

In addition, I read their “competitive analysis” of the iPhone. It was a short powerpoint deck that proceeded to lay out all of the reasons why Nokia did not have to change what they were doing at all. They even included “developer annoyance at the App Store submission process” as a reason why the iPhone would ultimately fail (this was around the time that the 3GS was released, so they had no excuse).

Bottom Line: Nokia is a hardware company that hates software.

Even if they thought Apple’s App Store *was* terrible, that’s no excuse as to why their software/hardware segregation would be “okay”. That just means they shouldn’t operate their app store in the same way. Apple’s marriage of careful software and hardware integration has been the ultimate factor to their success thus far. Nokia needs to learn from that.

You know a company has horrible direction when they count on the failure of others for their own success.