second brain

dept. of candour

During Apple's wilderness years, it nearly got bought by Sun Microsystems. This is what former Sun CEO Scott McNealy has to say about that now:

“If we had bought Apple, there wouldn’t have been iPods or iPads … I’d have screwed that up.”

why nokia failed

Nokia has gone from being the world's most successful purveyor of communications devices to a basket case in the space of a few years. Stephen Elop, its new chief executive, has described the company as standing on a 'burning platform'. To understand why, you - and he - could hardly do better than read this brilliant post by an ex-Nokia employee, Adam Greenfield. It's full of insight, not just into Nokia, but into how the world of communications has changed:

Nokia’s engineers were and are brilliant at this. I am so far from an expert on the topic it’s not even funny, but I’d feel comfortable wagering that there is still no organization on the planet more capable at designing the guts of a phone, the various antennae and radios-on-a-chip that allow a handset to communicate with a network. Nor are there many who can compete with Nokia on the ability to optimize a supply chain and bring in a given bill of material at a given (and generally astonishingly low) cost. These are precisely the skills you need if you’re interested in dominating a global market in commodity communication devices, as Nokia did for the fourteen years ...But the company utterly failed to anticipate, understand or organize itself to deal with the critical thing that happened...This was that you could no longer think of mobile phones as communication devices. You had to conceive of them as interface objects through which users would experience content and command functionality that ultimately lived on the network.

Nokia's 'value engineers', says Greenfield, have been allowed to dominate the company, at the price of marginalising its more visionary and design-focused thinkers:

And this is the crux of it. As it happens, the value-engineering mindset that’s so crucial to profitability as a commodity trader is fatal as a purveyor of experiences. Of course you still want to produce your offering for the lowest achievable cost — but that cost is bound up in intangible, nondeterministic dimensions of design, in ways that are only partially-at-best quantifiable. It’s just not particularly wise to allow engineers to make decisions about things like product and service nomenclature, interface typography and the graphic design of icons: they’re, I daresay, not even neurocognitively equipped to do so.

Read the whole thing.

 

 

semiotic cross-dressing