The post reckons that Apple has committed ‘two meaningful errors’ and quotes Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster outlining them. Gene reckons the two screw-ups were thus:

1. Apple did not get subsidies for the iPhone
2. Apple signed an exclusive agreement with AT&T in the States

Surely Gene must have been in the room when the iPhone launched?

Getting a carrier to anything on your terms at this point was almost impossible at this point of time. Exclusivity built demand. It built demand and really, really wound up the carriers who didn’t get the iPhone — many of whom were severely pummelled by their shareholders for this ‘failure’. It also really annoyed consumers who were delighted (or, perhaps ‘content’) with their existing carrier and had to go through the rigmarole of swapping.

Apple had to get a top carrier on-side. They had to make sure they got complete control of the purchase experience, of the price plans and other features such as visual voicemail. Indeed, ‘inclusive data’ integrated into a price plan was nigh on invented by Apple as far as most people are concerned. It was certainly available beforehand but Apple were able to insist on a whole raft of requirements from their exclusive partner.

And if you think this is old hat, just remember how iPhone is priced today. Apple still maintain strict control over the amount of minutes, texts and so forth the carriers are allowed to include. The price plans need to be ‘Appleified’. That is, small, medium and large. And it has to cost money. Famously Apple never make a loss on anything they sell. There are (virtually) no loss leaders at Apple.

And let’s get to the nonsense of subsidy. Zero carrier subsidy was a masterstroke. Of course everyone-and-his-dog would have purchased a shiny iPhone if they’d got the opportunity to do so ‘free’ with a 2 or 3-year contract. Of course. Apple are masters of marketing. Not for nothing was the iPhone branded the ‘Jesus Phone’.

We had a good two or so years of only the rich elite being able to afford iPhones (though that has changed, see: Vicky Pollard has an iPhone 4; You are not cool anymore). In many markets, the operators were simply banned from selling them on a Pay As You Go basis. Why? Because Apple said so. Apple’s message? If you want an iPhone, you’ll need to pay for it. This helped Apple manage it’s back-end logistics (I doubt they could have coughed out 100m iPhones in the first year). Simultaneously Apple benefitted hugely from the fact that the devices were ‘valuable’.

Every player in the industry benefitted. If you’d like a super (and highly vexing) example, just look at the insurance premiums for the iPhone. Whilst I insured by Vodafone-supplied Nokia E90 (£700 value) for just £6 per month (for all my phones), when I went to buy an iPhone I was astonished to find a £570 iPhone requiring a ‘special’ £12/month insurance premium. That only covered that iPhone. No other phone on my account. You what? Push the sales person and they’ll explain that ‘it’s an expensive phone’.

What did we all do? Well most of us secretly felt a bit good and paid the extra cash. Just in case. Because the phone was only partly subsidised. You know, it was ‘valuable’. Whereas the £700 Nokia model … well, that was ‘free’ as part of the contract, right?

Even today, you can ONLY get a ‘free’ iPhone (i.e. completely subsidised) in the United Kingdom if you commit to the carrier’s largest £75/month price plan. Way out of the reach of the UK’s £30-35/month majority.

Exclusivity helped Apple guarantee the experience and it was instrumental in ensuring the carriers in other international markets played ball too.

Subsidy wasn’t a problem. If anything, it was a huge, huge benefit. Admit it, you rather enjoyed walking about with your ‘expensive’ iPhone whilst everyone else looked on in admiration.

Gene reckons that Apple was really hurt because they didn’t do a deal with Verizon. Like they could have just knocked out a CDMA version in twenty minutes. Apple had to focus on GSM in order to get the international footprint.

Are you ready for a final bit of JesusPhoneLovin’?

Here’s the last paragraph from MacNN’s post:

Exclusivity is the only reason Android phones are outselling the iPhone in the US, the analyst claims. “As an example, in countries where the iPhone is available on multiple carriers and competes with Android, we see the iPhone outselling Android,” he says. “The greatest factor in the success of Android has been Verizon. Customers are loyal to their carrier, and once Verizon gets the iPhone, we believe Android’s success in the US will be tested.”

Customers are loyal to whatever’s cheap and provided by the carrier. Can Apple’s Foxconn production centres knock out enough stock for them to supply all carriers? Nokia, they are not. Nokia and Samsung can turn out hundreds of millions of devices in a given year — but I really wonder if Apple is built, yet, for this kind of volume.

As for Android outselling iPhone. Get over it. Verizon is selling FREE Android devices. Take the Motorola Citrus, for example, a perfectly nice ‘entry level’ Android device. That’s free. You can pick up the rather fancy LG Vortex (in Violet colour, no less) for a measly $39. Or you can plonk down $179 for the sumptuous Motorola Droid Pro. All of these, obviously, need you to agree to all sorts of 2-year contracts, data packs, mail-in rebates and the like.

Android is going to continue to outsell iPhone for donkeys years.

Until, that is, Project Nano appears on the horizon. Whatever Steve tells you, their sales of iPhones are not in any-single-way stratospheric compared to Android, Nokia and RIM. There’s a reason RIM is the #1 smartphone in a bunch of countries around the world, not least the UK, most of Latin America and quite a bit of Asia. But when Apple decides to get real and introduce a $200 iPhone that it WILL allow carriers to subsidise, the market will get rather exciting.

It’ll get even more exciting if Apple decides to use a bit of it’s cash pile and put 300 million iPhone Nano $49 devices into the market in one year. That would set the market alight. And it would probably need another person as CEO who will apply old fashioned economics to the industry.

Until then, suck it up.

Update: I forgot to point out the Android price-point. In the UK, you can now pick-up a pretty good Android ‘smartphone’ for £70-80 or just over $100 — that’s for the handset itself, no service plan, no contracts, just ‘pay-as-you-go’. No wonder Android is outselling iPhone. As Martin points out in the comments below, it’s all about the price.

Following on from Tomi’s lengthy piece on Nokia (“Nokia’s fall from grace: The Background Story“), I thoroughly enjoyed Andrew Orlowski’s piece in today’s Register.

Andrew interviewed a former senior Nokia Executive, Juhani Risku, who’s penned a ‘diagnosis of the company’ along with ‘some radical surprising solutions.’

It makes for a super read. A super read.

Whilst Tomi was talking about the background and (generally) external factors, Juhani gets stuck right in — naming names — and documenting utter, utter disasters.

The funny thing is, we knew it anyway — well, we suspected.

For instance, check out this quote:

In the case of Maps following the €8bn Navteq acquisition, nothing happened for six months. Then Google made Maps free. More recently, it has made turn-by-turn navigation free. In another case, the bureaucracy implemented processes carelessly.

“One day, one of those people responsible for directing User Experience at Symbian came in and said – you can’t work anymore with the old process any more. Everyone asked what that new process is – and she didn’t say what it was. So 200 people were doing nothing for six months.

“A strategy is devised, then it’s delayed a bit, then delayed a bit more… then it’s already old.”

It’s magnificient, truly magnificent, to see this kind of feedback — from a guy who actually *witnessed* it.

Because we’ve all been witnessing it from the outside. We saw the acquisition. We saw absolutely NOTHING happen for 6 months. Heh.

Dear me.

Dear, dear me.

Anyway, get another coffee and do check out Risku’s perspective at The Register.

I’ll finish with this final quote:

One phrase repeatedly came up in our conversation: The Peter Principle. This is the rule by which people are promoted to their own level of incompetence. Many, but not all of Nokia’s executives have attained this goal, claims Risku.

Oh dear.

[The image at the top of this post, by the way, is one of Nokia's now well forgotten Aeon 'concept' phones -- more details at The Reg Hardware]

Yesterday, Tomi Ahonen posted yet another magnum opus chronicling Nokia under Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo’s reign. It makes for absolutely compelling reading, especially — and I mean especially — if you’re drinking the Apple Koolaid, or if you are curious as to how Nokia was once regarded as an impregnable super-brand and now is effectively relegated to bottom-feeder status. Almost everyone in the mobile industry (even if they’re new to it) knows it wasn’t always this way.

Tomi’s piece is most definitely not a defence of Nokia, however it sets the record straight on a number of key points that the rest of the market [or media] simply does not appear recognise.

I tweeted the post — but I also asked Tomi for permission to republish the post in full here in order to make sure it goes out to the largest amount of readers. I know many of the executives in the audience don’t have time for Twitter. Thank you for permission, Tomi.

I strongly recommend getting a cup of coffee to read along with this one, or saving it for the evening commute. It’s a long one, but I hope you’ll find it engrossing.

Right then, let us begin…

Over to Tomi.

- – - – -

Wall Street is a Cruel Mistress. The business press are buzzing with the rumor that Nokia is searching for a replacement for Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (OPK) their CEO who has only run the company for 4 years following Jorma Ollila who is now the Chairman.

Nokia is the world’s bestselling mobile phone brand – selling more mobile phones as numbers 2 and 3 combined. Nokia is also the world’s largest smartphone maker – selling more smartphones than numbers 2 and 3 combined. Nokia is profitable where most rivals are struggling to make profits. None of Nokia’s big 5 global handset makers have managed to migrate customers to smartphones in meaningful ways, while Nokia’s market share in smartphones is better than its market share in dumbphones. By all measures Nokia is executing well. Why is Wall Street demanding his head on a plate?

I think its a combination of 6 factors. There is Apple’s iPhone of course. Then there is the question of Nokia’s profits. There is one particular Nokia phone model, the N97. There is the smartphone operating system Symbian. There is OPK’s promise to investors that he would restore Nokia’s market share in the US market. And lastly – but very importantly – there is the relative lack of sophistication and knowledge of the US based analysts who are far more familiar with the easier and simpler PC industry than the complex mobile industry. This is another very long article, so please bookmark the page and read it when you have good time. Grab a cup of coffee to go with it.

WHAT DID OPK INHERIT

OPK took over from Ollila to run Nokia in the summer of 2006, four years ago. What was the mobile world like back then? Nokia was the world’s bestselling mobile phone maker. For the full year 2005 they had achieved 35% market share. Their big rival was Motorola who was nearing 20% market share with their surprise hit phone ‘Razr’ and many analysts were accusing Nokia of having missed the boat on flip phone design – thinking the world would soon all have Razr look-alike phones (how quaint, isn’t it. Today most phones are still candybar phones – the Nokia staple – even Apple’s iPhone is a candybar form factor, not a flip phone, as are most Blackberries and most Androids..).

In addition to Motorola’s Razr surge, the two big trends in mobile phones in 2006 were 3G phones and musicphones – and in both, Nokia was accused of having falled seriously behind. SonyEricsson was launching Walkman phones, Motorola its Rokr. And in 3G Nokia had only about 25% market share vs 35% in all phones where the South Koreans LG and Samsung had taken a surprising early lead.

In 2006 the tech world was not very impressed by ‘smartphones’ – the category of superphones that Nokia had invented exactly 10 years before – and most analysts felt that the very expensive smartphones would only sell to enterprise/corporate users with business-oriented smartphones like the Blackberry and various Palm, Windows Mobile etc devices. US analysts didn’t even believe in mobile data services in 2006, as the USA was the last country to discover SMS text messaging and didn’t really believe in SMS until the Obama Presidential campaign of 2008. And here was Nokia with its crazy notions of expanding the expensive smartphone market to consumers – the N-Series – with the cameras and music players and user-installed applications and video recording and forward-facing second cameras for 3G videocalls and internet surfing and picture messaging – all that was seen as a dangerous and costly gamble by many analysts.

But Nokia believed in its views. It had set up the Symbian partnership with its rivals (something we don’t see Apple or Microsoft or RIM even trying today) where all of Nokia’s biggest rivals – Motorola, SonyEricsson, Samsung, Panasonic etc were invited to join as part of the Symbian family – as co-owners! By 2005 there were 60 different smartphones manufactured by ten major phone makers using the Symbian OS, which powered almost 7 out of 10 smartphones. Nokia was the biggest minority shareholder in Symbian – but only minority, it couldn’t dictate Symbian development. The OS was being developed to meet the varying demands of the partners, including Motorola asking for improvements based on the laggard USA market, to NTT DoCoMo asking for improvements based on the world-leading Japanese mobile market. Nokia was there in that mess, but determined to keep it a partnership that helps all, rather than having the mobile phone industry fall into an all-out war of a dozen duelling smartphone operating systems and immense fragmentation.

So when OPK took over, Symbian powered most smartphones in the world. Nokia’s market share in smartphones was a fraction of that, obviously, being 48% for the full year 2006. Microsoft Windows Mobile based smartphones were the second biggest platform behind Symbian with 14%. RIM’s Blackberry had 8% of the market and Motorola who made both Symbian and Windows Mobile smartphones had 6%. Previous global number 2 smartphone maker Palm had fallen to 5%. The total worldwide smartphone market in 2006 was only 80 million handsets, about 8% of all mobile phones sold. Of the world’s Global Fortune 500 brands, only 7 were involved in manufacturing or selling smartphones, so the competition was not very fierce.

ENTER APPLE

The first thing that happened during OPK’s reign and changed ‘everything’ in the phones market was Apple entering the phones space, with Steve Jobs demonstrating his prototype iPhone in January of 2007. OPK had only had half a year in control, when the whole mobile world changed forever. And all the rules changed too.

Up to 2007, the best marketing machine in mobile telecoms had been Nokia, hands down. It was loved by the tech media and had the best customer loyalty in the world. But Apple is far better than Nokia in marketing. And Apple’s customer loyalty is legendary. A new kid was in town. Steve Jobs is the master showman even back home in the USA, where marketing and presentation is given far more relevance than in OPK’s home country of Finland, where you are expected to conform to the rules and stick to the facts. Not to brag, not to show off.

The iPhone 2G was not the best phone in the world. Apple has since made 15 major technical improvements to the original, over the past 3 years, and Apple itself has celebrated those 15 changes as radical and important. Nokia’s flagship N95 which was being sold before the iPhone 2G even launched in 2007, had 14 of those 15 technical abilities as standard features. And the N95 had tons more features and abilities that even the latest iPhone 4 does not support. By every reasonable comparison, the N95 was the superior phone in 2007. Except for one very visible drawback – the N95 didn’t have a touch screen. And most head-to-head comparisons of smartphones by international reviewers in 2007 found that the N95 bested the iPhone 2G.

But somehow with Apple, the facts no longer matter. The iPhone was the ultimate best phone ever – according to Steve Jobs – and because Steve Jobs says so, that started to become the storyline. The truth didn’t matter. That the iPhone 2G was not even a proper ‘smartphone’ – it didn’t even offer users the ability to install apps (this ability came a year later) and didn’t support industry standards like MMS and even today doesn’t support Adobe Flash. The iPhone 2G was not a 3G device, making it instantly obsolete for example for the Japanese market and didn’t have such abilities as GPS and stereo bluetooth. But that didn’t matter. If your smartphone didn’t have the one cool thing the iPhone did – a touch screen – it seemed that your phone was old-fashioned.

Nokia was manufacturing over 50 phone models when OPK took over. The iPhone was outrageously expensive and with that price point, it could ‘afford’ to install a touch screen. Nokia sold a wide range from superphones more expensive than the iPhone (yes thats true) to far cheaper dumbphones with basic T9 keypads. It would have been prohibitively expensive to abandon the existing product lines of its existing 50 or so phone models at Nokia in 2007 and migrate them all with reckless abandon to touch screens (and a dumb move too – even today in 2010, more QWERTY based texting-oriented phones are sold than touch screen phones; and more basic T9 keypad based phones than all QWERTY and touch screen phones put together).

But it was not only about the phone with Apple, i.e. the hardware. And no, I’m not talking about the UI or the apps or the App Store or the iOS eco-system. Something far more devastating changed with Apple’s entry to phones. For Nokia, someone changed the rules of the game in January 2007 and didn’t bother to tell Nokia. Because Apple was in the game, now anything Steve Jobs said was the word from god. And no matter how severely deficient the first iPhone models were, because they were Apple phones, that meant they were the world’s ‘leading’ phones. And if you didn’t match the current iPhone model with a potential ‘iPhone killer’ – then you were obsolete. Suddenly in 2007 Wall Street lost its respect for facts, and started to believe Apple’s version of the story, ignoring the truth. And most analysts who would study the iPhone would come from the PC side of the tech industry, far more familiar with the relatively simple and easy PC industry than the remarkably complex mobile telecoms industry. Those PC industry experts were very familiar with Apple’s accolades and could see in the iPhone the long-held promise of the pocket PC. Again it didn’t matter that Nokia was the first phone maker to boldly call its smartphone a ‘multimedia computer’ – the truth no longer mattered in 2007, when all stories were now spun by Apple’s PR machine. Besides, with Apple’s touch screen, the ‘pocket PC’ metaphor seemed far more compelling than with Nokia’s early smartphones with keypad based navigation.

I do not mean this as a criticism of Apple, I mean it with admiration. Apple are masters at marketing. They know how to wow the investors and Wall Street. They know how to play THAT game. So for example, RIM has sold more Blackberries every single quarter since Apple launched. The past 3 quarters when Apple’s iPhone unit sales have been flat or declining, and the iPhone market share has shrunk from 17% to 14%, in the same time Blackberry’s unit sales have grown and its market share has grown. How does Wall Street report the story? They keep repeating the factually opposite from the truth story – they keep repeating the myth that RIM is losing market share to Apple’s iPhone. The exact opposite is the truth. Apple is losing market share to RIM! But with Apple, Wall Street is hypnotized. Facts no longer matter, it is what Apple says.

So suddenly the rules of the game changed. Now its the ultimate game of hype and spin-the-story. And Nokia was Finnish to a fault, being the ‘stick to the truth’ very honest and open story, any problems too, bring them into the open and volunteer as much truth as possible. This had been a good strategy back in the Era Before the iPhone – when the rivals were other very engineering oriented, facts oriented rivals like Motorola, SonyEricsson, Samsung etc. Now there was a new kid who seemed to play ‘unfair’ and start to distort the market opinion with all sorts of bizarre claims and facts and ‘innovations’ which certainly were not invented by Apple and often were simply established industry standards. Look how Apple handled the Death Grip problem. First, it denied the problem and told customers to hold the phone differently. Then Apple said there is no hardware problem, there was a software bug in the display of the phone. Only after Consumer Reports verified the problem, did Apple do a formal acknowledgement of the issue, but then, Apple blamed the press (for supposedly spreading a false story) and then took the child’s excuse – everybody else is doing it too (which turned out not to be true) and then finally said the problem is miniscule (again not true). This is the modern spin-doctor way to handle a crisis. That is the Apple Way. Fight the story, control the story, deny it all, change the story, blame the reporters, blame the rivals. Spin doctors that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would be proud of.

When facing a rival like Apple, what Nokia needed from a CEO, was a showman and a brawler. OPK is not that showman and its not in Nokia’s ethos to go out and fight. What Nokia needed was over-hype and super-celebration of its huge legacy of achievements and every possible new tidbit it was doing. Nokia has a trophy cabinet full of innovations and patents and true world leadership it could celebrate with every major phone launch, but Nokia doesn’t do that well. It is understated. It is the wrong rival to Apple, Nokia can’t win in a marketing-spin game. Not with OPK in charge. That is not his style (nor the style of previous CEO Ollila either). It is anathema to Finnish management style. They want to ‘do it’ rather than ‘say it’. They want actions to speak rather than words. They believe in cooperation, not competition. They want to work with their rivals, not fight with them in public like Apple does with Adobe and Microsoft and now HTC and Samsung etc. And then Nokia are bewildered why is Apple getting all the accolades for deploying solutions and systems that are industry standards and Nokia has had on its smartphones for years already.

This was a total change and it hit OPK and his team hard. There was an unreal aspect to the coverage of the phones market, in particular the smartphones market, after the iPhone launched. Nothing was the same, and still up till today, Nokia has not adjusted to the press relations and analyst relations and investor relations side of the new world order in the iPhone Era.

Consider how unfair this issue is. Apple has today 2% of total phone market share. Nokia has 34%. Apple has 14% market share in smartphones – and has lost market share now for 3 straight quarters. Nokia has 41% market share in smartphones and has been growing market share in the same period. Of Apple’s flagship phone the iPhone 4 – with its 5 major improvements now in 2010 – Nokia has had 4 of those in its phones long before 2007. Why is Apple given any credit as the ‘leader’ and Nokia accused as ‘having lost the lead’?

But Nokia doesn’t know how to sell itself to Wall Street. Not to match Apple’s amazing PR spin machine and Steve Jobs’s stage presense.

Apple yes is the most profitable phone maker (it is the most profitable tech company too) but it is 100% certain that Apple could not sustain that level of profits if it sold 20% of the world’s phones. That is classic ‘niche’ luxury bracket market share profits – its what Porsche does in cars. Nokia is not a Porsche, its more like Toyota. Nokia’s motto is not ‘connecting rich people of the West’. Nokia is connecting people. Period. All people including the poor in Africa. Selling new phones as cheap as 25 dollars, unsubsidised. Selling 3G smartphones as cheap as 100 dollars, unsubsidised. Thats one sixth the price of an iPhone, yet its a 3G smartphone. And Nokia is still doing it profitably. It is patently unfair to do any financial comparisons of Apple’s niche smartphones-only luxury goods strategy to Nokia’s mass market strategy.
Apple will never, ever, have 20% of the global mobile phone handset market. Never. It cannot hope to have it, why? Because Apple has a huge investment in its design and look and feel, which is expensive to maintain with its expensive California based designers. Apple’s price points are far above the industry average in anything it does. Look at the Mac line of PCs. The Macs have always been premium priced PCs. The Macintosh sells in the 3% or 4% market share globally. That is what Apple is good at. The Mac has never had even 15% of personal computers. Never, not one quarter in 26 years since launch. That is Apple. It is a luxury premium design brand. That is not a true rival to Nokia! And if Nokia abandoned its 35% market share in the mass market, and put all its effort to win some share in the small 4% luxury bracket where Apple currently is, I’d get a shotgun and go shoot the CEO myself. No, Nokia has been doing the right strategy (for a mass market brand). It has had to manage its global dumbphone market share (profitably) while migrating its customers to smartphones (profitably) and has been able to do that, where Motorola, Samsung, SonyEricsson and LG have been spectacularly unable to do that.

But now that Apple is in the game, and as Apple is the master at stealing the spotlight, suddenly Nokia is being compared to Apple! How unfair is that? Its like comparing Toyota’s total range of cars and their average engine performance, to the performance of the Porsche! Giving no credit that some Toyotas have four doors or big cargo ability or diesel engines, etc. Just on Porsche’s particular one advantage! Come on, Toyota sells taxis and family sedans and rugged off-road vehicles and cheap city cars and luxury sedans and hybrid eco-cars and minivans – and some sports cars too. Porsche cannot offer anything in almost any of those other categories. Porsche is pure performance at luxury niche prices, profits and markets. Toyota cannot be compared to Porsche, not fairly. Compare Porsche to Ferrari or Aston Martin, and compare Toyota to Ford or VW or Nissan. But no, Nokia finds itself now constantly compared to Apple.

And then that bizarre and cruel twist of the facts. While Nokia’s market share in smartphones is growing and Apple’s is declining, the storyline for nine months now and counting, has been from Wall Street – that Nokia is ‘losing market share to Apple’s iPhone’. This is absolutely categorically factually untrue! For the past year the exact opposite has been happening. Apple’s market share peaked in Q3 of 2009 and is in decline. Nokia has turned its market share decline back into growth. And with any other tech brand as Nokia’s rival, there would be sanity with the tech reporters and business press. But its Apple and their hypnotic way to change the perception of reality.

PROFITS

Which brings us to OPK and Nokia profits. When he took over, Nokia had 21% profit margins. Last quarter (Q1) Nokia reported 4% profit margins. During his tenure Nokia reported for the first time in more than a decade, a quarter of making losses (last year). And twice this year Nokia has already issued profit warnings. This is a very valid Nokia investor concern and the CEO has to take very strong leadership in profits.

So again, the nemesis. Apple makes ever bigger profits one quarter after the next. But Nokia is in three businesses, in the ‘dumbphones’ business, in the ‘smartphones’ business and in the networks business. In the dumbphones business, since OPK took over, almost for the full 4 years Motorola has reported losses. SonyEricsson has reported losses about half the time. LG has reported losses several quarters and even Samsung reported losses a few times. Nokia’s handset business has never reported a loss! Does Nokia master its core business? Yes. Does it get credit for it? No, because a luxury niche smartphones-only maker called Apple makes tons of profits.

In smartphones Nokia has been making profits too. Not all its rivals do that. Yes, Apple and RIM make profits, but HTC and Palm have been making many quarters of losses, Palm did them for three years straight until bought out by HP. The smartphones business is no guarantee to make money – witness how quickly Google pulled out of the market with its Nexus One ‘superphone’ and even more astonishingly Microsoft, who pulled the plug on its own smartphone ‘Kin’ project in only 6 weeks. Nokia keeps making profits in the smartphones space – a market it invented and it utterly dominates – selling more smartphones than Apple and RIM combined. But because Apple makes massive profits, and Nokia only modest profits – Nokia is punished. It is not compared to the other major handset makers like SonyEricsson, LG and Motorola who have struggled deeply in attempting to shift to smartphones.

In networks the story is truly bleak. Ericsson has been barely profitable countless quarters and making lossses in many more. Alcatel has reported many quarters of losses. Canadian Nortel and American Lucent were making losses and were sold. Motorola’s networks division was deeply in the red until sold to NokiaSiemens Networks now. But Nokia’s networks division has been on the threshold, making mostly slim profits, but falling into losses several quarters. Is it fair to compare Nokia’s brave and mostly successful performance in this deeply unprofitable industry against Apple’s niche smartphones performance? I think not. But networks do about a third of Nokia’s total business and is a heavy drag on its profitability. To put it another way, the handsets business (dumbphones and smartphones) are far more profitable than Nokia’s corporate profitability. But the networks unit has hurt Nokia’s corporate performance.

Is that the responsibility of the CEO? Yes, definitely. Is it something OPK could have done and fixed? Yes, he could have sold the unit or spun it off. Or he could have instituted severe staff cuts to reduce costs. Or he could have increased networks division prices trading NokiaSiemens Networks market share for better profits. Yes OPK could have been a more ruthless CEO and made painful cuts and forced the networks unit into better profitability, helping Nokia’s bottom line immensely. He didn’t do that. He was a more ‘Finnish’ CEO respecting the individuals and giving the division time. Was he too soft? Its a tough call, but this is management difference very strongly between US and European managements. OPK is definitely a European manager.

SYMBIAN

Then we have the Symbian operating system. The analysts seem to hate Symbian. There are continued calls for Nokia to abandon Symbian and adopt Google’s Android. There were many who suggested Nokia should have bought Palm to get its operating system and replace Symbian with Palm.

Here life is utterly cruel to OPK, to Nokia and to Symbian. A decade earlier, Nokia could have very easily developed its own OS for use with only Nokia branded smartphones. That would have been the better thing for Nokia but not for the industry. Nokia has believed in open systems, partnering and industry standards (where Apple, RIM, Microsoft and Palm have all been pursuing proprietary solutions that create industry fragmentation). So rather than create only its own OS, Nokia invited its rivals to join in the Symbian Partnership: Motorola, Sony, Ericsson, Panasonic, Samsung, etc. Who does this? Especially where Nokia had invented the smartphone and had a huge lead in smartphones, and Nokia very much in public said it believed that in the future the smartphone market would be enormous? Why ‘gift’ this advantage to rivals? But that is the Nokia Way. They believe in cooperation with rivals, especially on standards. Nokia wanted a global standard OS. They had 10 handset manufacturers providing Symbian phones by the time OPK took over Nokia in 2006.

So what did Nokia and Symbian do when the iPhone appeared? They first started to develop a touch-screen oriented Symbian evolution. Note that if you compare the ‘advanced’ Apple OS/X or iOS of the iPhone 2G in 2007, Symbian was MILES ahead of it in 2007, in everything else except touch interface (and please please remember, even today in 2010, the majority of all phones do not use touch screens, not even smartphones). In 2007 Symbian supported apps (Apple added app support in 2008); cut-and-paste (Apple added in 2009); folders and multi-tasking (Apple added in 2010). Even today, Apple doesn’t support Adobe Flash, the internet industry standard which Symbian has supported for most of the decade. Why is Symbian ‘accused’ of being old fashioned and Apple’s iPhone OS ‘celebrated’ as being modern?

But the Apple interface looked futuristic, and its touch interface was ‘intuitive’ and definitely modern. Far more modern than keypad navigation. But this is only one aspect of the OS. By any other measures, Symbian was ahead in 2007. But this was now the Era of Apple’s iPhone, and nothing mattered except Apple. So no matter what else you had, if you didn’t have touch interface, you were obsolete. That was suddenly the new thinking in 2007. No matter how unfair, that is how the world reacted to Apple’s spin.

Yet consider what Nokia did. Symbian was a partnership. Nokia spent a billion dollars to buy out its partners, and then Nokia would have owned Symbian to do anything with it. What did Nokia do? This is totally Nokia philosophy – the best thing for the industry, not just for Nokia’s short term interest? Nokia turned Symbian into a Foundation and made it fully open source. Apple’s iOS is not open source. Microsoft’s Phone 7 is not open source. Neither is RIM’s Blackberry OS or HP’s Palm. Who is ‘advanced’ and who is retarded? Who is the true leader? But this is how Nokia does things. The Symbian OS is still used by leading smartphones made by Samsung, SonyEricsson, various Japanese phone makers – and of course Nokia. Apple, RIM and Palm do not license their OS to anyone else. Is this the ‘right thing’ or the ‘wrong thing’ for Nokia to do with its smartphone OS strategy?

If you were Nokia with Symbian after Apple’s sudden success of its App Store in 2008, what would you do? You’d want an app store, wouldn’t you? The Apple iPhone App Store has received all the big press and attention. Did you know Nokia launched its first app store in 2003? Yes, five years before Apple’s App Store. And then while Nokia was carefully working with its carrier/operator partners – where Apple rudely bypassed the operators/carriers and deployed its App Store to bypass the carriers/operators – Nokia still was able to build an app store – with operators/carriers. Again that Nokia mindset of cooperation, not abuse. And how is Ovi doing? It was the world’s third most successful app store behind Apple’s and GetJar’s. Still, where is LG’s app store? Samsung’s app store? Motorola’s app store? SonyEricsson’s app store? Nokia has the world’s 3rd most used app store and gets no credit for that, while Nokia started before Apple and works through its partners, not against them. And Apple gets all the accolades as it thumbs its nose to the industry and bypasses the chain. Yeah I like Nokia’s approach more, even if it takes more time.

And the first Symbian touch screen version was not very good. Nothing first generation usually is (remember all the missing ‘standard’ parts in Apple’s iPhone OS in 2007). But what is Nokia and Symbian doing with it now? They do as they always do, keep improving. The touch interface is getting better. It need not be as good as Apple in the touch department, as long as it is good enough. Nokia is not trying to become a Porsche of supreme performance only in one type of vehicle; Nokia does the full line of phones to all market segments. So as long as its ‘sports car’ is reasonably good, if that same platform (Symbian) also supports business phones and youth phones and cheap Africa smartphones, etc, then it is far more suited for Nokia’s vast market – and its partners who make smartphones for other markets! And you know what? Nokia is now selling more touch screen phones than Apple does. Yes.

Then if you were Nokia, what is the perfect strategy? Seeing the new operating systems like Google’s Android and Samsung’s Bada and Microsoft’s Phone 7 – all operating systems developed after the iPhone – what would you want in an ideal world? You’d want Nokia to embark on its own super OS for ‘modern’ touch-enabled smartphones. But not to do it like Apple or Microsoft with proprietary systems. And you’d want Nokia to license the new OS to rivals, not like Apple and Palm and Samsung, but more like Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Phone 7. And you’d want Nokia to use Linux as the basis of that new OS, like Google Android.

Better than that, you’d want Nokia not to abandon its vast Symbian developer community. So you’d want the tools to be made compatible for Symbian developers also to be able to develop on the new OS,wouldn’t you? That is opposite of what Microsoft did, when it abandoned Windows Mobile developers when switching to Phone 7. And where there is a Linux heritage to Google Android and Japanese Linux Mobile phones and Nokia’s new OS, you’d want Nokia to pursue ‘compatibility’ into the future, among all Linux OS platforms including Android, wouldn’t you?

And if you could ask for one more thing, a partner, a global giant partner, so Nokia isn’t doing this alone. That theoretical smartphone OS strategy is ‘everything you have in Google’s Android’ – but more and better and even more kind to Symbian partners and Nokia’s heritage. That is not the quick solution and not the cheapest solution, but it is by far the best solution for Nokia, its developer partners, its handset manufacturing partners and Nokia’s future – as well as the industry. When Apple and RIM and Palm and Samsung all selfishly release smartphone operating systems only for their own platform, that only hurts the industry with unnecessary fragmentation.

So now Nokia. This is exactly what Nokia is doing with MeeGo, the Linux based totally new smartphone OS, developed together with Intel. They have over 20 manufacturers already signed up to release devices using the MeeGo operating system. The development tools for Symbian will be harmonized with MeeGo to allow smooth migration. This is Nokia’s future smartphone OS. Isn’t this the ‘perfect’ strategy for Nokia?

You didn’t know all that, did you? Isn’t this a very prudent, well thought out, strategic path for the brand whose smartphone OS (Symbian) in Q1 of 2010 still sold more than Apple and RIM and Android – combined! Give the developers a growth path into a cutting edge touch-oriented Linux OS, but along the way, don’t abandon the Symbian platform and the Symbian handset partners and developers.

Because Nokia has a strategy already in place for MeeGo, there is utterly no point in even considering going Android. Buying Palm would have been idiotic in this environment. But then consider true Nokia rivals SonyEricsson, LG and Motorola – they do not control their destiny. They don’t even make a smartphone OS. They are utterly dependent on Google or Microsoft (or Symbian or MeeGo) for their smartphone future. Which is the right strategy? And what of Samsung? Nokia saw smartphones as a strategic direction in 1996. Samsung launched its own smartphone OS, Bada, now in 2010. Is Nokia not miles and years and yes, lightyears ahead of its real rivals, Samsung, LG, Motorola and SonyEricsson, when it comes to smartphones? But no, now there is an Apple in the market, suddenly Symbian is ‘obsolete’ and Nokia is ‘lost’ in its smartphone strategy? No, OPK, life is not fair. Wall Street is giving you no credit for the best strategy in smartphone OS’s and is rewarding Apple for very sub-optimal, proprietary, industry-dividing, hurtful, excluding smartphone OS strategies that even refuse basic internet standards like Adobe’s Flash being supported.

With Symbian, Nokia has failed in communicating clearly its strategy. It didn’t defend Symbian’s reputation when it should have. It has ignored Apple’s ‘improvements’ and let them enter into the folklore of Apple’s supposed leadership. This is as much OPK’s and Nokia’s PR failure as it is a failure of Wall Street in understanding Nokia, Symbian and MeeGo. If more QWERTY phones still are sold in 2010 than touch screen smartphones, then isn’t there at least some merit in saying that Symbian will allow excellent QWERTY use, for enterprise/business phones – where Apple utterly fails – and for the youth segment that is addicted to SMS. No, Nokia doesn’t know how to fight a PR war and with a better OS and a far superior OS strategy, they lost the perception war. Now all think that Symbian is a dinosaur in its death-struggles..

US ANALYSTS

So then there is that aspect, that the country where there are more Nokia investors than any other, is the USA. It is Wall Street which decides what the majority of Nokia investors feel and think, not Helsinki or Stockholm. And American analysts are very knowledgable and have high standards of reporting and analysis. They have excellent tools and there is a huge resouce of various tech analysts who support Wall Street bankers. The USA tends to lead most industries of high technology so there is an abundance of competence to do deep analysis of computers and rocket science and nanotech and microbiology and home electronics and automobiles and the internet industries and almost any other, including the fixed landline telecoms industry. As it happens, the one technology area, where the US domestic market lags the world leaders by many years is also one that is evolving currently the fastest – and that is mobile telecoms.

American domestic mobile industry analysts are very much behind the times, when it comes to mobile telecoms. This is due to no fault of their own – they are very competent and hungry for information and are doing a professional job. But it is the US domestic market which has stagnated, fallen years behind the world leaders, driven now by true industry dinosaurs like the carriers Sprint, AT&T, Verizon. Note that almost all traditional major mobile tech vendors from North America have gone bust including Palm, Lucent, Nortel and now Motorola which was in the process of splitting into two. American mobile telecoms is so far behind, it took outsiders like Apple and Google to come and revitalize it. The US domestic mobile industry is a corpse, rotting.

Now understand, I am an ex Nokia executive and a Finn. You might forgive me for arguing that Finland leads the mobile world (and indeed there would be plenty of evidence to suggest that) but I do not claim that. The world’s leadership in mobile has shifted from Northern Europe to Northern Asia, where Japan leads closely followed by South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. And note, I live in Hong Kong, so I am not somehow championing my new home country either.

Very quick evidence. Those cool things you liked about the iPhone? GPS? 3G? WiFi? App Store? 5 megapixel cameraphone? Touch Screen? Games? HD video recording? Video calls? – those were all invented and done first on mobile phones in Japan, years and years before the iPhone (obviously all done in Japan before Nokia did it too).

Or consider the carriers/mobile operators of America. That ‘all you can eat’ data plan you like on the iPhone? Invented in Japan. The 70:30 revenue sharing that Apple’s iPhone App Store offers – was invented in Japan but they offer a far better deal: 90:10. Mobile wallet/mobile payments? Invented in Japan. 2D barcode based coupons you see now on Times Square? Invented in Japan. The mobile internet? Invented in Japan. Idle screen services. Invented in Japan.

It is very clear that Japan is currently the world leader in mobile. And South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore come far ahead of Europeans, who come ahead of the USA. So take your ‘superphone’. The top Samsung Galaxy from South Korea that went on sale last week – offers a built-in pico projector! For the same price roughly as the iPhone 4. Think about that for a moment. Where was that first sold? In Singapore. And HTC? Based in Taiwan. Apple manages one new smartphone model per year, which it doesn’t have time to test well enough, that it fails the Death Grip test by Consumer Reports. HTC is releasing 6 new smartphone models mroe this year before Christmas of 2010. HTC does have time to rest its smartphones well enough, that it gets on average 2 complaint calls per day. Apple’s iPhone 4 generated 750 complaint calls per day in its first 3 weeks and growing.

If you wanted the world’s best analysis of a rocket program, whether by a company or a country, you’d go to NASA or any US based aerospace analysts. While Iran also has a rocket program, the world’s best rocket science analysts are not in Iran today. So similarly, the USA is behind in mobile telecoms. Not all telecoms, but yes, in mobile telecoms. Years behind. And yet, Wall Street has tons of analysts who specialize in mobile telecoms (ie ‘wireless telecoms’ haha). They do their best, but they are guided by what they know, and what they can see in their own market. They cannot know how outdated some of their views are, because those analysts don’t get to make pilgrimages to Japan or South Korea etc to study the most advanced mobile markets.

Now, which was the Western smartphone maker who first put a camera on its smartphone? Not RIM, not Apple, not Palm, not Motorola – it was Nokia – based on studying Japan. What was the first Western smartphone maker who first put a 2D barcode reader on its smartphones? Nokia again. TV-out? Nokia. App store? Nokia. Touch screen? Nokia. Etc. Nokia has been tracking the most advanced markets and brought innovations to the smartphone space for the whole decade, but the US based tech press do not know this, and do not understand this.

The problem is made worse, by the fact, that most US carriers/mobile operators do not carry Nokia’s top phones. They were seen as too expensive. It wasn’t until the iPhone came along, that US carriers were willing to accept that consumers would be willing to buy ‘expensive’ smartphones. Up to then, the most expensive phone for consumers in America was the Razr. It was a mid-price phone in Europe and advanced Asia at the time. But an ‘expensive’ phone in America.

So in 2006 Nokia had a true superphone, the N93. By many features it was equal to the iPhone 4 of today and beats it with many features (but was not a touch screen phone obviously). In 2007 Nokia introduced the N95, far better than the iPhone 2G and in most tech specs matches or beats the iPhone 4 today (except not touch screen obviously). In 2008 Nokia brought us the E90 Communicator – the most awesome Nokia superphone ever, and the last Nokia phone to regularly defeat the iPhone of that time (the iPhone 3) in tech press comparisons (but the E90 was not touch screen). And fast forward to 2010, now we have the N900, again a master class of superphone design (which now is touch screen). But these smartphones are not carried by US carriers. The US carriers will not offer subsidies so that US consumers could pick one up for 199 dollars on a 2 year contract (European and Asian carriers/operators offer them!). So is it no surprise, that Nokia’s reputation in almost all of the rest of the world is one of a superphone maker of very high quality premium luxury phones, but in the USA, Nokia is thought of as a garbage brand of cheap phones?

So the US analysts had no ‘heritage’ of comparing Nokia’s best with those of the US domestic smartphone market like say the Blackberry Bold or Palm Pre or Motorola Droid or Apple iPhone. The Nokia flagship models were all missing from the US. So the US analysts were very easily convinced that the iPhone was the best phone on the planet. Also that as it looked like all phone makers were now ape’ing Apple (based on premium phones released in the US market recently) and as Nokia didn’t release an iPhone clone, clearly Nokia had ‘fallen behind’. And as the US analysts would read each others’ thoughts (and not tend to read Japanese or Korean or Finnish or Swedish language analysis of the market haha) – some ‘group think’ emerged, where if the other US analysts also thought so, then it must be true, that the iPhone is the world’s most advanced smartphone. This is for example the fallacy that follows RIM analysis time and again – even though Blackberries are growing unit sales and growing market share, while Apple is losing unit sales and losing market share – the madness of Wall Street thinking is that RIM should abandon its brilliant QWERTY oriented messaging phones, and try to copy Apple’s touch screen. Lunacy! RIM is not losing to Apple, RIM is pulling away from Apple! If Wall Street analysts got their heads out of their behinds, they’d look at the facts and insist Apple launch a QWERTY phone to reverse the Apple decline in market share and catch the big growth wave that propels Blackberry.
But no. The US press were hypnotized by Apple to obsess about the iPhone’s multitouch screen and if you didn’t have it, you were rubbish. Even though QWERTY outsells touch. No, if you’re not touch, you are ‘not modern’. But again, this is something OPK could not control. Nokia sells its shares on the DOW and therefore it has to live by US analysis.

But this is something Nokia could have tried to influence at least. The N-Series HQ was moved from Espoo to New York. Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s most charismatic senior exec has been based out of New York for some time. Nokia should have been educating the US media and analysts. I do not know to what degree they have been doing that (and I am sure they have tried) but clearly they have failed, if today in 2010, the US tech press says ‘Nokia is falling behind Apple’ (when facts show the opposite is true). Nokia have failed, not in the technology race, but in the perception race. And truth be told, they have been taking a black eye from the masters. Apple had been doing the same punching of Microsoft for decades now haha, and beating up Sony pretty badly for a decade now starting with the iPod. So small solace, but at least Nokia wasn’t losing to a marketing novice. They were beaten in the PR game by the best. With Apple laughing all the way to the bank.

TAKE BACK US MARKET

So if the US analysts were a fact Nokia HQ had to deal with, and suffer the consequences, there is one self-inflicted wound which hurt OPK dearly, and more quarter after quarter, as time went on in his stewardship. It was OPK’s promise to shareholders when he took office, that he would restore Nokia’s market share in the US market. This has been the most dismal failure of Nokia in what I really think has been a very solid run of management. There is no Apple effect here, there is no ‘reality distortion’ here, and there are no mitigating factors. This is OPK’s fault on a personal level, and his very visible commitment. Utter failure.

OPK promised that Nokia would regain its market share in the USA. The opposite has happened. Almost every quarter since he took office, the US market share of Nokia in mobile phones and in smartphones has declined. Think how bizarre this is. 93% of the world’s mobile phone accounts are outside of the USA. In that market, when OPK took office, Nokia had 35% market share in all phones, and about 50% in smartphones. Today outside of North America, Nokia has about 36% market share and about 52% in smartphones. It is only in North America where Nokia is a failure (apart from Japan and South Korea where domestic standards and domestic phone makers rule those small markets).

In the US market Nokia has suffered continuous losses in market share. This to me is unacceptable and since the new CEO committed to regaining US market share, OPK should have achieved it. No matter how. If that meant creating CDMA phones for Verizon and Sprint, then be it. If that meant creating USA-only iPhone clones, then so be it. If that meant (remember the commitment was from 2006) creating Razr clones to match Motorola’s US success, then do it. And Nokia had huge profits back then – bankroll that US invasion. If it meant Nokia’s US sales had to be subsidised from other markets, no biggie, its only 8% of the world market. Nokia EASILY could have afforded to do this.

But yes, change the leadership. OPK should have taken personal responsibility, and talked to the CEO’s of Sprint and AT&T and Verizon and T-Mobile USA, to find out why they are not selling more Nokia, and then appointed the type of manager to the US project, that gets the job done. Hire someone from one of the US carriers to do it, someone universally respected by the US industry. And keep meeting with those CEO’s every quarter, fly to their HQ’s and bring them every year to visit Nokia’s fantasyland, the special Nokia private lab and future showcase they used to call Generation Nokia (I think it was recently renamed, I forget what its called now, but this is like the Disneyland for telecoms engineers, where only 2 visits are arranged per day for VIP guests, to showcase Nokia’s view of the future; its a truly breathtaking place, I’ve seen it once..)

There are reasons why US carriers do not support the world’s bestselling phone brand. There are reasons US carriers won’t support the world’s bestselling smartphone brand.
There are reasons the US carriers don’t support the mass market phone brand that generates the most SMS text messages – where carriers make most of their profits. There are reasons of history and of politics and of personalities. Nokia know this, but OPK was a new CEO, and he was the boss, and he could have – and should have – made all the personnel changes (and policy and price and design changes), until these 4 US carriers were satisfied. Nokia needed the US market to experience Nokia’s best, not Nokia’s worst phones. And Nokia needed US carriers to promote its phones, so US consumers would adopt them.

But instead of going the carrier route, humbly, and accepting the bizarre, often archaic ways of the US market, Nokia went defiantly its own way. For the N97 Nokia decided since US carriers would not sell its flagship phone of 2009, Nokia would sell it online, directly to consumers. If you recall, Google tried this trick too, in 2010 with the Nexus One. Both were marketing disasters. You can’t bypass the carriers. And Google can be forgiven for not knowing this. Nokia knew this, they were stupid to do this. That would not get them the US market and Nokia knew this. Yet they did it, including the flagship store on Manhattan’s Times Square etc. All blatantly fighting the US carriers, rather than humbly working with them.

The US market recovery was botched totally by Nokia. And for that OPK has to take personal responsibility. He did promise this to shareholders and Nokia was unable to execute. This is his personal failure. And this point does surprise me, that OPK did not force this to happen. There is ample and intimate Nokia knowledge of the US market, Nokia has been there for decades already. But newcomers like South Koreans Samsung and LG are the ones who are now bestselling phone brands in the US market and Nokia is ranked something like 6th or 7th..

THE ONE ROTTEN APPLE – N97

Then we get to the straw that broke the camel’s back. High tech is difficult. All tech companies stumble at some point. Mercedes Benz once made a car unsafe at any speeds (remember the launch of the A-Series which tipped over when it turned around corners?). Toyota was making cars recently which didn’t seem to have any brakes. And even Apple failed in phones now with the first phone ever in history, that Consumer Reports tells us the iPhone 4 has such a bad Death Grip problem that it cannot be recommended. So yes, in tech there will be the occasional failure. And while Nokia has had a great hit parade of awesome flagship phones, during OPK’s short reign, there was one failed flagship, the N97. The N93 was superb in 2006. The N95 was a technology showcase in 2007. The E90 was so far ahead in 2008, it still today beats most smartphones. And the N900 of 2010 is highly praised and the early previews of the upcoming N8 are also highly positive. In that string of superb hits, comes one blemish – the N97.

And the problem is, that the N95 and the E90 Communicator were never even suggested as ‘iPhone killers’ and were not touch screen phones. They were in a different class, like comparing a Range Rover to a Ferrari. But the N97 was offered to the world as an iPhone beater, being Nokia’s first touch screen flagship phone (with a slider QWERTY as well). On paper compared to its contemporary iPhone 3G and the later iPhone 3GS, the N97 seems to tower and indeed ‘devour’ its rivals (as from the LL Cool Jay rap lyrics). The specs sheet is impressive. But the N97 is not. It was a dud. A rare failure in Nokia’s long history of premium phones, but one of its worst. And Anssi Vanjoki even openly said so.

When any analysts, not just US analysts, were offered the side-by-side comparison of the N97 vs the iPhone, the faults and shortcomings of the N97 become blatantly clear. Most of all, its touch screen (resistive and not multitouch) is slow and non-responsive. The touch screen Symbian OS seems slow and counter-intuitive. And then there were bunches of other technical faults and this flagship smartphone from Nokia’s N-Series was indeed a flop. Nokia did as it always does, it kept fixing it, better software and hardware, and the final N97 version is not bad, but even then, its no match to the iPhone 3GS.

When Nokia finally did an ‘iPhone killer’ – that project failed. And this falls onto the feet of OPK. The N97 was a rare disaster phone for Nokia and with hind-sight, its clear to see, Nokia would have been better served by delaying the N97 until it was more-or-less bug-free, than hurrying the phone to the market. The lessons from the N97 were very painful to Espoo and no doubt those lessons are why Anssi Vanjoki delayed the N8 launch now, knowing its not good enough yet, and wanted to refine it before releasing it.

But for most US analysts, the ‘current’ flagship smartphone from Nokia is still the N97 and the ‘next’ flagship will be the N8 (they mostly have not taken notice of the N900 which obviously is not targeted nor sold to the US market but we have for example here in Hong Kong as the current flagship Nokia smartphone). So the more the iPhone gets amazing news stories from Apple’s PR machine (how many billion apps downloaded or how awesome is the iAd platform or the new version of the iOS operating system etc), the US press is reminded that Nokia’s entry in the touch screen smartphones is that expensive and failed N97 with the old Symbian OS and its lousy touch screen. If the N8 had been released for Q2 (and assuming it was not very flawed haha) probably OPK would have survived, by the skin of his teeth. But that the US market still thinks in July 2010 that the N97 is the best Nokia can do, that was too much. The straw that broke the camel’s back.

WHAT IS FAIR?

So we have 6 major faults that are assigned to Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. Apple was one of those ‘once in a decade’ types of events. Think about it. When Sharp introduced the cameraphone in 2000, it didn’t change everything. When RIM introduced the Blackberry in 2001, it did not change everything. When Motorola introduced the Razr in 2004, it did not change everything. When SonyEricsson introduced the Walkman phone in 2006, it did not change everything. When Google introduced the Nexus One in 2009 or Microsoft the Kin in 2010, these did not change the whole industry. But when Apple entered the phone industry, suddenly not just were phone expectations changed permanently and thoroughly – the way marketing and PR to the investors and shareholders changed permanently and thoroughly.

But ‘unanticipated’ changes like this are what nimble managers are needed for, and executive wisdom to see when such a strategic change happens, and to adjust. Yes, Nokia was hurt and this media/marketing/PR side of Apple’s influence has hurt OPK’s reign and reputation. They should have fought back like Adobe fights with Apple or Microsoft fights with Apple etc. Now you have to put on a show and you have to brag about your greatness, else you will lose. Its no longer a ‘lets build it together’ world of cooperation, it is now a dog-eat-dog world of zero-sum: ‘for me to win, you have to lose’. That is the game Apple brought to town. And Nokia did not learn that lesson and did not adjust to it. The next CEO has to be far more brazen and bold – and vocal.

Profits is a fair point but an unfair judgement. Yes, Nokia’s profits are down, drastically, from 2006. But the market is fiercely competitive, and against Nokia’s traditional rivals, those who sell mass market phones to the world – Motorola, SonyEricsson, Samsung and LG, during OPK’s rule, Nokia has far outperformed these true rivals. The unfair part in profits is that the analysts are comparing Nokia to Apple and nobody can touch Apple’s profits. Not in PCs, not in musicplayers, not in tablet PCs like the iPad, and also no, not in smartphones. Its an unfair comparison. Apple is an aspirational luxury brand. But profits are a valid concern even without Apple. Motorola made losses and replaced its CEO. Nokia made its first-ever quarterly loss last year, and since then its profits have been very slim. This is an honest shortcoming of OPK. I would argue that the market has been fierce – the worst economic downturn of our lifetimes – and Nokia weathered that storm far better than its traditional rivals. But yes, its profits are down, and unfortunately now for Nokia, it is compared to Apple who reports ever stronger profits.

Symbian is not a fair accusation of any failure of Nokia’s CEO. He did not design the OS, he inherited it. Symbian was in 2007 – now with hindsight – actually a far more potent and mobile phone-optimized OS than Apple’s iPhone OS – and Nokia has played its Symbian global market share leadership brilliantly with the upgrade evolution path to Symbian – including touch screen now – and the future OS of MeeGo with Intel. Ovi and Nokia’s software strategy was in place long before Apple’s and Nokia has been patiently building this too. Its the world’s third best-used application store, where again Nokia is miles and years ahead of its real rivals Motorola, Samsung, LG and SonyEricsson.

And for the future of its OS, Apple’s iOS is proprietary, using its proprietary tools, tightly controlled by Apple and only working on Apple devices. Palm’s is exclusive as is RIM’s and Samsung’s Bada. Microsoft is licensed to others but is using Microsoft’s systems. Google’s Android is the most open using Linux. Nokia’s new MeeGo is also fully open source and using Linux and licensed to rivals, but it is developed with Intel. And Nokia went through the trouble of ensuring a migration path with common tools to support current Symbian developers into MeeGo, and also is working to bring harmonization among other Linux OS tools like Android. Isn’t this the best possible smartphone OS strategy. But its a ‘complex’ story. Its ‘easier’ just to hear that Symbian is old and fragmented and difficult to develop for and its touch screen interface is cumbersome. The lazy story is to take the superficial and just say, Symbian is dead. This is not a fair criticism of OPK’s rule. Nokia has by far the best smartphone OS strategy of any in the industry and in the past 4 years Nokia has executed brilliant and elegant migration decisions on its two operating systems.

Then there is the issue of US analysts who live in the laggard US market and their views of advanced phones is very outdated. This is a ‘reality of life’ and Nokia is fully aware of this. There is no excuse that Nokia couldn’t navigate in this environment, knowing the landscape. But yes, it means that if Nokia introduced widgets or near field or FM broadacast or some artifical intelligence elements into its new phones, Nokia has a far bigger job of educating to do with the US based analysts. Nokia knew this. There is no excuse. Nokia failed its PR efforts with US analysts and journalists.

And finally the N97. OPK could not go personally test the phone. He should have been personally interested enough in its launch – as it was so critical also for the US market – to pay attention to final testing etc. He should have known as the N97 neared launch that there were problems and halted its launch. Or else, the moment the world started to complain, he should have stepped in, apologized for a bad phone, and fixed the issue. That N97 should not have remained long on the market as Nokia’s primary proof of leadership (ie lack thereof) as its ‘flagship’. Nokia could have taken an older world-winning superphone like the N93 or E90 or some other recent platform, slapped a few updated parts onto it, and launched that as the N98 and quietly discontinued the N97 – very quickly. This is what Apple will no doubt do very soon with the iPhone 4 – Apple cannot let the ‘Consumer Reports cannot recommend’ iPhone 4 to remain as a stain on Apple’s reputation. It will be replaced by a newer iPhone long before June of 2011, mark my words. Probably still during 2010 haha..

Similarly Nokia should have issued a new flagship quickly to replace the flawed N97. It didn’t and the N97 still today continues to stain Nokia’s leadership reputation, in particular in the US market.

Its a cruel world, Charlie Brown. OPK got to dance with Wall Street for four years as Nokia’s boss. He would have done fine were it not for the best dancer ever, Fred Astaire stepping on stage in the form of Apple. Now OPK is remembered for losing to Apple. This even as Nokia’s market share in smartphones grows and Apple’s share shrinks. Life’s not fair..

Incidentially. Four years ago, Nokia’s global mobile phone market share was 35%. Since then the number of rival handset makers has doubled. The market shares of the other top 5 makers have shrunk from 48% to 40%. Did Nokia do well? Before OPK took charge, Nokia’s smartphone market share globally was 48%. Since then the number of smartphone manufacturers has more than tripled. Nokia’s market share is still 41%, bigger than numbers 2 and 3 combined. And Nokia’s smartphone market share is better than its dumbphones market share – as the only one of the Top 5 phone makers, Nokia is able to improve its market share, as it migrates customers from dumbphones to smartphones. And is doing it profitably. Of its major smartphone rivals just four years ago, Palm died and Motorola’s smartphone market share was cut in half, Microsoft’s Windows lost three quarters. Nokia weathered the influx of over 30 new rival smartphone makers by only losing a couple of market share points over a 4 year period. Did Nokia do well?

Of the challenges he inherited, Nokia did not foolishly retool for all flip phones in the Razr craze and that was the right call. In the transition to 3G, Nokia’s market share in 3G is now the world’s best, so Nokia did not lose out in the migration from 2G to 3G. Nokia led the smartphone revolution, then the migration of smartphones from business phones to consumer phones – both initiatives Nokia started long before the iPhone. Nokia set up its app store with partners, and all along the way it is connecting people also for the very poor, and even manages to win consistently Greenpeace’s award as the greenest phone maker. While Apple uses Foxconn as its supplier, a manufacturer some accuse of being a sweatshop, Nokia set up the world’s largest handset factory into China so it can control the handset manufacturing process itself. Is this all good management? I think it is.
But OPK failed the US market, he presided over the launch of Nokia’s worst flagship phone. His rule coincided with the moment when Apple came to disrupt the phone market and his PR people didn’t adjust to this, nor to US analysts and their lack of understanding of the finer points of modern premium phones. And yes, Nokia’s profits have declined from the good old days. These are valid reasons why Nokia shareholders demand a change in management. The Symbian story is not fair, but it is not an easy issue to understand adequately either, so I can see why the lazy analysis says, Symbian is not good in touch screen, therefore Symbian is obsolete. Thats not true, but I can see why that argument is easy to make.

Sorry OPK. I think you did do a competent job steering Nokia through very tough times, and in all other markets of dumbphones and smartphones – except the USA – Nokia has shined. Unfortunately the US based analysts, press and investors will not prioritize the rest-of-the-world performance ahead of that within the US market. I think its clear your management was far better than those at Palm or Motorola or SonyEricsson or LG.. But it was not perfect and now Wall Street is demanding your sacrifice. Its a cruel world out there..

- – - – -

This text was originally published on Tomi Ahonen’s Communities Dominate Brands site on July 21st 2010 and is republished with his permission.

To my delight, Malcolm Barclay, the iPhone super-developer, weighed in. The use-case scenario that I’d mentioned in the post was to do with bus travel — and that happens to be one of Malcolm’s specialist subjects (he’s the developer of superstar apps such as Tube Status, NextBuses, Tube Deluxe and London Bus. If you’re a Brit iPhone user, chances are you’ve got at least one of those apps.

I wanted to highlight Malcolm’s reply which I thought very illuminating. To the whole cadre of network operators, handset manufacturers, infrastructure providers and public service providers out there, make no mistake, the moment you can all get together and deliver some kind of unified platform, talented developers such as Malcolm will get stuck in.

As I read through your use case here I started thinking practically how I could actually implement this in London Bus. All the technology exists today that could make this happen, the Bus would need some sort of near field communication or at least a realtime tracking system (they are all already fitted with GPS systems) I could reference based on the bearing of your phone, there’s security implications of being allowed access to appointment data etc, but that said, all of this can sort-of be done. Or go for cortex view of what you are looking at (i.e I know you are looking at a bus…perhaps you want to know where it goes) like what the crew at WINEFindr did. That technology took 5 years to develop from primary research.

Stepping back from all the technical stuff, you touch on a wider point here. One user commented to me that getting real-time information for all 20,000 bus stops & where their buses are in London is a no brainer and could not understand why I’d left such an obvious piece of functionality out; I must be stupid. And there in lies the problem, more & more, peoples expectation of technology is starting to outweigh what’s currently possible or even simply put together.

BTW TfL are working on making real-time bus information available, go live is about mid 2011.

The nice chaps at Mobile Entertainment magazine ran my ‘Fear The Googlepipe‘ opinion-piece yesterday morning. Did you catch it?

It’s based on a post I did a little while ago about the launch of the arrival of the Nexus One and what that could mean for your common-or-garden mobile operator. I say ‘based’, but the guys at Mobile Entertainment — proper media — have sprinkled some editorial dust and turned the original wail into a half decent looking piece. Thank you ME!

Here’s the first bit…

Well that was a day to remember. The day Google got stuck into mobile merchandising and nailed the mobile operator to the wall.

That’s it: thank you for coming, mobile operators! You did your best. But now you’ve been ‘owned’.

That’s it: thank you for coming, mobile operators! You did your best. But now you’ve been ‘owned’.

Well, maybe not yet. But do look out for the big G. With the Nexus One, Google has ushered in an entirely new way of buying a consumer handset: from its website in six clicks. Shit! Is it that simple?

Continue at Mobile Entertainment –>

Thank you to the delicious people who retweeted it — including the Infomob chaps, Mitcan, SLAMobile, Peggy Anne, Martin Wilson, Radek and MEF.

It’s getting a little bit silly now, dear reader.

Ridiculously silly. We’ve had a good year now of mobile applications taking off, going ballistic. Now, though, it’s time for the industry to get real about the iPhone: It isn’t the only handset on the marketplace.

The World Is Not Flat

I understand that the iPhone is gorgeous, glorious, elegant, beautiful. Indeed, I have been first in the line to pan the painfully obvious failures of other manufacturers who had the temerity to vomit out handsets that couldn’t hope to match the ‘elegance’ of the jPhone (“Jesus Phone”).

I won’t go into specifics, suffice to say that for the last 3 years, any manufacturer stupid enough to show off their ‘iPhone killer’ looked, well, stupid. Very stupid.

And now that the plebians have got hold of them — i.e. you can get the jPhone free on contract in the United Kingdom — it seems there’s no stopping the iPhone juggernaut.

i-Limitations

As I discussed in my DevNest presentation last Wednesday, the iPhone has limitations. Here’s a good example: Anyone calling themselves a geek and actually using an iPhone as their primary handset is universally acknowledged to be wet. Highly wet. Aged-45-and-still-lives-with-his-parents wet. That’s because the iPhone is a glorified Fisher Price toy phone. It doesn’t do background applications. Like the proverbial thick-kid at the back of the class, the iPhone can only do one thing at a time. iPhone users are reduced to thinking and working in monotone.

[Sidenote: I do feel for the people showing off magnificently crafted applications that turn your iPhone into something awesome. I'm thinking of super-cool mobile messaging aggregators, VOIP clients or remote access clients, anything that's particularly nifty. How galling is it to know that when your users get a phone call, the whole sodding house of cards -- the simply fantastic system you've built -- falls to pieces because the device only does one thing at a time? And then the user has to fire up the application again... Simply rubbish, isn't it?]

Anyway, for the rest of the planet, the iPhone is a pretty nice experience. My mother loves hers. My wife — having dumped her Android G1 for the latest iPhone 3GS — is delighted. She is particularly enamoured with the nifty applications.

iPhone: 14% — still in the teens!

Gartner reckons that in terms of 2009 sales, worldwide, 14% of them were iPhones. 20% were BlackBerries and a whopping 47% were Symbian devices. 4% were Android (which, in case you were wondering, is why nobody is downloading your Android app). Just so we’ve got numbers in perspective, there were roughly 80 million smartphones sold in 2009. Looking at total handset sales — including rubbish devices — Nokia shipped 440 million phones last year. Samsung shipped 235 million, LG knocked back 122 million and both Sony and Motorola did about 50 million each.

Today, Nokia will ship about a million phones. Just to be clear: Over a million phones will leave their factories today.

And you’re busy developing on… iPhone.

Yes.

Great.

iPhone has served its purpose. It has demonstrated that mobile applications have relevance, that the market is worthy of attention. We have got past the stage of experimentation though. We know it works.

It is no longer good enough to only release an iPhone application. It’s fine to experiment with it. But if you’re a big brand and you only release on the iPhone, you’re stupid. Stupid, stupid and thrice stupid.

That’s because there’s a massive market sitting staring in the window wondering why they can’t do business with you.

The other platforms out there have been working really hard to make sure that the app experience on their handsets is beginning to resemble the elegance of iPhone. BlackBerry’s AppWorld is working nicely. Nokia’s Ovi Store is chugging back 1.5m downloads a day now. Samsung are working hard on their offerings, likewise Sony. Even the Android Marketplace is becoming useful.

Time To Think About Other Platforms

For a long time I’ve been complaining to Nokia. I’ve been going nuts over the fact that, a few months ago, I went out and bought a Nokia N86 on contract from UK operator, 3. The N86 is a piece of engineering genius and the camera is simply fantastic. I really do like it.

Here’s the example I’ve used — that really winds me up. A little while ago, Ocado (the grocery delivery service allied to the Waitrose chain of shops) launched an iPhone application. The app enables you to literally order your toilet rooms whilst you’re sat on the train. Genius. It’s basically an app interface to their existing online ordering portal.

My problem is this: How come the chump sitting opposite me on the train with his iPhone can order his toilet rolls with a few taps — and, with my Nokia N86, I can’t?

It’s because the people at Ocado decided not to create a Nokia/Symbian app. Instead, they decided just to focus on iPhone.

Initially I railed at Nokia for allowing this situation. And whilst the manufacturer did carry a substantial amount of responsibility for not creating the conditions to easily allow application creation and dissemination, the key issues are more or less fixed.

I don’t believe it’s Nokia’s problem any more. It’s companies like Ocado that are holding the marketplace back.

I’ll be more specific: It’s the digital agencies that are propping up the iFascist viewpoint.

I should point out that I haven’t phoned Ocado to find out if they did their development in-house or via an agency. I don’t want to because the Waitrose brand is held particularly high in my mind. I don’t want to destroy that by phoning them and finding out that they’re a bunch of numbskulls who haven’t even considered developing on other platforms. I actually did phone and got through to the voicemail of a chap called Ben.

But it doesn’t look good for Ocado. Oh no.

Silicon carries an fantastically illuminating interview with Jon Rudoe, head of retail at Ocado. Here is Jon discussing why they launched their iPhone app:

Silicon: What was your business case for launching an app?
Ocado: “The [problem] that people are trying to solve is: ‘How do I get my cupboard stocked and my fridge full with the products I want? How do I find, select and retrieve my weekly grocery needs?’ When you look at the world like that then you almost become platform agnostic. So, rather than sitting there thinking ‘well, I must have a website’, or ‘I must have a supermarket’, or ‘I must have whatever’, you actually find yourself thinking ‘I must have a mechanism for people to fulfil that want/need/job’… And then all you have to ask yourself is: ‘Do people want to do that on this platform?’.”

So we must assume that the Ocado chaps sat around the conference table and decided that anyone using a Nokia, a Samsung or a BlackBerry was unclean. Dirty. And of course, dirty people wouldn’t want to use Ocado on their device, right?

Here’s one more quote from the Silicon piece:

Silicon: How much research did you do before you launched the app?
John: “It was quite easy, at the stage we started developing, to look at the market and to look at where most of the phone usage was. We did some research and we can obviously spot which customers were visiting our regular website from which mobile devices and obviously we could understand general statistics about iPhones and other smartphone penetration. [An iPhone app was] a pretty obvious first place to start, basically.”

Goodness me.  This is why the mobile industry is screwed at the moment.

Numbskulls.

Ocado selected iPhone and for everybody else using a Nokia, a Samsung or a Sony Ericsson — or anything else — their message is (by default): If you want to order your toilet rolls on the train, sod off and buy an iPhone.

Unfortunately that isn’t a sustainable or sensible suggestion. It’s like suggesting customers trying to use Ocado Online from their Mac laptop should go and buy a PC first. Or vice versa.

Jon-from-Ocado goes on to point out that the iPhone now accounts for 2% of their online sales.

Let’s just stop there for a moment.

TWO PERCENT?

Their heads must button up the back.

TWO PERCENT of your sales go via mobile and you’ve limited that to ONLY iPhones?

What about Nokia?

What about Samsung?

What about BlackBerry?

It beggars belief, it really does.

The Cost Issue

Of course it’s expensive to develop on multiple platforms. Yes indeed. The kind of expense that small developers simply can’t cope with. And that’s entirely understandable. But if you’re an online retail giant — and TWO PERCENT of your sales are coming from iPhone already — what’s stopping you reaching out to other platforms?

Well it’s probably because it’s difficult.

That’s right. The one thing most digital agencies don’t tell their clients is that they don’t have a flucking clue how to develop for the other platforms.

Do ask your mobile agency about developing on Nokia. Or BlackBerry. Or Vodafone 360.  Watch their horrified look. Watch their faces screw up with mock disdain. It’s no longer possible to dismiss anything other than iPhone as ‘irrelevant’ or ‘not ready for prime time’.

This poses a real challenge for the Nike-wearing digital agency fraternity, who’ve had a really nice time knocking back the iPhone apps at pretty good rates.  Most of them have no experience with any other platforms. Most of them will — when your call comes in — be reaching for the phone number of that Eastern European mobile developer company, because the agency themselves — seriously — can’t tell a BlackBerry from a Samsung.

That’s going to become quite a business challenge for a lot of companies, soon.

It’s Not Just Ocado

Of course it’s not just Ocado guilty of this iFascism (“only focusing on the iPhone”) — the industry is rife with it. While everyone is busy competing with each other on the iPhone, there’s a land-grab beginning on the other platforms. It’s been ok to ignore these platforms whilst they’ve been busy struggling to establish themselves.

They’re established now.

And if you’re not developing for these other platforms, if you think they’re irrelevant — be very careful. They’re now coming of age and looking for their own superstars to rise up and dominate their charts. Heroes are being made on a daily basis across the other platforms. Even BlackBerry’s AppWorld has now started creating millionaires out of developers who were smart enough to get stuck in way before the hordes descend.

It’s time for me to calm down now.

Update: For the Americans, here’s the definition of ‘wet‘.

Right now, one of the biggest things that prevents smart entrepreneurs (British or otherwise) from going to live and work in Silicon Valley, is the Visa issue. Sure, most nationalities can get 3 months worth of time in the States, but after that, they need to leave and come back again… and thus begins the dance with the immigration chaps at San Francisco International Airport.

This is the comfort blanket that most British entrepreneurs cling to.

It stops them actually doing anything.

Instead they arse about in the UK dealing with total numbskull venture capitalists — most of whom are playing the role admirably up until it comes to coughing up cash. It is all about risk, as John Malloy from Blue Run Ventures pointed out in a recent interview we did.

In Silicon Valley, they get risk.

Your brilliant, amazing, its-gotta-work idea is risky. Anything new is inherently risky. But in America, you try it. You mitigate as much risk as you can then you try it. You get stuck in and you see what happens.

In the UK, entrepreneurs try too. The first thing that happens is they become social outcasts. They’re labeled, with a bit of a laugh, ‘delboys’. But those doing the labelling do actually mean it. And this is the horrifying thing in the UK — normal people do quite like to thwart the efforts of anyone thinking outside the box. There are two fundamental points about the British culture contributing to this:

1. British people are inherently jealous of any success whatsoever. I often joke, ‘that shouldn’t be allowed‘, when I hear someone has made a pile of cash. I am being ironic, but it’s fascinating to watch the number of people who actually nod along with the statement.

2. Know your place. British people need to ‘place’ you in society. They need to understand where precisely you are in the hierarchy. And if you’re seeking to change that hierarchy — by doing something entrepreneurial, well, that’s your fault. See point 1.

Executives in big UK companies are super examples of this. Whilst they’re earning — for example — £200k a year, they will do their utmost to be suspicious of startups. What’s particularly annoying for these executives is discovering that the startup founders were middle managers — subservient to him — prior to starting their company. And, with just a signature, this executive could ‘make’ the startup company by granting them a stupendous contract.

What typically happens in most deals is that British businessmen (and women) will evaluate whether or not they’d like to see the other person be successful. The answer is resolutely ‘no’. Therefore all sorts of difficult questions ensue — how are you backed, what happens if, I’m concerned about the risk… all the sorts of questions that are never asked of bigger, more established companies. Because of course, you’re never actually dealing with the founders of big companies. So you never have to deal with the jealousy issue.

This is a critical reason why most tech startups in the UK go absolutely nowhere. You can’t legislate against it. It’s built straight into the culture.

Which is why the cleverest escape.

The biggest misjudgement I ever made was staying in the UK throughout my twenties and not moving to Silicon Valley. Instead I fought tooth and nail against the establishment. By hook or by crook, I managed to get my ideas out the door. I paid for it. I mean, I literally had to fund it all, with the exception of the initial capital. Which came from… you guessed… America! Or, An American venture capitalist. Once, I managed to secure a small amount of investment from a thoroughly understanding angel investor. Once. Those people are unfortunately few and far between in the United Kingdom. Although I worked with smart Americans all the time, I failed to recognise reality: If you’re starting a new tech business, the only place — the ONLY place — you should be is Silicon Valley.

The amount of times I have been nailed to the wall by insanely jealous British executives is simply ridiculous. Any business concept I’ve had — it’s typically gone nowhere because when I try and pitch it to the Brits, in order that someone actually pay for it, the answer is invariably no, no and thrice no. Until some bright spark starts the business in the States, gets a good bit of venture capital and… ‘momentum’. Then I have had to watch with familiar dismay as that same executive gets on a plane and flies out to do business with them.

Which is why you find me in San Francisco every two weeks. Well, I was there more or less every two weeks last year. There’s a baby on the way here so I’ve had to change my priorities slightly. It’s a surreal experience, going from the British boardroom to the American boardroom.

Can’t-do becomes Can-do. The word ‘yes’ is used a lot more. There is no immediate feeling of jealousy. Instead, there’s excitement.

Sit down with a Bank Manager in Silicon Valley and they will — genuinely — treat you as though you’re serious. As though you could well become the next Bill Gates. Talk to your accountant and they’ll do the same. They’ll make sure you’re setup in a tax efficient manner so that when you get ‘your first round’, it’ll be easy to grow the company. You’ll fall off your chair when the chap picks up the phone and calls his friend (“he’s usually good for $20-30k and he loves mobile stuff”). You’ll start having heart palpitations when your accountant puts the phone to his chest and asks, “Can you do a drink with him tonight?”

They move fast, they move seriously, they move with passion and excitement. It’s everything you’ve experienced in the UK, but inverted.

By the way, for the Americans reading — and for the British reading who don’t quite get the ‘jealousy’ thing that I’m talking about, here’s a good example: This is a Bugatti Veyron in Manchester (via Autoblog).

That is a traffic warden putting a parking ticket on the Bugatti. That is also a crowd cheering on the traffic warden. Why? Well it’s because each of the people watching will never, ever, ever have the capacity to even think about buying an £800,000 Bugatti. They know it. They know their place. Why should someone else be allowed to be successful enough to blow almost a million quid on a car? Yeah. Fluck’em! Rich B’stards!

Alas, this is generally the attitude found in the UK. It doesn’t really matter out on the streets. But when you’re trying to get a contract or trying to get a company to buy your new service — 9 times out of 10 — you’ll have to deal with a middle manager who would have been stood right at the front of that crowd above, jeering. They can’t be arsed to think outside the box. They can’t be arsed to startup their own business. And they’ll sure as hell lord it over you and, if at all possible, not give you the deal. Or they will give you the deal, but on punitive, ridiculous terms.

1 out of 10 business people get it. These are the chaps who contact you, get you in for a meeting and then award you the deal there and then. These are the people who understand entrepreuenrs — they’re the ones who will actually add a zero on to your cheap-as-chips pricing, commenting, “I actually need you to stay in business, ok? And we can afford this. We need good service.”

It doesn’t happen very often at all, unfortunately. It’s why you’ll have seen one or two British tech startups succeed. At some point, they got a 1-in-10 person at one of their clients and managed to establish themselves and hire some staff. In the UK you need a lot of middle managers so that they can do business with the other middle managers at your prospective clients. Middle managers cannot stand the smell of a successful entrepreneur, especially if, last year, that entrepreneur was doing their job.

Of course, after reading this, most British entrepreneurs still won’t get it. I speak to British mobile and tech entrepreneurs all the time. They simply don’t believe what I say about Silicon Valley. Some do believe, but — well, it’s all too easy to sit in the UK and spunk the little money they do have up the wall.

Most of them invest in hope.

But there’s a looming problem for these entrepreneurs. This rumoured ‘StartUp Visa Act’ that the Americans are discussing would completely and utterly destroy any barriers for the poor British entrepreneur. So explains BusinessWeek:

The StartUp Visa Act would create a new type of two-year visa, called an EB-6, available to any immigrant entrepreneur who has secured at least $250,000 in capital from accredited venture capitalists or angel investors. After two years, the person would become a permanent U.S. resident if his or her business has met one of three criteria: created five full-time jobs in the U.S., raised an additional $1 million from investors, or achieved $1 million in revenue.

If this is made law, I can foresee bucketloads of talent heading West.

And good for them, all things being equal, I’ll be there too.

Meanwhile to all British entrepreneurs reading, your head can go back in the sand now.

Update: Thanks to @micrypt for adding this post into the Hacker News feed here. I noticed an excellent comment on that discussion by Pete Warden who links to both Paul Carr’s Guardian column (“I’m calling time of death on London’s startup industry“) on a similar subject and his own analysis (“You can’t fail if you don’t try. Or why I left the UK“).

Definitely worth reading both.

Although Google makes the Android mobile operating system, the search giant’s chief competitor, Yahoo, will be the default provider on AT&T’s first Android-powered handset, due to be released March 7.

Great.

Talk about fragmentation on the Android platform.

Yes, you bought a ‘Google Phone’. But, no, the reason your search isn’t that good is because Yahoo is powering it. Sorry, I mean Bing. Yahoo doesn’t actually do search any more. While Bing does have some very good qualities — it’s search results aren’t quite there yet.

But what the hell are AT&T’s executives thinking?

Apparently there is a ‘long-standing relationship’ between AT&T and Yahoo for search partnerships. And this means that they’ve decided to screw about with the inner-workings of the device and really piss off consumers at the same time.

This is precisely why mobile operators need to be shot. In a nice way, you understand.

Some executive from AT&T and some executive from Yahoo have got together. They’ve both gone for very expensive martinis (on expenses) and discussed each others’ aims and objectives. They’ve nodded along with each other, they’ve got to know each other, they’ve — dare I say it — bonded with each other. After a few more martinis, the Yahoo guy confesses that they’re completely irrelevant ‘in mobil’ (it’s important to do the accent).

Nodding along, the AT&T guy, chest swelling, explains, “Well, you know Pierce, I can help…Yes, another round of martinis please…”

Pierce — the Yahoo Guy — sits back, with a slight frown, “How, Giles?”

“Well Pierce, we have eighty-five million subscribers…”

Giles takes a moment. He just loves flopping his subscriber number out on the table for the lads to look at.

Giles continues, “We have eighty-FIVE million subscribers, I’m sure we could put a bit of traffic your way…”

You just know it. Something like that happened, at some point, between Yahoo and AT&T.

They hatched a plan.

They thought it would be ‘super-fantastic’ to change the default search.

It’ll get folk chattering. It’ll show we’re with-it. It’ll let AT&T pretend to have a bit of relevance for 20 seconds during the initial announcement. It’ll breathe useless life into the decomposing carcass that is Yahoo’s ‘mobil’ strategy.

Not once has anyone thought about delivering the best possible user experience. No — that was traded away as soon as possible. That’s the thing with mobile operators. If there’s an opportunity to screw things up, to do the wrong thing (or the slightly wrong, annoying thing), they will. Especially if there’s a shite small amount of potential revenue in it.

Witness, for example, the carrier-deck b0llocks strategies that permeated the globe for much of the last half-decade.

Ridiculous.

Absolutely 100% ridiculous.

Would AT&T please get back into’s it box and fix their shitter-than-shit data network?

Would Yahoo please just get bought by somebody and put out of it’s misery?

I thank you.

The key points?

- 1.7 billion irrelevant press release emails estimated to be received in total each year by UK and US Journalists alone

- 78% of press release emails are received by Recipients to whom they are irrelevant

- 55% of Recipients have taken action to block a sender of news

An Inconvenient PR Truth from RealWire on Vimeo.

There’s only one absolutely ridiculous agency that I’ve actually sent straight to my trash bin automatically. Everything else, I glance over.

Then I star it — because, to be honest, as long as it’s half interesting, I may well use it.

Then I usually go and get really busy earning money elsewhere.

Then I panic because I thought I had some things lined up I was going to write about (those starred items).

Then I write my own stuff because it was quicker and because those starred items are now on my third page of Google Mail (the equivalent of the graveyard) because I’ve had even more half interesting press releases come in. That I star.

And I think about…

Then I go and make proper money advising investment banks, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and building my own businesses.

The one hugely misplaced assumption that most PR make about me is that I’m here to provide a service level to them — like the chap at the mainstream media publication is. Obviously he’s paid to bang out five pieces a day. About whatever.

I reckon about 15% of the stuff I publish originates from a press release sent to me by someone I don’t ‘know’ or have some kind of relationship with. I’d then go so far as to suggest perhaps 25% comes from PR that I know and trust.

The balance — around 60%, I make up myself.

I’d love a lot more assistance from PR. For example, I thought of sending out an announcement to the various PR lists asking them to send me some feedback on the iPad. The concept is sound — they would go back to their clients and ask them to pen 250 words on the iPad. They’d then send that to me. I’d integrate into a wickedly interesting piece. Everybody wins. I haven’t had to do a ton of chasing to 20 odd executives directly, they look good in front of their clients, their clients are happy because they’re published — and I’m delighted because I can deliver good stuff to the audience.

I didn’t bother doing this because the sad reality is that, despite spelling out what it is you’d like to read (at my best guess), I’ll either be sent nonsense, or nothing at all. Or I’ll get it next week. Not because of the PR being slow, but because the client doesn’t bother responding. Worst is when I’m sent something almost irrelevant. For example, a comment on the iPad by someone who manufacturers paper towels. Not quite in the zone for Mobile Industry Review.

It’s such a frustration watching more public relations professionals do their jobs.

Do you remember we used to do a newsletter years ago? In that newsletter, I liked to put in little bits of news. Every week I’d email perhaps 300 PRs asking ‘have you got any news’.

I used to expect being sent wholly irrelevant stuff as a result but goodness me. The amount of PRs who simply wrote back ‘no, nothing, sorry’ used to shock me. It was generally because they’d hit their press release quota for their client contracts and were sitting pretty. Or they’d finished doing the ‘hours’ for that particular client I was emailing about so they didn’t need to do any thinking.

They’re very good at being proactive. Try asking a PR if they’ve got any news. 95% usually respond ‘no’. The smart 5% will generate something. They’ll rustle up something within 10 minutes: A new hire, a bit of product feedback, an anecdote for one of their clients.

I used to keep a list of PRs who wrote back ‘no’. Most of them worked for agencies who routinely bill 7,500+ month to their clients. So whenever anyone needed a PR company recommendation, I’d know precisely who suggest avoiding. If you need a recommendation, let me know.

Now, though, the newsletter is just me. Speaking of which, I had a break last week. This week the topic is — predictably — about the iPad.

You know, something that’ll carry a laptop, maybe even charge it via a solar panel, lots of pockets for phones and iPhones… integrated headphone loop or something like that?

What’s the absolute pinnacle?

Any ideas?

One company, Newscom, really, really frustrates me — and I thought I’d lend a bit of insight.

I’m working on a post about a wristband tag that patiences would wear in hospitals. It enables their location to be tracked precisely by WiFi.

I found out about this from a press release emailed to me that features photographic links. So far so good. There’s a picture I’d like to use.

The PR has helpfully included the link for the photo in their release text.

They’re using this absolutely rubbish service, Newscom, to host the imagery though.

I clicked on the supplied URL for the photo:
http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20091014/363009

That takes you to this page:

The photo, as you can see, has got bollocks newscom branding all over it. I suspect this was relevant about 10 years ago when people wanted to control access to ‘official photography’. Hence the watermark. I can’t get the un-watermarked version unless I login.

I have a login. Somewhere. I can’t remember the details. To GET a reminder of my details, I have to email a support address. You know, like being back in 1995 again.

I just don’t have time to arse about.

Newscom, alas, appear to be in the dark ages. Almost every other press release service — RealWire for example — just provide you the images right there and then. You can pick’em up free of watermarks or any other time sapping rubbish and get on with the writing of your post.

I want to point out to every marketing/PR executive reading that if you’re including Newscom as a method of photo delivery for your releases, recipients like me will be getting mightily annoyed every time they want to actually pick something up and write about it.

Meanwhile, dear reader, I’ll be using this image in the post I’m writing:

Yup. That’s the only one I have the rights to use.

Total unmitigated bollocks, isn’t it.

It really is like being back in 1995.

Please either use a proper distribution service — maybe even a ‘social media release’ function, or publish the images on your blog or something like that.

My post on the Ekahau wireless wristband is coming soon… complete with stupidly small photo.

RT @sbergel: Two billion pieces of content shared on Facebook each week – http://bit.ly/15tCdQ

The link leads to this InsideFacebook blog post on recently revealed statistics from Facebook.

So there are two billion pieces of content shared on Facebook each week?

So that’s 8 billion items a month. Or 104 billion items a year. Or, with the aid of a calculator, just under 200,000 items shared per minute.

Sheeeeeeeeeeeet! (to quote Senator Clay Davis‘s catch phrase from The Wire)

Facebook announced at Nokia World a few weeks ago that more than 65 million people are actively using their service via mobile device. And when they say ‘active’, they mean it. I can’t quite remember the specifics, but it wasn’t some namby pamby ‘logged in this year means active‘ rubbish. It was within the last 30 days or something like that.

Looking at Facebook’s published stats, I find it fascinating to consider what’s coming soon.

Here’s the mobile section:

# There are more than 65 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
# People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
# There are more than 180 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

What’s going to happen when those 180 mobile operators have actually delivered something?

Where would we be if, for example, Orange’s Motorola DEXT (or ‘Cliq’ in the States) along with their MotoBlur offering (which integrates Facebook directly into the main phone apps), becomes a category best seller?

That kind of future is rather exciting to behold. Where will we be when a full 30 million Britons login to Facebook via their mobile device every day?

Is that possible?

Could we, conceivably, get to that stage, any time soon? I wonder just how many Britons, just as an example, have got a mobile data plan? It’s still a *real* problem for your average consumer who’s still accustomed to the sad reality of 4-5 pounds per meg data pricing.

Facebook came along at the right time. It’s Facebook — way more than any other brand today — that’s galvanising the masses.

“What, you mean I can Facebook on this?” is oft commented when I’ve seen people evaluating handsets in shops. Indeed it’s a popular tactic, to include that as a ‘feature’ when you’re selling some of the more capable handsets.

The company’s efforts to either directly develop (or heavily assist) in the design of a dedicated application for as many device platforms as possible has certainly been useful.

If you thought the rather bollocks looking Facebook widget on the N97 and N97 Mini were a little limited, fear not. I briefly met the chap from Nokia who’s part of a team working with Facebook to integrate it properly (and one would hope, wholly) into the manufacturer’s handsets. The huge consumer draw for status updates and photo sharing is lifting millions out of ‘mobile poverty’. When new handset time comes round, I’m anecdotally seeing tons of normobs (“normal mobile users”) prioritising the feature of Facebook as a key buying decision.

What’s more exciting for me is that these consumers aren’t buying the ‘here’s a bollocks widget’. A lot — again anecdotally — that I’m meeting and interacting with, are specifically choosing their handsets based on how *good* the ‘Facebook stuff’ is on them. Witness, for example, that rather brilliantly integrated Facebook for Blackberry app. There’s many a twenty-something female normob walking about the city of London now, sporting a new Bold or a Curve with Facebook continually on in the background.

This is exciting, very exciting. Because Facebook is showing the way for the consumer. What’ll be really, really interesting is if they make good on the rumours, the conjecture, the potential that many have been talking about for some time — a Facebook mobile platform and framework for applications (and services). You only have to look at what they’ve done with their latest iPhone App — have you seen the second screen ready for an array of Facebook-deployed mobile applications?

We shall see.

In the meantime I’m delighted by the fact that new mobile users, having got hold of their new Blackberry or their new [whatever handset] principally for the purposes of Facebook are, naturally, looking at other applications and services that might be interesting. Since they’ve dealt with the billing/data/worry nightmare that may well have kept them from experimenting in the past, I’d hope that the trickle-down effect will continue to grow and grow. So that once you’ve done your 15 minutes of Facebooking, you might want to go and download a mobile audiobook via GoSpoken or even book a flight, hotel or hire a car with ShopQwik (who, by the way, is doing a roaring trade on flights at the moment).

It’s all good. Nice work Facebook. More of the same, please!

I *LOVE* the Novatel one. I really do. (Check the video overview I did recently) I’m excited to find out more about 3UK’s offering.

Meanwhile, what do you think?

I setup a vote to get your impressions:

Will you be buying a MiFi personal wireless hotspot device?

Vote on the right-hand-side of this page!

I’ve setup a vote on the right-hand-side here on Mobile Industry Review to capture your perspective on the new Nokia Booklet 3G laptop coming soon (see yesterday’s post).

To vote, look over here –> and choose an option.

And here’s a nice picture of the Booklet as a reminder:

Synchronica are all about sync — in particular, their Mobile Gateway (push email for everyone) and Mobile Backup services are being enjoyed by customers of many an operator. Social networking is naturally an area of interest for the company hence Carsten’s comments below:

I think this shows that carriers have understood the importance of social networking, but it also shows the limitations of the technical approach some solution providers are taking.

Orange said ‘Widget Player is currently available on the Nokia 6303, but it plans to roll out the application to more devices throughout the rest of 2009′.

How much sense does it make to introduce a solution that clearly is targeted at the mass-market of consumers and then make it available only on a single handset?

The client-based approach of many messaging vendors is drastically limiting the addressable market. Synchronica has always implemented a different approach using industry standards delivering push Email, synchronization and now social messaging to the native applications of a wide range of handsets – without requiring an additional client to be downloaded to the handset.

As a result, our solutions have a much larger addressable market and are better suited for the consumer sector which is categorized by a highly heterogeneous device landscape.

That’s a very interesting point. I took a look at the announcement and wondered that too, Carsten. I can only assume (and hope) that this the first of *many* Orange handsets that will go live with widget support.

The underlying assumption is that the Romans are rubbish. Until each of the ‘Front’ members pop-up with suggestions unhelpful to the broad argument, like the aqueduct, sanitation, roads, irrigation, medicine, education…

That’s how I felt the other day when I was standing amongst a group of friends of friends.

“What kind of new phone should I get?” a girl asked.

I did a quick analysis in my head and said, “iPhone”. I reasoned that she’d enjoy the interface, she’d love the apps, the maps, the user-interface — and that it would really blow her Nokia-N95-bearing-mind. And it’d be a good experience for her.

For me, for tech geeks, the iPhone’s almost Fisher-Price-like lack of background processing begins to annoy pretty quickly.

“Hold on a moment, that’s a monopoly!” declared a chap next to her.

The conversational attention moved to him as he ranted at the ‘grip’ wielded by Apple and their exclusive operators.

“Right, but the features, the potential, what you can actually DO with the device, it’s brilliant,” I argued, my underling point being that the device would actually increase the girl’s quality of life, in a small yet meaningful manner.

“All I need is to be able to call and text,” said the girl.

Somewhere, a pretty little mobile industry angel popped out of existence.

“Precisely!” said the monopoly chap, “It’s a monopoly!”

“Apple needed to do a deal with the mobile operators to get them to accept and implement ‘unlimited’ mobile data,” I explained, “Plus they needed to be able to install some software/services to deliver visual voicemail at the operator level, hence the initial exclusivity.”

The argument continued.

Before somebody mentioned ‘TomTom’ and the girl picked up, “Oh, maps on my mobile would be good.”

And almost immediately — exactly as per the script of the Life of Brian, everybody listening into the conversation started listing benefits of the iPhone. (Or, benefits of an advanced mobile platform, over and above the call/text basics).

Maps.
Sending pictures easily.
Train times.
Cocktail instructions. (Another chap promptly got out his iPhone, downloaded a cocktail video app and proceeded to follow the instructions to make a Caprina).

Here’s a video of that Life of Brian scene I found on YouTube:

To end the conversation, before we got onto more interesting discussion themes, I gave an illustration to how I’d used my mobile that day.

1. Alarm clock in the morning
2. Check train times
3. Find Thorntons chocolate shop in the High Street
4. See where my friend was, currently, with Google Latitude and rendezvous
5. Deal with some technical support perspective from a colleague via Facebook
6. Use the National Rail Enquiries iPhone app (priced at a steep £4.99) to ‘Find my next train home’ — a genius, genius offer.
7. Looked up and ordered a book on Amazon
8. Watched three episodes of The Wire
9. Listened to 60 minutes of Terry Pratchett’s Making Money audiobook
10. Took a photo and blogged about the fact that you can get an Entire Wedding Day Package for £1,799 at a venue in Billericay (walked by the poster).

At the end of my list, the chap didn’t say much for a few moments, before affirming that he, “Only wants to call and text on his mobile.”

Which is perfectly fine.

But the girl in question — and a few other on-lookers were sold. And they’ll be heading out to buy iPhones shortly.

The Great Unwashed — the mobile masses — are slowly realising that they don’t just need to restricted themselves to calling and texting.

There’s actually a lot more you can do with your handset…

What’s the definition of a smartphone?

I didn’t immediately have an answer. I had the answer in my mind… I could feel the neutrons firing but not giving a distinct summary sentence.

Then I formulated this:

A smartphone is a handset that enables you to manage your work and social life via means other than just the medium of voice.

What do you think? The thinking behind my definition is that, irrespective of what platform or specific functions, the main element that differentiates a ‘smartphone’ from a ‘shit phone’* is the fact that you can DO stuff. Manage a diary that’s synced from your Google Apps. Use instant messaging to talk to your team in Singapore whilst on an extended conference call at the office. Browse a spreadsheet or powerpoint on your device whilst you’re waiting for the ‘check’ at the restaurant.

What do you think?

* By the way: Will people PLEASE stop ‘shit phones’ that only call or text as ‘feature phones’. They have next to NO features.

The removed the UK’s largest chain, Carphone Warehouse, from the roster and gave Phones4U exclusivity.

So if you walk into a Carphone Warehouse, even today, you can’t get a Vodafone service. They won’t offer you a Vodafone contract.

Rumours abound as to why Vodafone made this decision in the first place — and what that meant for Carphone Warehouse.

Well, this is all changing. Again.

From the 7th of July, you can now walk into Carphone Warehouse and be furnished with a new Vodafone connection.

You can’t talk to them about your existing service offering. Mind you, you can’t even do that in a sodding Vodafone shop. You need to phone Customer Services.

That said, it’s a good move for the consumer looking ‘for a deal’.

You simply walk into Carphone Warehouse or Phones4U and — this is where the mobile operator gets an absolute kicking — you tell them you want a ‘better deal’. Let’s say you’re on Orange, right. Well, you won’t be. Not for much longer. The retailer typically gets a heck of a lot more revenue for obtaining a new customer than it does for ‘retaining’ and upgrading an existing customer. The deals for new customers are usually a lot more appealing.

So you’ll be whisked off Orange before you can say ‘can I get free minutes with that’ and the sales executive will begin pointing you to the operator that offers the highest revenue payout/bonus/vouchers for them.

So, from July 7th, you could now be walking out with a new Vodafone connection from Carphone Warehouse.

Good news for the consumer.

Good news for Carphone.

Bad news for Phones4U (slightly less reason to get your hands covered in snakeoil).

Good news for Vodafone. They can hopefully benefit from the churn that these retailers are generating. Carphone Warehouse, by the way, sold 19 million handsets last year. A majority of which were obviously churned from other networks.

Bad news for the operators in general.

We shall see…

Opinion and commentary is a a lot more valuable to MIR’s readers than your average handset review. Phonedog, Engadget, the industry leaders have that covered.

I want to know what you think of the implications of the iPhone extending reach into the medical environment. I want to know whether you think the market for mobile messaging is slowly dying. I want to know whether life in India is better with the addition of mobile, or not at all. I’d like to know what your mother thinks of her Motorola. Or why you think Palm are poised to take over the world. Or fail.

MIR’s readers aren’t necessarily commenters. Now and again you’ll see a post that attracts a lot of feedback. For MIR, it’s not always about the comments. It’s about the fact that your contribution is printed out and put in front of one of the mobile operator’s CEOs. Or having your article about the future of mobile music being included in the background dossier as briefing for one of the world’s top music companies.

Those are both real world examples that I’m aware of. Indeed I know of one mobile operator and another handset manufacturer who regularly prints off entire segments of MIR to forward round the office.

If only we could make people pay for that…. oh wait…

Anyway, part of the reason I’ve brought back MIR 3.0 is because I was missing really good opinion. I’m certainly capable of forming my own. Indeed I’ve never been known to be short of a perspective or two. But I thoroughly enjoy reading other people’s viewpoints.

So I’d like you to consider taking the time to write a post for MIR. On whatever mobile related subject turns you on. You don’t need to be *somebody*. You don’t need to be a jobbing columnist. You don’t need to have your own blog or 50,000 followers on Twitter. Nor do you need to worry about committing to a punishing 5-post a week schedule.

Submit one. Or try it weekly. Whatever. Provided you’ve got something to say — I’d like to publish it.

And the MIR audience would like to read.

I can’t commit to paying for content at the moment, but I can put your name in lights and give you an influential platform to reach hundreds of thousands of people, not just in the industry, but all across the tech blogosphere.

Here’s how it works.

1. Email me and tell me you’re interested. Tell me who you are, tell me what you reckon you’d like to write about. If you’ve just got one post in mind, no problem. Or if you’d like to try doing a few, tell me what you’re thinking.

2. I’ll write back as soon as I can. Usually within a day. I’ll give you some feedback as to what I reckon the audience will think of your idea.

3. If you’re still up for it, I’ll sort you out with a MIR publishing account and we’ll go from there.

If you think this might be a useful way of promoting you or your company, sure. That’s not a problem. We’ll put in a link and tell the audience about you — they typically want to know that level of context anyway. Indeed some of the readers might want to do business with you or hire you.

For anyone thinking about writing 4 paragraphs of puff rubbish and getting it published: No. The MIR audience are old enough and smart enough to be able to identify a bullshitter from someone who is passionate about a particular subject (and happens to be writing from a company who specialises in that area). We’re all about helping out with business development anyway.

Now, I’m often asked about word count.

There is no word count limit.

If you’re a new columnist then the readers aren’t going to react that well to three lines of text. Equally, there’s nothing worse than reading an article that’s a really cool subject — but finding that there’s only five paragraphs, because the author stuck rigidly to some imaginative 400 or 500 word limit. The key thing with MIR is we have — deliberately — a conversational editorial tone. If you want to write with the Queen’s English, brilliant. I set the tone as conversational originally because I wanted to be able write-as-I-speak, or perhaps, write-as-I-think. I find it a lot easier to get the stuff out my head that way. So don’t be worried about word count. Worry about quality. Get the stuff out of your head and keep writing for as long as you feel is relevant. And if you can’t find a decent end to the post, say something contentious and end with a question mark.

If we’ve talked in the past about you writing — and you didn’t necessarily get an immediate response from me, it’s because I’m rubbish. It’s because I probably wanted to reply properly — but that’ll have required 45 minutes work and [insert more excuses here]. I do my best, but there’s a constant inbox of about 4,000, so please don’t be put off. Try me. Drop me a note and let’s see what we can do together.

Mail me on ewan@mobileindustryreview.com or get me by Twitter (ew4n) or instant messenger.

Here’s a quote from that CNN report:

Ashton Kutcher — Twitter’s top tweeter — warned he may pull the plug on his tweeting if the micro-blogging service partners on a reality TV show.

“It’s all fun and games until somebody gets stalked,” Kutcher wrote in a Twitter posting late Monday.

I think it’s an interesting concept, getting members of the public (“ordinary people”) to use the likes of Twitter to keep tabs on celebrities. It’s the next evolutionary step. Do we all want to know that Brad Pitt just used the bathroom? I don’t. But I’m sure a good few million people who’ve got nothing better to do would be delighted to give their attention to this — and make it a ratings winner.

Brad Pitt. Live.

And all you need to do is pay some guy $2,000/month plus expenses to literally follow him everywhere? Done.

It’s a genius concept.

I don’t agree with it. But it’ll work.

Introduce photos (ShoZu) and live QIKing when the network speeds and batteries support it.

Yup it’s a genius concept, it really is.

“What’s Britney Spears doing right now? Right now? Well I can tell you because Jimmy is inside The Beverley Hills Four Seasons with this latest update [link to Twitter feed/photo/video].”

Yeah. That’s going to get eyeball-after-eyeball. Sad, but true.

It’s the next step in the evolution of celebrity obsession.

But what’s Ashton going to do about it?

Could he, theoretically, setup AshtonLive, himself? And send an invite to every one of his 2 million followers? How many would join? 70%?

It’d would be more or less frictionless for them to do so. One click and your account, friends and whatnot are imported.

After all, a lot of those who’ve joined are genuinely interested in what Ashton’s up to. They’re fans. They’re on Twitter for him. Ashton is the draw, not Twitter.

So isn’t it better for Ashton to own his own AshtonLive feed — and make it wholly compelling, so he can control it? So he can switch it off when he really wants a break? So he can put re-runs (or highlights or something) up when he wants to go away for 2 weeks to get some peace and quiet?

Much better to own your own medium, right? Do it now, while you’ve got the authority and control over those 2 million followers.

Setup AshtonLive.com — do a carbon copy of Twitter, hire a few smart developers and woosh, you’re live over night. You’ll need a bit of help scaling but there’s plenty of technical assistance out there ready to access. In fact you could probably stick it all on Mosso and let them sort it out.

Launch your own AshtonLive iPhone app.

Stop Tweeting on Twitter immediately. Transfer the attention assets out over night. Make huge, huge headlines while you’re doing it.

Meanwhile do a deal with the talent agencies across Hollywood to rip their celebrities off Twitter and on to their own services.

I’d really like to see what would happen if Ashton, Demi and the celebrity Twitters launched their own microblogging alternatives.

(Mashable also covered the story here.)

Here are some quotes right off the press from some mobile developers. (I have removed names).

- “I’d like to know how much of my revenues they’ll demand.”

- “I like the ease of billing and the potential of micro-payments.”

- “I suspect they’ll take 30% just like Apple / Nokia etc. I hope it’s not more than that.”

- “It’s just another App store – we WILL develop for it, obviously, but only because I’m yet to see which store will capture the minds of consumers.”

- “I very much like the concept. Especially if one SDK works across a number of MNOs. That would be really cool.”

- “Is this too good to be true? It sure looks like it.”

- “If they were REALLY thinking of developers, they’d be finding a way to reduce the amount of work we need to do across the various mobile programming languages. Perhaps they are, I can’t quite work it out yet.”

- “Interesting, interesting… that’s all I have to say until you tell us more, Ewan.”

I’m aiming to have more information soon! If you’ve got a comment or opinion, drop me a note — ewan@mobiledeveloper.tv.

(I regularly tap up people for live reaction — if you’d like to be on that list, add me at ewanmacleod@gmail.com on Google Talk or ewanjmacleod on Skype.)

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My name is Ewan and I’m founder and Editor.  You can find out more about me here.

After Mobile Industry Review turned subscription-only back at the end of March, I’ve been looking around for other projects to commence.  Mobile Developer TV started off as a concept in the back of my mind about 6 months ago.

Here’s the Background

I’m founder and editor of Mobile Industry Review (”MIR”), one of the world’s most influential commentators on the mobile industry.  The site published daily news and opinion for almost 3 years, reaching a core audience of 250,000 industry executives and fanatics.  MIR’s feed is integrated directly into the intranets of many mobile operators, handset manufacturers and mobile service companies.  Super reach, super influence.  Witness, for example, our ground-breaking video of the never-before-seen Nokia Test Labs in Farnborough (Over 175,000 people viewed it within days of publishing). Or take a look at the recent post I published about iPhone centric developer mindset in Silicon Valley, picked up by MocoNews, VentureBeat and the Washington Post.

I thoroughly enjoyed producing the site with a team of brilliant contributors.  In March 2009, I turned MIR subscription-only, providing the site’s on-going feed to one company.  The nature of the company’s requirement developed to the point that I was able to engage a small team of writers to deliver the on-going service.  I still retain all MIR rights and content — including the domain names and the site’s extensive reach — so I’ve been looking for another project to put these resources to good use.

Why Mobile Developer TV?

I really, really enjoy producing online video features. There’s something about ‘TV’ that you just can’t match with the written word.  It’s about seeing the person (or people), visualising their excitement and seeing just how passionate they are about their products and services. I did a lot of experimenting with the Mobile Industry Review Show — the MIR Show — and after a good few hundred hours of stress and learning, I think I’ve more or less perfected the art of brilliant online video production: Top quality HD cameras, excellent HD video hosting, super-expensive microphones — in fact, the best equipment you can buy, a bit of creativity in the editing studio (Final Cut is excellent, but iMovie, although frowned upon from the professional sector, is extremely quick).

Marry this passion for online television with my fascination with the mobile industry — and more specifically, with mobile development — and it didn’t take me long to hatch the concept.  And here it is!

The Aim

I’m going to meet the best and the brightest in mobile development — and I’m going to put them on camera.  I’m aiming to publish one TV show per week to start with.  Each show will centre on one or two people in the mobile development space.  iPhone App developers, certainly.  But I’m interested in the whole spectrum — from Blackberry’s App World, to Nokia’s Ovi, to Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace and beyond.

If you’ve ever seen any of the interviews I’ve produced in the past, you’ll know I like to keep myself out of the picture. It’s not about me, it’s about the interviewee.  In some cases I’m aiming to do a straight interview — me to the right of the camera pointing the microphone and asking questions.  In other cases, I’ll do a walk-about or a show-and-tell with the developer.

I’m interested in talking to and profiling:

• Mobile application developers
  (Platform agnostic: iPhone/Blackberry/Nokia/J2ME/Samsung/Microsoft/Android)
• Companies whose primary business is NOT in the mobile space — but who have developed or are developing mobile applications.
  (For instance: A travel company launching an iPhone app, dotcoms launching their own apps — eg. Lastminute’s FoneFood app)
• Companies who supply services to/work with mobile developers
  (Example: Providers of mobile advertising, debug/testing)

Video will comprise most of the content here on Mobile Developer TV — however in my research over the past months, it’s clear that, whilst there are a lot of developers in Silicon Valley and London (my two primary locations), there’s a considerable geographic spread of developers.  Only today I was talking to developers from Ohio, Johannesburg, New Zealand, Ukraine, Paris and Scotland.  I’d like to be able to fly into meet each — that might be a bit of a challenge in the short term though.  So to supplement, I’ll aim to publish text interviews and profiles regularly.

One developer I spoke to suggested recording his own interview on video, answering my questions to camera with his own facilities — and sending it over to me to publish.  I think it’s a super suggestion and I think we’ll do that.

Can I profile you?  Contact Me!

I’m based in London and San Francisco so I’ll be producing the majority of in-person videos from those locations.  If you’d like to feature, drop me a note.  I’m ewan@mobiledeveloper.tv — this is the best way of contacting me.  But you can also phone/text me.  My mobile numbers are:

+44 7769 658104 (UK)

+1 415 200 9515 (US)

… (I’m happy to hear from PRs too.)

Don’t Be British

Please don’t be British — that is, sit at the back and hope I’ll come across you.  I really will do my best to find mobile developers and companies to profile — I’ve already got a big list from working with MIR — but I am most certainly no genius.  So I need your help in order to profile you — I need to know you exist. So please do drop me a note if you’re keen to be profiled.  At the very least I’ll aim to send you out a list of questions to answer by email that I can turn into a profile piece here on the site. (Who are you, what are you creating/have you created, what platform, why, what challenges have you had, and so on).  Ideally I’ll arrange to meet physically to interview you on-camera and perhaps produce an application walk-through.

Got News?

If you’ve got a particular topic of announcement that you think mobile developers and those working in related fields should know about, knock me over an email right-away.

Design

I’m doing a Robert Scoble at the moment — that is publishing with a default WordPress Theme.  I’ll update it as we progress.  The content is way more important than the theme and that’s where my focus is at the moment.

Editorial Policy

As for editorial policy, I’m aiming for a macro view of mobile development.  I don’t plan on publishing code level discussions, or discussing the finer points of the Symbian operating system.  Instead, I’ll be looking at the commercial aspects of the mobile applications development sector along with the trends I’m witnessing.  The overriding focus is, of course, on profiling developers.  I’m particularly interested in talking with one-man-bands:  The chaps (and ladies) who’re single-handedly driving the massive change sweeping the industry.  That said, I’m also keen to talk to the business people — the product managers, the executive teams — about the challenges and successes in the field of mobile applications development.

This is a work in progress so I’d welcome your feedback, either below or by email.

I’ll be syndicating the output through the public feed on Mobile Industry Review so if you’re already a MIR RSS subscriber, you’ll start to get updates shortly.  You can also catch blog updates via the new Mobile Developer TV Twitter account @mobdevtv.

Standby!

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Regular reader, Mike Stead, reckons Mobile Industry Review should ‘get out a bit more‘.

I took exception to this statement on the basis that we’ve reported from six different countries in the last 3 months. But what Mike meant was we should get OUT more. Out into the fresh (read: cold, rainy) air. In the countryside.

Here’s his full statement:

We love Mobile Industry Review. The team are great guys, and their videos are the gems of an otherwise staid and boring industry. However we do think that they should get out more. Way out. In the countryside. Back to nature. Mobiles are at their best when out and about, and come into their own when a PC is not an option. So instead of jetting off somewhere exotic, incurring a massive CO2 footprint, let’s see the lads down home in the West Country somewhere, under canvas, kicking back but using their mobiles to have fun in the outdoors.

And he’s setup a Facebook group. Dear Gods…

You can take a look and decide whether or not to join here.

I made the commitment that we will go camping if 500+ people join Mike’s group. We’ll film the whole experience and make a MIR TV show from it.

I think that, right now, this 500+ number is a safe bet. Maybe 10 or so people will join, right?

I reckon James Whatley will be up for it. He’s generally up for doing ‘stuff’ like this and he’s also been to that festival. What’s it called? The mud-infested one that’s much, much better when you can switch it off (i.e. watch on TV)? Glastonbury, that’s it.

I reckon Ben Smith might exhibit some good old fashioned plucky ‘come on Tim’ positiveness and will probably, at a push — and provided there’s electricity — be up for it.

Meanwhile Dan Lane and I share an affinity for warmth and comfort. My own perspective is that we (the Royal ‘We’) came out of the cave. We discovered fire. We evolved beyond our original programming. We got warm. We got comfort. I like to celebrate that, in a quiet way, each night.

I also happen to believe that I — and everyone else reading this text — is particularly lucky to have the ability to sleep more or less soundly in a warm environment every night. Millions do not. There’s a teeny bit of me that reacts negatively to going camping as a recreational thing to do when lots of people don’t even have a home to get back to. But then, looking at my 5 or 6 mobile contracts … they are highly, highly unnecessary in the context of daily life.

That said, the prospect of spending a sleepless night in some godawful field in the middle of the West Country of England with ‘wildlife’ crawling over me is not, on any level, appealing. I know some people enjoy that sort of thing though. Each to their own.

Mike’s had one chap, Justin Davies, join his Facebook campaign today. I joined as well, so I could write some outrageous things on the group’s discussion board.

So if you’d like to see us getting cold, soaked-through and generally really, really annoyed trying to ‘enjoy’ a night or so ‘camping’ in the West of England — and making a MIR TV show out of it — vote with your feet and join Mike’s group.

We are always responsive to our audience.

And Mike, if no one joins, we’ll stick to the Four Seasons or the Ritz Carlton…

The screen on the Joggler is incredibly bright and crisp and the device itself feels very solid and well-made with a fixed sturdy stand on the back. Also on the back of the unit is a power socket (No batteries here, this is a wired device), an ethernet port and an audio out jack. On the side is a USB socket and on top is an LED but I didn’t see any applications taking advantage of this. Inside the device is powered by an Intel Atom processor, has WiFi connectivity and runs an O2 branded version of the OpenFrame software (which appears to be based on Ubuntu linux with hacking opportunities aplenty!).

Overall I found the Joggler to be a bit of a disappointment. I’m familiar with the OpenFrame platform this is based on and was expecting to find the same Flickr, YouTube and RSS content included. Unfortunately the only place the Joggler can show photos from is the built-in 1GB of storage or a USB stick. O2 are definitely downplaying the photo frame aspect of the Joggler and concentrating on the O2 Calendar integration which itself has a few disappointing aspects such as not having any sync capabilities. I think it’s safe to assume that any family that’s tech-savvy enough to buy one of these on launch has someone in it that already uses an online calendar such as that provided by Exchange or Google and it would make sense to sync with that calendar. The kids might not need to know that Daddy is in a meeting with his boss but at least some availability information would be useful. The biggest disappointment of all is that I know the OpenFrame platform has a Dominos Pizza button and the Joggler does not!

I think the Joggler is a good start to what is essentially a new market for MNOs but I can’t help but think that an untouched OpenFrame device would be more appealing to a wider audience. I certainly know of some other MNOs that are working on similar device offerings so this should be a very interesting market to watch over the next 12 months.

Alongside the Joggler, O2 announced the O2 Calendar, a free family oriented web-based service that is available to anyone in the UK regardless of them being an O2 customer or not. For those users who are O2 customers the service provides free SMS reminders of appointments and integrates with the Joggler device. O2 also announced a family bolt-on for existing customers allowing one person to pay a monthly fee to add a number of other O2 customers to their family group. Once part of the group every family member can make calls or send SMS or MMS to other members of the group completely free of charge.

The O2 Joggler will be available in April from O2 stores and their website priced £149.99 or free if taken instead of a handset when upgrading or signing a new 18 or 24 month contract. Pricing for the O2 family bolt-on has yet to be announced.

“Errrrr,” say I. I’m thinking about the possible catalogue of problems that could occur.

“It’s the Vertu Shop. We’re in Prague. Let’s go in and see if they’ll let us do some filming?” prompts Ben.

“Errrrrrrr,” I repeat, still processing the potential issues. The biggest issue in my mind is that we’re unannounced.

“Listen, why don’t I just pop in and ask them?” says Ben.

I look at Dan. We both do a virtual shoulder-shrug, but with eyebrows instead.

We’re standing on what appears to be Prague’s version of Bond Street. There are security guards standing outside every shop — like the Dior one, or the Cartier one. Each of them is eyeing us. We’re carrying an HD camera, tripod and we all have at least two handsets on-the-go at once. Definitely worth the time of these suspicious security guards.

Ben waltzes into the Vertu store whilst Dan and I stand outside with the equipment.

Ten seconds later, Ben reappears.

“It’s fine. They’re open until 6.30pm and they said we can film all we like.”

Come on! We’ve never been invited to any Vertu events or shops or anything like that before in London. Indeed in the Nokia store on Regent Street, they positively growl at you if you so much as head toward the Vertu stand without your 60,000 pounds on display.

So standby. I’ve had a look at the ‘digital rushes’ of the Vertu store and the footage looks good. We’ll bring the experience to you shortly.

We all went in skeptics. Find out just what Dan Lane and Ben Smith thought of the experience… soon.

By the way, the Vertu shop in Prague was buzzing. We interrupted filming a few times because of customers wanting to buy. One guy came into the store whilst we were pointing the camera at one of the shockingly expensive devices. I nodded to the chaps and we headed to the front of the store and stood in the corner respectfully — I thought this was the best thing to do — whilst this American chap took a browse around the devices aided by the expert Vertu salesman. In 2 minutes he’d made up his mind.

“Cash discount?” he asked.

The Vertu salesman nodded sagely and explained ’3%’.

“Done,” said the chap, “Where’s the nearest bank?”

The Vertu salesman pointed it out.

I’d like to point out that I have never, ever popped into an HSBC in Prague and asked to withdraw 60,000 EURO (minus 3% cash discount) to buy a new phone. Not yet, anyway.

Recession?

What recession!

Standby for the videos.