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]
