Nokia road to a new business proposition

El artículo es de Fast Company

Con el lanzamiento del iPhone Apple se puso en competencia directa con el líder de hace décadas en la categoría, Nokia (viniendo Apple también de ser líder indiscutido en algunos de sus negocios); lucha de titanes sin duda...

Extracto inicial (de una presentación ante los ejecutivos de la industria de la música en USA, por parte del executive vice president of entertainment and communities, Tero Ojanperä, de Nokia):

""This is an early advertisement from Nokia. It says: A tire you can trust ... from Nokia," he says. "Nokia is a great company from Finland that I joined in 1990. In its history, it has made great car tires and also great rubber boots."

The crowd is visibly flummoxed; after a smattering of awkward laughter, table chatter resumes. Ojanperä is close to losing his audience but plunges on. "We have since become the No. 1 cell-phone company in the world, with nearly 40% market share and 1.1 billion users. Today, Nokia is making 13 phones every second. So you can think about how many we are making during your dinner."

The magnitude of those numbers seems to register on the diners, drawing their attention back to this stranger dressed in black.

"But the numbers are not important," Ojanperä continues. "The point here is, the world is a vibrant place. We are in India, China, Africa, Russia, the United States. Think about a young boy in India who is getting his first phone: He can listen to music or take a picture or watch a movie or even make a movie. In many ways this" -- he holds up his slim E71 handset -- "is his first computer and it is connecting him to the rest of the world for the first time.""

Y viene la redefinición - ambición del valor:

"Because the group is composed of music execs, Ojanperä then explains Nokia's Comes With Music service, which offers unlimited downloads of more than 6 million songs (that can be kept for life) and is paid for with a fee built into the cost of certain mid-to-high-end Nokia handsets. "The two forces we are competing against are actually nonconsumption and piracy," Ojanperä says. "If we can get people engaged with music and compete against piracy, then we have won the war. And we believe we are revolutionizing the way music is being consumed." [...] "We want to make a difference in the payment for music. Nokia not only wants to revolutionize music, but I am claiming now that we will quickly be the world's biggest entertainment media network.""

La observación de que se compite contra el no-consumo y contra la piratería es absolutamente acertada (pensamos aquí)

A continuación 2 min de video en el cual el EVP de Nokia explica su plan:



Extracto que responde a porqué Nokia podría triunfar sobre Apple en lo sucesivo:

"The company believes there are three reasons why people adopt new technology. The first is survival, the second is social, and the last is entertainment. The common thread among the three can be loosely described as culture, and Nokia has worked hard to develop a deep understanding of all the cultures in which it operates. It runs 10 research labs worldwide, each based on an Open Innovation philosophy and affiliated with a local university -- Berkeley and Stanford in the Bay Area, MIT and Cambridge in the two Cambridges, as well as locations in Hollywood, Helsinki, Nairobi, and Beijing. Researchers learn what different people's needs are -- and what they can afford -- by immersing themselves in locales that cover the widest spectrum of the human condition. So while Apple, RIM, and Palm offer singular products that target an elite, niche market, Nokia builds devices to satisfy every budget and appetite for information, making it indispensable all over Africa and Asia."

Coincidimos aquí, que, en efecto, contar con la disciplina de la investigación sostenida de los mercados meta es condición insoslayable para la innovación disruptiva y la mejora de productos...

Extracto ejemplo de resultados (en producto) logrados:

"When I meet with Henry Tirri [habla el reportero de Fast Company], Nokia's research chief, who oversees the R&D labs, he explains how his teams are working to build a handset that senses what a user is doing -- jogging, say -- and then selects music from a personal library to suit that activity. Then in the next breath, he describes how his labs developed features such as a compass that shows Muslim users the direction of Mecca or a voice-based version of a Craigslist-style service for countries with high illiteracy rates. Last April, the company launched a program in India called Life Tools. For a fee of $1.30 a month, users can receive daily information about agriculture, education, and/or entertainment. In addition to cricket scores and Bollywood gossip, rural farmers get weather updates and daily crop prices from three of the closest markets."

[...]

Aquí el final del reportaje (fusión de música y juegos)

¿Qué más podemos decir?

1. Nokia está demostrando cómo se construye una verdadera compañía GLOBAL; por estar entendiendo "global" en el sentido de que sus productos son los mismos no obstante ser diferentes para cada mercado

2. El "teléfono celular" es un aparato que no dejará de sorprendernos por años; nada tan personal desde la invención de la billetera (o el nombre propio); nada tan universal desde la invención misma del mismo lenguaje :-)