Category: Windows Phone

Nokia

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One of my favorite things to write about is the competitive landscape in the industry. I have seen many companies come and go. Some remain. Some are stronger and some are weaker. There are those that burst on the seen looking to change the world. They end up like Kim Kardasian on stage with Prince, bright lights and large audience but in the end they just can’t dance. Netscape and MySpace come to mind. They are then politely asked to leave the stage. Then there are those that burn so bright they are the future and the end is something they can only define, Facebook and Apple seem to be those stars of late.  We call them Lady GaGa.  How long will they last?  Who  knows.  They may end up becoming the next Madonna (Apple probably already is this category), constantly changing and exciting us or they could end up like…Lady GaGa.   Then there are those that were stars of huge magnitude and now they are like an aging Frank Sinatra or Mickey Mantle. The people who were there when they started revere them and those that came after are told to revere them, they just don’t know why. Microsoft and Nokia fall into those camps.  With the recent announcement of a partnership between Microsoft and Nokia,  I thought it would be good to go back and have a deeper look at Nokia.

Nokia has an interesting history.  Unlike your current high flyers who have a history that can be measured in some instance less than a decade.  Nokia is over 140 years old.  Being located in Finland they started in an industry that Finland has by default…timber.  The founders Fredrick Idestam started a pulp mill and Nokia stated manufacturing paper.  I am sure at the time it was sexy but in todays world  it just seems so un-environmental now.  That was back in 1865.  It would be much later during the era of diversification and mega conglomerates that they would diversify into another vertical,  telecommunications. This would lay the foundation for the Nokia that we all know.

When mobile phones came onto the scene Nokia was well positioned to provide the phones and start the drive towards where we are today.  Nokia had some keen insights that would propel them to the leadership position in the industry. As a a friend told me who has a deep history in wireless what Nokia really figured out was that you could do more with those phones then just make phone calls.  There was software on them.  You could show what day it is, the current time, all sorts of cool things.  You could even do this text thing pretty easily.  It was also one of the first companies to have accessories for their phones.  Those original dove bar phones that sold 80 million world wide pretty soon had all sorts of colorful cases, the kids loved them.

Things were going good for Nokia and then they made a series of unfortunate decisions.  Though people liked the dove bar phone there was a whole group that did not like them, but preferred the flip phone.  Nokia tried but did not persist in trying to create the next cool phone.  All companies should try to influence the market however they should not dictate to it.  It is a fine line, but I am afraid on this one Nokia decided to cross over it.  There was also the debacle with the US market.  For a long time the US market was perceived to be behind the rest of the world when it came to wireless. In all fairness this was true.  Part of the reason is in the rest of the wireless world used mobility to get around a lot of network constraints and government regulations related to traditional LAN line services.  Nokia being headquartered in this part of world understood it.  However the US is a very competitive culture, to dismiss the US and think we would not catch up at some point and be an exciting and aggressive market, well it is inexcusable.

Finally we have to look at the mobile OS that Nokia chose to build around, Symbian.  Symbian started as a open source project backed by NTT DoCoMo, Ericsson, and Nokia.  It operated independently for many years until Nokia bought the Symbian LTD in 2008 and became the main contributor to the source code.   Through the years it seemed that Symbian and then Nokia struggled to maintain a vibrant developer community.  With the move by more and more consumers to smart phones Symbian seemed to lose direction.  Though the largest mobile OS on earth by market share, recent years have seen a steady decline as more viable platforms like iOS and Android emerged on the seen. Those two platforms have obtained the perfect marriage; developer loyalty with consumer love.  Another interesting tidbit is Finland is the home of Linus Torvalds, the father of the open source movement.  Just think the birthplace of open source is standardizing in Windows Phone 7.  Turns out David didn’t beat Goliath.

Which brings us to today and the big recent announcement that Nokia is going to move to Windows Phone 7.  This deal even on the face of it has so many connotations and implications that it is hard to get ones head around it.  But in short Nokia is ditching the Symbian OS and letting Microsoft do the innovative things in software and reducing Nokia to a manufacturer of handsets.  It is, I am sure a hard pill to swallow for Nokia as for a long time they were perceived as the leader in mobility, a company that would try and set the future course of mobility.  They are walking into the wilderness deciding that their primary competition is HTC, Samsung, LG, and China is now also getting heavily into this space.  Nokia has decided they are going to compete on design.  Good luck with that.  The Asian handset manufacturers have made a living  off of creating cool inexpensive handset models.   At a time when the world is realizing the value of mobility in ways far larger than originally imagined, Nokia has decided not to lead and to walk away.  It’s a stunning fall from grace.

Will this partnership work? Possibly.  It’s two companies that really needed to do something different.  Nokia and Microsoft were losing market share.  What they were doing was  not working.  Focusing on the Nokia side the challenge will be selling the new strategy internally.  Early on there has been a lot of backlash, but lets be pragmatic and look 6-12 months out.  The big challenge for current CEO (and former Microsoft President) Stephen Elop will be managing a big cultural shift in the organizations mentality and the companies outlook toward the future.  I am sure of late they have paid a lot of attention to Google and Apple, moving forward that will be more a Microsoft issue.  How much input will Nokia have in these discussions?  What kind of input will Nokia have into the Microsoft software? Will they have more than HTC or Samsung?  Or will they just be another OEM partner?  I think in the end there are a lot more questions than answers, but one thing is clear the era of Nokia leading in the mobile industry is over.  It did not follow the traditional trajectory and now it looks like Kim Kardasian is back on stage trying to dance, Nokia it’s your turn to leave the stage, you just can’t dance.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann February 18, 2011

The iPad Juggernaut …..

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I guess it was bound to happen.  It is something I have seen many times before.  It is annoying, frustrating, and in some corners just plain pathetic.  Addressing the competitive threat by any means necessary.  even when it is obviously desperate.  It’s these type of corporate responses that drive me nuts. Recently Microsoft (my old company) has come under a lot of pressure to come up with a Tablet strategy.  I should add Microsoft has had for years a Tablet.  It was one of Bill Gates’ pet projects,  They just need a strategy that works.   The Microsoft response is a iPad battle card to help Microsoft partners and its field sales force sell Windows 7 slates in the enterprise, while combating the threat from the iPad.

Let me go back a bit in time and just say I have seen these battle cards before.  It was pretty standard practice at Microsoft across all battle lines and often they were very helpful.  However after the successful debut of the Apple iPhone I received in my mail box a little envelope that contained my Windows Phone 6 versus the Apple iPhone battle card (I am serious…I am not making this up).  What were some of the advantages of Windows Phone 6?  It had mobile Office, Sharepoint Support, better Exchange Synch etc..If you read the link earlier you will by now realize that whomever the marketing manager is who put the Apple iPad battle card together has mastered the art of copy and paste.

Do not get me wrong for a minute, I do not envy the marketing Manager who had the responsibility of taking this on.  It is one of those things that when nothing is happening on the product side you still have to generate some sort of response, the worst thing is to be quiet. And to their credit they created some really nice slide ware. I will be however surprised to see if any of my former mates in the Microsoft field sales force ever have the guts to present this to a customer or even regurgitate it over drinks or dinner with a client.

The slide, though intended for partners, demonstrates the focus on the enterprise and the disengagement in general from the consumer market place.  I should also add this did not come out of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices division.  If it had it would have a far greater emphasis on the general market.  The Windows Division is outside all of that its own $20 billion juggernaut.  We call that power.    The slides do highlight the success the iPad is having in the enterprise space as more and more users want access to their corporate networks from their iPad.  It’s the reverse of what happened with Windows , which first took off in the business world before penetrating the home.  But times have changed and with new devices hitting the market at an ever-increasing pace and a much more affordable price big sea changes in the enterprise often come from the outside in versus the inside out.  People want to be cool even when they are in he office.  Even if they are an accountant.

Finally the biggest issue I hear these days is people at the Big M are tired of following and not leading (the exception being the xBox team with Kinect).  They want to be out in front of the industry.  But if you read my last blog on Facebook I highlighted how similar they were to Microsoft, when it was a younger company.  Now it’s not like people at Microsoft are really old, no far worse, they are middle-aged.  They have kids, they live through their kids, they have divorces, they are joining AA, they buy expensive sports cars, they try really hard physical activities that they used to be able to do, they buy iPads…I think you are getting the picture.

In the mean time the Tablet market keeps chugging along as highlighted in Apples recent earnings announcement.  There are other entrants that are also gaining momentum, like Android (we should seem new slide ware shortly).  I admit I was skeptical when the iPad came out.  I felt like it was just a giant OS, but there is a beauty in having the same core code between your phone and your tablet.  The applications are easy to write for both.  The iPad seems to be gaining momentum as it creates a scenario where a more powerful device can be useful and mobile.  There are a lot of scenario where having a monitor is useful and even desired, but with so much time spent on the web there are a lot of scenarios where it does not, just look at all the useful features of the latest Facebook mobile apps.  How many people out there are just checking into their favorite Starbuck’s? I need no mouse or keyboard for that I just need my finger.  The only way to compete with iPad is to get ahead of it, but once a boulder starts to slide down a mountain it i s hard to stop.

Good Night and Good Luck!

Hans Henrik Hoffmann January 25th, 2011

Generating “Buzz”

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With the Consumer Electronic Show just having been completed I think it is a good time to talk about one of those things that every technology provider strives for which is to generate a certain amount of “buzz” around a future product.  It is so very important to the success of any new product that people begin  to talk about it before the product is released.  Certainly out of this years show there was a lot of noise generated around Google’s Android platform, with companies making a big push to showcase upcoming releases of both phones and tablets.  Companies like Verizon, Samsung and Motorola did a lot to push the new releases of Android based tablets, pinning future success on the release of the product.

There are some good historical examples.  The “buzz” generated around Microsoft Windows 95 or the “buzz” created around the Apple iPhone.  In each case you had people lined up at midnight to get the product.  This is great stuff, but there is another type of “buzz” that gets created underneath all that and that is creating the excitement in the developer community.  The people who make the cool apps for the Apple app store or Google store.   Without developers extending and creating a market place an application can have a very short life span

My last role at Microsoft there was a commitment that everyone had to sign up about creating “buzz” in the development community for Microsoft Developer tools .  To clarify for those with no Microsoft background every employee signs up for a “commitment”, which is a goal that will be either fulfilled or not fulfilled come review time at the end of the Microsoft fiscal year.  This determines salary increase, bonus and promotion.  Anybody reading this probably has the same question is what the hell does “generating buzz”  mean?  Being developer land, my first thought was “good luck…with that”.  How are less than 100 people out in the field going to generate excitement around Microsoft Developer technologies, especially when there are so many dependencies? 

To be fair to create buzz goes beyond assigning a few people it really takes a commitment beyond a few individuals, to multiple organizations to external partners.  One of the keys to Apple’s iPhone success was not just the whisper campaign they were generating.  They also had a behemoth like AT&T behind them and they were fully bought in, up to their neck.  Not like the dipping their toes into the water effort they did with the Windows Phone 7 launch.

Another key success factor is just having a product, because it is the end game , it is where you are trying to take the consumer.  When the product launched there is a certain level of satisfaction in having got there.  Sometimes tech companies are guilty of trying to generate excitement without really telling the end customer what to be excited about.  Usually it is to try to get people excited about the company.  Coming from my background at Microsoft the last years seemed to be spent trying to recapture the glory of yester year.

Having a certain level of “buzz” is the difference between having momentum and not having momentum.  When you have the ear of the consumer and the press then a new phenomena sets in, which is “what is next?”  In todays world Apple certainly has tha momentum.  They have the iPod, iPhone, MacBooks,i Pad, Apple Store…they really are in the zone right now here they are setting the industry direction.  Google now is starting to get beyond just being a search company with first Android and next Chrome. Facebook maybe has more momentum than anybody as under their CEO Mark Zuckerburg, they have that “it’s a young mans game” syndrome going.  Similar to what Bill Gate’s had back in the 80’s and 90’s.  It’s the difference between rolling the boulder up the hill or down the hill.

Finally with regards to CES and why it has become what it has. A big reason is that technology is pervasive in everybody’s lives today.  It is not restricted to the “nerd” or “geek” or “hobbyist”.  We all have technology in some capacity of our lives.  It is our cell phones, flat screen TV’s, Tivo, game console’s, Roomba’s, etc.. The Consumer Electronics Show is about showing off how technology is going to further enhance our day-to-day lives in the near future.  Any company participating better not be showing off what is already available.  Attendees want to see the coming years Christmas purchase, not what they already have.  They want the participating companies to wow them.  In short they want some “buzz”.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann January 10th, 2011

I bought an iPhone…how could I!?!

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It is one of those things that there was a time when the idea of getting any non-Microsoft product was just not part of the equation.  I was there for 18 years during the good and the bad, we had a pretty deep relationship.  But on the very day that Microsoft launched its evolutionary Windows Phone 7, I walked into my local AT&T store and purchased my first Apple product ever.   Even though the store had a nice display and the AT&T rep even gave me a quick walk through of the Windows Phone 7 (and some slick Android devices), my mind was set.  I was breaking ranks.  I was on a mission.

How does such a loyal soldier become a deserter?  I mean have I really lost all my faculties?  Living a life on the run cannot be all that much fun.  Well to those who question my motives I shall take you to task with but one statement…mid-life crisis.  I am over 40, rapidly heading towards the middle part of that decade. I mean it has to be,  doesn’t it?  Luckily there are more factors to consider.  Some obvious.  Lingering bitterness over how my time at Microsoft ended? Sure, I would be a liar if I did  not allow my stubborn pride to show through just a little bit.  A desire to step  out of my skin and do things differently?  You bet, but that is also my nature to want to experience new things so it’s not much of a stretch.  If I have a flaw it is a desire to want to see, learn and experience too much in life.  It’s a flaw I am willing to live with.  Getting back to my midlife crisis, just because I am getting older it does not mean I have lost my desire to be hip or cool.  But getting back to my iPhone decision let us move forward.

Kevin Turner, Microsoft COO, would often get asked by internal employees, “Why can’t Microsoft be cool like Apple?”. He would always reply, “I would rather have 90% market share than be cool”.  All I can say is its dangerous to use the past to justify the future.  It has been an interesting twist of events to get to this point and by all accounts great product execution by the folks at Apple.  It shows a certain innocent stupidity on Microsoft’s part to not realize the necessity of making technology make people  feel good about themselves.  When people feel cool they tend to feel good about themselves.  The second mistake made by Microsoft was not realizing the power of the younger generation.  They completely ignored them, and they made the worst criminal offense, they did not listen.

A few comments regarding my iPhone.  I have the 3g with the new 4.01 OS.  Since I was really going to the store to add  minutes to my plan and since I could get  the “honor” of extending my contract I could get the phone for $99 (A 4g would have cost $199).  As far as the phone goes I shall make this not so much a review as most people either have or used the iPhone.  The brilliance of the iPhone is an idiot could use it.  The user interface is colorful and intuitive.  Finally and probably most importantly is, it is fun.  Since fun is a form of addiction in the sales and marketing world, that is a good thing…for Apple.

Moving forward with my technology purchases I can’t say what my next thing I need will be (ok..it will be a 42″ Flat Screen…don’t tell my wife).  Do I feel bad about moving away from my Windows Mobile Phone after having had every iteration there was through v6.5?  Not really, they were not all that good.  Have I left the Microsoft mother ship, no, but it’s not my mother either. I am just trying to get by and enjoy life and in the end isn’t that what matters?  Even if Apple does profit off of it.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann Nov 9, 2010

Windows Phone 7 – A brighter Future…maybe

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I have been pretty hard on Microsoft Mobile and rightfully so as they have been a rather stagnant organization and as I posted in my earlier blog (A Microsoft Mobile Disaster) one that  has failed to listen to the market place.  It now seems with the launch of Windows Phone 7 that Microsoft has decided to compete.  Some at Microsoft would say they have always competed and others say they have never competed.   I side with the marketplace on this one.

When I look at Windows Phone 7 everything I read is this is a consumer phone.  It seems stupid when you hear it.  Why wouldn’t you have  been making a consumer mobile phone?  A little history may shed some light. I was on vacation for a couple of weeks and when I got back I received an email that SteveB had sent to the Windows Mobile  Team.  While I was away he had come to Bldg 117 and spoke to the Windows Mobile Team.  At the time Pieter Knook was Sr VP of Mobility.  During that time within te team they were focused on the business professional.  One of the least sexiest segments, if not the least sexiest, in the mobile industry.  It focused on the suits of the world, and frankly since they no longer do martini lunches they lack personality.  Steve told the audience in a moment of wisdom, “You can focus all you want on the business Pro, but unless you have a consumer play the numbers will never add up to greater market share”.  Unfortunately the email I received was not about that.  Apparently the troops were a little down trodden after his talk, so he apologized.  Steve…why!?!?!  For whatever reason Steve did not trust his instincts on this one. This set off another 5 years of sub par performance.

When the iPhone launched and Billg saw it he said, “We have set the bar too low..”.  The iPhone really ripped the Microsoft Mobile team to the core and with the latest quarterly results from Apple it may be a juggernaut too great to catch, but to my old companies credit a technical challenge is something that will never be shunned.  My old team had VP of Development Scott Guthrie present once.  Scott said it was painful to get the Windows Mobile team to scrap the old code base, but it was realistically the only way that Microsoft was even going to have a remote chance of catching up with Apple.  But it was interesting to hear how many opposed this idea.

Now that the phone is in the market (in Europe) a bigger challenge will be to get application developers to write cool apps for the phone.  The goal was to have 10,000 applications at launch.  To put this in perspective Android and the iPhone have over 100,000.  When you are asking internal people at Microsoft to write apps so you can make your number a certain amount of sadness comes over me to hear  that company needs to issue that directive.  If you cannot excite the developer then it is time to pack up and go home.

At the end of the day the market will decide and it is already a pretty crowded field so what does Microsoft Mobile 7 offer that separates it from the rest of the mobile crowd?  Having seen it and test driven a little, not a whole lot.  Don’t get me wrong the touch screen  UI is nice and responsive.  But as far as I can tell there is no “wow” moment.  Those type of moments are hard to come by.  Even Android does not have a “wow” moment but it was out way earlier than Windows Mobile 7 was, so it had a head start.  Plus i think the open source driven development model had a “sexy” appeal to developers.  The interesting change in mobile is  the need for application’s and both Google and Apple have high marks in getting developers to write these “cools” apps.   Getting back to the Ray Ozzie final memo it demonstrates the idea of technology as part of an appliance.  No longer is one chained to the desk, sitting and watching their waste line expand.  In todays new world everything is mobile. 

We have come along way in mobility and though Microsoft jumped on at the midway point it is just now starting to understand the battlefield.  Is it too late?  When you have $40 billion in the bank you have weapons that others don’t you have a chance.  The reviews so far has been mixed and Microsoft has been working hard to get developers to write Windows Phone apps.  The market was tough when Microsoft entered but now the landscape has completely changed.  It is no longer RIM they are after, but Apple and Android.  I will be honest I am really skeptical on this one, but maybe a catastrophic defeat is just what Microsoft needs, for a brighter future…maybe.

Good Night and Good Luck.

Hans Henrik Hoffmann Oct 27th, 2010