Every year, Nokia solicits suggestions from their employees as to what new ventures Nokia should become involved in. It enables employees to have a small voice in the direction. In my email this morning is a notification that now is the time to submit your suggestions.
Last year, I submitted a suggestion to begin differentiating ourselves based upon application functionality rather than improving the phone itself. The company has already made great strides in producing the most performant and equipped phone. So my suggestion was to make fast food faster, by enabling phones to obtain menus and place orders. On the surface, it sounds like a silly suggestion, but there are advantages hidden within which would open up a sizeable market. But alas, that is not the subject of this post.
The recent news of the Apple and Motorola joint venture to produce the Rockr saddens me. Well, I’m grateful for the new technology, but I’m sad that Nokia wasn’t the one involved in the new product. Though Nokia produces great phones, they are unfortunately not as fashionable as other phones. We were very late in picking up on the clam shell trend. I can only imagine that Steve Jobs took a look at the Razr phone and concluded that Motorola was the company most likely to produce an iPhone-like offering that was anywhere close to his very particular stylings. I think Nokia phones were probably eliminated on that basis alone.
I truly believe that people do want to mix their music with their phones, so I hope that we are actively looking into that technology. However, I think we’ve missed a huge opportunity to elevate the coolness of our offerings.
So where do we go from here? I’m not sure what I’m going to suggest just yet. I’m going to suggest something since I like the mini-competition aspect of the process. Unfortunately, my first idea is not a new venture, but a suggestion to save infrastructure expenses — eliminate desk phones. We are Nokia, after all, and we all have company-issued phones. So why not eliminate the land line phone infrastructure and move to VoIP calling company wide? I will probably suggest this independently, but it seems like a good idea to me.
If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to channel them through me.
UPDATE: I have been made aware that Nokia has an offering under the N91 model number which will provide a 3000 song capacity. This is great and the phone does look cool, although I still think Nokia missed an opportunity to work with Apple. The lack of an iTunes integration will probably affect the acceptance of the N91, in my opinion. For information on the Nokia N-Series phones, take a look here.