Another thing that I think we should point to Nokia for as a, as a good
example was it was thinking innovative, in innovative
ways about how best to sell this item.
If you think about it, today it's obvious, but back at the time
it seems less obvious, how do you sell a consumer a cell phone?
Now, today we all know that the easiest way to sell a consumer a cell phone
is through a cell phone provider, through a contract right?
Lock them into a contract then you give them the phone.
But that strategy isn't immediately obvious, because it means in
fact you have a kind of indirect relationship to the consumer.
You're going through any number of providers, and you're kind of
dependent upon them in order to drive your strategy for it.
But at the same time, it allows you to lock long
term relationships into place so that you can actually create key relationships
with critical partners in order to create a very compelling consumer item.
That's another key Nokia insight that we find the company pursuing,
which helps to find its success in the course of the 1990s.
I think there are some other things as well that we should focus on with Nokia.
Another key insight that Nokia had when it was
developing this market and I think it's an insight that
we often attribute mistakenly to Apple and I think it,
we should put it back where it belongs, it belongs
to Nokia.
Which was to recognize that a cell phone is as
much about its software as it is about its hardware.
Nokia phones and those of you who have owned a Nokia phone will know this.
One of the nice things about a Nokia phone was
whichever model you bought from model to model to model,
it had the same kind of internal characteristics so that
the software that drove gave you a kind of familiarity.
Once you learned how to use it you could continue to know, you
would continue to know how to use it even if you upgraded your device.
In fact, if I go [NOISE] how many of you instinctively
reach for your pocket and go [NOISE] right, to unlock the, screen?
That's the kind of consumer knowledge that you want to
have people that you want people to have about your product.
Because it indicates that they've got a certain level of buy in.
And I think that many of us would probably,
are able to confirm this anecdotally that when you had
your Nokia device and you went to the store and
you were thinking, okay I'm going to upgrade my cell phone.
What kind of device do I want to buy?
Nokia was a compelling and interesting choice in
part because you already knew what the phone was.
You knew how to use it.
You knew where to get your contacts. You had a kind of familiarity.
Well that sense of familiarity is driven by the internal ecosystem,
driven by the software, so that understanding that a phone is as
much about the software that runs it as the hardware that
you're using I think we should give Nokia, I think we should
give Nokia the credit for that, for that insight.
And for a long time Nokia's operating system
Symbian, was the gold standard for mobile telephony.
It was an elegant, easy, easy software that worked very well
in the kind of limited memory, limited computational environment of a phone,
and so, for many years, when you thought of optimal, when
you thought of a very good operating system for a mobile syst,
a mobile phone you thought Symbian.
And they put a lot of money into Symbian to
generate, to create this operating system, and to continually upgrade it.