Nokia said too emphasized on size over speed

Previous Nokia design head Adam Greenfield explained on the weekend some of what he saw as the institutional failures at Nokia in the run-up to its Windows Phone 7 switch. He saw the company as too obsessed with focusing on reaching as many users as possible. The Finnish company has been too focused on lowest common denominator technology and safe design where smaller, nimbler companies like Apple, Google and HTC could move faster.

"Espoo is only and solely interested in scale," Greenberg wrote. "In Nokian terms, this generally means 'on the order of tens of millions of users.' On the surface, this is defensible, but it means the company doesn’t really have many innovation pathways open to it. It certainly can’t tolerate the kind of lowercase experiments that other institutions benefit from."

He cited the example of the Nokia Sports Tracker app. He saw it outperforming Apple's Nike+iPod features, but Nokia's inability to support a niche platform left it without support.

Bureaucracy was also a problem. Similar to Microsoft, it often has multiple executives required to sign off on any decision, making it difficult to move quickly. The company didn't anticipate the shift from phones as direct communicators to intermediary data devices, and many executives would receive feedback only to override it later, according to Greenberg. Smaller teams were more forward-thinking and even seemed to genuinely understand the shift even in the pre-iPhone era, but this hadn't been taken to heart.

The former developer also reiterated Nokia's overly hardware-focused culture. It has known how to engineer a product to work well but has often had trouble understanding how to make it easy to use, including in software. One NFC payment system would have let users shop at a vending machine but had been slowed down by an insistence on adding a text message as verification in the small chance that the phone might have been stolen. The engineers didn't understand the practical reality and that ease of use outweighed the security risks.

"It’s not that the NFC-based, phone-to-object interaction didn’t work," he added. "Of course it did: it had been engineered perfectly. But what it hadn’t been was designed... they failed to understand that, for low-value transactions like this, at least, the touch gesture is a useful proxy for consent -- and that if someone’s got physical possession of my phone, I’m likely to have bigger problems than whether or not they order a few cans of Coke with it."

Greenberg wasn't certain that Elop would necessarily solve Nokia's ability to understand what made for a good user experience and evidence of taste. Finland had defined taste but hadn't brought that to Nokia so far.

The move is still expected by many to be a possible help to Nokia by having it focus more on customizing an existing, more modern platform rather than trying to maintain an entire OS. WP7 has a much cleaner and streamlined interface versus the aging Symbian platform and is poised to move quickly, getting copy-and-paste text in its NoDo update as well as multitasking and a fast browser months later. Nokia didn't add multi-touch to Symbian until late 2010, over three years after it appeared in the iPhone, and was equally slow to eliminate longstanding flaws such as an inability to change from 3G to Wi-Fi on the fly.

By Electronista Staff