Comments on: Why Kodak’s bankruptcy should scare Nokia

By: Sam

Sam — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 07:50:47 +0000

The old world gives way to the new… its very important that laggards are removed from the evolution pool to foster unprecedented innovation, growth, and prosperity.

By: Ashwin

Ashwin — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:26:10 +0000

Looks like your prediction is right :-) Nokia announced losses recently!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/industries/nokia-posts-loss-of-107-billion-as-sales-slump-21-percent-in-fourth-quarter/2012/01/26/gIQA1cQUSQ_story.html

By: Vikas Agarwal

Vikas Agarwal — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:40:47 +0000

and RIM too!

By: babyis60

babyis60 — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:33:14 +0000

Indeed Nokia have chosen not to optimise the win-phone platform, despite being given the (exclusive) right to do so by MS. This makes me wonder if it is just a placeholder for some future OS who’s IPR they don’t want to taint.

By: Praveen

Praveen — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 03:39:25 +0000

Hi Milen I wonder have you tried the Asha phones. lets be factual. You can play angry birds and download lots of other apps on the Asha phone.

By: Oobio

Oobio — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 22:00:38 +0000

Time and again Nokia is either misunderstood or underestimated. Is that because it is a Northern european company from a part of the world where most people have no idea what the working culture is like? If even 10% of half of the articles over the past 5 years were true about the company it would have been bankrupt already 10 times over. Ironically, Nokia is selling more camera’s than anyone else in the world. How’s that for a comparison to Kodak? Same for FM radio’s, alarmclocks and a bunch of other stuff that most of the world still uses separate devices for today. By the time the majority of the globe would even have saved up the money to buy a smartphone, todays featurephones will have done away with any differences left that one can possibly make between the two categories. Last time I checked Nokia’s appstore for featurephones counted some 11 million downloads per day. That’s a rate of 4-5 billion app downloads per year for feature phones alone. So while you are busy dividing up the world between android and apple smartphone users, please excuse the 1.2 billion people installed base using a Nokia phone every single day. Even if Nokia could retain only 25% of those, it would still have a larger installed base left than there are android users today. Collaborating with MSFT at this point for it’s smartphone strategy might very well be the most brilliant business decision ever made by the company to date, but then again, bloggers are much better at evaluating and making business decisions with huge future impact aren’t they? But yes, lets get back to this next year. I for one very much like the current Nokia product portfolio, and for the past 14 years most mobile phone buying people on the planet seem to agree, so why in the world should the company be ‘scared’ if they still have the means to hit a homerun?

By: charan

charan — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 09:46:55 +0000

As people say, Too much of anything is not good, nokia have been stuck with symbian for too long, true that it brought nokia hell of success, but now it has become cliche and mundane..and with the light of android flashing bright in the market and many budget fone companies takin birth( micromax )..doomsday for nokia will be arrivin soon if its rnd doesn’t wake up.. And comes up with somethin radical…!!!!

By: Patrick Vlaskovits

Patrick Vlaskovits — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:51:22 +0000

Om & Abhisshek,

Gladly!

Quick recap:

The Innovator’s Dilemma is characterized such that one sees market incumbents (rationally!) cede market share to market upstarts in an effort to improve margins by exiting lower margin business lines for higher margin business lines. (These market upstarts usually look like “toys” to the casual market observer and typically aren’t considered credible long-term threats.)

Short-term, this looks like a great strategy for market incumbents. But long term, after this pattern of market incumbents moving up the value chain in search of higher margin with the market upstarts following on their heels — the market incumbents have found themselves dead & disrupted as they have no where left to go.

This pattern is especially insidious b/c smart managers, for many reasons too long to be listed here, are rational participants and cannot be written off as “stupid” or unimaginative.

So back to Toyota & Hyundai — Toyota is now increasing resources to luxury cars & trucks (going up-market) and Hyundai is producing ridiculously good & good looking cars when it once was known for producing cheapo econo-boxes with a great warranty.

Wait — who does that sound like? Maybe Toyota & the legendary Toyota Corolla? :)

Once one sees this pattern, it is impossible to un-see it. :)

By: John

John — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 18:52:35 +0000

Kodak’s core income came from a product category (photo film) that no one needed any longer, and, unlike Fuji, didn’t move fast or smartly enough to other relevant products. Nokia still makes a product, the cell phone, that people need, they just need to make one that at least matches, if not exceeds, what people want in a cell phone.

By: rabi

rabi — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 18:04:22 +0000

I think Sony also can be added to the list!