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I was in Motorola labs until 2003, and the article is spot on. I had heard crazy stories back then, for example how the handset division (PCS) had to reverse-e

by salem 12y ago

I was in Motorola labs until 2003, and the article is spot on. I had heard crazy stories back then, for example how the handset division (PCS) had to reverse-engineer Motorola Semiconductor products after buying a phone on the street in Hong Kong because they could not get the specs internally. The whole idea of Motorola competing with itself sounded as crazy to us then as it does now. Motorola was way too silo'ed and metrics driven, with a ruthless focus on efficiency, that was often short sighted. I guess no one there read the Innovators Dilemma.

pavlov 12y ago
Drawing lessons from The Innovator's Dilemma is harder than it seems. In the early 2000s, Nokia's management team often referred to the book. CEO Jorma Ollila has said that he tried to build a corporation that would avoid the traps described in the book. Yet when we look back now, it seems obvious that Nokia was coasting on increasing profit margins and incremental innovation to drive its featurephone and Symbian smartphone lines. How did that happen? My impression is that Nokia misjudged their market position. They saw themselves as the upstart innovator as compared to traditional PC vendors. Just before the iPhone was unveiled, Nokia introduced the N95 smartphone with the tag line "This is what computers have become." In Nokia's eyes, their phones were going to disrupt computers in a few years. But they were beaten by Apple's better vision of what the disruptive mobile computer should look like, and they never recovered from that punch.
- salem 12y ago
  It was pretty obvious in 2003 that PCS was too focused on the US market, and ignoring "niche" GSM touch-screen smartphones at their peril. In 2003 PCS China developed a Linux-powered touch-screen phone that ran Java (J2ME) apps, the A760. A clear predecessor to Android. It never launched outside of Asia because it wasn't developed in the USA, and wasn't the razr.
- rational-future 12y ago
  I remember when the iPhone 1 was introduced there were comments here that it will inevitably kill Nokia. At the time I was wondering what those guys are smoking :)
  - joezydeco 12y ago
    If you combine 2007 and 2008, Nokia sold nearly 1,000,000,000 handsets in those two years. That's One Capital-B Billion. Nobody thought an 800-lb gorilla like Nokia could ever be unseated. Looking back, it's still boggling that the collapse took a mere seven years.
    - sendmorbutt 12y ago
      True. It's still mind boggling when I think about that.
  - x0x0 12y ago
    Me too, but I thought that because I assumed the ceo of Nokia would order his engineers to drop whatever the fuck they where doing this second, start a death march, and build him an iphone.
    - xorcist 12y ago
      I think they already had one, in the N800 line that was to become Maemo/Meego/Tizen/Sailfish. They just didn't want to put all wood behind that arrow. I never understood why, exactly, and I still don't.
      - zurn 12y ago
        It's probably hard to make a leap of faith that will leave 95% of your engineers fumbling in the dark after being robbed of their Symbian/Windows environment, while that organisation is making record profits. The iPhone 1 was just a glorified iPod without 3rd party apps, it excited mostly Mac users, not obviously something to "drop everything" over. Even now iPhone has less than 15% market share. Android was arguably a more obvious threat.
        x0x0 12y ago
        I have to disagree. I worked with someone who got an iphone the first week they where available; it probably involved standing in line for a day or something ridiculous. But while the videos that Jobs did where pretty amazing, when you held it in your hand and played with it, my thoughts where 1 - holy shit I need this, and 2 - using fb on this thing is going to be like crack. Maybe I was over optimistic, but I was pretty confident everyone with an ipod or a train/bus commute was going to have one pretty soon. I still believe any ceo of a cell phone manufacturer who got one (and they all should have purchased an iphone on the first day) and didn't immediately see the future unfolding in front of them is incompetent.
- melvinmt 12y ago
  It took about 3-4 iPhone generations before Apple finally caught up to the immense feature set of the N95 (which was released a year before iPhone 1). I remember I was live video streaming on N95 (Qik) before video recording was even possible on iPhone!
- rythie 12y ago
  They peaked with the N95, it was good for it's time (March 2007) especially since we didn't get the iPhone in the UK till November 2007. It was popular at the time in the UK with early adoptors. However, the N96 (Feb 2008) was a poor product, hard to read email on, browse the web and tons of bugs in basic features, with basically no software updates in all the time it was out. All of this on a product cost much the same as the iPhone. I wrote about this a while back: https://rythie.com/blog/blog/2009/09/17/dont-buy-a-nokia-n96/ https://rythie.com/blog/blog/2009/09/17/dont-buy-a-nokia-n96... They didn't see (nor did many) that the highend/smartphone market, would basically be the entire market. They needed to double down on N95/N96 and highend phone quality, but they were all over the place trying to make 100s of different phones.
nostrademons 12y ago
I once had a coworker who used to work at Intel tell me that when a company or product has no competition, it's time to find somewhere else to work, because only bad things will happen to that company's culture. I kinda suspect that companies in this position are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they foster internal competition, then the place becomes overly political, nobody cooperates, it becomes miserable to work there, and all the good people leave. If they don't, then there's no sense of urgency, everybody goes off and does their own pet project, people waste time on silly stuff, folks who pay attention to external customer needs can't get the necessary internal buy-in, and all the good people leave. Eventually competition springs up externally, but by then the organization may have ossified so much that it's incapable of responding to it.
- bane 12y ago
  It almost makes you think a good idea might be to fund high performing employees to form their own companies to compete with you. Basically incubate your own competitors, but hold a minority stake in their companies.
  - x0x0 12y ago
    cisco seems to do that: they allow internal employees to create startups, fund them and acquire a large stake, then if they succeed, fully acquire the companies. There's a cute name for it; something like fold-in innovation? I forget.
  - yuhong 12y ago
    Of course I hope there is a better solution than that.
- mercurial 12y ago
  Where is Google in this context then? They are the 800 pounds gorilla, but a steady stream of innovations still seems to flow from them.
  - Padding 12y ago
bane 12y ago
It sounds crazy (and is crazy), but that kind of corporate structure is surprisingly common. There's probably some executive training manual somewhere that advises this kind of nonsense. I think that manual is called "The Prince".

by salem 12y ago

pavlov 12y ago

Drawing lessons from The Innovator's Dilemma is harder than it seems. In the early 2000s, Nokia's management team often referred to the book. CEO Jorma Ollila has said that he tried to build a corporation that would avoid the traps described in the book. Yet when we look back now, it seems obvious that Nokia was coasting on increasing profit margins and incremental innovation to drive its featurephone and Symbian smartphone lines. How did that happen? My impression is that Nokia misjudged their market position. They saw themselves as the upstart innovator as compared to traditional PC vendors. Just before the iPhone was unveiled, Nokia introduced the N95 smartphone with the tag line "This is what computers have become." In Nokia's eyes, their phones were going to disrupt computers in a few years. But they were beaten by Apple's better vision of what the disruptive mobile computer should look like, and they never recovered from that punch.

salem 12y ago
It was pretty obvious in 2003 that PCS was too focused on the US market, and ignoring "niche" GSM touch-screen smartphones at their peril. In 2003 PCS China developed a Linux-powered touch-screen phone that ran Java (J2ME) apps, the A760. A clear predecessor to Android. It never launched outside of Asia because it wasn't developed in the USA, and wasn't the razr.
rational-future 12y ago
I remember when the iPhone 1 was introduced there were comments here that it will inevitably kill Nokia. At the time I was wondering what those guys are smoking :)
- joezydeco 12y ago
  If you combine 2007 and 2008, Nokia sold nearly 1,000,000,000 handsets in those two years. That's One Capital-B Billion. Nobody thought an 800-lb gorilla like Nokia could ever be unseated. Looking back, it's still boggling that the collapse took a mere seven years.
  - sendmorbutt 12y ago
    True. It's still mind boggling when I think about that.
- x0x0 12y ago
  Me too, but I thought that because I assumed the ceo of Nokia would order his engineers to drop whatever the fuck they where doing this second, start a death march, and build him an iphone.
  - xorcist 12y ago
    I think they already had one, in the N800 line that was to become Maemo/Meego/Tizen/Sailfish. They just didn't want to put all wood behind that arrow. I never understood why, exactly, and I still don't.
    - zurn 12y ago
      It's probably hard to make a leap of faith that will leave 95% of your engineers fumbling in the dark after being robbed of their Symbian/Windows environment, while that organisation is making record profits. The iPhone 1 was just a glorified iPod without 3rd party apps, it excited mostly Mac users, not obviously something to "drop everything" over. Even now iPhone has less than 15% market share. Android was arguably a more obvious threat.
      - x0x0 12y ago
        I have to disagree. I worked with someone who got an iphone the first week they where available; it probably involved standing in line for a day or something ridiculous. But while the videos that Jobs did where pretty amazing, when you held it in your hand and played with it, my thoughts where 1 - holy shit I need this, and 2 - using fb on this thing is going to be like crack. Maybe I was over optimistic, but I was pretty confident everyone with an ipod or a train/bus commute was going to have one pretty soon. I still believe any ceo of a cell phone manufacturer who got one (and they all should have purchased an iphone on the first day) and didn't immediately see the future unfolding in front of them is incompetent.
melvinmt 12y ago
It took about 3-4 iPhone generations before Apple finally caught up to the immense feature set of the N95 (which was released a year before iPhone 1). I remember I was live video streaming on N95 (Qik) before video recording was even possible on iPhone!
rythie 12y ago
They peaked with the N95, it was good for it's time (March 2007) especially since we didn't get the iPhone in the UK till November 2007. It was popular at the time in the UK with early adoptors. However, the N96 (Feb 2008) was a poor product, hard to read email on, browse the web and tons of bugs in basic features, with basically no software updates in all the time it was out. All of this on a product cost much the same as the iPhone. I wrote about this a while back: https://rythie.com/blog/blog/2009/09/17/dont-buy-a-nokia-n96/ https://rythie.com/blog/blog/2009/09/17/dont-buy-a-nokia-n96... They didn't see (nor did many) that the highend/smartphone market, would basically be the entire market. They needed to double down on N95/N96 and highend phone quality, but they were all over the place trying to make 100s of different phones.

nostrademons 12y ago

I once had a coworker who used to work at Intel tell me that when a company or product has no competition, it's time to find somewhere else to work, because only bad things will happen to that company's culture. I kinda suspect that companies in this position are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they foster internal competition, then the place becomes overly political, nobody cooperates, it becomes miserable to work there, and all the good people leave. If they don't, then there's no sense of urgency, everybody goes off and does their own pet project, people waste time on silly stuff, folks who pay attention to external customer needs can't get the necessary internal buy-in, and all the good people leave. Eventually competition springs up externally, but by then the organization may have ossified so much that it's incapable of responding to it.

bane 12y ago
It almost makes you think a good idea might be to fund high performing employees to form their own companies to compete with you. Basically incubate your own competitors, but hold a minority stake in their companies.
- x0x0 12y ago
  cisco seems to do that: they allow internal employees to create startups, fund them and acquire a large stake, then if they succeed, fully acquire the companies. There's a cute name for it; something like fold-in innovation? I forget.
- yuhong 12y ago
  Of course I hope there is a better solution than that.
mercurial 12y ago
Where is Google in this context then? They are the 800 pounds gorilla, but a steady stream of innovations still seems to flow from them.
- Padding 12y ago

bane 12y ago

It sounds crazy (and is crazy), but that kind of corporate structure is surprisingly common. There's probably some executive training manual somewhere that advises this kind of nonsense. I think that manual is called "The Prince".