Nokia realized the importance of smartphones “too early,” the Finnish company’s former chief executive says in a new ebook, countering the view that the company’s failure to remain a world leader was once as a result of its being late to spot the market shift. In “Mahdoton menestys”, or “The unimaginable Success”, an autobiography printed in Finland on Thursday, Jorma Ollila rejected the concept that Nokia didn’t foresee the recognition of telephones related to the web.
We believed in the arrival of smart telephones. We believed in it so strongly that we even created a new organisational unit focusing on sensible telephones,” 63-12 months-old Ollila wrote within the e-book. Nokia launched a reorganisation in 2004 to “mirror over what was about to happen on the telephone market,” in line with Ollila.
The former chief executive recalled that the cell phone corporations did not have much to offer the early good phone users earlier than the meteoric success of Apple’s iPhone. It later came out that we had invested in the fitting concept, but it was too early… It wasn’t until much later that the operators were prepared to provide services that accelerated the rise of the sensible phones, he wrote.
When the iPhone became available on the market in 2007, Nokia presented the hit N95 without a touchscreen. However, the follow-up, the N97 with a marginally larger screen, wasn’t launched until 2009, becoming “a complete failure, just when Nokia wanted to be triumphant and change its route,” wrote Ollila.
We addressed the fitting issues, but the outcomes were nonetheless weak. We tried to do just the identical things that Apple, Google, and Microsoft would do later,” he wrote. Nokia will surrender its mobile phone handset division to the US giant Microsoft in early 2014 for five.44 billion euros ($7.4 billion), ending the Finnish company’s phase in which it was a worldwide leader.
Ollila also regretted having ignored out on instrument design, especially the improvement of the running system Meego. “Even though 1,800 workers labored on Meego, the results were ‘very negative,” Ollila told the media in Helsinki.
Eventually, Nokia went for Microsoft’s new Windows Mobile working system, after “particularly cautious” planning. The former government also stated achievements, like choosing not to buy the American telecommunications equipment firm Lucent in 2005.
Nokia concluded the corporation had “too excessive fixed costs and an excessive amount of team of employees,” and that it wanted a world reorganisation. In 2006, it was once bought by using French Alcatel, because then with shaky results. It used to be clear, beautiful soon Alcatel didn’t get the anticipated advantages. Like in many industry acquisitions, the synergies were not expressed,” said Ollila.