Tomi Ahonen has been keeping us entertained with a series of posts on the Nokia sage. Everything from karaoke to an MBA meets cosmopolitan questionnaire. Next week I am anticipating the libretto to Wagner’s ring cycle to be rewritten as the Nokia Story.
In the end though the problems confronting Nokia are simply a matter of business intelligence. Not the flashy EIS dashboard data driven type of business intelligence that we find in Silicon Valley. But the real world business intelligence that can only be found in talking to people at the coal front.
Any management consultant worth his or her salt will tell you that the answers to the questions surrounding Nokia’s future are in reality only a phone call away. All the CEO or the Board of Directors have to do is pick up the phone, or better still walk into the shop, and talk to the people selling the phones.
All they need to do ask is one very simply question: What sells?
Here’s what I suspect they may hear…
“Everybody comes in the store wanting an iPhone. Once they figure out they can’t afford an iPhone they start looking for the next best option. That means Android. Simply because with Android they’ll find a look alike iPhone experience across every price range.”
Then, if they pose the question, “What about the Windows Phone?”
They will probably hear something a long the lines of…
“The problem with Windows is the “Vista experience” and/or the old Windows mobile experience is still framing the customer’s perception of the Windows brand. Windows is very much yesterday’s story”
Then you may ask the Nokia question. But in reality you don’t need to know the answer to that question because it is the wrong question. Why? because it isn’t a question customers are asking themselves today. They are in the market for mobile experiences (i.e. OS) not mobile brands.
What the success of Android is demonstrating is that the real challenge isn’t about being an iPhone killer (It also tends to suggest that the Silicon Valley identity that Nokia should have tapped for the top job should have been Google’s Eric Schmidt but that’s another story). It is about being the best value mobile phone experience for everybody who cannot afford an iPhone. Pretty much the same scenario that saw Windows emerge as the dominate PC OS back in the days of the Mac vs WinTel vs IBM OS2 WYSIWYG shoot out… and at the moment it’s looking like history is repeating itself with the iOS vs Android vs Windows mOS shoot out. The only thing that may be different this time around is Apple may be smart enough to bring to market a range of iPhone Lites that will allow all those people who want an iPhone to have an iPhone they can afford.
The problem for Nokia of course is it no longer seems to be a part of this smart phone sales conversation.
The challenge then is to reframe the conversation so that Nokia is back in the front of mind when people are talking about the future of mobile.
Which brings me to this video of Tomi doing what he does best. Selling the story of what the future of mobile will look like in the world of banking and commerce in much the same way that he sold mobile as the future of media (i.e. the 7th Screen) five years ago. Displaying something that is evidently missing in today Nokia… a real passion for the future of mobile.
So if the iPhone is the future of mobile media today then what will the future of mobile money look like tomorrow?
Take a look at the video and you’ll soon see that the future of money isn’t money (at least not money as we know it). Tomi explores ideas like Money having a memory and Money having a screen.
This is probably why mobile money is such a difficult concept to sell to bankers and government regulators. After all if the future of mobile money isn’t money what’s in it for the banks and the tax man?
As I have said before the biggest fear the financial services industry have with mobile money is that everyone will be issuing their own virtual currency in much the same way that Social Media now has everyone in the business of self publishing and advertising. With the convergence of Social Commerce and Mobile Commerce money will become increasingly, as they say, social… be that Mobile Coupons, Social Credits or Mobile Bling that can be shared among friends. All of these social sharing activities are in reality virtual currencies operating outside of the highly regulated banking and financial payments settlement systems that operate around the globe.
Put very simply the mobile phone’s evolution into the mobile wallet offers the world a lot more than just the arrival of “mobile cash”. After all there is going to be a lot more in there than just cash, cards and photos of the family.
The question is who has the imagination and the passion to make the future of mobile money more (much, much more) than just having “money on your mobile phone”? Answer that question and, as Tomi would say, maybe you too will have a future as the CEO of Nokia.
Posted on July 7, 2011
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