Nokia took the competition seriously, but made a single fatal error: it tried to evolve its low end platform into its high end platform. While that strategy makes complete sense in 90% of cases for market innovation, in the mobile phone industry--which, it turns out, was going through revolution--Nokia should have done the opposite. People often forget that Nokia still controls more than 70% of the worldwide phone market, and controlled vastly more of it in the mid-2000's. In 2007, they had no idea that 90% of industry profits would come from the 30% of the market that they were not focusing on.
You can't really fault them for that, because strategically it makes perfect sense. They regarded the competition seriously but had a flawed approach/response.
That being said, they had a bunch of half-assed hedges against their fatal strategy, like high-ish end platforms such as Maemo, Symbian's advanced versions, etc.., but in fast moving markets with extraordinarily complicated infrastructure/platforms, this approach does not work. You can half-ass evolution, but you have to full-ass revolution.
They realized this mistake fairly early on, but by then it was too late to develop a platform, and full-assing it would have put the company's core competencies at huge risk. So Kallasvuo was fired, Elop was hired, the company moved in with Microsoft, and, eventually, they married.
Nokia took the competition seriously, but made a single fatal error: it tried to evolve its low end platform into its high end platform. While that strategy makes complete sense in 90% of cases for market innovation, in the mobile phone industry--which, it turns out, was going through revolution--Nokia should have done the opposite. People often forget that Nokia still controls more than 70% of the worldwide phone market, and controlled vastly more of it in the mid-2000's. In 2007, they had no idea that 90% of industry profits would come from the 30% of the market that they were not focusing on.
You can't really fault them for that, because strategically it makes perfect sense. They regarded the competition seriously but had a flawed approach/response.
That being said, they had a bunch of half-assed hedges against their fatal strategy, like high-ish end platforms such as Maemo, Symbian's advanced versions, etc.., but in fast moving markets with extraordinarily complicated infrastructure/platforms, this approach does not work. You can half-ass evolution, but you have to full-ass revolution.
They realized this mistake fairly early on, but by then it was too late to develop a platform, and full-assing it would have put the company's core competencies at huge risk. So Kallasvuo was fired, Elop was hired, the company moved in with Microsoft, and, eventually, they married.