By James DeRuvo (doddleNEWS)
There’s an old saying … if you snooze, you lose. There’s another saying … strike, while iron is hot. Nokia learned the first saying the hard way by ignoring the second. How? Engineers from the once dominant cellphone company, presented executives with a smartphone prototype with many of the same features as a modern iPhone. It had a color touch screen set above a single button, could play games, had apps, and it could even made a restaurant reservation via the Internet. And yet, Nokia didn’t know what to do with it … sound familiar? Xerox did the same thing with an OS that was the inspiration Apple’s Macintosh OS in the 80s. And both times, Cupertino was the ultimate benefactor. But it gets worse…
“’I was heartbroken when Apple got the jump on this concept, said Frank Nuovo, the former chief designer at Nokia Corp. “”When people say the iPhone as a concept, a piece of hardware, is unique, that upsets me. We had it completely nailed.”
“We would present Nokia with a new technology that to us would seem as a big opportunity. Instead of just diving into this opportunity, Nokia would spend a long time, maybe six to nine months, just assessing the opportunity. And by that time the opportunity often just went away.”
“In part, you have to listen to consumers, meet and exceed their needs, but also, you have to have the courage to do something different and demonstrate a new user experience that customers didn’t even know they wanted.”
About James DeRuvo
