What to call the past decade? Has to be the Nokia decade, here's why

Just about a year ago I wrote a blog that I entitled a Study in Digital Convergence, the Nokia Decade. That tracked how mobile phones had cannibalized various other industries and technologies like wristwatches, cameras, MP3 players etc, and showed the incredible sizes that Nokia had achieved in this new 'uber device' category. I happened to mention that blog today on Twitter and it found a lot of new fans and many retweets. But the old blog was a quick story trying to cover very many areas, so it was long and meandering. And it covered the 'decade' from 1999 to 2008. Now we can do the 'proper' decade ie from Jan 1, 2000 to Dec 31, 2009, the 'ending in zero' type of decade counting. Lets re-examine the Nokia Decade now, that was the 2000's decade.

NOKIA AND MOBILE PHONES

The world's first handheld cellular phone was invented by Motorola, but commercial mobile (cellular) telecoms services were commercially launched by NTT DoCoMo in Japan in 1979. Nokia made portable (carphone) type phones earlier, but its first truly handheld phone, what could be considered an early and very bulky mobile phone, was the Mobira Cityman in 1987 on the NMT analogue (1G) standard. AT this time Nokia was a multi-industry conglomerate in Finland, offering anything from home TV sets to personal computers to car tyres and rubber boots to toilet paper and electical cabling. They also made telecoms networking equipment on the fixed landline side of the industry. They made industrial systems like nuclear reactor control gear and military stuff like military radios. Oh yeah, and a tiny unit of Nokia dabbled in mobile phones.

But from that point, Nokia's growth in mobile has been phenomenal and it would only take eleven years for Nokia to overtake Motorola and become the world's biggest mobile phone maker in 1998. And from January 2000, Nokia's lead in phones has been dominant, for most years its size has been as big as the second and third largest handset makers put together, as it still is now a decade later, at the end of December 2009. So for Nokia, clearly it has been a mobile phone decade. But what of the world? Could we say this past decade has been not only a 'mobile phone' decade, but in fact, the Nokia decade. I would argue yes. Follow me on this.

The last year before the decade began, the total annual market for mobile phones was 285 million units, and the world had a little over 500 million mobile phone subscribers globally. Nokia sold about 77 milllion phones that last year before the decade began. Since January 1, 2000, over the past decade, Nokia has shipped a total of 2.7 Billion mobile phones. It is by far the most widely spread technology brand of all time, in the pockets of 1.38 Billion people today, or in the hands of literally one out of every five people on the planet. Not adults, not households. All people from babies to great grandparents. There is a currently active used Nokia branded phone for literally 20% of the planet. Ford even with its Model T car never achieved this. Sony with its Walkman or Apple with its iPod or even Microsoft with DOS and Windows combined, never came close to this kind of global market success. 20% of the planet is talking on a Nokia branded phone (or sending SMS messages on it). 

So we have a starting point. There is no historical precedent for this. That is a breathtaking accomplishment. Consider the world's bestselling watch, Timex. It reached one billion sold in 2003, which was accomplished in 80 years, and certainly nowhere near one billion humans on the planet wore a Timex at any one time. The Sony Walkman never reached 100 million units sold and the Apple iPod has only passed 200 million shipped in its lifetime. For contrast, Nokia sold over 420 million phones just during the year 2009.

But it is not just about the mobile phone. Consider these significant industries and their measurements.

VOICE CALLS

Lets start with voice calls. On january 1, 2000. the world had about a billion fixed landline phones at this time (twice the number of mobile phones, worldwide) and the number would keep on growing until reaching a peak level of about 1.25 billion by 2007. Now total fixed landline connections are in slight decline worldwide. This changed in a hurry. By 2003 there were more mobile phones than landlines and today the advantage is almost 4:1 for the mobile phone and growing fast.

So yes, today there are about 1.2 billlion fixed landlines in the world. And the installed base of Nokia branded mobile phones is 1.38 billion. So consider the telecoms voice call business. Today it is more likely, that any voice call that is made, has originated on a Nokia branded mobile phone, than any kind of landline phone on the planet. That is quite a big achievement, I would say. And bear in mind, telecoms alone, is worth a little over 4% of the global GDP so we're looking at a truly giant industry, far bigger than say television or print publishing or advertising or movies or the global automobile industry even (mobile telecoms alone is worth over a Trillion dollars, on par with the global car industry). Telecoms is that big. And now Nokia is not only the biggest mobile maker, it alone is bigger than the worldwide fixed landline industry. Wow. So lets move beyond telecoms voice calls.

MESSAGING

Email started on mainframe computers in 1965 and by the time the PC came along in 1974, email was spreading to the desktop devices too. Email was the first killer application for businesses and consumers to want to connect to the internet. At the start of the past decade the world's PC installed base was about 500 million and that grew during the past decade to reach just about 1 billion PCs as the total installed base, including all laptops and desktops, at the end of the decade. A great achievement, the PC industry doubled in global user numbers in the decade. And nearly all of those PCs today are connected to the internet (not all, there are still many PCs in Africa and Latin America which are not connected). So in terms of unique PCs with email, we are looking now at a number of about 1 Billion. Of course there are many more internet users than that, as others use internet cafes and universities and libraries and shared work computers and family home PCs to share, to get to the internet, so the total internet PC based user population is much larger at about 1.2B or 1.3B or so today. And then there are hundreds of millions more who only access the internet or email on a mobile phone (not only smartphones, you can also do email on simpler non-smartphone browsing solutions like iMode and WAP). But yes, if we count actual personal computers, not shared users, we have about 1 Billion PCs currently connected to the internet, and for practical purposes almost all of those will have some email use on them. Lets call it 1 B unique PCs used for email globally (with multiple accounts and users, so the user number is bigger).

Now lets compare to Nokia. Nokia did not invent messaging on a mobile phone. This very counter-intuitive concept was invented by Matti Makkonen then of Telecom Finland (now part of TeliaSonera) and we know it as SMS text messaging. The most widely used data application on the planet has now about 78% of all mobile phone users as active users, as the last laggards, USA and Canada have also finally picked up on this trend the last few years. 78% out of 4.6 Billion mobile phone subscribers is 3.6 Billion people. Yes, more than three times as many people are active users of SMS on their phones, as the total installed base of personal computers of any kind, all laptops, desktops and new netbooks, that are in use worldwide. SMS is not just a teenager thing, as we noticed when President Obama annnounced his VP pick via SMS, not via TV press conference. His various speeches around the world have been carried via SMS to many parts of the world (translated, of course) etc.

How is Nokia doing with SMS? Nokia has consistently promoted SMS use, taught the mobile operator (carrier) community about this addictive service and made sure its phones have always been among the most SMS friendly in the industry. Today only the Blackberry line of phones is better than Nokia on SMS, and that is only because Blackberries are all QWERTY keyboards, but Nokia is rolling its QWERTY keyboard features down to mainstream non-smartphones this year, and is continuing its focus on this need. Samsung was quick to catch on, and where Motorola in the last decade focused on flip phones, had brief success with the Razr then quickly fizzled, Samsung put effort into becoming 'as good as Nokia on SMS' and a key part of Samsung's rapid rize in Europe - Nokia's home market - has been the fact that Samsung was far better than Motorola or the others like Siemens, Alcatel, Ericsson, Sony and many more big global brands of phone makers of 2000, in SMS. Samsung wisely read those documents that Nokia released haha..

But yes, its safe to say that Nokia is doing its worst market success in North America, the market that lags in SMS. And Nokia is not big in Japan, the only market where SMS is not a big success as they use several other phone based messaging solutions (but have SMS as well today). In the giant countries (by mobile phone subscriber counts) where SMS itself is huge, China, Indonesia, Philippines, India, Russia - Nokia is the market leader in all those countries and in several of them, has near 50% of the market. I have cautiously estimated that Nokia phones have active SMS users today of 1.1 Billion people.

In round terms, Compared to unique PCs that are connected to the internet, and can be used for email or any other PC based messaging like Instant Messaging, Nokia alone now exceeds that number of Nokia branded phones used for messaging on the planet. So today Nokia alone has more messaging enabled digital devices also used for messaging, than all internet connected computers in use on the planet made by all of the PC brands, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Apple, Acer, Toshiba, FujitsuSiemens, etc - combined. not all of which are used for messaging...  I think the message of this blog is that it was the Nokia Decade?

MUSIC.

The world's most recognized song is the Gran Vals by Francisco Tarrega (actually Francisco de Asis Tarrega y Eixea). You might not recognize the name of the song nor the composer - who died one hundred years ago. But we all know that bit of music. We ALL know it. This piece of classic Spanish guitar music is what most people think of as "the Nokia Tune". Note that the Beatles have sold about 1.3 billion records, and Michael Jackson and Elvis about one billion. But being embedded on every Nokia phone since 1994 - the first phone with the song was the Nokia 2100 - Tarrega's grand walz has been sold (as a tiny part of the bundle) over 2.9 billion times. The Nokia tune has sold over twice as many times as ALL of the Beatles's records. All of them. By the end of this year 2010, more copies of Gran Vals will have been sold as part of the bundle of services and apps on Nokia phones, than all records by the Beatles, Elvis and Michael Jackson - combined. Love me tender, indeed, but only the Nokia tune is known by every person on the planet. It is indeed at least the theme song to the decade, has to be. More people recognize the Gran Vals/Nokia Tune, than the James Bond theme or White Christmas or Happy Birthday, etc.

We've discussed the iPod vs musicphone "battle" many times at our our blog and in my books, so I'll keep this short here. Apple launched the iPod in 2001. The first MP3 playing musicphones were launched in South Korea in 2003 but Nokia was soon in that game and rapidly expanded its musicplayer line. By 2006 Nokia was selling more Nokia branded musicphones than all iPods sold that year. Apple's CFO Oppenheimer last year admitted that Apple had to rush the iPhone to the market, explicitly because "musicphones were cannibalizing the iPod market". Today more than 800 million people have a Nokia branded MP3 player on their phone, whether they listen to it or not, vs about 200 million Apple branded iPods ever shipped (and many of those being replacements of earlier iPods to the same buyers, so the total installed base of iPod users is far less than 200 million worldwide). Counting all non-Apple branded stand-alone MP3 players, and all older cassette based music players and all portable CD players and all 8-track players - ever manufactured - there are more Nokia branded MP3 players currently on phones in use, than all types and brands of any other kind of (non mobile phone) portable recorded music player ever made. Is this not really a Nokia decade?

CLOCK CLOCK, TICK-TOCK

So then some time around 1997 Nokia sticked a clock and alarm on the phone (Its astonishing to think that the early mobile phones did not have this basic feature, but yes, this was an innovation). I don't know who did this first for a mobile phone, but I know Nokia had it on the 6110. From this point on we start to see the migration of wristwatch use to the mobile phone as well as alarm clock use.

So yes, how many? I don't have a measure of how many people wore a wristwatch at the peak of that form factor, but since the early parts of this decade, we've seen a migration of wristwatch use to the mobile phone. A Portland University study in 2005 found that only 10% of university students were wearing a wristwatch. The peak year of wristwatch manufacturing was 2004, when 1.35 billion wristwatches were made, according to the JCWA, the Japanese Clock and Wristwatch Association which is the global body for the industry. In 2008 the global production was 1.1 Billion wristwatches and declining (while the phone industry in 2008 and 2009 made around 1.2 Billion phones). Timex has made the most watches in history, with about 1.1 billion produced over a span of 80 years. Currently Timex is a small player with only 38 million wristwatches produced per year. Today the biggest watch brand is Seiko at about 300 million wristwatches sold annually. Most of those, by the way, are no longer manufactured in Japan. Seiko has for example a big manufacturing plant in Singapore.

So Nokia sold about 420 million phones last year, and every one of them had a clock and most phone owners now use the clock as their watch. Of the total shipments, against Timex's 1.1 billion over 80 years, Nokia sold 1.1 billion phones with clocks in the last 2 and a half years. In terms of thinking of time and the past decade, shouldn't we count it as the Nokia decade already?

ALARM CLOCK

No? Alarm bells not ringing yet? Then lets do alarm clocks. A 2008 UK study reported in the Birmingham Post revealed that 71% of British people think their home alarm clock is obsolete, as they use their mobile phone as their alarm clock. How does that square with clock shipments? The JCWA also reports on clocks, which fall into three categories: Tabletop clocks (including alarm clocks), wall clocks, and instrument panel clocks like on cars, boats, airplanes etc. The clock manufacturing is still growing but tabletop clocks represent about half of all clocks. In 2007 the total of clocks made was 530 million units and half of those were tabletop clocks, or 265 million. Not all of these were alarm clocks. But yes, Nokia branded alarm-enabled mobile phones alone outsell all brands of stand-alone alarm clocks by something close to 2:1. Time to wake up and smell the cellphone? Nokia decade?

VIDEOGAMING

The first computer designed for gaming was the British Nimrod in 1951. The first successful arcade game was Pong in 1972 and that year Magnavox (later bought by Philips) launched its Odyssey, the first family of videogaming consoles for the home, that sold 2 million units. The most played videogame on consoles is the family of Super Mario Brothers games on Nintendo consoles, that has been sold 120 milllion copies in all of its variants. A far more popular videogame, however, is Solitaire, the game that has been shipping with Windows and as part of that package, has reached total shipments of a billion units. a milestone that Microsoft recently celebrated.

Nokia innovated again in the mobile space in 1997 by installing the Snake game onto its 6110 phone. Since then the classic PC game has been commonly called the "Nokia Snake" game and has reached a total shipment level of over 2.5 billion. Currently over 1.3 billion people use a Nokia phone that has Snake pre-installed on it. Its not the most complex of games and its not the most exciting multiplayer 3D virtual reality role-playing game. But its the world's most widely spread and most played videogame. Game, set and match? Nokia decade!

CALCULATOR

So in 1999 Nokia released the 6210, which included a calculator. Again, I don't know if this is anywhere near the first phone with a built-in calculator, or even Nokia's first such model, but it was a mass-market phone that did have the feature. Since then the calculator function has expanded to most phones in the line. How does that compare? Casio invented the electronic calculator in 1957. It took them 49 years to sell their billionth calculator and they are the only brand of desktop and pocket calculators to reach that milestone. Oh, obviously excluding mobile phone makers. Nokia is the first brand to sell more calculators than Casio, as embedded devices in the phones and accomplished a billion calculators in their phones in only seven years. For all those in the maths related businesses like accounting, the way I calculate it, this is the Nokia decade, isn't it?

INTERNET BROWSER

The first web browser was Mosaic, launched in 1993. Today there are a little over a billion personal computers with a browser and almost all of them are now connected to the web (but not all). Nokia was the first phone maker to include a WAP browser on its 7110 model in 1999. Today more people surf the "mobile internet" using WAP (and other technologies such as i-Mode) browsers than surf the "real internet" on a personal computer. I know this is not the same and am not claiming it to be the same as the "real internet" but just like an SMS text message is not email, yet both are forms of electronic messaging, so too WAP is not the'real internet', yet both PC web and WAP are forms of browsing. In many countries such as South Africa, India, Japan etc, more people browse the 'mobile internet' than use the 'real internet' by wide margins. And when measured by browers, the total installed base of Nokia branded phones with an inbuilt browser, of more than 1.3 billion, is more than all personal computers with internet browsers of any brand, combined. Now please note, not nearly all with basic non-smartphone WAP phones are active users of WAP. I am not claiming that. But in terms of a browser, neither is every PC that is in use. They ship with Windows and Microsoft's Internet Exploder pre-installed but not all PCs then (still many millions in Africa for example) are not used to access the internet. In terms of a device with a web browser of any kind, more Nokia branded mobile phones have a browser, than all PCs that have a browser.

CAMERA

So we come to the digital camera. Stand-alone digital cameras were introduced in 1990 and after a long struggle, took over from film-based cameras. According to the CIPA Camera Imaging Products Association, by 2006 film-based cameras formed only 4% of the total world camera shipments (excluding disposable cameras). IDC said that in 2008 stand-alone digital camera sales reached 111 million units.In 2004 approximately 120 million rolls of film were sold globally so that is the maximum possible active use of film-based cameras and the more an average user buys film per year, the less is the total active installed base. 

The first cameraphones came from Japan in 2001. Soon Nokia too started to install cameras to phones. The world has shipped 3.8 Billion cameraphones in the past 9 years and 2.5 Billion of those cameraphones are in use today or 65% of all phones in use. So Nokia's installed base of cameraphones in use is about 1 Billion. Now compare, even counting all film based cameras, and all digital cameras, ever made; Nokia branded cameraphones in use exceed all non-phone cameras ever made, counted together. This picture is starting to look a lot like a Nokia decade, I'd say.

VIDEO CAMERA

The first portable (shoulder-mounted) video camera was the Ikegami ENG professional news gathering camera in 1973. The video tape recorder (open reel, not video cassette) was a back-pack sized device that was so heavy, it took another engineer to carry it, and which could only be operated when on a flat surface. Still, this was the beginning. Technology evolved and by 1980 Sony released the world's first camcorder. I haven't found global shipments and installed base figures for camcorders but we can safely assume they are far less than the levels of stand-alone digital cameras. due to the great price difference.

Video recording ability was offered already on some of the early J-Phone cameraphones in Japan and Nokia had it from its early cameraphones too. So if Nokia bested stand-alone digital cameras, it certainly bested the camcorders too. And yes, most early cameraphones did very grainy poor quality video, but today top end Nokias (and many other cameraphones) record at DVD quality, perfectly usable for mainstream consumer video recording use. I think we can safely guess where this home movie is now headed? My little film is called the Nokia Decade.

COMPUTERS

I have been arguing for a long time that the smartphone is a tiny computer, but it truly fits the definition of computer. It was held as a widely heretical viewpoint some years ago, but now the PC industry has come to the same conclusion. The first computers were giant house-sided units weighing many tons costing many millions, were single use machines, used teams of people with Ph D's to operate and were immobile. There were thousands sold.

The second generation were mainframe computers costing hundreds of thousands, were programmable only by the manufacturer's systems using punch cards, were the size of a room, weighing a ton. They needed a couple of people to be operated, with college degrees and could be relocated by the manufacturer as an industrial move operation. Many but not all mainframes would be connected to the early internet. There were hundreds of thousands sold.

The desktop (stand-alone) PC came along next with devices that cost several thousand dollars. They had industry standard operating systems and shrink-wrapped applications. They were in a system that fit on a desk, weighed enough for one person to potentially carry each item individually. One person could operate them but often were shared as in an office for example. They would need basic courses to learn to use (I am talking of the early PCs before Windows and the Mac). These could be physically moved by the user such as moving house or an office relocation. Many more PCs were connected to the early bulletin board systems and the early internet than mainframes but using mainframe computer emulators (there were no browsers). Dozens of millions were sold in this era.

Then came the portable and connected laptop and internet PC, where the device cost shrunk to under a thousand dollars and the weight of the total system is measured in a few pounds/kilograms. These now had typically apps preloaded (for consumer machines in particular) and the OS was Windows or Mac or something similar like Linux. These were personal. They were that easy, that almost anyone not afraid of technology could rather bravely take one and try to use it. Courses were no longer needed, but often various guidebooks (PC for Dummies, Internet for Dummies) etc were still preferred. Essentially all of the newer laptops and internet PCs were connected to the internet using browsers, often at broadband speeds. The laptop was portable in a briefcase type of situation and could be operated in remote locations for a few hours on its battery. The user level reached a billion.

Now we have the smartphone, where the device itself costs only hundreds of dollars and the weight is measured in ounces and grams, not pounds and kilograms. The smartphones come with an OS preinstalled which increasingly is open source, and lots of preinstalled apps, but consumers can download new apps over the air. They are so personal they are nearly never shared and now many people carry two smarthphones. They are so easy, our grandparents can use them. They don't need users guides to be used. All smartphones come connected to a network, often more than one (Cellular 3G and WiFi for example). These are pocketable and their battery life is measured in days not hours. The user numbers will pass several billions soon (are at roughly half a billion already this early in the stage)

So its clear that the smartphone follows EXACTLY every trend in the computer industry, the shrinking size and weight, the numbe of users, the ever more open OS, ever more user-friendly apps, ever less need of training to use the computer, ever more connectivity, ever more portability and ever larger user numbers. Yes just like the PC was a shock to the established 'real' computer makers but who soon had to adjust to PCs just to survive, we've now seen almost every major PC player from Apple to Google to Microsoft to Dell to HP making soem play to the mobile space, and none of the major CEO's doubts anymore, that a smartphone is indeed the latest form of personal computer.

Ok. with that little lecture out of the way, lets return to the Nokia decade, shall we? Last year the PC industry sold about 280 million PCs including desktops, laptops and the hot new netbooks, all counted together. HP has been gaining market share as the global number 1, and has sold about 54 million units in the past year. Now, according to the 'old accounting' of mainframe and personal computers only, but excluding the newer smartphones, yes, HP is the world's biggest computer maker. But if we add in the 180 million smartphones sold in 2009, the total market becomes 460 million computers sold, and suddenly out of nowhere, the world's biggest computer maker is the smartphones part of Nokia, with roughly 72 million smartphones sold. When we add smartphones to the market, then HP only has 11% of the market, and Nokia already has 15% of the global computer shipments for 2009. Right at the end of the Nokia Decade, Nokia still snatches another major industry crown. If you accept the increasingly approved wisdom of the PC industry that a smartphone is indeed a computer, then the world's biggest computer maker is now Nokia. I would compute that as clear evidence it was indeed a Nokia decade, don't you?

GPS, COMPASS, PDA, FM RADIO, TV

There are many more. Its likely that Nokia is about to be (or perhaps has already become) the world's biggest supplier of GPS equipment. Now they are adding the compass functionality to phones. The PDA battle was long since won by the Nokia Communicator series (now part of the E-Series) and yes they have inbuilt FM radios and now are integrating TV tuners etc. We are seeing ever more cannibalization.

THE CANNIBAL OF CANNIBALS

Lets go back that ten years. In 2000, the camera industry considered that the big contenders were Nikon, Canon, Minolta, Konica, Kodak, Polaroid. They saw a digital revolution coming, and probably could guess that Sony (Cybershot) would emerge as a rival. But could they have foreseen that an obscure Finnish geeky techie mobile phone brand would become their biggest challenger? Now Konica and Minolta have quit the camera business altogether! Kodak has quit all but the disposable cameras and even those it only sells in selected markets. Polaroid has gone bankrupt, twice. Nokia towers over them in total cameras made and total pictures taken with them.

The watchmakers thought ten years ago that it was a fight between Seiko and Citizen and Timex and Swatch and Casio; and there were ultra-cheap Hong Kong and Chinese digital watchmakers and ultra-expensive luxury watchmakers in Switzerland. But they could not see that the phone would take their market and Nokia would eat their cake. That the catwalks of Milan and Paris and New York and Tokyo would soon feature luxury phone brands like Vertu alongside the Omegas and Rolexes; and that the major fashion brands would start to design phones like Armani, Prada and Dolce & Gabbana. Even Tag Heuer now makes its own branded phones.

The computer makers did see a pattern of the shrinking computer, and did expect a pocket computer or palmtop computer, and they invested heavily in the PDA market, from HP to Apple, but they did not expect that the cellphone would emerge as their biggest rival (and to tower over the shipments of stand-alone PDAs). And yes, now the past few years we've seen most major computer brands announce mobile phone or smartphone strategies.

There are millions living in villages in Africa where there is no electricity. So even global brand giant Coca Cola won't be there, with no coolers to keep the Cola cold. But they have mobile phones. And the leading phone brand of Africa is Nokia. There are villages with millions in population in India, where not only don't they have broadband or dial up narrowband internet, they don't have TV reception and they don't even have FM radio reception. Hundreds of millions live in such villages. But they have cellular reception and use their mobile phones for all media needs. And the favoured brand of phones in India is... Nokia.

CONCLUSION: NOKIA DECADE

So there you have it. The world's most widely-spread technology brand. If you want to compare it, consider these types of numbers. Logitech, the PC mouse maker, has sold one billion mice. Seagate the hard disk drive maker, has shipped one billion hard drives. Hot Wheels, the toy car maker, has manufactured a billion toy cars. Nokia has shipped more nearly 3 billion phones in the past 23 years, and has an installed base of active users of its phones at over 1.38 billion, and sells a massive 420 million more phones this year alone (of which well in excess of 75 million will be smartphones).

But there are still bigger players in the graphical input industries.. BIC has sold 100 billion pens and its rival, Crayola, has manufactured 100 billion color crayons for kids. So there is still a way for Nokia to grow into the next decade ha-ha.  Yes, never before has any one technology brand been so pervasive on the planet, so ubiquitous, and at the same time slash and burn so many other giant industries as Nokia and mobile phones did this past decade. I say it was the Nokia decade.


UPDATE - My writing is well, writing. What I was stunned to find, was that my dear friend David Doherty over at the 3G Doctor blog had liked this story so much, he did the illustrated version of it. The pictures and diagrams are BETTER than my writing, as a picture so powerfully tells the story of a thousand words. Wow, thanks David. Please go see his version and please say hello there at David's blog and leave a comment. Here is the link

http://3gdoctor.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/2000-2009-the-nokia-decade-but-why-should-it-stop-there/


UPDATE Feb 10, 2010  - The TomiAhonen Almanac has now been released, it has 180 pages, 84 charts and tables (13 more than the 2009 edition) with sample stats, first opinions and ordering info at this story TomiAhonen Almanac 2010 Released.

PS thanks to Mathias Ziolo for the correction on the WAP phone model.

Comments

[Mathias Ziolo]

Hi there,

that's a really great article you wrote! Unfortunately you got one slight error in your article: it's the 7110 to be released in 1999 with a WAP-browser on-board. The 6210 was released in 2000 with HSCSD support. The 7110 received later then in 2000 a firmware update (V 04.84) which has been necessary due to crashes in the browser and problems with the scroll-wheel.

Anyway, great job!

[Tomi Ahonen]

Hi Mathias,

Thanks! I love this about social networking, we get so easily feedback and yes, any tiniest error will be spotted - and I don't mean this waa a tiny error - so yes, thanks. I was there, I remember now the 7110, but somewhere along the line when I was writing the blog (the older version) I got the facts wrong... Thanks, will go correct it and credit you.

Happy you liked it..

Tomi :-)

[Mathias Ziolo]

Hello Tomi,

thank you for the credits ;-)

Greetings

[David Doherty]

Tomi,

Brilliant stats, thanks for sharing them.

I agree with the title... but what of 2010-2020.... where next for this R&D giant?

[QuixoticQ]

Guys,

Great - but... I beg to differ a bit.

http://quixoticq.posterous.com/nokia-vs-the-decade

[henrylow]

Having been a part of the Online Universal Work Marketing team for 4 months now, I’m thankful for my fellow team members who have patiently shown me the ropes along the way and made me feel welcome

www.onlineuniversalwork.com

[Tomi Ahonen]

Hi Mathias, David, QuixoticQ and henrylow

Thanks for the comments. David - where next for Nokia? Microsoft certainly managed to remain giant and powerful through the desktop stand-alone DOS PC era to the networked windows PC era to the internet-connected laptop PC era and are by no means out of it in the mobile/PC mobile internet era that is dawning. So its possible for a giant to remain as the leader for more than one cycle. As a Finn and ex Nokia guy of course I always root for Nokia (I joke that if you cut me, I don't bleed red blood, I bleed Nokia blue). But realistically, odds are that the mighty will fall, and Nokia has been top dog for a dozen years now. Can they still rule the roost come 2020 - very tough to believe - haha, but in 2020 I will be 60 years old, and retiring on some lazy college campus lecturing occasionally about the good old days of mobile phones back when they were only 3G haha...

QuixoticQ - thanks. Took a look at your blog rebuttal and I see where you are coming from. Now I need to make this point very clearly - Apple is by far the better music player than any other phone maker. They are also by far the better internet surfing phone. By far the better. But Apple is not best at everything - eg texting or camera or video recording. And Apple's iPhones are viciously expensive. If you price yourself at the Mercedes Benz Cadillac Lexus range, you can afford ot do things well. IF you sell to the mass market like Ford, Toyota or Volkswagen, then you can't do perfection.

Apple can afford to do perfection (in some ways but not others). An optimized super premium 600 dollar phone. Nokia carries about 50 phone models in its current catalog at any one time, and perhaps 2 are in that price range. Then they have 400 dollar phones and 300 dollar phones and 200 dollar phones and 100 dollar phones and 50 dollar phones.

If you want to argue 'Apple is best' - its like arguing Sony Betamax was best VCR (it was, VHS was cheaper and won the market). Or that Concorde was the best technology of the 1970s aircraft in its all-luxury only 1st class service; while ultra-budget Boeing 747 Jumbo jets ran away with the market stuffing up to 500 people into a plane. Being best is a surefire recipe not to capture the market. The way to capture the mass market is to be 'good enough'. And Nokia know all about 'good enough' Most of their phones are good enough for that market price segment. Occasionally they have hit products and they can anticipate some needs (they had touch screen phoes long before the iPhone and Nokia invented the 'real internet' phone a decade before the iPhone)

So you don't like to listen to an MP3 player on a Nokia phone. Why is that? Because you are rich enough to own a separate iPod and to afford an iPhone. What of the four fifths of the planet who can't afford a separate media player - but need a phone. For them ANY media player that comes on the phone will be 'good enough'

Apple cannot capture the mass market not with one phone model costing 600 dollars. Impossible. Nokia can capture Apple's consumer - internet - touch screen market if it sets its mind to it - they have a whole division (N-Series) set up to that challenge (set up before the iPhone appeared). I am not saying they will, but as long as Apple has one iPhone they run the risk of in any one year losing half their market - like Motorola did with the Razr.

Nokia is 'safe' because they fight in so many markets. It does not mean they will always win - Samsung is their real global nearest rival. But Nokia does not need to engender the passion you ask for with Apple. Yes, any brand would like it, but that takes years of work and is expensive. And the biggest passion brands rarely dominate their markets. Harley Davidson? Ferrari? Hummer? Apple Macintosh haha, for 26 years in a row and always brilliant, excellent and loyal fans. Never passed 10% global market share in PCs... Not the way to become the king of the hill, where Nokia sits now.

thank you all for writing

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[Mathias Ziolo]

Hello Tomi,

I share your opinion and I don't do this, because I'm a Nokia addicted person since about 14-15 years. In my eyes Apple is a big hype and with all respect to their participation to the computer revolution in the 80s, I don't believe they will ever dominate the mobile market.

As you mentioned, the Mac has about 10% of the global market share in PCs. Last time I read Microsoft news, saying that Windows 7 already has more market share than all Macs toghether. I think, the only thing for what Apple has to be admired is their marketing. Everybody knows Apple somehow but in figures, they're almost nobody.

For me personally, I already made my decision: the next smartphone will be a Nokia (probably one of the Maemo series). Why? It's Linux, it's Nokia. I think that most Nokia customers are subtile loyalists whereas Apple's strategy is all about romanticizing.

Finally I think that the real threat to Nokia will be Samsung. Why? Nokia missed somehow the "female market". I hardly know any woman to use a Nokia phone. They are all addicted to Samsung and since the man/woman-ratio is about 50/50 on this planet, this will be a long road for Nokia to regain this market back again.

Best regards

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