The narrative of Nokia’s defeat in the smartphone war, with Apple’s iPhone as the catalyst for change, may be deemed a common case study in today’s business management textbooks. Recently, the Nokia Design Archive project by Aalto University in Finland, responsible for compiling internal data of Nokia to reflect past ideas, featured a document presented by 9 Nokia employees at the time. The document questioned how iPhone posed a formidable threat to Nokia.
Spanning 22 slides, the presentation titled “Apple Just Introduced the iPhone” contained discussions on Apple’s branding, which overlapped Cisco’s products but reached a resolution eventually. Nokia, holding over 50% of the global mobile phone market share back then, seemed invincible against all competitors. Yet, when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, he humbly stated they only aimed for a 1% market share, indicating the Nokia executives might have underestimated the potential threat.
Merely 7 years post the launch of iPhone in 2007, Nokia ceased its mobile phone operations by selling them to Microsoft. Consequently, Microsoft exited the phone business 2 years after, selling Nokia’s feature phone brand to HMD.
The slides highlighted iPhone’s strengths that made the Nokia employees ponder what the company needed to do to address these weaknesses, like the touch-based UI with a single button, which may affect Nokia’s UI strengths. They proposed enhancing Maemo to counter this issue. The iPhone’s media attention could potentially lure Nokia customers away, impacting the N-series products.
If Apple’s predictions were accurate, Nokia would start feeling the sales impact by 2008.
Additionally, the presentation discussed various other iPhone features that could potentially pose challenges, such as mobile web browsing and app design. Despite not directly pointing out potential issues, the slides from the Nokia Design Archive project showcased Nokia’s acknowledgment of the impact posed by the iPhone.
TLDR: Nokia faced the threat of Apple’s iPhone in the smartphone market, leading to significant changes in Nokia’s business operations and market share.
Leave a Comment