To all my friends and colleagues at Nokia, my contribution

Without a doubt many of you have read the news about Nokia taking Windows Phone 7 as their main Smartphone platform.

That decision by Nokia has a tremendous impact in my local software community: Finland. Nokia mobile phones (as it was known before) has always been a major employer of software development professionals in Finland where I live. It is expected that this decision will significantly reduce the number of software professionals that Nokia employs. This is nothing short of a blow to the local software community. However, this is not a tragedy. Far from it. Ironically there's never been a better time for software professionals in Finland. Many industries are adopting software as a key part of their products. From forestry to fleet management to network elements to health care, you name it.

This is why I've decided to start posting interesting software related job opportunities. I want this to be about the software industry globally, not just Finland. But, of course also about opportunities in Finland. If you are interested in posting the openings you have in this blog just drop me a line at SoftwareDevelopmentToday@gmail.com. Here's what you can gain:

This blog is read weekly by ~200 and monthly by ~790 unique visitors, from mostly Finland, United States, United Kingdom, India and Brazil. As this is a blog for software professionals, you will be reaching people that are already in this industry, but better yet you will be reaching early adopters who are interested in improving the way software is developed. This can be a competitive advantage for your company!

NOTE: i will not charge for these posting but I do reserve the right to select which ones I post, so make them interesting and as buzzword free as possible. Remember you are reaching a crowd that already knows a lot about software development, you want to focus on making your job opening as enticing as possible interesting for this crowd.

If you are looking for fresh new opportunities you get a filtered list of job openings. I'll personally read all of the posts and contact the companies to make sure they are legit and not just a fake interesting post.

So, I hope this is a contribution to the next career path for all my friends and industry colleagues at Nokia. I wish you the best of luck!

Photo Credit: streetart @ flickr

Apple vs. Nokia, spot the differences

Being in Finland I'd love for Nokia to continue to be a big player in the mobile phone and mobile Internet access market. I lover their N810 device (just don't get why they did not put a GSM chip in it...), and have been a loyal customer of their mobile phones.

But that is about to change (and I'm not talking about me being a customer). Indeed, more and more Apple is showing Nokia how late they are to the "consumer" game and to the whole "digital life" ecosystem. It's not enough to have a product, you have to have the right product, the one your customers want. Check this article for a comparison of Nokia's and Apple's stores in London. The pictures in the post say it all...

Nokia is missing the bus, why the N96 is not good enough

Disruptive technologies don't always come with revolutionary new technology or feature-packed packages. And this is no different with the iPhone/Nokia debate going on today after Nokia failed to impress with the announcement of the N96 multimedia phone.

The fact is that Nokia is missing the bigger point and the proverbial bus. One year after the launch of the iPhone, Nokia should be following on the heals of Apple and presenting a credible alternative to the second largest selling smartphone in the US market as of Q4/2007. But no, they just packed another set of features (already hard to use or even find in the older models) into another phone that could be said to be "more of the same".

With this play, Nokia is missing the point illustrated by the Hard Drive business in the 1980's. It is not "more of the same" that will change the market and gain market share. It is innovation! Not technological innovation, but useful innovation.

As Christensen put is in "The Innovator's Dilemma":

Generally disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream.

What's most amazing is that there's already an S60 "touch" which is the operating system that Nokia uses in their smartphones.

Today, if you want a decent Internet phone from Nokia you have little choice: the bulky Communicator/E90, the "Blackberry Killer" E61i/E62 or the ugly E70. None of these phones comes close to the elegance, size efficiency or usability of the iPhone, and none of them competes with the iPhone in the "player" market for iPhones (music/video/etc.).

I wonder when Nokia will wake up... Probably not too soon judging by the time it took them to release their "Blackberry killer": 7 years!!!!!