Why failing matters...

In our world we are often pushed to succeed. All of time. But, as counter-intuitive as it may sound, failure is the key to success!

If you are in a position where "they" say "Failure is not an option" or "Make it right the first time" and similar phrases, maybe you should make them watch this movie:



Way to go Honda. No wonder you are kicking ass with your sales numbers!

Only build products you would *NEED* to buy!

This may be the reason why so many people love Apple. This thing is that those that build Apple products love the products they build! If it happens to be a failure? So what? Let's build another one that will not be a failure.

Steve Jobs clearly has an influence on this culture because he did the same at Pixar!

So, in summary: the only way to build great products is to get the people that build them to be excited about the product (truly excited, not "corporatese" excited).

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!!!!!