Nokia Screen Quotes

Kodak was not defeated by other printer makers, but by the rise of screens. Nokia was not defeated by traditional handset makers, but by the rise of mobile software applications. And taxi fleets were not defeated by other medallion holders but by the rise of ridesharing platforms. The nature of competition, and of competitors, is changing.

It was 2006, and I was working with the Nokia Nseries marketing team. We were holding focus groups with prototype touchscreen phones, the like of which nobody had ever seen before. This was way before the iPhone. It was fair to say that not everyone saw the future that day. People almost without exception hated the new phones. They worried that the screens would smash even though we assured them that they would not. They hated the fact that the battery life was less than two days. They worried about strange things such as fingerprints making the screen greasy. Above all else, people couldn’t really see the point. For the outrageous trade-offs that had to be made – the large screen necessary to view photos that people were yet to share and to access apps that didn’t yet exist – the main takeaway was that it did more than they needed to. I remember more than anything else the proclamation that, ‘I like the internet, but I’ve already got it at home’. Even those companies who see the future more than most can find it very hard to change.