STEVE BALLMER SAYS IT’S UTTER HOGWASH!

If looks could kill, the outrageous way my seven year old cellphone looks could have killed anybody a mile around with a ten mile collateral radiation damage. I have been supremely chided by friends, families (neighbours’ included), philosophers and tour guides about the villainously repellent profile my cellphone seems to have inherited after so many years of use, misuse, and abuse. I had been completely insulated from all these ‘change-to-a-modernphone- dear-junkie’ diatribes, till one evening, for the first time, my wife with quite a rancid look on her face accosted me the moment I entered the house, and steamed away, “It’s not anymore about you, but about how outsiders have started perceiving us all due to that schlock of a contraption. Why can’t you buy a new phone? Even the car cleaners have better handsets. Don’t you think buying new technology actually improves productivity?” The thundering sword of a question was pretty haunting in nature: Critically, how valuable do the world’s greatest organisations consider investments in new technology? How well do these investments improve profits, sales etc...?

When the famed Jim Collins wrote a few years back in his best seller, Good To Great, that “none of the Good-To-Great [world class] executives put technology as one of their top 5 drivers,” not many believed that that would be the way it would be in the future. A year back, when I researched the outstanding NYSE CEO Report 2008, it stunningly corroborated Jim’s findings by showing that only 5% of CEOs now thought that new technology would be “the most important internal factor affecting profitability...” 67% of CEOs believed that “the ROIs from technology investments have failed to meet expectations till date!” In fact, the factor considered most important by CEOs for revenue growth was ‘management team’, rather than technology. Now, when I study the most recent NYSE CEO Report 2010, it brilliantly states, “As was the case [previously], operational efficiency and management stand out as the internal factors expected to have more impact on profitability. CEOs have downgraded the importance of new technology and products...” 70% of CEOs now say they would not increase their investments in technology.

A lucid and provocative speaker on business and technology, Nicholas G. Carr, in his most celebrated and controversial HBR article titled, ‘IT Doesn’t Matter’, proves through extensive research how, “As Information Technology’s power and ubiquity have grown, its strategic importance has diminished. Technology’s potential for differentiating one company from the pack – its strategic potential – inexorably diminishes.” While experts and media houses from around the world called the work “A bombshell” (Forbes), “Provocative” (NYT), “Firestorm!” (BusinessWeek), “Accurate description of the technological world...” (CNN Money), “...and of today’s tech landscape” (WSJ), Steve Ballmer, CEO of tech-giant Microsoft, predictably called the article a “hogwash!”

A famed letter from John Seeley Brown (former Chief Scientist, Xerox) and John Hagel III to HBR had this epitaph of a warning, “Businesses have overestimated the strategic value of IT. They have significantly overspent on technology in the quest for business value. IT-driven initiatives rarely produce expected returns...” And for those companies believing in being at the forefront of innovating new technology, I present PwC’s most recent Annual Global CEO Survey 2009, which shows that ‘technological innovation’ does not feature even in the top five factors for CEOs as a “critical driver of long-term success” (The most important factor was “Access to, and retention of, key talent”). Even when it comes to ‘Immediate threats’ that are driving CEOs’ priorities, ‘technological disruptions’ are ranked at a lowly #13; second from last! ‘Terrorism’, ‘Climate Change’, ‘Inadequacy of natural resources’ and other such factors are ranked higher in importance by CEOs. From the IBM Global CEO Study 2006 to the peerless thesis titled Economic and Technical Drivers of Technology (March 2006) by Dr. P. Yin (HBS) and Dr. Timothy F. Bresnahan (Stanford), from the superlative Economist Intelligence Unit 2007 report to McKinsey’s classic 2007 report (The Next Frontiers in IT Strategy), study after study has now proven that investments in technology have not only left a humungous majority of CEOs completely unconvinced about their effectiveness but are also atrociously useless in many cases.

So what do you do when on one side you have all the research in the world screaming away to you to not invest in a new cellphone, and on the other side you have a pressure cooked wife shouting at you to invest thousands in the latest thingamajig?... You buy the cellphone! Period!!!

BEASTUS MAXIMUS OR DON JUAN DE MARCO?

No man ever gets a potbelly. No one! And born gymnasts like me, never in ten lifetimes. You might get a little plump here and there, but a potbelly? Bah! Thus it was, when – with much irritation after being hounded for over a month by my wife who libelously accused me of having procured a potbelly – I landed at the neighbourhood gym (which looked more like a fancy den for bully boys, one-third my age, trying to show off their hormone pumped muscles).

Trudging in contemptuously, while ogling at the plethora of mile-long machines lined up on both sides, I was straightaway introduced by my teenage nephew, who frequented the gym, to two brawny thickset six-footers, and asked to choose the trainer I would desire to be trained under. And why would I ‘desire’ one trainer over the other? Their differing training styles were put forward for my consumption. While one hooligan roughneck (Beastus Maximus is what I call him) was purported to be the toughest monster-trainer west of Cambodia, who could savagely whip your ten generations blood-dry till you got into shape, the other surprisingly had a gentler and suaver style of training, allowing you to lavishly train according to your ‘desires’ and needs, without pushing too hard.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Don Juan predictably was the more admired trainer with a bigger following. But that brought me to an interesting question. Despite the likability – or dislikability – index, who would be in reality more effective in getting people into shape – would it be bullboy barbarian who could machine wrench your guts out; or would it be the caring inveigler who’ll give you enough space to set up a farmhouse?

I decided to check out the metaphor in global corporations – have hard taskmasters been less successful universally than soft taskmasters? My research gave results to the contrary. The list of Fortune’s 2009 Best 100 Places To Work For (which contains names of 100 corporations which employees love the most globally) had only 5 names from the world’s top 100 and best performing corporations. That is, 95% of the world’s 100 largest companies – including Exxon- Mobil (the most profi table corporation in the world), Walmart, Chevron, Hewlett-Packard, GE, Berkshire Hathaway – are actually not the best places to work!! More shocking is the fact that the #1 company in the Best Places to Work ranking (a company called NetApp) did not even make it to the Fortune 500 list of the world’s largest corporations! The #2 and #3 do not even feature in the Fortune 1000 list!!!

For information, Fortune once noted that research shows that having or not having natural talent is “irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice, and hard work...” Fortune also wrote about Warren Buffett, the world’s richest individual, that he was “not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster,” and that he achieved greatness “only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but of a particular type that’s demanding and painful.”

In other words, deep-rooted and long standing sustained sincerity works terrifically better than plain passion and myopic bursts of commitment.

Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what research proves. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely young age (when he was just 2 years old!) and encouraged him to “work hard,” Tiger had racked up at least 15 years of hard work by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the US Amateur Championship, at the age of 18! Even today, after winning many world titles, he works as hard, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking the same swing twice, because that is his formula to getting super better.

When Carly Fiorina left HP (of course, after halving HP’s shareholder value in her six year term), the tumultuous 2001 merger with Compaq appeared to be driving HP straight to the undertaker’s workshop. Enter Mark Hurd, who is described as a “peerless control freak and an unrepentant leftbrainer!” As Fortune confi rms, “Hurd quickly established himself as a stern taskmaster for accountability.” Ben Horowitz, who was CEO of Opsware, which HP bought in 2007 in a $1.7 billion deal, adds, “His weapon of choice is the voicemail... and he begins the barrage in the wee hours. If Hurd is down on someone’s work, he’ll complain openly, so everyone knows he’s displeased. It feels like the walls are closing in on you.” Hurd’s greatness comes from the fact that he’s unrelenting, unrepentant and ruthless in his employee destruction, reaching below various levels of employees to rebuke bad performers personally. HP today is the world’s largest IT corporation (Fortune #9) whose revenues of $118.36 billion surpass even that of IBM’s. Even in the face of recession (a time when desktop and laptop sales have been battered), HP’s stock price has jumped by an unbelievable 130% since 2008 to touch $46 as of date.

That brings us to a close associate of Mark Hurd, A. G. Lafley, who in July stepped down as the CEO of P&G, while retaining the seat of P&G’s Chairman. When Lafley took CEO charge on June 6, 2000, P&G was in a big mess. Over the next six months, matters worsened, with the stock losing 50% of its value and its Mcap falling by more than $50 billion. But Lafley did the unimaginable through his ‘Working It’ program, which ensured that every member of the P&G family was made to “actually go into shops to sell to consumers,” as the April 2008 book by Ram Charan and Lafley titled The Game Changer notes. This go-to-field program ensured that each and every employee was made to work hard and sweat it out for maximum productivity! By the time Lafley left office as the CEO, P&G’s Mcap had improved dramatically to $150.59 billion from the lowly $33.74 billion it touched in the first six months of his arrival – a rise of 346.28%! What about ‘unhappy’ employees? Lafley confesses, “The company has no right to be happy unless ‘the boss’ is happy.”

Mentioning Jack “Neutron Welch” as “a tough taskmaster” would be a cliche. But it’s still important to note that Jack was well renowned for his often most displeasing “handwritten notes on performance” to employees, throwing out even passionate people at will, if they didn’t have sustained sincere attitude towards work. When Jack retired, GE’s value had increased by an astonishing 2,729% to $410 billion!

In the 2009 Conference Board Review paper titled, Why Americans don’t trust CEOs, Jason Jennings, author of the best-seller Less Is More notes that “strong leaders should be: straighttalking, hard-charging, tough taskmasters...” Many say like AIG’s former boss Hank Greenberg, who built a $99 billion financial-services empire (before Martin Sullivan, his successor destroyed it) – BusinessWeek calls Hank “the impatient and prickly leader, who could yell at people even while cycling furiously on a stationary bike!”

For too long, we have been a nation purporting the myth that companies should protect employees, give them brilliant and amicable working environments. No more! It is time to call the ridiculous bluff and to realise that without being the worst taskmasters and slappingly demanding sustained sincerity from employees, we can never become world class and globally benchmarked!!!

But hey, all said and done, research could go to hell, what about my personal life – and the ever growing potbelly? I still had the Damocles’ predicament hanging on my head at the gym. Who could ensure my potbelly could be zapped away with sureshot guarantee? Was the ungodly taskmaster Beastus Maximus really a better choice as my trainer or was my hero going to be the genteel Don Juan de Marco? I was confused and undecided through the day, until dinner when I met my dad – who had sometime back rid himself of his potbelly almost unbelievably overnight. I asked him what choice would he have made in such a damning situation? “Kapalbhati,” came his lightening reply. Taken aback, I said, “Kapalbhati?!? What in crazy heavens is that?!” He coolly replied, “It’s a yogic breathing technique, kid.” I stammered back, “But how can a breathing technique help you to get rid of your potbelly overnight?” Dad smiled mystically, and said, “Suck the damned potbelly in boy, that’s what it teaches you!”

Is Apple too powerful?

The new iPod nano is a tour de force, the Swiss Army Knife of mobile entertainment. I'm sure there's some obscure gadget from Japan that packs more features per cubic millimeter, but I've never heard of it, and chances are neither have you. This one's a major consumer product, just in time for stimulating the economy this holiday season. Speaking as a technophile, I want one of the new nanos for the same reason I want a Dremel with 300 different bits: just because.

I'm also impressed by the new price point on the iPod Touch. Apple frequently overhypes its announcements, but the $199 price point in the US truly is a milestone that should lead to much higher sales. The improvements to iTunes and the App Store look promising as well, and I'm especially intrigued by Apple's effort to make paid apps more prominent. More on that in a future post.

But the thing that surprised me the most about Apple's announcement wasn't the features of the new products, or the absence of a tablet or an iPhone Lite. It was something Steve Jobs said when he talked about the video camera in the nano:

"We've seen video explode in the last few years," he said, showing a picture of a Flip video camera. "Here's one, a very popular one, four gigabytes of memory, $149, and this market has really exploded, and we want to get in on this."

Think about that for a minute. "There's a big new market, and we want in." Not, "we're creating something new" or "we can vastly improve this category." Just, "we want a cut."

It sounds like something Don Corleone would say. Or Steve Ballmer. But it's not what I expected from Apple.

Now, it's logical for Apple to put video cameras into iPods. A friend of mine worked at one of the companies producing cameras-on-a-chip, and he's passionate about the potential for building vision into every consumer product. It's not just an imaging issue; when the device can see the user, you can create all sorts of interesting gesture-based controls that don't require you to ever even touch the device. Instead of point and click, the interface is just...point.

So it's been inevitable that video cameras would eventually be built into things like the nano. For Pure Digital, the makers of the Flip, this ought to be a tough but normal competitive challenge. The first step is to make sure your camera works better than theirs (check). Next, since music players are becoming cameras, you might want to build a camera that can also play music.

But that's where the situation becomes abnormal. Because even though Pure Digital was recently purchased by Cisco, giving it almost limitless financial resources, it's more or less impossible for its products to become equivalent to the iPods as music players. Not because they can't play music, but because they aren't allowed to seamlessly sync with the iTunes music application.

The issue of access to iTunes has already been simmering in the background between Apple and Palm, with Palm engineering the Pre to access the full functionality of iTunes, Apple blocking that access, and Palm breaking back in. To date I've viewed it as kind of an amusing sideshow, and I didn't really care who won. I figured the folks at Palm had plenty of time in the past to build their own music management ecosystem, but they (including me) didn't bother, so there wasn't any particular moral reason why they should have access to Apple's system.


Apple the predator

The situation with Pure Digital is vastly different, in my opinion. Pure Digital pioneered the market for simple video cameras. It identified an opportunity no one else had seen, and built that market from scratch. In a declining economy, it created new jobs and new wealth, and made millions of consumers happy. It's incredibly difficult to get a new hardware startup funded in Silicon Valley, let alone make it successful. For the good of the economy, we ought to be encouraging more companies like Pure Digital to exist.

But there's no way for a small startup like that to also create a whole music ecosystem equivalent to iTunes. Yes, third party products can access iTunes music. But not as seamlessly as Apple's own products, and as we've seen over and over in the mobile market, small differences in usability can make a big difference in sales. So Apple gets a unique advantage in the video camera market not because it makes a better camera, but because it can connect its camera more easily to a proprietary music ecosystem.

In other words, iTunes is no longer just a tool for Apple to defend its iPod sales; it's now a tool to help Apple take over new markets.

In the legal system they call this sort of thing "tying," and it is sometimes illegal. For decades, Apple complained that Microsoft competed unfairly by tying its products together -- Office works best with Windows, Microsoft's file formats are often proprietary so you can't easily create a substitute for their apps, and so on. I was heavily involved in the Apple-Microsoft lawsuits when I worked at Apple in the 1990s, so I know how passionately we believed that Microsoft's tactics were not just unethical, but also harmful to computer users and the overall economy.

So it's very disappointing to see Apple using tactics it once bitterly denounced, and declaring that it's decided to take over a market because "we want to get in." If Apple can use iTunes as a weapon against Pure Digital and Palm, what's to stop it from rolling up every new category of mobile entertainment product? Where's the incentive for other companies to invest?

I saw first-hand the stifling effect that Microsoft and Intel's duopoly control had on personal computer innovation. PC hardware companies learned not to bother with new features, because Microsoft and Intel would insist that anything new they created be made available to every other cloner. And software investments were restrained by the belief that Microsoft would use its leverage to take over any new application category that was developed.


Good fences make good neighbors

There's a danger that Apple's behavior will have the same chilling effect in mobile electronics. So I believe Apple should allow any device to sync with iTunes content, the same as an iPod. But not because it's morally right or even because it's legally required, but because it's the best thing to do for Apple. Here's why:

The two biggest threats to a very successful company are complacency and consistency. Complacency is more common -- a company that's very successful starts to relax and loses the hunger and drive that made it a winner. I think we can safely assume that won't happen to Apple as long as Steve is around. But the second risk, consistency, is more insidious -- behavior that's appropriate and accepted for a spunky startup gets punished when a big company does it.

This is what tripped up Microsoft. The same aggressiveness that served it well against IBM got it a series of lawsuits and intense government scrutiny a decade later. Even though Microsoft eventually won those suits, its execs were distracted for years, and it was forced to dramatically change its behavior. It has never been the same company since. I think Microsoft would have been much better off had it proactively adjusted its own behavior just enough to pre-empt legal action.

That's where Apple is today. It has to realize that it's no longer the underdog. It's the dominant company in mobile entertainment, and the fastest-growing major firm in mobile phones. It's already under a lot of legal scrutiny for the way it manages the iPhone App Store. If it also leverages iTunes to take out small competitors, and especially if it's dumb enough to say things like "we want in," it will guarantee unfriendly attention from government regulators -- a group of people who actually have more power to hurt Apple than do most of its competitors.

The Obama administration in the US is making noises about enforcing competition law more vigorously, and look at how the EU is picking on details in the Oracle-Sun merger, allegedly to protect local companies (link). If they'll do all that to help SAP and Bull, what will they do to protect Nokia?

Apple, you don't need the special connection with iTunes to keep on winning. You've already proven that you're much better at systems design than almost any other company on Earth. The huge iPhone apps base is exclusive to you, and that won't change. By opening up iTunes, you take away an easy excuse for regulators to pick apart your business, a process that would be distracting, expensive, and could result in much more dramatic restrictions on your actions.

Ease up a little on the gas pedal, Steve. It's the best way to keep moving fast.

ALL CONSUMERS ARE FOOLS!

Well, almost all! It was three years and three months ago when I had covered this concept passing a conclusive judgement on the intellectual incompetence of consumers around the world. And the wonder is, while releasing this iconic issue of 4Ps B&M that contains the exclusive ICMR survey of India’s 100 Most Valuable Brands, I realised that even after so many years, nothing has changed globally, and therefore I decided to bring to you the same editorial once again in toto! All consumers surely still remain fools! Seriously believe that, and you’ve got the most astoundingly rocking and smashingly successful marketing campaign! But don’t blame me, blame Dr. Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University, who received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002-03, for emphatically proving the above mentioned statement... His ‘Prospect Theory’ suggests that rather than undertaking decisions just based on ‘logical reasoning’ (namely, choosing the better product over the worse), humans also include a critical factor known as ‘intuition’, which is the main reason for consumers behaving irrationally and many a time even foolishly while purchasing products and services. Some years ago, even Dr. John Nash (of Nash Equilibrium fame) won the Nobel Prize for theorising a similar concept.

Most interestingly, the ‘Prospect Theory’ has its mirror image in the competitive strategy theory propounded by Dr. Michael Porter, where he postulates that all the global theories of competitive strategies and tactical warfare can be summarised into one electrifying word, ‘positioning’, and consecutively, into another word that is mind-bogglingly changing paradigms of marketing battles in global industries and consumer spaces. And that word is ‘perception’. Porter aggressively argues that consumers do not make decisions based on which product is better, but based on which product is “perceived” as better. Amusingly, across industries, more often than not, the product which is actually worse off in quality is the one which sells more, and many times, despite being priced higher.

And it’s been the same for quite a few years. For example, in 2006, the cell phone manufacturer that had the number one rank in quality in India was Sony Ericsson (IDC survey 2006); while the company which sold the most cell phones was Nokia (with a jaw dropping 79% market share, compared to a pathetic 5% of Sony Ericsson; the figures are 64% for Nokia and 6% for Sony Ericsson in June 2009), in spite of lagging behind Sony Ericsson in quality, and in spite of a majority 60% of their sales being in the costlier priced segments. Similarly in automobiles, Toyota has been consistently ranked as number one in quality, year after year (JD Power Surveys) and in 2009 was ranked the third Most Admired Corporation globally by Fortune. But still, despite being ranked relatively way below Toyota in quality, despite not even featuring in Fortune’s Top 50 Most Admired Corporations list, despite being bankrupt, the company that has consistently been the world’s largest passenger car manufacturer for years is General Motors (August 2009 global market share: GM 18.9%, Toyota 17.5%). And if speed & technological excellence were the factors of quality, then while Ferrari has won six of the past nine years’ F-1 Grand Prix Championship, its parent Fiat’s market share globally is 3.6% only. The ‘Judgement of Paris’ wine tasting competition in 1976, covered by TIME magazine’s George Taber, which was held again in May 2006 in London, proved that California wines tasted better than French, and by miles. Guess which sells more? But obviously, the French.

The strategy these global leaders use is ‘perception’! Play on consumers’ irrationality, and one can easily change their perception about eating cancer causing burgers, drinking liver destroying alcohol, consuming pesticide infested cold drinks, munching on fungal infected and worm strewn chocolates, smoking life destroying cigarettes, doing dope etc. etc. etc.; the list is never ending and extends even to football. In the history of FIFA World Cup Finals since 1930, only three times has a team that had the best quality player (that is, the player who won the Golden Boot award for scoring the most goals) gone ahead to win the tournament! For the sake of it, guess who is the most successful footballer of all times scoring the most goals in the history of international football. Obviously, the “perceived” answer is Pele, right? Wrong! The man is Daei Ali of Iran (109 goals). With 77 goals, Pele is not even second in the list (Ferenc Puskas from Hungary is, with 84 goals)! So are all consumers fools? Like I mentioned, I know of at least two people who’ve got Nobel Prizes proving just that! And none of them is a consumer like you or me!

Four questions about the Microsoft-Nokia alliance

The Microsoft-Nokia alliance turned out to be a lot more interesting than the pre-announcement rumors made it out to be. Rather than just a bundling deal for mobile Office, the press release says they'll also be co-developing "a range of new user experiences" for Nokia phones, aimed at enterprises. Those will include mobile Office, enterprise IM and conferencing, access to portals built on SharePoint, and device management.

Of those items, the IM and conferencing ideas sound the most promising to me. Office, as I explained in my last post, is not much of a purchase-driver on mobile phones. And I think Microsoft would have needed to provide Nokia compatibility in its mobile portal and device management products anyway.

I understand the logic behind the alliance. Nokia has never been able to get much traction for its e-series business phones, and Microsoft hasn't been able to kick RIM out of enterprise. So if they get together, maybe they can make progress. But it's easy to make a sweeping corporate alliance announcement, and very hard to make it actually work, especially when the partners are as big and high-ego as Microsoft and Nokia. This alliance will live or die based on execution, and on a lot of details that we don't know about yet.

Here are four questions I'd love to see answered:


What specifically are those "new user experiences"?

If Nokia and Microsoft can come up with some truly useful functionality that RIM can't copy, they might be able to win share. But the emphasis in the press release on enterprise mobility worries me. The core users for RIM are communication-hungry professionals. If you want to eat away at RIM's base, you need to excite those communicator users, and I'm not sure if either company has the right ideas to do that. As Microsoft has already proven, pleasing IT managers won't drive a ton of mobile phone purchases.


Will Microsoft really follow through?

Microsoft has been hinting for the last decade that it was were willing to decouple mobile Office from the operating system, but they never had the courage to follow through. Now they have announced something that sounds pretty definitive, but the real test will be whether they put their best engineers on the Nokia products. If Microsoft assigns its C players to the alliance, or tries to make its Nokia products inferior to their Windows Mobile versions, the alliance won't go anywhere interesting.


What does this do to Microsoft's relationships with other handset companies?

Imagine for a moment that you are the CEO of Samsung. Actually, imagine that for several moments. You aren't exclusive with Microsoft, but you've done a lot of phones with Windows Mobile on them. Now all of a sudden Microsoft makes a deal with a company that you think of as the Antichrist.

How do you feel about that?

I can tell you that Samsung is not the most trusting and nurturing company to do business with even in the best of times. So I think you make two phone calls. The first is to Steve Ballmer, asking very pointedly if you can get the same software as Nokia, on the same terms, at the same time. If you don't like the answer to that question, your next call is to Google, regarding increasing your range of Android phones.

Maybe the reality is that Microsoft has given up on Windows Mobile and doesn't care what Samsung does. But that itself would be interesting news.

I would love to know how those phone calls went today.


What does RIM do about this?

It has been putting a lot of effort into Apple-competitive features like multimedia and a software store. Does it have enough bandwidth to also fight Nokia-Microsoft? What happens to its core business if Microsoft and Nokia do come up with some cool functions that RIM doesn't have? Are there any partners that could be a counterweight to Microsoft and Nokia? If I'm working at RIM, I start to think about alliances with companies like Oracle and SAP. And I wonder if Google is interested in doing some enterprise work together.

Nokia and Microsoft, sittin' in a tree...

Multiple sources are reporting that Nokia is hedging its bets on mobile phone software:

-- The New York Times says Microsoft and Nokia will announce Wednesday that Microsoft is porting Office to Nokia's Symbian S60 phones (link).
--TechCrunch, quoting the Financial Times in Germany, claims Nokia is planning to dump Symbian in favor of its Maemo Linux operating system (link).
--Om Malik says he asked Nokia about it, and the company denied plans to dump Symbian. But the company also said, "recognizing that the value we bring to the consumer is increasingly represented through software, there is logically not just one software environment that fits all consumer and market needs." In other words, we have an open marriage with Symbian (link).


In one sense, this is absolutely not news for Nokia. It has been playing the field for years, trying to prevent any single company from gaining control over mobile software (and thereby imposing a standard on Nokia). The change is that in the past, most of that energy was aimed against Microsoft.

Microsoft too seems to be bending its standards. With the exception of the Mac, Microsoft has been extremely reluctant to license Office for other operating systems. In the past, if Nokia wanted Office, it would have been expected to license Windows Mobile.

But now both companies feel threatened by Apple and Google, and all of a sudden that ugly person across the dance floor looks a lot cuter.


The real question that no one seems to be asking is whether most customers will care about any of this stuff. Most Nokia smartphone users are blissfully unaware that their phones have an operating system, let alone whether it's Symbian or Maemo. They just want the phone to work well.

And speaking as a former Palm guy who dealt with the mobile market for years, putting Microsoft Office on a smartphone is like putting wings on a giraffe -- it may get you some attention, but it's not very practical.

Don't get me wrong, I like and admire QuickOffice, which is probably the leading Office-equivalent app in the mobile space today. It's a cool product, but for most people the screens of smartphones are too small for serious spreadsheet and word processing activity. It works, but it's awkward and produces eyestrain. Most people who have a serious need for Office on the go will just carry a netbook.

So Nokia and Microsoft will both get some nice publicity, but the announcements mean very little to the average user. What both Microsoft and Nokia need to do is create compelling new mobile functionality that's better than the stuff being produced by Apple and RIM. Until they do that, all the strategic alliances in the world won't make a significant difference.

=====

Update: The announcement this morning was more subtle and perhaps far-reaching than what was reported yesterday. I think the strategic situation is still the same as what I described above, but there might be more value for users than I expected. More thoughts after I have a chance to digest the announcement.

YOU’RE A CLASSIC FAILURE, BOY!

Flying is something that I simply hate. The symptoms are always the same. My heartbeat and BP shoot up the moment the aircraft starts taxiing for a takeoff, I break into a sweat, yet my hands turn ice cold. Thus it was when last week, with great trepidation, I entered an unavoidable flight down south. It was with pleasant surprise that I noticed that my co-passenger was none other than my favourite professor from my b-school days; the wizard used to teach us astounding leadership case studies, but I liked him more because he was the easiest to irritate amongst the lot and we used to take full advantage of it. Initial greetings aside, the fleeting scowl on his face was a giveaway that he remembered me too well. Attempting to rekindle old relationships thereon, I mischievously told him how I remembered his classes even now, and he smilingly nodded back, knowing very well I didn’t mean it at all. Thereon, we kept exchanging random statements... till the point that I got this crazy devilish urge to vex him and fibbed up a make-believe grouse that despite trying very hard, I had still not been able to achieve some of the visionary things that I had been aiming to achieve by this age. He looked at me, and surprisingly said, “That’s pretty good, I say!” I was foxed by his reply. Looking at my confusion, he said, “Let me tell you a story...” And that’s how the story began...

He was born at an underprivileged medical center. Even as a baby, life was anything but sweet for him. His parents divorced within three years of his birth. Although his mother remarried, she unfortunately married a man who was known to be jobless, and who got into the habit of coming home drunk every night – in fact, during a drunk-driving incident, the man had both his legs amputated and died soon after. As a young lad, struggling to keep up with social questions about his multiracial heritage, he became addicted to alcohol, marijuana and cocaine during his teenage years, which he later said was his “greatest moral failure.” He also became an uncontrollable chain smoker who couldn’t quit smoking despite trying too many times. He even lost his mother to ovarian cancer in 1995, much before he had anything signify cant to achieve. But failures are what taught this man the beautiful attitude of sincerity. That belief is what led Barack Obama to win the Illinois senator seat in 1997; that belief is what led him to convince a totally opposed state assembly to pass a bill that forced police to videotape all interrogations to reduce torture and deaths in custody, especially of blacks; that belief is what led him to run the Presidential elections in 2008 despite being trounced devastatingly in the 2000 Congressional elections and despite being told a few years back by his media consultant that he stood very little chance as his name sounded too similar to Osama Bin Laden.

If Obama had an underprivileged childhood, Steve Jobs went through worse. When he was born, his mother was an unwed graduate student who put him up immediately for adoption as she did not wish to rear him. Ironically, Steve wasn’t even the first choice of his adoptive parents as they had actually wanted a girl. Steve’s ‘new’ mother was just a high school pass-out, and his father wasn’t even that. Later on in life, Steve Jobs did join college, but dropped out within six months as he couldn’t see the value in it. But despite dropping out, Jobs continued dropping into classes that interested him. He would sleep on the floor of his friends’ rooms and returned Coke bottles to earn 5 cents per bottle to buy food. Every Sunday night, he would walk seven miles across town to get a free meal at a Hare Krishna temple. The learning from that part of his life and those ‘dropout’ classes is what gave him the zeal to co-found Apple in 1976, market its Mac products too passionately, and make the cover of the TIME magazine by the age of 26. It’s common knowledge now how Steve Jobs was fired from his own company by Apple’s board of directors, a failure that drove him again to found Pixar and NeXT, two more iconic companies, before he was reinstated storybook style as Apple’s CEO! A pancreatic cancer patient (one of the most dangerous cancers with the lowest survival rates), Steve Jobs also had a liver transplant earlier this year. And he has already joined back for work! “Living every day as the last day of your life,” is the very statement Steve Jobs says has been driving his ambitions through all his failures since the age of 17.

From Milton Hershey of Hershey Chocolate Company (whose businesses went bankrupt three times before he finally made it big) to Henry Ford (who failed twice before Ford Motor Corporation was born) to Abraham Lincoln (who lost seven times in the Presidential elections before he finally made it), all successful people have been the biggest failures at one point or the other in their lifetimes.

My professor was almost done speaking and strangely justifying to me why when he kept reemphasizing that I was an utter failure, he actually meant good. Well, I seriously didn’t know how to take it. Before I could poke him further, the plane hit the biggest godforsaken air pocket I’ve ever experienced in my life and started rocking and rolling better than Elvis could ever have done in his dreams. And then, suddenly, the aircraft plunged into a dramatically sickening dive; and I did likewise into a crazy bloodcurdling banshee scream. With cups, and my whole life, streaking in front of me, I couldn’t help but astonishingly notice the professor calmly smiling away to glory. It looked totally ridiculous. Didn’t the professor realise we all were well on our way to Kingdom Come? Sniggering, he shouted to me through all the noise, “Live every day as the last day of your life!” It sounded insane and totally inappropriate. I shouted back, “Sir, if I don’t make it alive through this rotten flight, how the heavens do you think my failure to survive will ever make me hugely successful?” The prof shouted back through his guffaws, “Son, your ‘failure’ could result in somebody else’s success! Your sacrifice could very well help rewrite future safety rules to create the most successful airlines in safety standards...” If I had to understand what being a failure meant, that moment in time encompassed it all; a moment when I decided that if I were to escape the crazy air ride, I would never ever trouble any professor of mine, especially this one. Well, as is obvious, I escaped; but I have to confess that the talk did have some advantage at least. These days, whenever my sweetest wife accuses me during our classic championship bouts of being the biggest loser in life, she just can’t get it why my face starts glowing with pride. Last I heard she was growling at me that this was going to be the last day of my life... That’s the way we husbands live it all the time honey, that’s the way we all live it...