Nokia's new e-mail phones

Nokia’s newly-announced e-mail phones are interesting, and I think one of them could be very successful.

The three new devices come with a bewildering array of mail client options, including RIM, Good, Visto, Seven, and Nokia’s Business Center (which I believe is the software that syncs directly to Exchange). I wish I’d had a mail client on the market, they probably would have licensed from me as well.

I think the client that matters most in the short term is RIM, because a lot of companies and operators have standardized on the RIM server and have been asking for RIM-compatible devices. Unfortunately for Nokia, in the US what they’ve been asking for is RIM-compatible Windows Mobile and Palm OS devices, and Nokia’s devices are on Symbian, which has basically no traction in the US.

I’m very pleased, though, that they didn’t try to tart these things up with a bunch of multimedia features. The people who want e-mail phones are, for the most part, very distinct from the people who want entertainment phones. Look at RIM -- they’re a crummy device for almost everything except e-mail, and yet they’re the leader in the category. If I had my choice, I wouldn’t have even built cameras into the Nokia devices, but many operators require cameras these days, so Nokia probably had no choice.

Anyway, the three devices are the E60, a candybar phone; the E61, a minitablet with keyboard; and the E70, which has a flip-over keyboard. I don’t expect much from the E60 -- an e-mail phone without a keyboard is like a bicycle without handlebars. (Yeah, I know they exist, but how well do they sell?)

The E61 is being compared online to the Treo, but actually it’s a pretty slavish RIM Blackberry clone, just like the Motorola Q and the HP Mobile Messenger. I guess it makes sense to target RIM’s ID, since Blackberries outsell the Treo by a wide margin. But all of these RIM-like designs are too wide to be held comfortably in one hand by many people, and I think that’s going to be a barrier to wide adoption. It’s not really a comfortable replacement for a mobile phone.

The device I like best is the E70, which picks up the flipover keyboard design of the Nokia 6822. The cool thing about this design is that when the keyboard’s closed, it looks like a regular mobile phone and you can hold it to your face fairly comfortably. But when the keyboard’s open, you have a pretty roomy keyboard in which you can type easily with two thumbs. It’s much roomier than the Treo’s keyboard.

Downside: You can’t type one-handed while strap-hanging on the subway.

The thing that bewilders me about the E70 is that it’s triband instead of quad band. That means you can’t travel with it and be confident that it’ll work around the world. E-mail phones are professional road warrior power tools, and you need to make the user confident that they’ll be well connected wherever they go. The Treo is quad band, and I assume Palm will make an issue of that when selling against the E70.

Nevertheless, the E70 impresses me. I think typing will be faster on its keyboard, and the RIM client will be a big selling point (assuming it works, a big if). I think it has good prospects in Europe. Will its advantages be enough to overcome US IT managers’ distaste for the Symbian OS? That’s going to be an interesting one to watch.

About this blog...

Mobile Opportunity is a blog on the technology industry, with a special focus on mobile and wireless. During my six years at Palm and PalmSource, I was constantly surprised by the disconnect between what we believed in the mobile industry and what our end-user customers thought. The pain this causes to companies and customers is immense. The mobile data products and services we create fail more often than they succeed, and customers are often frustrated by products that almost, but not quite, do the things they need.

The name of this blog is a bit of a stretch, since I don't pretend to have all the answers on what the real opportunities are in the mobile marketplace. But this is my effort to help figure it out. I hope that by comparing notes we can all get a little smarter. Your comments are welcome; this needs to be a conversation.

Note: This is one of two blogs I’m running. The other, Stop Flying Blind, is focused on business strategy.

[March 29, 2006: Sorry for the repost of this old message. I'm finally re-launching the Stop Flying Blind weblog, and wanted to update the link to it.]

Strategy in uncertain markets requires active waiting

Strategy in uncertain markets requires active waiting. That is what Donald N. Sull says in HBR of September 2005. Furthermore, he identifies a number of management principles for surviving and thriving in unpredictable markets. These principles, taken together, define "active waiting":

1. Keep the vision fuzzy and the priorities clear.
2. Conduct reconnaissance into the future. Send probes and watch for anomalies and gaps.
3. Keep a war chest. Save cash for when disaster strikes or when faced with a golden opportunity.
4. Maintain the pressure. During the waiting, focus on improving operational efficiency.
5. Declare the main effort. Decide and communicate. Focus all resources on the golden opportunity.

Doing active waiting well requires from leaders that they are patient, disciplined and alert during the waiting process, and courageous and bold during the rare times of major disaster or major opportunity. Not many people are capable of aligning their leadership behavior to these crucial external circumstances.

A Radically Simplified Approach to Business Strategy

It is now 25 years ago that Harvard professor, Michael E. Porter wrote "Competitive Strategy". Essentially Porter says you need to consider Five Competitive Forces to analyse the attractiveness of an industry for a company.

A new book on business strategy: "Competition Demystified - A Radically Simplified Approach to Business Strategy" by Bruce Greenwald, a professor at the Columbia Business School, and Judd Kahn, is a conscious simplification of Michael Porter's classic.

According to the authors, in most cases, studying only one factor will do: Potential Entrants. They claim the Barriers to Entry is by far the most important factor in business strategy.

If they are right that would make business strategy formulation a lot simpler!

"Either the existing firms within the market are protected by barriers to entry or they are not," the authors write. " No other feature of the competitive landscape has as much influence on a company's success as where it stands in relationship to these barriers." And: "Avoiding competition is the only way to escape a level playing field in which anyone can join... [and] only the best... survive and prosper."

Greenwald and Kahn argue that:

• Firms operating without competitive advantages should concentrate all their efforts on being efficient;
• Companies that do have competitive advantages need to design strategy with their competitors in mind;
• Most competition is over pricing or capacity, and there are established techniques for analyzing these situations and devising the right strategies to handle them;
• Cooperation between competitors is possible and beneficial and can be accomplished without breaking the law;
• In an increasingly global economy, competitive advantages still stem primarily from local conditions. Even large international firms need to understand and protect the local sources of their success.

Most importantly, according to the authors there are really only three sustainable competitive advantages;

1. Supply. A company has this edge when it controls an important resource: in Hollywood, for example, it may mean having Julia Roberts or Tom Cruise star in a movie. Or a company may have a proprietary technology, like a prescription drug, that is protected by patent.
2. Demand. A company can control a market because customers are loyal to it, either out of habit - to a brand name, for example - or because the cost of switching to a different product is too high. Companies often put off changing software vendors, for example, for that reason.
3. Economies of scale. If your operating costs remain fixed while output increases, you can gain a significant edge because you can offer your product at lower cost without sacrificing margins.

Greenwald and Kahn explain in depth how a business can capitalize on each type of advantage.

Bestselling Books on Strategy and Competition

Customer S. taken beyond CRM

In the HBR of December 2004, Jeffrey F. Rayport and Bernard J. Jaworski write that the task of managing customer interfaces and managing interface systems is an underestimated strategic imperative. Those who deal with this in their customer S. cracking the code of interface systems will have a competitive advantage.



Advances in service technology have opened up new possibilities for how companies can create value not only through improvements in productivity but through better interactions with their customers. Businesses must change fast to embrace these new realities. Reengineering the front office will eliminate and displace many jobs, but it will also inevitably create new opportunities for human labor. Getting the balance right will require Corporate leaders to develop a subtle understanding of how to manage the intelligent division of labor between people and machines. A company's interface system works best when it combines the best of what people and machines can do.



Every customer interface must deliver high levels of customer-perceived value relative to the competition. This is possible along the four dimensions of a customer interface:

1. physical presence and appearance
2. cognition (recognize customers, draw intelligent conclusions and act upon that)
3. emotion or attitude (right sense of humor, repect, etc, calibrated with the customer)
4. connectedness (Amazon generates recommendations based on buying patterns of people with similar interests)

In all of this, the Personalisation Paradox should be kept in mind: the notion that a personalized interaction or relationship may be one that is actually coldly and impersonal (not all customers want to be treaded with lots of personal attention).

After years of cost cutting, it may well be that Customer S. will become more interesting now as a source of creating competitive advantage with so many new technology options to choose from.

Industry Change

A new article on strategic industry change can be found in the Harvard BR of October 2004. As we all know, industries change. Some industries change fast, some change slowly over time, but all of them do change eventually. Anita McGahan explains industries actually change in one of 4 ways: radical, progressive, creative or intermediating.



She argues that if your company's innovation S. is not aligned with your industry's change trajectory, your plan for achieving returns on invested capital is less likely to succeed, "Moreover, a firm's S. - its plan for achieving a return on invested capital - cannot succeed unless it is aligned with the industry's change trajectory". If you understand which path your industry is on, you can determine which strategies will make your company succeed and which ones may backfire on your company.



A further description of McGahan's innovative industry change model can be found here.



It's interesting to note that while McGahan seems to focus only on aligning your business strategy to industry changes, Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in another article in this same HBR issue advise to try to create a new uncontested market space yourself, which they call a blue ocean strategy.