Every change in communication technology will bring about a reshuffle of the industry. As the inventor and innovator of mobile phones, Motorola was successively acquired by Google and Lenovo. Bird, Southern Hi-Tech, Sony, HTC, these "fighters in mobile phones" are all brilliant, but the most embarrassing thing is the fall of Nokia, which can open walnuts to block bullets.
The glory of finnish mythology and Northern Europe once plummeted from the global market share of 4 1%. In 20 12, Fitch Ratings downgraded Nokia's debt credit rating to "junk", which became a typical case of business school closure.
Some people say that Nokia is complacent under the boss's mentality, arrogant or even complacent after excessive success, some people say that it is lack of innovation, and some people blame it on Nokia's too humanized and comfortable working environment. Nokia's mobile phone is no longer beautiful. Afterwards, we can easily and arbitrarily blame all the genes in it for the failure. But only under the comprehensive consideration of the times and individuals can we get closer to the truth.
1
Born in the cold war and war, Nokia has a strong sense of crisis in its genes. Founded in 1865, Nokia's business has been bumpy from logging and papermaking to rubber shoes, tires and cables, creating amazing adaptability. It was not until the crisis in the early 1990s that the business concentration strategy was basically realized and the diversified enterprises were transformed into communication companies. It took Ollila 10 years to turn Nokia from a loss-making paper mill into the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer.
Ollila
In this era of rapid industrial renewal, the lack of innovation and insufficient investment in R&D may become the universal magic weapon to accuse failure. Despite losing to Apple, which is famous for its innovation, Nokia can't carry this pot.
Nokia has 1/3 employees engaged in technology development. As early as 2000, it designed a touch-screen smart phone with the functions of sending and receiving emails and playing games, seven years earlier than Apple. Nokia mobile phone announced the arrival of the era of smart phones. In 2007, it launched the world's first carl zeiss professional camera smartphone N73, and Nokia reached its peak. In 2007, Nokia's market share exceeded 43%, making it the first, and relying on its own efforts to promote WCDMA technology all over the world.
In 2007, it was not until Apple's iPhone came out that Nokia began to decline, but the company's R&D expenditure in 2007-201year remained above 5.5 billion euros, four times that of Apple. Nokia has invested heavily in ethnographic research, market research, etc., and customized products for users in different life situations and different geographical life forms, and even more than 1000 models. Why did Nokia lose? And lost to an apple with such a single product?
Smartphones, which started in 2002 and broke out in 2005, entered a new era with the appearance of iOS in 2007. In fact, Nokia launched Ovi Store before Apple's App Store, but unfortunately, the resource matching is insufficient, and the application supply is only one tenth of Apple's. When Google is free, Nokia's Ovi map is charged for a long time. The open platform led by Apple and Google has dealt a fatal blow to Nokia under the traditional thinking in a destructive and innovative way.
In the face of small-scale enterprises, it is a good way to unite with Lian Heng if they want to "eat big fish", so an open platform is the only magic weapon for their innovation and competitiveness. However, for Nokia at that time, its super R&D team and high market share made it very difficult to make this innovative decision. Even excluding the consideration of profit, their huge investment in R&D gives them confidence to surpass the "rabble" in the market.
This makes it easier for enterprises to fall into the indirect cost trap (they need gross profit margin, so they are unwilling to develop products that deviate from the existing indirect cost and profit rate level) and the mutual substitution trap (leading enterprises are unwilling to sacrifice their existing business areas and would rather let competitors do so). This drawback in the subsequent development, let Nokia rout.
Nokia's research and development achievements have not been turned into weapons on the battlefield. When inputting characters, the touched virtual key instantly becomes larger, which is actually a patent of Nokia, but ironically it only appears on Apple phones. At the same time, many R&D patents have nowhere to display because of the constraints brought by Saipan system. IOS is closed and easy to operate, and it is easy for two or three-year-old children to get started. Android is open and rich in content. Saipan has lost in these two aspects, which makes people can't stand Saipan's slowness, crash and few applications. Since Saipan is not good, why not change it quickly?
2
Strict and perfect quality control and testing (every Nokia product has to undergo drop test, electromagnetic compatibility test, fatigue test and other reliability tests), coupled with efficient supplier management and perfect supply chain system, make cheap and easy-to-use Nokia take the lead in the market.
The idea of cost control in the 2G era and the development idea of attaching importance to market share and market competition have made Nokia form an organizational convention that attaches importance to financial data and short-term goals. The stability of organizational practice plays an important role in effectively maintaining and replicating business behavior and reducing the uncertainty of business risks. However, with the arrival of the new era, the new organization convention to deal with the business model of "hardware+software+mobile service" in the 3G era has not yet been formed, and even its development is difficult.
We know that Nokia does not lack innovation, but what it really lacks is the mechanism to integrate innovation into strategy and form organizational practice. In enterprises, profitable departments often have absolute right to speak, while departments with future imagination cannot be taken seriously because of poor profitability. Even after discovering the disadvantages of Saipan, the repair cost is too high and the time is too long, Nokia's high task and performance-centered management system inevitably lead to the situation that middle-level leaders create false prosperity to keep their jobs, while high-level people who don't understand technology set unrealistic goals.
In the enterprise environment where sales and profits are paramount, the company's existing advantages will continue to strengthen, and few employees dare to point out their disadvantages bluntly. So in general, Nokia focuses on hardware with short-term market effect, and even gives up the trend of touch because of high cost and risk, and has made little achievements in systems with long-term value. If the advantage goes too far, the core competence becomes the core obstacle, and the organizational practices that once made the company prosperous become the constraint of its development. Therefore, for a successful enterprise, "forgetting becomes very important". Only by forgetting the best and core things in the past can we regain the ability to innovate and the courage to take risks.
On the one hand, the system closure criticized by Nokia is subjective, that is, the future development trend of the industry mentioned above has not reached organizational awareness, and organizational norms have been formed within the organization. On the other hand, in the 3G era, wired, wireless, image, video, entertainment, e-commerce and so on are constantly merging, and Saipan system cannot resist such a large amount of traffic. Although Nokia constantly mobilized the developers of Symbian platform and held a developer conference, the application software developers were not very enthusiastic, and good application development could not "run".
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Nokia was once chosen as the worst board of directors in the world, because at the most critical moment, the board always sent the wrong person. Hierarchical management and leaders who don't know technology (one executive admits that "no one at the top really knows software") make the internal decision-making mechanism of the company lengthy and there are management faults.
Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo
In 2006, Olli-Pekka Olli-pekka kallasvuo, CEO, not only failed to attach great importance to the independent smart phone business to avoid the shackles of the old business, but also merged it with the feature phone business, killing it in vain. This old employee who has been in Nokia for 30 years has complex feelings about traditional business, which makes him unable to give up the traditional and declining Saipan.
The leadership knew the necessity of changing from a mobile phone company to a software company, but failed to invest the profits of the mobile phone business in the development of new fields. An executive said: "It takes time to build a new operating system. This is why we must stick to Saipan. " In this way, enterprises have entered the "mutual substitution trap".
In order to make the financial statements look better, in 2007, Nokia abandoned the independent development of core chip technology and sold the ——3G chip team, the result of years of technical investment, to stmicroelectronics. The abandonment of chips, operating systems and two core positions made Nokia cut its own hands and feet. When the high-end market was occupied by Apple, Nokia shanzhai mobile phones flew all over the sky and were attacked by both sides.
Many cases of business failure tell us a humorous irony. Enterprises that aim at making money and profits often fail to make money. Because the cost was out of control, Apple drove Jobs away and replaced him with a vice president who sold coke, in exchange for an Apple printer that could not be sold. It was not until Jobs returned to focus on technology and user experience and launched epoch-making products that today's Apple appeared.
20 10, Elop, a former Microsoft person who has nothing to do with Nokia, became CEO, and his modality is still deteriorating at the other extreme. Less than a week after the release of N9 based on Meego, Elop clearly responded that despite the huge response of N9, Nokia still had to give up Meego and concentrate entirely on the development of Windows Phone. 20 1 1 At the beginning of the year, Nokia formed an alliance with Microsoft and turned to the Windows Phone platform, almost from scratch. Google's vice president hit the nail on the head and said that two turkeys together will not become an eagle, because they are both representatives of the old times.
Some people say that Elop is a Microsoft undercover, and Microsoft bought Nokia for $7.4 billion, which was a real bargain. He got a high signing fee and liquidated damages himself, but nearly 20,000 Nokia mobile phone employees were laid off, and Nokia's mobile phone market share plummeted. But up to now, Microsoft didn't get anything cheap in this acquisition. Some people think that this is a good opportunity for Nokia to emerge from its shell and become one of the four largest communication equipment providers in the world.
Nowadays, the discussion about whether Nokia can make a comeback continues, and its new product strategy is also mixed. However, it should not be underestimated that a large number of patents of Nokia Technology Department enable it to obtain very high profits only through technical authorization. As early as 20 1 1, Apple paid Nokia a one-time compensation of about 420 million euros, and more than 95 million euros in follow-up fees every quarter. Except for Apple, those familiar companies are basically listed here.
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It was Apple from the PC industry that defeated Nokia, and the last straw that crushed him and Microsoft's mobile phone system turned out to be Google, which was engaged in search. These challengers who eat "big fish" bring new ideas and ways of thinking to the market, thus having a unique emotional appeal.
With the development of the times, mobile phones are no longer receivers, but information terminals. The competition between enterprises has changed from a hardware war to a system war, and a good mobile phone must come from the hands of information companies. This is why the apple with a single product came to the core later. When one or several aspects of an industry's technology, mode, products and services have undergone fundamental changes, it is the structural change of the industry, and this is the do or die of enterprise structural transformation.
Enterprises with successful experience should promote innovation and transformation to a higher level of life, and have the courage to bear the sharp decline in profits and the determination to break the routine. This seems to be an impossible task in front of a CEO who is not the founder. Unfortunately, when managers focus on the stock market instead of the incremental market, external expansion will turn into internal checks and balances, thus missing the opportunity to enter new markets.
Enterprises facing changes in industrial structure should be keen on structural transformation. Enterprises in transition should correctly handle the relationship between old and new markets; Competing with rivals and social trends at the same time; Improve the ability to defeat opponents and at the same time improve the ability to defeat yourself; And do a good job in two dimensions of innovation: new bottles of new wine, new bottles of old wine, grasp the present with one hand and embrace the future with the other, otherwise the tide will come and the ship will not be able to turn.
Emotionally speaking, many people still have deep feelings for Nokia, so the fall of the giant is even more regrettable and tragic. Some people say that the decline of Samsung's global market share, the Apple battery door incident and the sluggish sales of iPhone X phones have all become great opportunities for Nokia's mobile phone to re-emerge. Tomorrow is unpredictable, but cleaning up the lessons of yesterday is a compulsory course for everyone.