Posts by Simon Rockman 577 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Nov 2007
You know that the Italians say that you shouldn't have a cappuccino after 11:00 and that it's a breakfast drink, a faux par akin to Nadurra before the sun is over the yard arm?
Turns out there is a scientific basis for this: chronopharmacology.
I can't see Microsoft giving up on Bing. It's the reason why Msoft bought all of the Nokia phone business and not just smartphones.
For all the "failure" of Nokia they still sell north of 20m phones a month, and there are plenty of parts of the world where the Nokia lead in distribution makes them the strongest brand. This is many people's first touch with technology. They may have access to internet cafes but putting Bing in their pocket is the way to get them using the Microsoft service before they get sucked into Google.
If Microsoft didn't have designs on this they would have left the Asha/S40 range in Finland.
HGST is not revealing its spin speed - although current high-capacity Ultrastars spin at 7.200rpm – its cache size (64MB in existing Ultrastars), or the sustained data-transfer rate.
That's like a sports car manufacturer selling car without revealing the acceleration times or top speed. Or McLaren not revealing the 6:47 Nürburgring time. How can they sell it without basic specs. I'd also want to know seek time.
It needs to watch out for sneaky changes though. When I signed up for my contract I got Vodafone Passport which gave you the same deal as you had in the UK when roaming. They then changed the T&C for Passport and introduced Euro Traveler which cost more to give you what Passport used to give but no longer did so.
Of course, as ever, we have been here before. A long time ago (15 years?) Orange had to let a load of customers out of their contracts when they changed pricing under them. It seems that the contracts have got wise to them.
And as for the end of subsidies: It was promised when Virgin launched, and I remember sitting down to lunch with the heads of Nokia UK, Motorola Europe and Ericsson UK in the late 1990s when we toasted the end of the subsidy model.
When the wifi on my Lumia stopped working on the Underground
Nokia said it was a Virgin Wifi problem
Virgin said to contact my service provider, after all that's who I pay the bill to.
Vodafone (for it was them) said it was a Nokia problem.
With an "open source" phone I can see nothing but problems.
Of course it's not the first time Motorola has been here (and given up)
I was talking to a Nokian at mobile world congress - just a chat on a moving walkway bus and , not wearing a Register hat - I asked about the rumoured metal phone "that will come" he said - it became the 925, and the Pureview phone "you'll have to wait a little longer for that", and the table? "We looked at that and decided against launching it".
As good as the Lumia tablets look I suspect that it took the Microsoft purchase to push them out into the open. The cost of development (I guess about $5m-$8m) is insignificant once you commit to tooling, supply chain and inventory. We've waited so long because Nokia wouldn't take the risk. Microsoft will.
Blackberry makes great email devices. What they should have built was an e-ink device with a good keyboard and great battery life. Focused on the corporate market, based on security and productivity, and left the music 'n teens to Apple. This is from 2010
This week's announcements are not the end of Apple dominance: they are the signal of the end. We won't see queues in the streets or the 5S or 5C. We won't seen the consumer pull which is the only reason the operators stock the kit.
The operators will pounce on the reduced demand to re-negotiate terms with Apple. We'll see some operators (Telefonica perhaps) de-list Apple from their portfolio or at least make it "special order" and expensive. Perhaps they will demand a revenue share from the 30% Apple makes on App sales, Apple will rue not following the principal of being nice to people on the way up.
As an aside I'm amused to read the NFC sites which all say "Apple may not have put NCF in the new phones but they are just bucking the industry trend and will do so next time".
Selling Vertu wasn't a sign of desperation. It was a sensible re-aligning of the business. The idea of Vertu was that it would be an experimental brand (much like Bugatti is for VW) to try super high end things with a view to brining them downmarket.
That didn't happen. What did happen was that they amassed an amazing property portfolio as they bought a lot of the prime retail space they put their shops in.
Nokia wasn't in the retail business and selling was sensible. I also think there was some vanity going on, the mega wealthy Nokia directors wanted something flash to impress their friends with. A bit like VW franchise owners are the only people who want Phaetons.
What is a sign of desperation is the other sales. Selling the building on lease-back? And the ridiculous fire-sale price to Microsoft. Is Nokia really only worth half of what Google paid for Motorola? OK there are some issues on patent ownership: Microsoft only has the right to use them , not own them, but still.
What's not factored in is supply chain - in and out. Nokia's use of platforms and making suppliers work directly together brings down their BOM incredibly. Much more important is the route to market. Nokia can get stock to most of India on a daily basis, the word "Nokia" is colloquial for mobile. "I'll call you on my Nokia". Even if it's a Sony, Spice or Samsung. The brand dominates Africa.
The only company with better emerging market distribution is Coca-Cola.
I can only think that there is something dreadful around the corner and Elop could see it coming. That he had to sell or the company would fail.
I also suspect they were seriously looking at an Android Plan B and that rattled Microsoft into buying. They bought the S40 business to stop the Nokia rump from building a cheap Android phone and then leaveraging that distribution.
Nokia was scared so they frightened Microsoft into buying them.
Yup, he was a trojan horse after all
I heard of one person who has an 070 number which is 50p/minute,. As many people think anything beginning with 07 is a mobile number they call it happily.
The said uber-scammer is getting over 30p/minute revenue share, and has VoIPed it to an overseas call centre. He then courts the scam calls - registering an interest on websites and the like and leads them along with his call centre working from a script.
His revenue is significantly more than Lee Beaumont's.
There is an MVNO particularly targetted at younger kids: Bemilo. http://www.bemilo.com/ This pretty much gives parents sysadmin control on their kids phone usage.
There is a huge effect of playground tribalism. In my day it might have been a battle between who uses Schaefer or Parker pens, BBC Micro or C64, Amiga or ST. Today it's Android Vs iOS.
Having the latest release of Jellybean or whatever matters. Particularly in schools where you wear a uniform and it's harder to stand out.
When you change school at 11 you've gone from being the Big Kid with status to the smallest runt in a much bigger school. It's no wonder kids want S4s, iPhone 5s and the smart ones 925s.
The failure of O2 will be seen as a reason for other players to not engage in the seniors market. I'd agree with Chris Millington's view on positioning and I'm using Doro phones for my service, however I'd say that there is scope for what O2 was offering it's just that they didn't tell people about it.
Not even their own staff.
Call the standard O2 telesales and they have never heard of it. It's the same story at retail. I mystery shopped a number of O2 stores. Say "what can you recommend for my fail mum" and they wouldn't suggest "help at hand". Ask about it by name and they would say "what's that then", with some prompting and an explanation that it was an O2 emergency button service they would look it up on the Intranet and find that it not only existed, but they had handsets in stock at which point they would disappear into the store room and emerge with one.
I recommended it to a friend I bumped into on the tube this morning - for his son who has a nut allergy - this friend is an industry veteran and very much has his finger on the pulse, and yet he had never heard of it.
While Chris is right that you need to sell something which is desirable rather than sell on fear, you need to actually promote whatever you sell to shift any stock.
Nokia never had the same brand affinity in the States.
There is a pleasantly retro vibe about owning a Nokia here. A friend posted on Facebook today that she'd just bought a Lumia: She's a fashion maven, not a techie. She probably thinks an operating system is something to do with hospitals and that serial interface is having your breakfast.
But a 'Lumia' has the cool factor.
There was a time when Nokia had over 50% UK market share and 80% of those customers said that they would never buy another brand of mobile phone. These are probably the people who then went and bought pink Razrs and today have iPhones but they can be won back to Nokia.
There is no "Back" for the Americans, many of whom think Nokia is a Japanese brand. They can't even pronounce it properly.
If they can't sign up before 13 they become a social outcast. The inflection point is when kids go from primary to secondary school. Unless you are going from a Prep school this tends to be age 11.
Facebook needs a protected mode for 9-13 year olds, so that they can join but have a tighter limit on what they can be shown. Just banning them is asking for problems.
Also known as "but a Nokia", "No, not an iPhone, please, please buy a Nokia".
The carriers are desperate to fight against the power of iTunes and Google Play, and want some of the OTT revenue to themselves.
Luckily for them Nokia is making pretty decent phones, perhaps the best around.
At Mobile World Congress it was clear that the carriers were rounding on Apple, they liked Apple when the phones meant they could get customers to churn like crazy from their rivals but as John Strand has said (in an annoyingly loud way), there has never been any money in it for the carriers. They ran Club Nokia out of town and then welcomed iTunes.
The operators created the monster that is Apple and are looking to redress the balance. We are now seeing the carriers break the idea that you are locked to your device for two years, and I hazard that it's to churn customers off iPhones. Android, Samsung and Google Play might be far from ideal but if the consumer sentiment (not just those with pony tails) is to move from iPhone 5 to Galaxy S4 the operators will roll with it.
The Russians won't be the last, particularly if whatever comes next is as meh as the iPhone 5.
I got one for my son to take on a trip - he's working at an animal rescue centre in Thailand for the summer and was setting it up yesterday. I was surprised that it's a mini, not micro or nano SIM. That said he'll get a local SIM when he's out there and doesn't need to use the one in his S3,
It does feel excellent.
The O2 service which is sold through Sainsbury's Pharmacies : Help at Hand might struggle to sell against native competition in Sansburys.
Having worked for Amstrad and for a couple of massive companies it's odd to think of Amstrad as a 'corporate', it was amazingly free of metaphorical backstabbing. It was run like a family business and any skulduggery was aimed at extracting more money from customers - notably Dixons.
But that was the big difference between the kind of business where "having a good meeting" or "doing a good internal presentation", is considered work. At Amstrad people recognised that all that mattered was people going into shops and buying an Amstrad computer in preference to an Acorn, IBM or Sinclair one.
That came from the top, the "Mugs eyeful" and "Lorry driver and his wife" approach to products and marketing.
Even the logo was just AMS and (~CTO) Bob Watkins leafing though a Letraset catalogue and choosing Futura Bold Outline. No meetings, analysis, focus groups.
One of the things I respect about my former employer Motorola for is how little they messed with the logo over the last 75 years. When I was there around 2002 there was a big push to appeal to the teen market. To move away from the brand that made car and police radios.
The mantra was "not my father's Motorola". The marketing genius, Geoffrey Frost identified much on mobile as the Next Big Thing (shame the software teams let him down), and initiated "Hello Moto".
He offered Jony Ive whatever he wanted to move to Motorola.
And through all this he didn't change the logo or font. I've met lots of very smart marketing people and Frost was head and shoulders above the lot.
Whenever a new 'hot-shot' marketing person starts at a company they do two things - mess with the logo and fire the advertising agency.
Soon after that they get fired.
Using it as a Sat Nav on a longish drive (120 miles), it got hot, very hot, so hot that it crashed and lost time and date. Pointing the car cooling vents at it prevented a re-occurrence, but something is not right.
I'm also having bluetooth pairing issues that may or may not be finger trouble or my Jawbone ERA but I had no problems with the Nokia 800. When it works the combination of the ERA and Windows Phone is wonderful.
Battery life is a huge issue, it's iPhone-like in that if you use apps heavily it'll be flat by tea-time.
I'm a bit snobby about cameras, and generally of the view that a mobile can't possibly rate against anything where the lens is four times thicker than a mobile phone but the snaps I've taken with it are astonishingly good.
Simon
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