Back when mobile phones were all about hardware, radio technology, silicon chips and plastic casing design, Nokia kicked everyone’s ass and it was a proud time to be a Finn (also a Nokia employee for a while). That time period was around one decade ago. I guess you could compare it to the 80′s when personal computers were still a messy playground with tens of competing manufacturers pushing their hardware+software packages to consumers, and Commodore building a comfortable lead with their C64 killer product. We all know where Commodore is today, or more specifically, most of us have absolutely no idea of where they are. Since those early days we’ve moved on quite a bit and everyone’s using either Windows or Linux on very generic hardware (apart from the crowd who choose to pay for the Apple/OSX device lock-in). That, in my opinion, is where we have been moving towards im the mobile phone markets ever since 2007 and the release of the iPhone. Nowadays we carry just big screens with us, either with or without a slider qwerty keyboard, and that’s pretty much how exciting the hardware part gets. Take a look at the HTC product catalog if you don’t believe me.

How is Nokia doing in this brave new mobile world? Not too well. Sure, they’ve got as many devices on their product catalog as ever and they completely own the non-smartphone market in developing countries. But do they really live up to the promises of their product marketing department or, more importantly, the expectations of their most loyal customers, their advocates? Well, you be the judge. Here’s one example of how a N97 customer felt after his purchase:

Now here’s the piece of news that originally inspired my own blog post: Symbian-Guru.com is over. I strongly encourage you to read through what Ricky and Rita have written down as the epitaph of their site, as this reads much like an epitaph of Nokia and Symbian that wouldn’t of course be published like this. Some key points from their writing could be summarized as follows:

• The gap between promises/expectations and product reality has grown unacceptable
• Developers have abandoned the Nokia platform long ago and now all hope lies on Nokia’s internal software development efforts
• Nokia’s own services are all hype and no content, as not even the company’s employees are committed to using them
• “Open source” in the context of Symbian is a meaningless buzzword, when no one is interested in the source in the first place
• Waving the Nokia/Symbian flag has become too embarrassing in the US market due to lack of visible marketing support from Nokia

As a sort of a CRM practioneer with some little insight on what customer relationships mean to a company, I would now like to produce the following quote from my very own words:

When you betray your most loyal customers and they call it a day, the game is over.

The emotions described in the Symbian-Guru.com post are the cornerstones of a successful company, except that now the stones have been turned and there is nothing to build on anymore. It is no longer a case of doing minor adjustments to product offering or shifting the focus of marking communication – we’re far beyond that by now. Of course the biggest mobile device manufacturer in the world could never publicly admit such a deep crisis, but the most important customers know it already. From observing the market reactions of the early adopter crowd, everyone who is seriously looking for proper smartphone functionality from the handset that they carry around with themselves is going either for iPhone or Android. It’s hardly a secret to anyone, rather it’s plain and obvious. That’s what I’ve done and I’m sure many others will follow.

There will certainly be a big enough market outside the world of smartphones and “smart” (geek) users to ensure that Nokia can keep generating billions of € worth of sales, which the stock market analysts can delve into and speculate future revenue trends by analysing how much more the company can squeeze out of it’s superior supply chain. However, it will not be the market that will attract the interest of those people who are building the new application ecosystems on top of the device manufacturer’s offering. They will be following the iPhone crowd, where all the action is. Where new markets emerge.

If the old world of mobile phones was all about radio technology and hardware manufacturing, then the new world of mobile devices is focused around the services enabled by the hardware. This is of course not a surprise for Nokia, who have been continuously declaring their internal transformation to a service oriented company. Nokia have been making bold moves on the services front, by offering free navigation (after acquiring Navteq for $ 8 billion) and low cost packages for Comes With Music subscriptions to a semi-endless music catalog (something Spotify currently charges € 10 / month for mobile users) on their mid category products. Sure, these offerings do have lots of potential value to the customer, but upon a closer look they don’t necessarily have anything to do with the ability of building attractive mobile solutions that the users would like to use (as many Ovi users would probably agree). It is just built on external content, which Nokia is presumably using as a heavy loss leader product to get people hooked on buying the familiar hardware that the company actually physically develops and manufacures. There is basically nothing in this strategy that Microsoft, Google or Apple could not imitate if they wanted to. The difference is that neither Apple nor Google need to imitate it due to the success of their own unique strategies, and Microsoft can afford not to compete immediately but can rather attack a maturing market later on, since that is where they’ve always excelled at (and Windows Phone 7 looks to support this strategy).

Was N95 perhaps the last real flagship from Nokia? While there were many people willing to use it as the yardstick to play down the signifigance of Apple’s first iPhone offering, I think the underlying problems in the Nokia/Symbian camp were already building up at that time, regardless of the fact that N95 was a commercial success. A high number of complaints on software bugs and general lack of the kind of high-end feel expected from a flagship product could retrospectively be interpreted as signals that Nokia’s existing method of developing new high-end products was reaching the end of its lifecycle; a point where optimising the existing process no longer delivers significant improvements, but where you need to invent a whole new process instead.

How far do you then have to go to find a big flagship product from Nokia’s product catalog? Something that packed a true punch, like the iPhone did? Nokia 7650 from 2002 perhaps? The setting is of course completely different from Apple, who entered a new market, but the question still has to be valid. If you only deliver lots of good products but no single great one, then why should I buy from you? The picture below is a beautiful collage from the Nokia product catalog, featuring each and every mobile phone they have ever made between the years of 1982 and 2006. The number of new product innovations and dominant mobile phones of their time included in this serving is just awesome. The only problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a system in place that would keep producing the same kind of “wow” results in the new world we are living. Nokia has become a victim of its past success.

Acknowledging that all the market share you’ve achieved and the great products you’ve delivered over the years is now worthless might surely feel like an act of pure insanity at first. But if you could get yourself to admit it, wouldn’t that be the exact moment when the climb back up starts? If the game is over, just reboot (heck, remove the battery if you must) and start all over. If you can’t do that, then you might as well consider it the end of your world. We don’t need an N8 from Nokia, or Symbian^4, or statements from Anssi Vanjoki about the company’s passion to reclaim smartphone leadership – we need a hard reset, and we need it yesterday.

Now you have the chance to take a trip down memory lane and revisit the Internet from the 90′s, courtesy of the Geocities-izer by Wonder-Tonic. For example, you can remove all the Web 2.0 nonsense from this blog of mine by viewing it through Geocities-izer instead:

Ah, the good old times. More great examples available here.

I used to be tracking my sites with a free account from Mon.itor.Us for over a year and was quite satisfied with getting a weekly report delivered to my inbox, with the average uptime and response time stats for the week. However, trying to do anything within the service’s web interface, like examining the performance statistics or configuring monitors was just really painful, thanks to the poor usability of the service UI.

Enter Pingdom. Wow! Talk about the difference that a good UI design can make to the same underlying service, which at the end of the day consists of pinging different URL’s. It’s never  just about how you collect and store the data, it’s the presentation layer that really counts. Pingdom does an awesome job on this front, delivering a Google Analytics type of a user experience. They offer a free account for one single monitor, so trying out the features is a breeze. 5 checks is already $9.95/month, but if you’re actually making money with your sites, then I’m sure you could make worst investments.

So how’s the uptime then? Here you go:

Uptime report, last 30 days

Response time report, last 30 days

In addition to the widgets above, you can also access the monthly summaries over here. The reports inside Pingdom are much more detailed, one particularly nice feature being the possibility of filtering data based on different tracking locations, ranging from Stockholm to Los Angeles.

I’ve got a dirt cheap hosting package from Suncomet, which gives 2 GB of disk space with unlimited traffic & DB’s for just €30 per year. It’s not a lightning fast service and the P2 server does have it’s share of downtime, so every now and then I think about if I should bother to switch to another service provider. With a monitoring service like Pingdom I won’t need to make guesses on what I’m getting for my next-to-nothing investment. As for knowing the performance of other potential providers, well, that’s still going to be to some extent guesswork and leaps of faith. At least until we get more universal hosting service monitors like HostPeek.

Recently I haven’t been touching iTunes much at all, since my online music consumpion has transformed from files to streaming, thanks to Spotify. Many times there are still tracks that are not available through the Spotify subscription service, which is when I turn to see if iTunes is providing them available for purchase. Much to my surprise, I’ve started to increasingly dislike the iTunes experience. Looking at the results from the new 2010 Customer Experience Index by Forrester, it looks like I’m not the only one.

Let’s compare what happens when I search for an artists in both services. iTunes goes first:

With the current version of iTunes 9, there’s just too much going on in the user interface. Even with the UI chrome excluded from the picture, there’s still way too many items fighting over my attention. Furthermore, I don’t get the immediate Google Experience ™, where the first search result is big and bold, waiting to be clicked. In iTunes the items are too small and don’t appear clickable, maybe because there’s just so much I could click on. Overall, the navigation just feels like too much work, not enough fun.

What about in Spotify then:

Lots of small text here as well, but it’s a lot more bearable, since the structure is so clear. I know the purpose of each UI element and they are grouped in a logical manner, so that none of the information I’m not interested in feels like any kind of distraction. Even without any previous experience of using the application, I think I would be quite at home in navigating in Spotify, since it follows the univesal language of audio library software. What’s funny is that I think much of that language has evolved from the most popular audio library out there: iTunes.

Why is iTunes starting to become more cluttered? Why is it going down the path of Altavista, which used to be the top search engine of its time, before transforming into a messy portal with too much ads and features going on, then consequently losign the game to Google? My theory is that both iTunes and Altavista have (or had, in the case of AV) the same problem, which is the need to be constantly selling to the user. iTunes Store does not make any money until the user clicks “buy”, and it needs to achieve this same behaviour time and time again. In a similar fashion, the portal fever that Altavista was infected with consisted of presenting as many ad banners to the visitor as possible, whereas Google cleared away the clutter and developed a way to show only relevant text ads in predetermined sections.

The Spotify model doesn’t have the hard sell built into it. Its model lures in new users with free accounts, to explore the simple functionaliy built over the vast library of music available for streaming by just clicking on it, building up an engaging first experience of the service. Sure, the users are greeted with audio ads between tracks, unless they purchase the premium account. However, that’s a handicap that you can disable with giving them money, and I’m betting people can easily understand the trade-off there. In iTunes Store there is no subscription service that would make the catalog browsing free from the hard sell. Not until Apple starts offering the similar streaming scheme as Spotify, that is.

Let’s take one final look at another UI for searching a particular artist. With the introduction of Google Music giving some glimpse of things to come, I’m betting that the future UI design patterns for audio libraries will most likely be coming from the masters of search.

I had been gradually upgrading my home PC for many years, replacing parts here and there, which meant that there was hardly any original part left in the configuration. Luckily there was never any problem in getting the same old Windows XP activated, regardless of its draconian WPA hardware checks that had caused quite a stir when introduced back in 2001.

Last year I ran into a hardware issue that I was unable to pinpoint. I burned through a new PSU, new motherboard, new HDD, new graphics card, without finding a combination that would have booted reliably. Although I had never purchased a brand name PC during my 18 years of Wintel computing, I felt that I was just getting too old for this.

I’ve got a laptop from work, so at home I hardly need portability. However, with such low prices for supermarket laptops, it really turns the question around: do you really need a big PC under your desk? If I was tired of replacing components myself, then having a big case with free expansion slots does not actually provide a benefit but rather an aesthetic handicap. So, I grabbed a budget laptop from Acer, hooked it to my screen & keyboard and was happy as ever. Painless, easy to purchase IT gadgets for the home user, which I ultimately am. Sure, the hardware was not state of the art, but Vista ran as good as you can in general expect from it (not too well then).

Roughly a year later I found myself buying another PC for my home: Asus EeeBox EB1012. This was not even the size of a laptop, nor nearly as powerful as my Acer. It is in fact a miniature HTPC built out of the netbook level hardware of Intel Atom CPU and Nvidia Ion chipset. It runs Windows 7, which should be easier on the system requirements as its older brother Vista. The main point is that this little box can disappear behind your flat screen TV and sit there quietly, providing media library and web access in the living room. Forget about gaming, that’s what the Xbox 360 is for (and what a huge box it is next to the tiny EeeBox).

With this trend, I may soon be buying my next PC that will again be cheaper and less powerful than the one before. If I take a closer look, I actually already had purchased a Synology DS209j NAS station, which really is just a low spec PC built for one purpose: serving data from the 2 terabyte HDDs sitting inside the box. It does of course allow streaming the content or even acting as a web server with PHP & MySQL, but really it’s just a HDD with more accessibility features than a plain USB drive.

I haven’t got a netbook yet, but it looks like there isn’t a need for one in my hardware catalogue, regardless of all the hype. I’m writing this blog post while on the road, using my HTC Touch Pro 2 as the mobile typewriter. Packed with a touch UI, full keyboard, 3G/Wifi and the Opera browser, the “phone” ends up delivering me basically all the functionality I’d need from a netbook. It is almost hilarious that the device is pretty usable for all the basic tasks, except for making phone calls, which really is a lot more complicated than on my first Nokia phone in 1997. Maybe the Windows Mobile 6.5 ROM upgrade would help, maybe not.

At a time when applications are moving from the hard drive to the web, when the media is increasingly being streamed from some cloud (either your own private one or some published service), it is finally starting to feel like we have reached a point where the Moore’s law is no longer relevant to the consumer (or even for the manufacturer). Yes, there will be a need for the data centers to purchase more efficient servers for their racks, to accommodate the rising demand for the many freemium services operating with thin marginals. For the end user, the magic of a new CPU upgrade is just not what it used to be. We may finally be able to stop looking at the GHz’s or GB’s, and start to focus on the items higher up in the IT food chain: applications, usability and design.

Still, the geek in me is of course just waiting for the moment when I can start to compare chipset specs when purchasing a new washing machine or a toaster. That’s just some of the joys promised by ubiquitous computing where we seem to be heading.

Nevertheless, some changes in the behaviour and assumptions of the web audience are so profound that you shouldn’t really even dare to assume that you have an option whether to comply with them or not. One such assumption is the ability to search. The sad fact of the matter is that a huge portion of casual surfers don’t even know what is a browser, since all they do is search through Google, even for the URL to a site they want to visit. Hell, if it wasn’t for the smart address bar in Firefox that let’s me access pages from my browser history so painlessly, even I might be lazy enough to just google the name, instead of wondering about .com/.net/.fi.

In the current climate, you are then pretty safe to assume that most users enter your site as a result of a search (hence the popularity of SEO). What happens then after they reach your site? Well, unless they were lucky enough to land on the exact right page, I bet they’d prefer to do a search on the content of the site. The absolute quickes way to information is a search box, or at least it should be, when the search is working like Google is. Even if the results are not quite as well organized, it’s still useful when the visitor is looking for some more rare keyword.

How can it then be that in 2009 there is still an incredibly large portion of midsize retailer sites that are lacking the search functionality altogether? Take this one example: Koti-Idea furniture store.

There are 2 tempting boxes in the top right corner, but that turn’s out to be the account login, so most visitors will not be interested on that. There’s a shopping basket on the bottom left, but I don’t see anything to add to it yet. There’s even an application (IE only) for designing your own bookcases or sofas, which sounds all fine and dandy. However, I can’t get to the product which I have in my mind, since there’s no box to type in the name and click “search”. Instead, I would need to start thinking in categories and navigating menus. How much fun will it be to start guessing the taxonomy adopted for this particular store, browsing through one category after another, just in case you would run into the product you are, well, searching for.

Upon my quest for new furniture I ran into several sites that lacked any means of searching for the products that were hidden somewhere deep in the folder structure. Sure, I could have always gone back to Google and do an advanced search for hits from that particular site. In the non-eCommerce world that would have been roughly the equivalent of walking into a store, then going back home and returning with a credit card, just because the cashier didn’t accept cash payment. Now wouldn’t you just rather walk to the store next door instead?