What many of you might not know is that the reason Nokia became the biggest mobile phone manufacturer is because of Apple. When all their competitors were standing still, Nokia decided to think a bit differently. This story was one of the hidden gems in “Fast Strategy“, a book co-authored by Mikko Kosonen, a former executive at Nokia, and it tells the story how Nokia was able to challenge Motorola, Ericsson and other big players of yesteryear.

“When everyone saw mobile telephony as a professional service, Nokia’s leadership saw mobile phones as consumer – almost fashion – products. Rather than predict five or ten percent maximum penetration rate, Nokia quickly imagined everyone in the world having one – or why not several? – mobile phones for personal as well as professional use.” (page 3)

“[On the importance of strategic insight] Some insight may result from intense personal awareness and conviction, such as Pekka Ala-Pieitilä at Nokia being an avid Mac user and seeing the potential for Nokia to turn mobile phones into mass market consumer goods the way Apple was doing for personal computers.” (page 21)

One has to wonder why this Mac-love was only visible in the strategic thinking while Nokia’s Mac-support (PC Suite and other things) has been abysmal throughout the years.

So, what has changed so dramatically that blogs and business newspapers are declaring doom on Nokia? First of all, Nokia’s DNA changed the moment the became #1 mobile phone manufacturer in the world. Before that they were a challenger, trying out

The Nokia 1100, the best selling consumer electronics device in the world

different things and taking risks. But now they are playing defensive, trying to maintain their market share. According to Kosonen, Nokia is trying to counter this by being “strategically agile”.

But it isn’t just that. The backwaters of mobile innovation, USA, suddenly became relevant. I would argue that this is mostly due to Blackberry and iPhone and the huge domestic market. Also, one has to remember that the US is overpresented on the internet, so once the web broke through to mobile devices and Apple started to market the idea of software apps on mobile devices, things seemed to change a bit. Nokia has never been strong in the US, or for that matter in any market where consumers do not choose their own phones and where Nokia has never been able to work with operators. That’s probably the only thing that has been constant.

Couple of weeks ago yet another analyst group forecasted how Apple could pass Nokia in as soon as 2011. Now, this fantasy was based on how iPod users would convert to iPhone users and how Apple should launch low-cost iPhones (especially to developing countries) and sell customized ringtones and overall act in a non-Apple way (and eerily like Nokia). And yet, we’re still talking about smart phones which so far represent a tiny minority of total mobile market.

Sure, Nokia needs to get its act together, especially on the services front, but it’s too early to say that they’re doomed. Especially when you consider that Nokia is pretty strong in the developing countries. My prediction is that it’s not Nokia that will be irrelevant in the mobile phone market in the future, but the US market ’s importance will fade and it is the mobile players that win elsewhere that continue to matter. The sheer size of mobile phone markets in Africa just boggles the mind.

In the new world of the mobile web, Nokia’s biggest problem is their own legacy, something that slowed Ericsson and Motorola down when Nokia was decided to bring mobile phones to the masses. Apple, on the other hand has shown that it can take advantage of market discontinuities in many different markets where traditional barriers to entry are crumbling down.

“For decades, the dominant players were EMI and RCA, and more recently Sony Music, which had built up the assets and capabilities … In today’s digital world, however, companies like Apple, which have none of the traditional music industry capabilities, are becoming leading players.”

In summary, it’s all about bringing technology to the masses. Apple did that for smartphones, but Nokia, inspired by Apple’s success bringing personal computing to masses, did and continues to do that for mobile phones. It’s just Nokia struggles with the US and smartphones for the rest of us. In Fast Strategy, Cisco’s Corporate Vice President Strategic Allainces, Steve Steinhilber is quoted to have said “…five years ago could Nokia really have expected Apple to be the main threat to their high end phone business?”

I once asked a friend how one of my clients should improve their sales technique for a technical product, knowing that his company is very successful at what it does. He, himself a “sales engineer” (i.e. a technical sales guy), found the question very difficult to answer.

I had to reshape the question to “so, how do you guys sell your technical products?” And then he was able, with full vigour, to tell me how they do it. It should be mentioned that market plays a strong role here; my friend works in a very niche business, while my client suffers from powerful competition.

I’m starting to loose my naiveté, as far as crowd-sourcing is concerned. This easy-to-communicate world we live in, sometimes makes me forget that, just because we can ask, doesn’t necessarily mean that we should. Technology may have changed, but people’s brains, psychology, and business principles have not, at least not at that rate.

My general stance these days is that, no matter what context you talk in with people, you should always assume a complete lack of imagination. Instead, by either spelling it out, or better, by asking the best interview-question in the world “tell me about YOU!,” and then extracting what you need from that, is much more effective.

It’s as Jeremy advised me to blog when I started here, Keep It Simple & Stupid (K.I.S.S.). Even though I have ignored that lesson at times, it’s a good one to follow in this all-too-unsimple world.

Apart from crowd-sourcing, the same, incidentally, applies to:

• selling people stuff: spell them out exactly how your product/service benefits them!
• applying for a job: spell them out exactly how you will make them money!
• and everything else.

Want to make the world a better place? K.I.S.S. it!

Vincent

First, what I love about business plans. I contains four elements very close to my heart: Writing, talking to people, innovation, and entrepreneurship. That is not to say that writing business plans is a fun activity that should be taken lightly. The crux of writing a business plan is that it needs to be executed upon. And that is where the complication arises.

One of my last freelance projects was amazing fun and in two ways very rewarding. Financially, because the investment that followed it, far exceeded the more than generous fee I was paid. Creatively, because my involvement lead to a lot of focus product- and strategy-wise, and we developed what I thought was a clear timeline as to the execution of the plan in different phases of product and market development.

But, as mentioned, writing a plan does not mean that it reflects the reality. I was reminded of this again, listening to a venture hacks podcast on “pitching hacks” (you can watch and listen to the presentation here). Business plans are worth squat, because a. there’s a lot of them, and b. the proportion that is executed upon is fairly small.

In theory, business-plans serve as a way to make the strategy of a young company explicit. Kind of like Gerber’s “Franchise manual” for startups in the E-Myth Revisited, it allows you to solidify what you do while you’re doing it. But, I don’t think it automatically leads to a (better or actual) business…

…

Those three dots is where I stopped writing some three weeks ago, and I have in the mean time developed my thoughts further on this. I think that the gist of good business planning is taking ownership of the project. And the single most important key-component of the business plan is the timeline section. And the single most important action as an entrepreneur is to already have at least 10-30% completed of that timeline.

In other words:

• if you’re an entrepreneur you should write your own business plan: you cannot outsource this!




• The most well-developed section of your plan should be your timeline: as conservative and realistic as possible!




• The best way to illustrate the value of your plan (and timeline) is to already be following it: actions scream much louder than written words!

If those three components are in place, I think that the world of business planning and entrepreneurship would be a much better place.

End braindump…

Vincent

Addentum: The problem of multiple agendas! I should also add that another complication is that plans are written with a singular vision in mind, perhaps alternative scenarios are included, but it still very often reflects a singular approach to “doing things.” But… many companies are composed of multiple people, who may or may not have multiple agendas. I still think it can belong to taking ownership of the idea, in the sense that the plan is worked on together and perfected until everyone agrees with it. But more often than not, the business function is delegated to certain individuals, meaning that this isn’t the case.

Let me start by saying that we are passed the age of positioning, a concept that was pioneered as the 5th P, by the authors Ries & Trout of the book, fittingly called “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” Rather I think we are in the age of 2 C’s: Conversation & Customisation. Before I explain, I’ll briefly summarise my thoughts about the book in the next few paragraphs.

Book thoughts

What is positioning? It is

the art and science of creating positions in a targets mind, something “that takes into consideration not only a company’s own strengths and weaknesses, but those of its competitors as well.”

“Positioning” is neither a bad, nor an irrelevant book. Jeremy Fain gave it a favourable review a while ago, which inspired me to give it a read. Some things I immediately liked were its thinness (213 pages) and a very effective table of contents—every item has a short paragraph underneath it, shortly summarising that chapter. The book is also a pleasure to read, written in a flowing fashion and using effective titles that make you curious about what’s next.

The book itself points out that marketing has evolved in stages, determined by both our understanding of customers, but also by our competitors’ understanding and subsequent copycat-strategies. A marketing-strategy is only effective if it comes through clearly and isn’t diffused by too much noise.

In the 50s, according to the book, marketing was focussed on products, i.e. marketing your better mousetrap. As production-techniques evolved and more mousetraps were produced, that became increasingly difficult. This was followed by the image-era, where the focus was on brand and reputation. Again, as competitors caught on, the noise-level eventually decreased the ROI of that strategy. Now, the book (originally published in 1985, republished in 2001) states, we are in the positioning era, which is about “getting in the consumer’s mind.”

True, but clearly companies have had two decades to perfect and clone best-in-class strategies, so what’s next?

2 other C’s – Customisation & Conversation

Focussing on product features, on brand-image, and now positioning, is clearly something that won’t lose in relevance anytime soon. Nothing good in marketing ever disappears, but rather the marketing-mesh becomes ever more complex, integrating what came before into more comprehensive, more complete value-propositons. If I come up with more words starting with ‘C,’ I can probably write a book about it . Remember, there’s also the 4 C’s of positioning: confidence, clarity, continuity, and competitiveness.

What struck me about the book was that it seemed to describe a one-way strategy for interacting with customers. It wasn’t one-way with the competition, rather the book advises to actively combat other companies through your messages—e.g. “Avis is No. 2 in rent-a-cars, so why go with us? We try harder!“—and even change your brand-name if it makes sense—e.g. when B. F. Goodrich (a company I never heard of) makes a tire, it is actually Goodyear that get most of the PR benefits, so why not change the name? The book’s tagline is “The battle for the mind,” yet that battle only takes place within a competitive environment.

Now, I’m not saying to ignore the competition, but the book does ignore the relationship that can be built up with customers these days. In a recent interview, Jason Fried of 37Signals, said that the company a. doesn’t market, and b. doesn’t really focus on the competition. I hate to bring up that little company every time, but it just has some great attributes.

There are two facets of today’s society that make a significant marketing-difference, as far as I can see. One is that it becomes increasingly easier to customise products. From just-in-time / lean manufacturing techniques in the factory, to agile development techniques, quick prototyping and market-testing in software, the argument for creating static one-size-fits-all products becomes less and less relevant.

The second is that there is a bottom-up media-explosion. Everyone is a journalist, everyone has a voice. Now that is certainly a science that still has to be perfected, but when I see initiatives like Getsatisfaction.com for software, and Dell Ideastorm, it certainly gives me hope.

Using these two effectively can be a differentiator in consumers’ minds, one which is adapted to his or her tastes and one which evolves as that taste evolves. By perfecting the science of customisation, based on ongoing conversation, you actually lock in on a customer, you make him or her feel special and you completely make the competition irrelevant. At least… until the competition catches on, where we will need something else again.

A reading list:

I’d like to end with reading list of books that I think discuss the next step in marketing, none of which, I should add, I have read. But I’m hoping you give your critical perspective in the comments and add some other reading suggestions.

• Scoble and Israel’s The Naked Conversation
• Locke, Levine, Searls, and Weinberger’s The Cluetrain Manifesto (for free here)
• Tapscott & Williams’s Wikinomics
• Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae

Vincent

hello hello

It’s a sunny sunday so I will share my idea rapidly and kick off to photosynthesize.

Techiteasy is a community blog so we tend to interact, ping pong ideas etc. Kari was sharing some thoughts about gaming experiences, Vincent some others on blogging about books and I was trying how to o’reillishly “Learn Japanese in 24 hours” to get a glance of some Japanese neo authors who write novels on mobile phones, using the rules and language of mobile communication.

Interaction is an effort to extend your actions to enter another domain, act and receive action. In Gaming you choose among a list of actions on a specific domain. When you blog about books you do exactly the same but with ideas in the place of actions.

These two forms of interaction are both quite:

• Technically complicated (developing the book/game, mastering the actions/ideas, add your input).
• Imprisoned in a specific domain. (Kari cannot play the books Vincent is blogging about even if he had Windows)

Rin from Kokura (a primitive greek way of naming people that are distant but important) removed some bricks from my thought wall. Mostly, in terms of her functional proposition. (24 hours haven’t lapsed yet to understand Japanese)

Writing books on your mobile, much resembles coding, you have to keep it simple and efficient.

A hidden catch is that you can probably make it extensible and platform-independed.

Result? If you extend the functional proposition, you can possibly write a mini novel that will be playable for other users on other media.

…and pass from gaming, to authoring, to blogging for both…

How to extend the functional proposition? Starting from basic technical standardization:

XML will-it be sufficient enough to create scenery taxonomies, character ontologies and plot relationships?

XAL Extensible Authoring Language, does it exist?

Throw me the apples

Georgia

Trying to digest a cheesy crust pizza this noon, I was wondering if instead of a pizza I was carrying a baby. The good thing was that there would be two of us going back to work, even if the one was rather unqualified to give me hand. What a delight for my pizzababy to grow mentally through this early job! Apart from hanging around with Bruckner’s twins (le Divin Enfant) getting early to work will permit it to develop the working flexibility that parents preannounce and corporations tend to establish through rotation programs.

So, how often will it switch jobs? Every 3 years, two times a year, each month or…. why not several times a day?

Assumption: A job may less and less be outline of your style, status and skills, THE choice that you make in your self-creative youth and pursue with passion until your hands have shrunk and you mumble wisdoms on professional resilience to your children.

It seems (to me, to you too maybe?) that jobs get more and more project–centric, existing-skills based, time and locality indifferent.

with Theme-generated-tasks’ accomplishment  transforming into task accomplishment around a theme.

The digital business field, where change is well in advance, brings up a strong trend on segmentation of the classical notion of job.

Two examples on the internet can tell the story:

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

and

Innocentive

These two companies propose a per task remunerated employment, amazingly different as regarding necessary skills.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk mostly addresses the non qualified workforce and Innocentive the ultra specialized scientific one. The concept on both is that you’re hired on a per project basis, for a translation, to prove the Fermat Theorem or to fill in the ISO forms.

It is then highly important to have a personal job management system to handle contests you participate and your prizes, puzzle your profile and communicate with trusted professionals.

A sort of e-mployment survival kit to prevent you from e-xploitation.

This vast talent pool of potential Mechanical Turks, scientists and everyone between, also creates opportunities for providers of meta-HR services to aggregate and compose job particles into a real job.

Providers such as advisors, agents and therapists:

social engineers, serial trendsetters, legal timing planners for fringe technology testers (“get the trial before the action is criminalised with a law”), real life rehabilitation mentors (“get rid of Wii gestures when in the grocer’s”), tec-addiction therapists, viral marketing therapists/ digital image makers (banal already maybe), mini-krach recoverers, startup estate agents, other (attention, this is not a generic term, it can be a job where you are paid to differentiate and foster evolution), and so on.

A combination of a middlejob with a classical one or the mix of various middlejobs could result in a steady plus variable income, mental coherence and growth, an optimised planning and a life-job balance.

On the “which?” the question is open. On the “how many?” 2 jobs maybe ok while 3 or more could definitely assure the statics of the e-mployement construction. …

Job- memo for my pizzababy: Exercise with 3 or more jobs, with an hourly basis frequency, vary the status. In case you need help call your agent.

After it was digested I went back to work.

Georgia

Here’s a quick question to all people used to either interact with or being part of software development teams.

Consider a software vendor, a good one, and its technical headcount. It is no secret that R&D teams aren’t made of software developers only. In order to be deployed successfully, architectures and code need to be tested by a QA department (QA = quality assurance) where professional testers run through thousands of automatized-or-not scenarii; documentation; technical support staff help the install base with potential regressions occuring during updates and coping with changing information system environments; localization project managers monitor translations of the software: and last but not least, application engineers actually parameterize the software at clients.

Now my question, how many technical staff should you account for every software development engineer? I figured out an average ratio of 1 to 4, that is to say, for every technical team of 100 there should be around 25 software developers actually hacking code.

I know there exists extremes but by and large, from what I’ve seen, I don’t think I’m too far from the reality with a 1:4 developer / all-categories-technical-staff ratio.

What do you think? Feel free to describe what the company does when sharing your experience, because, since there are very large discrepancies between, say, an SAP that manufactures ‘heavy’ enterprise software and any web application designer that may not necessarily run industrialized testing and that has no professional service department, we might not get nuances at first sight.

PS: the ratio will also depend on the maturity stage of the company: at Microsoft, [# of develops]/[develops + Microsoft Consulting Services staff + developer evangelists + localization engineers + testers (1 for each develop) + architects] approximately equals 1/4 (1 to probably 5 ot 6 adding documentation specialists; & 1 to much more if you consider the system integrator ecosystem that actually does the application engineering). But the company is rather mature and therefore can afford to focus on quality of execution rather than productivity in execution. Which probably wouldn’t be the case for an enterprise software startup for obvious resource reasons. Anything to share? Best and worse practices, per specific industry (Web 2 / UGC, Video Games, enterprise, affordable consumer traditional applications, etc.) most welcome. I need to test my own budgeting assumptions

If you’re serious about software development &/or IT infrastructure, you can’t miss the Tech Ed developer training event between November 5th and November 9th in Barcelona. All the best developers from the very best European software publishers will be there. And I’ll be there too (as the outlayer, the worst developer in the room), to support IDEAS startups Chief Technical Officers making it to the EMEA TechEd. A few days ago, I chose the sessions I am going to attend. It’s going to be a great learning experience, not to mention the fun side as I’m going there with a bunch of wild animals from the French Developer & Platform Evangelism group of which I belong to at Microsoft. So, here’s my agenda for Tech Ed:

Mon, 5 Nov 2007

Putting the User Back into Architecture

Windows Live Platform: An Open Discussion

Why Software Sucks

Principles and Patterns of Security

Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: An Apostate’s Opinion

Implementing Microsoft SQL Server Express Edition

Tue, 6 Nov 2007

ASP.NET: Why, What, How and When?

Build Your Own Software Factory

Understanding Software + Services

Improving Software Safety and Reliability

Applying Ergonomics to the User Interface

Wed, 7 Nov 07

Exploring the Building of Software + Services

Applications with Microsoft S+S Reference Bits

Communities? Can They Really Help My Business, My Day-to-Day Job, and My Career?

Identity for .NET Applications: A Technology Overview

Agile Development with Team System

Thu, 8 Nov 2007

Exploring Event Driven Architectures

Self-Paced Hands-on Labs and CommsNet Open

ASP.NET Roadmap

The Irresistible Forces Meet the Moveable Objects Auditorium

Understanding the Data Mining Add-Ins for Excel

Software Plus Services

Fri, 9 Nov 2007

Blogging Panel

Top 10 Mistakes Developers Make – Tales of an Over-Worked IT Pro

Windows CardSpace Case Study 1: Identity Providers – Experian

The Future of IT

Web Application Security

Not bad, is it? I look forward to being there sooo much. And on top of that, I have many friends to visit in Barcelona.

Sprinting the stories

Scrum and XP from the trench describes how Scrum has been used to apply some Agile project team management methods on real life projects. Henrik Kniberg modestly describes this as a paper while it actually happens to be, well, an excellent practical guide.

The specific jargon may make it a bit slightly difficult to dive into, though. Sprint, scrum master, stories, when iteration, project leader or use cases could have done the trick. This could result in having the author sounding like some kind of sectarian, at least for the first 10 or 20 pages.

However, regardless of the actual Scrum radical approach, the project and people management tips in this book make it a definite must read to whoever is interested in these area of professional software development .

10 lessons in Project Management

The first half of the book mostly describes a Sprint (iteration). 10 brilliant project management tips bubble up from this description :

1. Complete transparency on the projet. All people in the team have clear tasks assigned to them, and everybody knows who is doing what, what are the objectives and dependencies.
2. Cost estimates are carried out by developers. I’m sure you fellow developers know how terrible that is to meet estimates and deadlines a manager (a technical one if you’re lucky) commited to. Having developers estimating their work (as long as you can challenge them) makes everybody comfortable.
3. Never ever compromise on quality to add more stories in a sprint. Rather have less stories.
4. Seat the whole team together
5. 15 mins daily status meeting. Hard time for procrastinators ahead …
6. Always end up the Sprint with a demo. So many reasons : it motivates the team, you can communicate more easily on what you’ve been doing, and hey ! you have to have something working !
7. My favorite one : the large taskboard to track the Sprint progress. No fancy colorful excel sheet that no one bar the managers can understand or even bother go through : just a board with colorful stickers for tasks and the Burndown graph. Instant view of the progress, daily updated, always accessible.
8. Keep the managers at bay
9. Post Sprint retrospective. This helps finding out what could have be done better, validate the initial estimates, the velocity, have the team to talk to provide feedback, etc …
10. All meetings are time boxed.

Applying XP with relunctant people

An interesting section of the paper talks more about how Scrum (team organisation) fits nicely with XP (programming methodology), going with the following main eXtreme Programming features.

These are : Pair programming, Test Driven Development, Incremental design (no need to over design at the early stages of the project), Continuous integration, collective code ownership, fighting overtime which eventually happens to be counterproductive, etc …

This is another story to apply these. In particular Pair Programming.

Here comes the other main quality of this book : suggesting different ways of dealing with people to put in place such controversial practices, especially when the most relunctanct people are the ones that never actually experienced those practices.

Each time Henrik describes different situations with different type of oppositions from the developers and suggest an appropriate way of dealing with it. This smooth, clever, thoughtful and yet assertive approach definitely are (from my experience) the most efficient and the less frustrating ones, from both perspectives.

It’s free

And that’s not the only reason why it’s worth having : this is an excellent book, fun and easy to read : strongly recommended if you’re interested in project management methodologies, even if you dont plan to apply such radical technique as Scrum.