[maemo-users] Nokia device usage

[From: John Holmblad]

Andrew,

Mark is on to something here and it has everything to do with how a 
company shapes consumer perception of its product over a period of time 
as the product is deployed into the market.

The fact is, that, when is comes to marketing, few corporations can be 
accused of intellectual honesty about their products 100% of the time. 
Nokia is no exception, and certainly not a paragon of perfection in this 
respect.

I have to agree with Mark that, implicitly, Nokia misleads the public to 
the extent that it markets the IT's along side of its other mass market 
mobile phone devices if, in fact, the IT's are a work in progress (I 
agree, they are, unfortunately)  that will take 5 generations  and a few 
more years to get the product ready for the mass market.

Nokia management might want to consider  to either

    a) cut loose the exec who made the arrogant assertion, foot-in-mouth
    style that it will take Nokia 5 generations to have a mass market
    ready product (as if we are dealing with some sort of rocket science
    here, that takes years to get it right, which we are not),

    or, if Nokia management in fact,  agrees with the truth of that
    assertion, then

    b) cut loose the exec who approved the mass market oriented www
    content for the IT's in the first place


Setting the issue of the Nokia exec's own assertion of  IT mass market 
un-readiness aside for the moment, I found some data from Amazon.com in 
favor of the IT consumer perceived quality (where quality is measured by 
whether or not the product meets the customer's expectations) among 
actual and, most assuredly,  non-mass market users (lets call them early 
adopters/techno-pioneers).

Here are the data

N800

    4 stars out of 5 with a sample size of 172

N810

    4 stars out of 5 with a sample size of 93

I would say 4 out of 5 is a good score with some room for improvement.


On the other hand I offer the following empirical observations that 
suggests that even if the Nokia marketing www site/literature for the IT 
is NOT misleading, then, at least, it has failed, big time,  to ignite 
the market for the IT, in my geographic area at least.

    This is an area with over 1 million people of all levels of
    social/business/economic standing who carry all sorts of mobile
    devices, and who have done so for a long time. We even have a
    President who is local and who serves as a priceless marketing icon
    for RIM/Blackberry at no cost to RIM.

    Over a period of three years, I can count on one finger the number
    of individuals besides myself that I have actually seen (not in a
    video, e.g. XOHM WIMAX Launch) carrying/using an IT, and that one
    person I did see, I know, for sure, is a technogeek/techno-pioneer,
    and not your average user.

    Just today I introduced the N800 IT to yet another  tech savvy
    individual who asked me "what is that thing you have?"


The takeaway from this observation is that, in this geographic market, 
at least, the consumer "ain't buying" the benefits that Nokia has 
asserted for the IT product family. Time to bring on Gen4 and Gen5 I 
guess. Maybe by the time WIMAX and/or LTE are widely deployed in the 
world's mobile infrastructures the IT will catch up to the market. Nokia 
shareholders must hope so.


Best Regards,

 

John Holmblad

 

Acadia Secure Networks, LLC

* *




Andrew Flegg wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 4:50 PM, Mark <wolfmane at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 9:46 AM, Andrew Flegg <andrew at bleb.org> wrote:
>>     
>>> For all their flaws, I'm not aware of Nokia saying you could do something
>>> which you actually couldn't
>>>       
>> The fundamental problem is that you are *deliberately* unaware because
>> you refuse to accept reality. Like G.W. Bush and a slew of others, no
>> amount of obvious fact will deter you from believing what you want to
>> believe.
>>     
>
> I'm trying to turn a flaming trollfest into something more
> constructive. Instead of calling me names, can you actually respond to
> my question: what has Nokia advertised that you can do on the device,
> that you can only do by opening X Terminal, fiddling with
> configuration files etc?
>
> The device may be well suited to hackers, but - as far as I can tell -
> it meets its stated goals adequately without having to resort to such
> things. A number of times in this thread, people have said "you have
> to be a hacker to do anything with it and Nokia don't advertise that".
> What did Nokia advertise that you've got to be a hacker to do?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Andrew
>
>