Nokia N-Gage screws you -- AND your granny!
I had a heads up from Ewan Spence over at All About Symbian this afternoon. The team here has just published an article that’s generating a significant amount of attention and consternation amongst the Nokia faithful.
Nokia just doesn’t get it.
They make widgets. Products. Physical things that are sold in boxes. Nokia is, essentially, a box-shifting company. That’s what they do. Some contents of the boxes are pretty nifty. Some less so. But they shift boxes.
They don’t do services. Oh no. Services at Nokia are the proverbial glint in the milkman’s eye. They are working on it, of course. There are a few promising starts. I read a quote the other day from some chap at Nokia saying that they don’t expect to make any cash from their ‘services’ until 2012. Or something like that. I didn’t bother posting about it here on SMS Text News as the statement was nearly as exciting as watching paint dry in a deserted warehouse in Hartlepool.
Nokia and services doesn’t mesh. Not yet.
You see, when you shift boxes — when you make stuff and flog’em in pretty colours to your customers, it’s a simple deal. Remember, of course, Nokia’s UK customers are Vodafone, O2, T-Mobile, 3 and so on. YOU aren’t a customer.
YOU don’t care. Individuals aren’t important to Nokia. They can’t be. That’s not the deal. Nokia’s a for-profit business and it’s major profit centres are based around delivering product to their mobile network operator customers. The content of the boxes doesn’t change. It’s a *product line*. It’s upgraded now and again. When you get your Nokia phone, you should shut up and use it. And stop complaining about firmware updates and all that jazz. It’s a commodity widget you just purchased. Stop thinking of it like a service. It’s a product. Nokia are expert product makers.
Services, on the other hand, are delivered to end-users. Millions of them. And it’s with services that the dynamic changes. It has to work. It has to be good. Responsive to changing user needs. It needs to be presented clearly and easily. It needs to, dare I say it, be Apple. Or Microsoft. Or any other company based around delivering services (as apposed to devices) to consumers.
I’m sure Nokia is aiming to become a player in ‘services’. There’s a lot of cash in services, particularly if you can stick some of those on the boxes that Nokia shifts each day. Trouble is, it’s a piss-poor service infrastructure that Nokia have created.
Oh yes, the technology — the underlying architecture of your average Nokia handset is brilliant. Phenomenal. First class.
Try putting SERVICES on the device and, well, you’re screwed quicker than a … well, you’re just screwed. Witness the legions of mobile developers sweating over the shitty shitty infrastructure they’ve been saddled with, trying to turn a dollar on a piece of shit infrastructure. Witness the salivating delight of the iPhone mobile developers who simply cannot, cannot, cannot WAIT for the application store to go live and for the iPhone to begin to touch mainstream.
Why a rant about Nokia?
Well. Did you buy an N-Gage game for your Nokia? Nice.
That was a bit of a stupid thing to do though. Because it was for your phone. Yes, the old N95 that you had — that game was ONLY for that handset.
You thought you were buying a service, didya? Hah! Sorry mate. No. You’ve just got that brand new N95 8GB and you’d like your N-Gage games on it, wouldya? Simple — buy’em again!
Head over to All About Symbian for the skinny.
Nokia’s next gen N-Gage platform potentially ushers in a new age of high quality connected phone gaming. However, it now seems that there’s a rather large flaw at the heart of the platform: if you upgrade to a new phone, you cannot transfer any of your N-Gage games from the old phone. The only way to move your N-Gage library is to buy all your games again.
PlayStation it ain’t.
