To: Jon Koplik who wrote (12188 ) 7/11/1998 10:11:00 AM From: tero kuittinen Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 152472
All right... that's just about enough. You bet I would use my own name, Jon. Just like I'm using it in all my posts instead of hiding behind an alias - that's accountability. And the address of my working place is Tero Kuittinen Institute of Biotechnology Viikinkaari 9 Helsinki If any one of you kooks visit the White Pearl of Baltic you are heartily welcome to drop by and ensure I'm not a front for Ericsson PR department. I'll even offer a shot of vodka if you can drink it like a Finn... under three seconds. Nice of you to bring up the Korea angle... I found it fascinating that within two weeks two articles on Korean CDMA situation pop up. In the first, Korean companies are told to be missing their export targets for CDMA phones by several millions of units. In the second, the CDMA subscriber cancellations in the first half of 1998 skyrocket by 100% compared to 1997. Incidentally, I visited four biggest phone stores in Helsinki last week. The new Nokia models were totally or nearly sold out in every place. The reason? The irritated shop owners told me that Nokia is funneling almost its entire production to export markets, because the demand from Shanghai to Capetown is raging out of control. What's up? Wasn't CDMA supposed to be the hottest growing digital standard? Wasn't GSM supposed to be slowing down? And now we find out that Korean CDMA phone manufacturers are falling *several* millions of units short of their export targets... while Nokia is forced to cut off its Finnish retailers in a desperate bid to feed the foreign hunger for its GSM phones. The Korean export numbers don't reflect the Korean demand for CDMA phones, in case some of you missed this. They reflect the global demand for CDMA phones. That Time piece was priceless... I've always been a fan of gonzo journalism. It was kind of nostalgic to read a review where Motorola was preferred to Nokia. The last time that happened was when Vanilla Ice was the hottest ticket on MTV. I'm sure the fact that the reviewer was American was purely coincidental. However, consumers don't seem to be as patriotic... the Motorola quarterly results indicated that Mot phones are only slightly more popular than bubonic plague. And that comment about how the reviewer likes the Qualcomm model because it's so nice and "hefty" (at almost twice the weight of Nokia)... it's not often you see scathing sarcasm so skillfully hidden. As a whole, the article can be regarded as a sly parody of 1995 attitudes towards mobile phones. The way the reviewer seemed inordinately irritated about the games in Nokia phones... he seemed to feign complete ignorance about the developments in the mobile phone customer base. In 1995 Nokia spotted a surprising trend in tracking Finnish phone sales - when market penetration hit 25% the sales to 16-20 year old customers and women started suddenly spiking. The mobile phone as a consumer product had matured beyond middle aged males. In designing its new 6100 model range Nokia conducted extensive consumer surveys to find out how to appeal to these new, fastest-growing consumer blocks. The result was designed to be the world's first genuine cross-over product in mobile telephony. And now some balding, middle-aged, high-income, elitist Time journalist whines about the games in Nokia 6160. It seems like such a juvenile feature. No shit, Sherlock. Well, here's a newsflash: that's the *point*. Look out the window. It's 1998 and the typical mobile phone customer doesn't look like you anymore. Middle aged executives may have liked "hefty" phones, because they carried them in their briefcases. Here's a newsflash number two: Nokia found out that female customers overwhelmingly preferred small, light models, because they often had to carry them in their purses. And in 1998, women buyers matter. The Future is Finnish. The consumer trends that originated in Finland, because it leads the world by 2-3 years in market penetration, are now surfacing all over the world. And Nokia is the company that is creating and molding these trends instead of following them. After Nokia's carefully planned and executed attack on the youth market, 90% of the 18-year old Finns now own a mobile phone. That's 90%. So I have this gut feeling that Nokia knows what it is doing when it introduces gimmicks like games and changing cover colors into its phones. Meanwhile, Motorola and Qualcomm are still chasing corporate customers with phones that have mid-Nineties design. Check out Nokia's new Startac-killer:203.5.74.20 And now compare that to what the soulless Qualcomm droids have come up with their Q-phone:webwombat.com.au A direct juxtaposition exposes Q-phone for what it really is: a tired imitation of an aging Motorola product. There is no more damning indictment of a creatively bankrupt company than that. Tero