Take Apple Computer - the masters of worldwide-surprise-product-launches. An achievement achieved through a closed-strategy. That same strategy of closeness and surprise is not particularly compatible with an open platform, and guess what, the iPhone doesn’t have the ability to install any applications. The iPhone contains what Apple believe the consumer want, not what the consumer chooses to use.

Nokia in comparison believes in an open uncontrolled world - or should we say consumer controlled world. This could be the result of many years of giant-wrestling with the mobile operators/carriers. Nokia was, due to the heritage of telecom, exercising the open-strategy by driving several different standardizations. A slow and painful worldwide process. The payout is better and equal competition for ANY company, as the standards are open and thus improves everybody’s ability to innovate on applications that utilizes this agreed upon communication layer. At this point I think all Nokia handsets allow for installation of applications, to the let consumer choose what he want, and to let the world innovate on this platform. I was not aware that Nokia moved the open-strategy all the way into the R&D labs - but it makes sense from a open-strategy perspective.

A lot of research is popping up these days looking at the pro’s and con’s of open vs. closed strategy. Apple and Nokia proves that both strategies have good opportunities for success, in each their own way.

Thanks for finding and sharing this Karl!

BR,
Anders Nancke-Krogh

Nokia has released a number of short videos on YouTube that explore how mobile phone design may change in the next three or four years.
There is a video for each of the four categories, or put more simply different lifestyles, that Nokia focuses on….