Man! When will these guys from Nokia learn not to put their foot in their mouth. Once again, yet another executive from Nokia is out dissing iPhone and Android. Niels Munksgaard, director of Portfolio, Product Marketing & Sales at Nokia Entertainment Global, in an interviewsays the young people are baffled by Android and are fed-up with the iPhone.

“What we see is that youth are pretty much fed up with iPhones. Everyone has the iPhone,” he said. “Also, many are not happy with the complexity of Android and the lack of security. So we do increasing see that the youth that wants to be on the cutting edge and try something new are turning to the Windows phone platform.”

I cracked up when I read that headline and that post. When I used to travel globally, the Nokia ringtone and the SMS beep were ubiquitous. Today not so much. I have seen more people with iPhones in more places. The “young people” are the ones with the iPhones. This Nokia executive’s statement is nothing short of bizarre.

I co-incidentally happen to be in Helsinki, a few miles away from Nokia’s global headquarters in Espoo, Finland. Walking around the downtown (where I am staying), I have seen many more iPhones than Nokia phones. And most of the startup people I met have some variation of the iPhone. One of them who is still in college told me that Nokia gave him one of their new phones, and he decided to use it as a way to support his nation’s largest employer. A month later, he switched back to the iPhone. Ouch! When you can’t give away your phones to your own “youth,” it is time to stop hating on other platforms and look for ways to get people to use your product.

Om Malik is a San Francisco based writer, photographer and investor. Read More

332 thoughts on “Nokia, iPhone, Android and wishful thinking”

  29. pretty much sums up how i and many i know feel… so maybe this due from nokia knows something you don’t know

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    2. Kevin I find your comment pretty comical, I have owned an iphone for the past 5 years and I am 18 years old. I used my friends new windows phone for about 15 minutes the other night and I honestly could not figure out what in the world would possess someone to develop a platform that is that horrible to look at and use.

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      2. I’m an iOS developer and I love the iOS system (although I’m not an Apple evangelist). But I used Windows Phone for a short time and I loved it too. The metro UI is great interface (IMO) especially compared to Android’s flexible (means: every app looks and behaves differently..) UI. And it caches up with iOS in features as well. I think in a few years Win Phone can be a real alternative.

        Of course beauty of the interface design is very much depends on personal taste.

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    3. The comments made by this Nokia executive are silly. The truth is, iPhone is the absolute best smartphone on the market and Nokia is very late to the party showing up with an unproven OS. They have a very uphill battle.

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    4. “…so maybe this due from nokia knows something you don’t know”
      And what exactly would they know that no else does?
      If people are leaving Android and iOS for the reasons he cites above, don’t you think it would have an effect on marketshare numbers? Wouldn’t we start to see Nokia gaining share at some point?

      As of now, it’s all anecdotes against anecdotes.
      “I’ve heard from a ton of people that they are all sick iPhones and that Android phones are far to difficult to use”
      “Oh yeah? Well, I’ve met a bunch of startups and they all used iPhones!”
      Problem with this is that no one can (dis)prove one or the other, it’s basically meaningless.

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      1. “…don’t you think it would have an effect on marketshare numbers? Wouldn’t we start to see Nokia gaining share at some point?…”

        I actually saw a recent report that the Nokia Lumia 800 was outselling the iPhone 4S in the Netherlands. And another one that the Lumia was selling out in the UK.

        Globally I doubt they’ll be able to do quite as well, but still that does seem like a significant improvement from before.

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  59. “Youth are pretty much fed up with iPhones” says Niels Munksgaard.
    In which parallel universe are you living in matey boy?

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  69. I kind of wondered when Apple PR would respond to the Nokia exec’s comments..
    I wouldn’t expect anything less from this site..I mean you have “Apple” right in the navigation bar..I bet they paid a lot for that..

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    1. Steve Ballmer is that you? I promise to use a Windows phone if you provide one to me and pay for all the monthly usage charges. Please let me know; thanks in advance.

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      1. No this isn’t Steve Ballmer…
        I still call this piece PR.. as with any PR hyperbole runs ram-pet, but the facts are usually missing…
        As a comment below stated Mr. Niels Munksgaard stated “Everyone has the iPhone.” To which the PR stated “I have seen more people with iPhones in more places.”
        This seems to be repeating what the Nokia exec said….
        The PR ends by saying “One of them who is still in college told me that Nokia gave him one of their new phones, and he decided to use it as a way to support his nation’s largest employer. A month later, he switched back to the iPhone.”
        Several things wrong with this, the most glaring of which is it doesn’t name the OS of the Nokia phone and because the Nokia exec was talking about Windows Phone’s the reader of the PR is left to guess that it was also talking about the Nokia Windows Phones..but this can’t be, because Nokia Windows Phones aren’t available in Finland yet, so in reality what the developer was given was probably a Symbian powered Nokia phone(which was so horrible that even Nokia dumped it)…

        I guess the money in PR is more than the money in fact based journalism. 🙂

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    1. If The Tortoise and the Hare is what you’re thinking, remember that the Hare lost because he didn’t get started until way too late — he was too confident that he could catch up. There’s not a single winning marathon racer who spends the hour after the starting gun re-tightening his shoe-laces and stretching out.

      From Microsoft’s perspective, they obviously know that more promotion is a waste of ad dollars and that they do NOT want to encourage word of mouth from people who aren’t closely affiliated with their whole ecosystem. From Nokia’s… how can it be, that months after the Burning Platform memo, there isn’t a major campaign to try to salvage their imploding market share? Utterly astonishing!

      It sure looks to me that Microsoft has given up recapturing a dominant share in phones, and is repurposing their management, development and marketing talents to staving off a similar fiasco in tablets. After all, they have a high likelihood of utterly undermining Microsoft’s desktop monopoly, and their roadmap is an utter mess of potential incompatibilities between ARM and X86, legacy vs metro. Partners, 3rd party developers and big Enterprise customers utterly confused about what planning to do for even the next 12 months.

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  104. Just read this rubbish!!! i have owned a android powered htc for over a year and after pressure from work collegues got an iphone, big mistake! the phone is boring. Didnt just dismiss straight away, gave it a week and back with my HTC, on the otherhand my son (15) would been seen dead with any of them they all have blackberry`s.

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    1. I agree with you Lee, plus Android gives much more application and softwares for free. Let me add as well, Nokia is the one that is boring, if ever I will ranked the phones, 1st will be Android, 2nd iPhone, 3rd will be Blackberry, 4th will be W. Phone and Nokia will be the last one.

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  108. Niels said “everyone has the iPhone”; you say “I don’t hear Nokia ringtones” and “I see more iPhones than Nokia phones in Helsinki” So… you *completely* agree with Niels. So not so bizarre so far…

    Then, Niels said people are turning to the Windows Phones. You say one young person in Finland didn’t like his new Nokia phone. But Nokia with Windows Phone (Lumia) is not even available in Finland yet, which negates your other point…

    I expect more logical reasoning from you, Mr Malik! 🙂

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    1. @Daniel: Since when seeing more iPhone means everyone has iPhone? The penetration of smartphone in the US is less than 40%. In Finland? less than 25%. Enormous number of consumers waiting to be converted. All of those people are fed up with iPhone? Is that your logical reasoning?

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      1. @ttran “everybody” should of course not be taken completely literally! But your point about penetration rates is valid and logical. Of course people without a smartphone are not fed up with iPhones (some are fed up with everyone talking about them though…)
        The truth is most people don’t actually want to try something new, at least not when committing to a 2 year contract. So even with good marketing and with some changes in perceptions, there is going to be a time lag before “everybody” (ie everyday consumers) would consider committing to a new operating system. There are signs that it could happen, but it cannot happen everywhere overnight. So, time will tell 🙂

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  113. I have owned a Android HTC for over a year and love its menu inside a menu feel. After hearing so many work mates rave about Iphone finally got one a week ago BORING is the right word, gone back to Android. however my son (15) wouldnt be seen dead with any they all have blackberry`s (UK)

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  132. When Nokia refuse to sell you a phone, full price, under some sort of pretense they don’t sell it in your area (the N900 in Canada), and when they even pull that kind of stunt when you want to get a developer phone, you know, to develop for it, how can it be otherwise.

    Where I come from, if a customer want to buy your product, you sell it to the customer. If the developer want help you sell the product by developing on it, you sell it to the developer.
    Only those in a dominant position need not to apply.

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  170. Well… Nokia overlooked their customer for decade and its difficult to believe they know what is out there. Even if they were right, it would not imply that they had the solution.

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  173. I’m a tad disturbed about the slight misdirection with the two non related factoids. The Nokia quote is about Windows Phone platform, from UK perspective. Because Nokia is not yet selling Lumia phones in Finland, the college guy has likely received a Symbian (or a Meego/Maemo) phone.

    The past quality of Symbian (or Meego/Maemo) does not tell anything about the desirability of Windows Phone platform in UK. The youth in UK seem to get become keen in Blackberries and Androids, I do not know whether it is about desirability of the iPhone or just a pricing issue. Also a startup guy is perhaps not the go-to person when assessing the generic taste of youth.

    I’m not claiming the Nokia quote is anywhere near the truth, I frankly do not know, but those two anecdotes do not really mix well.

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  187. Dude is like a religious fundamentalist who only interacts with that small circle of fanatics – whose only question is who is the most faithful. He should peer into the next church – not just the next pew.

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  190. I worked this last summer at HIIT in Helsinki and Espoo (I’d commute right past Nokia). We were designing ways to adapt a web-based voter advice application for users in African developing countries — which meant people who access the internet on their phones, not desktops or laptops. The biggest pain, from a UX standpoint, was having to account for all of the eight billion UI configurations (screen size, color/b&w, soft/hard buttons, etc.) on Nokia phones. Partially out of frustration I just built prototypes with UIs that looked like a Yahoo! page c. 1996, figuring that would be the lowest common denominator and justifying that decision because what we were studying at that point was interaction flow. Point is: that Nokia-funded project was crippled to some degree by the fragmentation Nokia still sees as a market advantage. (And our project was partly funded by Nokia, so you can guess what happened — they held funding before the end of the summer, so I’m not sure what’s going on.)

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  194. Seriously horrible positioning. Om, it’s not just sticking their foot in the mouth, it’s the verbal vomiting that occurs afterwards. They are in trouble if this is the best that they can do. With Apple’s dominance on the high-end and Android’s train rumbling to 600,000 activations per day, Nokia’s sunset seems to be in the 2020 horizon.

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  201. Hi I’m 40 in Arizona and I work for a major orthopedic medical device company that gives me tons of paperwork to do every night. Some nights I like to go to the local u of az college coffee shop and do you know what I see…..lots and lots and lots of very expensive apple laptops ipods and iphones being used by the future best and brightest young minds. Let’s not forget how powerful the Apple family of integrated products is and will continue to be in the future. These kids have spent lots of money on iTunes music books movies etc and probably aren’t willing to just chuck their tech out the window b/c of some comment coming from a plummeting tech company exec. His jobs on the line duh without Microsoft Nokia would cease to exist. It’s like RIMM saying they have the next iPad killer…..I’ll believe it when I try it out and it works better. Consumers whether young or old who rely on tech daily are very intelligent and have high standards and until something comes out that surpasses the Apple user experience my money’s still on Apple. Hey go to bestbuy or target and try to play with an amazon kindle fire…it’s just a fancy video displaying some features you can’t even play with it to really try it out and guess what….their browser is shit. Next up ipad3 can’t wait. The best thing about android and ms is they challenge Apple to continue innovating. Nuff said.

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      1. oh by innovating do you mean Multitasking, wireless sync, bar notifications, apps on lock screen, customizable Wallpapers,Wireless Updates,Front camera, LED flash, Voice Control, oh that was Android… finger sensitive screen HTC….

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  207. Om, come on… people in large companies say these things to motivate their own people. If you were in Nokia’s management, you would too. What else can you say – iPhone and Android are too good and we have no clue? And Nokia may be on to something here. For example, in India iPhone 4S is available at Rs.57,000 and cheap Androids for Rs.8,500. So, Nokia Lumia at Rs.19,000 may have takers.

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  208. OM, its a fare marketing effort by a Nokia official. What company didn’t try it, especially when fighting an uphill battle? The main point though, is whether he truly believes it or not. And I don’t believe that he does.
    I personally think that MS will disappoint Nokia and take them out of business. At the end of the day I still bet on the windows 8 horse to win the enterprise tablet market. But it will not get to the hybrid mobile-tablet market and definitely not the mobile smartphone one.

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  219. Will Nokia hurry up and die already? They had years to try and improve their phones and now they just look like buffoons trying to play catch-up now that smartphones have evolved. These comments by Mr. Munksgaard are laughable.

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  235. I call selective vision. I have an anecdote too. In the local commuter train to Helsinki recently I saw only 1 iPhone. The rest were all Nokia phones including a young woman browsing the net on her Nokia 5800.

    And the guy who got a free phone can’t be just anybody. I can tell you Nokia doesn’t give away stuff without a reason.

    On the other hand iPhones (and other models) are pretty cheap here compared to the US. You can get an iPhone 4S on 24 month contract for 35€ a month (including data).

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  238. Nokia executive comment just showing the frustration at Nokia HQ to bit iPhone and Android. Nokia was expecting big boom; they live the nostalgic old days when each phone they introduce was grab quickly by the market, and today,they only manage to sell around 10000 pieces of Lumia800 in all of west Europe(peanuts)!! Nokia depends now on Microsoft to come-out with major release of the phone to support many languages around the world to be able ship the devise globally otherwise they will be in big troubles.

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  240. “I have seen many more iPhones than Nokia phones”
    Even if that is true, Finland is not the center of the universe, lol! And I would get fed up with iPhones really quickly if I saw them everywhere!
    P.S. I have lived in Finland all my life and see MUCH more Nokia phones than luxury toy iPhones…

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  242. Strangely enough, I heard exactly the same type of comments from teachers the last months. They notice that youngsters are starting to shift away from the iPhone because their parents are using it, so it is no longer cool to use a phone like that.
    So for Europe at least, I think that Nokia is noticing a trend that is indeed happening on this moment.

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  249. Hey Munksgaard, have another hit of acid. ‘the youth’ are not turning to the Windows platform. Windows has a major branding issue it is not attracting ‘the youth’. ‘the youth’ want cool and hip != Windows…savvy?

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  252. I live in Helsinki. While I see old Nokia phones around, the new phones I see tend to be iPhones or Android phones (iPhones more often).

    However, it’s worth noting that Lumia 800 is not available in retail in Finland yet. Nokia is pushing it elsewhere first. Thus, you can’t draw conclusions about the desirability of Nokia Windows Phones by looking around in Helsinki.

    The current top-of-the-line Nokia phone being marketed in Finland is N9, but Elop told the largest newspaper in Finland prior to the N9 launch that there will be no more Meego phones regardless of how successful N9 will be. Tough to market a phone whose ecosystem has been explicitly burned ahead of time by the CEO.

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  260. so your approach to research is to walk around Helsinki looking at the phones people have in their hands, if they have a phone in their hands at all? You also ask some random dude about his phone and because it re-enforces your view you publish it.

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  268. I’m not sure how valid is the argument that the youth “are fed up with the iPhones”, but I do see a lot of them sporting Blackberrys. Figured it would be because of BBM.

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  281. I don’t know about you folks, but I was always taught that it’s a bad business model to diss your competition. Taking the low road just looks desperate.

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  315. I’m not going to argue with the numbers or with the Nokia’s poor smartphone offering, but I kinda agree with Mr Munksgaard. If you’re the kind of person who wants to express themselves by your choice of mobile phone (as “young people” are wont to do) then iPhones are boring. They’re the luxury product that everyone wants to own, including your parents, your aunt and the 13 year-old kid on the bus. As a “young person” that’s not exactly cool.

    That said, Mr Munksgaard has got his work cut out if he’s going to create anything that works better than an iPhone and that taps into this youthful disaffection. Some people might be bored of the iPhone but it doesn’t seem to have stopped anyone buying them.

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