Nokia knows quite well that its biggest challenge is adapting and reacting quickly. But they're shipping something like million units a day from an organization that probably numbers 100,000 people. That's 10x the volume of iPods rolling off the line, nevermind iPhones. Good luck steering a ship that big! It's a fucking miracle to do this at all, and they do it with a 3.5% dividend on their share price and great margins.
You can see steps they've taken to address most of the problems listed in the article going back over a year, but they've just done a shitty executing them at every step of the way. Unlike some of their competition. It's going to take losing 15-20% of their market share to get back on track, if they're not slain completely by Apple, Rim, Google, SE, LG, etc...
Why is the speed of developing new products inversely related to the number of old product units shipped? I'm not saying it's not related, I just wonder why.
Maybe the answer is that huge numbers of the old product shipping means that any new product promises only a relatively small change in revenue and earnings. And that may be particularly true if the new product is perceived to be a niche product.
It's a network effect, and not the good kind. The new products/existing products relationship doesn't have to be inverse -- but the organization size required for these unit volumes creates staggering complexity and inertia.
So if it ever turns out there's something about the organization itself or its structure (hypothetically speaking, of course) that's impairing your ability to put out new, different or more competitive products, you might have a very, very hard time changing it.
It's like rebuilding a car while you're driving down the road. The faster you're driving, the riskier and/or more expensive the proposition gets.
And if, for example, you build up a corporate culture which is focused around protecting those earnings and margins at all costs (again, completely hypothetical) and put in place financial incentives which reward people for doing so, you're making it even more difficult to enact large-scale change.
You can see steps they've taken to address most of the problems listed in the article going back over a year, but they've just done a shitty executing them at every step of the way. Unlike some of their competition. It's going to take losing 15-20% of their market share to get back on track, if they're not slain completely by Apple, Rim, Google, SE, LG, etc...