Nokia shipped a touchscreen smartphone in 2004. The 7710. Three years before the iPhone was announced. The year after that they shipped an internet tablet, the 770, running Maemo.
I find that harder to sit with than the usual telling of this story, which is that a comfortable incumbent could not see what was coming and could not build it when it arrived. The second half of that is simply not true. Nokia had built it. The engineering existed, in the building, years early.
Which forces a more uncomfortable question. If they could build it, where did the time go?
The same signal, on the same day
On 9 January 2007 the iPhone was announced. That date is useful precisely because it is boring: it is public, it is documented, and it landed on Nokia and Samsung simultaneously. Neither had an information advantage over the other. Both were large, both had deep engineering, both had global distribution and supply chains that most companies would envy.
Samsung adopted Android in 2009, shipped its first Android handset that June, and had a genuinely competitive flagship in the market with the Galaxy S on 4 June 2010.
Nokia made its commitment on 11 February 2011, when it announced that Windows Phone would become its primary smartphone platform. The Lumia 800 reached buyers on 16 November 2011.
Seventeen months apart in what reached customers, from an identical starting gun.
It was not capability, and it was not execution
The 2004 handset disposes of the capability explanation. Whatever else was true of Nokia in that period, “could not build a touchscreen smartphone” was not among the constraints.
The execution explanation does not survive either. Once Nokia decided, in February 2011, it had a product in customers’ hands by November. Nine months from strategic commitment to shipped hardware, including a platform migration, is not a slow organisation. It is a competent one.
So the seventeen months did not accumulate in the workshop and they did not accumulate on the production line. They accumulated in the gap between the thing being knowable and somebody committing to a response.
Four years, roughly, of knowing and not deciding.
What happens inside that gap
We are not guessing about this. There is a substantial academic study of Nokia during exactly this period, based on interviews with people who were there, and its findings are about information rather than technology.
What it describes is a company where senior managers, under pressure themselves, did not fully convey how severe the external threat was, and where middle managers, reading the room, filtered the worst of the news before passing it upward. The practical effect was that the numbers reaching the top looked better than the numbers underneath.
Read that as a mechanism rather than as a moral failing, because that is what it is. Every organisation has a path that information travels to reach the people who can commit resources. That path has a speed, and it has a fidelity, and both are properties of the organisation rather than of the people in it. Nokia’s path was slow and lossy. The signal arrived eventually, in degraded form, years after it was available.
Late is a different failure from absent
Samsung passed Nokia as the world’s largest handset maker in the first quarter of 2012. Nokia’s answer had reached the market one quarter earlier.
That is the detail worth holding onto. Nokia responded. The response was real, it was expensively resourced, and it was shipped by competent people. It simply arrived after the window it was meant to fit through had closed.
We are reasonably good, as a profession, at asking whether an organisation can do a thing. We are close to useless at asking how long it takes to decide to. Capability assessments are everywhere. I have built plenty of them. They will tell you, in detail, whether the skills and the platforms and the processes exist. They will tell you nothing at all about the interval between a situation changing and somebody committing to do something about it.
That interval is invisible in most organisations for a simple reason: nobody timestamps it. There is no record of when something first became knowable internally, so there is no way to measure the distance from there to a decision, so the distance is never managed and nobody is accountable for it.
The question I would ask
Most of the organisations I work in already have the capability. That is usually not the constraint, and the capability assessment that confirms it is often the least useful document I produce.
What almost none of them can tell me is how long they take to decide. Not how long a project takes once approved, which everyone tracks. The other interval. From the moment the situation changed to the moment somebody with authority committed.
It is worth finding out what yours is, because unlike most things in an organisation it is measurable, and because the answer tends to be considerably larger than anyone expects.
Nokia’s was four years, and they had the phone the whole time.