Nokia's challenges as Mobile Software Provider

Code lines of Nokia’s Open EMS Suite were very much in my life during summer 2006. During the time, my ex-boss Mr. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (OPK) was building the big picture of the company as I was the one writing code lines in Karaportti, Espoo.

The EMS Suite project included hundreds of developers and architects from other countries around the world. This software project had a significant role in my career when comparing to other projects I have participated.

Last Thursday, OPK spoke in Kasvufoorumi 09 software seminar in Helsinki. He said that Nokia is going through its biggest change in the last 20 years. For me, OPK's presentation had two interesting facts:
1) It is harder to estimate profit in software business than in hardware business. The lack of predictability leads to short-time product development projects and results in a big number of different software versions.
2) It is challenging to combine the old and new business. Software and service business is partly similar natural addition to traditional mobiles as camera was before.

Today’s mobiles are devices with lots of processing power and memory capacity. Network bandwidth is good enough and latency in modern radio networks is getting close to the values we experience in Local Area Networks. Therefore we don’t need to think too much about the earlier problems in mobile development, such as code optimizations for performance and small memory footprint.

Recently, as an evening home project, I built a JavaME-based camera application for Nokia mobile phones. The goal was to provide a simple user interface to take a picture and upload it into web portal with a given user authentication. The project was ready and tested within a week. Even though, the JavaME techniques are somewhat newly developed, they can be very quickly mastered.

Two main problems for me, to which I think also OPK referred in his last presentation at Kasvufoorumi 09, were the usability and small mobile screen. It was somewhat easy to create a few user-interfaces with forms for a small photo uploader, but as well, the real business logic stayed in the portal on the server-side. But, how to get money out of a mobile client with its current physical restrictions? To answer how to find profitability in combining old and new for Nokia, it could be found by thinking: "This piece of software is for [customer] to deal with [problem] with a small display and mobile usability." Which is the customer group and what problem do they have that does not care of the known hardware limitations?

Small mobile projects are usually short-term, less than 6 months, and instead of heavy project management with daily scrums and reportings, prototyping method could be used. After the initial concept, developers start the design and implementation of first prototype. After that, the prototype is re-developed again and again until it's acceptable.

BR,

/markus