After a long debut party in New York, the latest best chance for Nokia and Microsoft to make a dent in the smartphone market is finally upon us.
From afar, the list of features and ideas packed into the two new Nokia phones looked pretty impressive. In a world of iPhone clones, Windows Phone remains the most original take yet on a smartphone operating system.
All of that stuff matters, but it won’t make a real difference. To climb back from the dead and make smartphones into something more than a two-horse race, Microsoft and Nokia will have to turn to blunt-force marketing and drop the feature worship that’s being used to court reviewers.
That has to make all of the Harvard MBAs and brilliant engineers at both companies cringe, but it’s the truth. At this point, Apple and Samsung/Android have such a lead in smartphones that no amount of augmented reality apps, mitten-enabled touchscreens, and tiny camera-stabilizing springs will break into the top tier.
Analyst firm IDC estimates that Samsung shipped more than 50 million smartphones last quarter, while Apple shipped 26 million. Nokia is in third place with some 10 million units shipped—but only 4 million of those were next-generation Lumia devices. The balance were based on operating systems that are being slowly killed off.
So what will make the difference for Nokia and Microsoft? The advertising equivalent of carpet bombing—hugely expensive, relatively indiscriminate, and simply relentless.
This is not really a new point—there’s no shortage of evidence about the difficulties faced by late entrants and third-place upstarts in an entrenched market. But the point deserves to be made again to counterbalance the flood of new-gadget press that has been unleashed by today’s unveiling of the new Nokia Lumia phones.
In the end, there are three principles that will govern whether broad numbers of consumers decide to grab a new Nokia Lumia 920 or 820 when they go phone shopping. If you read a lot of the technology industry’s press and blogosphere, you may have encountered these principles before. But all three tie directly into today’s news, and the uphill battle that Nokia and Microsoft face if they hope to compete in smartphones.
—Specs Are Dead. Tech investor and columnist MG Siegler put this thesis together last November. Specs, in industry speak, are the technical specifications and whiz-bang elements that are supposed to make people fork over their cash.
I couldn’t get that idea out of my head watching the webcast of the Nokia and Microsoft phone rollout. I’d argue that his thesis now applies beyond the typical rundown of how well the guts of a device work, and extends to many of the one-off product features built into a new device. Trying to understand all of that stuff makes buying a product too complicated—consumers want their new toy to work without having to learn a bunch of new names and explanations.
At the Nokia unveiling, a wide cast of characters from both companies went through exhaustive lists of new features, technological advancements, and statistics meant to convey the technical superiority of the new high-end Lumia 920.
There was the PureView camera. The City Lens augmented reality app. The Pure Motion HD+ display. The Fatboy Charging Pillow. Even that old impressive-sounding standby, Carl Zeiss Optics.
Gearheads and insiders will love all of this stuff, but most consumers have no idea what any of the alphabet soup of brand names means. The broad mass of American consumers doesn’t care about all of those features, and won’t waste time trying to learn about them. People are busy, don’t have as much money as they used to, and just want to get the best phone available on their carrier for the money. That’s about it.
As Siegler wrote, the mainstreaming of computing made possible by the iPhone revolution has relegated feature obsession to
