Turns, turns, turns, just like a popular song written in the late fifties of the previous century. Same in mobile devices industry, it matters a lot what time to be born and what time to die. Giants got born because their time to emerge was right while other world ruler fell because their timing was wrong.

Let’s take Nokia, a true giant fallen and reborn, sort of at least. They dominated cell phone market in 1990s and early 2000s with no prospects of losing the position until it actually happened. Many commentators and experts say that Nokia missed the emergence of a smart phone. I can’t disagree more with that, the Finnish giant put substantial effort and money in developing Symbian, the Nokia smart phones operating system. Born in early 2000s it had its moments. While pretty good product from architecture perspective it lacked quality control and proper hardware integration. Namely the OS was too thirsty for what smartphones at the time could have offered in terms of processing power. There was quite a bit of speculation at the time on Nokia twisting policy where a beefy hardware phone was planned, thirsty OS developed and then hardware was stripped to improve margins; it was too late to recode the software and in result a permanent hourglass was the ultimate user experience.

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Symbian case was clearly too early for its times example. Nokia decided to use Windows as its primary OS for the phones. They still have a tough road to hoe in order to regain once lost market position. Blackberry on the other hand is a perfect example of acting too late in response to market needs.

2006 was the peak for Blackberry, almost complete domination of enterprise mobile device segment, solid stock price growth of mother company Research in Motion followed by missed expectations, late reactions to market needs , two new competitors and a spectacular implosion.

Blackberry was so business oriented that allegedly the high command of the company dragged their feet for years before introducing even a basic media player into the list of applications. Engineering microphone and speaker to the point where a mobile phone would be able to act a conference phone as well as extending battery life was far more important. Unfortunately the users did not share that point of view. iPhone premiere was vastly underestimated by Microsoft and RIM and opinions of short life project were common in 2007. At the time iphone indeed was just a media player with rather basic smartphone functionality and mediocre email client. Application platform and redistribution model became a key to Apple product success and RIM platform ultimate failure. After short period of time when you could see a lot of people carry Blackberry at the belt and iphone in the shirt breast pocket RIM fell off the cliff. Failed attempt to re engineer operating system, introduce a tablet and touch screen phones were only music for the funeral.

We also have Microsoft case and Bill Gates infinite dream of tablet device. This however is not timing related, more lack of understanding of customer expectations in my opinion. Windows 8 makes me believe they still don’t understand it. At our company where we print photo id cards there are number of folks who believe we should make a mobile device application for online id badge  personalization except I still refuse to believe the idea of mobile device being a point of data entry.