Competing on Price vs. Competing on Taste

Lee Williams, former SVP at Nokia:

When I was at Nokia and we shipped a Symbian product and it was bad, in its worst incarnation we knew that if we just flipped the switch, we could move 2.5 to three million units — overnight, no matter how bad the product… That was Nokia. That was Nokia’s brand, we knew we could count on that.

And now look at it — they flipped the switch and oh, 200,000 [Windows Phone] units out of the gate. Huh? Only selling in the US, under AT&T’s moniker. If you can’t flip the switch like that, Nokia’s dead and devalued.

(via Kontra)

Nokia built it’s business competing on price. For many years, they were the defacto penny-phone at all the major carriers. The user experience of Symbian was poor, but it didn’t matter because it lived in a sea with other phones with the same poor experiences. There wasn’t a good reason NOT to buy a Nokia phone. I’ve owned several of them.

Apple gave us that reason. They used their unwavering great taste to build a better product and are selling it for less than Nokia’s penny.

Nokia is being forced to compete on taste, and they are all-in on Windows Phone 7. I think Windows Phone could be a strong player, is that enough to save Nokia?