Thursday, April 05, 2007

Easter fun time: Ask Nokia...



I think Brad Feld's doing a great job at demystifying the somewhat perplexing aura of the VC world; today's post is a case in point. I guess some people have similar questions about Nokia - since we're not always as open as we could be. So, as we break for Easter, how about a small a small experiment in openness as a reward to my loyal readers. Ask a Nokia related question as a comment to this post and I'll try and do my best to find the right person in Nokia to answer it, and post the answer as a future post - if both question and answer are interesting...
No guarantees or refunds, and rather depends on the quality of the questions, and not expecting much about the standard off-limits stuff (future product releases, financials etc) which will just get boring answers. Of interest?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What is Nokia's policy on letting their employee's blog?

Why hasn't anyone done for Nokia what Robert Scoble did for Microsoft?

Humanize the company.

I want to know who made the 8800, why S60 isn't componentized (web browser, music player).

Treo's have had threaded SMS for years. SMS was born in Finland, why hasn't Nokia adopted that method to display messages?

I think I'll stop since I went over my quota :-)

Unknown said...

Well, there's not been an overwhelming rush so far, so I guess you can exceed the quota. I can answer some of these myself here in the comments, others will need a little digging and i can make a separate post.

Re the blogging policy - that's pretty easy. Nokia's fine with people blogging, but just reminds people that exactly the same confidentiality rules apply for personal blogs as they do elsewhere - so i would be equally responsible if i blogged something i shouldn't as i would be if i emailed something i shouldn't (or chated about it in a pub, put it on a USB stick etc). With the glory of google, blogging errors can be more rapid and dangerous than email, so that's my look out.

Nokia's Scoble?
Nah. I'd say this is not really our style. It's a very collegial atmosphere, and I'm not really sure that bringing in a big name just to be a blogger would be inline with our culture. Nokia's fairly bottom up so ideas and spokesmen emerge through subject matter expertise, rather than top down dictat. Tommi V's probably our most well known blogger - would be interested in his feedback.

Will explore the others and come back after Easter. Thanks for the input Stefan.
Cheers, Stephen

Anonymous said...

thanks stephan

hope you had a great easter!

Anonymous said...

Heh, thanks for naming me as the most well-known Nokia blogger. But having a technorati ranking of ~20000, I wouldn't count myself as a Nokia-scoble :)

And in fact, I wouldn't want to be one. I just want to do my share in telling people about the stuff we do, and listening feedback about how we could become better. I'm afraid that getting more attention than I currently have (technorati ranking, # of readers, # of commenters) would only make things more difficult. Think about Scoble or Kathy Sierra etc.

Thinking about it, I'm unsure would superstar-full-time-bloggers really be worth it. How would they benefit Nokia? If you think about Mr.Scoble himself, I felt that, while giving a easily-approachable public face to Microsoft, he was a little too disconnected from the mainstream MS business. He talked, but did he listen and change things at Microsoft? I really don't know.

Instead, I'm much rather see an increasing number of regular Nokia people join the blog conversations, than having a few unconnected superstars. I think http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/ and our s60 blogs are a relatively good start towards this direction.

Sorry for typos etc, this was just a quick brain dump...