Take My Nokia, Please
John Gruber (daringfireball.net) has a nice little article up, What’s Next For Nokia, in which he describes, through public and private sources, the hardware-oriented design and development process at the handset maker. Read it and come back; the nut is that Nokia feels the ticket to winning customers is catchy hardware design, and the software running on it is merely a tiny component.
Contrast this to Apple, who regards the software as the primary driver in the design of everything they produce. Much is made of their minimal hardware designs, true, but the deceptive thing is why it is minimal: the hardware itself gets the hell out of the way of the software and what you are trying to do. The iMac, iPhone and iPad are epitomes of this.
Steve Jobs’ line, “Where’s the computer?” is almost a gag, but in truth it’s the main selling point. What used to be an industry of big beige monitors with thick bezels containing myriad control buttons, and even bigger beige boxes with as many disk drives, buttons, and indicator lights the clone makers could think of to put on the front, is now, in its ideal form, represented by a screen. You can’t even see the ON button on the front of an iMac, let alone its ports, and the black border just makes the whole thing disappear. The star of the show is the OS, the software.
The iPhone and iPad are the same story, only even more-so, because they’ve removed the keyboard—you interact directly with the software. If Apple could just have an ethereal floating screen appear wherever you want it, and sell that as a product, it would. I don’t think anybody, obviously not Jony Ive, starts the design of an Apple product with the idea, “Let’s make this really stand out, give it a flashy, trendy case, and put lots of buttons on it to show it has a lot of features.”
My 1st gen iPhone, going on 4 years old now, essentially has the same design as the current iPhone 4. Oh, the case is a slightly different shape, and the iPhone 4 no longer has the chrome frame of the previous generations, but it’s basically the same rounded black slab with a few buttons on the edges and one Home button on the front. With the iPad, they didn’t go back to the drawing board and make it “look cool” for the sake of looking cool, they just went with essentially the same minimalist design. It’s a sign that Apple has the confidence in what their product actually is and does to let those verbs sell it, not the noun of the hardware.
Apple understands that it’s about the software. So do Google and Microsoft (being software companies), and that’s where Nokia is in trouble.