Nokia‘s latest restructuring, announced yesterday, is just one aspect of its many-fronted smartphone war.
As Nokia’s senior vice president of design and user experience, Marko Ahtisaari is the man charged with leading the software and hardware designers who must craft the challenger to the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices that the Finns have so far lacked.
Mr Ahtisaari joined Nokia last October when the firm acquired Dopplr, the online travel community he led. (Dopplr’s “social atlas” concept is a distant cousin of Foursquare, Rummble and the other location-based services that are causing so much fuss right now.)
A fellow Finn and former Nokia strategist before he turned entrepreneur, Mr Ahtisaari has impeccable design cred: he sits on the board of Artek, which produces stylish furniture designed by Alvar Aalto, the Finnish “father of modernism”.
When he arrived, Mr Ahtisaari combined the hardware and software design teams, to make them work more in harmony. This in some ways prefigured yesterday’s group-wide reshuffle. He reports into Anssi Vanjoki, head of the new “mobile solutions” division, which for the first time brings its services and smartphones units under the same roof, with its own dedicated R&D team.
Although the same design team works on more conventional handsets – “feature phones”, in the jargon – and Symbian ^3 smartphones (such as the N8, pictured above), Mr Ahtisaari says Nokia’s new MeeGo venture with Intel will take up most of his time as the company chases Apple, RIM and Google.
“I still think the whole industry is missing a trick,” said Mr Ahtisaari during a meet-the-press session in London yesterday. “All the touchscreen interfaces are very immersive. You have to put your head down. What Nokia is very good at is designing for mobile use: one-handed, in the pocket. Giving people the ability to have their head up again is critical to how we evolve user interfaces.”
Given humanity’s growing fixation with staring at glowing rectangles, any innovation that helps improve off-screen interaction really would be “social change”, as Mr Ahtisaari puts it. Having to update Twitter, BlackBerry Messenger and Foursquare at all times can be quite a distraction from real-world conversation.
But in spite of Mr Ahtisaari’s Dopplr background and Nokia’s big push on maps, he isn’t particularly keen on Foursquare-style “check ins”, which let your friends know where you are.
“I think it’s one pattern. It’s not the only way,” he said. “This is an area where you need to ace the balance been privacy, trust and publicness. As a brand, even at the expense of growth of services, Nokia will err on the side of small groups and privacy. It’s where it as a brand comes from. The default switches won’t be [that] the check in is open to everyone to see.”
Perhaps with recent shifts in Facebook’s privacy policy in mind, he warned users of location-based services to keep an eye on how their information is used as they push for greater growth: “The industrial logic of every single social network is that those terms of service will be renegotiated very quickly.”
That doesn’t mean Nokia won’t try to bring more “social” elements and personalisation into its own services. “I think as we move into the MeeGo platform, [there will] more and more layers of value above maps … and social data about maps – other paths that people you know have taken through cities.”
Mr Ahtisaari also pushed back against the tech world’s other current obsession: the iPad. “It’s interesting but very early days” for tablets, he said. “It’s like junior soccer. Everyone is running after the same ball. So it dominates the imagination but my passion is in real mobile use, not luggability.”
Although Nokia said last year that it would concentrate on producing fewer, better handsets, Mr Ahtisaari’s main pitch against the iPhone emphasised the diversity of its portfolio.
“Nokia is not about one lifestyle or one style,” he said. “You are not buying into a story about how you have to live your life and what is good taste…. There will never be one single design language. It’s much more democratic in that sense than many other brands.”
So far, it seems smartphone buyers prefer Apple’s benevolent dictatorship to Nokia’s democracy. But in these tumultuous times for the Finns, Mr Ahtisaari will be leading the insurgency.
