Kodak has filed for bankruptcy protection. Although it has not yet truly gone bankrupt and still hopes to rise again, the chances are probably slim.
Nokia’s situation is in some ways similar to Kodak’s. Both were old firms that dominated the market for a century, and both were undone by the very new technologies they themselves helped develop, weighed down by the burden of their own success. Kodak did not fail to try to adapt to the new trend, but it did not succeed; Nokia is now placing its bet on Windows Phone, hoping to make a desperate comeback with Microsoft’s support.
Is there any chance that, by self-amputating all other possibilities and gambling its fate on WP, Nokia can still be saved? In my view, no. The reasoning is similar to Kodak’s case.
Why did Kodak never stop falling and start rising again? Was it simply the result of the shock of digital technology? Not entirely. The traditional film giants Fujifilm and Lucky, under the wave of digitalization, also successfully transformed themselves, moving into optical films, the medical industry, and even cosmetics. Kodak too was trying to adjust and transform, but the key was that the direction of its transformation was fundamentally wrong.
On cnBeta I saw an article that was written very well—Kodak’s defeat lies in this: it did not understand the user’s purpose in taking photos or social needs. What brought Kodak down was less digital technology than the rise of social networks like Facebook. Kodak’s mistake was that it “mistakenly believed that people would continue to print out the photos after taking them, but such things are becoming less and less likely to happen.”
In Kodak’s eyes, digital technology was apparently nothing more than a new kind of film technology: invisible, boundless film. Digital technology replaced traditional film, and that was all; the other links in the traditional process of photography would not change: camera—film—developing. Now that the film stage had been replaced by digital technology, then on the one hand we develop digital technology, and on the other hand strengthen our advantages in the other links of photography—wouldn’t that be enough? Kodak did exactly that. It “stuck with” areas such as “from dedicated photo-print shops to automatic terminals” for “too long,” and until recently it was still trying to focus its business strategy on printers and ink. In other words, Kodak was always unwilling to give up its understanding of “taking photos” as an activity. From the very beginning, Kodak’s slogan was: “You press the button, we do the rest.” But in the Web 2.0 era, people not only press the shutter more often; after pressing the shutter, they also need to do more things: upload, share, interact with friends online… The one thing they no longer need is to have the photos developed.
Technology is not neutral. New technologies will create new environments and change the entire way of life, rather than merely replacing one link in an existing way of life.
The problem with Nokia and WP is similar. The WP system may have won a very good reputation, but I am completely unconvinced by it. Because Nokia and the WP system in fact have not broken out of the traditional logic of the “feature phone.” In their view, a “smartphone” is nothing more than a more efficient feature phone. One can see this from Nokia’s own boasting and from Microsoft’s as well:
For example, Nokia once boasted that “Android and Apple interfaces are outdated.” In Nokia’s view, a phone should be centered on contacts rather than apps; that is to say, a phone is nothing more than a tool for connecting with other people. It is only that there are now more channels of connection: besides calls and text messages, there are now microblogs, social networks, and so on. What needs to be done is nothing more than integrating these new functions into the phone. Microsoft’s attitude is even more obvious. At the recent CES (Consumer Electronics Show), Microsoft staged an eye-catching challenge. Microsoft “believes WP devices can beat other people’s smartphones in ordinary daily tasks. This is very different from comparing processor speed, hardware specifications, and benchmark tests.” Microsoft asked contestants to use their own phones to complete a specific task together with it, and the competition was based on each side’s execution efficiency. The result seemed to be that WP phones achieved a very high win rate. I am willing to believe this, but this not only does not prove the superiority of WP phones; on the contrary, it is precisely evidence of the fundamental mistake in WP phones’ starting point. We can see that Microsoft’s understanding of phones is still that of a “feature phone”: the meaning of a phone is nothing more than efficiently completing this or that “function.” Changes in the network environment merely mean that there are now more functions waiting to be completed. In the final analysis, in the eyes of Nokia and Microsoft, a smartphone is nothing more than a feature phone with more functions and with the possibility of further expansion. They have not moved beyond the traditional logic.
By the way, one can also refer to this article about Microsoft’s .NET programming development tools. It seems that Microsoft’s thinking is consistent throughout—“Programming in .NET is like cooking at McDonald’s. There you have a full set of magical equipment that can automatically produce everything. As long as you press the right button and follow the indicator lights, you can mass-produce perfect 1.6-ounce hamburgers, faster than anyone else on earth. However, if you want to make a 1.7-ounce hamburger, sorry, you can’t.” In other words, Microsoft’s programming tools also seem to focus on content, taking the efficient completion of concrete functions as their aim.
“You press the button, we do the rest”—Kodak, Nokia, and Microsoft all insist on this slogan and take pride in efficiency and directness. They have all failed to understand that “the medium is the message.” Just like the design aesthetics of WP phones—where “content” is king. The medium should be as transparent as possible, unobtrusive, pass through as quickly as possible, in order to reach the content. But Android phones leave you lingering more within the phone itself; they do not so simply and directly achieve the “goal,” and the phone’s performance is somewhat redundant for accomplishing the necessary functions. So Nokia and Microsoft are smugly pleased with themselves: look, Android is inefficient, flashy, troublesome, wasteful, whereas WP phones are straightforward. Yet it is precisely in the interval that is not so directly accessible to content, in the “thickness” or room for maneuver of the medium, that a new space of meaning or mode of play unfolds. The reason smartphones differ from feature phones lies precisely in the “room for maneuver” beyond function. Only when there is room—only when there is interstitial space, leeway, or redundancy—does the phone acquire a kind of unlimited extensibility.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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