The birth of the product

The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet was a product first started to develop around the year 2000. The concept was based on the vision that wireless internet technology (WLAN) was about to come very big and that laptop computers and personal digital assistants (PDA’s) were unable to answer consumer’s needs for the mobile internet (Forum 24 2006).

The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet concept combined two development streams inside Nokia into one project. One stream was a hardware concept of a portable widescreen device made for Internet usage and the other stream was a Linux based open source software product.

From my point of view, the idea for the 770 product was born somewhere around 2000/2001 when I was working in special products department doing standardizing things. We got WLAN cards to our product portfolio and at the same time, we had to think about what else uses could there be for WLAN other than data cards and business tools (communicators). I had some experience from 3G/WLAN from my university studies so someone happened to ask me... The concept was born in a brief moment of time. At that time I was an avid trader and hooked on stock markets and stock-related news. I couldn’t came away from the PC or leave home. So, a solution to my need had to be found. I then created a product concept named

“Darude”.

The “Darude” did not go into production in 2000 due to the screen technology was not ready and WLAN penetration was not high enough. It then took year or two and a concept that was born dead called “multipart”

come from somewhere. Multipart was a concept where you had a cellular modem in pocket and an operating system around it. So, we [me and the product program manager] saw an opportunity in this for the ”Darude” and started to work with it.

[Interviewee 4, Senior Product Manager]

At this point, the first problems related to the product concept that was the starting point for the Nokia 770 can be connected. “Darude” and “Multipart” product concepts did not go into production since the screen technology was not ready and

“Darude”

product

concept Screen technology

WLAN penetration Nokia product

development

“Multipart”

product concept

Artefacts Social

group Problems

Symbian platform

the WLAN-technology penetration was not high enough. In the figure 9 I have illustrated the first connections of the social construction of the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. What is also worth noticing is how personal interests like stock trading and inability to move away from the PC were mentioned as a source for the needs that created the “Darude” product concept. Following Akrich’s (1995, 173) definitions, this was an implicit “I” method of representing the end user in the product design by relying on personal experience.

Figure 9: Problems related to the product concepts Source: Author

For a couple of months we tinkered with a Symbian platform and we realized that we simply are not getting any kind of support for the project due to the limited resources. At the same time a strategic decision was made that Nokia will do a Linux product. The Linux team was looking for a product and we had a product “without an operating system”. Looking now backwards I have wondered many times that was this coincidence or a strategy of someone wiser :)..and so, this was the start of the 770 Internet Tablet

[Interviewee 4, Senior Product Manager]

2000

Software update:

OS 2006 May 16^th

“Darude”

“Multipart”

2002 2003 2004 2006

May 25th 2005

After the market launch Before the market launch

“Laika”

Product concepts not brought to the markets 2001 2005

According to the interviewees, the solution to a problem around the Symbian operating system developed into the early Nokia 770 Internet tablet. With Linux, the software development of the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet could start and move faster.

I addition to the “Darude” and “Multipart” concepts, a third concept that never made it to the market called the “Laika” was also being developed in 2004 before the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet was brought to the market. The main feature of the “Laika” was an integrated hard drive, something that the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet lacked.

According to the product manager who was in charge of the “Laika” concept, the time was not ready for the product, and a management decision not to do a “media device”

was made because of the many products competing in the media device category.

Figure 9 shows when the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet was brought to the market and the timeline of its development along with the product concepts that didn’t make it to the market. About one year after the market launch, Nokia published a software update called OS 2006 that added the possibility to make internet phone calls and use an instant messaging service called Google Talk, as well as a full screen touch-keyboard to make text entry easier.

Figure 10: Timeline of the development of the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet

After reviewing the technological background of the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, the envisioned users of the product and the role of market studies was discussed with the interviewees.

We did not have that kind of educational background that we would have troubled ourselves too much with any kind of target users. From the beginning, the product was made with “let’s do it for us” mindset because there had to be others like us with similar needs for sure. (…) Then when we had to seriously think about this as there had to be some kind of input for the marketing we concluded that the concept was “broad appeal” though we did not use that term, but when we described as whom we see as the users and it was broad appeal without any strict age segments.

[Interviewee 4, Senior Product Manager]

The interviewee that was involved in making the product concepts stated that the product was made with a “let’s make it for us” attitude. Again, this serves as a good example of Akrich’s (1995) “I” method where the own persona serves as a starting point for bringing in the end user of the product. What is also worth noting is that how a “broad appeal” approach to a product’s target consumer was decided as there had to be input for marketing to work on.

The role of market studies in this product’s development was interesting. According to the interviewees, while there was end-user studies created for the Internet Tablet concept that clearly showed that there was little or no interest in the concept, and that their role was not significant in the final product. Interviewees said that this was because in those studies, the products that were used were not functioning and the users in the studies were PDA-users whose needs for a mobile product were different than what the internet tablet product concept offered.

They [Nokia’s internal user insight organization] made an end user study and the results were - according to the professionals – extremely discouraging. The results were worst in the history of these end user studies.

(..) But [product program manager] made a lot of noise about these studies since no real products were used… only mock-ups. The users were also PDA-users so they had different kind of needs from a product than what the 770 could deliver.

[Interviewee 4, Senior Product Manager]

Creating a compelling marketing message for the product was also a challenge.

Since the product was using Linux, the open source community developing the operating system was an important group of potential customers of the product.

For this group of users, Nokia launched a developer website called Maemo.org.

According to the senior R&D manager, the early marketing material created to promote the product and development environment was not usable since it did not represent the right kind of message that Nokia was trying to send to the open source community.

Lot of the marketing material that was produced was useless…it was like that Nokia would came and take over the Linux world. It was just wrong and it felt like the marketing department didn’t understand at all the message we were trying to send.

[Interviewee 2, Senior R&D Manager]

In short, the product development process of the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet from the first product concept to the final product was a five-year process, driven by the vision of mobile Internet penetration, and made with a very implicit way of envisioning the end user of the product. User studies that were created with the products did not significantly affect the products development even though the results of these studies were discouraging.

Before the market launch of the product, the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet had created a lot discussion around the Internet due to its open source development model and the non-phone approach to developing a new kind of communication device. The next chapter goes through how the non-users in the interviews saw the product and what were the initial reactions towards the product on the Internet.