The Fall of Mammoths
By: Tanmaiy Bhateja
Tags: Technology, Innovation, Smartphones, Product Development, Design

There are micro firms, there are medium firms, and then there are big firms. But some firms go beyond and become mammoths. These are companies whose revenues are on a scale that could be equated to a small country’s GDP.

These companies hire the best designers, smartest engineers, leading marketers, and top-tier managers. But sometimes, they still don’t succeed.

And the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Let’s talk about some mammoths of the smartphone industry who, despite their size, resources, expertise, and experiences, just couldn’t hit the mark. These tech giants made errors in judgment, big enough to prove fatal. In fact, what these companies did wrong is actually quite interesting.

Let’s jump in.

1. Not Taking a Hint from Time: Nokia

Let’s rewind to the 2000s. If someone had a phone, there was a good chance that it was a Nokia. But we all know where Nokia stands now — almost nowhere.

How did this happen?

In the old days, phones could be anything — some of them would flip, some of them would slide, and there were all sorts of screen types and sizes. People used to choose a phone almost purely based on its hardware. Maybe they liked the unique color or maybe the keys felt nice.

In this battle, Nokia was outstanding. Their phones were affordable and had the kind of durability that people talk about even now.

So when and where did things go wrong?

In 2007.

The iPhone was launched and the battle quickly shifted from being about hardware to being about software. All the things that we talked about above, faded away in importance. Now everyone had their eyes on just one thing — having access to the best apps and that was it.

Nokia didn’t actually do anything wrong. They just did not act.

They kept releasing their trusty old phones for a few years and their market share just evaporated.

They severely underestimated the iPhone and the impact it would have.

Not adapting early enough proved fatal for a company that was known to have innovation and marketing wizards.

2. Failing to Price Right at the Right Time: Microsoft

In 2017, Microsoft announced that their Windows phone operating system was officially dead. But, those of us who’ve followed the smartphone market for quite some time, know that Windows phone died a long time before that.

When it came out, the Windows phone was so promising. You got a radically different aesthetic to anything out there at the time. It was faster and felt much lighter than the bloated Android phones we were getting. The brand name ‘Windows’ alone carries enormous power when it comes to operating systems, so naturally, their product was all the rage.

It could genuinely have been the third player that we always wanted in the iOS vs. Android battle.

But if you’ve used a Windows phone, you’ll know that there was a woeful selection of apps to choose from. Users were missing out on so much. For the first three years, even the Instagram app was unavailable.

At the same time, there were so many good options in the market at affordable prices. Windows had to bring something equivalent to the table.

What they should have done was subsidize Windows phones. You can’t just drop a new operating system and expect it to beat the operating systems that have been going in the market for 3 years already. But by pricing more competitively, they could have had a chance.

We know they didn’t do this. So, the Windows phone operating system was dead within 2 years. But Microsoft spent the next five years flogging a dead horse and it was painful to watch.

3. A Whole Series of Lessons to be Learnt: Sony

Sony used to be one of the biggest smartphone companies. Now they sell only a tenth of the phones that they used to sell in 2014. And there are lots of reasons behind this, but mostly just a combination of poor decisions on top of really strange ideas.

The Naming Conundrum

The way Sony names its smartphones is borderline criminal.

They went from Xperia X10 to Xperia S to Xperia T to Xperia Z. It sounds like they were just picking random letters from the alphabet. but it gets so much worse.

They then went on to the names Xperia Z1, Z2, Z3, Z3+, Z5, and just when it looked like they might have figured out what they were doing, they hit us with Xperia XZ.

It’s almost as if Sony was playing with its customers.

After continuing the XZ series to XZ2 and XZ3, they hit us with their recently launched smartphone, which is named, no you did not guess it right, Sony Xperia 1. But what Sony did after this is almost unimaginable. They named their next phone Sony Xperia 1 (2).

They are just playing with us at this point.

Not Playing to Strengths

Sony phones had good camera hardware but they did not take the best photos or videos. When you factor in that Sony is one of the few smartphone makers that also make cinema-quality cameras, it was shocking to see that their smartphone cameras were not winners.

It’s funny. If anyone should have the best smartphone cameras, it’s Sony. And that was all they needed to do, but didn’t.

Another reason why Sony smartphones just fell into irrelevance was that every phone launched for the next 4 years after Xperia Z, looked exactly the same.

You just can’t do this in a market where bezels are shrinking every year and some people out there are bending screens.

Inadequate PR

Sony’s problems extended way beyond the phones themselves. Even the company’s PR strategy wasn’t very good.

Take the Xperia 1 for instance. The phone was announced in 2019. It was sent to popular YouTube reviewers 6 months later. And the phone was only lent to the YouTubers for a week. Ouch.

Compare this to OnePlus. They send out their phones 2 weeks before the launch. They also give send ‘guides’ along with the phones, explaining all the new features. And they let the reviewers keep the phones as long as they need, to test.

This makes all the difference because if reviewers themselves are not happily willing to review your devices, how can you expect an efficient promotion?