Maybe you still remember how Nokia used to dominate the market, including in Indonesia. Their cellphones are always trendy and known to be durable. So many are flabbergasted to see the collapse of Nokia. What really happened at that time?
Nokia is not the first company to commercialize mobile phones, but it can be said that it really has great appeal to millions of people. "Back in the 1990s, there wasn't another big brand," said Ben Wood, analyst at CCS Insight.
"Nokia is very dominant. People don't talk about the brand, but just the model of the phone like 3210 or whatever you have," he added, as quoted by us from the BBC.
As of 2007, Nokia was unbeaten with a 49.4% market share at that time according to Gartner. But then continued to fall to 43.7% in the following year, then 41.4% and 34.2%. Even in the first half of 2013, it was only 3%.
Why was Nokia's fall so dramatic? The first, according to Wood, is feeling too satisfied because you've been at the top for so long, so you're not alert. "Satisfaction hit, where they feel they can do no wrong," said Wood.
"Then suddenly, in January 2007, Steve Jobs walked onto the stage and took his iPhone out of his pocket and changed the world forever."
Yes, the arrival of the iPhone can not be answered by Nokia. Moreover, then came a row of Android troops. Dependence on the Symbian operating system is disastrous because it feels old school.
"They don't think software is important. Nokia makes good phones. They've gone through decades of incredible hardware innovation, but Apple saw that what was needed was the screen and the rest was about software," said Wood.
Knowing that Symbian failed to compete, Nokia's new CEO Stephen Elop, switched to using Windows Phone. But Nokia didn't recover until it was bought by Microsoft in 2014.
Unfortunately, the duet of Microsoft and Nokia did not bear fruit, even Microsoft later removed its mobile division. Now, the Nokia mobile phone brand is under the auspices of HMD Global, but of course not as successful as it used to be.
The former CEO of Nokia, Olli Pekka Kallasvuo, agreed in an interview that the cause of Nokia's collapse was that the company was too complacent and had been in its comfort zone for so long.
Olli believes Nokia is not arrogant, it's just that this kind of complacency sickness is common in big companies. "In successful companies, it's easy to start to feel comfortable. It lowers the need to take risks and innovate," he said.
Olli also believes that Stephen Elop who chose Windows Phone over Android is not a Trojan horse sent by Microsoft to destroy Nokia. If that was the intention, it would have been known by Nokia's top brass at the time.