In my mind, this proves how important it is to hire people that can hit the high notes

    The Creative Zen team could spend years refining their
    ugly iPod knockoffs and never produce as beautiful,
    satisfying, and elegant a player as the Apple iPod. And
    they're not going to make a dent in Apple's market share
    because the magical design talent is just not there.
    They don't have it.

    The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that
    the top talent hits all the time. The number of divas
    who can hit the f6 in Mozart's Queen of the Night is
    vanishingly small, and you just can't perform The Queen
    of the Night without that famous f6.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html

I don't disagree but when you say this "proves" that point I'm not sure that's true. You can just as easily hire people that can "hit the high notes" and fail because of mismanagement. The best example of this is Apple's Copland (a.k.a. System 8) Operating System. To quote Wikipedia...

At WWDC '96, Apple's new CEO, Gil Amelio, used the keynote to talk almost exclusively about Copland, now known as System 8. He repeatedly stated that it was the only focus of Apple engineering and that it would ship to developers at the end of summer with a full release planned for late fall.

(Source: http://tinyurl.com/2lrwzd)

So even with the entirety of Apple's engineering resources devoted to it this project still collapsed. As far as we know Nokia could be in the same boat with a bunch of high note hitters being held down by poor management.

There are 10x managers just like there are 10x engineers.

Thanks for the link, great article. Ripe with memorable quotes.

Am I the only one that finds Asymco to be transparent and unsubtle pandering?

Nokia's got higher R&D than Apple, but Apple's got higher profits, so Nokia are stupid and Apple are smart.

If Nokia had lower R&D than Apple, then Apple would still have higher profits, so Nokia would still be stupid and Apple smart.

So how is this any different from his other 900 posts pointing out that Apple have high profits? What analysis or insight does it add?

It tells you something about how the competition is doing, and a particular area where Apple excels.

Knowing how Apple compares to the competition, and what they do differently, is interesting.

There's some room for complaining about the "smartphone" classification. Most Symbian-based phones would not qualify as smartphones in the US. I'm on my third, and they're pretty smart, but not having touchscreens really puts them in a separate market segment.

And those phones run Qt, too, which this analysis lumps in with MeeGo. So, if you counted up just the people Nokia has working on touchscreen phones, you might find it about matches the iPhone team.

Which, mind you, is still not a ringing endorsement of Nokia's efficiency. My N86 has some advantages (1) over, say, my wife's Android phone (a Backflip running 2.1), but Android has a lot more room to improve.

(1) Mostly quality of the phone UI, as opposed to computer UI. For example, the N86's voice control works with my headset. On Android, voice dialing requires you pull out the phone and press a button; with Symbian, you can just push the button on the headset. I now consider that essential; if I had to drive without a feature like that, I wouldn't be able to make calls.

>On Android, voice dialing requires you pull out the phone and press a button

That might be a quirk on your particular model of phone or headset, or maybe it was fixed with 2.2. The N1 definitely supports the headset button for voice commands.

That's nice to know, since I'm hoping to get an NS One Of These Days.

(I know it's not the headset, since it's the same one I used to use with my Nokia, and it worked fine. But I could well believe it was a problem with the phone.)

No matter what you say about Nokia, I love them. Here is why: - Easy designs - Affordable phones - user replaceable batteries - Cheap and fits in with my upgrade cycles - the N900.

The N900 certainly wasn't cheap. In fact, the fact that I'd have to shell out another few hundred for a replacement smartphone is the only reason I haven't thrown it against a wall. I have it overclocked, and it's still dog slow. :(

Do you have the latest Maemo version? It made it a lot faster.

I think I do: 20.2010.36-2.002

A bit of searching didn't tell me what the latest Maemo is supposed to be, but did imply that it was released last October, so I'm sure it would have popped up for install by now.

I was going to submit a comment about how poorly written the article is. Instead I will just mention that this has always been one of Apple's best qualities. They have managed to stay lean and capitalize on the inability of their competitors to do the same.

Might be interesting to look at the total salaries instead of just the headcount. I understand Nokia did quite a lot of cheap outsourcing in the last decade.

According to Asymco's data, Nokia also spends 10.2% of their phone revenue on R&D, versus 2.5% for Apple.

Except R+D at nokia means anyone not actually bolting phones together.

Having 4 competing operating systems, each with their own layers of management and their own VPs all fighting each other - counts as R+D spend.

Four? I see S40, Symbian, and MeeGo.

Or are you counting the touch-based and non-touch-based Symbians separately? There'd be some justice in that.

So? What are we supposed to take away from that? They have more numbers? That doesn't extrapolate to better products or better anything.

I don't think this article is praise for Nokia, quite the opposite. They are saying that Apple is much more efficient.

More to the point, Nokia is losing profit compared to Apple:

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:NOK&fstype=ii

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:AAPL&fstype=ii

so measuring efficiency as net income per employee the contrast is more stark.

>That doesn't extrapolate to better products or better anything.

Agreed. So maybe we should be asking how Apple is growing faster than Nokia with fewer resources?

Nokia suffers from the mythical man-month. They've only recently discovered that throwing 6,000 engineers at Symbian didn't make it better.

But to be fair - they have now hired another 6000 HR managers to work out why not

That's not very fair :-)

Don't worry they have set up a series of "Strategy Boutiques" (seriously!) to get over it

http://www.slideshare.net/whatidiscover/open-innovation-in-a...

I read in an article that I cannot track down right now that Steve Jobs has gathered some of the world's leading experts in aluminum, process engineering, glass - the creative power of Apple lies in its breadth and astonishing depth.