Once the gold deposits are mapped, or if cheaper shovel-makers start eating into your margins, you better pivot quick and become the best gold miner in the business, or the best refinery, or the best goldsmith in town. If the gold market changes from being about discovering gold to locking up, distributing and selling it, the act of shovelling becomes a much smaller slice of a much bigger pie, and your shareholders will punish you for not adapting to the changing market.

This story isn’t about gold mining, it’s not even about shovels. But as with most of my writing, I need analogies to set the scene. This post is actually about the smartphone market, and it’s partly a response to a post by Jojo over on 37Signals, where Jojo asserts that the new Nokia N9 handset may still be successful, even though the app offering for the N9 looks sparse. This post started out as a comment at the end of Jojo’s post, then got way too long for anybody to read at the end of many pages of other comments, so here it is in full.

Here’s the thing: the N9 will find customers and will be profitable, but will it be a big enough success to do what Nokia shareholders *really* want from the company? To take back #1 place? No. And the answer lies in the way Nokia just keeps selling shovels. Or, if you prefer, keeps making TV sets…

Oh dear me. Billions of dollars, thousands of well-paid employees, and this is what you see when you first go to Nokia.com?

The handset market is changing

Being a handset maker is becoming a smaller slice of a much bigger pie, in the same way that making TV sets is now a small slice of a pie mostly made up of content production, distribution/licensing, and advertising.

By sticking to handsets and partnering with Microsoft for mobile operating systems, what Nokia has done is to commit to making TV sets, handing the content production to Microsoft (the networks, remember, are already owned by carriers).

That would be fine, if making the hardware was still a premium margin business, or if the market for content was still unproven. But a seething mass of Asian manufacturers making Android handsets are cutting all the margin out of making smartphones, and the market for content is very much proven. VERY much proven.

For Apple, meanwhile, is the fastest-growing content production, distribution, licensing and sales business that the media industry has ever known.

Shareholders expect Nokia to make the same leap and the reason it’s taking a hammering is that it’s failing to do so. In fact, it’s been failing to do so for a very long time.

Build a better marketplace

Enough of TVs and shovels, they’ve served their purpose. Nokia can be a successful and profitable handset manufacturer, but it is now clear that it won’t be the biggest brand in the mobile space unless it has the biggest content marketplace. Mobile content is now largely about music, TV, movies and, more than anything, mobile apps. How’s Nokia doing?

Not good. Nokia’s first opportunity to build an app marketplace was actually with the N-Gage platform, which it launched in 2003. Apple didn’t launch the first iPhone until mid-way thru 2007. Here we are in 2011 and Nokia’s had several attempts at building a thriving content marketplace, yet has been overtaken by every other competitor of note, most especially by Apple.

Nobody likes inertia, especially a shareholder

Nokia’s had an eternity in ‘market time’ to see the change coming, from a hardware market to a content market. It’s even had the luxury of being first to market with a content store. Yet with each strategic decision it makes, and with each product releases, it just confirms that making hardware is written so deep into its corporate DNA that there’s no room in there to become anything else.

That’s OK, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Nokia’s doomed, it just means that the market will adjust its valuation of Nokia, and we see that happening right now, with shareholders pricing in the adjustment, realising that Nokia’s probably only ever going to do one thing well, and that’s make shovels.

See, what will make the iPad successful is not the list of technologies included in the specification list. When the iPhone was launched, sceptics pooh-poohed the lack of hardware (especially the low-res camera and lack of a front-facing camera). The iPhone went on to sell millions. It was because of how the included technology was implemented, not which technologies were included.

First, Apple provided a high-quality app development toolset that allowed third-party developers to write so many different apps, not just operating on the OS but addressing the hardware in the phone in a consistent and reliable manner. (See “The best camera to have is the one with apps on it” http://doingwords.com/?p=1995)

Next, Apple provided a great retail experience for consumers and developers in iTunes Store, leveraging the iPod’s vast community of music, TV and movie customers to rapidly create a new market for iPhone apps. There’s never been a simpler, more seamless click-to-buy experience than finding and buying a new app from your iPhone. Apple knows the best way to sell iPhones is to market apps not iPhones — when was the last time you saw an ad for the iPhone itself?

I’m predicting the iPad will be an even greater success as an entertainment device than the iPhone because it’s not a compromise between a phone and an entertainment device.

It has a brighter, clearer screen with a far wider viewing angle because it doesn’t need to fit in your pocket, so it allows two people to watch a show together, read a book together, compete or collaborate on a game together. It has a 10 hour battery life because it doesn’t need to keep a 3G radio powered up and connected to a tower.

Unlike a MacBook Air, the iPad has no ‘up’ orientation — we can pass it around a table without needing to re-orient the screen or input area, making collaboration faster and more natural.

Unlike a MacBook, it’s light enough to make no significant impact on your shoulder bag, it doesn’t need a power brick to get through the day, it’s awake instantly and it’s significantly faster at all compute-intensive operations than your iPhone.

Multi-tasking? Please, the only common purpose I can think of for multi-tasking on a portable device would be polling an imap mail server while you’re reading an ebook or surfing the web, and Apple provides for that with push and pull email services. If you get an email while you’re reading, the iPad (and iPhone) will pop up a badge. Click on the badge and the iPad (and iPhone) will hold your front app in its current state and open the email for you. Other apps (such as eBay or Facebook) can access the same push notification services to push you a badge notification that you’ve been outbid on an auction item or that you’ve been tagged in a Facebook photo.

You don’t need multi-tasking to do this and leaving it out makes the device simpler to manage and preserves battery life. Try explaining to Nanna why her battery’s only lasting three hours because she’s minimised instead of quit her mail app. No thanks.

The iPad converts your next Economy plane seat to a Premium Economy seat. It makes a bus or train journey a potentially collaborative, social experience. It makes a visit to Nanna’s a chance to go through the latest family photos without having to teach Nanna a single thing about using a computer. It allows a classroom to get straight into educational play without first installing patches, removing viruses and debugging the network and printer connection.

And that’s the single most important benefit of an iPad: it puts real-world use first. It hides computing from the user. You don’t need to learn how to use it.

Needs black cables, black power supply, black keyboard and a black Apple logo!

I definitely don’t want a black Apple MacBook 13″ connected to my black iPod Nano by a white cable, and I definitely don’t want the power supply for my black Apple MacBook to be white. What if I can’t get an Apple Bluetooth Mouse and Keyboard in black? And if the video adaptor cable is white, I’m gonna scream, yell, and throw a little hissy Mac user tantrum, like Steve Jobs reportedly does when things are not 100% perfect. I’m surprised he hasn’t noticed this himself. I may send him an email about it…

Apple – MacBook – Gallery 2