Innovation/Strategy/The Narrative

The magnitude of things: What it means to make things in the millions

Posted on by charlie

I was in a meeting recently and we were talking about the number of people with Nokia phones, the number of Nokia phones sold a year, and other large numbers associated with Nokia.

All that number talk made me think of the magnitude of the mobile world – it dwarfs the PC-based Web world.

Here we are thinking the Web is huge (with a few clever quips, though) and that the PC market is huge, and that Microsoft has the most devices with their operating system on it.

Eh, I don’t think so.

There are more mobile phones than PCs, there are more Net-connected phones than PCs, and the scale of mobile phones means that a few companies (maybe one or two) touch almost all of the mobile phone users in the world in a more personal way than Microsoft, Intel, or even Dell do.

How does the magnitude of all this change the way we deliver services and provide value?

That’s what Nokia must be thinking these days, right?

Link [via JP]: Herald Sun: Fun with a Finn [17may06].

QUESTION 1: Who is the biggest camera manufacturer in the world?

A: Nokia.

Question 2: Who is the world’s biggest music-player manufacturer?

A: Nokia.

Some would argue that these titles should apply only to those making dedicated cameras and MP3 players, but the fact remains that mobile-phone company Nokia makes most of the devices that take photographs and play music.

And it may not be too long before it’s the world’s biggest computer manufacturer as well — a computer being a device with a programmable operating system.

charlie

5 Comments

  1. Any chance that you could pop the numbers into the post to show the scale (order of magnitude) I’m guessing it’s something like ten, ie 10 phones sold for every 1 pc, but I could be wrong.

  2. Factor of 10 sounds about right if Seattle Times are to be believed: “Already, [Nokia] dominates the wireless business, producing about a third of the 800 million mobile phones sold around the world every year. Contrast that with Dell, the world’s largest computer maker, which last year shipped a fraction of that — 37 million units.”

  3. But the big, big difference is cost.
    1MB broadband internet from my home PC costs £10 per month, with a limit of 1GB per month (though I don’t think they have any tools to check or enforce this yet).
    GPRS internet on my phone costs
    “0.5p per kilobyte”, or
    £51.20 per megabyte, or
    £52,428.80 per gigabyte.
    1GB on PC = £10
    1GB on phone = £52,428.80
    Guess which one I use? 🙂

  4. HSDPA launched – soon to be followed by WiBro

    SK Telecom, the #1 mobile service operator of Korea, launched HSDPA service the other day. KTF (#2) will launch its own HSDPA service next month. HSDPA (Definition) is called 3.5 G service. To give a 101 on the evolution of mobile services for those who..

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