Latest news with #Symbian
Time of India
03-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
The story of 5 words from Steve Jobs that made Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff gift Apple AppStore.com domain, that helped iPhone Crush Nokia
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff once shared how a meeting with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs led to the idea of Salesforce's app marketplace and how years later, he 'gifted' domain to Apple. In a 2019 interview with TechCrunch, Salesforce CTO and co-founder Parker Harris recalled how the idea of an app store came out of a meeting with Jobs. In 2003, Harris along with Marc Benioff and Dave Moellenhoff, visited Steve Jobs in Cupertino, he said. Steve Jobs advice to Salesforce founders During the meeting, Jobs told the trio that to grow Salesforce, they needed to build a cloud software ecosystem. At that time, the idea of an app store was new for Salesforce, which had just launched (in 1999) as an online service to sell software over the internet. As the conversation moved forward, Benioff asked Jobs what exactly he meant by a cloud ecosystem. To this, Jobs replied that it was up to them to figure out. The idea stayed with Benioff, and a few years later, during a dinner in San Francisco, he thought of creating an online directory where developers could build and share apps for Salesforce users. Marc Benioff writes in his book, Trailblazer' 'One evening over dinner in San Francisco, I was struck by an irresistibly simple idea. What if any developer from anywhere in the world could create their own applications for the Salesforce platform? And what if we offered to store these apps in an online directory that allowed any Salesforce user to download them?' Benioff quickly registered the domain to match his idea. However, when he discussed the name with customers, many did not like the name. Salesforce eventually launched the app marketplace in 2006 under the name AppExchange. In 2007, Salesforce also introduced a platform for building and distributing apps through AppExchange. Meanwhile, remained unused. 5 words from Steve Jobs that led Benioff to gift Apple In 2008, Benioff attended a major Apple event where Jobs announced the launch of the App Store for iPhone . During the event, Jobs said five words — "I give you App Store" — which surprised Benioff and his team. After the event, Benioff met Jobs backstage and signed over the domain to Apple. How App Store helped iPhone crush Nokia phones The launch of the App Store became a major factor in the iPhone's success. It created a marketplace for apps, which helped Apple strengthen its hold in the smartphone market and contributed to the decline of companies like Nokia. The Apple App Store then highlighted the importance of software and app ecosystems in the smartphone market, an area where Nokia struggled to compete effectively. Having said that, while the iPhone didn't single-handedly kill Nokia, the App Store's success demonstrated the demand for a wide variety of apps and the value of a user-friendly platform, which Nokia's Symbian and Windows Phone systems failed to deliver. AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now
Forbes
26-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Kill Your Business - Before It Kills You
In the realm of entrepreneurship, success often breeds complacency. The very strategies that propel a company to prominence can, if left unexamined, become the catalysts for its decline. This phenomenon, known as the 'Icarus Paradox,' illustrates how businesses can fail by clinging to past triumphs without adapting to evolving markets. Understanding the keys of this trap, might lead you to the obvous answer that to really grown, you might have to kill your business. Danny Miller coined the Icarus Paradox, which describes how a company's strengths can become its weaknesses. As businesses achieve success, they may become overconfident and resist change and innovation. This resistance can create a 'success trap.' In this trap, companies stick to what they know. They focus on using current skills instead of seeking new opportunities. Depending on your company's structure and culture, you can simplify discussing the Icarus Paradox. Try asking this question: 'Why don't trees grow to the moon?'' Trees Don't Grow To The Moon Erik Logan This question comes from an old German saying: 'Trees don't grow to the sky.' No matter how you bring it up with your company, the answer is clear: Success has stalled. What are you going to do about it? The first step is to acknowledge, then begin the understanding: Are you in a success trap? Are you a tree that has stopped growing? Maybe this can help. Nokia went from being a top mobile phone brand to a warning sign for businesses. This shows how dangerous it is to be complacent and not adjust to fast-changing markets. Nokia once held over a third of the global mobile phone market. But it failed to see the smartphone revolution coming. Its heavy reliance on old operating systems like Symbian caused a big drop in market share. Internal conflicts, a strict structure, and slow reactions to tech trends made things worse. When Nokia tried to shift to the Windows Phone, Apple and Samsung had already taken control of the market. This left Nokia fighting to find its place again. Stay alert for warning signs to keep your successful business from struggling. But as the old saying goes, 'You can't read the label from inside the jar.' You need to have some objective metrics and market data to help clear the fog and think clearly. Here are a few key areas you may start: • Stagnant Growth: Plateauing sales or market share can indicate a need for a strategic reset. Be honest with yourself; if sales are slow, ask yourself if you are making excuses for the flattening. Are you trying to find the good in your numbers? You might think those answers are good enough. But push your team and yourself to find the real truth. • Resistance to Change: A clear sign of stagnation is a culture that ignores new ideas or technologies. This can slow down progress. A subtext here is also the amount of turnover you may be having with your company. Unless you have initiated layoffs, the turnover could signal internal dissatisfaction . • Loss of Market Share and/or Profit Margins: This is where you actually see the decline year over year, not just slowing growth. A common mistake is attributing the downturn to market headwinds. The temptation at this point is to find ways to justify the downturn. A common theme or variation is, 'The market was down 10%, and we were down 2%, which means we were up 2% against the market.' While technically true, it builds in a mentality that growth isn't there. And by definition, maybe it's time to grab that saw! The first thing you should do is pat yourself on the back for having the courage to look at the reality of where you are. It's something that isn't as easy as many think. After reflection, you may determine that you are not ready to kill the business but rather use it as motivation to delve deeper into the core issues. Two very quick and easy ways to push the culture and the company forward are: 1. Test New Ideas with Your Leadership Team: Observe who is open to innovation and who is stuck in old ways. This will help clue you in on who is ready for larger conversations. 2. Fire Yourself: Imagine that you are not the leader or CEO. Next Monday is your first day. Go through the process of walking in on your 'first day.' Ask questions as if you are the new person. Why do we do it that way? Even if you understand, does your team? Ask for clarity on how what they are doing maps to the goals and overall strategy of the company. Success isn't just a one-time goal. It's an ongoing journey that needs constant review and adjustment. Businesses can avoid mistakes made by others by recognizing past strategies' limits and embracing change. The key lies in balancing the confidence of past successes with the humility to evolve. Don't just watch a company's failure. Dig deeper to find where their strategy went wrong. Learn from others and form your own opinion. Take those lessons and apply them to your company. Remember, trees don't grow to the moon, and neither do businesses. Recognize when you need to kill your business. Be honest, time to plant a new seed, nurture it, and allow it to flourish in new soil.
Forbes
25-03-2025
- Business
- Forbes
How LG Got Left Behind: A Strategic Lesson in Missing the Future
An LG phone in a palm tree. Four years ago, South Korea's LG made the decision to quietly shut down its mobile phone business. The move was an admission of what had been obvious for a while: LG had lost the battle for cellphone dominance to Apple, Samsung, and a host of new Chinese competitors. Losing to its Korean arch-rival Samsung was perhaps the most frustrating point of all. Samsung now competes with Apple for dominance in mobile phones, with around 20% of sales in a market that has since grown to over half a trillion dollars. That performance has helped elevate Samsung to be one of the world's fifty most valuable companies. Its market cap is more than double that of LG's. What happened? Twenty years ago, both LG and Samsung competed head-to-head in mobile devices. Both had developed high-quality component manufacturing capabilities. And both companies were known for world-class execution. The difference was strategy. Both LG and Samsung had thriving businesses in what were called 'feature phones': small phones with simple LCD screens and keypads. Some of us have fond memories of versions that allowed users to send texts using a cumbersome interface (press the 2 button three times to make the letter F…). So when the first glimpses of smarter phones appeared—such as the BlackBerry and Nokia's flip phones—both LG and Samsung faced the same question: was this a trend worth betting on? To answer that question, Samsung began a program of innovation and experimentation. It developed its own operating system, called Symbian. It worked with design firm IDEO to imagine new use cases. And it partnered with Jump on a series of projects to develop a new growth playbook. The goal was to take small but deliberate steps into the smartphone space. No one could predict what the future would bring. The goal was to just get in the game and start learning. For its part, LG turned to McKinsey, a trusted advisor and the world's dominant management consulting firm. According to multiple sources, McKinsey conducted an exhaustive market study. The results seemed clear: McKinsey assured LG that smartphones were a niche product that would always be too expensive to gain widespread acceptance. Feature phones would remain dominant, they told LG. So the company doubled-down on feature phones, focusing on issues like reducing the cost of manufacture. Of course, then Steve Jobs launched the iPhone in 2007. There has likely never been a product launch in our lifetime that has had the immediate impact and long term influence of the iPhone. It sent consumers lining up outside Apple stores to be the first on their block to get one. And it sent every other phone manufacturer back to the drawing board. Google had acquired a small mobile operating system called Android. Android's founder Andy Rubin would later recall watching the iPhone launch and realizing he had to start over. Seeing Apple's touchscreen interface, Rubin turned to a colleague and exclaimed, 'Holy crap, I guess we're not going to ship that phone...' For its part, Samsung was well-positioned to compete as a fast follower to Apple, having run experiments in the smartphone space. Samsung abandoned its own Symbian OS and began shifting to Android. LG now realized that smartphones were more than a flash in the pan. So it went back to McKinsey to ask what it should do. McKinsey's advice was to partner with a company who could supply an operating system. However, they steered LG away from Android. As they saw it, Google had no established competence in mobile operating systems. Microsoft, by comparison, had a long track record in making operating systems. Windows OS would be the smarter bet. LG hurried its Windows smartphone to market. The product was a dud. Four years later, LG was forced to abandon Windows and shift to Android. It was clear that LG had bet on the wrong horse. It had squandered precious time and energy and the company would never recover. It's too easy to blame LG's predicament on poor leadership or a lack of vision. It certainly wasn't a lack of intelligence. Firms like McKinsey are renowned for having some of the smartest people in the room. The problem was that their approach to strategy was fundamentally backward-looking. Like many consultants, the McKinsey team analyzed markets and technologies based on existing information: hard data, historical trends, and competitive benchmarks. In doing so, it focused on the world as it currently existed, not as it could be. McKinsey had done a thorough job of analyzing all of the facts. They just didn't imagine any new ones. This wasn't the first time that happened. Way back in 1980, AT&T wanted to know how seriously to invest in mobile phones. So they asked McKinsey to forecast the number of cellphone users that might exist by 2000. The consulting firm ran the numbers and advised that mobile phones were too heavy, too costly, and too unreliable to ever attract a large market. They predicted only 900,000 users by the turn of the century. As it turned out, by the time 2000 rolled around, some 900,000 new subscribers were joining mobile phone networks every three days. Successful strategy happens when leaders recognize that present-day data is useful, but only one piece of the puzzle. The best leaders also look at emerging signals, experiment with new technologies, and build capabilities before they're needed. That doesn't mean betting the farm on one outcome. Predicting the future is impossible, but you need to be in the game early enough to adapt. Samsung didn't go all-in on smartphones immediately. Instead, they experimented. They tested different operating systems, partnered with Android, and learned along the way. The smartest companies prepare for multiple possibilities. This means scenario planning, investing in flexible capabilities, and being ready to shift when needed. McKinsey's advice to LG and AT&T wasn't technically wrong based on the data available at the time, but it failed to account for how markets evolve. Seemingly safe bets can be the riskiest moves of all. Disruptive changes start at the margins. If you're only looking out for existing competitors, you're probably missing the real threats. In the early 2000s, mobile email on BlackBerry was an emerging player. By dismissing it as a niche, LG missed the signal that people were ready for mobile computing. Leaders need to pay attention to their most forward-thinking customers, not just their biggest ones. Only then can they see behaviors that hint at the future. The same goes for capabilities. Based on current data, it made sense to identify Microsoft as the best OS partner. But that failed to account for Google being a company that both prized learning and set its mind to being a major player in smartphones. The biggest risk for any company isn't being wrong about the present—it's missing the future. Many leaders believe that they're making smart decisions when they rely on real-world data. If that data is only focused on what exists today, they're effectively trying to drive a car by staring at a rearview mirror. In times of rapid change, the companies that win are the ones that stay curious, keep learning, and take action before the future is obvious. They don't just analyze facts; they create new ones. The question isn't whether smartphones (or AI, or blockchain, or any emerging trend) are a big opportunity today. The question is what you can do to make it a big opportunity someday soon. As Peter Drucker said, the best way to predict the future is to create it.
