Marketing MeeGo: Introduction

One of the biggest challenges facing the MeeGo venture will be creating tangible interest around its (eventual) offerings.  iOS and
Android enjoy the buzz right now, the latter now benefiting more than the former.  At some point MeeGo as a product (or family of products) needs to establish the same sort of excitement if it is to seize significant market share.

It’s only natural to assume that any corporate entity utilizing MeeGo in some manner would craft unique marketing campaigns for their implementations.  But grassroots or community-led marketing is something else entirely.  

Giving users what they don’t know they want

I spent many years as a product designer, in various fields.  I even had some cool inventions for consumer tools and medical devices that sadly got hung up in former employer bureaucracies.  It’s been so long though since I was heavily immersed in the world of design that I had forgotten some key principles.

Reading Juhani Risku’s clear and well-considered thoughts on Nokia’s survival brought it all back to me.  On page three of the online Register article, he makes the following point:

“There is a philosophy called Contextual Design, every designer at Nokia has been trained in it by the guru Karen Holtzblatt.  Everybody has attended her courses and got her very expensive book signed.  The idea is that you ask the users what they are doing, then design something.  If you think about Apple, they don’t ask anybody.  The idea of users as designers is a catastrophe!

“It’s only relevant to evolutionary products, it’s not relevant to blue-sky products.  When you have a blue-sky product, there are no users, and so there are no users’ opinions.  We have to rely on what the desires of users are and trust the designers.” 

An open letter to Anssi Vanjoki

Dear Anssi,

First let me say that you have always had my utmost respect and admiration.  When I was a Nokia employee I made sure to attend broadcasts of your speeches as they happened because I knew you would say something important that resonated.  And so it was a real thrill when you took time at one point to not only read one of my internal blog articles about computers but took the time to respond with a very lengthy, thoughtful email.  I was very impressed and encouraged by that.