Nokia senior vice president is guest lecturer Erik Anderson ’84 talks about ’Wireless Revolution’ by Sara Peters “I ended up in Finland because of a girl,” he said, “and started working at Nokia simply because it was the only place I could get a job where I could speak English.” So began the lecture of Erik Anderson ’84. He is a slim, spectacled man, who looks younger than he probably is, and his charisma is almost surprising. A confident swagger, a relaxed slump against the podium, and a sharp wit that could be described as wry with a sprinkle of cynical makes it easy to see how he “ended up” as senior vice president of business applications for Nokia Mobile Phones in Finland. Photo by Frank Wojciechowski Erik Anderson was a guest lecturer in ELE391: The Wireless Photo by Denise Applewhite Mr. Anderson, who followed up his Princeton B.S.E. in electrical engineering with a master’s degree in art history from Harvard has worked at Nokia for 13 years. He recently made a brief trip back to campus to talk to students in ELE391: The Wireless Revolution, taught by Professor Vincent Poor *76 *77. He dispelled myths he said have been perpetuated by Wall Street, assuring students that, for the wireless industry, it is not the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning. According to Mr. Anderson, the same things that helped Nokia and the wireless phenomenon go global will continue to keep the wireless world growing. To illustrate, he related a brief history of Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), and Nokia’s storybook rise to glory. “How could a small, Finnish company—which was known mostly for its good toilet paper—turn itself into a global company in five years and end up the winner in this very lucrative business, which was dominated by powerful European giants?” Mr. Anderson posed. “How was it possible that they could become the winner, when it seemed that the odds were stacked against them?” Most propitious, he said, was the nature of the GSM system, which provided a level playing field in which even a small, budding company could flourish. Another essential component to its success was the environment within Nokia that nourishes innovation. Lastly, Mr. Anderson credits Nokia’s focus on creating products that enrich person-to-person communication, rather than products that provide information access. Once upon a time, Nordic Telecoms broached discussion within the industry about the next generation of digital systems. The GSM was formed in 1982, to discuss how to make wireless technology work across geographic borders. The GSM established manufacturing standards, ensuring that all components of all machines from all operators would be compatible. In 1987, 13 operators in 12 countries, plus government regulators, signed a memorandum agreeing to deploy the wireless system with the standards GSM established. Operator summits continued for several years, and the system was launched in 1992. The open standards prevented any one company from patent blocking, and government oversight ensured that a level playing field would be maintained. “They didn’t want a Microsoft or a Qualcomm to control the system and hold everyone else for ransom,” Mr. Anderson said. Yet, open industry or not, an individual company still needs a good product and a winning business plan to succeed in a competitive market. Nokia’s innovations helped them rocket to the top. To describe his company’s providential business theory, Mr. Anderson flexed his art history muscles. He cited the classic concepts of firmitas (quality), utilitas (ease of use) and venustas (beauty), which are used to assess architecture. Mr. Anderson said these three concepts working in harmony and balance to make a classic, beautiful product, and that those are the concepts his Nokia team have always used when creating new products. “Create products with identity,” he said. Nokia’s phones vary in color, shape, style, and capabilities. The new 7650 even has a digital camera, so that users can send quick images to other phone-users. Perhaps one of Nokia’s greatest achievements was seizing on a suggestion made by an international team of GSM engineers, who proposed that a small remainder of memory on phones be used to support a short messaging system (SMS) that could fit about 160 characters. Marketers scoffed, saying SMS was too small to be used like E-mail and would never succeed. When they grudgingly decided SMS could compete with pagers, Nokia put SMS capabilities on all their phones. It did not instantly catch on. “But then,” Mr. Anderson said, “people started to use it—but not like E-mail, and not like a pager. Then one day the first teenager sent the first message to a friend. SMS became crucial to social life! A young person in Finland who didn’t have an SMS phone had no hope in hell of getting a date on Friday night.” No one could have anticipated precisely if and how SMS would be used, but Mr. Anderson asserted that it was important to provide users the SMS option anyway. “Just put capabilities in people’s pockets and see what happens,” he said. Mr. Anderson compared the SMS example to the wireless access protocol (WAP) that allows mobile users to surf the net from their phone. While Wall Street was prophesying that mobile Internet would be the next big thing, WAP-ready products were collecting dust on the shelves—perhaps a portent of the inevitable dot com business crash that followed. Then, as Mr. Anderson told it, “‘WAP is crap’ became the cry of brokenhearted, would-be Internet, not-quite millionaires as they gnashed their teeth in the outer darkness.” Mr. Anderson stressed that in the wireless industry it is important to remember that communication with other people is more desirable than information access. “Access to information becomes more fun when you can share it, and user-generated information is the most fun of all,” he said. “It is fun to download a Dilbert cartoon. But it’s more fun to take that Dilbert, put a little message on it, saying, ‘Hey, isn’t this just like our boss?’ and send it to a friend. I’m personalizing the message. Even better, I take a 7650, photograph my boss, glue it to the Dilbert, and send it to all my friends.” The key words, then, are “innovation” and “freedom.” GSM inspired innovation from Nokia, which inspired innovation from its engineers. The resulting products inspire innovation from the users. “As long as the wireless world remains open,” Mr. Anderson said, “innovation can continue and therefore will continue.” [ contents ]   [ previous story ]  [ next story ]   [ top of page ]