The commodity trap

Recentemente escrevemos vários postais com o título "You are building a business not a product", julgo que o título se ajusta perfeitamente à lição que se pode retirar desta reflexão sobre a Nokia "Nokia's Real Problem: The Commodity Trap":
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"A commodity trap is a subtle trap. Companies that differentiate their products by building them to be smaller, faster, more powerful and cheaper begin to find that others quickly imitate every new feature that they introduce. The length of time that any given product is attractive in the market begins to decline, as even newer products quickly take over. And with the globalization of manufacturing and even R&D now, skills like total quality management, six sigma, supply chain management and enterprise resource management are now widespread, and known to most everybody.
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For Motorola and for Nokia, coming up with ever better cell phone products is no longer enough. (Moi ici: Ainda recentemente Guy Kawasaki alertou-me para essa realidade ""Enchanting your customer may mean that doing fewer things will enchant your customer more") These handset manufacturers face mounting pressures from new entrants like Apple, Google, Palm (now part of HP), and Microsoft, all of them working hard to continue to innovate new mobile phones, either by themselves or with partners. But each is doing far more than that: they are building platforms that attract thousands of other companies to design applications and services that run on their handsets. Even if Nokia can develop a superior handset and then continue to lead in producing superior handsets, that is no longer sufficient to provide a superior customer experience. Nokia must focus its innovation efforts on the applications and services (which support its platform) that will enrich its customers' experience with its phones. If it fails to do so, it will soon be supplanted as the market leader in cell phones as Motorola has been.
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There is a lesson here for all companies. Whether you make a product or a service, you need to think of your business as a service business. With a service mindset, you will encourage your people to create valuable experiences for your customers. With an open mindset, you will invite many others to add to and build upon your products and services - your platform. If you set out to innovate your services to create new and differentiated customer experiences, you can escape the tyranny of the commodity trap. This is the path to win and sustain leadership in your market."
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Seth Godin também escreve algo sobre o tema em "Faster, Better and More"