if connected

Switching a vast company’s strategy takes time. Stephen Elop may have announced the jump from Symbian to Windows Phone smartphones back in February, but there are numerous smaller decisions that need to be made too: how departments should be organised, who does what, which products stay, which are delayed, which are killed off. Steve Jobs followed a similar path when he returned to Apple. It’s hard work.

Today, CTO Rich Green steps down for personal reasons. We won’t know what those really are because they are, well, personal. It could be as the rumours suggest a disagreement over strategy with regard to the high end MeeGo platform, it could be the stress of implementing so many changes so fast, it could truly be a personal family matter. They do happen outside of soaps.

But whatever,  the venture that Nokia embarked on first by appointing Elop as CEO last September, and then with the Windows Phone move is now too far along to retract.

Nokia is committed. Anyone at Nokia that thinks otherwise will only increase the chance that Elop’s bold courageous plan fail, and with it Nokia, by creating delay. The last thing that Nokia, and Nokia loyalists, needs now is more delay, more talk, or yet another shift in strategy.

Nokia has to ship Windows Phone devices in volume quickly to catch-up with Samsung, HTC, Apple and even and  most worryingly for Nokia to gain competitive parity on smartphones with the recently struggling Motorola and SonyEricsson.

This era is so much more than just a ‘Post PC’ age. Numerous other devices are being sidelined too as both their reasons to exist and their business models are disrupted.

Yes, we have switched from a unipolar PC world to a multipolar device era where smartphones, eReaders, tablets, connected TVs and many other smart connected devices are finally becoming viable. In this new digital era the PC remains extremely important. In every country, household PC penetration is rising, even in countries such as the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden where PC penetration is already 92%, 87% and 87% respectively. [Source: Eurobarometer 335, E-Communications Household Survey, European Union].

Yet despite this continued success, the PC is still being sidelined.

The most significant innovations are now happening outside of the PC market. Even at Microsoft, the major user experience innovations that will be incorporated into the upcoming PC OS, Windows 8, were pioneered on Microsoft’s smartphone OS, Windows Phone 7, or on the xBox360 games console.

For those companies that lost out in the PC era, like Apple, it’s useful to market this era as a ‘Post PC’ one as that re-defines the market battlefield in a way that favours the strengths of their products: around highly mobile iOS-powered iPhones and iPads, rather than Windows PCs. Steve Jobs successfully changed the battlefield in just this way with his speeches about the iPad in early 2010. Yet Apple continues to innovate with its traditional computer products with imminent launch of iCloud and Mac OS X Lion.

So, when Apple talks about ‘Post PC’ what Apple really means is that this will be a ‘Post Windows’ future.

But whether we call this Post Windows’ or ‘Post PC’ both terms are too narrow a view of the innovative disruption that is transforming the Internet, consumer electronics, media, advertising, navigation, retailing, and almost every aspect of life.

It’s not just the PC that’s being sidelined. Numerous devices are becoming obsolescent as they too are disrupted, so this new era is also:

• Post Phone — Mobile phones are now routinely smart and consumers often choose to buy a phone that is not the best phone but instead choose a mobile handset with the best apps, Facebook access and Internet browsing delivered with a great user experience. If call quality, signal reception, and battery life were the key factors for consumers buying phones then Nokia’s market position would not be in free fall.
• Post Print — Paper books, magazines and newspapers are being replaced by digital distribution and business models on PC-accessible websites, eReaders, smartphones and tablets.
• Post TV — The TV set is no longer the only way to watch TV. Increasingly, it’s not even the main way. Traditional broadcasters are offering live and recorded TV programmes on their own websites or through special services such as Netflix, Hulu, iPlayer or many others. People are choosing what device to watch TV on based upon whatever screen is most convenient. Old metrics such as the number of TV sets per household are irrelevant. Instead, the new metrics are how many TV-capable screens does each person have available, what size is that screen — from very small such as on a smartphone, to enormous living room projectors — and is it mobile and usable at any time of the day or night wherever that person is?
• Post disc — Music, TV, software and games used to be distributed on physical media. With the arrival of digital games distribution systems such as Valve’s Steam or OnLive, streaming video and music subscriptions, people no longer need optical disk drives. The latest generation of light laptop computers forego that drive. Games consoles and home music systems will go the same way soon.

Those that are talking about ‘Post PC’ are right that this is a new digital era. We’re long past ‘Web 2.0′ but the term ‘Post PC’ does not describe this new era adequately. It’s so much more. It’s post so many many devices, business models, and companies.

In a future post I will set out how to describe this new era.

This post was originally published on my Forrester blog.

Too many firms are building their mobile strategies as a mere extension of the PC Internet, and are missing out on what’s now possible when mobile, but which remains impossible using a PC.

A PC is always going to be limited to deliver a part time Internet experience. They are too bulky, too heavy, too power hungry, and increasingly too dependent on the assumption that a super fast fixed-quality broadband connection is present to be something that people will have with them all of the time 24×7. If a PC evolved to be suitable for 24×7 use it wouldn’t be a PC anymore.

Today’s Internet mobiles offer people that 24×7 digital life. People are becoming connected 24×7 through their Internet phones and that must transform the strategies that firms adopt. Mobile enables a 24×7 relationship between brands and consumers. Mobile enables people to interact with websites 24×7, both to consume — read and browse — and to contribute. Mobile opens up new business models through the fusion of location awareness and a 24×7 Internet-connected device.

The first and clearest example of this new world is what’s happening with social computing. People are now able to lurk on Facebook or Bebo at anytime, or post photos onto Flickr that are taggged with where they were taken (as well as when).

Read this new report for more on 24×7 people:-
How Mobile Handsets Will Deliver 24×7 Social Computing

I’ll be developing this theme in future reports this year.