ESPOO, Finland – Oh boy, what a year it has been for Nokia! Those of you who have been following us for a long time know exactly what I’m talking about, so I won’t bore you with details.
When you work in Communications, you obsessively follow what the media are saying about your company. At times, that has been about as much fun as stabbing yourself in the liver with a sharp object. The great thing is that towards the end of the year things really started improving, and now we can finally see the fruits of our labour.
Here, I am of course talking about the climactic point with Nokia World and the Lumia launches. The reception of our new range of Windows Phones smartphones has been really positive.
We at Nokia are thrilled, and we can’t wait to tell you what we have in store for 2012. What we have showed you until now is just the beginning!
The year in highlights
For me personally, the year 2011 held a couple of highlights. The first one of them was the Nokia N9 launch in Singapore in June. It was simply great to launch a product that everyone loved so much.
The second highlight was of course Nokia World in London in October. Bringing the Lumia smartphones to the market in just eight months was a tremendous achievement. When I first tried out my Nokia Lumia 800 I breathed a huge sigh of relief: the phone was everything I had hoped for it to be, and I knew that was going to make my job a heck of a lot easier going forward.
Product-wise, Nokia World was a huge success, but it also nearly caused me a heart-attack – we had just launched the new Conversations site, and when we made the Lumia announcement we had such a massive spike on the visitor numbers that our servers crashed and the site was down for a couple of hours.
While a large number of readers is certainly a positive problem to have, we’ve learned from it and carried out some extensive testing to prevent the same thing from happening again at CES at the beginning of January.
And onwards to 2012
After Nokia World, I got the opportunity to start leading Nokia Conversations. As a result of that the last couple of months have been really hectic, trying to learn the ropes. I quickly found out that our readers are very passionate about Nokia and keen to voice their opinions.
This blog is a priceless channel for getting immediate consumer feedback and I thank you all for being so active in telling us what you think.
As a token of my gratitude, I will now give away some free stuff! Please tell us what have been your own highlights in 2011 in the comments below. They can be Nokia or mobility related, or something entirely personal – the choice is yours!
Three of the nicest comments (based on my own, entirely biased opinion!) will get a parcel containing a Nokia-branded backpack, lanyard, mobile pouch, cap and an Angry Birds keyring.
Remember to submit your email address with your comment, so we’ll know how to contact you (it won’t be displayed on the site). I’ll be going on holiday after today, so I’ll inform the winners and send the presents after New Year.
Finally, I hope you will all have wonderful holidays before the year 2012 kicks in! Switch off your computers, tablets and mobile phones and spend some quality time with your loved ones.
Hyvää joulua! Happy Holidays!