Report: Nokia Decided on the “Lumia” Family Name in Only One Day

According to an article by Reuters, the “Lumia” name for Nokia’s family of Windows Phone handsets that we’re all familiar with was picked in under a day. That might not sound like a big deal, but when you think of what the Lumia family means to Nokia (and more importantly what it meant regarding Nokia’s future two years ago) you’d think it would have been weeks in the deliberation. Instead Elop decided not to waste time and had them make the decision within the day:

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop recalls a meeting in August 2011 in which the company’s leadership struggled to decide on the name of its new smartphone, the first using Windows Phone software.

“We almost fell into the trap that had often befallen Nokia, which was… let them work on it a bit longer because we couldn’t quite reach agreement,” Elop said. Instead, he demanded a decision that day.

“Why wait till tomorrow or next week? We could make the decision today. And we did.” Lumia was the result.

I recall when I first heard the name I went the first week or so thinking it was actually called “Lumina” (like the car) and thought that was an odd choice, but I’ve grown to like the name; it seems to have more character than “Galaxy”. Something Samsung might have noticed, by their decision to use a less common word “ATVI” for their Windows Phone line up.

There’s also a bit more about Elop speaking up against Nokia’s arrogance and stubbornness that lead to their downfall:

The problem, Elop says, was a stubbornness that came from years of being at the top. He says he has encouraged employees to adopt a “challenger mindset”.

“What I really mean is, don’t be arrogant,” he said. “There’s a number of examples over the last six, seven years, where Nokia heard trends but decided to ignore those trends because it felt that it somehow knew better… And that hurt the company badly for many years.”

Alf Noto, head of Nokia’s customer care division, said that approach was reflected in the way it now deals with customers. Elop answers around 10-20 customer emails each day, he said.

Others say Nokia has also become more humble towards its partners, including carriers and retailers who sell handsets, as well as developers who create the apps for phones.

“He took a lot of the arrogance out. For a while we were behaving like a market leader and we weren’t,” said Christof Hellmis, an executive at Nokia’s Here navigation business.

Once again seeing how the Lumia name was decided within a day, I don’t think it’s that unbelievable that the 1020/909/1000 had multiple “official” names along the way.

Source / Via

Category: Lumia, Nokia, Windows Phone