Jolla and Web 3.0

I’m getting a little bit excited about Jolla.

Jolla is what happened after the Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop, wrote his infamous memo comparing the company to being stuck on a burning oil platform. It’s Finnish for dinghy, which is something that would come in very handy in a situation like that.

There are a bunch of reasons. For one thing, I’ve followed the rise and fall of Nokia more closely than most; a close family friend was instrumental in laying the groundwork for Nokia’s success. Nokia Research Centre was in the next building from where I work; now it’s vacant except for a shiny new cafeteria that feels like a derelict spaceship where the galley androids are still happily serving food to a long-dead crew. Two of my closest colleagues are ex-Nokia; the boyfriend of another of my closest colleagues is still there but wants out. The guy at the next desk over worked in the next office from the guy who’s now the Jolla CEO.

I felt sad about seeing Nokia crash and burn, the more so for doing it by outsourcing their innovation to, of all companies, Microsoft.

So at the basic level, Jolla represents something of the best of a Nokia that no longer exists.

There’s more to this than nostalgia, though.

I’ve checked out Jolla’s recent presentations at Slush, and I think I’m finally getting what they’re trying to do. It really is pretty damn cool, and I don’t mean in the “shiny new toys” department, although I get the impression that their toys are shaping up to be pretty damn shiny. (I wonder who their manufacturing partners are? Huawei? ZTE?)

It’s the way they’re doing it.

There’s their way of communicating. It’s refreshingly different. The way they marched the entire company on-stage for their presentation, with some of their people clearly terrified of speaking in public but at the same time super-excited about what they’re doing. The way their logo and website’s color is different every time, and instead of the usual corporate pablum just aggregates everything about them on various social media. Their Twitter presence.

There’s more to this than a clever marketing strategy too, though.

What Jolla are trying to do is, I think, pretty revolutionary. They’re trying to create a whole new way of doing business, and one that’s far more in tune with the times than, say, Google, Facebook, or Apple, or even Twitter or Rovio.

The normal way of surviving in the ICT business, especially in the already-threadbare Web 2.0 environment, is to stake out a piece of ground, own it, and expand it. Facebook and Apple have been the most successful at building their walled gardens. Google is pretty damn good at it. Nokia and Microsoft are trying hard but not getting anywhere much, as far as I can tell. The potential for success is measured in market share.

Jolla, on the other hand, seems to be looking at stuff in a fundamentally different way. They’re getting people involved. Building networked communities of communities. They want to have “their” OS work on as broad a range of stuff as possible, and stuff on their OS with as many other things out there as possible. They intend to turn this into a business by packaging the chaos into something your average non-geeky guy or girl can enjoy using.

What I like about this way of working is that it’s based on generosity rather than greed. Community and peer-to-peer rather than ownership and exclusion. It’s pretty unlikely that Jolla will ever be able to extract the kind of monopolistic rents that make for Apple’s huge earnings, although I’ve no doubt that if it does take off, the founders won’t be short of pocket change. However, if it works out, they will be able to make it possible for lots of people all over the world make a living doing what they enjoy doing. And they’ll certainly be able to do so themselves.

While this approach certainly has precedents, e.g. in the FOSS community, there is something new about it. It could be the harbinger of the same kind of revolution that turned the Internet from a set of loosely-connected information resources into a set of huge social networks.

I really, truly wish them well. If Web 3.0 turns out to follow their vision, the world will be a better place.

I get a phone every two years as a perk from work. The one I have now is close to two years old. I know what brand my next one is going to be.