THE WIRELESS WONDER COMPANY Nokia Corp., Chairman and CEO AGE 49 ADDRESSwww.nokia.com BIO No one makes more mobile phones than Finland's Nokia--this year more than 70
million units--but that's nothing to Jorma Ollila. He figures that once you can get
the Net on your phone, sales will zoom toward 1 billion. His idea: remake Nokia
into a kind of wireless Cisco, providing the plumbing to manage all the airwave
traffic. If he succeeds, the Internet will be unbound from the desktop, turning
e-mail and the Web into everywhere, all-the-time experiences. (Won't that
make Amazon's Jeff Bezos happy?)
Nokia started in the 1860s as a pulp mill on the outskirts of Helsinki; the company
didn't develop its focus on phones until the early 1990s when Ollila, then a junior
exec, helped jump-start the GSM standard that European cell phones use. Now
Nokia is backing a host of new standards for so-called 3G (third generation)
wireless that will also handle Internet connections as fast as cable modems.
Ollila is active in a partnership called Symbian, which got Nokia, Motorola,
Ericsson and Psion to cooperate on a handheld operating system that's not
owned by Bill Gates. BEST LINE "We now see the emergence of the wireless information society." FORWARD TILT Nokia becomes the perfect hybrid, combining the gotta-have
design sense of Apple with the no-nonsense business acumen of Cisco.
