Where Is Nokia Now?
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Unless one is doing GUI apps required without integration with OS APIs or their native UIs, replicating everything in QML (C++ widgets are not supported) and writting JNI and Objective-C++ wrappers isn't that much fun.
Xamarin gets more love from app developers, because even before Microsoft's acquisition they had a whole set of teams dedicated to doing nothing else other than achieving parity with iOS and Android native APIs.
For example The Qt company makes about $30M in revenue and Microsoft spent about $7B for the acquisition. That's less than 1% of the $7B.
Qt was the UI toolkit for the _Meego_ OS, which Nokia was developing at a time where there was still very much room for a third mobile OS. wolfspider's paranoia has some truth behind it. When MS invested in Nokia and a "former" MS exec became CEO, his first action was to completely kill Meego and announce that Nokia would exclusively make Windows phones, even though Meego was gathering steam. Much of the company walked out of the address that he announced it at.
At the level Microsoft plays, Qt is insignificant.
http://weston.canncentral.org/writing/index.php?2011/02/18/0...
I was pretty ignorant of the rest of Nokia's business outside of mobile devices, and there are some particulars that differed a bit, but I think I called basic trajectory they traced in the mobile market from that point pretty well: premier hardware maker loses lead in market shift, turns to Microsoft for software partnership, finds itself still struggling in a competitive market, now working with another failing software platform whose destiny it can't control on top of its other problems, eventually is "married" by Microsoft.
Now divorced, and looking to make a new life, it would seem.
Selling to Microsoft when things went bad was a pretty big thing. If they had not been able to sell the mobile phone business for decent price, it might have taken down the whole company. Considering what happened, the outcome for Nokia was (IMHO) pretty spectacular.
Nokia was struggling to differentiate itself by making their own OS, which is, in retrospect, a huge mistake. Had they gone with Android, they'd leverage all their knowledge of the Linux kernel on their own hardware. Getting Android to run on the N9 would probably have been trivial and they would have a compelling product in no time.
The whole model of the handset market changed - instead of courting telcos, they needed to court end-users and they totally blew that up.
There's plenty of evidence that there was demand. I'd love to see them relaunch a similar device with updated specs today. I'd certainly get one.
Many considered it an inferior product, many had just lost the work of their lives. Most just went to the bar across the street.
I feel the heart and soul of Nokia, just like those engineers, is off of the main building somewhere. Getting drunk and telling stories of how great things were and could have been.
Ruoho = grass
You were in Ruoholahti, although I suppose there's some irony in that typo.
They're deluding themselves. Things were not great at Nokia before February 2011. The product pipeline of mostly Symbian-based smartphones was an unfolding disaster.
I recently waited for a couple of months to try and buy one of the new Nokia 6 android phones. It took so long that I ended up with a MotoG instead. It's been years since I actually owned a Nokia phone, but I have fond memories, and the technical staff always seemed very competent, passionate, and thorough.
- Heart rate used to show on a chart that would show normal range and your history. Now it's a single number. I have to swipe to see my history.
- I can no longer swipe pinch to customize the date range.
- They removed one of my features, a running average of my weight over time. If you zoom out to three-month view, you can still see an average. However, I liked seeing it always.
I think they could have updated the fonts and made the background colors shades of white and gray. This would have made it felt clean without removing a ton of functionality. Perhaps mocking up a redesign will be a weekend project for me.
The old team is still in charge of app development, the only thing Nokia has changed is the brand.
It's still a work in progress but it's functional.
(No judgement if not, but awesome if you have : )
I mean the manual approach starts with the only step of the automatic approach.
You don't have to fumble with bluetooth or apps. It takes the measurement and uploads it to the internet with no help over WiFi after you have configured it once in its lifetime. It tells me my weight and my trend on the screen, so I don't need to open the app.
Once a month or so I look online or on the app and get the effect of the spreadsheet.
A $20 scale in the bathroom with a 3x5 card and a pen nearby has worked out pretty well for me over the last 3 years. There's two whole steps, but they're entirely transparent and quick, the equipment involved is affordable, I haven't had to spend time on setup or troubleshooting beyond occasionally retrieving a new 3x5 card or pen from my office supply box. The privacy is pretty good too.
Once every week or two I look at the 3x5 cards and can see what the trend looks like.
As always, that depends on your threat model. There are potential attackers (read: snooping family members) with physical access to my bathroom.
End of the day, your weight doesn't fluctuate that much... that level of precision doesn't add much value and can make weight loss harder.
It does if that's a focus of your health efforts.
> ...that level of precision doesn't add much value and can make weight loss harder.
In fact, that daily feedback is immensely helpful. Very quickly, you begin to understand the connection between your actions of the last day or two and your weight.
Really? According to e.g. the Mayo Clinic, a healthy weight loss programme is aiming for no more than 2 lbs lost per week. That's 4.5 oz per day.
Edit: If you go any faster, you're mainly just dehydrating yourself and you'll bounce right back up (maybe even higher).
Meanwhile, your body weight fluctuates by up to 64 oz in 24 hours as you eat, drink and go to the toilet. There's a whole forest of confounding variables, and what you're doing is looking at twigs and going "Significant!"
E.g. eating salty food the night before will easily retain an extra 20 oz of water in your body the next morning. That's got nothing to do with weight loss. But salty food often has a lot of fat, so you go "Correlation! Causation!"
Really, if you're looking at weight changes on time scales less than two weeks, you're only chasing patterns in randomness and fooling yourself.
There's lot of reasons to use computers, but there's also a large problem space where it's really hard to beat pencil and paper. They even usually come pre-installed in most offices and homes.
You're vastly overestimating the friction here.
The Withings is $100. So it’s up to the consumer of the simplicity, ease of use, lack of friction in monitoring, and saving of time is worth $40-60 extra.
If I save 30-45 mins of my time over the life of the scale: yes it is. Just from time alone (not taking other benefits into account yet) That’s not wasteful - that’s economical long term.
You’re promoting such short term thinking.
This is just an exercise in false progress. The average scale has an error range of 10-20 oz for a 200lb load. Automating something of little value (i.e. Daily or more frequent body measurements) doesn't make it more valuable.
The network side of Nokia is heavily dependent on big buyers. It used to be that telecom service providers were national and fragmented. That allowed many companies with localized services to serve them. Of course there are efficiencies to be gained by running networks across borders and buying in bulk. The consolidation on the service provider side prompted a consolidation on the network equipment provider side.
Nokia's networks part merged with Siemens Networks part in a "merger of equals" imho. not the most effective manner to do these things. Then Alcatel-Lucent was folded in as well. It is worth contrasting Nokia's strategy with it's Nordic arch rival Ericsson who went through a consolidation and rejuvenation a few years earlier and pursued a more organic growth path.
I am not sure why this badge engineering bugs me, to make me think they are not real Nokia. More generally, why is it that badge engineering sometimes is seen as okay and sometimes not?
To take an automotive analogy, in the VW group there are various high end brands, e.g. Bentley and Bugatti. Both these marques are seen as having heritage even if the engines are 'glorified Golf engines' to a certain extent, even if built in heritage locations (e.g. Crewe, UK) rather than straight out of Wolfsburg. Same with the BMW brands - the Mini and Rolls Royce cars aren't seen as badly styled BMWs, but with heritage intact.
Perhaps the reason that these auto brands are okay is that there really has been innovation, the product line has evolved and the reputation survives. Getting back to the Nokia 'phones', there is no innovation in bringing out a ten-year-old product, OEM made by some randoms. This product makes 'Nokia' one of those fake brands in my estimation and obfuscates the real Nokia that is innovating with the backend hardware.
Imagine if IBM, when they sold their PC hardware, decided to let Lenovo use not just 'ThinkPad' but 'IBM' on the products. You would have no idea as a casual observer that 'IBM were still going'. Nokia just had numbers for their product line, no household name for that, as per 'ThinkPad'.
I am most amazed that Microsoft could not make this work and I think it was the death of the evil Microsoft that cowards used to love and the rest of us used to hate. The once fearsome Microsoft were humbled by it. Even today there is definite scope for being able to carry your office PC around in mini-form in a phone in some seamless way, as hinted at with 'Continuum' and so forth. But whatever happens on the Microsoft Phone platform is negated by things like 'not being able to play YouTube' on it.
So basically the phones are designed by the same engineers, and the office where they are designed is right next-door to Nokia. The reason it's a separate company is just that Nokia is not that interested in making phones right now.
Compare that to computers which have changed dramatically in a short amount of time.
The other thing to remember is that you're comparing technologies at different parts of their life-cycle: automotive technology matured half a century earlier so it's unsurprising that there's less room for dramatic change, just as the computing market has had periodic plateaus where the annual changes were far less significant to users – how many normal people even know what CPU/GPU they're using?
(and, of course, for awhile they've been moving together as we're seeing manufacturers shipping cars which have things like the ability to stop when a kid jumps in front of the vehicle. That's not just a car thing or just a computer thing but it'll save tens of thousands of lives, which seems a lot more significant than most of what's in an app store)
There was something about the culture there that just made it an incredible place to work for everyone. An environment where people were treated with dignity and respect and rewarded with generosity.
The Fins are incredibly hard working and talented along with their US counterparts. I imagine any company that hired an ex Nokia employee was rewarded well.
The company has greatness in it, would not surprise me at all if it rose like a phoenix from the ashes.
Also, as far as Socialist countries go, there are plenty that come short when it comes to business (Italy, Spain, Greece,etc...)
They also did consumer electronics (VHS, TV) and PCs (desktop and laptops) using sub brands though.
During the netbook fad, Nokia also release a high-end one under the Nokia brand.
They could be selling euthanasia kits and I'd get in line for one.
Though unfortunately Nokia isn't going there.
A big part of the Alcatel acquisition was acquiring their customers - in a recent All Hands meeting, Nokia stated they were planning to move away from "nuts and bolts engineering". In America at least.
As a German I say: I would not say we can't do software or we are bad at it. "Getting really big" is not the typical German culture - so instead we have software companies from mittelstand that are quite successful in their niche, but if you don't work in the specific industry, you surely have never heard of.
What we are really bad at is internet-based (cloud-based) services. On one hand in Germany there are strong data protection laws which make some kind of monetization harder - but only people from Germany and neighboring countries seem to care about what is done with their data. On the other hand there existed German companies that tried to provide similar services to GMail, Dropbox etc., but they simply did not have the large financial backing that is necessary to provide such a service with large capacities for free in the hope that some time in the future they will make money on it. So they had to do monetization attempts much earlier on which did not work out well.
I don't think data protection is our problem. For one thing, if our government really meant it (which they don't), we could build businesses that attract customers from all over the world who need strong data protection laws they can't find anywhere else.
For another thing, there probably is a huge, unexplored market for all kinds of software which would be in line with the current law.
However, there are many roadblocks that hinder people from experimenting, like too much bureaucracy and financial dangers (UBI might come in handy here)
And then there are "the little things". Take that law which urges you to fully disclose your address on your website. If I had build twitter, without knowing how it is going to turn out, I would not want my boss to be able to find out what I do in my spare time. In other words, I wouldn't have put it online.
This is what happened to Booking.com, sold to Priceline back in 2005 for about $150M due to lack of growth capital, currently Booking.com accounts for 70% of Priceline's revenue, which, with some handwaving, would amount to a virtual market cap of 50+ Billion $ if hypothetically they had continued on their own.
Sage and Sophos are pretty well known.
Generally though I agree and it's something Europe should/could be good at since they are high paying jobs that require a good thorough educational system.
I know Nokia is a strong brand, but I doubt that is the proper way for them to get back to being loved company.
You can see all their consumer products just as a way to ensure that there are products that push 5G to the max in terms of low consumption/latency/bandwidth in the next 5-10 years. Milking and maintaining the strong consumer brand is extra.
Successors of Ozo camera will the bandwidth hog in 5G.
Withings products are the platform they will use to push factor 10 reduction in energy consumption and “sleep modes” for always on network devices that are part of 5G.
Their new deal with HMD Global / Foxconn means that others take the risk and Nokia brand stays relevant in smartphone market. They still own the brand but they don't but significant money into it.
I see this a lot with respect to poorer eurozone countries like Greece. I wonder if it's part of the reason why some U.S. states like West Virginia are (apparently permanently) poor. Would the U.S. economy be more dynamic and productive if each state had its own dollar?
Larger countries (including the UK) are not necessarily Optimum Currency Areas but can mask the effects by using fiscal transfers between richer areas (or states) and poorer areas (or states).
Some smaller countries do better sharing a currency even without the fiscal transfers, (such as Switzerland and Luxembourg I believe).
The Euro is a classic example of far too large an area, encompassing widely disparate economies, and without sufficient balancing fiscal transfers - hence the considered opinion of many people that the Euro as it is currently constituted is not viable over a longer time period. To survive, the Euro requires one of: (a) Strong Political Union and Fiscal Transfers (b) The Departure of Weaker Economies (such as Greece) (c) Breakup, into for example a "Northern" Euro and a "Southern" Euro
Link : http://www.chicagofed.org/digital_assets/publications/workin...
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/07/the-sun...
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/11/nokia-u...
Source: I went to school with a Son of a Nokia employee who informed me the origin of the name wasn't anything exotic, but a specific town in Finland. Thus, I gather it's still there.
Nokia's headquarters have been in the city of Espoo for a long time (near Helsinki). The area in Espoo where they have their office, Otaniemi, is home to many Helsinki-area tech companies, Aalto University, and many science and engineering institutions.
Much of the nostalgia connected with this brand is from its early phone days, it's been an utter mess since.
To that extend, there are very little highlights since then.
However, top of the line Nokia phones were had great hardware and construction quality. Look up Nokia E51 or Nokia N9.
What hobbled them was Symbian. Nokia N9 was close to "escape velocity" since the OS was really cool. But by then Nokia pivoted to Microsoft and...
In the early times there were great phones by Nokia, but also among the later ones there were great ones. Just mention "Nokia N900" on HN and get detailed explanations... ;-)