Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones
medium.com
medium.com
Having two competing OS teams was a bad choice made much earlier by Elop's predecessors, who didn't understand software (the previous Nokia CEO came to that position from the legal department — a terrible mismatch for a company about to be overrun by Apple and Google). Elop was fundamentally right in killing both of Nokia's operating systems. Symbian sales were collapsing in early 2011 because the devices just couldn't respond to user expectations anymore, not because of anything Elop did.
I can see why Elop picked Windows Phone over Android: it truly was a more innovative UI and Microsoft was willing to pay Nokia a billion USD per year for the partnership. Elop's grave mistake was not having a replacement ready to go. The Lumias shipped way too late. Playing "armchair CEO", I have no idea how I would have solved that either.
In any case, Nokia didn't end up too poorly. Microsoft bought the phone division that was bleeding cash, and that money gave Nokia the opportunity to buy back its network division that had been a joint venture between Nokia and Siemens. The outcome was probably better than if Nokia had tried to downscale itself into a commodity Android vendor.
I've been using a Xperia X running Sailfish for the last week, and can't get over how well Android apps run along side beautiful native Sailfish apps. While Google Play Services are kinda hacky to get up and running, if you can live out of F-Droid and/or the Amazon app store, everything Just Works. Even Prime Video and Netflix.
Nokia was coming from a similar position as BlackBerry, so I don't see how it would have worked for them either.
I really tried hard to like the system, but let's not exaggerate its strengths. The open source software was mostly amateur ports from desktop Linux.
I remember back in 2008 demoing my Nokia 800 mini tablet to someone who had got a brand new iPhone 3G. There just wasn't any contest. The Maemo software felt like a product of the '90s, and the hardware clearly wasn't by Nokia's "A Team".
I still miss the BB10 workflow. Messaging, multitasking, swiping was all perfected ahead of the mediocre implementation of those in iOS 11, but the X is so fast, I can just brute force my way around the UI gaps and get shit done more quickly.
Nothing will ever replace the Hub, though.
Is it worth the switch over from F-Droid to Sailfish + F-Droid?
Jolla seems to have no interest in markets outside of Europe (I had to use a UK prepaid bank card and vpn to urchase it from the US), so a great many folks who would like to develop for it can't even get ahold of a device without jumping over hurdles.
I'm to use this phone until either the Librem 5 or Pyra ship, but won't hold my breath.
Personally, I think they should have gone with AOSP and leveraged Qt: by the end of 2010, they'd already gotten their two operating systems (Symbian and MeeGo) to a point where it wasn't a lot of work to recompile applications for one to run on the other. (N.B.: I don't know how much of this work ever actually made it out of Nokia. I was working there in 2010, when all of this was going down.) Given that Qt already ran on Android, IIRC, it might not have been that much work to do the same thing on top of AOSP, producing a Nokia-specific release that could run Android software and provide a clear path forward for Symbian users and developers. I was a little shocked that they didn't release a Qt compatibility layer for Windows Phone, instead choosing to pretty much leave their existing developer community on that burning platform.
The Lumias did ship too late, but I think the previous commenter who referred to the "Osborne Effect" has it right; a Nokia that had appeared firmly committed to Symbian and forging a bridge from the existing to the forthcoming generation might have fared considerably better. The Nokia N8 and N9 should have been supported as flagships rather than sort of apologetically shoved out the door with "DEAD PHONE WALKING" written on the boxes. On a practical level, this might not have saved them (especially if they'd stuck with Windows Phone, which it turned out the market really hadn't been waiting for after all), but it might have given them a fighting chance.
I don't think Nokia would have tried to downscale itself either way, by the way -- they'd have kept their network equipment division, and might have even kept their mapping division. They'd balanced that with consumer mobile hardware for years before that, after all; I don't see why they couldn't have kept doing that with Android devices.
One thing -
> I was a little shocked that they didn't release a Qt compatibility layer for Windows Phone
Windows Phone 7, which was current at the time of the switch, was managed-code only (i.e. .NET). There was no way to port Qt to it and no way to leverage any experience that developers for their existing platforms already had. That was one reason the switch was so dramatic.
D'oh! I didn't know that. (I was laid off right before the Windows Phone switch was announced, so never had any reason to look into it.) Welp.
> The Nokia N8 and N9 should have been supported as flagships rather than sort of apologetically shoved out the door with "DEAD PHONE WALKING" written on the boxes.
The N8 shipped in late 2010, before Elop had done anything. It had a huge marketing campaign and was Nokia's great Symbian hope. A poor market response was entirely due to the product itself.
The painfully visible shortcomings of the N8 probably were a factor in Elop's decision. Nokia's pipeline for 2011-2012 was filled with devices built on the N8's software and even older Symbian versions, and it was obvious those would not sell.
> I don't think Nokia would have tried to downscale itself either way, by the way -- they'd have kept their network equipment division, and might have even kept their mapping division
The phone division was losing money. Selling it to Microsoft gave Nokia the cash to buy out Nokia Siemens Networks. Selling maps gave the cash to expand those operations. If Nokia had kept phones and maps, they wouldn't have networks today.
The book says otherwise. Elop met with Ballmer twice during the negotiations. He never once met with Google representatives even once.
Elop kept a physical distance from the negotiations. He and Schmidt had not met in a real negotiation even once. There were two or three phone negotiations, but there were only meetings at events, at the most. Elop was also not known to have met any of the other Google negotiators. This makes one wonder, when it is known that Elop met Microsoft’s Ballmer at least twice in direct negotiations.
>With Google, that was an either/or choice
No it wasn't. The book details how Google was prepared to make concessions for Nokia.
According to a source present, Google seemed to really want Nokia to join the Android world. The company assured that Android can be customized more than Nokia understood, especially compared with Windows Phone. Even if Google was criticized continuously for having Samsung, HTC and Sony Android phones differ from each other too much, Nokia would be given leeway to create its own user experience. Google saw that Nokia differentiated from these competitors in that it had a global area of operation. Nokia would be able to create better local services and user experiences for network providers and customers, one person present remembers being discussed. The Nokians also noticed that they had been living partially with misinformation. Nokia could continue with Android with its own maps side-by-side with Google’s maps. The same applied with the app store. Nokia’s music service as well as ovi.com could continue, as long as the phone had Google Play.
As the negotiations proceeded, a solution was found. Google offered Nokia, among other things, plenty of say in choosing the direction of Android development. By directing Android development to align with its own competitive goals, Nokia would gain some advantage, even if the changes would be available for everyone at the same time. Now Nokia was interested. Android and Nokia had an area where their interests converged in a brilliant way: Developing countries. If Android could be made to work on cheap hardware, Nokia would be best at getting in through in developing markets. The arrangement was enticing. Google would secure the position it was dreaming of in smartphones, and Nokia would become part of virgin Android markets. The precise details remained hidden, but Nokia was able to learn that Google worked Android into clearly cheaper models than Windows Phone.
Google made a substantial offer regarding distribution of income. Nokia would have gotten a portion of the income from Google’s search engine, app store, and other services which originate from Nokia phones, and the terms would be in relation to Nokia’s influence in the ecosystem. We don’t have information about precise percentages, but at any rate, Google’s promise was quite exceptional, considering that Nokia would still have been able to keep its own services in its phones.
Contrary to what Nokia has claimed, Google was ready for concessions. It was ready to flex as far as it could in the framework of OHA, and even then some more.
Then why were Nokia services side by side with Microsoft services on Nokia Windows Phones? Also, the Nokia app store was nowhere to be found.
Additionally, according to a review of the Lumia 800, by The Verge[1], there was almost nothing to differentiate the device from any other WP device produced by HTC or Samsung. The extent of the Nokia modifications amounted to nothing more than Nokia Drive, Nokia Music and sounds, ringtones and wallpapers. Is this what Nokia had in mind when selecting Windows Phone to showcase their services and USP? Unique Nokia sounds, ringtones and wallpapers?
The Lumias always had a number of exclusive Nokia-only "accessory" apps like Glance that were so well embedded they seemed like built-in Windows Phone apps (and unsurprisingly subsequently became built-in platform-wide apps post-Nokia acquisition) that a lot of people didn't notice they were Nokia services/value adds. On the one hand, that was part of why the Lumias were so great at the time was how seamlessly they upgraded the platform as a whole, but on the other hand, it's a weird marketing failure that comparison shoppers may not have realized what was an important value-adding Nokia app/setting/feature and not a Microsoft app/setting/feature, and what value Nokia was adding on top of the platform.
It's certainly complex to armchair quarterback the idea, but I don't think Nokia would have had any more luck than Amazon's FireOS (or the failed/doomed commercial attempt at Cyanogen, for that matter) if they had attempted that. AOSP has long been a seemingly open carrot with far too many hidden and closed sticks in Google's control.
FireOS is still used on the Fire tablets, which appear to be one of the most successful non-Apple tablet around. At least successful enough for it to be on its 7th generation with yearly refreshes, anyway. Similarly FireOS continues to mostly track AOSP, with the Android 7.1-based FireOS 6 being the latest release.
I wouldn't be so quick to blame FirePhone's failings on FireOS vs. Google given the number of gimmicks FirePhone tried to do, like the weird 4 front-facing cameras doing pretend-depth on the UI. I think would be hard to definitively state FirePhone failed purely because of FireOS not being Google-certified. FireOS probably didn't help, sure, but I don't think it was FirePhone's exclusive failure point, either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_OS#List_of_Fire_OS_versio...
Even before Google started moving most API investment out of AOSP and into Google Play directly, FireOS has never felt like a "real" Android. I'd wager most of its tablet users don't even realize the connection to Android. At this point, how much does Amazon really benefit from AOSP that aren't already handling themselves?
This is entirely my own supposition, but based on what I've seen of the entirely different apps platform and ecosystem for the Echo devices, especially the Echo Show "tablet", and how well it is currently doing in the market, it is very easy for me to imagine Amazon will also be getting out of the AOSP game eventually on its Fire tablets/sticks as well. It's easy to imagine Amazon would be happier to have an ecosystem it more directly owns (and doesn't have to keep fighting a cold war with Google Play).
People who followed the ecosystems very closely then knew that even Android was lucky to see the success it did against iOS, and that success was almost exclusively due to the fact that "it was there first" to allow the OEMs to unite against iOS as an ecosystem. But even that wasn't easy at all and the fans had to suffer through ~4 years of Android phones being "close, but no cigar" compared to the iPhone. This is why WP had no way of winning a significant portion of the market being multiple years behind in development, interest, and ecosystem.
If the roles had been reversed for WP and Android, and WP launched in 2008 and Android in 2011-2012, I don't think Android would've seen too much success either, even though it would be open source. Maybe it would've gotten like 20% of the market if Google played its cards right, but I think WP would have dominated.
But yes, the time to shine for Meego (Maemo actually) was immediately after they announced it. However, it was obvious the leadership didn't want to "rock the boat" for the Symbian cash cow. By the time they had to pick between WP and Android, it was of course way too late for Meego.
WP's problem was in the length of time between flagship phones, and the length of time between updates.
WP7 came out, with a big marketing push, and it was an overall good OS. The initial wave of phones were received OK, but the platform had some warts that needed to be cleaned up.
What MS did is announce that they were going to release an update, and then do a huge rewrite. 7.5 came out, fixed all the obvious show stopper issues, and then all MS needed to do was keep iterating the platform.
But they didn't. They waited 2 years to release 8.0 instead. Which regressed features from 7.5, asked developers to learn a new API, and had features missing from that API that used to exist in 7.5.
At this point the platform has lost a lot of mind share, new phones need to come out yearly, not on some random scattershot schedule. iOS sees regular platform updates, and is iterating much faster. Android is still a dumpster fire at this point, and could have been eclipsed.
So then WP8 finally comes out. Android is in a much better spot, and iOS looks pretty damn spiffy.
New API, huge chunks of functionality are missing, making many types of apps not even possible to write.
But hey, the Lumia 1020 comes out and gains a TON of attention. The best mobile camera ever made!
And then Microsoft up and does nothing for another two years. They stop releasing flagship handsets, and basically let the brand die.
Finally 8.1 comes out, but by this time it is too late. No developers, the APIs finally aren't terri-bad but they are still miserable to develop for compared to anything else, and all mind share has been lost. 8.1 is actually a good OS (unless you are a developer), but 7.5 was also a good OS, 4 years earlier.
If MS had released updates to the 7.x line every 6 months, focusing on making the developer's lives easier, they could have won. 7.x required far fewer resources than Android, ran much smoother, and performed well on lower cost devices.
But instead someone in the MS engineering department won, and Windows Phone underwent a complete OS rewrite. The reason was merging the Mobile org and the Windows org together, and Engineers played politics instead of writing software, thus one of the kernel teams had to go.
(It's possible that my local perspective is overvaluing them though, German market shares often don't match what's going on e.g. in the US)
I liked the cameras on Lumias better, but overall, I have no complaints about my Nokia 6 - and it can probably stop a bullet too.
> In 1983, the computer manufacturer Osborne announced several new models of computers, which they said would be launched in sales after one year. In the meanwhile, sales of the old models plummeted because the consumers were waiting for the new models. Osborne ended up in bankruptcy. Gerard Ratner, on the other hand, was the CEO of the jewelry company Ratners. He gave a speech in 1991, where he said that Ratners products were so cheap because they were “total crap”. The consumers believed him and stopped buying.
> Elop announced that Nokia is giving up on Symbian before any Windows Phone smartphone was ready (Osborne effect) and with his “burning platform” speech, expressed that Symbian and MeeGo were trash (Ratner effect).
https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52...
That was an accurate (and arguably obvious) description of the market in 2011. Nokia had a big problem on their hands and that's true whether they chose to acknowledge it or not.
Should the CEO have stayed silent to his own staff about the perilous fate of the projects they were working on?
It was clearly made by disparate teams who didn't talk to each other. The design language was all over the place, the radio performance inadequate, and there was no sensible way to develop or release apps for it.
Nokia made brilliant firmware, and amazing hardware. But they simply didn't have the ability to design beautiful, usable software.
Personally, I'd have gone with Android. But you don't hire a Microsoft guy for anything other than getting in bed with MS.
I had a N9, and I completely agree with the person above. The funniest thing is that when I got the phone and showed it to a friend who had just received the most recent Nexus at the time, the first thing he did was just scrolling, switching between apps and admiring how smooth everything was. The illusion faded quickly when you tried to open a web page with any javascript.
As far as I know, the code behind the scenes and especially the app store were a mess, but it didn't show to the user. And of course every app could access everything.
I also had the N8, their last hurrah with Symbian. Three years after the iPhone launch and they were so far behind it was embarrassing.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2010/10/n8-fail-reasons-why-the-nok...
Symbian was always likely to be clumsy, but I was surprised how well they made it work by the end. (I should say, my Nokia 700 was my first and only Symbian phone, and I came into it expecting the worst, having heard a lot from other developers.)
I'm sure the N8 lost them a lot of fans though. I had some friends who were positively angry about it.
My plan was to buy the next one at next contract change - of course that wasn't going to be possible. (I've always had a liking for the Communicator layout, going all the way back to Psion 3s)
Then some months later, for some reason, I ended up owning a phone with the last release of Symbian on it (Symbian Belle). And I realised that the original Nokia plan wasn't as stupid as it seemed.
Symbian Belle was a surprisingly smooth and pleasant OS -- much smoother in many contexts than Android at the time. It had some serious pitfalls, but it turned out there was quite a lot of productive turd-polishing that could be done. A lot of the good stuff on Belle was down to Qt Quick, which was the same framework as they were intending to carry through for Meego developers. And although I never used Meego, I can believe that it could have worked very nicely in the end, and a polished Symbian could have seen it through for a while.
But I was just as surprised to find out how much infrastructure there was behind it all. Nokia had an app store and billing platform serving a lot of countries and languages, that could bill you for apps either from credit card or straight from your carrier balance. They had one of the best mapping providers, a decent weather service, and a fine music provider. They had first-class hardware and a lot of public goodwill.
The experience changed my mind completely. Nokia could have done it with Symbian and Meego.
At that point it was all about the ecosystem. It didn't matter anymore even if they did get the OS right.
- Internal politics and the "old school" symbian developers not buying into this ecosystem
- MeeGo/Maemo was more worried with Free Software "circle self pleasing" and rewriting stuff every couple of months than actually shipping a product
How did Android approach the same problem? Kept the kernel and replaced X and most of userspace with dedicated libraries and binaries. Focused on shipping a product (first Android versions were very poor) and after the iPhone came focused on making it similar.
Meego was a distraction and pretty much a mistake. I think it was mainly pushed by Intel so they have a reason to sell Atom. People may not remember but before "netbooks" Atom was supposed to go into Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), which were much smaller than netbooks but larger than smartphones.
Netbooks pretty much came out as a "trial and error" device from PC manufacturers, who were failing with MIDs. If I remember right, Microsoft also had to extend selling new XP licenses post-Windows 7 launch, because of the netbook popularity, and because it didn't want Linux to become popular on them.
The N9 was a really polished product. Offline navigation was incredibly good. I still use it. With a bit of care it could have been a nice product.
It definitely still is. It's unfortunate that map updates are no longer available.
If they had focused on shipping and improving the user/developer experience instead of rewriting their product every year or so (and while I didn't see the N9 I did see the N800/N900 and the experience wasn't great - also because of hw issues) we wouldn't be having this conversation
N9 was released in September 2011 that's 5 years after the first iPhone and Android had an ok product by then.
Had them focused on improving what they had on the N800 (released January 2007) instead of what they did they would have owned the market. Instead they let Android surpass them. They had everything to succeed and THEY BLEW IT