Nokia’s collapse turned a sleepy town in Finland into an internet wonderland
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There's definitely lessons their for the rest of Europe.
Very true! Many colleagues I met here were ex-nokians. It seems that the market was able to absorb at least a bunch of them over time.
Or build entire new cities. This is what the UK did after WW2 [0], building dozens of new cities of 100k to 250k people, most notably Milton Keynes, Peterborough and Northampton.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdo...
What it means is that 65% of homes are occupied by their owners. It doesn't mean that 65% of people live in their own homes, but I suspect it is not too far off the share of people living in their own home or in a home owned by a family member or partner.
I guess the difference is people renting a room in a house occupied by its owner. Did I forget anyone?
It may not be the same at all in big cities though. I know that homeownership rates in London have collapsed far below 50% in recent years.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/home-ownership-r...
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/housing/o...
Theres also the question of what it means to own ones house. A lot of people have a mortgage for their house, but the relationship between this and benefitting from the value appreciating is different for different people.
"Households in London were fairly evenly distributed across the tenures, with half in owner occupation and half in the rented sectors."
Section 1.10 in https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-housing-sur...
To get the number of voters you could weight by average occupancies but I don't know what those numbers are.
Or enact laws that don't have a negative effect on most voters - e.g. block non-resident ownership like in NZ and give owner-occupiers the same tax breaks as landlords.
I would gladly see the value of my house drop by 60%, if it meant that all the bigger/nicer houses in the area also dropped by 60%.
For most homeowners, the absolute value of their house is broadly irrelevant. What matters most is the difference between their current house and the next one they want to move to.
People looking to stay put for the foreseeable future are unaffected by changes in house prices.
Empty nest downshifters benefit from prices remaining high and rising, as do flippers, landlords, and those with a very high LTV who wish to move.
People looking to move to a bigger/better house would benefit (e.g. renters saving up to buy, a young family currently outgrowing the house that was perfect when the parents were just a couple).
Thank you!! Exactly this
Say I own 50% of the equity in a home valued at $1M today, and I want to move into a new home valued at $1.5M.
I sell my current home, and I realize enough cash ($0.5M) to cover a 33% down-payment on the new home. Assuming I have the cash flow to satisfy the lender I can pay the mortgage, I can make the move.
But assume all property decreases in value by half. Now when I come to sell my home I only get back enough to repay the mortgage and I have nothing to fund a down-payment on the new home.
Even though the difference in price between the homes halved, I can no longer afford the move.
If you were trying to move from a 150K place to a 200K place, you are now moving from a 60K place to an 80K place.
You never had that 90K that you just "lost". Your net worth didn't really drop from 150K+savings to 60K+savings, it was always 1house+savings.
If you limit yourself solely to the utility value of the home (i.e. you can live in it), you could perhaps convince yourself of that, but for most people their home is the largest investment they'll ever make.
I know a lot of people (including myself) have "sell home, move to a lower cost-of-living area, roll excess cash into retirement funds" as part of their retirement plan.
Which is why almost any talk of trying to actually make systemic, long-term fixes to the housing market--to move it back towards something that provides housing for actual people instead of an investment vehicle for those (shrinking few) who are lucky enough to get on the property ladder--feels doomed to failure. That this situation sustains means that people who have spent many years in a place that is a high cost-of-living area will not be able to retire there unless, again, they got lucky on the property ladder.
On a macro level, people will say that they want fixes and that people should be able to find housing near jobs and all of that. But, at the individual level, rising housing prices that stay high over the long term are beneficial to so many people in a way that, were it to change, would fundamentally crash their post-work prospects. So everyone who owns property is scared to death of that being undermined, to the point that it is, intentional or not, an "I got mine don't touch it" situation.
I know that's a bluntly unfair way to put it because people are simply playing the game as it exists, but that it's unfair doesn't mean it's not also true.
It isn't about limiting yourself solely to the utility value, but about the difficulty in separating the utility from the investment.
You can sell your shares for market value at any time, and use the proceeds for whatever you want.
If you sell your only home, you usually then need to spend money on replacing it, whether in the form of rent, mortgage, or using the proceeds to buy outright.
Say I owe $400K on a $1M home, and I want a $1.5M home. I sell my home to make a 600K downpayment and have to borrow 900K in order to buy that new place.
Let's say all property decreases by half. My home is now 500K, the one I want is now 750K.
I sell up and have a 100K (13%) downpayment and have to borrow 650K to cover the rest.
My LTV has risen considerably, and if the market continues to fall, I might be stuck with negative equity, but I still owe less than I would at the higher prices.
Lenders might be less likely to lend in that scenario, but there will be a sweet spot somewhere where the price drop corresponds to something sufficiently below the majority of movers' LTVs to be beneficial for homebuyers in general.
Maybe you mean to say that what matters is the difference between the price of the desired future home and the amount of salable equity that they have in their current home?
Someone who took out a 100% LTV mortgage ten years ago and only paid the interest would now own about 30% of the equity.
Housing cannot be both 1) "a good investment" in that it grows more than the economy 2) and affordable.
Ideally, prices would be fairly stable, so that people can swap out of different housing depending on their needs at different stages of life without stressing too much about 'the market'.
Real estate is a backstop on equity.
Leveraged real estate is (as with homeowners) a tremendous risk to financing firms.
They will (and have) fought tooth and nail to resist any depreciation of assets.
This is one of the resistances to technological innovations that Bernhard J. Stern wrote of in 1937. The commonality with the other examples he gives is striking.
https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...
Retyped Markdown: https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is
Prices are driven by supply and demand. Highly desirable locations with limited scope to increase supply have always been expensive, and will always be expensive.
Oulu is a small place almost literally in the middle of nowhere and extremely North, hardly a property hotspot.
I guess the question is "let people build condos" ... where? What if there's a natural park? Or what if something is private property and the owner doesn't want you to build there?
Zoning laws basically prevent construction of condos even by the owners of the property in like 90% of the Bay Area, if not more...
You know it's possible to regulate prices with laws, do you? The thing you said is not a law of nature, just something we agreed on. And we can change our mind.
Price controls do not work and are actually damaging because instead of trying to balance supply and demand they make the imbalance even worse. They do not remove the pressure of supply and demand, which continues to be at play.
I'm not trying to be coy, I simply haven't seen a viable alternative with details. And since most of the world converged on using money to decide allocation of resources, I'm wondering if the alternatives have significant drawbacks.
I understand that wealth begetting wealth, especially for generations seems unfair. But the solution to that doesn't have to be lottery or waiting list of housing. If the goal is to spread the wealth around more evenly, then that can be accomplished with higher taxes.
You can't legislate what people value, but you can change things so they value them more or less. I think the most promising thing would be to convince companies to create jobs in places where the cost of housing is lower.
There has to be some selection. With free market, the selection is about how much you can or are willing to pay. Cap the rents and other criteria will be used. In many cases, more or less legal froms of bribery will make up for the gap in value.
Another common thing that happens when rents are capped is that landlords are going to make sure that they are only renting to the rich, because the rich are less likely to default. How are they going to know that you are rich? Obvious ones are to look at your bank account (privacy?), but unfair criteria like race can also be used.
You can also become communist, have the state take all housing and redistribute them "fairly". I think it is an area where communism actually works, but it probably won't be well received in the US...
You know they did just that in Venezuela, with noble intentions, do you?
Interest rates and mortgage policies have a huge effect on housing prices.
Bizarre tax policies like the ability for Americans to write off interest on mortgages also certainly don't help.
There are governments that intervene directly to keep their housing market cool in order to maintain affordable housing stock for their workers. My understanding is the German state tries to do this, for example, in order to maintain its ability to be a relevant industrial exporter.
https://qz.com/167887/germany-has-one-of-the-worlds-lowest-h...
Prices are driven up because people compete to buy a limited stock.
Restrictions on mortgages and higher rates to not necessarily make desirable areas more affordable. The absolute prices might be lower, indeed, but fewer people will also be able to afford the mortgages.
For effective and sustainable affordability there is no alternative to balancing supply and demand.
So it should be no surprise that in countries where the state effectively encourages private home ownership through favourable loans that the demand for private homes is high enough to drive prices high.
Obviously there is the supply side to this. I think in some regions, especially the badly planned sprawl that is Silicon Valley, restrictions on density and supply are really a big part of the problem. But it doesn't explain it everywhere. There are regions where construction and density are not similarly restricted that still have high, unaffordable home prices, because demand for single family homes is effectively stimulated by economic policy.
The demand for private homes is driven by people wanting to live in a specific location. Prices are then set according to how that aligns with supply.
It is unrealistic to expect every locations to be affordable to everyone.
Apart from increasing supply, a remedy is to spread demand. Prices in e.g. London or Silicon Valley are high in part because these are very attractive locations and there are so in part because jobs are concentrated there.
There are macroeconomic policies that underwrite and encourage private ownership of single family homes.
The two are not equivalent in the real world.
Not quite unique: this kind of loan is available for college tuition too!
Perhaps unsurprisingly, that’s another disaster zone...
I support building up (with ample green space) to bring down the cost. But that doesn't have to be the only solution. The attitude that everyone has to work from an office every day of every week is ridiculous to me. A week or two per quarter of travel and then a strong culture around remote work will distribute the prosperity as well. The future economy is knowledge based and we better prepare for it.
one of those is not like the other. Berlin has recently passed a law capping rent at below 9 Euro per square meter (much less in many regions) all over the city.
It's the first time such a law was passed anywhere in Germany. [1]
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/eckpunkte-fuer-mi...
What if it's the reverse?
The supply of land is fixed. Its intensity of usage is not.
By imposing a per unit rent cap, what's effectively happening is that a rule is being established that no more rent than that cap can be extracted per unit. But there's no inherent restriction (zoning, construction laws, etc., being of course the exceptions) to more intensive development. Increasing the unit count.
A rent cap plus zoning restrictions is one form of death: there's no new housing supplied, and if the issue is rent control (limited rates of increase over tenancy), then the result is similar to what happens in San Francisco.
But with sane zoning and construction standards and a cap, you're inducing more intensive development -- an increase in housing supply -- by imposing an arbitrary per-unit revenue cap. And without nominally raising taxes, the bugbear of the land value tax approach.
I'm not aware this argument has ever been proposed, though I am fairly confident it has been.
Your hypothesis assumes that increasing the potential revenue by square meter has no effect attracting Urban development projects.
It seems obvious that if it's possible to increase intensity then being able to generate more income per m² only helps put together a valid business plan that increases supply.
There are two ways to increase revenue per m^2. One is to intensify the construction. The other is to limit supply.
For numerous reasons, the latter approach ... seems to predominate. Rather than constructing denser residential, commercial, and (where appropriate) industrial space, the tendency is both to sprawl out, and to simply refuse to allow new construction. San Francisco is the pathalogical case, but hardly the only, and numerous other US growth areas (LA, Seattle, Austin) and elsewhere (Sydney, Vancouver, London) are to large degrees similar. There's new construction ... of large McMansions. But not of denser forms of housing.
By imposing an arbitrary constraint in one dimension (rent extraction per unit) but allowing intensification on another (density or height of construction), this should be addressable.
Keep in mind that most of SF is at best 2 storey construction. You don't have to airdrop Salesforce Towers all over the city, only allow construction to 4-5 storeys, to more than double effective density. Apply this more broadly over the SF Bay Area, and what's become a region-threatening blockage to housing availability (and incidental issues such as traffic congestion, hours-long commutes, access to schools and services, etc., etc.) would be lifted.
The fact that landlords (or banks, through mortgages) can extract arbitrarily high amounts of rent from a given area regardless of intensity of development, is the problem. The land value tax is one approach, and is probably a better one. I'm considering what the implications of a rents cap might be.
A usual objection to rent controls (increases on existing units) is that landlords are not incentivised to maintain or improve the quality of units. Whether that might also apply to a cap is a possible objection.
you know why Oulu has inexpensive housing? Because not many people want to live there. I probably wouldn't live there even if they paid me to live there.
You want to make SF affordable? No problem, make it bad enough so that no one will want to live there
[1]: Looked it up, they're certainly getting praise for it: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-finland-beats-america-on...
finland: 5.5 million
usa: 327.1 million
USA: $60k Finland: $45k
So there's no reason Americans shouldn't have the same level of comfort.
It's not, however, useful as the sole metric for evaluating the economic condition of a society.
for me it's just a fact that in a high population, high wage, highly regulated society it's much harder to overhaul things radically than in a similar tiny nation. without some sort of a disaster (think WW2), it would be very hard to force everyone to switch from an entrenched system to a different one.
how would it be easier to force 300 million people vs 5 million?
It is fine to suggest that this system is better but there is a reason it only exists in some countries and not others. If you have a high level of business creation/destruction, it is a huge risk (Denmark is an example of a country with this system but very low regulations on business/labour, 2008 nearly killed this system). If you have a very mobile population, it doesn't work either. If you have a heterogeneous population, it doesn't work.
The simpler solution is to take the parts that will work i.e. investment in retraining.
To be totally clear: I have studied this topic (I studied econ/policy at PG level) and no research I have ever read has suggested this. Google comparative social policy research.
I understand that if you get your knowledge from misinformed politicians who haven't studied the issue but believe it will solve all their country's problems...yes, that distinction is not clear. If you actually read books though, it is quite wrong.
There are big differences between the US and EU though, not disputing that. But maybe there's a way of describing this difference that makes the distinction clearer?
Because you seem to not understand some part of this: in Europe, if you make $100k/year and you lose your job the state will pay you a percentage of your previous income for a fixed period of time (and you then get nothing or put onto a long-term unemployed program). For example, 75% so you will get pro rata $75k/year. In the UK/US, if you lose your job you will get $x/year, regardless of your previous job and what you contributed to the system (i.e. it is redistributive...some people pay a lot into the system and get nothing, people who pay nothing in get the most...insurance doesn't work this way).
The history isn't worth going into but the European welfare state was invented by Conservatives. The US/UK welfare state was invented by Socialists. Practically, what most people think about the European system is almost 100% wrong: the US/UK welfare system is intended to intervene in the market, the European welfare system is not (and the Nordic countries are usually most strident about not interfering in the market, particularly Denmark which has very high rates of job creation/destruction).
Just to be totally clear: what most Americans are being sold by Democrats is a total fiction. There is no alternative to the market. Every country that has had politicians that tried to outsmart the market has failed (the Nordic countries did this in the 80s, they were bankrupt by the early 90s). The US already has the most heavily redistributive social policy anywhere. If it isn't working, that doesn't mean you need to go further.
And yes, that is why I suggested you read about it yourself. This is seminal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Worlds_of_Welfare_Ca... - but social policy is perhaps one of the biggest areas in comparative politics (because the importance of context/history is so evident).
Social programs take care of you based on needs, regardless what you payed in. Healthcare (the public program) gives the same service to everyone while having you to pay a % of income. You won't get neither more housing nor child benefit by having payed in more.
Yes, unemployment is a bit of a special case since its goal is to minimize disruption on peoples live in case of sudden job loss. Not just being a basic safety net... those are available to everyone.
Great, you have a "real problem"...no-one cares.
Why I have to tell you this is unclear? Just look on the internet. Too much like hard work, amirite comrade? Also, you are not only reasoning from your sample size of "people I know" but that is limited to one country...at least try to be serious.
> The only way to obtain money without performing work is to be disabled. That is it.
Right, but getting a diagnosis from a psychologist that you are depressed or similar and can't work is not very hard. I've also received this kind of aid before I got a job so I know.
Though it is true the higher taxes are also the source of benefits they provide other benefits even if you're employed.
It's difficult or even impossible to translate that into different country, but I'd argue each bit has an effect over long period of time. US has become so antagonistic over the years it's hard to see it ever growing out of it. And in smaller scale of course, US must have similar kind of environments. But the cultural norms are such that it's not really a joint goal of the people to have it for everyone. It's a behavioural dilemma since in order to create such culture it has to reciprocated and seen as the "better way", but that takes generations to happen. By believing it can't be done it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our egos are too fixated on our own habits that learning to look life at different perspective is made impossible. And when happiness can be directly measured in how many dollars you have, who could convince people otherwise.
This is not possible for either countries with low income or large cultural or racial diversity because there is big difference of opinion on what is good for society
Finland is still in many ways a very conservative society.
In everyday life speaking Finnish will be beneficial, for obvious reasons. I've been here a few years now, having moved from Scotland. Using English I've been able to get my brain scanned, buy a couple of flats, deal with daycare (I became a parent after moving here), and most bureaucracy.
Finnish is indeed hard to learn, but even getting the basics down will make your life easier and better.
There's also regions along the coast where a sizable portion, or even the majority of people, are Swedish speaking[1] (and bilingual to various degrees). Swedish is an official language, and if you want to be a pain in the ass to the 95% of the population that doesn't speak Swedish apart from the mandatory school courses, you are entitled by law to get service in Swedish.
Working only in English is obviously harder, but if you want to live here, don't let that stop you.
I speak from experience. I’ve lived in a central Europe country where I cannot speak anything and it was annoying outside work; I felt like an idiot most of the time. Now I’m living in a country I can speak the language and I can interact with people, do complex things alone (moving home), and it’s way more nice to live like that.
I think there are a few exceptions in Europe, e.g The Netherlands.
There's just a big jump from simple things that will get you by to actual fluency.
In my experience Finnish is not required for jobs at 95%+ of product companies, only consultancies and even there there are exceptions.
You can check out our current positions in Finland here: https://www.toughbyte.com/developers#positions - perhaps there's something you might be interested in and if not, you can can also leave your email via the Get in touch button and we'll get back to you the moment there is.
It is very, VERY common in both IT and education sectors to hire people who speak no Finnish.
I've personally hired half-a-dozen English-speakers who do not speak any Finnish.
Our company (mobile gaming) consists of ~10% non-Finnish speakers, all of whom are very happy here. Almost ALL Finns (incl. our cleaning lady) speak good English.
My previous company (hardware) had roughly ~10% of non-Finnish speakers as well.
Both universities here have hundreds of non-Finnish speakers. The game education program in Oulu University of Applied Sciences (Oulu GameLAB) is being run by (a super smart) Romanian who does not speak a word of Finnish.
The local Nokia office has hundreds of people from abroad.
There's an active Chinese community of couple of hundred people, most of whom do not speak Finnish.
On the surface, a big difference seems to be that the current talent pool of Oulo is R&D heavy, vs the assembly labor heavy Rust Belt cities and towns.
The workers of Oulo, despite their initial misfortune and pessimism, faced a growing market for their skills - the government just needed to facilitate their transition to a new set of employers and ventures.
Does such a market exist for Rust Belt assembly workers? Probably not making the same things they made before - the auto industry is in major turmoil as it transitions to a structurally different transportation future.
I'd love to see a future where the collection of assembly skills those workers have are put to use to build the wind turbines and batteries that we desperately need, but it seems like there are both cultural and political hurdles in the way of that happening.
http://ftp.lanet.lv/ftp/mirror/x2ftp/msdos/programming/forma...
Somewhat unrelated but this really reminds me of Germany's Kurzarbeitslosengeld - short working hour unemployment benefits - which was introduced in the crisis years and is given credit why Germany has high employment and the economy quickly recovered after 2009. Companies were allowed to send employees on "part time unemployment" for a certain period of low work. So eg 300 staff get 60% hours and work 3/5 days per week and get 3/5 of their full time salary and in addition 2/5 of what they would get as unemployment benefits. This kept workers in employment, unemployment and benefit payouts low and helped make it easy for companies to keep skilled staff - and for staff to stay in employment and maybe upskill themselves in their spare time.
The scheme had some issues but overall a similarly positive impact.
I wish more countries & companies would recognise the benefits of investing in and catering for staff, rather than to see workers as replaceable widgets.
The Company was overflowing with brilliant people and was a wonderful employer.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25965140
Not just IP, but also funding for new companies.
The Nokia management used the Microsoft money to buy Siemens part of NSN (Nokia Siemens Networks) and managed to turn it around somewhat, in a situation where it looked like Ericsson and Huawei were going to be the only survivors.
I was working for a subcontractor to Nokia during 2010-2016 and we were dumbfounded in the beginning, but as the years went on that turned into a belief that Nokia scammed Microsoft in that sale.
That's what I've heard too -- They knew they were going down and simply took the opportunity to dump the handset business on Microsoft while securing funding to allow the network business to grow.
I think that's the more likely explanation. Remember that Steve Ballmer was crazy enough to also try to buy Yahoo, which would have been an even bigger disaster for Microsoft.
Paralel to that N900 was shapping up quite well, also using Qt as part of its SDK.
Being asked to throw away their Symbian Java and Qt for Windows 7 pure .NET SDK was what made the large majority abandon ship.
Naturally Elop was just driving Nokia into the position he could benefit from his compensation clauses given to him by the Nokia board.
Netflix is great example of how to do big transition right. Netflix was in renting DVDs by mail business. When the decision to move to streaming was made, Netflix CEO did not allow managers who responsible for DVD renting business into meetings where the future was planned.
People responsible for Symbian should have been locked out from all future planning. They were allowed to participate and of course they sabotaged–both intentionally and unintentionally–all big changes. Moving from hardware and embedded software world to full software platform mindset required completely different people.
When you move to smartphones as software platforms you produce basically the same phone hardware with 2-3 small variations. It was this transition that Nokia missed.
Nokia made a metric fuckton of different kinds of phones. Some of them, like your example, were just really goddamn weird and didn't really work out. But the key thing is that they weren't just sitting on their asses making a better Nokia 3310 every year.
When Nokia found a winning formula they absolutely used it and created devices based on that formula. However they were never afraid to try new weird shit. Doing new things and trying to break the mold of a traditional handset was exactly what allowed them to find new features and things to add to phones.
Their real problem was that they were too slow to adopt the changes brought forth by the iPhone, and were too confident in their dominance over the mobile market so they never saw the possibility of someone overtaking them.
It was classical engineer vs. designer/marketer viewpont.
It's slower to write in touch-screen. From objective engineering perspective it's backwards in ergonomy. But most people who are not power users like Obama and his blacberry addiction. They just want to point and drag and big screen is better for pointing.
Steve Jobs saw the trade-off. Uses are willing to write slower and do more errors in exchange of bigger screen. Nokia engineers were doing ssh connections with Nokia Communicator and iPhone UI sucked small planets for anyone writing a lot. Touch-screens are still slower for writing.
Capacitative touchscreen + "real" web browser (not WAP!) was the key capability of the iPhone. The fact that it subsumed the already successful iPod was a big benefit too.
That's an odd swipe in an otherwise good post. You don't have to use a stylus with the Galaxy Note series but the option is quite popular
Which is why nobody is buying ipad pros or surface pros and Wacom is bankrupt /s.
Having a pen in addition to capacitive touch is great. Having only a pen was not. Though the resistive screens in the Nokia N900 or the Nintendo DS for example were not bad.
A big part of Iphone 1 UI was a direct copy of HTC designs.
Well according to some folclore it wasn't that straight forward.
It also took a long time and a lot of tries from internal teams to Jobs acknowledge they were onto something. Jobs had the same concerns you mentioned, and some more (accordingly).
And one of the deal breakers for the iPhone to be launched was the Keyboard, where they were predicting which was the most probable letter to be typed and increased the area of the letter without displaying it.
Don't take me wrong, Jobs ended up being the one pushing forward with ridiculous deadlines, high ambitious goals, and, when he was on the train, the vision.
Yes. They just didn't have the skills or the execution or the taste to apply the idea...
I've seen this idea a lot on Hacker News and similarly-minded sites ever since the iPhone came out. It's a myth--touchscreen keyboards with good software are faster than physical ones. The Guinness world record for phone typing speed has gone to touchscreen keyboard users for years, and it doesn't even allow autocorrect or predictive text [1]. The average typing speed on touchscreens is only 14wpm less than on full computer keyboards, and some people get up to 85wpm [2]. Software buttons are larger than physical ones and they change activation area based on the predicted next character, among other advantages. Even if screen space weren't an issue, touchscreen keyboards would still be better.
[1] https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2014/5/fastest-tou...
You could see it the other way around: for regular users who mostly just wanted to message, which was their core audience since the 3310, the keyboard was best. For power users who wanted to take advantage of the new features that were being ported from the PDAs used by professionals, like Wifi and HTML browsers, it was clearly that the lack of a decent pointing device was a major hindrance.
Like with age discrimination, a company should be able to judge people by character, not just by CV or age.
All the old boys managers of ICE tech run the show and don't want electric to be too successful as their decades of experience in a now outdated tech would put the future of their corporate careers in danger.
Had a similar situation at an ex company where a manger would only allow a crummy outdated tool he developed 10 years ago to be used as that guaranteed his job security.
To move forward you have to find the people holding the company back and cut them off, but that's difficult to see from an upper management perspective.
Didnt Steve Jobs block the idea of having native third party apps on the first Iphone as well.
And arguably a lot earlier when they chose Symbian over mobile Linux for the first time in the late nineties. This was when the early trend that Linux was heading for the embedded and mobile space were already bleedingly obvious to industry insiders. It killed Symbian touch screen OS after Apple iphone rumors got quite serious (2005) and then relaunched it in a hurry when it became clear that they were actually launching it. If you trace back Android's roots, you arrive more or less at a period where Symbian was still in the R&D stage and several companies were attempting a mobile linux. Android was one of them and was picked up by Google eventually.
Around the time the iphone rumors got serious (2004-2005) was in the same time frame that Nokia's internal linux mobile OS showed promise. The n770 tablet launched in 2006 and featured Debian linux (complete with apt-get update and oss repos full of oss tools and software), x-windows, and a mozilla based browser. Yet this platform was never allowed anywhere near anything resembling a premium smartphone until 2012. Attempts to create a platform with mobile phone capability were consistently shelved for years.
The reasons for this were entirely political. Maemo and later Meego were perpetually targeted at developer devices because it was considered a threat to Symbian. Projects to target premium phones with Maemo/Meego died over and over again. The N8 (cool metal design with a 13mp camera in 2010) actually started out life as a Meego phone but then turned into a Symbian phone (arguably one of the better ones) because management chickened out. If there ever was a chance for Nokia to make a move against Apple and Google; that would have been it. Never happened because senior management chickened out. The only proper phone that actually made it to market, the n9, was only launched after they decided to kill the whole platform and go for Lumia & MS. For that reason once more never got the benefit of Nokia's marketing and distribution reach.
I can't stress enough the utter stupidity of repeatedly killing (multiple) smart phone platforms with full OSS browsers, awesome developer tooling, and all the multi media stuff you could ever want throughout the development cycles of Android and IOS. When the iphone finally launched they had nothing whatsoever worth shipping.
The N97 mentioned in the article was gobbled together in a hurry and so bad that it allowed Apple and Google to rapidly claim marketshare. Attempts to fix Symbian amounted to too little too late and futile posturing. Throughout this, Meego was considered a threat rather than a solution and attempts to get it to market were frustrated with decisions to continue focus on Symbian over and over again. Meanwhile, Nokia continued to 'differentiate' with under powered devices with cheap CPUs and not enough RAM to shave a few dollars of a device that people did not want. A misguided deal to partner with Intel did not help either. Apple meanwhile correctly identified that margins on smart phones ought to be measured in hundreds of dollars and did not save pennies on materials, hardware, or bother crippling their own software to please the operators. Nokia did all of that. When Nokia got rid of their chip developers, Apple was planning to move CPU development in house. When Apple and Google chose capacitive touch screens, Nokia continued to ship crappy resistive touch screens, because they were cheaper. Technical ineptitude and penny saving is what killed Nokia.
Bot Android and IOS were very limited platforms in their first years. IOS had no SDK in the first version at all and Android devices were a combination of slow and buggy and poorly designed. However, Nokia was a no show and gave them over half a decade to fix this before it eventually folded. Fun fact: a lot of the early Android development was actually done on N800's (Nokia's maego tablet launched in 2007; several years before the ipad): reason Android and Maego shared much of the kernel internals and Nokia was a big kernel contributor and because it was open source, booting another OS was easy and common on these devices. So, Nokia enabled Google massively with their awesome developer oriented devices, tooling, and kernel contributions that they just could not be bothered to target at consumers. Ultimately Google said thank you very much and launched Android and never looked back.
This serial stragic blundering is what killed Nokia.
Android survived (IMHO) because they hyperfocused and took basically only the linux kernel and replaced most of the userspace, especially all the XOrg stuff, focused on the Java API and that was it and then shipped.
Of course Google money helped, but it's not like Google never fumbled a product before.
The Nokia partnership with HP fell silent when the Communicator was released. Nokia never got much more productivity software running - Symbian slowed them down and the consumer business distracted them. RIM took over the segment for some time, iPhone was released and the rest is history.
That thing and a Nokia 6110 saw me through college very nicely. Just enough functionality to be useful. The whole HP LX line was really cool and was even more impressive when you factored in that it was an 80186 running MS-DOS.
The phone dock, incidentally, was for a Nokia 2110. There's a Nokia Cellular Data Card in a hidden PCMCIA slot in the LX (lower base section if memory serves), with a cable leading up inside the unit to the dock.
Yet, PlaszmaOS could have been a real boon in the industry - especially if they'd licensed it off to all the Asian clone makers. It could've slowed Android, anyway, imho ..
Nokia's Multimedia director Anssi Vanjoki welcomes Apple into the mobile phone race.
– Apple entering the market is a fantastic thing. It will bring forth more growth for the business, Vanjoki tells Taloussanomat.
He thinks that Apple's phone is a sign that Nokia's multimedia direction has been correct since the beginning. Nokia was among the first to add multimedia features on phones.
– This is evidence of us having the right direction since the start.
Vanjoki is not expecting a significant blow to Nokia from Apple's phone. If Apple can hit its sales target of 10 million iPhones in 2008, it will have less than one percent of the mobile phone market.
– Apple's target is not very high.
Vanjoki thinks Apple is competing with the products of his directed Multimedia business.
– Apple's iPhone is competing with our N series products. We just have a much wider array of prices, going from just under 200 euros to a thousand euros, Vanjoki says.
– An interesting product, but it's missing several critical features such as 3G to enable fast data transmission.
https://www.is.fi/taloussanomat/art-2000001490727.html (in Finnish)
Except it has always been creepiest place in Finland thanx to Laestadians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laestadianism