Nokia’s Suicide Note | Hacker News Reader

Nokia’s Suicide Note

esr.ibiblio.org

131 pointscwb45 comments

Excellent analysis: Nokia has effectively announced that they have no focus and plan to spend three quarters losing money in the hops that in 2012 or 2013 WP7 is going to be a big hit for them.

It's a shame Elop doesn't take a page out of Jobs' book instead of Ballmer's. Rather than announce a strategic blah blah direction blah blah partnership blah blah, he could have called a press conference, walked on stage, and showed them a Nokia running WP7, announced a date you could buy them, and invited the heads of the world's biggest carriers on stage to announce cut-rate deals and plans for them.

p.s. I meant to write "hope," and not "hops," however considering what we make out of hops and the kind of decisions we make after drinking too much of it, I'm leaving it uncorrected.

Agreed. And in even less time, he could have walked on stage with an unlocked Android-based smartphone. What would Nokia have to lose from offering such a device? Does the new partnership with Microsoft prohibit such a move? If so, it seems like a limiting move for a hardware manufacturer that harkens back to the early days of Windows.

I agree. I keep hearing comments about Nokia being late to the game... blalballba ...if they decided to use android instead of WP7. I don't see how that is an issue. As has been stated by Nokia, this is going to take 1-2 years to make the switch to WP7. Why don't they spend 1/2 of that time switching to a popular platform instead of an unpopular platform. I guess I'd have to be an ex Microsoft employee (like the CEO) to understand any of this zaniness.

I assume that they want to keep their hardware platform. And porting Android to that would almost certainly require opensourcing their baseband implementation and thus enable everyone else to build phones with similar architecture (ie. without dedicated baseband CPU).

I don't think being able to go without a dedicated baseband processor will be an advantage for more than one hardware iteration. It may be useful in featurephones, but not that much with smartphones.

It enables Nokia to manufacture cheap smartphones with good battery life. Some Chinese Android-based phones are starting to have comparable prices, but certainly not battery life.

For how long will that advantage exist? Would you like to lose performance on your game because your phone wants to chat with the cell towers?

I'm not so sure that would be good for Nokia.

This decision is an admission from Nokia that they aren't good at software.

If they went with Android they will need to write software to differentiate themselves from the myriad of other Android handsets.

By going with WP7 they are immediately differentiated (there simply isn't a flood of WP7 handsets out there) and Microsoft handles the software side.

EDIT: edited so it reads better.

That's not very viable at Nokia. The news would have been out roughly 15 minutes after they started working on the phones initially. Nokia is really tightly ingrained into Finnish life at this point. It's a huge part of their economy, and these sort of moves won't escape a leak.

They have to go this route. Pre-announce... and build like crazy.

> The news would have been out roughly 15 minutes after they started working on the phones initially

Don't develop top secret projects internally. Develop them in a separate office. In this case, since it's more of a software project, you can leave designers thinking they are designing a Symbian or MeeGo phone, engineers using a current N8 hardware and ship your programmers to Redmond so they can work on their port from within Microsoft.

That's what I think is scary about the deal. Without a clear date. It's just vapor. And it they don't bring a solid device to the market fairly quickly, it would be a bad deal for both NOK and MSFT.

Ok, I have a lot of respect for esr, but all this talk of "porting" makes me think that no one knows how any of this works. "Porting" Android or WP7 to a new phone consists of: write drivers, write userland apps that give your users the experience you want, and possibly modify your existing bootloader code. They have documentation on their hardware, they have existing BSPs to reference, etc. This is not a hard problem. Getting this up and running with basic functionality would absolutely take no more than a month. Period.

And then there's this bit:

>History matters; the Android codebase is designed to be ported in ways Microsoft is probably culturally incapable of even imagining.

NT is portable. It's been ported to at least four CPUs that I know of (x86, Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC), and MS has announced that they will deliver it on ARM.

I don't much care for MS, but pretending that they're incapable of writing a portable OS is nonsense.

Um...you do know that all the non-Alpha/x86 ports were considered failures in-house and dropped, right?

Portability was one of the first things Microsoft sacrificed to get things "working right".

And the OS engineers who wrote the "portable" NT code have long since vested and moved on. The new kids on the block have probably never seen their code.

Right, and this is why my Windows NT 4.0 CD contained x86, Alpha, MIPS and PPC versions. I had never tried anything but Intel, but it was certainly not just in-house.

Right, and how many Windows NT apps were there for MIPS and PPC? If Developers still have too much trouble creating "universal" apps, your port is effectively dead. Outside of x86 and Alpha, NT was never used.

> Um...you do know that all the non-Alpha/x86 ports were considered failures in-house and dropped, right?

This is patently false.

> And the OS engineers who wrote the "portable" NT code have long since vested and moved on. The new kids on the block have probably never seen their code.

As an ex-Microsoftie I can tell you that you are wrong. Check Dave Cutler, Larry Wang and several other engineers (even from the original VMS team) still at Microsoft. NT has been ported to several different architectures internally many times over, though commercially only the x86 and PowerPC (XBox 360) variants have been widely released. Itanium ports worked perfectly well, but there was never any significant market for it.

They have it working on ARM internally already. And the current WP7 OS kernel is Windows CE, one of the most widely ported OS of all time, running on SH4, MIPS, x86, ARM i.e. almost any little-endian architecture.

Nokia's CEO shouldn't be focused on tech. He should be focused on significant internal cultural factors he was clueless about. He should also try to figure out how he and his advisers could've got it so severely wrong. After that, he has about 3 more Whys to go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys

This has nothing to do with the CEO, it's responding to everyone talking about how long it's going to take to "port" WP7.

Nokia's current situation has everything to do with the C-level team.

Bringing up new hardware is a bit harder than that -- take a look at the most open example we have of doing so, the OLPC. 100% open hardware which they designed, but building the tools and bringing it up were still a lot of work.

Credit where it's due: the Android folks have worked very hard to make this an easy process for their OEMs.

By the way, this is why just about all hardware these days is brought up on Linux first. Yes, even your dear iDevices. :-)

I would have thought iDevices used BSD, since the whole Mach-kernel architecture is BSD based and all iDevices claim to run a Mach-kernel derived OS.

(I am aware there was MkLinux, which was also mach kernel powered, but it had very bloated performance compared to linux.)

It was my understanding that with phones, the bulk of the time is spent in testing the radio hardware to bring it up to compliance. That's why there is such a large delay between reference implementations and actual hardware. Software-wise, you're right, porting Android is only slightly less trivial than porting WP7

I think you're right. Look at the gap between WP7 GSM and CDMA launch. It's definitely not a trivial problem.

I think as developers unfamiliar with the tech we'd like to think that different radio stacks can be abstracted away, but the reality is likely very different.

you have a lot of respect for esr, I don't.

Eric wouldn't be able to port Android on his own to a platform like x86, much less a platform with a constrained environment (like a phone).

He's just not good enough.

So when he writes about the efforts involved, he doesn't know what the f---- he's talking about.

I was wondering who would be the first in this thread to engage in off-topic personal attacks against the author. You were the first. Congratulations, I guess?

Please, let's try to keep HN above this.

Smart devices is Symbian, Meego, WP7.

Mobile Phones is S40 (not Symbian). This is the ancient Nokia platform, which is the only part of Nokia that is currently competitive in its price bracket.

The intention is to kill off Symbian as quickly and painlessly as possible. Good riddance. It was not a realistic smartphone contender to begin with. Finally Nokia stops throwing good money after bad. Only it may be too late.

One of Nokia's systemic problems is its uneven software culture. Nokia's diffrentiator was hardware. When competitors surpassed Nokia in software it was fighting a losing battle. From this point of view the move makes much sense. Remove the software that don't perform well: Symbian and Ovi service "platform", developer tools. Keep and streamline the parts that have a chance of success: S40, MeeGo.

The transition will be painful and success is far from certain, but the obvious alternatives would be even worse.

S40, IIRC, is Symbian. It's related to the S60 that powered lots of Nokia smartphones, mostly the ones that actually work. Keeping to it and ditching the newer versions would be clever.

Never having seen the code, I can't say for sure that there's no Symbian OS code in the S40 series devices. I can say, however, that there's no Symbian OS access for developers in those devices. The S40 phones are semi-smart -- they allow J2ME applets to run and that's it.

You remember incorrectly. See e.g. http://www.forum.nokia.com/Devices/ for comparison.

It's a marketing barrier, not a technical one. The core is very much the same.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_40#Operating_system

Sorry, but your link doesn't support your assertion. It only says that S40 is simpler than S60 and that S60 is based on Symbian.

With a bit of googling I found this quote from a Forum Nokia champion: "Series 40 (S40) is not based on Symbian at all, but a Nokia proprietary real-time operating system. Series 40 does not allow any native (C/C++) development (with or without Qt). The primary app development for Series 40 based phones is Java (JME, J2ME, MIDP/CLDC), or Flash Lite." http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?21666...

Here's another link: http://eve-c.org/2011/syskwyawan/

Interesting. The use of the word "variant" on Wikipedia misled me.

Splits nokia in two? What a load of crap! Nokia is currently split into four, or five, or ten, or worse. When you consider the platforms, the hardware streams, ovi, qt -- it's a total mess of competing agendas.

I've been in the belly of the beast, and aside from having a very nice sauna, it's really ugly in there. There's total paralysis, as evidenced by the lack of competitive produts. OPK was fond of saying how nokia needed to reinvent itself, but he lacked the willpower to make any meaningful changes.

When I was there we used to say "it's hard to fire a Finn." Now some heads are finally rolling. Shaking it up like this is their only chance.

Eric totally forgot about S40. It's a platform which sells very well.

He didn't forget about it. It's presence ruins his argument, so he didn't mention it.

There has been a side-conversation between Eric, Doc Searls and I for days on this subject.

The 'other shoe' will shortly drop when Nokia sues Google for infringement of many of the patents it holds.

Nokia also just radically cut it's R&D spending. Payments for WP licenses are being offset with payments from Microsoft for things like the Nokia Maps and 'other' items (likely: Nokia patents). Elop essentially ended up with an effective $0 WP license.

"Porting?" As I've noted already, this move sounds like he's trying to follow a script for corporate meltdown drawn from Smalltalk history:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2206788

Congrats. "Porting" enters into the plan!

If the CEO follows that script, he will have damaged employee relationships to the point that Nokia won't be able to execute some of the difficult goals he's set going forwards.

Seriously, he needs to look up some old ObjectShare alums to get some historical perspective on what he's trying to do and how it can go seriously wrong.

Opinion from Robert Scoble:

http://scobleizer.com/2011/02/11/dear-nokia-fans-youre-nuts/

Compactified version: "I prefer Windows Phone 7 and consider it much better than the rest, so it was a smart move. It's just that WP7 has no apps now, but you'll all see it'll rock."

He says that platform with no apps doesn't matter at all, then believes apps will magically come out of nowhere (uh, reminds me of http://twitter.com/RovioMobile/status/35985499667562496), so the platform will shine and become an ecosystem. Sure, this is probable (especially after the agreement), but they'll have very tough time making it so. We've already seen lots of great platforms failing for about the same reasons and WP7 may as well become another one.

Time'll show the real outcome, and we could only wish Nokia+MS to success.

Personally, I believe Nokia would've in a better position if they put all resources on MeeGo development and ability to run Android apps on it (which was already shown recently). This way they'd profit on two already strong ecosystems at once, yet won't become yet another Android vendor. But that's just my own thoughts.

Microsoft has many weaknesses, but attracting and supporting a substantial developer community has NEVER been one of them. Look at the speed with which developers adopted XBOX360 on the back of Microsoft's toolchain.

There are millions of developers across the world with Visual Studio on their machines, who are VERY comfortable with The Microsoft Way. Their resistance to downloading the Android SDK and using Eclipse to write a Java app is high. Their resistance to buying a Mac to do iPhone development is higher. Their resistance to downloading the WP7 SDK and writing an app in a language familiar to them is VERY LOW.

It may be harder for them to attract the cutting edge startups... the Paths and the Flipboards... but Microsoft is not Palm. They are not Google. They are not Blackberry. There will be apps. Particularly with respect to business apps, there will be MANY WP7 exclusives.

And for the big, 90-percent-of-all-app-use apps, like Facebook and Angry Birds, Microsoft will either write the apps themselves, or court the shit out of the companies who make them to get them to do a port. They will give them direct lines to WP7 engineers who will fix their bugs.

They'll have a developer horde, no question. They'll screw up a lot of things about WP7, but I'm baffled that you think nurturing a developer community is one of them.

Remember: "Developers! Developers!"

Scoble isn't saying much more than "WP7 is great!" which has no bearing on ESR's arguments that this puts an organization in disarray into further disarray.

It does quite aptly respond to the comments about WP7's abysmal sales, however: the lack of apps is what's killing it. I'm honestly surprised that more people aren't developing WP7 apps right now, betting that it'll take off.

please bear in mind who the author is.

Note, Scoble has been wrong on Smartphones from iphone first launch, to android and now WP7..

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