Hacker News Reader

Comment by ahartmetz | Hacker News Reader

If there was foul play involved, you'd have to pull back a few more curtains to find it. Information that transpired after it was all over was that the Nokia board hired Elop with the assignment to sell to Microsoft.

The N9 is a really sad story. I had one, it was great. It did get some "better than iPhone" reviews. It was in development for too long, and when it was released and it was great, Nokia was too cowardly to bet on it.

View on HN

You can't really call it foul play, it was deliberate corporate takeover.

They had an unplanned stockholders meeting where the then-CEO was voted out and Elop was ushered in. He did a lot of good stuff like clean up five layers of middle management, got rid of build-it-five-times mentality as well as bring Nokia up-to-date with a bunch of modern practices.

But then he made a PUBLIC speech about Symbian being dead and that they would have an amazing Windows phone at the end of the year. This caused the Osborne effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect) to just eat up Nokia.

Nokia was ahead of the game in a lot of things, like platform security -- let's not forget the first iOS ran everything as root and had no App store, while Nokia was making secure boot and encrypted applications happen.

Nokia was five or ten years ahead of everyone else in technology (you can look at iOS history and tick off boxes when they catch up to Nokia), but they had massive problems in their company culture. Nokia could not have bet on the N9 because they just didn't have that sort of mentality.

Nokia decided to never adopt Android ever and that decision started the whole collapse, I think.

They chose to maximize diversity of investment, while opposing widespread use of free beer software, that is Android as perhaps they perceived. That combined with Microsoft’s chronic inability to launch and stabilize new platform led to burnt ash of Microsoft Mobile.

Had Nokia adopted Android and had Google allowed them to maintain MeeGo, a MeeGo/Android/S60/Series40 train of platforms could have worked at least for a while.

> Had Nokia adopted Android and had Google allowed them to maintain MeeGo

IIRC that wasn't a possible option, thanks to Google's monopolistic practices that prevented other companies from shipping phones with Google's proprietary apps and at the same time shipping phones with alternative mobile OSs.

That was a mayor reason why technical people rooted against Android open-but-not-so-much and for any other available truly-free-software platform.

That’s not true. Samsung shipped GAPPs Android devices along with phones running their own proprietary mobile OS. HTC, Samsung, LG etc shipped GAPPs Android phones at the same time shipped windows mobile phones

That's right, my memory failed me. Google's anti-competition behavior was limited to preventing companies from distributing both devices with and without their proprietary Play Services at the same time, thus making it almost impossible for hardware manufacturers to support non-Google's AOSP full open-source distributions of Android; which is bad enough as it is.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...

In NOKIA's case, they couldn't ship e.g. NOKIA Maps (now HERE) as default navigation, but instead use Google Maps; that would make their navigation investment pointless.

No they could have shipped Nokia maps as default just as long as Google Maps was included as part of the GAPPs suite. Samsung still ships many of their proprietary apps as default (Samsung Pay, their own messaging and mail app etc)

I am not convinced board hired Elop to sell the company to Microsoft. Anecdotally Jorma Ollila, the Nokia Chairman when Elop was hired[0], was extremely agravated to learn the sale of handsets had taken place [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#CEO_of_Nokia

[1] Siilasmaa: Transforming NOKIA: The Power of Paranoid Optimism to Lead Through Colossal Change

I am wondering if the surveillance capitalism we have now would have been impeded if NOKIA was still around in full force. I miss time when my phone didn't track everything I did. The only alternative I own now is running on SailfishOS, from MeeGo team members.

It's not just your phone that spies on you, it's mostly the apps on it that do. With no Android to push it so hard and fast, perhaps surveillance capitalism would be a bit less developed by now, but I doubt the difference would be all that big. The allure of corrupt money is just too high, and the pressure is industry-wide.

But it's the OS that allows apps to spy on you.

There's only so much an OS can do about it. Every feature that can be used for tracking has also legitimate user-beneficial uses.

Not true, Symbian was highly locked down. You needed permission for pretty much anything, and some of them required you to ask Nokia for permission. It's probably part of the reason why it didn't take off in the US.

It’s the apps that spy on you, largely not the OS.

If you lock down your app permissions and install the bare minimum of apps that you need or aren’t practical as web versions, you can absolutely limit your blast radius.

Changing your OS to sailfish isn’t helping you on its own. Sailfish can run Android apps, so if you installed an Android app and gave it those permissions, you’d have the same problem.

yeah, Nokia was a dead man walking when Elop was hired. They had no way of caching up to iPhone.

Big product companies don't die from one day to another, they take a slow long time to fizzle out.

The N9 did have a chance, I think. If you live in the US, you have no idea how big Nokia was. Problem was that the decision to sell to Microsoft was made before the N9 release. It would have taken a lot of courage to change course. People making that decision could have ended up looking like idiots. The N9's success was possible but not a sure thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com