Nokia culture will out | Hacker News Reader

Nokia culture will out

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40 pointskgutteridge8 comments

Nokia’s problem is not, and has never been, that it lacks for creative, thoughtful, talented people, or the resources to turn their ideas into shipping product. It’s that the company is fundamentally, and has _always_ been, organized to trade in commodities.

Amen. How else to explain the continual production of a bewildering array of handsets that differ in only slight ways or in bizarre configurations. (On the latter, I'm thinking in particular of those handsets where they arranged the dialing keypad in a circle reminiscent of the old land-line phones. How in the world did those ever get into production?)

The article seemed like a lot of babbling from someone who spent a very short time at a company who's problems started over ten years ago. An insight here or there, yes.

Nokia for much of the later 90s and early 2000s was the handset of choice for the enterprise in Europe. Blackberry ruled the US market. At the same time, they had an amazing market opportunity in basic handsets in the US, Europe, and emerging markets. Nokia was the go to phone for "just working".

Things changed in 2007 w/ the iPhone and the subsequent drive towards an app based smartphone ecosystem. Before the iphone, there were "smart phone apps", but they were a small franctional percentage of what is available now. iPhone and Android have helped this app-based economy.

Nokia never got there. Developing on Symbian is a royal pain in the backside. Despite their working w/ Borland to develop tools for development, a simpler tool chain never emerged. Furthermore, a lack of an app store (ovi was late to the scene) didn't help things.

Nokia failed to adapt to this new world and proceeded to try and develop OSs at a glacial pace. The hardware has always been great, but an OS with an app (and developer friendly) ecosystem never emerged.

I agree with most what you said but this one "Developing on Symbian directly is a royal pain in the backside". Developing for Symbian directly was and is pain - actually I have spend only couple of months trying to learn that (with some degree of success) and I have not liked that too much.

Later Nokia pushed message "use Qt for everything, now Qt is everything" (or at least I got it this way). That's the point there you are wrong. Developing for Symbian using Qt is not very hard. There are still some cases where you must use workarounds or think about specifics (like touch and non-touch Nokia phones are different), but overall experience is great.

The only remaining question for Nokia is "isn't it too late?".

a very short time at a company

Well, the author says it was two years, which doesn't seem like a short time at a company these days. And part of it was in 2007. I'd say he was well situated to understand things like the company's usability blind spots and why it couldn't really understand the thinking that went into the iPhone.

People who have one watch know the time, people with two don't.

Smaller companies have less ideas to execute on. Larger companies have so many that they are not able to execute any at all.

A company the size of Nokia should have been big enough to start dozens of Y-Combinator style companies from their own talent base, instead produces the same products years on end.

If only QT/Trolltech had a well-know market value, then they could sell it.

Well, there's really only one way to truly establish market value. That's to sell it. Try to go for as high a price as possible and see what the market will bear. The market will usually be right on the matter.

By definition, the market is always right on the matter. That's the point of market value. Whether it makes sense or not is another matter entirely.

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