Why Nokia failed: 'Wasted 2,000 man years' on UIs that didn't work | Hacker News Reader

Why Nokia failed: 'Wasted 2,000 man years' on UIs that didn't work

theregister.co.uk

156 pointsmacco60 comments

Or as JWZ put it 8 years ago, the CADT model of software development.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

I nearly spat out my drink when I read the sentence claiming that a team within Nokia working on a Linux version of the product tried to launch a UI/UX competitor to QT, even though Nokia had acquired Trolltech, the QT company, using... wait for it... GTK.

Anyone want to put up odds that there were other UX "initiatives" there pushing Tcl/Tk? :)

Pukey UI look and bad UX have killed more promising and cool technology than anything else, probably by more than an order of magnitude.

Open source needs designers, badly.

Opensource doesn't need designers, there are plenty of those (real designers, and programmers with decent design skills). What it needs is focus.

The main problem with opensource UIs is the lack of attention to integration issues and detail, which results in a (serious) lack of polish.

The proprietary model has the advantage that you can put someone in charge of this. Someone that will order people to polish stuff up. Opensource projects can't do this. Everyone does its own thing, and can't be bothered to do the boring work, or they'll leave.

The mistake here is thinking that uniformization fixes the problem. Well, guess what, none of the successful UIs are uniform (violation of UI guidelines is the norm on Windows, and Apple also doesn't with increased frequency). But what they don't do is leave applications with misaligned components and such crap.

If I read it correctly, that was specifically in relation to the "declarative UI" approach not the whole UI.

Also, to be fair, Nokia's acquisition of QT occurred when Nokia already had a GTK UI, it's not like the GTK UI didn't exist beforehand.

(One of the interesting conspiracy theories someone shared with me was that the Symbian team orchestrated the Trolltech acquisition to give Symbian more time and slow down/make redundant the GTK-based effort. :) )

All this internal politics between different UI teams seems like evidence of a clear lack of technological vision at the top.

I suspect that the top management at Nokia got stuck with the old idea that networks are the strategically important technology in their business. They always seemed to treat software as basically "the boring last part when outsourced peons implement feature checklists" rather than anything strategic.

When you look at where Nokia was coming from, the emphasis on devices and network tech made sense. They bet the whole company on GSM in the early '90s and reaped amazing rewards. (Finland was the first country in the world with a GSM network, which gave Nokia a nice push into the market that would explode to billions of customers worldwide.)

In the late '90s, networks were similarly a matter of corporate life and death as the European companies battled Qualcomm and the Japanese over the fate of 3G. Meanwhile Nokia was essentially outsourcing their core software. Symbian was set up as a separate corporation in Britain. Maemo was an underfunded Linux skunkworks operation in Brazil.

Nokia didn't even care enough to do the Series 60 user experience design themselves. Instead, this crucial task was outsourced to a German company (I think they were called Mango Design). With nobody in the company fighting for the UX vision, it's not difficult to see how it got so neglected.

Not quite - Symbian was a British company that Nokia bought.

It was originally the OS on the excellent Psion PDAs before they gave up on the hardware business and split the OS off as Symbian.

I remember being astonished on how bad the S60 UX was, when compared to the mid-90s Psion that was built on the same codebase.

using... wait for it... GTK.

The real irony here is that this GTK+-based UI modernization attempt was the only one that actually shipped. The product was called Nokia N900 (still a fairly popular device in hacker circles).

The Maemo operating system on the N900 worked well and was a good effort by 2009 standards, with a hardware-accelerated GUI and an excellent desktop-quality browser. Unfortunately Nokia's internal fumbling doomed it to premature obsolescence: as soon as the device shipped, Nokia effectively declared it dead by talking up their various internal Qt and Symbian competitors instead, and then confounding things further with the MeeGo OS merger madness.

(Their upcoming MeeGo device has already suffered the same fate thanks to the recent Microsoft deal, of course.)

As good as the Maemo 5 redesign was, I think they set their sights too low (e.g. single-touch), which effectively forced them into another redesign for Maemo 6. The mistakes of switching to Qt and merging Maemo with Moblin seem to have been politically motivated, though.

I disagree. Multitouch is cool, and it's great for certain tasks (notably zooming web pages) but compared to having a great UI, having a fully featured platform for developing apps, having great apps, integrating well with popular network services.... I don't think it's that big of a deal.

If I were designing a smartphone, and it came down to whether we supported, say, multi-touch or video chat... I'd pick video chat. I'd put the developer hours on making UI fixes first too. Multitouch would be one of the first features to get punted for 2.0.

And actually, I'd invest in making the single-touch really smooth before I did multitouch too. It's just really low on my list of priorities. It's 95% whiz-bang.

I have N900, it's pretty awesome. The main downside still (as always) was lack of apps/apps market. But still, nice video chat, ssh / VNC into servers, Flash 10, FM transmitter, video/sound out, nice camera, a freakin stand. I currently use it as my sole inet connection (tethered to router PC) at home. Watch Hulu with it.

Don't plan/feel need to replace it for several more months. Not many phones have kept me satisfied for 3 years.

The Maemo platform (what was shipped in N900, and later joined with Intel's Moblin into MeeGo) was based on GTK+ and related technologies since the days of Nokia 770 tablet (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Nokia_770).

From that POV, you could say Nokia abandoned a lot of man-years of Maemo toolkit work becaues they wanted to use Qt so they could say it targets all Nokia devices.

Now with no plans to put Qt on WP7, it's kind of ironic :-)

Interestingly, at the same time you can write fully-integrated software on Maemo with Qt, even though the platform itself is GTK+. There was no need for a rewrite to achieve a consistent developer story.

"For want of a nail the kingdom was lost" overly diminishes the significance of UI. For users, the experience of using the phone is not a minor detail added onto a great device, it IS the device.

Perhaps a better quote for Nokia's situation is, "My kingdom for a horse...."

They had 3 horses, which were trying to turn and eat each other.

Back in the 90's, Nokia im my opinion has the best UI's by far compared to the competitors then. When Motorola phones did not even query the phone book to get the caller's name, Nokia was innovating with tabbed menus and whatnot. Its a shame they lagged.

I wonder how many man-years Microsoft has spent on failed UIs? (and, yes, they've had successful ones too).

Nokia had a broken development process. The answer clearly was to surrender and turn the company over to ... another company with a long history of broken processes.

NOTE: I'm not saying everything in Microsoft is broken by any means. Microsoft has had processes which produced Windows ME and Windows Vista ... and they fixed their process and produced some better things. That might be evidence Nokia might have been able to do something similar.

> With its mature and well-debugged phone stacks, it is better for phone calls than any other smartphone: it drops fewer calls, the calls sound better, and it uses the antenna better.

I've heard this "fact" presented many times, but is there actually any meat to it? It seems to me there must be many mature and well-debugged phone stacks out there.

3G phones are complicated beasts. It takes years for an implementation to mature -- and the standardization bodies continue evolving the standards and adding complexity.

In the past, Nokia was one of the first to have a prototype implementation -- hence, more time for testing and improving it.

I would say this is no longer the case today -- but it's still probably one of the more mature implementations around.

IIRC, the phone stack live completely outside of Symbian itself (I'm not sure how this looks in something like Android). So each vendor attempting to deploy a phone would have to provide their own telephony stack... I worked on at least two memorable projects where they just couldn't make that work.

Now Nokia has put out hundreds of models of S60 phones, each largely sharing components. I would imagine that their telephony layer was rock solid. I have no idea if the assertion in the article is true or not, but it wouldn't surprise me. Nokia has always "gotten" the phone side... it's the UX side of a smartphone that has always vexed them.

>Nokia has always "gotten" the phone side

True, but my current phone N900 is weaker in terms of a phone. It is a hacker's delight with a real terminal, apt-get etc but the phone experience I never really enjoyed much. My earlier phone N95 was better than this.

The thing that didn't work iirc is that people other than Nokia tried to write their own Symbian Telephony server (TSY) and failed to get it working.

What makes Android successful, was coming late to the party are QCOM & co having easier to integrate solutions with their baseband chipsets.

It appears that this Register article is based on the following blog post from Mark Wilcox. Just in case you want it from the horse's mouth... strange that they cited this obliquely in the Register article, but didn't link to it...

http://mobilesoftware.tumblr.com/

The link is all the way at the end of the Register article.

To be fair, the Register article does provide useful context that is missing from the Wilcox piece.

Also Nokia wanted to flood the market with cheap phones to curtain the people from seeing other brands. I guess this might have created them a support nightmare. New kids understand the concept of singularity and just strieve for perfection, lefting Nokia the land of the lost buttons.

That never happened in the US. It was only the past couple years that S60 phones got introduced to AT&T and other US carriers as bundled with contracts. And nobody's going to pay $400+ for a phone they know nothing about. I always decried the fact that Nokia's phones were more advanced than the iPhone when it came out, but nobody gave a crap (they also didn't know it existed).

I admired Nokia's "noble" stand against carrier exclusivity deals and subsidized phones, but in retrospect it cost them a lot of their relevance in the US market.

Its not that it didnt work, People use to love Nokia it worked like charm. Nokia was the biggest mobile phone manufacturers until it stopped innovating and iterating their products. It wasn't new for them that Apple and Google are coming up with their phones and how they would be changing the mobile industry. Had Nokia took that up and changed their product to be up with the tech innovations they would have not lost the market share. Right said if you don't innovate or iterate you are going to Die.

Totally agree. I bought a Symbian phone in 2003 (Nokia 6600) and got a new one in 2008 and the user interface was almost the same. The only difference was better looking icons and more options. The applications was the same as before.

It's rather unfortunate because Qt Quick is a rather promising framework for mobile development, it just needed a bit more polish.

The Symbian UI is really bad right now though, it actually defies many layers of common sense. The flagship Nokia N8, for example, still doesn't have a full qwerty keyboard in portrait mode. You have to rotate it to landscape mode in order to type, and the keyboard input takes up the entire screen.

I'm not really sure how that device managed to get shipped without such basic functionality in place, not to mention the fact that it is March 2011 and still not available.

I totally second the Qt Quick comment, I tried recently and it's very pleasing, especially if you're comming from javascript development.

By the way, they just launched Qt Quick Components for desktop: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/03/10/qml-components-for-deskt...

Should make app development a lot easier...

They were designing for the wrong hardware, Nokia hasn't had a single device that rivals the iPhone's technical capabilities. With that said Nokia's brick phones have some of the easiest interfaces to use of any device ever, which is a huge reason they are so popular in the developing world, that and they saturated the market.

> Nokia hasn't had a single device that rivals the iPhone's technical capabilities

Which iPhone? Version 4? Of course not. 3GS? Have a look at N900. The hardware is pretty much comparable, with N900 being slightly better in many categories. More memory, 32GB storage in every model, twice the screen size, additional flash memory, 2MP more on the camera. Actually the only place where iPhone wins completely is the multitouch screen.

So out of 4 released iPhones, only the most recent one is definitely better than N900.

> Actually the only place where iPhone wins completely is the multitouch screen.

That's no small thing though. I had the N810, which I'm pretty sure used the same display and sensor as the N900 and the touch screen was just painful to use.

I think an actually working touch screen sensor has been one of the biggest things the iPhone introduced (or popularized, mobile phones at the time all insisted on resistive sensors, probably because of lower costs).

I'm not judging features here as more or less important. I just meant to point out that N900 can easily be a rival to all but the most recent iPhones from the technical point of view. I'm not sure about N810 screen - never used it. I'm ok with the N900 one, although yes, it could be more sensitive. But I'd honestly take resistive screen over the cap. one for the advantage of using it in gloves (my hands are easily getting cold ;) )

Well you have some valid points but I'd like to remind you the screen size is meaningless with a weaker graphics chip.

N900 and iPhones (both 3GS and 4) run on basically the same GPU - PowerVR SGX 530 and 535 respectively. Original and 3G were lower spec (PowerVR MBX Lite).

It easily handles games like NFS in fullscreen with pretty nice shading. Fullscreen movie playback is also good.

I am somewhat biased to view that as an opinion rather than as fact. Symbian has always had a much lower overhead than iOS, and Symbian has also been very good about offloading processing tasks to specialized hardware rather than relying on a fast main processor. One of the beautiful things about this approach is that Symbian is much better with battery life than iOS.

Nokia's focus on high end devices is different from the iPhone, and the "technical capabilities" is all in the checkboxes you choose to include.

Physical keyboards, removable storage, removable batteries, 5-band UTMS (the iPhone 4 may have this?), HDMI out, Xenon Flash, FM transmitters, DUN & FTP bluetooth profiles, Adobe Flash, video calling w/o WiFi, and true multi-tasking are all checkboxes that I can use to make the iPhone look like it lacks technical capabilities.

So I think we need to be careful about what we define as lack of technical capabilities. While Symbian may seem less responsive than the iPhone, my opinion is that the iPhone does lots of caching and transitions to make it look smooth while processing. Symbian traditionally has been more baked in functionality than the iPhone, but Symbian certainly is less beautiful.

With that said Nokia's brick phones have some of the easiest interfaces to use of any device ever

As someone who uses a recent Series 40 phone, I have to disagree with you. I think their last decent brick was the 6230i.

I got an XpressMusic (don't know the exact model number) Series 40 phone in 2009 , and, although it does the basics well, it has some serious design flaws.

It is a music phone, but it lacks a "stop" button to go with the play/pause button on its side. Therefore it is always on pause, so that, if it is in my pocket, and the "play" button is hit accidentally, a preloaded song called "The Dance of Shiva" starts playing. Very embarrassing.

And if you want to send an SMS, you need to save the number first as a contact, since the SMS UI doesn't allow for numbers in the "number" field.

These are shockingly obvious design flaws that Nokia missed. Something went wrong with Nokia a few years ago, and it wasn't limited to their smartphones.

I'd love to say what phone of Nokia was the best one, but I can't remember its obfuscated and cryptic code-name.

I was talking like the 2002 models, sorry for the confusion. I personally have no experience with any new Nokia phones.

I would waist another 2000 man years than go with a company that released a credible competitor on October 21, 2010 ; although they've been doing it since at least year 2000 (i.e. working on handheld / mobile operating systems). That's not a good track record if you ask me - whereas both Apple and Google came out of nowhere and swept the market since the first versions released.

While not specifically a phone, the iphone does have ancestry that didn't exactly "sweep the market"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)

iOS has about as much to do with the Newton as it has to do with Go.

And Windows Phone 7 has barely anything to do with Windows Mobile. And no one can court developers like Microsoft(the big problem with Nokia). There are already close to 10,000 applications compared to close to 5,000 for WebOS which had a head start.

Windows Phone 7 is based on Windows CE 6 [1]. It has a lot more code in common with Windows Mobile than iOS has with the Newton.

1. http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/04/windows-phone-7-based-on-...

Windows CE 6 is a complete redesign of Windows CE 5.2(on which Windows Mobile is based).

Windows Phone 7 is product of the same organization, staffed by mostly the same people, with only certain degree of improvement to development process since the CE 6. What makes you hope 7 will have better quality?

Everything I've heard about the Zune HD (the only pure CE 6 device I'm aware of) is positive. Maybe you're getting confused with Windows Mobile 6.5, which is based on an older version.

Besides, Windows 7 is of unquestionably better quality than Vista, so what's your point?

The value of the Newton to iOS is not in shared technology (obviously, that is next to nothing), but in what Apple may have learned about the market. That is probably impossible to quantify in any way.

How many man hours are there to a man year? Is the unit supossed to concider how much hours a man works in a year, or is it just 365 * 24 a man hour?

Don't forget that the measure is probably in metric too.

I guess you're joking, but a European person-year is definitely smaller than an American person-year (or PY as we call them at the office).

It's 40 hours * 52 weeks, according to http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/manyear.asp

Although, I think that number is closer to 40 hours * 50 weeks (vacation included)

50 weeks seems high, Finland gets a minimum of 5 weeks a year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_emplo...

149.7 Hours in a FTE month; so 1796.4 in a year

Well atleast they had a bubble inteface! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSRuY_9ZMsY&feature=playe...

I was reading a post by a Nokia employee that teams used to work on improving their own branches of Symbian that were never merged into the main one. This lead to fiefdoms and waste of duplicate effort.

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