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Comment by foobarian | Hacker News Reader

So if all these things were possible on Symbian so early what in the world happened that they lost the market race so badly. Too much engineering-driven design? Lack of a unifying Jobs-esque force at the top to make hard decisions?

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IMO

• iPhone's capacitive touch screen vs Nokia's resistive touch with stylus requirement was too much of a friction (pun not intended). 1 year after iPhone's release, Nokia released 5800 marketed as iPhone killer; guess what? it had f'in stylus with resistive screen.

• Then when android happened, which was poor man's iPhone; Nokia hugged Windows Phone OS. Which never became a thing as it lacked Google apps (Google killed it, MSFT would have done the same to Google if places were interchanged). Other comments have detailed possible leadership sabotage related to the MSFT deal, which I agree with.

> 1 year after iPhone's release, Nokia released 5800 marketed as iPhone killer; guess what?

I guess beside its resistive screen, Nokia 5800 has much more power than iPhone 3G:

- J2ME apps;

- Python for S60 apps (+ Pys60 IDE);

- Qt4 apps;

- Voice input;

- Built-in voice recorder;

- Video recording;

- Frontal camera for video calls;

- 3.2 Megapixel camera with zoom & flash;

- 35 hours of work in music player mode;

- Changeable battery;

- And much, much more.

Here is good comparison list (in Russian).[0]

[0] http://mobiltelefon.ru/post_122880924.html

That's true of several mobile hardware/SW of that time, I mentioned capacitive screen to show typical consumer preference.

Btw, you can also add native 3G video calling via front camera to that list, my Nokia N70 did that years earlier in India. Not many westerners seem to know about this feature in my earlier discussions.

Reading around on the Internet a bit I came upon this [1] which indicates Nokia's leadership was less engineering-driven than I thought.

[1] https://knowledge.insead.edu/strategy/who-killed-nokia-nokia...

> Nokia's leadership was

Stephen Elop, Nokia President & CEO since September 2010.[0,1,2,3,4,5]

Since 2011 Symbian & Nokia starts its degradation under Elop 's "leadership".

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

[1] https://www.europeanceo.com/profile/stephen-elop

[2] https://www.smartcompany.com.au/business-advice/strategy/how...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/08/nokia-ste...

[4] https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/17/8796465/grand-theft-elop

[5] https://www.theregister.com/2018/02/15/elop_and_the_fall_of_...

Which is to be expected when one gets a contract from the shareholders with a bonus clause if the CEO manages to devalue the company and sell it.

US market was never keen in Nokia devices and Android is free beer.

The market have shifted. Before iphone, everyone was trying to build the smalles phone possible. Jobs convinced the world for brick sized devices and SymbianOS lost its USP - doing a lot on small batteriess. Had there been a wearables market back then, it could have had a second lease of life.

> So if all these things were possible on Symbian so early what in the world happened that they lost the market race so badly.

TL;DR: "Operation Elop" organized by Microsoft...[0]

[0] https://asokan.org/operation-elop/

Actually by Nokia shareholders, including a big bonus for managing to sell mobile division.

No. Nokia just sold its business to new owner, but new owner killed it.

Which is why Elop got the bonus from Nokia shareholders as per the signed contract. Finn press found out all the dirt about the contract back then, and the news are still relatively easy to track down.

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