Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
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In a sense Nokia was (organizationally) victim of its own success. During the dumb phone and feature phone era Nokia did everything better than others. Everything from the supply chain management, to the phone design and manufacturing worked so well. Why would you sideline leaders and organizations who build all that and wanted to build on that.
When Netflix made the decision to move from mail-based rental to streaming, they did not allow leaders involved in rental business to any meetings involving the company future planning. It's one of the best organizational decisions ever made.
Nokia had multiple choices to stay in game at the beginning. Adopt Android and be like Samsung. Create a new internal Linux based computing platform. Instead, Nokia allowed more senior leaders Symbian/Feature phone teams to interfere and sabotage in multiple big and small ways because their teams still made all the money. As a result, the response to Apple and Android was constant internal reorganization and failed American style compensation structure that caused talent to leave the company, not new stuff.
Hardware was great and software was great, but needed a bit more polish. MeeGo was more advanced than iOS in many ways at the time of this memo, and Maemo had been released way before the iPhone. The 770 was released in late 2005 and it was totally futuristic.
However, Elop had no interest in going this route. When MeeGo was released they dumped the project publicly shortly afterwards and then N9 was sold with no advertising. Despite this, it had a phenomenal demand.
I totally understood it as soon as it was leaked. MicroSoft exec joined a phone company as a CEO back when MS was trying to convince manufacturers to adopt Windows Phone. Double bonus: they could kill and incipient Linux competitor in one stroke.
If you've read the Halloween Documents or docs from the Comes case, it's quite clear: classic "love them to death."
One does not just "join" the biggest company in a foreign country as CEO. The board decided to hire him after evaluating all options.
The board's chairman was this guy who was CEO of Nokia for 14 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorma_Ollila
Why would he allow Elop to be hired unless he thought it was in the best interest of Nokia to align with Microsoft?
Not to mention the board could've fired Elop anytime if they thought he was prioritizing MS's interests over Nokia's.
Even if Nokia market share would have dropped to less then 10%, that would still have been profitable business for them, and would have made them a major player.
Going from being the dominate player in a major growing market to getting a few billion for it, is not really a success.
Only reason why N9 ever was released is because they simply brutally cut down the scope of the project, e.g. dropping Qualcomm-based variant for US/CDMA markets (that one was repurposed to be their first Windows Phone).
I used a N9 as my daily driver for 7 years. The card-based UI was incredibly elegant and easy to use with one hand. I prefer it to current iOS or Android. Besides, gestures blended really well with the curved screen edges. It had a great dark mode which also blended well with the AMOLED screen.
Offline GPS navigation was a pleasure to use, and unmatched till date. It had a terminal, which let me SSH anywhere to do quick jobs. I handled lots of tasks this way. For example, I used a remote Mutt instance running on my workstation to read email. The terminal was a real terminal running on the N9. For example, ifconfig could work on all network devices, including the mobile radio.
Messaging was highly integrated. Different services (e.g. XMPP, Skype, etc) were just addons. All contact management, chat and calls were performed from the same application irrespective of the protocol used to handle transport.
And lastly, it was an open device. You could install anything you wanted. It was truly Linux on your pocket.
Elop really robbed Nokia of what could have been an incredible product.
Intel gave up on x86 in phones right before Microsoft gave their Windows Mobile 10 Continuum demo, which was almost an eternity after the N9.
If N9 had been widely released and marketted and successful (it did well in small release, but who knows), that may have changed Intel's course. If Nokia hadn't abandoned it before release, it would have gotten application support; I joined WhatsApp around all this, and there were plans to support it as Symbian users were a large part of user base, so the next thing from Nokia was highly likely to be used, but not when Nokia drops it. Third party WA client development for the N9 was somewhat successful and became the start for a lot of other third party clients.
Blast from the past!
I remember when Maemo first arrived wanting one, and they never made it mainstream.
They arrived at about the same time. They used the same CPU. They both had (approximately) 800x480 screens, which at the time was flagship class. They both used slide-out keyboards, removable batteries, a 5MP camera, 256MB of RAM, and some on-board storage plus a microSD slot. They weighed within 20g of each other.
The N900 had a resistive touchscreen, the Droid was capacitative. Both had an official price of $600-650, but would actually be sold for $200-250 when bought with a 2 year carrier plan (that was the norm back then).
Maemo had a small developer community. Android had a medium-sized dev community. Android had marketing -- for about 2 years, people were calling all Android phones "Droids". Maemo had none.
N900 touchscreen was great. Not only was it perfectly readable in direct sunlight, it was also much more accurate than capacitive screens and not anywhere close to cheap resistive screens' clunkiness people usually imagine when hearing the term. The only issue I had with it was that they tend to develop issues after years of use, so my Nokia N900 does some very annoying ghosting these days.
I still however miss Windows Phone, there were some major mis-steps by Microsoft (the intial side load / developer story) forcing a software break with the move to Windows Phone 8. However as a user provided you could live with the pre-installed apps it was a great phone.
Interesting, I have used N900 for almost a decade and I found its stylus completely unnecessary, never used it. As mentioned earlier, the touchscreen started to be annoying to use in its final years once it started to misbehave, but before that I absolutely preferred it to capacitive screens as it was harder to trigger accidental touches with it.
People ran IRC clients directly on the console on it. A few friends of mine ran them as IRC hosts on their home network well into the 2010s - it was basically a Raspberry Pi with a keyboard and display =)
They had everything they needed to run Linux on (some of) their phones quite early on. Battery life might not have been great, but they had plenty of Linux-running mobile hardware around, kept in bags outside of the building.
I wonder, who was the “they” that successfully made such a decision? In most places, there wouldn’t be any senior leadership that isn’t “tainted”, so to speak, by the previous business model. Even a freshly appointed CEO is ineffective if not supported by the bulk of the organization. I wonder how Netflix managed to solve this.
I guess the reason was to let them move fast and deliver 0-1 product without being shackled by existing strictures, including the leaders with vested interests. They would hire whole division worth of people within weeks. The downside was a whole bunch of duplicate systems, as everyone would build their own payment processor, order management, UI etc. The results are starting to show as AWS is struggling to piece everything together as coherent higher order offerings. Like there are some two dozen ways to control access, a dozen ways to deliver notifications and so on.
Where can I read more about this?
There was a recent thread where Bezos was quoted as being against bet the company moves. I get where he’s coming from, ideally you’d avoid getting into that position, but faced with a fundamental technological shift like that, sometimes it’s just the right thing to do.
As an aside I’ve been at two companies that were sunk by mismanaged bet the company moves. In both cases they actually had plenty of time to change course, but management was so heavily invested in their pet project that by the time reality has punched them in the face hard enough to wake them up, it was too late.
Android back then was crap, iPhone and Blackberry too expensive.
Symbian phones were spreading like wildfire in dry grass, people were switching from dumbphones to Symbian, and the community was having great growth, I saw children looking online for tutorials how to learn coding so they could make Symbian games, there was even a bootleg Counter-Strike for Symbian.
As soon the demo came out, Symbian sales tanked, and people switched instead to random cheap and crap Chinese phones, a popular one was "hiphone".
The effect in my view was devastating, all the hacking community that was starting, suddenly died, what proliferated now was poor quality phones or people doing crazy things (one waiter sold his kidneys to buy an iPhone, literally). Nokia had a very confortable first place in market share in Brazil, in a few months they had became irrelevant.
And now the effects are still felt, in Brazil it is hard to get a decent phone without going into debt, a lot of good phones with interesting features are not sold here, and you can't import them either, because the proliferation of chinese cheap phones that caused all sorts of trouble, the national regulator decided that they will ban from the cell towers any phone that they detect that doesn't have official permission to be sold in the country, this means there is no FairPhone in Brazil, no Shift phone, no Jolla, and so on.
And sadly, not even Nokia themselves are bothering with us anymore, they recently released some fairly interesting phones with WhatsAPP support using FireFox OS (KaiOS), and didn't bother asking permission to sell them here, so they can't be imported.
Isn't the story that iphone development was a secret project with competing teams, one of which proposed the touch-screen interface?
There was no real separate Mac product team from the iPhone team, the head of hardware was responsible for the hardware for both so he didn’t have a conflict of interest. Whichever succeeded, to whatever degree, he would succeed. He would have no incentive for either to fail or to spike one in favour of the other.
I had an early Nokia Linux tablet (770, I think?), and I really liked it. I was very sad when Elop turned over the keys to Microsoft. Not surprised, though.
You have to do both. A company pivoting to a new technology too quickly can run out of steam if there’s no adoption and no stable business to keep it afloat. The challenge is to make sure that your legacy team doesn’t stifle your innovation team yet remains profitable as long as it is strategically beneficial.
People claim this about literally every single thing China was successful at. A government can't just magically make its companies successful in every single industry.
What did the CCP do exactly to make these phones better?
Edit:
Also, HTC didn't exactly have the market dominance of Nokia. So not sure the situations are comparable.
They are still the best, Nokia "dumb" phones feel a bit like the f91 Casio watch... but just like those watches, they aren't as popular as they once were.
For people who want a no bullshit, inexpensive, bulletproof, practical phone that lasts and isn't horrible to use, Nokia is still the best. But without competing with smartphones Nokias only other option was to downsize, because as great as they are dumb phones are no longer popular enough - so as you say they were a victim of their own success, they reached a size that was unsustainable in the face of what was to come.
Personally, I want a smartphone along the lines of traditional Nokia phones: Big and tough. I'm glad to have something double the thickness of a normal phone, but:
- The screen shouldn't crack if you squint at it funny (bezel is fine)
- The battery should last a week (double, or more, the thickness of modern smartphones is fine)
- The cell coverage should be spectacular. Again, thickness means more space for antennas.
- It should have good cameras, at least 1080 resolution
- Standard plugs and jacks (USB-C, headphone, SD, dual SIM, etc.)
- Ideally, software updates forever, as stock Android / open source as possible, as little tracking as possible, etc.
- Ideally, stylus (with built-in storage)
- Good security, app sandboxing, no data collection, no cloud sketchiness, reasonable ToS
I think there are a lot of corporate segments as well. Increasing size should also cut down on NREs and allow more modularity, making it easier to make niche devices. I think there are enough markets to have a diversity of devices if NREs can be brought in-line.
“It wasn't until the streaming business was massively ahead of the DVD business before the execs on the DVD side weren't going to the overall strategy meetings. A lot of us had roles on both sides until like 2012ish when there was a clear split internally and a DVD-only executive team was officially set up.”
Apple had the advantage of a nicer product, and was building products for the US first, rather than US maybe later. Tech news is mostly (but not completely) based in the US, so Nokia smartphones got little coverage as they were often unavailable or non functional in the US. Different GSM frequencies meant different builds, and CDMA was an even more different build. And Nokia had messed up relations with US carriers at a time when phones selling through carriers was the primary method of reaching customers.
Before that, we’d been building an app for Nokia N97 handset users, an ever-decreasing market - all the engineers on the team had iPhones.
We thought after that email that the next step would be to go on Android. Sure, Nokia would contract a little as it lost its platform, but the platform wasn’t that valuable. It was the great handsets - software wasn’t Nokia’s forte - the leadership structure just didn’t have the vision to bring it together.
When the meeting rolled around, we all went to a big conference centre at the heart of Berlin to watch the announcement of the future vision. Stephen Elop appeared on a gigantic screen, talked a bit before laying down the new vision. It was going to be Android, right? It made perfect sense, the ecosystem was growing and aligned to Nokia. But, no - Stephen announced that the future of Nokia was with Microsoft.
I walked out of the conference when I heard that - standing outside of the conference hall. I knew two things at that moment. One, there wasn’t going to be a future for Nokia - there was no way Microsoft under Ballmer’s leadership could produce an ecosystem. Secondly, I realised that Elop was still Microsoft’s man - He didn’t make the logical choice that fit with Nokia’s culture - It was going to be a takeover by Microsoft.
The project I was working on soon got a new boss. We thought this would align with the new vision of the company. He took us into a room and projected a picture on the wall of a mountaintop surrounded by clouds. He said, “I know you must feel a bit like this, unclear about the direction, clouded about what the future holds. Don’t worry… I also feel like that, too”.
The new boss did eventually make a decisive decision - the N97 app that we were building was to be kept, but it was going to be focused on an even smaller niche of the market, N97 users who were pro skiers. I left soon after.
The takeover by Microsoft did eventually happen, and the rest is history.
People sometimes think that we can see Android was the right route only with hindsight. No, every engineer at the time knew that Android was the right way to go and that there was huge opportunity for Nokia there. Sure enough, in the following years we all had to read reviews of Nokia's phone that always concluded: "The handset is fantastic, if only it was running Android". I won't bother going into all the reasons that Windows Phone was a disaster. Elop used some nonsense justification that Android would be a 'failure to differentiate'.
Ultimately though, I take a different view about what the real strategy was. The Nokia board had seen their phones business drop in value from around $120b to around a third of that. They wanted to get out, whilst there was still something left to sell. Choosing Windows Phone effectively saddled Microsoft with the risk too (a joint future), and at that point it was obvious they would have buy the unit entirely in time. Elop wasn't a Trojan horse, the Nokia board saw Microsoft flailing in phones and used their riches to get out.
It's sad because Nokia could have been an Android powerhouse. Particularly getting in early, with really interesting hardware innovation. But someone wanted to cash out. They weren't happy to risk having a phone business worth not 40bn but nothing at all.
The rank and file have no idea what to do with this information. The new platform looks great, but it isn’t proven, doesn’t replace the margin targets for sales, and the marketing is split telling the new story while trying not to accelerate the fire. Customers don’t know us for the new platform, so large effort is invested trying to get the smallest of wins at new clients. Invariably, the staff don’t really understand the new platform, quality is lower than the burning platform. Client decides this isn’t something you are good at, sales gets burned and says no thanks. Executives say, oh shit, our finances are a catastrophe, focus on the burning platform. We need quick wins!
Layoffs throw a bunch of people off the platform, repeat until the business is 10% of size, and languish for years with mediocre executives (well paid for skills /competency as no one that has a clue will work for them). People that should resign do the work for 8 people until they burnout. The situation messes with people’s minds and they stick around even though they know they must leave.
The analogy makes sense, but thought out, it is apparent why it can’t work. The whole business leaps from a platform, not to another platform, but to a life raft. It has no stability, can’t support the same people, processes, or way of thinking. Eventually it capsizes and sinks, or is collected by someone with a platform who will extract the last of the value as it goes away silently in the night.
In a proper public company, crucial strategic decisions like these are not CEO-level but board-level. The CEO is called chief executive officer exactly because he executes the strategy set by the shareholders, whom the board represents. And that's exactly how it went down here. You can read it all from the 2014 book "Operation Elop" by Pekka Nykänen and Merina Salminen, Teos Publishing.
They flooded this thing with crappy apps anyone could submit for some weird incentives just to get their weird app store metrics up, making the user experience horrible. I wonder what would have happened, if they ran a properly curated platform, where they didn't allow for keyword spamming. At a time Windows Phone had pretty much all the apps you needed back then and a more then decent camera at a competetive price.
There were zero requirements other than publish N number of apps, there was zero form of quality control. I was a freshman in college at the time, could barely code my way out of a leetcode at that point and I’d have five calculator-esque apps ready to go whenever my local Microsoft division dropped a Tweet saying a new program was live since there was only a limited amount of phones.
Felt real good for me and my buddies but ironically we were left with phones that had these junk riddled app stores, amazing hardware devices though.
But yeah, Balmer did great developing the B2B side of things, consumer devices wasn’t it.
Honestly that's a bullshit feature to lock behind premium, given a PC can do it without.
But then Google more or less gave them the 'fuck you' and made the app unusable. Which I still feel has some antitrust connotations, as they waited until the platform became competent to do so.
It would have been nice if they didn't copy Apple so hard, leaving out copy and paste and restricting browsers in the store weren't the best decisions for an upstart platform. Mozilla had been excited to port Firefox early on, but Microsoft told them no, so WP users were stuck with Mobile IE and much later in WM10, the amazingly worse Mobile Edge.
- First-party apps using the same SDK as third-party apps. This would’ve forced the third-party sdk to be awesome from the beginning, but it also would’ve delayed the launch of WP7 by at least 4-6 months. It wasn’t until a couple years later that some first-party apps switched to the public sdk and improvements were made, but by then it was too late.
- Google allowing us to build official apps for YouTube and maps. We even offered to build and maintain it, but they simply refused to allow those apps to exist on our platform.
I still had a wonderful time working on the product 2008-2012, but it’s really a shame WP never made it as a viable third platform.
I can’t stop laughing at this.
To these days their gesture navigation implementation is the best. And they had Swype keyboard preinstalled.
Speaking of apps: Here maps, SoundHound, amazing mail client and calendar...
Gosh I miss that phone.
I used mine for about 3 years, I think, and sold it for more than a half of its original price in literally a couple of hours (which means my price was too low).
By the time the software started showing its age: no banking apps, browser failing to display more and more modern sites...
I believe, they should have pushed with Meego. With vendor support their OS could've been a hit.
I owned a Communicator 9290, and have yet to have a phone that performed as well on speaker. Bar none. Noise cancelling and volume both. I had an e90, and although it was less amazing on that front, the build quality, and look at feel just was... Great!
I'd pay iPhone Pro prices for (basically) an e90 running Android with a decent camera. Nobody's made one yet, but I keep hoping. And yes, in a matter of weeks I'll have my Astro Slide from Planet Computers, but I have little doubt the form factor will still fall short of the dream of a truly pocket phone you can type decently well on.
Mind you that memo and the decisions made were either incredibly stupid or part of a strategy by the shareholders to break apart Nokia. I mean apart from the fact that you tell the public that you don't believe in your product while selling it, they also decided to axe the Meego version N9 successor even though it was essentially ready. Many believe that was done to not risk it being a success, which would have revealed the whole strategy change to be wrong.
I actually miss it, those were simpler times where your phone didn't spam you with ads or notifications or didn't get outdated every 2 years. No constant data collection or surveillance to the scales we deal with now.
More so, I actually miss the feeling of how new everything was, in the sense that is you wanted to play some games you'd sometimes scour WAP sites for the game files (or pay exorbitant fees through magazines).
There was a certain charm to games back then, too, seeing what people could knock together with Java on such a limited platform. Games like Gravity Defied, Galaxy on Fire or Gish, or even Doom RPG.
I'm kind of nostalgic, admittedly, maybe for a time when not everything was so well optimized towards monetization. And before Wirth's law became so present on our devices.
SDK available only for Windows and really awkward to install and use? Check. Pre-11 C++ but without exceptions and something called cleanup stack and ELeave macro instead? Check. Ok, a whole periodic table of string classes instead of std::string (which would still have been terrible because it was before C++11)? Check. GUI API that was designed for a Psion handheld (Uikon) and implementation for Psions (Eikon) and Series 60 UI implementation (Avkon) piled on top of that? Check. App architecture that doesn't really have a concept of standalone app but works on the idea that apps are views and controllers that handle files? Check. What about making every single phone model slightly different so that apps are not portable between Symbian phones by default but you have to actually test and port with every model? Check. And there was a lot more at deeper technical level that I never had to reach.
I understand that the developer experience was better for the last Symbian versions but at that point it was already late, iOS and Android were taking over and Symbian had a reputation to fix.
My definitive memory of Symbian development having a lunch at a Nokia cafeteria, a week after starting the job and all the dreams about having a computer in your pocket that could run anything as long at it didn't need huge amounts of CPU power, memory or screen area crushed, and complaining with a friend who was in similar situation. An older engineer had heard us, told us that we don't know anything about how bad S60 is and continued with a hour-long rant that as far as I know was all pure facts.
That you couldn't develop for at all.
I do have a newer one, that's because the camera is something I care about, not because an X isn't fast enough or whatever, it remains a capable phone.
I get nostalgic for the HipTop, personally. Probably because I never had one, by the time I was done with flip phones the slab-o-glass was the obvious winner. Seriously cool little gizmos though, I don't think a better typing experience has been made for a pocketable jeejah to this day.
In-between Chromebooks and generic Linux distros (say what you will about the year of Linux on the desktop, use is only growing; slow paced or not, doesn't matter), specialised Linux distros (SteamOS - you might think it doesn't matter, it's only for a handheld console, the Steam Deck, but it will force many games to have Linux compatibility. And one of the main things keeping many tech savvy users on Windows is gaming) i think a duopoly is a bit of a strong word, and it's getting disrupted.
The other is the advanced state of Windows emulation for games, you can bypass the platform effect if you can piggy back on an established platform's APIs. That's tricky though, plenty of mobile OSes tried to get traction with Android APK compatibility, but the problem with that is, why bother developing native apps for them? With games consoles it's a different situation, maybe emulation in the long term is just fine.
Meego, running on the N9, was an absolutely wonderful experience. It was smooth, fast, beautifully designed, and had simple elegant swipe-based navigation system, it had multiprocess app switching (AFAIK before iPhone OS did) and a brilliant newsfeed/notification system. It felt like it really had extraordinary potential. And Elop ditched it.
N900 was a great beta. We never got a 1.0 though.
Eventually got a Sailfish Jolla.
Some of the bugs you describe could have been fixed with simple software updates.
Android have copied some elements of this but it's nowhere near as simple!
The hardware was fantastic as well. I dropped mine several times without a case and it never broke.
The TI dac sounded great with my Sony XBA-3 iems I had at the time.
I did hate the USB port cover though. And hated that they didn't have a dedicated camera button like the N8 and n97.
Paid a lot for the 64 gig N9. Soon after Nokia abandoned the OS, and I felt ripped off.
I remember the flash refused to stay off. I would disable flash for a photo, but next time I used camera the flash was back on. This was enough to move to a phone that remembered the flash setting.
Years later I tried to start my N9 but it was demanding a password that I didn't know. Some kind of recovery password I never knew I had set up. There was no way I could find to reset the phone even to factory settings. It's basically bricked with no way to restore, so I couldn't even sell it as a working phone.
I'll counter with the Nokia N900.
> I believe, they should have pushed with Meego. With vendor support their OS could've been a hit.
So say we all.
I've never understood this about N900 fans.
My experience with the N9 was great, and never left me wishing I could go back to something more like a Sharp Zaurus with modern cell connectivity.
What is it that makes the N900 appealing? Is it strictly the physical keyboard? So the N950 would have been the N900 killer? Or was there something else about it?
First of all ot was a true Linux phone. Running a derivative of Debian, complete with apt etc. Most of the apps on it, even the app to make a phone call where preexisting open source Linux applications with a nice mobile UI. An UI that was clean and consistent without the need off branding that other platforms suffer from.
I could simply write bash script for it to extend its functionality. For example I remember writing a script that would record and sent recordings of phone calls to my server.
I installed Pidgin the chat client and used it to chat with my friends when MSN was still popular in my county. It truly felt like having a PC in your pocket.
The keyboard was the best keyboard ever made in my opinion. I could actually type blind on it sensing a message without looking at the phone at all. I still own 3 N900's with the hope of every managing the find the enthusiasm to rig in the another phone or a pi.
On top of that it was actually usable for normal users which the n900 failed at, largely due to not being usable in many networks due to the radio IIRC. The UI of the N9 was also much more polished. So unless you never used an N9 I don't understand how you would prefer the N900 (except for the keyboard).
The keyboard made it. It was very usable too. I took it once to a hackathon and was able to follow along nicely.
I've had them all, including a Zaurus, various Palms with phone, various XDAs, Nokia N900, Free Runner, Firefox phone, Ubuntu phone, you name it... but IMHO the N900 was the best form factor and UI - the only reason why I got rid of it was the band didn't support where I was traveling to.
Still sad the NEO 900 went nowhere. I would jump at that. Still interested in trying the Purism and PinePhone, but with my time as limited as it is, I'll stick to my Pixel 4a running LineageOS for now - but can't wait to get me back a pure Linux phone that works without issues!
> Or was there something else about it?
It's pretty simple: hacker vs. user points of view
i used both N9 and N900. N9 was a way more polished, user-centric device. I love the UX and even how the device looks
however, for (low-level) hackers, N9/N950 was a bit hostile environment compared to N900. The first major stumbling block was Aegis (somewhat similar to Samsung's Knox perhaps). With N900, you can just boot any other Linux by simply loading u-boot to memory using the flasher. Nothing else. N9/N950's Aegis prevented that kind of luxury, so you needed to mess with the OS first, deal with permanent ominous warranty warning, and risk bricking it (see https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=81579). On the other hand, N900 is basically unbrickable. So N950 loses to N900 because of these reasons, even though it has a keyboard, a somewhat better one in fact
Still better than pretty much every alternative at that time though.
HERE was spun off, and is a great platform today. HERE WeGo is available for Android and iOS, plus web.
[1] https://mspoweruser.com/nokia-here-transit-now-covers-46-uk-...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.schildbach....
It's a horrible buggy mess. Nothing like the smooth experience of the meego/Maemo n9
Making UI for mostly existing apps, porting lots of existing apps over. Lots of free continues investments. Like you get other companies on board who use the same basic distro and apps and help with bug fixes and so on.
You can use the same distro on phones, tables and even sell laptops with that software on it.
And you can do all of that for no cost to anybody. Every single Nokia with Windows gives money away to Microsoft.
Now what Nokia did in response... that may not have been right either. But they had to do something.
In this metaphor, Nokias actions were neither staying on the platform not jumping into the water but shooting itself in the head instead.
If the internally Nokia OSes were not going anywhere, which looked to be the case from the outside, the obvious solution was to go with Android. Something that already had the user base, had the apps, had the platform, was open source so it allowed for innovation and differentiation, and Nokia could tailor it to work well with their hardware.
Instead, he chose to go with Windows Phone which had absolutely no benefits. And had severe restriction the kind of phones Nokia could create and on the modifications they could make (they could barely even reskin it) and did not allow Nokia to leverage any software or hardware prowess they may have had.
LG, HTC, Sony …etc have all but disappeared and they all chose Android. Sony especially had some solid hits back in the day.
Microsoft utterly failed Nokia but I don’t consider the decision at the time to be a terrible one.
They could have probably produced better hardware than the other Android makers - the N9 and first Lumias were very nice devices to hold and use - but they weren't exactly coming in with a ton of momentum in the market.
Regarding the N9, it was released essentially without any marketing push, with very little availability (I think they didn't even get it into live stores, you had to order online). It was also released after the memo, so obviously only few people got it.
> LG, HTC, Sony …etc have all but disappeared and they all chose Android.
Yeah, but that took a decade or more. Going with Windows was an insta-death. Going with Android would have given them at least a decade to decide on a strategy.
Windows over Android was an insane choice, no matter which angle you look at it from.
Edit to add: the most popular vendor, by far, is Apple, with more than 60% of the market. Steve Jobs studied Sony very carefully, back in the day. It shows.
While some of the assessments in the memo might be correct (it took way too long to get the N9 out for example), shouting this out to the public is incredibly stupid. I mean he is lamenting the fact they only have one top of the line phone out, but then decides to completely axe the system (and the pending new tip of the line phone) for making them and only sell the Symbian version which he just decried as being for lower end phones. And then wait another year or 2 until they have a Windows phone, a platform that they don't control and where they are completely reliant on MS and which is totally unproven?
Edit: OK reading up again, it seems I misremembered. It was actually the N9 which was the Meego phone released after the memo. It was essentially released that you had to be order specifically through an online system only at Nokia. It still gained wide critical acclaim, but at that point was poised to fail already.
...which is mostly because of infighting with Symbian team. Nokia N810 was supposed to be a phone already. Nokia N8 was supposed to me a lower end Meego device. Both didn't end up that way because of internal politics.
They thought they couldn't build hardware good enough to compete with other Android makers, but somehow convinced themselves that the solution to that was to put their less competitive hardware onto a less competitive platform.
But that is so wrong. Hardware was their strength. They could've sticked to what they knew best and over time do what's necessary.
They were slow. Really slow. Typing was so slow. Opening the camera app even more so.
Starting with Window Phone 8 everything was native code, even .NET, while on Android the first Dalvik versions didn't even had a JIT.
Only in retrospect. At the time, the internet was full of people who thought Symbian was Just Fine. And they had sales figures of millions of (mostly 12-key) "smartphones[0]" to prove it. And then this shifted to "Lost Causeism" when whatever MooMooMo platform never got off the ground.
[0] Okay, I had one of these and you could check your email or do a google search, but obviously the iphone it was not.
Our culture was pretty much anti-MS before he came on board.
On the server side we were using HP-UX, Perl, C++, in 2005 the transition for Red-Hat Linux and Java started.
On the devices, Symbian and the Maemo (Linux based).
Symbian was finally getting usable with PIPS, Qt and Eclipse based Carbide.
I happened to be in Espoo the week after this memo was published, I haven't found anyone that agreed with it.
Everyone thought the community would never jump of joy with Microsoft technologies, and right they were.
(edit: a highlight was getting to meet Dan Ingalls once; he was cool)
Everyone knew at the time Elop had made a terrible choice crafted to sell Nokia to Microsoft. Here's a nice HN comment I saved that was written a few days after the memo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2206437
And then the Nokia transition was supposed to take two years! Posting a memo like this and then taking two years to transition while expecting customers to buy inventory on the old platform? That's just a way to kill a company.
He was after all reaching its targets.
https://www.slashgear.com/stephen-elops-contract-revealed-as...
Nokia went for Windows because of the acquisition target, not because of quality of the OS. With that, they prioritized business strategy over product quality, and we all know what happened after.
But since Microsoft were 2-3 years late, there were not many apps. And then they shot themselves and all people who already bought a Windows Phone device in the foot, by completely forking the ecosystem with Windows Phone 8. Leaving early adopters stranded on Windows Phone 7 and no ability to run newer Windows Phone 8 apps.
and had no apps. Windows Phone/Mobile had atrocious developer share. There few apps that were available were of terrible quality. Ironic, considering this happened in the era of a sweaty Balmer screaming "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"[1]
It took Android 10 years, for something like AGK to come up, and even then it is a mess of development experience.
Used all Windows Phone versions, and they all got more updates than most my Android devices.
Their market was around 10% in Europe when they decided to give up.
Any WP7 polish advantage was skin deep at best. It took approximately 3-5 interactions for something to break in 3rd party apps and maybe twice that in first party apps.
I think betting on either (a) MS beating Apple at their own game or (b) there being room in the market for two premium-limited-but-smoother-UX systems was a dicey call.
Nokia's hardware design advantage over that HTC was MUCH larger than WP7's UI advantage over Android, anyway. I would've stuck with Android but moved to Nokia in a heartbeat if that sleek blue slab of plastic phone ran Android.
Also at the time of this memo, WP was essentially nonexistent. It was with Nokias switch that they gained some momentum and polish.
I worked with an ex Nokia hardware engineer around that time and he said lots of them had left / been laid off (can't remember which) since Windows Phone could only run on quite specific chipsets (Qualcomm, I think), which basically made their jobs less useful.
But if cost was a factor then maybe that was part of the point, rather than a side effect of the decision.
Let's not forget just how bad Microsoft products for handhelds were in the 2000s. (In fact, if you have any devices from back then, dig them out and try them. They are a lot worse than everyone seems to remember. And Microsoft released this stuff with a straight face).
Android might have been behind in 2011, but it had more momentum and it didn't have bone cancer - it had sound bones. It was pretty obvious that Android was going to be the better bet when you have 1-2 years of lead time. As Nokia would have had anyway to get something put together.
It is really hard to see how rational people would make such poor choices - unless motivated to do so.
Stephen Elop gets the blame for this often but he was merely the messenger boy. Put there by a board that allowed all this to happen long before he was installed to quickly execute what had been decided by that board. And that board was lead by its former CEO Jorma Ollila. Who made Nokia big in the nineties and was instrumental in its demise and involved with all the key blunders in the ten years prior to selling the remains of the phone division to Microsoft.
Nokia thought they were being smart by jumping ship to Microsoft's Windows Phone. But the reality was that was the merely the latest in a series of very misguided moves that started in the late nineties when they failed to see the potential of Linux and bet on Symbian instead. Nokia's leadership had an enormous blindspot when it came to software. It's technical leadership consisted of people with radio and electrical engineering backgrounds. They were simply incapable of seeing what was happening very clearly in the industry in the late nineties. Linux was happening in a very big and obvious way. And it was inevitably going to run on phones. That was clear in 1999 and a reality before the first Symbian phones even shipped.
By the time Google bought Android, backing Symbian had very obviously been a bad move. By that time there were so many people trying to get Linux going on phones that it was just a matter of time before someone succeeded. Google wanted in on the action. Linux/Android was their quick way in.
Nokia was struggling to get Symbian to market while all that was happening. It was crap. The first versions crashed all the time and were really sluggish and klunky. Incidentally, Nokia actually killed a touch screen platform for Symbian that they never launced. In 2005 as the rumors about the iphone started circulating. Nokia was instead obsessing over flip phones and saw Motorola's razr as its biggest threat. So, it killed the touch screen platform mistakingly thinking that it was not needed.
All this was so obvious that in fact a department in Nokia took it upon themselves to build a Linux based platform. Maemo. The first product launched in late 2005. It was based on Debian Linux and featuring a UI built using GTK and a web browser that was based on Mozilla. A full six years before the first Ipad launched, Nokia had an linux based tablet with a touch screen. Exactly the right kind of thing to be bringing to market around then. Except the Nokia management was completely blind to this and kept on favoring Symbian.
Years later when Google finally unveiled Android after Apple launched the iphone. Google had been relying on a lot of the R&D that went into Maemo. As they lacked a phone until they launched the first Nexus, they even used the N800 as a development platform for Android. There was even a port of Android that you could boot on an N800. I know because I had one and tried it.
Google bought and eventually launched Android between 2005 and 2009. But it was Nokia that was doing a lot of the heavy lifting on kernel development. By 2008 Nokia had a very coherent platform strategy for launching a Linux based range of phones. By 2010 that strategy included a UI platform (QT), Meego, and a then still secret entirely new platform based on Linux aimed at feature phones that got unceremoniously cancelled in 2012 without a product ever having been launched.
Nokia's failure was favoring Symbian throughout this chaotic period until it was crystal clear that the market was never going to favor Symbian and that all attempts at open sourcing it and fixing it were simply not succeeding. By then Google was succeeding with Android and Apple was growing market share with the iphone without Nokia ever having gotten serious at even trying to compete with the platform it had all along.
The thing is, it took Google many years to turn Android into a decent platform after they launched it. The first versions had all sorts of issues with poor UX, poor performance, stability, security, etc. Manufacturers used it mainly because Symbian and Windows CE were worse and there wasn't much else in the market that they could use. And they were hopeless at doing software themselves. And while the iphone was popular, the first versions were pretty limited in features.
So, Nokia had a chance for several years to launch a platform based on the same Linux kernel that Android was using that they were using in Meego. They had all the pieces to pull that off; including a large base of existing users that still loved their Nokias. But they blew their chances because internally Symbian was the darling and people backing that spend years frustrating and delaying Meego.
Phones that were intended to launch with Meego in fact launched with Symbian. They bought Trolltech (QT) to fix the UI for Meego but that turned into a project to fix Symbian instead. The original Maemo devices were using GTK. That move delayed a Meego launch by three years or so as the UI platform they had was scrapped in favor of QT. The only Linux phone with QT that ever launched was the N9. And only after they decided to kill the platform and fire the team. The N900 before that (2009) was still using GTK. It was fine. I had one. Pretty awesome device at the time. Way nicer than anything Google was shipping. But it was very obviously a developer phone and never aimed at consumers ,and a bit klunky, and limited from a hardware point of view. Almost as if they wanted it to fail.
The N9 was launched after Stephen Elop had been appointed around the time of this silly memo. The decision to can it was of course taken before he joined. One of his first moves was killing that at the same time as he was killing Symbian. Basically, he killed Symbian, Meego, and Meltemi (the linux based feature phone platform) to make room for windows phone. In a bizarre move of defiance, Nokia actually managed to launch an Android phone just before MS acquired the phone unit and promptly killed that.
In the IT school I was at Nokia was a regular topic of conversation. All of us completely frustrated that they were apparently unwilling to invest in a Linux based phone and everybody eventually getting an Android or IPhone.
They really had a chance, they were at the right time with the close to the right product and just failed.
And there is a pretty clear path to making an android comparability layer.
Also, even if you want to switch to Android (or Windows) just 'burn it all down' is a bad strategy. That was a profitable business and still had huge market share. Just pissing all over it wasn't a good plan.
I'm surprised how positive HN was about this. I don't remember reading any positive coverage at the time. I personally thought the guy was an idiot. He wound up performing worse than my expectations.
Symbian definitely wasn't the way forward. MeeGo wasn't looking like it was gonna be an iOS or Android killer.
Elop was right about needing to change horses. Terribly wrong about which one to pick, in retrospect. One could argue that MS fucked that up as much as Nokia, though - this was before MS continually screwed up their WP strategy for several subsequent years, like with the WP8 hard reset. Even best case, though, it was a high-risk/high-reward gamble to try to be "the" WP7 phone instead of one of many Android contenders. Would've been interesting to see them take on Samsung instead of just HTC and zombie Motorola, though.
What was wrong with MeeGo?
The memo just states:
> at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.
But that's not soo bad considering that they started the platform in 2010.
It's not like changing to a different platformbat this point would make things faster anyway.
The way I remember it was that at the time the management-forced merge of Maemo and Moblin to Meego and the sudden switch from Gtk to Qt were thought to be risky moves and it was well known that Symbian supporters are doing anything they can to sabotage other platforms. Later I was told that N9 was incredibly polished but Meego wasn't that great behind the scenes and would have required massive rewrites if development had continued (which isn't that different from stories about early iOS).
That was probably because N9 didn't really use MeeGo - technically it was still a Maemo based system that was only disguised under MeeGo brand.
I remember the N900 coming out and wanting Maemo.
Then years later when I didn't care anymore I MeeGo peaked my interest, but I didn't really care anymore.
What other then GTK vs QT is different.
And why was it needed, I never understood why they simple didn't go forward with Maemo.
By then, however, management had struck an agreement with Intel to join forces over a Linux OS for devices. Intel had its own Linux distro, Moblin, which was based on RedHat. Moblin and Maemo were meant to merge into "MeeGo", a distro based on RedHat but with a QT interface. The project started fairly quickly but, by then, the N9 was basically ready, so Nokia effectively shipped what they had beforehand and just called it MeeGo.
Beyond the UI, iirc, the differences between Maemo and Moblin/MeeGo were the packaging system and some service daemons. The most annoying part, really, was that third-party apps built for Maemo would have had to be repackaged and retested for MeeGo, effectively throwing away all community efforts made over several years. Despite the best efforts by Nokia to placate folks, the community they had built around Maemo was completely pissed off and largely gave up, focusing on the actually-profitable systems. And then the burning platform memo happened.
I had an n900 in 2009. I think they theoretically had a winner there.
But they never prioritized it above Symbian.
Then between the n900 and the n9, they totally rewrote the UI on a new toolkit, wasting resources and making it clear that if you write an app for it they may completely discard 95% of the app platform from release to release.
If they had iterated on Maemo 5 in that time and put all hands on deck behind it they could have used those ~3 years more productively and been more competitive. Maemo 5 was actually pretty close to what they needed.
Blackberry had a similar situation. Like meego, in bb10 they had a qt based platform in the early 2010s. But it was too late. The biggest blunder is not doing it sooner, before Android solidified.
I was afraid disaster would ensue...
Maybe it was impossible to do better, but it seems it would have been difficult to do worse.
For example: the Moto-Q ran Windows, shoe-horned in some AT&T UX junk, and a huge nubin that stuck out in the middle. It pioneered the ever present "pocket dial." Was thinking of developing for it, but after a few dozen pocket dials, I wanted to go full Frisbee mode.
Apple cut through the 3-body problem. They controlled the UX. Such as integrated voice-mail. The carrier didn't mess with the UX. After a few months, Apple provided a decent development environment -- maybe as a response to all the jailbreak apps that we were making.
Around that time I was in a focus group. What struck me was a horror story from a Symbian developer. Their toolchain broke after an incremental update. Lost a week dealing with it. That kind-of put me off of Symbian.
Maybe the real choice for Nokia was: either the burning platform or the sharks.
There were major components people refused to even touch (like messaging) because the code was basically unmaintainable. An aggressive refactor of the entire OS was needed but they never really got comfortable with that. Symbian was originally essentially an operating system targeted at a calculator that outgrew itself several times over.
The first modern slab phone I ever saw wasn’t an iPhone… it was a Nokia prototype in like 2005. If they had a real operating system in place maybe Nokia is the world’s most valuable company today.
The difference could be that the technical foundation was more sound, and also, Google is institutionally capable of large refactorings in a way that I think few other companies are.
People forget this, and it’s solved now, but it took Android several years and quite a few iterations of the rendering layer to get smooth scrolling working to the level of the iPhone 1. Look up “Project Butter” if you’re interested.
Smooth scrolling is hard, but important for touch to feel perfectly right. I’m convinced that this is one of the places where it mattered that touch screens were an afterthought in the original architecture.
But I loved my BlackBerries - they were the perfect tool for email/chat/calling and nothing else, the perfect complement to a laptop, whereas iPads partially overlap with both mobile phones AND laptops in terms of functionality, which is why at airports you now see so many people carrying three devices instead of one.
So while I have fond memories of Nokia, I don't miss their devices, but I'd give my metaphorical leg for getting my BB back.
That phone was absolutely top tier at the time. It lacked some apps but overall it was an amazing phone. Everyone always wanted to know what it was I was using.
I wish they had continued pushing it forward.
Qt/Sailfish worked well enough too but it definitely had its defects. My biggest complaint was they didn't ship complete source prepared for convenient reproduction of the firmware and out-of-box encouraged flashing of self-made builds. Then I would have been fixing the bugs I tripped over.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/916271-how-stephen-elop-des...
Nokia was "old people in suits". I don't think the company was ever going to be capable of transformation.
That amount of money is roughly what the top two smart phone manufacturers make in one week of sales. The industry represents a multi trillion dollar combined market cap due to smart phone sales. Then there is all the new businesses it enabled, creating wealth for developers.
Oh yes, Nokia lost. There really isn't any spin one can put on that.
Nokia owned a significant slice of late stage pre internet telephony infrastructure level equipment, bridged over to the emerging mobile world and .. kinda missed the boat when Apple happend in with iPhone and then Android's emergence killed them.
A lot of people loved their handsets. Just not enough in any single market to make up for some bad decisions.
A similar fate: I wonder if the myriad of vendors who glued to the Japanese market regretted it, as that model shrank as internet rose?
So for the big mobile wireless telco's, the big players are basically Nokia, Erricson, and Huawei these days. My experience with Nokia's equipment did reflect the burning platform memo, but all the big players had lots to be desired in my experience with them.
Note: I've been out of the industry for several years, so I'm not totally up to date on the vendors.
It wasn't just a rebranding. Nokia wisely bought Siemens out from the Networks joint venture already in 2013, before selling the phones to Microsoft. Then in 2015, they acquired Alcatel-Lucent (including Bell Labs) to the mix. This way, they stayed in Fortune Global 500 even without the phone business.
And nowadays there are new Nokia branded feature phones as well as Android phones and tablets: https://www.nokia.com/phones/
I remember reading a deep dive into how exactly Nokia run it's cellular department, in it's corporate culture... and things there were not great. Everything were behind the red tape and countless meetings, every feature had someone who was appointed as an 'owner' of that feature and if you need to change something what would somehow involve that feature you needed an approval from that owner. And if the guy didn't want to give the approval, because he was afraid to take the responsibility than there was nothing you could with it. Same in the Symbian dept.
People like to shit on Elop, but with or without him the mighty Finnish giant would die anyway. With Elop and MS deal they, at least, tried to do something and saved jobs for a couple of years (though not all). Without MS deal all those people would been on the street in 2013 at best.
That included me. I had fond memories of an near indestructible 3310 and I genuinely wish I did not miss the boat on N900 ( I just landed in US and phone was the least of my concerns then ).
<<Just not enough in any single market to make up for some bad decisions.
Sadly, clearly there are decisions that can sink even a dominant power in the market. He is not HP's Fiorina. He did have some wins in previous positions, which makes a person like me question whether the failures at Nokia was little more than a sabotage. Obviously, we will likely never really know.
> Maemo Leste continues the legacy of Maemo ... based on Devuan Beowulf (Debian Buster) and all the supported devices ship with recent mainline Linux kernels. We are currently in the development phase and we are actively searching for developers. For some devices, we have development images available - such as the Nokia N900, Motorola Droid 4, and the PinePhone. There is also a 64bit virtual machine you can use to try out Maemo Leste.
Software WIP status: https://leste.maemo.org/Status
The failure of this situation to talk about how intensely stupid it was to give up on the platform is farcically bad. What was here was incredible. It needed improvement & work but the architecture was immensely omni-potential, more capable clearly & growing well known existing tech well, rather than alternate reality symbian or then counter respondes danger or android. weird new alternates to actual linux desktop. Selling out to MS was one of the most shortsighted sorry pathetic givings ups, in a time of vast growth with fantastically little belief in yourself & your people doing good. There was no technical reason to refocus. (But bad numbers, as most players saw). They should have kept going. This was a decision made by people who had faint sense, gailed to appreciate hope, missed clarity on what creating value was like, what value was. This was a pathetic ignorant stupid business decision, to end Maemo. Things rocked, that was a great could do possibility, the OLE COM competitor kf DBus was winning, the market just didnt see yet.
What did they do instead? They made an extremely stupid bet on Microsoft, which by that time was even further behind in mobile world than Nokia itself.
Open or closed source wasn't the problem, really.
Motorola A925, Motorola A1000, Motorola RIZR Z8, Motorola RIZR Z10 (aka 'banana')
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Motorola+Z8&t=ffcm&iar=images&iax=...
And their linux based phones were pretty open but they had no power in the organization and having an open source platform with no phones is pointless.
Aaaand that's where I would have decided to get a new job. I've survived two different "roll up your sleeves, plebs, the management set our house on fire" scenarios. Never again.
Unfortunately identifying the problem is only half the battle. Figuring out what to do next is the other half, and that is where nokia failed.
But instead they just continued with the Symbian feature phones that nobody wanted.
It is a book originally written in Finnish by two journalists who start out with the question of whether Elop was placed at Nokia with the goal of "handing over" the phone business to MS. Their final answer is "no": it is unlikely that this was the case, according to their research. Most decisions that were taken were rational and explainable, many of them risky but adequate given the desperate situation ...
I was not at the company at the time of the memo, having joined in 2012. I do remember the morning when every employee at Nokia got an SMS on their phone saying that the phone business was sold to Microsoft. I was part of the maps division that was later sold to a consortium of German, an event that was way less spectacular ...
Never forget that no matter how brilliant you think your company is, there are five of those companies in China, four of which are brand new and working in a playground of mass production at scales you can't comprehend. If the world ever shifts power and relevance to China the whole West will collectively have a burning platform situation. China's not just "cheap", and when people start trusting them for the occasional higher-quality product, and there's a market for it, they'll come for all of us.
Make no mistake, China's industrial prowess will be the major game-changing force in the 2020's.
Chinese manufacturers are already doing top quality products. Huawei phone are/we're on par with the iPhone and were selling like hot cakes until the company was stopped "by any means necessary".
https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52...
Now, having used it for a while, I wouldn't say I'm impressed - design-wise Apple products for example are miles ahead. Yet I don't really have anything to complain about - it does what a modern phone should do. It's pretty big though so it's harder to put into your pocket but I guess that's just how phones are nowadays.
I'll be more interested to see though how long the phone will last, my previous OnePlus endured 5 years before the electronics started to show their age. I hope Nokia still has its built-quality and this one will be rocking way past that with couple of drops to concrete in-between.
> design-wise Apple products for example are miles ahead
Well yes, of course. The cheapest iPhone, the SE, which is of an old design and with an old chip, costs 500€+. You can't expect 50%+ price difference to result in no difference in what you get.
Premium Android phones closer to iPhone pricing are usually better design-wise.
So it's not really "of course, that's how it's supposed to be". I did not like the feel of some of the premium Android phones either, so I think it's just in general the vibe of the phone that I don't find that exciting.
It's a fine phone but it feels the people who made the phone were not overly passionate about making it. Which makes sense but I had hoped more distinct personality out of it. Not just another generic mid-range Android phone.
Was it Balmer that hired Elop?
I have no idea why things succeed or fail and so I don't know for this either, but my guess is it was new, but didn't have anything that provoked an interest with mainstream users. And Microsoft does not have many faithful users.
Nokia had extremely high hardware quality. Indestructible Nokia 3310 meme and all that.
It's harder to do now with iPhone's market size, but I think we're looking at it with rosy glasses.
Where Apple succeeded is having a viable touch interface. That's where RIM, Nokia, Fujitsu, Compaq and countless other device makers failed at. Including Nokia.
Otherwise the iPhone was buggy and crashing all the time, battery life was trash compared to other phones or the iPod, I don't know anyone actually relying on it to make "serious" calls (we kept our feature phones) it would straight ignore some of the incomming calls and we just were willing to go through all of that to get a usable touch UI.
I know there was a lot of noise about dropped calls and all that in the US, but this was not a thing here in Europe. I would assume that the issue was at least as much with AT&T than with the iPhone.
Here there were controversies about a lot of things (for example, it became caught up in the electro-sensitivity pseudoscience argument, there was also some noise about the glass front being brittle), but not reception. At least not before the iPhone 4.
In asia it was the same deal (from iPhone 3G, not the original one). Most of the issues seemed to be when the phone ran from too long and/or was low on battery. From my understanding memory was leaking all over the place, and as the phone app isn't isolated from the system it was affected too (even if the network chip is a separate hardware and OS)
Basically rebooting every now and then was a good idea at the time.
They made everyone buy new phones for Windows Phone 8, which did not have any user-visible changes (though it did switch the OS to NT).
They took multiple years to add basic functionality like a notification center, and by the time they did, it was too late.
They actually shot themselves in the foot and had extremely poor Office support - behind even the competitor platforms that got a proper set of apps.
They bought Nokia's phone business and then just gave up completely.
What's a shame. I liked the minimalist Zune-like UI - it was perfect for a phone. And it just looked cool.
That's an interesting look into their corporate attitude at the time.
You could say that their Office app monopoly sabotaged their web browser (and the web in general) and their desktop monopoly sabotaged their phones (and phones in general) but both the web and smartphones proved stronger in the end.
However, it is easy to find the iPhone.
https://g.co/kgs/MVvYKr (click more -> max)
When that came out I created nokiaplanc.com
https://web.archive.org/web/20110218174018/http://www.nokiap...
Which was then followed by others creating nokiaplane.com and so on
But what about Symbian and Ovi? I've had a bunch of Symbian devices with the Ovi store. They were simply not in the same league; the apps were basic because the development tools were just not good enough; and targeted basic low-end experiences. Windows Phone was the most modern OS out there (including the dev tooling); and had the best shot at competing with the Androids. I also bought the N800 (which ran Maemo) from Nokia in 2007. It was ok - but it never looked like a phone platform.
I'd still be on it if it existed and wasn't laden with Windows 10 style telemetry. I don't care about having a wide selection of apps. I care about having a low-distraction, well organized UI that's optimized for specific tasks.
For instance, opening an entry in the address book produced a cross-social-network feed of everything they sent you recently (including call logs, email, SMS, twitter, etc...).
That was fantastic, but prepared to have your mind blown: Typing an address into the navigation app and hitting enter (or tapping on a destination) immediately started navigating.
8.1 was strictly a UI regression. I heard 8.5 was even worse.
It is technically a successor, but it just wasn't there. App story was worse than N9 (without considering alien dalvik/anbox/waydroid).
Some of the technical decisions they've made meant more headaches for developers (Old gcc version. Old Qt version. Repacking Fedora arm packages just to run on sfos wasn't fun). The browser was based on a very old and buggy Firefox version. At the end of the day, it wasn't even fully open source.. so you always had to play catch up with their updates just to keep your mods working.
Despite all that, the community was vibrant and very talented. Oddly enough, it was also smoother to use and feels more well designed than Android on the same device. Even little things like double tap to wake, being easier for one hand usage
Yes I have it installed on a Sony Xperia. It's not my main phone (I have a work phone that I mainly use), but I would say it works very similar to the N9 so yes a proper successor. The major downside is a relatively small selection of native apps and that the platform did not progress as much as it could have. I would recommend that anyone who has a phone that can run it should try it out.
Everyone who had one said so. It was the best of all the “third option” OS devices. All the WebOSes and such.
But the market just doesn’t want a third option… even back then the Android and iOS were ossified
The only cool thing was the grid but that only goes skin deep. Otherwise I hated the phone. Maybe WP8+ devices were better but WP7 was a piece of crap. I didn't want to try WP8 and got myself a Jolla instead.
It's the app developers (and their companies) who wouldn't be happy with a third option, because the existing two cause enough problems, just think about how many frameworks for cross-platform app development exist, they were created for a reason..., and even with them you still have to do OS-specific stuff to tackle different app store policies, different privacy features, updated APIs breaking your app on new OS versions... or you can have two entirely separate teams working on two separate codebases and try to keep the feature parity...
Apple invented the smartphone. The fact Nokia didn't understand that shows why it failed.
The 2002 SonyEricsson p800 (and the p900, p910 followups) kinda sniffed on the form-factor (it was basically the same if you disconnected the numpad) and software had all the features incl a "proper" browser (but not nearly the same polish).
Sadly it seems it was an isolated "enterprise" group that seems to have been hamstrung later (the followup phones made the form factor worse and the UI improvement was marginal compared to the leap the iPhone took).
Every company has it's rules and regulations regarding review devices but with Nokia you had to sign up to three forms just to do your work. Partly with ridiculous rules like a missing charger or cable was up to 50 Euros or so.
And they let you very much know where in the pecking order you were regarding your publication and who would get the devices first and last. This was in Germany.
Everybody at Nokia strived for not just being difficult but outright jerks to deal with... so when Apple came around and the disaster started to unfold it was quite the show to watch...
"ah Nokia would like to invite you to this and that shebang..." ah no thanks I think I'm good.
I'm not the guy who carries a grudge but Nokia really made it personal with their whole behavior.
Apple and Samsung aren't perfect but their marketing people are always nice and super helpful.
They clearly had a mandate to make some moves in mobile, so we were in their target sphere. But the investor was just so slow about moving, lackadaisical in personality, and seemed like he was more paid to come into the office versus actually achieve results (regardless of whether they funded us).
I later read Clayton Christianson and immediately knew what he was talking about with old dinosaurs resting on their laurels.
Good riddance. Market forces don't always act in the interest of society, but when it does like this (v Apple, Android) it's refreshing to see.
I met one of their "evangelist" when they were trying to push Qt. He came to a iOS usergroup, so clearly in "enemy territory", and just used a precooked slide deck that compared Qt to Symbian - nobody gave a shit about Symbian there, but that's how they lived, stuck in their bubble. He was quite off-putting and way too commercial-focused for a tech UG; I already knew Qt and left thinking I could have done a better job of selling the tech.
Plenty of companies have workforces that treat each other well but treat their customers, vendors, press, etc like they're subhuman annoyances.
Some people had a bad experience with a couple of folks and decided to extrapolate to everyone in the company.
Every single company has such pearls. If they don't, they aren't yet big enough.
E.g. I can perfectly believe the employees of the DMV are super sweet to each other, while being the bane of customers.
A couple of people got some bad seeds and pretend everyone on the customer business units behave the same way.
No that wasn't my unit, but it also wasn't pure internal engineering bubble with zero customer contact.
Nokia was not a software company at all. They treated their OS and UX as an afterthought and put hardware features first.
The same is currently happening in the automotive world with their in-car software. Auto makers aren't thinking of their OSs and UX and the people who develop them as the absolute center point of their industry, when they are.
Then I looked around the whole website, and there was interesting data. Which ended in 2018. The whole website seems abandoned.
It is not intended to be flippant, but I believe this one time the entirety of the relevance boils down to the following:
“Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it.”
<< It was a pretty melodramatic way of describing being beaten by a competitor, which happens all the time in business history.
Yes, and I am certain MBAs review Nokia rise and fall in great detail as a result.
Nokia also was the most successful European high tech brand. Losing it felt disheartening at the time.
If not for Elop, I might now develop apps for Meego instead of iOS.
So, I guess, there‘s a moral to the story: don’t let bad hires run your company to the ground?
Many of us also really liked what they were doing with N900 and wanted it to continue. But it didn't.
Most recently my cousin, whose daughter has an extremely debilitating incurable illness, emigrated back to Finland on his sick daughter’s request. The whole family is attempting to learn Finnish but it is apparently a struggle compared to other languages they learned.
Totally off-topic, but Nokia is a sad story and Finland is a wonderful country with wonderful people.
Nokia got out of the phone business in 2014. They still exist and are a mjor force in networking equipment.
True, they are of less interest to people here as they do not make many hackable consumer devices, but an obituary is premature
Offloading the Mobile Phone unit to Microsoft for nice $7 billion gave them room to breath. Without this, the losses from mobile phones might have dragged the whole company down and somebody could have acquired them for a small price.