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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Great hw engineers let down by less than stellar software decisions.

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?

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The network / infrastructure side of Nokia still exists. When the handsets division was split or sold off, the network division continued as Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), and was rebranded to Nokia Networks I think after the merger with Alcatel-Lucent.

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.

> the network division continued as Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), and was rebranded to Nokia Networks

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/

> Great hw engineers let down by less than stellar software decisions.

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.

<<A lot of people loved their handsets.

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.

Internally they didn't miss the boat. They literally were on the boat and were crushing it. But they failed to make actual products and continued selling crappy Synbian based phones.

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