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Comment by skavi | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s simple enough to see why Nokia thought Windows would be the right choice. It was far more polished than Android at the time. It ran well on cheap hardware. And they would have Microsoft backing them.

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Elop did, Nokia engineering not so much.

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.

I was a consultant working on two Meego projects at the time, fancy mechanics and some pretty interesting ideas about graph data storage and inference. Super talented crew of diverse hackers, kind of a tech head dream project thinking back on it now. This all was such a gut punch. I always thought they should have just rallied behind their own OS, but I don't claim to understand the business all that well.

(edit: a highlight was getting to meet Dan Ingalls once; he was cool)

> I think it’s simple enough to see why Nokia thought Windows would be the right choice. It was far more polished than Android at the time

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.

Because the Nokia board had a nice bonus clause for the case he managed to sell the company, and sell he did.

He was after all reaching its targets.

https://www.slashgear.com/stephen-elops-contract-revealed-as...

As someone who owned a Windows phone around that time, and knew others who did as well, the shared opinion was that it was a pile of crap.

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.

> As someone who owned a Windows phone around that time, and knew others who did as well, the shared opinion was that it was a pile of crap.

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]

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs

Compared with Android, to this day, WinRT development experience is like being in heaven.

It took Android 10 years, for something like AGK to come up, and even then it is a mess of development experience.

My memory is completely different. I was an iPhone user, but I bought a Nokia Lumia 710 (I think) to play with and I was thoroughly impressed. It was fast, fresh, the tile interface really worked well for phones - it looked much better than the boring grid of apps and gave useful information at a glance.

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.

While Windows Phone 7 wasn't that great, Windows Phone 8 was quite good.

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.

They brought in a trojan horse with Elop. Any sensible company at the time would have bet on both horses. E.g. Samsung and HTC had both Android and Windows Phone devices. IIRC there was even one Samsung model (I think a Samsung ATIV) that you could install both Android and Windows Phone 8 on.

I don’t think there is or was a lot of money to be made just being yet another Android OEM.

Apparently also not in Windows Phone :). At any rate Nokia I know, not exactly the same company) is making Android phones now.

I owned a WP7 and an Android around that time.

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.

What apps ?! That store they had was practically vacant so the phone basically ran on what it came installed with. Android was not as slick at that time but at least you had a ton of software and cooked ROMs

They already had Meego which was a true Linux distribution, already more polished than Android and fully Open Source; unfortunately the deal with Microsoft implied the termination of any further development of it in favor of Windows Mobile, and the rest is history.

WP7 was more polished than Android - I went from an HTC Evo to a Lumia - but a lot of that polish was in the same style as early-iOS: fewer features and capabilities, just done well and with better consistency.

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.

But that was at least a year after the memo. They already had an incredibly polished system, Meego. Now Meego like WP7 had the problem of limited apps for the platform, but there were quite a bit more than WP still, largely due to significant OSS apps having been ported. There was also a good development story using the qt framework.

Also at the time of this memo, WP was essentially nonexistent. It was with Nokias switch that they gained some momentum and polish.

The cheapness of the hardware is an interesting point.

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.

As a software engineer I'd have to disagree. In 2011 Windows on handheld devices was a consistently low quality product that had at least a decade of Microsoft failing at it behind it. Believing that Microsoft would suddenly be capable of producing a quality product after more than a decade of not being able to was a highly irrational view. And this isn't something you'd have to particularly clever to see back then.

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.

I mean these early tablets that ran windows XP were bad in so many ways

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