The Old, Innovative Nokia Is Back
bloombergview.com
bloombergview.com
It was very sad to see Nokia fail.
Nokia in 2006, near their peak, spent about $5.x billion on R&D per their annual report. The R&D figures are similar for 2005/07/08.
Microsoft spent $6.5 billion on R&D in 2006 (and that was close to their average from 2002-2007). By 2009, Microsoft was spending $9 billion per year (now up to $11+ billion).
> And not exactly life changing...
Ya Good luck designing a ultra low power multi use protocol that runs on a single coin cell over an entire year, as your next weekend hack. /s
Do you have any examples? I can't remember having ever heard anything innovative from Nokia, and I'm interested what this might be.
http://gizmodo.com/319318/nokias-haptikos-technology-makes-p...
That said I think it only covers a subset of what went wrong at Nokia, and that was only the first half, before a whole different set of things went wrong under Elop
For one, Xerox PARC innovations DID change the world, even if they didn't appear in Xerox products.
Second, I think the parent is much overstating the "innovations" that Nokia did. Nothing like Xerox PARC at all...
The company executives were worried about Maemo eating into their fairly steady Symbian earnings, and so where reluctant to commit fully. At the same time they feared going Android would turn them into just another "me to" company (Samsung has done some serious advertisement binging to get their current position).
And just as that seemed to clear up with buying Trolltech for their Qt library, aimed at using it for cross platform app development, the board ousted the CEO and brought in Elop.
But shit didn't really hit the fan with Nokia until Elop's "burning platform" memo. Pretty much overnight retailer dropped outstanding orders etc, and the Nokia brand basically crashed.
Now its a battle of ecosystems so unless Nokia can pull an entire ecosystem out of its hat then I don't hold out much hope for its future success.
I think that's kinda revisionist history.
Maemo was already developed by the time the phone market turned into the software-driven smartphone market.
Nokia was late to throw Maemo on a phone, true, but they had one ready in 2011. It had hardware that won all sorts of design awards and was cutting edge in both hardware specs and design, with classic Nokia durability and engineering. It ran a wonderfully-slick, open-source friendly, polished OS. It even had a "Retina-level" display before they were common. Nokia still had a major marketshare when it was ready for release and could have used their market presence to ensure a successful launch.
The problem was, Elop was trying desperately to kill it.
He couldn't quite kill it outright, as Nokia had contractual obligations to release it, but he ensured that it got minimal advertising time and prevented it from being distributed in many key markets. Despite that, people loved it. It swept design awards. Some reviewers called it the "best phone Nokia ever made." People in EU countries where it wasn't released were buying it via eBay from the countries that did have it.
Elop's response? No matter how successful the phone was, no matter how much people liked it, Maemo would never be used again.
Naturally, the aggression towards the platform by the CEO coupled with the limited release and minimal marketing did just fine to kill it, and he was free to continue molding Nokia into a target for an MS buyout.
Nokia understood the market just fine. They were just betrayed.
That said I completely agree that the N9 was the best phone Nokia ever made and that Windows Phone was a catastrophic decision that should tarnish the career of every executive at Nokia who supported it and refused to change course when it was obviously failing.
The demise of Nokia devices was entirely avoidable
I think the Lumia line is the best thing that ever came out of Nokia, after all the home grown crap-OS at Nokia before.
"Symbian ... no, let's do Qt ... actually MeeGo will be great; really! Aww shucks, it sucked, too."
Please don't blame your downfall on Microsoft.
Stephen Elop was working for Microsoft's interests long before he ever joined the organization.
Nokia was the best steward of Qt, and I'm glad MS didn't get their hands on it when they had the chance.
Obviously you have an inside perspective that I don't, but from the outside it just looked like y'all made an amazing phone. :) I can't say I heard much about internal issues, but I believe it given other things I've heard about Nokia internal management...
As someone who had a number of Nokia ix devices this* is a steaming mound of revisionist history. The 770, 800, 810, and smartphone successors were absolutely aweful at basic PIM-type tasks. They failed because their core functionality was dreadful. Want to sync your contacts with Google? Enable redpill mode.
They built tablets and phones that were very interesting for people who want to add Debian repos to their phone. This is not a market niche that will make you billions, no matter how often it blames Big Bad Elop.
Did you ever use an N9? It was nothing like that.
The 770 tablet, and such, sure. But the N9 was quite far removed from the geek toy tablets.
They couldn't even ship two Series 60 phones back to back with the same J2ME profiles. It was simple mistakes that stopped any kind of platform emerging.
The sad part is that Nokia had all the pieces as early as 2004. But they never grasped the software software side of things (RIM made exactly the same mistake).
Qt could have been a good strategy for Nokia, it provided the most important part of their puzzle, a clear migration path for their valuable customers from Symbian to a new Qt-based platform. Too bad they moved much too slowly to capitalize on that, and probably for many good reasons.
Just like IBM, I guess their demise in consumer products was gradual, but went by a lot quicker than IBMs did.
Some of their assets were pretty valuable (especially patent-wise), so that $7 billion MS write-off may not be completely telling (AFAIK, MS are making a tidy profit from phones running Android, through patent-infringements).
Even in the US, Nokia had a huge portion of the cell phone market. Maybe more than half? The 51xx and 61xx phones were all over the place. Can't find any sources for this, just my recollection.
I believe Apple likely holds the record for most dominant US market share. They're around 43% of the US smart phone market today (not sure how that would look if you blend in feature phones though).
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/technology/companies/19nok...
http://allthingsd.com/20130904/from-can-we-talk-to-a-coffee-...
...and in danger of stalling: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=oculus%20rift
It's not a consumer product. It's explicitly for businesses and will cost ten thousand dollars or more. This article completely misses the point and draws invalid conclusions.
BTW - any sample footage available from this?