7 ms·

Who killed Nokia? Nokia did

80 points by chmars 11y ago

StripeNoGood 11y ago
A trojan horse from the MS did it...
- maximmilius_rob 11y ago
  Eh, he was not the only guy in nokia.
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    No. He was just the guy giving orders to everyone.
- doikor 11y ago
  Nokia was in big trouble / dying years before that.
  - marvel_boy 11y ago
    So true, from the 'Burning Platform Memo': "The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable."
  - ryanlol 11y ago
    Nokia was in trouble indeed, but the damage caused by that memo was irreversible. I remember the day it came out, it was the day everyone who I knew at Nokia realised that they'd soon need new jobs.
- throwawayaway 11y ago
  Five year anniversary of the burning platform memo just passed, the world is a different place now. http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/02/09/full-text-nokia-ceo-stephen-elops-burning-platform-memo/ http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/02/09/full-text-nokia-...
- trm42 11y ago
  The management got too rosy picture of what Windows Phone 7 was (a quick hackish MVP, nothing more, like the first iPhone few years earlier) and they were really surprised when upgrade path to Windows Phone 8 was really hard.
  - Ezhik 11y ago
    I firmly believe that the messy transition from WP7.5 to 8, Microsoft focusing on the internals of the OS versus much-requested user-facing features is what doomed the OS. I recognize that the transition was necessary, but between the lackluster functionality (notification center, for example, was the #1 requested feature for years), lack of updates (8.0 to 8.1 took 20 months), and, of course, lack of developer support, I'm wondering if Windows Phone had a chance at all. I will never stop being upset over the death of Zune HD and WP7 era Metro UI, though.
    - trm42 11y ago
      And basically developers needed to remake (more or less) the apps from WP7.* to WP8. Nowadays they need to port apps from WP or from Desktop Windows to Windows Universal Apps, so what's the point if nobody's using those apps? :D
- alexandrerond 11y ago
  This is a very extended assumption which is quite wrong. When Nokia opted for MS all paths were already downhill. Going with Android would have meant and injection of money from Google, but clearly Nokia was not prepared to land in the highly dense Android ecosystem, fighting for a tiny piece of the cake with giants like Samsung. There was no way that Nokia would have a success in Android that would put out the fire. MS in turned meant to have most of the Windows Phone market for itself and a BIG partner behind. As terrible as WP was at the beginning, it bought Nokia a LOT of time. Nokia reorganized its business in the meantime, separated the location business (what is now HERE), the NSN side and consolidated its patent portfolio and research divisions. This way, they managed in the end to sell Devices to Microsoft, which was a huge burden. And then sell HERE (which wasn't really profitable) to the automotive consortium. With this two moves they kept the company afloat, along with many great assets that actually make and will make money (the research division and NSN ), and the brand. Had Nokia opted for Android back then, it would have ended much worse (Blackberry maker comes to mind). I think from the point of view of share-holders, Nokia escaped dodged a terrible future. Basically they took their things and left the platform in the rescue boat, while the rescuers (MS) burn with it.
  - bitmapbrother 11y ago
    I always despise such theories of what would have happened had Nokia selected Android instead of Windows. You have absolutely no idea what would have happened. What we do know is that selecting a single OS from a company that had ulterior motives was a key to their demise. It's clear the Microsoft decision was a failure and anything else is just rampant speculation. It was nice, though, to see Nokia get the last laugh by selling their device division to MS for 7+ Billion dollars. As for Nokia, well, we'll see how they do when they re-enter the smartphone market in late 2016 free of Microsoft.
vatotemking 11y ago
They should have released an android phone when android came out. They lost a lot of time trying to make symbian work as a smartphone and later using windows phone os which is the smallest ecosystem among the 3 (iOS, Android, WP)
- 4ec327 11y ago
  Hope you realize Symbian was in the market several years before Android arrived.
- ryanlol 11y ago
  Symbian wasn't even home grown.
zerr 11y ago
At least they bought and LGPLed Qt before dying. That's a huge contribution to world.
- trm42 11y ago
  Nowadays QT is doing well with LGPL + Commercial licensing. It's really good thing Nokia didn't hug it to death.
  - zerr 11y ago
    I also wander what would happen if Nokia have gone with Maemo platform with Qt as an official SDK, instead of switching to Windows...
kpil 11y ago
At the time, the Finns seemed to be rather proud of the "management by perkele" culture. Also, the traditional industrial product development cycle (requirement specifications document driven waterfall) does not produce good design, as it takes many iterations to figure out what's good in reality. It's hard to change an engineering culture.
- seivan 11y ago
  You can still have management by perkele but make sure management understand what engineers actually do.
  - hga 11y ago
    By this you mean management would better understand how their extreme perkele is forcing those under them to lie, and they could construct a better view of reality through better adjustments of how they view those lies??? How about focusing on creating a culture where the people under you don't have to lie, who's jobs and careers, and therefore families, aren't threatened when they tell the truth to those above them?
lordnacho 11y ago
As one middle manager pointed out to us, at Apple the top managers are engineers. “We make everything into a business case and use figures to prove what’s good, whereas Apple is engineer-driven.” Top managers acknowledged to us that “there was no real software competence in the top management team”. That stood out for me. Whenever I've worked with managers who didn't understand the field, interactions have always gone something like this: Manager: Can we deliver X? Team: Sure, it will take 3 months. Manager: Can we deliver X in 2 months? Team: No, I told you 3 months. Manager: I need it done in 2... And how it proceeded depended a lot on how bone-headed the manager was. Sometimes they would effectively let someone competent on the team do the management. Sometimes they would just try to bully until they got the answer they were looking for.
- kabdib 11y ago
  "What if I got some more people to help out?" "Five months." "You guys are too slow. I'm going to give it to team B over there. They say they can do it in two months, no problem." "You'll be asking us to help out that team in about a year." It is amazing how little value most managers add.
  - madeofpalk 11y ago
    Sounds like you're working in a pretty crappy place. I don't consider my employer to be exceptionally great, but at least there's no managers stupid enough to act like that, or developers to tolerate it.
    - kabdib 11y ago
      Oh, that's from very long ago. And most of them weren't that bad. And I have had good managers, really good ones who added value, but only 3-4 really qualify (in 35 years). I work in a flat organization now. No managers at all. So it's an interesting perspective.
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  Whenever I've worked with managers who didn't understand the field, interactions have always gone something like this I've seen that, but there's something even worse. It's when a manager who doesn't understand something thinks that it must be simple and/or easy. Where I experienced it firsthand was working for a VP of Engineering who was from a hardware background. He didn't grok software and therefore believed that it should be easy to do. I didn't mind, I was one of the hardware guys. But that meant that the software guys at the company were sucking hind tit. Hey, at least its better than working for a company run by sales and/or marketing people. They have contempt for both the hardware guys and the software guys.
trm42 11y ago
Nokia had long term plan which looked promising: They bought first Trolltech for QT and after that started doing Meego* (albeit too slowly) but the idea was to have one development platform for all their new and old phone platforms and QT fit the bill really nicely. But in the end the QT plan was really half-assed because getting it into Symbian took too long time and Meego was even slower project. The first Meego phone N9 and it's unpublished sibling N950 (with the best qwerty hardware ever) were better phones than Android phones at that time, but when they released the N9 it was already known that Nokia will switch to Windows Phone and there was no point in buying N9 or developing apps for it. They even had the QT + QT Quick setup working and showing lots of promise for writing javascript apps for different platforms. Sigh. So if they've had the guts to execute the QT plan and Meego as a first priority projects + skipping Elop, the situation could be a lot different. Meego still feels more Linuxy than Android. * Of course creating first Maemo on top of GTK and after that switching to QT sounded weird and with Meego there was other parties like Samsung and Intel meddling around so they lost lot of steam in that transition too.
- madeofpalk 11y ago
  > Meego still feels more Linuxy than Android. ...is that supposed to be a good thing? Edit: snark aside, I'm not sure how this would be a factor in what makes a mobile platform successful. It feels like the sort of comment that would be made right after saying "year of desktop linux!"
  - ryanlol 11y ago
    Definitely. Is androids java mess a good thing?
    - madeofpalk 11y ago
      Good enough to get it into the duopoly with iOS, beating everything else.
      - yedpodtrzitko 11y ago
Aoyagi 11y ago
>Nokia needed a better operating system for its phones to match Apple’s iOS I strongly disagree. Symbian just needed a few optimisation, which it got. It got them too late, but it did. Maemo/MeeGo was probably more capable than iOS is today. And what exactly are those "quality problems of N95" they speak of? Nokia was indeed wounded by incompetent management, but Microsoft was the one who stepped in and finished the job.
- raesene9 11y ago
  Maemo was a more capable Mobile OS that iOS 9.x... that's an ... interesting... opinion. Care to provide some details on what you think makes that the case? My experience of Maemo on the N900 was that it wasn't really very polished and needed development which it, unfortunately, didn't get from Nokia
  - Aoyagi 11y ago
    Well, sure. If you consider how nice an OS looks and how many "apps" there are for it the main parameter of "capability of an OS", then iOS is definitely more capable.
    - raesene9 11y ago
      Well it's perhaps not ridiculous to consider user experience and functionality as large factors in the capability of a device operation system is it? But I was more interested in what made you think that Maemo was more capable that iOS (i.e. what do you think it did better than iOS)?
      - Aoyagi 11y ago
        It leaves you in control. You can do anything with the OS, install anything, develop anything for it. Without an iTunes/Google/MS account. It's not limited to some proprietary connection over USB. There are so many things... As it is, no need to "jailbreak" it or something. Obviously it's not as fast, user-friendly, or easy to develop for.
mahouse 11y ago
Very interesting read: http://muropaketti.com/artikkelit/the-story-of-nokia-meego http://muropaketti.com/artikkelit/the-story-of-nokia-meego
raesene9 11y ago
My feeling for what went wrong for Nokia, which kind of chimes with what's here is that the problem is that they couldn't decide a strategic platform and stick with it. There was a lot of differences between the Symbian crew and the Maemo crew. The prime example of this , for me, was the Nokia N900. It was their flagship phone, I got one in their store in London and within 6 months it was pretty much unsupported, as Nokia changed focus again. Also whilst the hardware was good the software wasn't great quality...
- trm42 11y ago
  One of the things Apple changed was how the software was perceived for phones. Nokia (or the others) didn't update that much the firmwares for the old models. They just fixed the problems and added features to the new models. They were coming from simple phones that were not flashable in the beginning and they just wanted to sell more phones instead of supporting the old ones. It's ironic how Apple is selling amazing amounts of phones with just few models and upgrading the software and features few times a year.
  - seba_dos1 11y ago
    The Internet Tablet series, which is what N900 came from, actually was a bit different. Nokia N800 got an update from OS2007 to OS2008, and Nokia 770, while officially supported from OS2005 to OS2006, has been updated via semi-official "Hacker Editions" all the way to OS2008. It was N900's Maemo 5 (Fremantle) where they finally stopped supporting earlier models.
dvirsky 11y ago
It's interesting that Samsung were in a similar position around that time (and also had Bada in the works at the time). But around 2010-2011 they just hopped on the Android bandwagon and went all in with it, and won big time. Which reminds me, what's up with Tizen? Are they still trying to push it?
- trm42 11y ago
  It seems they are keeping Bada -> Tizen around just to have some leverage over Google. If some negoatiations are really tough with Google, they can say "hey, let's forget the whole thing and we'll start using Tizen instead of Android". They don't really want to do that but it's a good plan B.
  - bitmapbrother 11y ago
    It's also a good way to commit business suicide. Plan B would relegate them to a has been in the smartphone market as the others rush in to fill the void.
SixSigma 11y ago
Hardware, software & management - I think someone is missing something fundamental. I had an N95, I thought it was quite a good piece of kit. What people never seem to mention is that the iPhone had a generous data plan, whereas I was paying by the byte. That is a massive difference in use case.
- trm42 11y ago
  The hardware of N95 was the pinnacle of Nokia engineering. They stuffed lots of new stuff there like A-GPS receiver, accelerometer, 3D-accelerated GPU, lots of flash storage, better camera etc but the Symbian UX was horrible (it was from the beginning but tech feature -driven engineers didn't understand that at all). N95 had so much of features that nobody used them. They just were happy with all the stuff they never used. Been talking about the subject to lots of people who bought the phone then. N95 was released the same year Apple demoed iPhone first time. N95 sold really well then. Nokia's old management has told afterwards they were so lulled by the success of N95 they were not worried about iPhone at all. They did N96 which was even more stuffed than N95 but with the same UX flaws.
  - Aoyagi 11y ago
    If I could choose between a touch-only sleek smartphone and modernised version of N95 with all its original features, I'd definitely go with the N95.
    - trm42 11y ago
      I would like to have touch-phone with a full QWERTY keyboard. Just like the dev-only Nokia N950 ;-) In hardware design sense it's really well engineered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950
Geee 11y ago
I think the biggest mistake in their engineering execution was skimping on the specs of their phones. For example, the "flagship" N97 was released with a resistive screen, 433Mhz ARM11 processor, and without a GPU (they already had GPUs in some earlier models). N97 would have been a "decent" phone with modern specs, and bought them more time to innovate in software.
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  the "flagship" N97 was released with a resistive screen I had a similar experience working with another company. It was after the iPhone was available. But they still wanted to support a resistive screen in a high end product that wouldn't debut until years later. I just couldn't believe the cognitive dissonance. Once the iPhone screen appeared, resistive screens were deader than Kurt Cobain. People in the trenches understood it clearly. But somehow top management either didn't get the memo or managed to rationalize it away.
  - seba_dos1 11y ago
    To this day I strongly prefer N900's resistive screen than any other capacitive screen when it comes to mobile phones. While it's easy to find crappy resistive screens, and in such case capacitive ones clearly win, I definitely wouldn't replace N900's screen with one from iPhone - it'd feel like a downgrade for me.
    - PhantomGremlin 11y ago
      I did a quick search. Apparently the N900 can't handle multi-touch[1], which is a big advantage of capacitive screens. I'd really miss that feature of the iPhone if it were taken away. Presumably the N900 has alternative ways of implementing equivalent features. [1] https://www.starryhope.com/15-ways-nokias-n900-is-better-than-apples-iphone-and-5-ways-its-not/ https://www.starryhope.com/15-ways-nokias-n900-is-better-tha...
      - seba_dos1 11y ago
aleem 11y ago
This article seems to have a personal axe to grind. Building an OS is hard, building an SDK is hard and so is building an IDE to go with it. Nokia is not a software company. It could not have competed with Google, Apple or Microsoft on the software platform. These companies have their own OS. They have their own browsers and even programming languages they can claim their own. They have massive developer ecosystems. The fact that Nokia failed has little to do with Nokia itself and more to do with the disruptive power of software. It really had just two options. Get acquired or adopt a third-party platform. Google was not interested post Motorola acquisition. Microsoft had its own demons to deal with. There was little wiggle room. Had Motorola not been acquired, it would have gone the same route, fizzled into oblivion. RIMM is going the same route. For all their trying, these companies don't have the software DNA.
- trm42 11y ago
  According to rumors Nokia had lots of discussion with MS and Google about which platform they should take. Got the impression that the proposition from MS was somehow better and at least initially gave more room to move for Nokia. Later on got the impression that lots of things didn't went as was promised. But, Nokia is still alive and the situation seems to be a lot rosier for them after selling the mobile phone business. They got good price and got really cheap loan from Microsoft as part of the deal. Of course in PR side Nokia didn't have to kick out the phone engineers. Microsoft is handling that still and getting the negative PR from that. One has to remember that earlier Ericsson quit the phone business as well by selling that to Sony. Actually those phones got better after that :)
  - aleem 11y ago
    Yes, that's exactly right. Ballmer wanted to react to Google's Motorola acquisition and Nokia got a good deal out of it. Ballmer was heavily criticized (by the board no less) and the acquisition was mostly a write-off [1]. Compare this to Google's Motorola acquisition, it's clear that Nokia was a bad buy and Elop netted the company the most amount of money possible so all in all a good outcome for Nokia. As per Don Harrison, head of M&A at Google: [2] > I think the Motorola transaction has been a success for us. Financially, we bought the asset for $12.5 billion. It had $3 billion in cash; we were able to sell the Home division for $2.5 billion; we ended selling the handset division for $3 billion. There were some other tax assets as well. When you work through the math, you realize we spent between $2.5 billion and $3.5 billion for the patent assets. At the time, the nearest comparable transaction was the Nortel patent auction where Microsoft and Apple teamed up to buy that asset for $4.5 billion. And there’s a good argument that the Motorola patent portfolio is a better portfolio. Which is why the INSEAD article seems so off base. [1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/satya-nadella-just-undid-steve-ballmers-last-big-mistake-2015-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/satya-nadella-just-undid-stev... [2]: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/02/12/a-peek-at-googles-ma-ambitions/ http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/02/12/a-peek-at-googles-ma-...
andmarios 11y ago
My theory about Nokia's fall is that it was primarily driven by the company's inability to succeed in the United States. The first iPhone was indeed good, but still it wasn't a clear win for Apple. Nokia had impressive software and features that took many years for the competitors to catch up. In the same time, Nokia would have to catch up to the iPhone's (usable) touch interface but couldn't make it in time. Apple (and other US companies) have a huge marketing machine; hollywood, various tv programs, music industry etc. Once this marketing machine worked for Apple, Nokia had no chance of success since it hadn't an established audience in the US to keep the company's image afloat until it delivered something better. I believe this is also the reason the shareholders accepted so easily Microsoft and/or Elop. Elop did the worst possible move imho, during a period of heavy competition, he changed the company's roadmap, without thinking about the implications. You just can't pivot that fast on such a complex product. Also by doing this he alienated the company's audience in Europe.
f00fc0d3 11y ago
It is exactly the same what is happening to Nokia Networks. What saves them is fact that mobile networks market is pretty much closed and there is very high barrier of entry. If the market would be more open (patents!) - Nokia wouldn't survive a day there. Nokia top management have no clue about technology, they are not engineers so you can sell them any s##t you what if you have smooth talk. Nokia suffers also from politics and internal battles between sites and organizations (basically Finns vs everybody else). This results in ubiquitous NIH syndrome. Nokia Net reinvents wheel all the time, and almost every time they get a square.
digi_owl 11y ago
My personal take on it is "boardroom meddling". Rather than allow the share price to slump some and their CEO to put his long term play in to action, the board ousted him and brought in a short term sock puppet. And he was given one objective, goose the share price. You will find this behavior up and down the tech world. Take a look at HP for example. They went through 3 CEOs in nearly as many years. From that we have an aborted attempt at getting into the mobile business with WebOS as just one example. Hell, consider what Dell said after buying back his namesake company. That now they were free to pursue less profitable long term goals.
perseusprime11 11y ago
Isn't the bottom line technical incompetence more than anything else?

80 points by chmars 11y ago

StripeNoGood 11y ago

A trojan horse from the MS did it...

maximmilius_rob 11y ago
Eh, he was not the only guy in nokia.
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  No. He was just the guy giving orders to everyone.
doikor 11y ago
Nokia was in big trouble / dying years before that.
- marvel_boy 11y ago
  So true, from the 'Burning Platform Memo': "The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable."
- ryanlol 11y ago
  Nokia was in trouble indeed, but the damage caused by that memo was irreversible. I remember the day it came out, it was the day everyone who I knew at Nokia realised that they'd soon need new jobs.
throwawayaway 11y ago
Five year anniversary of the burning platform memo just passed, the world is a different place now. http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/02/09/full-text-nokia-ceo-stephen-elops-burning-platform-memo/ http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/02/09/full-text-nokia-...
trm42 11y ago
The management got too rosy picture of what Windows Phone 7 was (a quick hackish MVP, nothing more, like the first iPhone few years earlier) and they were really surprised when upgrade path to Windows Phone 8 was really hard.
- Ezhik 11y ago
  I firmly believe that the messy transition from WP7.5 to 8, Microsoft focusing on the internals of the OS versus much-requested user-facing features is what doomed the OS. I recognize that the transition was necessary, but between the lackluster functionality (notification center, for example, was the #1 requested feature for years), lack of updates (8.0 to 8.1 took 20 months), and, of course, lack of developer support, I'm wondering if Windows Phone had a chance at all. I will never stop being upset over the death of Zune HD and WP7 era Metro UI, though.
  - trm42 11y ago
    And basically developers needed to remake (more or less) the apps from WP7.* to WP8. Nowadays they need to port apps from WP or from Desktop Windows to Windows Universal Apps, so what's the point if nobody's using those apps? :D
alexandrerond 11y ago
This is a very extended assumption which is quite wrong. When Nokia opted for MS all paths were already downhill. Going with Android would have meant and injection of money from Google, but clearly Nokia was not prepared to land in the highly dense Android ecosystem, fighting for a tiny piece of the cake with giants like Samsung. There was no way that Nokia would have a success in Android that would put out the fire. MS in turned meant to have most of the Windows Phone market for itself and a BIG partner behind. As terrible as WP was at the beginning, it bought Nokia a LOT of time. Nokia reorganized its business in the meantime, separated the location business (what is now HERE), the NSN side and consolidated its patent portfolio and research divisions. This way, they managed in the end to sell Devices to Microsoft, which was a huge burden. And then sell HERE (which wasn't really profitable) to the automotive consortium. With this two moves they kept the company afloat, along with many great assets that actually make and will make money (the research division and NSN ), and the brand. Had Nokia opted for Android back then, it would have ended much worse (Blackberry maker comes to mind). I think from the point of view of share-holders, Nokia escaped dodged a terrible future. Basically they took their things and left the platform in the rescue boat, while the rescuers (MS) burn with it.
- bitmapbrother 11y ago
  I always despise such theories of what would have happened had Nokia selected Android instead of Windows. You have absolutely no idea what would have happened. What we do know is that selecting a single OS from a company that had ulterior motives was a key to their demise. It's clear the Microsoft decision was a failure and anything else is just rampant speculation. It was nice, though, to see Nokia get the last laugh by selling their device division to MS for 7+ Billion dollars. As for Nokia, well, we'll see how they do when they re-enter the smartphone market in late 2016 free of Microsoft.

vatotemking 11y ago

They should have released an android phone when android came out. They lost a lot of time trying to make symbian work as a smartphone and later using windows phone os which is the smallest ecosystem among the 3 (iOS, Android, WP)

4ec327 11y ago
Hope you realize Symbian was in the market several years before Android arrived.
ryanlol 11y ago
Symbian wasn't even home grown.

zerr 11y ago

At least they bought and LGPLed Qt before dying. That's a huge contribution to world.

trm42 11y ago
Nowadays QT is doing well with LGPL + Commercial licensing. It's really good thing Nokia didn't hug it to death.
- zerr 11y ago
  I also wander what would happen if Nokia have gone with Maemo platform with Qt as an official SDK, instead of switching to Windows...

kpil 11y ago

At the time, the Finns seemed to be rather proud of the "management by perkele" culture. Also, the traditional industrial product development cycle (requirement specifications document driven waterfall) does not produce good design, as it takes many iterations to figure out what's good in reality. It's hard to change an engineering culture.

seivan 11y ago
You can still have management by perkele but make sure management understand what engineers actually do.
- hga 11y ago
  By this you mean management would better understand how their extreme perkele is forcing those under them to lie, and they could construct a better view of reality through better adjustments of how they view those lies??? How about focusing on creating a culture where the people under you don't have to lie, who's jobs and careers, and therefore families, aren't threatened when they tell the truth to those above them?

lordnacho 11y ago

As one middle manager pointed out to us, at Apple the top managers are engineers. “We make everything into a business case and use figures to prove what’s good, whereas Apple is engineer-driven.” Top managers acknowledged to us that “there was no real software competence in the top management team”. That stood out for me. Whenever I've worked with managers who didn't understand the field, interactions have always gone something like this: Manager: Can we deliver X? Team: Sure, it will take 3 months. Manager: Can we deliver X in 2 months? Team: No, I told you 3 months. Manager: I need it done in 2... And how it proceeded depended a lot on how bone-headed the manager was. Sometimes they would effectively let someone competent on the team do the management. Sometimes they would just try to bully until they got the answer they were looking for.

kabdib 11y ago
"What if I got some more people to help out?" "Five months." "You guys are too slow. I'm going to give it to team B over there. They say they can do it in two months, no problem." "You'll be asking us to help out that team in about a year." It is amazing how little value most managers add.
- madeofpalk 11y ago
  Sounds like you're working in a pretty crappy place. I don't consider my employer to be exceptionally great, but at least there's no managers stupid enough to act like that, or developers to tolerate it.
  - kabdib 11y ago
    Oh, that's from very long ago. And most of them weren't that bad. And I have had good managers, really good ones who added value, but only 3-4 really qualify (in 35 years). I work in a flat organization now. No managers at all. So it's an interesting perspective.
PhantomGremlin 11y ago
Whenever I've worked with managers who didn't understand the field, interactions have always gone something like this I've seen that, but there's something even worse. It's when a manager who doesn't understand something thinks that it must be simple and/or easy. Where I experienced it firsthand was working for a VP of Engineering who was from a hardware background. He didn't grok software and therefore believed that it should be easy to do. I didn't mind, I was one of the hardware guys. But that meant that the software guys at the company were sucking hind tit. Hey, at least its better than working for a company run by sales and/or marketing people. They have contempt for both the hardware guys and the software guys.

trm42 11y ago

Nokia had long term plan which looked promising: They bought first Trolltech for QT and after that started doing Meego* (albeit too slowly) but the idea was to have one development platform for all their new and old phone platforms and QT fit the bill really nicely. But in the end the QT plan was really half-assed because getting it into Symbian took too long time and Meego was even slower project. The first Meego phone N9 and it's unpublished sibling N950 (with the best qwerty hardware ever) were better phones than Android phones at that time, but when they released the N9 it was already known that Nokia will switch to Windows Phone and there was no point in buying N9 or developing apps for it. They even had the QT + QT Quick setup working and showing lots of promise for writing javascript apps for different platforms. Sigh. So if they've had the guts to execute the QT plan and Meego as a first priority projects + skipping Elop, the situation could be a lot different. Meego still feels more Linuxy than Android. * Of course creating first Maemo on top of GTK and after that switching to QT sounded weird and with Meego there was other parties like Samsung and Intel meddling around so they lost lot of steam in that transition too.

madeofpalk 11y ago
> Meego still feels more Linuxy than Android. ...is that supposed to be a good thing? Edit: snark aside, I'm not sure how this would be a factor in what makes a mobile platform successful. It feels like the sort of comment that would be made right after saying "year of desktop linux!"
- ryanlol 11y ago
  Definitely. Is androids java mess a good thing?
  - madeofpalk 11y ago
    Good enough to get it into the duopoly with iOS, beating everything else.
    - yedpodtrzitko 11y ago

Aoyagi 11y ago

>Nokia needed a better operating system for its phones to match Apple’s iOS I strongly disagree. Symbian just needed a few optimisation, which it got. It got them too late, but it did. Maemo/MeeGo was probably more capable than iOS is today. And what exactly are those "quality problems of N95" they speak of? Nokia was indeed wounded by incompetent management, but Microsoft was the one who stepped in and finished the job.

raesene9 11y ago
Maemo was a more capable Mobile OS that iOS 9.x... that's an ... interesting... opinion. Care to provide some details on what you think makes that the case? My experience of Maemo on the N900 was that it wasn't really very polished and needed development which it, unfortunately, didn't get from Nokia
- Aoyagi 11y ago
  Well, sure. If you consider how nice an OS looks and how many "apps" there are for it the main parameter of "capability of an OS", then iOS is definitely more capable.
  - raesene9 11y ago
    Well it's perhaps not ridiculous to consider user experience and functionality as large factors in the capability of a device operation system is it? But I was more interested in what made you think that Maemo was more capable that iOS (i.e. what do you think it did better than iOS)?
    - Aoyagi 11y ago
      It leaves you in control. You can do anything with the OS, install anything, develop anything for it. Without an iTunes/Google/MS account. It's not limited to some proprietary connection over USB. There are so many things... As it is, no need to "jailbreak" it or something. Obviously it's not as fast, user-friendly, or easy to develop for.

mahouse 11y ago

Very interesting read: http://muropaketti.com/artikkelit/the-story-of-nokia-meego http://muropaketti.com/artikkelit/the-story-of-nokia-meego

raesene9 11y ago

My feeling for what went wrong for Nokia, which kind of chimes with what's here is that the problem is that they couldn't decide a strategic platform and stick with it. There was a lot of differences between the Symbian crew and the Maemo crew. The prime example of this , for me, was the Nokia N900. It was their flagship phone, I got one in their store in London and within 6 months it was pretty much unsupported, as Nokia changed focus again. Also whilst the hardware was good the software wasn't great quality...

trm42 11y ago
One of the things Apple changed was how the software was perceived for phones. Nokia (or the others) didn't update that much the firmwares for the old models. They just fixed the problems and added features to the new models. They were coming from simple phones that were not flashable in the beginning and they just wanted to sell more phones instead of supporting the old ones. It's ironic how Apple is selling amazing amounts of phones with just few models and upgrading the software and features few times a year.
- seba_dos1 11y ago
  The Internet Tablet series, which is what N900 came from, actually was a bit different. Nokia N800 got an update from OS2007 to OS2008, and Nokia 770, while officially supported from OS2005 to OS2006, has been updated via semi-official "Hacker Editions" all the way to OS2008. It was N900's Maemo 5 (Fremantle) where they finally stopped supporting earlier models.

dvirsky 11y ago

It's interesting that Samsung were in a similar position around that time (and also had Bada in the works at the time). But around 2010-2011 they just hopped on the Android bandwagon and went all in with it, and won big time. Which reminds me, what's up with Tizen? Are they still trying to push it?

trm42 11y ago
It seems they are keeping Bada -> Tizen around just to have some leverage over Google. If some negoatiations are really tough with Google, they can say "hey, let's forget the whole thing and we'll start using Tizen instead of Android". They don't really want to do that but it's a good plan B.
- bitmapbrother 11y ago
  It's also a good way to commit business suicide. Plan B would relegate them to a has been in the smartphone market as the others rush in to fill the void.

SixSigma 11y ago

Hardware, software & management - I think someone is missing something fundamental. I had an N95, I thought it was quite a good piece of kit. What people never seem to mention is that the iPhone had a generous data plan, whereas I was paying by the byte. That is a massive difference in use case.

trm42 11y ago
The hardware of N95 was the pinnacle of Nokia engineering. They stuffed lots of new stuff there like A-GPS receiver, accelerometer, 3D-accelerated GPU, lots of flash storage, better camera etc but the Symbian UX was horrible (it was from the beginning but tech feature -driven engineers didn't understand that at all). N95 had so much of features that nobody used them. They just were happy with all the stuff they never used. Been talking about the subject to lots of people who bought the phone then. N95 was released the same year Apple demoed iPhone first time. N95 sold really well then. Nokia's old management has told afterwards they were so lulled by the success of N95 they were not worried about iPhone at all. They did N96 which was even more stuffed than N95 but with the same UX flaws.
- Aoyagi 11y ago
  If I could choose between a touch-only sleek smartphone and modernised version of N95 with all its original features, I'd definitely go with the N95.
  - trm42 11y ago
    I would like to have touch-phone with a full QWERTY keyboard. Just like the dev-only Nokia N950 ;-) In hardware design sense it's really well engineered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950

Geee 11y ago

I think the biggest mistake in their engineering execution was skimping on the specs of their phones. For example, the "flagship" N97 was released with a resistive screen, 433Mhz ARM11 processor, and without a GPU (they already had GPUs in some earlier models). N97 would have been a "decent" phone with modern specs, and bought them more time to innovate in software.

PhantomGremlin 11y ago
the "flagship" N97 was released with a resistive screen I had a similar experience working with another company. It was after the iPhone was available. But they still wanted to support a resistive screen in a high end product that wouldn't debut until years later. I just couldn't believe the cognitive dissonance. Once the iPhone screen appeared, resistive screens were deader than Kurt Cobain. People in the trenches understood it clearly. But somehow top management either didn't get the memo or managed to rationalize it away.
- seba_dos1 11y ago
  To this day I strongly prefer N900's resistive screen than any other capacitive screen when it comes to mobile phones. While it's easy to find crappy resistive screens, and in such case capacitive ones clearly win, I definitely wouldn't replace N900's screen with one from iPhone - it'd feel like a downgrade for me.
  - PhantomGremlin 11y ago
    I did a quick search. Apparently the N900 can't handle multi-touch[1], which is a big advantage of capacitive screens. I'd really miss that feature of the iPhone if it were taken away. Presumably the N900 has alternative ways of implementing equivalent features. [1] https://www.starryhope.com/15-ways-nokias-n900-is-better-than-apples-iphone-and-5-ways-its-not/ https://www.starryhope.com/15-ways-nokias-n900-is-better-tha...
    - seba_dos1 11y ago

aleem 11y ago

This article seems to have a personal axe to grind. Building an OS is hard, building an SDK is hard and so is building an IDE to go with it. Nokia is not a software company. It could not have competed with Google, Apple or Microsoft on the software platform. These companies have their own OS. They have their own browsers and even programming languages they can claim their own. They have massive developer ecosystems. The fact that Nokia failed has little to do with Nokia itself and more to do with the disruptive power of software. It really had just two options. Get acquired or adopt a third-party platform. Google was not interested post Motorola acquisition. Microsoft had its own demons to deal with. There was little wiggle room. Had Motorola not been acquired, it would have gone the same route, fizzled into oblivion. RIMM is going the same route. For all their trying, these companies don't have the software DNA.

trm42 11y ago
According to rumors Nokia had lots of discussion with MS and Google about which platform they should take. Got the impression that the proposition from MS was somehow better and at least initially gave more room to move for Nokia. Later on got the impression that lots of things didn't went as was promised. But, Nokia is still alive and the situation seems to be a lot rosier for them after selling the mobile phone business. They got good price and got really cheap loan from Microsoft as part of the deal. Of course in PR side Nokia didn't have to kick out the phone engineers. Microsoft is handling that still and getting the negative PR from that. One has to remember that earlier Ericsson quit the phone business as well by selling that to Sony. Actually those phones got better after that :)
- aleem 11y ago
  Yes, that's exactly right. Ballmer wanted to react to Google's Motorola acquisition and Nokia got a good deal out of it. Ballmer was heavily criticized (by the board no less) and the acquisition was mostly a write-off [1]. Compare this to Google's Motorola acquisition, it's clear that Nokia was a bad buy and Elop netted the company the most amount of money possible so all in all a good outcome for Nokia. As per Don Harrison, head of M&A at Google: [2] > I think the Motorola transaction has been a success for us. Financially, we bought the asset for $12.5 billion. It had $3 billion in cash; we were able to sell the Home division for $2.5 billion; we ended selling the handset division for $3 billion. There were some other tax assets as well. When you work through the math, you realize we spent between $2.5 billion and $3.5 billion for the patent assets. At the time, the nearest comparable transaction was the Nortel patent auction where Microsoft and Apple teamed up to buy that asset for $4.5 billion. And there’s a good argument that the Motorola patent portfolio is a better portfolio. Which is why the INSEAD article seems so off base. [1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/satya-nadella-just-undid-steve-ballmers-last-big-mistake-2015-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/satya-nadella-just-undid-stev... [2]: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/02/12/a-peek-at-googles-ma-ambitions/ http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/02/12/a-peek-at-googles-ma-...

andmarios 11y ago

My theory about Nokia's fall is that it was primarily driven by the company's inability to succeed in the United States. The first iPhone was indeed good, but still it wasn't a clear win for Apple. Nokia had impressive software and features that took many years for the competitors to catch up. In the same time, Nokia would have to catch up to the iPhone's (usable) touch interface but couldn't make it in time. Apple (and other US companies) have a huge marketing machine; hollywood, various tv programs, music industry etc. Once this marketing machine worked for Apple, Nokia had no chance of success since it hadn't an established audience in the US to keep the company's image afloat until it delivered something better. I believe this is also the reason the shareholders accepted so easily Microsoft and/or Elop. Elop did the worst possible move imho, during a period of heavy competition, he changed the company's roadmap, without thinking about the implications. You just can't pivot that fast on such a complex product. Also by doing this he alienated the company's audience in Europe.

f00fc0d3 11y ago

It is exactly the same what is happening to Nokia Networks. What saves them is fact that mobile networks market is pretty much closed and there is very high barrier of entry. If the market would be more open (patents!) - Nokia wouldn't survive a day there. Nokia top management have no clue about technology, they are not engineers so you can sell them any s##t you what if you have smooth talk. Nokia suffers also from politics and internal battles between sites and organizations (basically Finns vs everybody else). This results in ubiquitous NIH syndrome. Nokia Net reinvents wheel all the time, and almost every time they get a square.

digi_owl 11y ago

My personal take on it is "boardroom meddling". Rather than allow the share price to slump some and their CEO to put his long term play in to action, the board ousted him and brought in a short term sock puppet. And he was given one objective, goose the share price. You will find this behavior up and down the tech world. Take a look at HP for example. They went through 3 CEOs in nearly as many years. From that we have an aborted attempt at getting into the mobile business with WebOS as just one example. Hell, consider what Dell said after buying back his namesake company. That now they were free to pursue less profitable long term goals.

perseusprime11 11y ago

Isn't the bottom line technical incompetence more than anything else?