8 ms·

The best part, Nokia gets shafted in all of this. Nokia got dragged along in this clown show and we lose out on getting great hardware. Not to mention the softw

by jtrip 10y ago

The best part, Nokia gets shafted in all of this. Nokia got dragged along in this clown show and we lose out on getting great hardware. Not to mention the software side of things that drowned as Nokia got torpedoed. Here's hoping they can rise from the ashes again. Maybe their spin off services like here maps are a sign of life. Edit: Maybe I speak from a position of ignorance about the industry. But I also remember thinking how greatly awesome it would have been if I could run Android on the new Lumia hardware. I also remember the fact that Nokia was worth 30 bn before the new ceo, ex microsoft employee, came in and within years it was left worth 9 bn; pop culture facts I suppose.

sverige 10y ago
Yeah, they really screwed that up. RIP Nokia.
honkhonkpants 10y ago
Nokia's software was garbage before and after Microsoft.
- nickysielicki 10y ago
  Sure, but their hardware was always great and their software could have been Android. Look at HTC. What do they do besides great hardware? In the early days of Android, they were the go-to vendor for a close-to-stock Android experience. That could have been Nokia. Now HTC is making the best VR headset and has a fairly bright future.
  - Analemma_ 10y ago
    > Look at HTC. What do they do besides great hardware? I'm looking at HTC - what I see is a company that did great with Android for a short while, then got chewed up as Apple and Samsung ran away with the high end of the market while the Chinese manufacturers gobbled up the bottom end. All the "Nokia should've gone with Android!" comments I see around the internet never try to explain how they think Nokia would've fared any better than HTC (or Sony, or Motorola). > Now HTC is making the best VR headset and has a fairly bright future. You and I see HTC's future very differently. The Vive is the thread they're hanging by, and as soon as Valve doesn't need them anymore, it's going to be over (http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/07/can-we-stop-pretending-htc-has-a-future-in-vr/ http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/07/can-we-stop-pretend...)
    - Touche 10y ago
      HTC still exists, Nokia phones doesn't.
      - coldtea 10y ago
        >HTC still exists That's not exactly a high bar regarding what we're talking about...
    - bad_user 10y ago
      I don't know about HTC Androids, but I've had about 3 Motorola phones and they've been both expensive and low quality. That's not a winning combination, irregardless of what your competition does. For example I'm typing this on a Nexus 6 1st gen. A phone that when I bought it, I had to replace it in warranty because the color temperature of the screen was uneven and extremely annoying. And I paid at the time the price for a high end phone and got a subpar camera, a screen that doesn't have the contrast of other phones in its generation and a design that feels cheap and bulky. Well, at least it has stock Android on it. I got basically fooled in buying it, thinking it is a Nexus. And I could say similar things about Sony. And about LG for that matter. For instance LG had big hits in LG G3 and in Nexus 4 & 5. My wife wanted an LG G5, but apparently it gets overheated, with the customer rep telling us they've had multiple returns. So she went with the Galaxy S7 Edge, because it was the safe choice. Here's the big problem: if we are talking about exceptional hardware, none of these companies produce good products consistently. Do you know who does that? Apple and Samsung. And back in the day Nokia as well.
      - Al-Khwarizmi 10y ago
        Well, since 2010 I've only had two smartphones, both HTC, and in fact the first still works flawlessly (it's just too slow for me with its 768 MB RAM, especially as I use a lot of apps - a coworker of mine who bought it at the same time in 2010 still uses it daily though). My friends and relatives with Samsung phones have had around 4 of them since that time because they always break.
      - Grazester 10y ago
  - flukus 10y ago
    >Look at HTC. What do they do besides great hardware? They cripple said hardware with awful software.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >Sure, but their hardware was always great Was it? They had some nice models for the early smartphone era, and nice camera/lenses, but aside from that? Plus, Nokia was king of featurephones, with tons of crappy, low margin models...
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >Look at HTC. What do they do besides great hardware? Lose money on their phone business? >Now HTC is making the best VR headset and has a fairly bright future. Not so sure about it. Even the best VR headset would be a niche product for the next 5 years at least. At best it can get to Wii kind of success for HTC, but that's not sustainable. And when the big players (Apple, Samsung) and the Chinese commoditizers come into VR, what will HTC have?
    - Strom 10y ago
      And when the big players (Apple, Samsung) and the Chinese commoditizers come into VR, what will HTC have? You could say this about basically anything for any company. The threat of competition is always there. How about you give some examples of what HTC could be doing where the threat of competition doesn't exist.
      - coldtea 10y ago
        >You could say this about basically anything for any company Nope, you can't say it for entrenched companies (and companies with diverse revenue sources). You can't say it for Apple, you can't say it for Facebook, you can't say it for GM, you can't say for Samsung, ... The threat of competition is always there. How about you give some examples of what HTC could be doing where the threat of competition doesn't exist.
        Strom 10y ago
        Sure you can. Nokia was pretty entrenched in the phone business in 2007. Sony has very diverse revenue sources, yet most of them have dwindled due to competition.
        coldtea 10y ago
        OK, how about: HTC's case is an order of magnitude worse? They're no Sony and not even Nokia.
  - slouch 10y ago
    > but their hardware was always great Do a lot of people think this? After using a bunch of Android devices for 4 or 5 years, HTC is my "never again."
- Nullabillity 10y ago
  Maemo was probably the best mobile OS out there.
  - honkhonkpants 10y ago
    Maemo was the 2nd-worst piece of crap anyone ever ran on a phone (just losing out to OpenMoko). It was a disaster. At the time it was competing against BlackBerry OS, that ran rings around it. Edit: and by the time Maemo was actually running on a _phone_ it was head-to-head against iOS and WebOS. I think you could actually make a good case for WebOS being the greatest ever, but compared to those two Maemo was awful.
    - walterbell 10y ago
      What specific concerns did you have with Maemo? Both the N900 and N9 combined "real Linux" with a handful of mass-market apps like Skype and maps, with the N900 having both a hardware keyboard and touchscreen.
      - honkhonkpants 10y ago
        The UI was a joke designed by "year of the Linux desktop" believers. I mean just look at it: http://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/reviews/11886-image/screenshot002.jpg http://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/reviews/11886-image/scree... Can't touch anything, touch targets are all too small, so you are forced to use the stylus. Visually it looks like the love child of BeOS and KDE. can't tell from a static screenshot but everything was unbelievably slow.
        htns 10y ago
        I think that's from a n800 or n810, which had no phone functionality and were based on gtk+ rather than Qt/QML. n900 calendar was totally different.
        honkhonkpants 10y ago
- tuna-piano 10y ago
  In 2011 I worked for a cell phone store, and a Nokia sales rep came in to demo a new phone. His one quote that cracked me up "We'll never win over the niche of people who want iPhones." It was obvious to anyone with eyes and fingers that iPhones were far superior to what Nokia was creating. Some random features I remember him showing: you could plug a mouse into the phone and it would vibrate during walking directions. They probably realized they couldn't make a better product, so they tried to make a differentiated one with some things that people don't care about.
  - ralfd 10y ago
    The fascinating thing is that Nokia knew. They knew right from the beginning. This "different phones for different niches" was just a desperate marketing spiel to save face. http://www.hs.fi/kuukausiliite/a1381288411564?jako=8ca7cf1217840c8e0761e9eb07e4ca5c&ref=og-url http://www.hs.fi/kuukausiliite/a1381288411564?jako=8ca7cf121... This is a letter a finnish journalist sent to Nokia in 2008. He was blown away by the iPhone! The letter was circulated internally and different managers called him to explain Nokias strategy. He meets up with the bosses and the following ensues: ---------------- The manager started to brief me on the backgrounds of Nokia's strategy. The idea was that people are different, and therefore, they need different kinds of telephones. I became agitated: "The kind of person who wants to use a bad telephone does not exist!", I said. THIS SPARKED AN argument. I explained in different ways how dreadful my new telephone was, and the manager spoke in its defence. All of a sudden he went silent. He looked directly in my eyes and said: "This conversation is in confidence, isn't it?" I assured him that it was. He continued: "I agree completely with everything that you wrote in your letter and with what you have said now." I was astounded. "I agree completely with you and I want to apologise on behalf of Nokia for producing a bad telephone for you." ---------------- 5 Years later (2013) he meets the manager again. He tells a story so disarmingly cute Apple should print it as advertising: ---------------- He told me that when the iPhones came out in the United States in the summer of 2007, the situation was followed at Nokia with keen interest. A large number of iPhones were immediately delivered to Nokia's head offices in Espoo by courier. The manager took his own iPhone home that same evening. He studied it so enthusiastically that it caught the interest of his four-year-old daughter. As an experiment, he gave the telephone to his daughter, and she learned to use it immediately. In the evening as the parents were going to bed, the drowsy four-year-old appeared at their bedroom door with a question: "Can I take that magic telephone and put it under my pillow tonight?" It was at that was the moment that the Nokia executive understood that his company was in trouble.
- amiga-workbench 10y ago
  I'm not so sure, I'm still using a Nokia N9 here, its so nice to have proper Linux on my phone, not some nasty JVM abstraction.
  - vetinari 10y ago
    N9 was also difficult to obtain, it was sold only in some countries and only if you knew where to look. Meanwhile they were drowning the market with S60 and S40 phones what ultimately nobody wanted.
megablast 10y ago
You can't blame Microsoft for Nokia, Nokia screwed themselves over. They never considered the importance off software, hardware was always number one for Nokia. Even when the iPhone came out they laughed and didn't change tack. They had all the money, all the opportunity, and they thought if they keep pumping out the same stuff, people will stay with them.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >They never considered the importance off software, hardware was always number one for Nokia. And even that wasn't anything to write home about -- though they did experiment with nicer cameras...
  - manojlds 10y ago
    Clearly you don't know about the runaway hits like N95 and other N series. Those were some exceptional phones.
    - Tobani 10y ago
      If nobody knows about them were they really runaway hits?
      - jacalata 10y ago
        Everybody who knew about smartphones at the time knew about them. A couple people on HN who aren't in that group doesn't mean 'nobody knew about them'.
        reitanqild 10y ago
        Upvoted. Although tbh: the moment iPhone started iterating the N-series was a lost cause IMO. I had the N82 candybar model with a great camera and real xeon flash.
    - coldtea 10y ago
throwabody 10y ago
Nokia sold their Here mapping division to a German automobile conglomerate. They have a big presence in the network infrastructure market. I think they recently dipped their toes back into the consumer market by acquiring Withings, a wearable products company.
pavlov 10y ago
Nokia didn't get shafted. They got $7.2 billion USD for the phone unit that was losing money at an incredible rate in 2013. They used that money to buy Alcatel-Lucent and now they're a major force in networks. I honestly believe Nokia would have been bankrupt by now if Microsoft hadn't bailed them out. And if Nokia hadn't adopted Windows Phone, they wouldn't have had Ballmer's ear to convince him to sign on such a bad deal. Elop deserves more recognition for this manoeuvre than he gets.
- toomanythings4 10y ago
  I don't think anyone ever called it a Microsoft bailout. And the people who lost their jobs, both at Microsoft and Nokia back then, wouldn't consider this such a rewarding, positive thing.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Speaking as former employee, I see the board as the ones where the blame actually lies. They were the ones not wanting to make handsets with GNU/Linux originally, allowed some internal political wars between Symbian and GNU/Linux camps when they finally went for it and the best of it was having a contract clause for Elop giving him a bonus if he managed to sell the company.
    - GedByrne 10y ago
      Has anybody told the story of what happened at Nokia? I'd love to find out more. I've spoken to a couple of former employees, and I was told that what really stopped Nokia from responding to Apple effectively was that they had started to outsource engineering. Has anybody written anything reliable on the subject?
      - giovannibajo1 10y ago
        My view on that is that Nokia has always been a hardware company with a weak software culture. They weren't able to write software of the complexity required to compete with iOS, so they acquired Symbian first (yes they did that after iPhone was already in the market) and Qt later. Neither avenue produced something that could compete on the market fast enough, so the board hired Elop to fix it with Windows Mobile.

by jtrip 10y ago

sverige 10y ago

Yeah, they really screwed that up. RIP Nokia.

honkhonkpants 10y ago

Nokia's software was garbage before and after Microsoft.

nickysielicki 10y ago
Sure, but their hardware was always great and their software could have been Android. Look at HTC. What do they do besides great hardware? In the early days of Android, they were the go-to vendor for a close-to-stock Android experience. That could have been Nokia. Now HTC is making the best VR headset and has a fairly bright future.
- Analemma_ 10y ago
  > Look at HTC. What do they do besides great hardware? I'm looking at HTC - what I see is a company that did great with Android for a short while, then got chewed up as Apple and Samsung ran away with the high end of the market while the Chinese manufacturers gobbled up the bottom end. All the "Nokia should've gone with Android!" comments I see around the internet never try to explain how they think Nokia would've fared any better than HTC (or Sony, or Motorola). > Now HTC is making the best VR headset and has a fairly bright future. You and I see HTC's future very differently. The Vive is the thread they're hanging by, and as soon as Valve doesn't need them anymore, it's going to be over (http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/07/can-we-stop-pretending-htc-has-a-future-in-vr/ http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/07/can-we-stop-pretend...)
  - Touche 10y ago
    HTC still exists, Nokia phones doesn't.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >HTC still exists That's not exactly a high bar regarding what we're talking about...
  - bad_user 10y ago
    I don't know about HTC Androids, but I've had about 3 Motorola phones and they've been both expensive and low quality. That's not a winning combination, irregardless of what your competition does. For example I'm typing this on a Nexus 6 1st gen. A phone that when I bought it, I had to replace it in warranty because the color temperature of the screen was uneven and extremely annoying. And I paid at the time the price for a high end phone and got a subpar camera, a screen that doesn't have the contrast of other phones in its generation and a design that feels cheap and bulky. Well, at least it has stock Android on it. I got basically fooled in buying it, thinking it is a Nexus. And I could say similar things about Sony. And about LG for that matter. For instance LG had big hits in LG G3 and in Nexus 4 & 5. My wife wanted an LG G5, but apparently it gets overheated, with the customer rep telling us they've had multiple returns. So she went with the Galaxy S7 Edge, because it was the safe choice. Here's the big problem: if we are talking about exceptional hardware, none of these companies produce good products consistently. Do you know who does that? Apple and Samsung. And back in the day Nokia as well.
    - Al-Khwarizmi 10y ago
      Well, since 2010 I've only had two smartphones, both HTC, and in fact the first still works flawlessly (it's just too slow for me with its 768 MB RAM, especially as I use a lot of apps - a coworker of mine who bought it at the same time in 2010 still uses it daily though). My friends and relatives with Samsung phones have had around 4 of them since that time because they always break.
    - Grazester 10y ago
- flukus 10y ago
  >Look at HTC. What do they do besides great hardware? They cripple said hardware with awful software.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Sure, but their hardware was always great Was it? They had some nice models for the early smartphone era, and nice camera/lenses, but aside from that? Plus, Nokia was king of featurephones, with tons of crappy, low margin models...
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Look at HTC. What do they do besides great hardware? Lose money on their phone business? >Now HTC is making the best VR headset and has a fairly bright future. Not so sure about it. Even the best VR headset would be a niche product for the next 5 years at least. At best it can get to Wii kind of success for HTC, but that's not sustainable. And when the big players (Apple, Samsung) and the Chinese commoditizers come into VR, what will HTC have?
  - Strom 10y ago
    And when the big players (Apple, Samsung) and the Chinese commoditizers come into VR, what will HTC have? You could say this about basically anything for any company. The threat of competition is always there. How about you give some examples of what HTC could be doing where the threat of competition doesn't exist.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >You could say this about basically anything for any company Nope, you can't say it for entrenched companies (and companies with diverse revenue sources). You can't say it for Apple, you can't say it for Facebook, you can't say it for GM, you can't say for Samsung, ... The threat of competition is always there. How about you give some examples of what HTC could be doing where the threat of competition doesn't exist.
      - Strom 10y ago
        Sure you can. Nokia was pretty entrenched in the phone business in 2007. Sony has very diverse revenue sources, yet most of them have dwindled due to competition.
        coldtea 10y ago
        OK, how about: HTC's case is an order of magnitude worse? They're no Sony and not even Nokia.
- slouch 10y ago
  > but their hardware was always great Do a lot of people think this? After using a bunch of Android devices for 4 or 5 years, HTC is my "never again."
Nullabillity 10y ago
Maemo was probably the best mobile OS out there.
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  Maemo was the 2nd-worst piece of crap anyone ever ran on a phone (just losing out to OpenMoko). It was a disaster. At the time it was competing against BlackBerry OS, that ran rings around it. Edit: and by the time Maemo was actually running on a _phone_ it was head-to-head against iOS and WebOS. I think you could actually make a good case for WebOS being the greatest ever, but compared to those two Maemo was awful.
  - walterbell 10y ago
    What specific concerns did you have with Maemo? Both the N900 and N9 combined "real Linux" with a handful of mass-market apps like Skype and maps, with the N900 having both a hardware keyboard and touchscreen.
    - honkhonkpants 10y ago
      The UI was a joke designed by "year of the Linux desktop" believers. I mean just look at it: http://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/reviews/11886-image/screenshot002.jpg http://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/reviews/11886-image/scree... Can't touch anything, touch targets are all too small, so you are forced to use the stylus. Visually it looks like the love child of BeOS and KDE. can't tell from a static screenshot but everything was unbelievably slow.
      - htns 10y ago
        I think that's from a n800 or n810, which had no phone functionality and were based on gtk+ rather than Qt/QML. n900 calendar was totally different.
        honkhonkpants 10y ago
tuna-piano 10y ago
In 2011 I worked for a cell phone store, and a Nokia sales rep came in to demo a new phone. His one quote that cracked me up "We'll never win over the niche of people who want iPhones." It was obvious to anyone with eyes and fingers that iPhones were far superior to what Nokia was creating. Some random features I remember him showing: you could plug a mouse into the phone and it would vibrate during walking directions. They probably realized they couldn't make a better product, so they tried to make a differentiated one with some things that people don't care about.
- ralfd 10y ago
  The fascinating thing is that Nokia knew. They knew right from the beginning. This "different phones for different niches" was just a desperate marketing spiel to save face. http://www.hs.fi/kuukausiliite/a1381288411564?jako=8ca7cf1217840c8e0761e9eb07e4ca5c&ref=og-url http://www.hs.fi/kuukausiliite/a1381288411564?jako=8ca7cf121... This is a letter a finnish journalist sent to Nokia in 2008. He was blown away by the iPhone! The letter was circulated internally and different managers called him to explain Nokias strategy. He meets up with the bosses and the following ensues: ---------------- The manager started to brief me on the backgrounds of Nokia's strategy. The idea was that people are different, and therefore, they need different kinds of telephones. I became agitated: "The kind of person who wants to use a bad telephone does not exist!", I said. THIS SPARKED AN argument. I explained in different ways how dreadful my new telephone was, and the manager spoke in its defence. All of a sudden he went silent. He looked directly in my eyes and said: "This conversation is in confidence, isn't it?" I assured him that it was. He continued: "I agree completely with everything that you wrote in your letter and with what you have said now." I was astounded. "I agree completely with you and I want to apologise on behalf of Nokia for producing a bad telephone for you." ---------------- 5 Years later (2013) he meets the manager again. He tells a story so disarmingly cute Apple should print it as advertising: ---------------- He told me that when the iPhones came out in the United States in the summer of 2007, the situation was followed at Nokia with keen interest. A large number of iPhones were immediately delivered to Nokia's head offices in Espoo by courier. The manager took his own iPhone home that same evening. He studied it so enthusiastically that it caught the interest of his four-year-old daughter. As an experiment, he gave the telephone to his daughter, and she learned to use it immediately. In the evening as the parents were going to bed, the drowsy four-year-old appeared at their bedroom door with a question: "Can I take that magic telephone and put it under my pillow tonight?" It was at that was the moment that the Nokia executive understood that his company was in trouble.
amiga-workbench 10y ago
I'm not so sure, I'm still using a Nokia N9 here, its so nice to have proper Linux on my phone, not some nasty JVM abstraction.
- vetinari 10y ago
  N9 was also difficult to obtain, it was sold only in some countries and only if you knew where to look. Meanwhile they were drowning the market with S60 and S40 phones what ultimately nobody wanted.

megablast 10y ago

You can't blame Microsoft for Nokia, Nokia screwed themselves over. They never considered the importance off software, hardware was always number one for Nokia. Even when the iPhone came out they laughed and didn't change tack. They had all the money, all the opportunity, and they thought if they keep pumping out the same stuff, people will stay with them.

coldtea 10y ago
>They never considered the importance off software, hardware was always number one for Nokia. And even that wasn't anything to write home about -- though they did experiment with nicer cameras...
- manojlds 10y ago
  Clearly you don't know about the runaway hits like N95 and other N series. Those were some exceptional phones.
  - Tobani 10y ago
    If nobody knows about them were they really runaway hits?
    - jacalata 10y ago
      Everybody who knew about smartphones at the time knew about them. A couple people on HN who aren't in that group doesn't mean 'nobody knew about them'.
      - reitanqild 10y ago
        Upvoted. Although tbh: the moment iPhone started iterating the N-series was a lost cause IMO. I had the N82 candybar model with a great camera and real xeon flash.
  - coldtea 10y ago

throwabody 10y ago

Nokia sold their Here mapping division to a German automobile conglomerate. They have a big presence in the network infrastructure market. I think they recently dipped their toes back into the consumer market by acquiring Withings, a wearable products company.

pavlov 10y ago

Nokia didn't get shafted. They got $7.2 billion USD for the phone unit that was losing money at an incredible rate in 2013. They used that money to buy Alcatel-Lucent and now they're a major force in networks. I honestly believe Nokia would have been bankrupt by now if Microsoft hadn't bailed them out. And if Nokia hadn't adopted Windows Phone, they wouldn't have had Ballmer's ear to convince him to sign on such a bad deal. Elop deserves more recognition for this manoeuvre than he gets.

toomanythings4 10y ago
I don't think anyone ever called it a Microsoft bailout. And the people who lost their jobs, both at Microsoft and Nokia back then, wouldn't consider this such a rewarding, positive thing.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Speaking as former employee, I see the board as the ones where the blame actually lies. They were the ones not wanting to make handsets with GNU/Linux originally, allowed some internal political wars between Symbian and GNU/Linux camps when they finally went for it and the best of it was having a contract clause for Elop giving him a bonus if he managed to sell the company.
  - GedByrne 10y ago
    Has anybody told the story of what happened at Nokia? I'd love to find out more. I've spoken to a couple of former employees, and I was told that what really stopped Nokia from responding to Apple effectively was that they had started to outsource engineering. Has anybody written anything reliable on the subject?
    - giovannibajo1 10y ago
      My view on that is that Nokia has always been a hardware company with a weak software culture. They weren't able to write software of the complexity required to compete with iOS, so they acquired Symbian first (yes they did that after iPhone was already in the market) and Qt later. Neither avenue produced something that could compete on the market fast enough, so the board hired Elop to fix it with Windows Mobile.