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Ex-Nokia employee here - I used to work directly for the CTO of Nokia. It's amazing, but unsurprising, to me the strength of Nokia's phone brand after all these

Ex-Nokia employee here - I used to work directly for the CTO of Nokia. It's amazing, but unsurprising, to me the strength of Nokia's phone brand after all these years. There's a lot longer of a story to Nokia's decision not to use Android than most people realize. For example, Intel figured prominently, the Symbian vs. Maemo debate raged internally, discussions with Google were marred by massive cultural differences and arrogance on both sides. I'm surprised no one has written a book. For what it's worth, Windows Phone was actually an amazing platform for both users and developers, and shows a fundamental rule of technology: There Is No Third Ecosystsm. The most dominant hardware maker (at the time) and software/os maker teamed up with a really great product, but couldn't break the established smartphone duopoly, even though it was only a few years old by that point. I wasn't a Microsoft fan by any stretch (the opposite actually), but even I agreed with the decision at the time, especially after using Windows Phone. First mover advantage is huge, and developers only have so much bandwidth. Edit: Heh. Apparently someone did write a book. See comments below. Wow.

baybal2 9y ago
What office you worked in? I used to meet a lot of Nokia refugees in Vancouver and Seattle. Almost all retell the same story: C-Levels spending more time flying than on the ground, complete sturpor with platform development, internal sabotage in between internal symbian teams
- xiphias 9y ago
  I heared the same thing, and I see the same thing happening to Google and Apple as well. Still I don't expect a manager who worked under the CTO to say this problem out loud
- russellbeattie 9y ago
  I was in Palo Alto. Despite the name, the CTO of Nokia at the time was basically the head of Nokia Research, which was focused on fundamental research - like nanotech and low-power comms like Wibree (which became Bluetooth LE). This is a part of the company present-day Nokia kept when they split off the phone manufacturing bit. I don't think the CTO had much to do with the Android decision really. He used an iPhone daily anyways (no joke).
garaetjjte 9y ago
Windows Phone 7 was horrible. No native apps, no background tasks, no globally accessible storage, no serious graphics API, no API for audio streaming, no API for anything! It got slightly better in WP8, but bad impression remained.
- Const-me 9y ago
  > no background tasks, no API for audio streaming Here’s my old WP7 project implementing both of these: https://github.com/Const-me/SkyFM https://github.com/Const-me/SkyFM Update: the solution in that repo builds a WP7 app using WP8 SDK. Earlier versions used WP7 SDK. I had to upgrade a few things, e.g. replaced Async CTP with Microsoft.Bcl.Async but the changes were minor.
  - garaetjjte 9y ago
    I don't remember exactly, but maybe streaming API got added with WP7.5?
    - Const-me 9y ago
      Right, they have added background tasks, media streaming and many other features in WP7.5. Happened less than 1 year after the initial 7.0 version, all original phones were upgradeable to 7.5. BTW, when original iPhone was released in 2007, it didn’t have any user-installable apps at all, only the built-in ones. The store with the apps was launched a year after the phone.
- cesnja 9y ago
  The phones worked more smoothly than any other mobile device I can recall, though. After I tried to switch away from WP7 for the first time, I had to return the Android flagship at that time (Samsung Galaxy Nexus) because it lagged so much. The lack of apps and no way to sync with Linux computers made me eventually migrate to Android, which still seems clumsy and slow even today..
  - ClassyJacket 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
torpedo 9y ago
> I'm surprised no one has written a book. They have. Help yourself: https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52c5 https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52... https://asokan.org/operation-elop/ https://asokan.org/operation-elop/
- russellbeattie 9y ago
  Wow. Thanks... That will probably help fill in a lot of missing blanks for me. (Actually, I'm not even sure I want to read it... Still a little bitter).
  - torpedo 9y ago
    That was just the beginning. Once you are done go for "Smartphones and beyond - lessons from the remarkable rise and fall of Symbian". It's an 800-page tome from David Wood, who, according to the publisher, is "the only executive to remain on the Symbian leadership team throughout virtually the entirety of the company’s history". https://smartphonesandbeyond.com/ https://smartphonesandbeyond.com/
nikanj 9y ago
Windows phone was a great platform, but the constant abandonment of hardware made many people really angry. First WP7 phones could not get WP8, then WP8 phones could not get WP10. Both times the users were promised years of upgrades and support when they bought the devices.
- russellbeattie 9y ago
  This is where Intel figures in. The lead time for a new phone is 18-24 months. Intel had been going around to OEMs and Microsoft promising that the Atom would catch up and surpass ARM, and started making deals. Palm also got screwed by Intel as well if I remember correctly. Nokia cancelled at least one Symbian phone and a Maemo tablet late into development because of this, and Microsoft as well lost a lot of time focusing on a chip that never came. By the time Elop wanted to launch a Windows phone, the only option was to go with a phone in the pipeline. The other option was to wait a full cycle. The phones that could run WP8 came out the next year, I'm pretty sure, and all of the original Lumia buyers (me included) were stuck.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    The whole Maemo+Moblin=Meego were also a mess thanks to Intel. Moblin, much like Maemo, started out as a modified Debian. But right after the merger was announced, Intel released Moblin 2, that was RPM based. End result was that Nokia was left hanging high and dry with their N900 that used DEB and also attempted to switch out GTK with Qt (Nokia bought Trolltech) because Qt could be used on both Linux and Symbian.
usaphp 9y ago
> For what it's worth, Windows Phone was actually an amazing platform for both users and developers Inability of Nokia/Microsoft to see that it wasn't amazing at all - in my opinion is the reason they got destroyed by iOS and Android. Windows Phone 7 was far from amazing, and by the time windows phone 8 came out - everybody already realized that and were not going to purchase another phone with WP8 that will be bricked by a new update again like all the WP7 phones did.
segmondy 9y ago
Windows phone was the worst thing ever. You could only open 4 tabs in your browser. Give me a break. The floor of stacking everything on top of each other was a mess where once you popped off an app you couldn't go back. I used windows phone via proxy, first thing I did was to get everyone to give it up and switch to Android.
- yorby 9y ago
  Too bad Firefox was not available.... I was pretty happy with mine anyways...
- j3097736 9y ago
  This, windows phone works well as a phone, but the lack of quality apps and crappy browser that chokes/crashes on avertising make the "smart" part a complete fail.
- ivm 9y ago
  I used Windows Phone 8 for two years, initially it was a $180 Nokia 520 that was as snappy as iPhone. Every popular app worked or had a decent 3rd party replacement. I liked the consistent and simple OS, much better than Android in terms of UX design. One day it fell down about 3 meters on a stone floor and survived almost without a scratch. Great hardware, nice software, but a poor mobile strategy by Microsoft.
toast0 9y ago
> For what it's worth, Windows Phone was actually an amazing platform for both users and developers, and shows a fundamental rule of technology: There Is No Third Ecosystem I don't think this is fundamental. Microsoft really dropped the ball on Windows 10 Mobile. Building a third ecosystem is very hard, and it's a long term commitment. Microsoft had made good inroads on cheap phones with reasonable performance, and they didn't follow through with that for W10M; instead they were focusing on flagship phones. Flagship phone buyers are a lot more discriminating about everything including OS polish, app marketplace, and upgrade experience (edit to add, and a browser that doesn't suck).
- jpalomaki 9y ago
  I owned Lumia 920 and 930. Hardware was good, I liked the OS. I eventually switched to iOS due to 3rd party app support. It was annoying when the apps you wanted to try were either not available or were lacking features. In my view the app support killed the platform. It would have been impossible to fix. Even if Microsoft had paid for the development it would not have made sense for companies to spend time with WP versions for just a few users.
  - toast0 9y ago
    App support was problematic, in part because Microsoft kept coming up with new, incompatible ways to develop apps. Apps for WP7 could work on WP8 and W10M (except sometimes, when the app compat didn't work right on upgrade, and users had to wipe their phone and try again, and Microsoft never fixed it); but there was also a 'new way' to build apps for WP8 that was required for some features, and a new way to build 'universal' apps for W10M that didn't work on any of the other versions of Windows Phone. To say nothing of the apps for Windows Mobile 6 that were thrown away (despite WP7 still being Windows CE, but with a fancy skin). It's one thing to build an app for a platform with not very many users; it's another to build three similar apps for three similar platforms that don't have very many users. This is something Microsoft should have done better, and falls in the camp of if you're going to be a third ecosystem, you have to be consistently good.
    - 9y ago
throwaway7645 9y ago
I agreed with y'all as well at the time. Anytime someone hated on windows phone I would show it to them and it wasn't at all uncommon for them to go out and buy it later. The PDF viewer is the only thing I've ever had an issue with.
digi_owl 9y ago
Established duopoly my foot. There was already an established duopoly when iOS and Android first shipped. But what happened was that for some reason the focus shifted from the well established European market to the backwaters American market, rolling back some 2 decades of progress in mobile tech in the process. Nokia was demoing Symbian phones that could operate as a pocket computer (just hook up to a TV a keyboard and a mouse) while Android barely could show a video on a external screen by blanking the internal one. Yet the established players flinched, bought into the MSM hype, and ran their ships aground, leaving themselves wide open to be overtaken by upstarts.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  So why is there only two and both from the US? I am no following what you are trying to say? Also not sure where MSM plays in if this means mainstream media?
- jordanthoms 9y ago
  Symbian had a lot of functionality, but the quality of the experience was poor in comparison to iOS and Android. That's why it lost, not hype.
joncrane 9y ago
If "there is no third ecosystem," then who's going to lose between Azure and Google Compute?
Bromskloss 9y ago
> First mover advantage is huge And second mover, it seems, then, but not third. Is that so?

baybal2 9y ago

What office you worked in? I used to meet a lot of Nokia refugees in Vancouver and Seattle. Almost all retell the same story: C-Levels spending more time flying than on the ground, complete sturpor with platform development, internal sabotage in between internal symbian teams

xiphias 9y ago
I heared the same thing, and I see the same thing happening to Google and Apple as well. Still I don't expect a manager who worked under the CTO to say this problem out loud
russellbeattie 9y ago
I was in Palo Alto. Despite the name, the CTO of Nokia at the time was basically the head of Nokia Research, which was focused on fundamental research - like nanotech and low-power comms like Wibree (which became Bluetooth LE). This is a part of the company present-day Nokia kept when they split off the phone manufacturing bit. I don't think the CTO had much to do with the Android decision really. He used an iPhone daily anyways (no joke).

garaetjjte 9y ago

Windows Phone 7 was horrible. No native apps, no background tasks, no globally accessible storage, no serious graphics API, no API for audio streaming, no API for anything! It got slightly better in WP8, but bad impression remained.

Const-me 9y ago
> no background tasks, no API for audio streaming Here’s my old WP7 project implementing both of these: https://github.com/Const-me/SkyFM https://github.com/Const-me/SkyFM Update: the solution in that repo builds a WP7 app using WP8 SDK. Earlier versions used WP7 SDK. I had to upgrade a few things, e.g. replaced Async CTP with Microsoft.Bcl.Async but the changes were minor.
- garaetjjte 9y ago
  I don't remember exactly, but maybe streaming API got added with WP7.5?
  - Const-me 9y ago
    Right, they have added background tasks, media streaming and many other features in WP7.5. Happened less than 1 year after the initial 7.0 version, all original phones were upgradeable to 7.5. BTW, when original iPhone was released in 2007, it didn’t have any user-installable apps at all, only the built-in ones. The store with the apps was launched a year after the phone.
cesnja 9y ago
The phones worked more smoothly than any other mobile device I can recall, though. After I tried to switch away from WP7 for the first time, I had to return the Android flagship at that time (Samsung Galaxy Nexus) because it lagged so much. The lack of apps and no way to sync with Linux computers made me eventually migrate to Android, which still seems clumsy and slow even today..
- ClassyJacket 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

torpedo 9y ago

> I'm surprised no one has written a book. They have. Help yourself: https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52c5 https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52... https://asokan.org/operation-elop/ https://asokan.org/operation-elop/

russellbeattie 9y ago
Wow. Thanks... That will probably help fill in a lot of missing blanks for me. (Actually, I'm not even sure I want to read it... Still a little bitter).
- torpedo 9y ago
  That was just the beginning. Once you are done go for "Smartphones and beyond - lessons from the remarkable rise and fall of Symbian". It's an 800-page tome from David Wood, who, according to the publisher, is "the only executive to remain on the Symbian leadership team throughout virtually the entirety of the company’s history". https://smartphonesandbeyond.com/ https://smartphonesandbeyond.com/

nikanj 9y ago

Windows phone was a great platform, but the constant abandonment of hardware made many people really angry. First WP7 phones could not get WP8, then WP8 phones could not get WP10. Both times the users were promised years of upgrades and support when they bought the devices.

russellbeattie 9y ago
This is where Intel figures in. The lead time for a new phone is 18-24 months. Intel had been going around to OEMs and Microsoft promising that the Atom would catch up and surpass ARM, and started making deals. Palm also got screwed by Intel as well if I remember correctly. Nokia cancelled at least one Symbian phone and a Maemo tablet late into development because of this, and Microsoft as well lost a lot of time focusing on a chip that never came. By the time Elop wanted to launch a Windows phone, the only option was to go with a phone in the pipeline. The other option was to wait a full cycle. The phones that could run WP8 came out the next year, I'm pretty sure, and all of the original Lumia buyers (me included) were stuck.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  The whole Maemo+Moblin=Meego were also a mess thanks to Intel. Moblin, much like Maemo, started out as a modified Debian. But right after the merger was announced, Intel released Moblin 2, that was RPM based. End result was that Nokia was left hanging high and dry with their N900 that used DEB and also attempted to switch out GTK with Qt (Nokia bought Trolltech) because Qt could be used on both Linux and Symbian.

usaphp 9y ago

> For what it's worth, Windows Phone was actually an amazing platform for both users and developers Inability of Nokia/Microsoft to see that it wasn't amazing at all - in my opinion is the reason they got destroyed by iOS and Android. Windows Phone 7 was far from amazing, and by the time windows phone 8 came out - everybody already realized that and were not going to purchase another phone with WP8 that will be bricked by a new update again like all the WP7 phones did.

segmondy 9y ago

Windows phone was the worst thing ever. You could only open 4 tabs in your browser. Give me a break. The floor of stacking everything on top of each other was a mess where once you popped off an app you couldn't go back. I used windows phone via proxy, first thing I did was to get everyone to give it up and switch to Android.

yorby 9y ago
Too bad Firefox was not available.... I was pretty happy with mine anyways...
j3097736 9y ago
This, windows phone works well as a phone, but the lack of quality apps and crappy browser that chokes/crashes on avertising make the "smart" part a complete fail.
ivm 9y ago
I used Windows Phone 8 for two years, initially it was a $180 Nokia 520 that was as snappy as iPhone. Every popular app worked or had a decent 3rd party replacement. I liked the consistent and simple OS, much better than Android in terms of UX design. One day it fell down about 3 meters on a stone floor and survived almost without a scratch. Great hardware, nice software, but a poor mobile strategy by Microsoft.

toast0 9y ago

> For what it's worth, Windows Phone was actually an amazing platform for both users and developers, and shows a fundamental rule of technology: There Is No Third Ecosystem I don't think this is fundamental. Microsoft really dropped the ball on Windows 10 Mobile. Building a third ecosystem is very hard, and it's a long term commitment. Microsoft had made good inroads on cheap phones with reasonable performance, and they didn't follow through with that for W10M; instead they were focusing on flagship phones. Flagship phone buyers are a lot more discriminating about everything including OS polish, app marketplace, and upgrade experience (edit to add, and a browser that doesn't suck).

jpalomaki 9y ago
I owned Lumia 920 and 930. Hardware was good, I liked the OS. I eventually switched to iOS due to 3rd party app support. It was annoying when the apps you wanted to try were either not available or were lacking features. In my view the app support killed the platform. It would have been impossible to fix. Even if Microsoft had paid for the development it would not have made sense for companies to spend time with WP versions for just a few users.
- toast0 9y ago
  App support was problematic, in part because Microsoft kept coming up with new, incompatible ways to develop apps. Apps for WP7 could work on WP8 and W10M (except sometimes, when the app compat didn't work right on upgrade, and users had to wipe their phone and try again, and Microsoft never fixed it); but there was also a 'new way' to build apps for WP8 that was required for some features, and a new way to build 'universal' apps for W10M that didn't work on any of the other versions of Windows Phone. To say nothing of the apps for Windows Mobile 6 that were thrown away (despite WP7 still being Windows CE, but with a fancy skin). It's one thing to build an app for a platform with not very many users; it's another to build three similar apps for three similar platforms that don't have very many users. This is something Microsoft should have done better, and falls in the camp of if you're going to be a third ecosystem, you have to be consistently good.
  - 9y ago

throwaway7645 9y ago

I agreed with y'all as well at the time. Anytime someone hated on windows phone I would show it to them and it wasn't at all uncommon for them to go out and buy it later. The PDF viewer is the only thing I've ever had an issue with.

digi_owl 9y ago

Established duopoly my foot. There was already an established duopoly when iOS and Android first shipped. But what happened was that for some reason the focus shifted from the well established European market to the backwaters American market, rolling back some 2 decades of progress in mobile tech in the process. Nokia was demoing Symbian phones that could operate as a pocket computer (just hook up to a TV a keyboard and a mouse) while Android barely could show a video on a external screen by blanking the internal one. Yet the established players flinched, bought into the MSM hype, and ran their ships aground, leaving themselves wide open to be overtaken by upstarts.

jacksmith21006 9y ago
So why is there only two and both from the US? I am no following what you are trying to say? Also not sure where MSM plays in if this means mainstream media?
jordanthoms 9y ago
Symbian had a lot of functionality, but the quality of the experience was poor in comparison to iOS and Android. That's why it lost, not hype.

joncrane 9y ago

If "there is no third ecosystem," then who's going to lose between Azure and Google Compute?

Bromskloss 9y ago

> First mover advantage is huge And second mover, it seems, then, but not third. Is that so?