6 ms·

Nokia’s Suicide Note

131 points by cwb 16y ago

raganwald 16y ago
Excellent analysis: Nokia has effectively announced that they have no focus and plan to spend three quarters losing money in the hops that in 2012 or 2013 WP7 is going to be a big hit for them. It's a shame Elop doesn't take a page out of Jobs' book instead of Ballmer's. Rather than announce a strategic blah blah direction blah blah partnership blah blah, he could have called a press conference, walked on stage, and showed them a Nokia running WP7, announced a date you could buy them, and invited the heads of the world's biggest carriers on stage to announce cut-rate deals and plans for them. p.s. I meant to write "hope," and not "hops," however considering what we make out of hops and the kind of decisions we make after drinking too much of it, I'm leaving it uncorrected.
- qjz 16y ago
  Agreed. And in even less time, he could have walked on stage with an unlocked Android-based smartphone. What would Nokia have to lose from offering such a device? Does the new partnership with Microsoft prohibit such a move? If so, it seems like a limiting move for a hardware manufacturer that harkens back to the early days of Windows.
  - Hov 16y ago
    Well, I suspect they didn't go with Android because they didn't want to get lost in the shuffle. It might be easier to make some sort of a splash using an OS that feels somewhat new. And WP7 is very good phone platform, as much as people would like to believe the opposite.
  - moomba 16y ago
    I agree. I keep hearing comments about Nokia being late to the game... blalballba ...if they decided to use android instead of WP7. I don't see how that is an issue. As has been stated by Nokia, this is going to take 1-2 years to make the switch to WP7. Why don't they spend 1/2 of that time switching to a popular platform instead of an unpopular platform. I guess I'd have to be an ex Microsoft employee (like the CEO) to understand any of this zaniness.
    - dfox 16y ago
      I assume that they want to keep their hardware platform. And porting Android to that would almost certainly require opensourcing their baseband implementation and thus enable everyone else to build phones with similar architecture (ie. without dedicated baseband CPU).
      - rbanffy 16y ago
        I don't think being able to go without a dedicated baseband processor will be an advantage for more than one hardware iteration. It may be useful in featurephones, but not that much with smartphones.
        dfox 16y ago
        It enables Nokia to manufacture cheap smartphones with good battery life. Some Chinese Android-based phones are starting to have comparable prices, but certainly not battery life.
        rbanffy 16y ago
        For how long will that advantage exist? Would you like to lose performance on your game because your phone wants to chat with the cell towers?
  - rahoulb 16y ago
    I'm not so sure that would be good for Nokia. This decision is an admission from Nokia that they aren't good at software. If they went with Android they will need to write software to differentiate themselves from the myriad of other Android handsets. By going with WP7 they are immediately differentiated (there simply isn't a flood of WP7 handsets out there) and Microsoft handles the software side. EDIT: edited so it reads better.
- enjo 16y ago
  That's not very viable at Nokia. The news would have been out roughly 15 minutes after they started working on the phones initially. Nokia is really tightly ingrained into Finnish life at this point. It's a huge part of their economy, and these sort of moves won't escape a leak. They have to go this route. Pre-announce... and build like crazy.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    > The news would have been out roughly 15 minutes after they started working on the phones initially Don't develop top secret projects internally. Develop them in a separate office. In this case, since it's more of a software project, you can leave designers thinking they are designing a Symbian or MeeGo phone, engineers using a current N8 hardware and ship your programmers to Redmond so they can work on their port from within Microsoft.
- barista 16y ago
  That's what I think is scary about the deal. Without a clear date. It's just vapor. And it they don't bring a solid device to the market fairly quickly, it would be a bad deal for both NOK and MSFT.
tommi 16y ago
Eric totally forgot about S40. It's a platform which sells very well.
- gonzo 16y ago
  He didn't forget about it. It's presence ruins his argument, so he didn't mention it. There has been a side-conversation between Eric, Doc Searls and I for days on this subject. The 'other shoe' will shortly drop when Nokia sues Google for infringement of many of the patents it holds. Nokia also just radically cut it's R&D spending. Payments for WP licenses are being offset with payments from Microsoft for things like the Nokia Maps and 'other' items (likely: Nokia patents). Elop essentially ended up with an effective $0 WP license.
innes 16y ago
Opinion from Robert Scoble: http://scobleizer.com/2011/02/11/dear-nokia-fans-youre-nuts/ http://scobleizer.com/2011/02/11/dear-nokia-fans-youre-nuts/
- ahi 16y ago
  Scoble isn't saying much more than "WP7 is great!" which has no bearing on ESR's arguments that this puts an organization in disarray into further disarray.
  - daeken 16y ago
    It does quite aptly respond to the comments about WP7's abysmal sales, however: the lack of apps is what's killing it. I'm honestly surprised that more people aren't developing WP7 apps right now, betting that it'll take off.
- drdaeman 16y ago
  Compactified version: "I prefer Windows Phone 7 and consider it much better than the rest, so it was a smart move. It's just that WP7 has no apps now, but you'll all see it'll rock." He says that platform with no apps doesn't matter at all, then believes apps will magically come out of nowhere (uh, reminds me of http://twitter.com/RovioMobile/status/35985499667562496 http://twitter.com/RovioMobile/status/35985499667562496), so the platform will shine and become an ecosystem. Sure, this is probable (especially after the agreement), but they'll have very tough time making it so. We've already seen lots of great platforms failing for about the same reasons and WP7 may as well become another one. Time'll show the real outcome, and we could only wish Nokia+MS to success. Personally, I believe Nokia would've in a better position if they put all resources on MeeGo development and ability to run Android apps on it (which was already shown recently). This way they'd profit on two already strong ecosystems at once, yet won't become yet another Android vendor. But that's just my own thoughts.
  - Hov 16y ago
    WP7 has over 8000 apps already.
daeken 16y ago
Ok, I have a lot of respect for esr, but all this talk of "porting" makes me think that no one knows how any of this works. "Porting" Android or WP7 to a new phone consists of: write drivers, write userland apps that give your users the experience you want, and possibly modify your existing bootloader code. They have documentation on their hardware, they have existing BSPs to reference, etc. This is not a hard problem. Getting this up and running with basic functionality would absolutely take no more than a month. Period.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  Nokia's CEO shouldn't be focused on tech. He should be focused on significant internal cultural factors he was clueless about. He should also try to figure out how he and his advisers could've got it so severely wrong. After that, he has about 3 more Whys to go. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys
  - daeken 16y ago
    This has nothing to do with the CEO, it's responding to everyone talking about how long it's going to take to "port" WP7.
    - stcredzero 16y ago
      Nokia's current situation has everything to do with the C-level team.
- spiffworks 16y ago
  It was my understanding that with phones, the bulk of the time is spent in testing the radio hardware to bring it up to compliance. That's why there is such a large delay between reference implementations and actual hardware. Software-wise, you're right, porting Android is only slightly less trivial than porting WP7
  - Splines 16y ago
    I think you're right. Look at the gap between WP7 GSM and CDMA launch. It's definitely not a trivial problem. I think as developers unfamiliar with the tech we'd like to think that different radio stacks can be abstracted away, but the reality is likely very different.
stcredzero 16y ago
"Porting?" As I've noted already, this move sounds like he's trying to follow a script for corporate meltdown drawn from Smalltalk history: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2206788 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2206788 Congrats. "Porting" enters into the plan! If the CEO follows that script, he will have damaged employee relationships to the point that Nokia won't be able to execute some of the difficult goals he's set going forwards. Seriously, he needs to look up some old ObjectShare alums to get some historical perspective on what he's trying to do and how it can go seriously wrong.
nobody_nowhere 16y ago
Splits nokia in two? What a load of crap! Nokia is currently split into four, or five, or ten, or worse. When you consider the platforms, the hardware streams, ovi, qt -- it's a total mess of competing agendas. I've been in the belly of the beast, and aside from having a very nice sauna, it's really ugly in there. There's total paralysis, as evidenced by the lack of competitive produts. OPK was fond of saying how nokia needed to reinvent itself, but he lacked the willpower to make any meaningful changes. When I was there we used to say "it's hard to fire a Finn." Now some heads are finally rolling. Shaking it up like this is their only chance.
tarvaina 16y ago
Smart devices is Symbian, Meego, WP7. Mobile Phones is S40 (not Symbian). This is the ancient Nokia platform, which is the only part of Nokia that is currently competitive in its price bracket. The intention is to kill off Symbian as quickly and painlessly as possible. Good riddance. It was not a realistic smartphone contender to begin with. Finally Nokia stops throwing good money after bad. Only it may be too late. One of Nokia's systemic problems is its uneven software culture. Nokia's diffrentiator was hardware. When competitors surpassed Nokia in software it was fighting a losing battle. From this point of view the move makes much sense. Remove the software that don't perform well: Symbian and Ovi service "platform", developer tools. Keep and streamline the parts that have a chance of success: S40, MeeGo. The transition will be painful and success is far from certain, but the obvious alternatives would be even worse.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  S40, IIRC, is Symbian. It's related to the S60 that powered lots of Nokia smartphones, mostly the ones that actually work. Keeping to it and ditching the newer versions would be clever.
  - tarvaina 16y ago
    You remember incorrectly. See e.g. http://www.forum.nokia.com/Devices/ http://www.forum.nokia.com/Devices/ for comparison.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      It's a marketing barrier, not a technical one. The core is very much the same. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_40#Operating_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_40#Operating_system
      - tarvaina 16y ago
        Sorry, but your link doesn't support your assertion. It only says that S40 is simpler than S60 and that S60 is based on Symbian. With a bit of googling I found this quote from a Forum Nokia champion: "Series 40 (S40) is not based on Symbian at all, but a Nokia proprietary real-time operating system. Series 40 does not allow any native (C/C++) development (with or without Qt). The primary app development for Series 40 based phones is Java (JME, J2ME, MIDP/CLDC), or Flash Lite." http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?216661-Why-Qt http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?21666... Here's another link: http://eve-c.org/2011/syskwyawan/ http://eve-c.org/2011/syskwyawan/

131 points by cwb 16y ago

Excellent analysis: Nokia has effectively announced that they have no focus and plan to spend three quarters losing money in the hops that in 2012 or 2013 WP7 is going to be a big hit for them. It's a shame Elop doesn't take a page out of Jobs' book instead of Ballmer's. Rather than announce a strategic blah blah direction blah blah partnership blah blah, he could have called a press conference, walked on stage, and showed them a Nokia running WP7, announced a date you could buy them, and invited the heads of the world's biggest carriers on stage to announce cut-rate deals and plans for them. p.s. I meant to write "hope," and not "hops," however considering what we make out of hops and the kind of decisions we make after drinking too much of it, I'm leaving it uncorrected.

qjz 16y ago
Agreed. And in even less time, he could have walked on stage with an unlocked Android-based smartphone. What would Nokia have to lose from offering such a device? Does the new partnership with Microsoft prohibit such a move? If so, it seems like a limiting move for a hardware manufacturer that harkens back to the early days of Windows.
- Hov 16y ago
  Well, I suspect they didn't go with Android because they didn't want to get lost in the shuffle. It might be easier to make some sort of a splash using an OS that feels somewhat new. And WP7 is very good phone platform, as much as people would like to believe the opposite.
- moomba 16y ago
  I agree. I keep hearing comments about Nokia being late to the game... blalballba ...if they decided to use android instead of WP7. I don't see how that is an issue. As has been stated by Nokia, this is going to take 1-2 years to make the switch to WP7. Why don't they spend 1/2 of that time switching to a popular platform instead of an unpopular platform. I guess I'd have to be an ex Microsoft employee (like the CEO) to understand any of this zaniness.
  - dfox 16y ago
    I assume that they want to keep their hardware platform. And porting Android to that would almost certainly require opensourcing their baseband implementation and thus enable everyone else to build phones with similar architecture (ie. without dedicated baseband CPU).
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      I don't think being able to go without a dedicated baseband processor will be an advantage for more than one hardware iteration. It may be useful in featurephones, but not that much with smartphones.
      - dfox 16y ago
        It enables Nokia to manufacture cheap smartphones with good battery life. Some Chinese Android-based phones are starting to have comparable prices, but certainly not battery life.
        rbanffy 16y ago
        For how long will that advantage exist? Would you like to lose performance on your game because your phone wants to chat with the cell towers?
- rahoulb 16y ago
  I'm not so sure that would be good for Nokia. This decision is an admission from Nokia that they aren't good at software. If they went with Android they will need to write software to differentiate themselves from the myriad of other Android handsets. By going with WP7 they are immediately differentiated (there simply isn't a flood of WP7 handsets out there) and Microsoft handles the software side. EDIT: edited so it reads better.
enjo 16y ago
That's not very viable at Nokia. The news would have been out roughly 15 minutes after they started working on the phones initially. Nokia is really tightly ingrained into Finnish life at this point. It's a huge part of their economy, and these sort of moves won't escape a leak. They have to go this route. Pre-announce... and build like crazy.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  > The news would have been out roughly 15 minutes after they started working on the phones initially Don't develop top secret projects internally. Develop them in a separate office. In this case, since it's more of a software project, you can leave designers thinking they are designing a Symbian or MeeGo phone, engineers using a current N8 hardware and ship your programmers to Redmond so they can work on their port from within Microsoft.
barista 16y ago
That's what I think is scary about the deal. Without a clear date. It's just vapor. And it they don't bring a solid device to the market fairly quickly, it would be a bad deal for both NOK and MSFT.

tommi 16y ago

Eric totally forgot about S40. It's a platform which sells very well.

gonzo 16y ago
He didn't forget about it. It's presence ruins his argument, so he didn't mention it. There has been a side-conversation between Eric, Doc Searls and I for days on this subject. The 'other shoe' will shortly drop when Nokia sues Google for infringement of many of the patents it holds. Nokia also just radically cut it's R&D spending. Payments for WP licenses are being offset with payments from Microsoft for things like the Nokia Maps and 'other' items (likely: Nokia patents). Elop essentially ended up with an effective $0 WP license.

innes 16y ago

Opinion from Robert Scoble: http://scobleizer.com/2011/02/11/dear-nokia-fans-youre-nuts/ http://scobleizer.com/2011/02/11/dear-nokia-fans-youre-nuts/

ahi 16y ago
Scoble isn't saying much more than "WP7 is great!" which has no bearing on ESR's arguments that this puts an organization in disarray into further disarray.
- daeken 16y ago
  It does quite aptly respond to the comments about WP7's abysmal sales, however: the lack of apps is what's killing it. I'm honestly surprised that more people aren't developing WP7 apps right now, betting that it'll take off.
drdaeman 16y ago
Compactified version: "I prefer Windows Phone 7 and consider it much better than the rest, so it was a smart move. It's just that WP7 has no apps now, but you'll all see it'll rock." He says that platform with no apps doesn't matter at all, then believes apps will magically come out of nowhere (uh, reminds me of http://twitter.com/RovioMobile/status/35985499667562496 http://twitter.com/RovioMobile/status/35985499667562496), so the platform will shine and become an ecosystem. Sure, this is probable (especially after the agreement), but they'll have very tough time making it so. We've already seen lots of great platforms failing for about the same reasons and WP7 may as well become another one. Time'll show the real outcome, and we could only wish Nokia+MS to success. Personally, I believe Nokia would've in a better position if they put all resources on MeeGo development and ability to run Android apps on it (which was already shown recently). This way they'd profit on two already strong ecosystems at once, yet won't become yet another Android vendor. But that's just my own thoughts.
- Hov 16y ago
  WP7 has over 8000 apps already.

daeken 16y ago

Ok, I have a lot of respect for esr, but all this talk of "porting" makes me think that no one knows how any of this works. "Porting" Android or WP7 to a new phone consists of: write drivers, write userland apps that give your users the experience you want, and possibly modify your existing bootloader code. They have documentation on their hardware, they have existing BSPs to reference, etc. This is not a hard problem. Getting this up and running with basic functionality would absolutely take no more than a month. Period.

stcredzero 16y ago
Nokia's CEO shouldn't be focused on tech. He should be focused on significant internal cultural factors he was clueless about. He should also try to figure out how he and his advisers could've got it so severely wrong. After that, he has about 3 more Whys to go. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys
- daeken 16y ago
  This has nothing to do with the CEO, it's responding to everyone talking about how long it's going to take to "port" WP7.
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    Nokia's current situation has everything to do with the C-level team.
spiffworks 16y ago
It was my understanding that with phones, the bulk of the time is spent in testing the radio hardware to bring it up to compliance. That's why there is such a large delay between reference implementations and actual hardware. Software-wise, you're right, porting Android is only slightly less trivial than porting WP7
- Splines 16y ago
  I think you're right. Look at the gap between WP7 GSM and CDMA launch. It's definitely not a trivial problem. I think as developers unfamiliar with the tech we'd like to think that different radio stacks can be abstracted away, but the reality is likely very different.

stcredzero 16y ago

"Porting?" As I've noted already, this move sounds like he's trying to follow a script for corporate meltdown drawn from Smalltalk history: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2206788 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2206788 Congrats. "Porting" enters into the plan! If the CEO follows that script, he will have damaged employee relationships to the point that Nokia won't be able to execute some of the difficult goals he's set going forwards. Seriously, he needs to look up some old ObjectShare alums to get some historical perspective on what he's trying to do and how it can go seriously wrong.

nobody_nowhere 16y ago

Splits nokia in two? What a load of crap! Nokia is currently split into four, or five, or ten, or worse. When you consider the platforms, the hardware streams, ovi, qt -- it's a total mess of competing agendas. I've been in the belly of the beast, and aside from having a very nice sauna, it's really ugly in there. There's total paralysis, as evidenced by the lack of competitive produts. OPK was fond of saying how nokia needed to reinvent itself, but he lacked the willpower to make any meaningful changes. When I was there we used to say "it's hard to fire a Finn." Now some heads are finally rolling. Shaking it up like this is their only chance.

tarvaina 16y ago

Smart devices is Symbian, Meego, WP7. Mobile Phones is S40 (not Symbian). This is the ancient Nokia platform, which is the only part of Nokia that is currently competitive in its price bracket. The intention is to kill off Symbian as quickly and painlessly as possible. Good riddance. It was not a realistic smartphone contender to begin with. Finally Nokia stops throwing good money after bad. Only it may be too late. One of Nokia's systemic problems is its uneven software culture. Nokia's diffrentiator was hardware. When competitors surpassed Nokia in software it was fighting a losing battle. From this point of view the move makes much sense. Remove the software that don't perform well: Symbian and Ovi service "platform", developer tools. Keep and streamline the parts that have a chance of success: S40, MeeGo. The transition will be painful and success is far from certain, but the obvious alternatives would be even worse.

rbanffy 16y ago
S40, IIRC, is Symbian. It's related to the S60 that powered lots of Nokia smartphones, mostly the ones that actually work. Keeping to it and ditching the newer versions would be clever.
- tarvaina 16y ago
  You remember incorrectly. See e.g. http://www.forum.nokia.com/Devices/ http://www.forum.nokia.com/Devices/ for comparison.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    It's a marketing barrier, not a technical one. The core is very much the same. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_40#Operating_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_40#Operating_system
    - tarvaina 16y ago
      Sorry, but your link doesn't support your assertion. It only says that S40 is simpler than S60 and that S60 is based on Symbian. With a bit of googling I found this quote from a Forum Nokia champion: "Series 40 (S40) is not based on Symbian at all, but a Nokia proprietary real-time operating system. Series 40 does not allow any native (C/C++) development (with or without Qt). The primary app development for Series 40 based phones is Java (JME, J2ME, MIDP/CLDC), or Flash Lite." http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?216661-Why-Qt http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?21666... Here's another link: http://eve-c.org/2011/syskwyawan/ http://eve-c.org/2011/syskwyawan/