16 ms·

Not entirely convinced that Apple would own the mobile space without Android. There were lot of mobile handset incumbents when IPhone came out. It was the one-t

• bitL 7y ago
  NOKIA had N9, the only phone that was well-received by US reviewers, quite few calling it better than iPhone, yet Elop killed it off by not allowing it to sell in major markets (e.g. Germans had to buy it in Switzerland). NOKIA was used by Microsoft's investors as a way to get MS back into mobile game, unsuccessfully. It was an internal coup. With the revenue and world-wide market share they had, they could have survived for a few years, finally going full speed ahead with MeeGo, at the cost of never making it in the US, but continuing their dominance in the rest of the world. There seems to be some foul play involved in ruining NOKIA as Elop had a bonus for the sale of a company in his initial contract and the chairman of the board publicly distrusted his own engineers as unable to compete with Silicon Valley. Finnish economy is still in shambles from NOKIA's downfall and only Google/US profited from taking over the fastest growing market segment at that time from NOKIA. EU lost its only competitive tech company.
  • fouc 7y ago
    That's terrible, action should be taken against participants of this.
  • fsloth 7y ago
    "Never presume an action is caused by ill will if it can be explained by ineptitude". Reading materials related to Nokia at that time period it was pretty dysfunctional as it was. The only mistake I can accrue for Elop was his "Burning platform" memo - which is basically paraphrazing crisis management 101. So he was clearly out of his depth when running Nokia. I think the sale of Nokia handsets to Microsoft was quite the coup. At that time the value of that IP was close to zero and Microsoft paid billions for it. If there was foul play intended then the players surely lost. The fall of Nokia was the best thing to happen to Finland. It was far too big an enterprise for a small country. It basically stifled innovation and entrepreurship accross the board.
    • samoa42 7y ago
      microsoft paid for the name, not the IP.
      • fsloth 7y ago
        Ah, you mean all device and radio patents were left with Nokia? Sorry, can't seem to remember the details on a moments notice - but I think you are correct. Hence MS underwrote all of Nokia acquisitions as a complete loss eventually.
        • bitL 7y ago
          MS got licence to all NOKIA patents as well.
          • type0 7y ago
            Oh well, why didn't they just gifted the whole company to Ballmer instead and maybe it would be "developers, developers" focused /s
• StreamBright 7y ago
  "those incumbents would have come up with something." I am convinced about the exact opposite. Apple interrupted so many different industries, all were sooner on the market with more resources and very good financial situation. Steve Jobs was extremely tough on staff do deliver what he wanted. He also had an extremely good 6th sense what people wanted. Combining all of these, you get Apple, lacking any of these you get the rest.
  • fsloth 7y ago
    "I am convinced about the exact opposite." But Android was exactly created by others than Apple. So while Apple surely performed admirably, I'm not sure how you can follow historical evidence to the conclusion that "without Android no one would have competed with Apple".
    • jayd16 7y ago
      Android was also not made by those incumbents. I don't necessarily agree but it seems like the point wasn't that it was impossible so much as the old guard was not capable or willing.
  • microtherion 7y ago
    > Apple interrupted so many different industries But I can't think of a single one where Apple in the long ran dominated in volume. Apple's goal was and is always to dominate in profit in a segment. So, absent Android, I'm pretty sure there would have been another low end disruptor.
• simonh 7y ago
  None of the handset makers back then were in a position to come up with a workstation class OS, with desktop class application development frameworks and highly tuned power management and commercial level software development tool chains. They just didn’t have software groups anywhere close to able to deliver something like that. Their software was at best based on embedded variants of Linux with very bare bones dev environments and frameworks. They just didn’t have anything close to the required level and breadth of dev experience and capability. Furthermore when the iPhone came out almost nobody in either the phone or the Tech industry in general appreciated what Apple had done and why it mattered. I must have read a handful of posts a month like yours back then trivialising the issue as just having to ‘come up with something’. Desktop OS systems like OSX and Windows at the time aren’t something you can just come up with. It’s this sort of thinking that doomed desktop Linux to the margins for decades, and without the Google Android team’s immediately realising what had happened and what they needed to do about it, handset Linux could very easily have ended up a footnote like desktop Linux. Nobody else in the industry seems to have had that insight back then. What I think would have happened is Microsoft would have eventually got their act together and brought out a credible Windows Mobile and licensed it to the handset makers. Other than Google they are the only software company with the resources in talent and technical depth capable of it. Without Android to light a second fire under them it might have taken longer than it actually did, but they did do this in the actual timeline and without Android to compete with their strategy would have worked.
  • mehrdada 7y ago
    > Nobody else in the industry seems to have had that insight back then Helps to have someone on Apple board, you know
    • jannes 7y ago
      That's a good point. I had forgotten that Eric Schmidt was a director on the board of Apple between 2006 and 2009 while being the CEO of Google. Apparently they had Eric Schmidt step out of the room whenever they talked about Apple phones. https://www.cnet.com/news/i-resigned-from-apple-board-for-the-right-reasons-says-googles-eric-schmidt/ https://www.cnet.com/news/i-resigned-from-apple-board-for-th...
• josh2600 7y ago
  It was 10 years ago so I know people might not remember this, but I do and I think it’s relevant. RIM had 10 year development cycles for devices. They had blackberries designed 10 years out and had nothing on the horizon that looked like an iPhone. Here is a slice of relevant context: http://www.edibleapple.com/2010/12/28/rim-was-in-disbelief-following-the-introduction-of-the-iphone-in-january-2007/ http://www.edibleapple.com/2010/12/28/rim-was-in-disbelief-f... Do not understate how ridiculous the iPhone was when it launched. You had to side load apps on your phone to use them. Remember getjar.com?
  • type0 7y ago
    > Do not understate how ridiculous the iPhone was when it launched. You had to side load apps on your phone to use them. Remember getjar.com? It looked ridiculous for for your average grandma but for young tech enthusiasts that was half the fun. That turned out to be detrimental for your average grandma but not the amount of cash that apple got at the bank. Did it matter that you could put SD card into your iphone , obviously not because you still can't. https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/69495/Can+you+stick+a+Micro+%28SD+card%29+in+a+iPhone+3GS https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/69495/Can+you+stick+a+Mi.... So grandma of today doesn't have to worry, she will be using some chinese Android device anyway.
• eloisant 7y ago
  I think it's less about "Apple would own the mobile space", but "some other company than us would own the mobile space and would be a threat to our advertising business". Just like Microsoft owned the browser market in the late 90's and 2000's, and it was a problem for Google. That's why they poured resources first into Firefox, then into Google Chrome.
• oblio 7y ago
  Microsoft/Windows would have won, not Apple. Apple is doomed† by the fact that they're a vertically integrated provider with a limited range of products. That makes them a big player in every market they are, but rarely the biggest. People crave simplicity but the real world is very messy and needs are super varied so they have to settle for complexity that solves their issues. At a much larger scale and with the US as a much bigger hold out, it's happening again now, very, very slowly. Before it was PC/Windows vs Mac now it's Android vs iOS. † "Doomed" is hyberbole, they'll just never be the biggest player on a long term scale. But they'll make zounds of money along the way :-)
  • agloeregrets 7y ago
    Vertical integration is how you win the upper edges of the market, Apple’s goal was never to have 90% market share, it was simply to make the best product and have (affluent) customers buy it. They know that the bottom 50% of the market is low-profit and low-CSAT products so they don’t touch it. To go a step further, Microsoft only really found any success in Windows Phone when they vertically integrated their involvement with WP. I agree that if you are chasing market share you should be licensing software, but if you want profits you should be chasing product. When compared, the Microsoft Model ends up being exemplified by the underperforming licensees. It makes holes for companies like Apple or Palm to make their own product that owns the story of the market. We are in a little different of a world than the 90s now. Android’s on most phones out there...but those manufacturers are looking at everything Apple does and following suit.
    • oblio 7y ago
      True, but as a vertically integrated company you only need to slip once badly and the piranhas eat you up. Everyone else, collectively, can make way more mistakes and still come out on top, long term. Apple has learned from past mistakes, though.
• tracker1 7y ago
  I think Blackberry killed themselves... they should have spun off and created business email apps for iOS and Android and focused on the software licensing... interacting with MS Exchange was painful around that time, and BB had a lock in on the corporate culture... they could have expanded into that space well before google docs and o365 took hold. I think Nokia might have eventually caught up, and I think the Windows Phones that came later could have been even more compelling. I thought Metro UX was really nice, but just missing crucial apps compared to iOS and Android... if MS had pushed about 2 years earlier with that OS, they'd be in a different position in the space. These days, who knows. It's easy to speculate with some hindsight.
• dougweltman 7y ago
  What's nifty about Google's business rationale here is how tight and elegant it is. The strategic case needs to clear a very low "knowability" threshold in order to justify their conclusion. Great example of contingency-based strategy. Google didn't need to waste a ton of cycles on the counterfactuals (would RIM/Nokia/others be a threat? Would Apple really box us out if they win? etc.). Android was simply a way to de-risk a potentially catastrophic scenario and give them some optionality.
• squarefoot 7y ago
  "Nokia, for example, had lots of nice Linux handheld devices before IPhone." True, and their partnership with Microsoft killed them all. When the 770 came out I bought it almost immediately; it was more like an expensive toy (1), but years before the first iPhone was being introduced it showed how Nokia had the technology ready. (1) there was a way to navigate Google Maps (or how was called back then) from this mobile device before any Android and iPhone devices were produced. A small utility (forgot the name, sorry) allowed the download of Google maps as tiles, georeference and rearrange them in a bigger map on storage memory, so that thanks to an external GPS receiver paired to the 770 via Bluetooth I could have my Tomtom-like screen perfectly useable with maps of the entire city. Oh, and the LCARS themed home screen was absolutely gorgeous!:) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwXBPjLdJnU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwXBPjLdJnU
• wvh 7y ago
  Microsoft killed Meego and Nokia, taking part of Finland with it. What I don't understand is why the board of Nokia went for it. Granted, I've been in the open-source world for a long time so my opinions might not be those of the average non-tech user, but Meego did feel like it could have kept some people happy ("critical mass") while giving Nokia a chance to rebuild itself. Instead, the board sold out, and destroyed what could have been a worthwhile competitor to the more closed platforms of Android and iOS. Jolla is still alive with Sailfish OS, but they are a very small fish in the sea.
  • fsloth 7y ago
    Remember, the board is responsible for stockholders. When Nokia's handset business was sold to MS, the value of the handset business to Nokia was close to zero. It would have been very difficult for the board not to accept a deal at the given pricepoint.
  • adgasf 7y ago
    MS gave Nokia 1 billion usd
• cmrdporcupine 7y ago
  Palm's WebOS was already competing and was better than Android at that point. Android being out there with Google behind it sucked the air out of the room, and WebOS was only deployed on hardware that was 6-8 months behind the competition... and so it died. Perhaps things would have turned out differently without Android in the picture. I really liked WebOS
  • pjc50 7y ago
    If wikipedia is correct, the google acquisition of Android was two years before Palm launched WebOS? Palm (and RIM) has a kind of first-mover disadvantage; they'd build a fantastic niche, and people loved their devices, but that inherently prevented them from building something completely different like the iPhone which could take the mass market and be "imitated" by Android.
    • cmrdporcupine 7y ago
      Sure, 2 years before, but in that 2 years period Android looked nothing like iOS. As others have pointed out it was an entirely different kind of UX until Apple announced the iPhone. WebOS was the first to come along after the iPhone and make something competitive. Android took some time to catch up. I don't think your statement is correct about Palm -- they weren't like RIM, stuck with an old OS for eons unable to switch because legacy; WebOS and Palm Pre were launched pretty soon after the iPhone. They just didn't do well in the market, because they couldn't keep up on hardware manufacture, and Android took the not-Apple ecosystem over despite being an inferior experience for many years.
• michaelt 7y ago
  > what actually killed Nokia handsets in one stroke was one memo by their then CEO Stehphen Elop where he basically stated their platform as it is was dead in the water. Gotta disagree with you there - when the burning platform memo came out the battle was already decided, even if it wasn't over. Just look at the HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2195520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2195520 - it's 95% praise for the CEO clearly stating the reality of the situation.
• FpUser 7y ago
  "I'm pretty sure there would have been competing Linux enabled smart devices in one way or another without Android" I wish that was the case. We'd probably have nicer Linux as a result and no extra Java bloat/performance hit on the devices that can do without it.
• tw04 7y ago
  Had Blackberry created an email and messaging client for iPhone I am 100% positive they'd still be around. It took Apple almost a decade on the email front to get to where Blackberry + BES was in the early 2000s. Blackberry messenger was THE THING back then too, and a reason I had friends who weren't even in the business world buying Blackberry phones.
• dehrmann 7y ago
  > those incumbents would have come up with something. The Zune Phone.
• Vrondi 7y ago
  Nokia also decided to abandon CDMA production, which killed even the possibility of using a Nokia phone in vast swathes of the USA.
• chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  I was at Nokia during Elop's short reign, and while he gets a lot of blame for what happened to them -- some of it fairly -- the thing is, that memo was basically right. Remember, by this point it was 2010. The iPhone had already taken off like a rocket, Android had pivoted to be "iPhone-like" and other companies were riding its rocketship -- and Meego, Nokia's ostensible Symbian successor, was way, way behind schedule. The Nokia Communicator was a great "computer in your pocket" device for a certain kind of ubergeek, but it wasn't ever going to be a mainstream smartphone. I know there are people who still fiercely defend the hardware keyboard -- I was a Sidekick user and used to be one of them! -- but it was obvious by 2009 that "giant touch screen with virtual keyboard" was the runaway winner, and it was also obvious by 2009 that most of the incumbents had dealt themselves death blows by refusing to read the writing on the wall. Elop's memo came about after he looked at the N9, what was supposed to be their response to the iPhone and Android, and it was clearly not just too little, too late, but at the time he saw it, it literally just did not work. You were lucky if you could get through a few hours without a fatal crash. Anyway -- I don't think Apple would own the mobile space without Android, either, but I think there's a good chance they'd have a larger marketshare than they do just because nobody else would gotten a credible response to the market before 2011. Maybe it would have opened up space for Windows Phone and WebOS to keep existing, which would have been nice. (Although if we're playing "what if," it's possible that if Windows Phone had succeeded, Microsoft wouldn't have gotten desperate enough to go through its executive shakeup and, ironically, would have been in a worse place today!)
• jldugger 7y ago
  > People don't remember but, what actually killed Nokia handsets in one stroke was one memo by their then CEO Stehphen Elop where he basically stated their platform as it is was dead in the water. Until then they had had a fairly good portion of the market, but that single statement just killed it. People who did not like IPhone moved from Nokia phones to Android after that. The way I saw that was that Elop was pretty much hired by the board to sell the company to Microsoft. Maybe he had some last ditch efforts in mind to save the company, but the fallback plan seems to have always been to lean on his connections to sell the place to a former employer. As a random example, he was allowed to keep his shares in MSFT, a direct competitor and eventual buyer, while working as the CEO of Nokia. This conflict of interest would likely have been blessed by the board of directors. Android certainly make Nokia's life harder, but like, if Nokia couldn't negotiate subsidies from operators, they were going to be sold for parts regardless.
• AceJohnny2 7y ago
  > People don't remember but, what actually killed Nokia handsets in one stroke was one memo by their then CEO Stehphen Elop where he basically stated their platform as it is was dead in the water. That's like saying that declaring the patient has pneumonia killed the patient. Nokia was treading water, and everyone knew it. Their Symbian phones were plasticky slow devices with a stillborn ecosystem. Their Linux devices were plasticky hacky devices that only geeks loved. They were hooked on the feature-phone pipeline and couldn't decide how to face the smartphone revolution. They had dozens of competing models that splintered their development efforts and made them compete, ineffectually, with each other. Elop told them the truth, didn't find a way to flip the behemoth around in 6 months, and sold the company. There absolutely is valid debate about selling the company, but people underestimate the difficulty of radically changing such a large company to effectively compete with the new existential threat.
  • AceJohnny2 7y ago
    At the time I worked for STMicro, in the division developing the Nomadik line of SoCs for Nokia's smartphones. We were all carefully watching Nokia's numbers and very nervous about their continued assertions that they'd pull it together. I quit ST in January 2011, knowing (like all my colleagues) that the Titanic was heading for its iceberg. The "Burning Platform" memo came out in February.
• ufmace 7y ago
  I owned a series of Nokia high-end smartphones through this era, and I have to disagree with this: > what actually killed Nokia handsets in one stroke was one memo by their then CEO Stehphen Elop where he basically stated their platform as it is was dead in the water IMO, Nokia was infact dead in the water compared to Apple and Android, and Elop was just the one to recognize it in a culture of stagnated development coasting on past glories, and call it out loud enough that it might possibly change in time. The key falling behind point, as I see it, is that Nokia just never got on board with making app development and distribution easy. Symbian phones in theory supported loading apps. In the many years that I owned one, I think I was able to install 1 or 2 total, which were mostly never used. IIRC, there was an app store with virtually nothing on it, and useful apps were usually downloaded from random websites directly. I don't recall the process exactly, and I never tried to look into building and distributing one myself, but it sure wasn't as easy as open the official store -> find an app that's useful -> tap "install" -> done, use the app. The bigger issue, also IMO, is that their engineering culture just never got into the rapid cadence that the new-gen phone OSes brought - they were stuck in the appliance mentality. The first iPhone and Android were a little lame compared to the best Nokias. Nokia's development pace was always slow though. iOS and Android rapidly eclipsed them, while they essentially stood still. I did also own one of the Meego devices. It was basically junk compared to Android. Nokia never had a chance. Elop might have been a MS stooge, but it was still arguably the best move they had at the time.
• sliken 7y ago
  Sad part is Nokia started the Nokia 770. Linux kernel, c based, nice 800x480 screen, (big enough for web pages of the day), app store, icon based GUI launcher, and a map app MUCH nicer than anything else in that space (maemo mapper). Sadly it took too many years for Nokia to add a WAN chip to it, tragic. They had a good lead over Apple, but had no WAN chip, quite ironic for Nokia.
  • pjmlp 7y ago
    The Linux unit was fighting politics with the Symbian one, hence no WAN chip.