7 ms·

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

by 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
        numpad0 7y ago
        They did, and the company exploded in their hands. The shockwave lasted 2-3 milli-millennium, and was observed as far away as Seoul from Finland, but not Tokyo.
- nmfisher 7y ago
  > 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 just did some very superficial reading on the "Burning Platform" memo (the first time I had heard of it). I'm intrigued by the idea that the memo shows Elop was "out of his depth". Is there something I can read to explain why this was such a terrible management move? What would have been a better response?
  - fsloth 7y ago
    The burning platform memo basically triggered the Osborne effect [0] on the whole range of Nokia's smartphone offerings. If you read crisis management literature this "burning platform" metaphor is literally in the "For dummies" section (at least what I recall). It implies he was desperately trying to find something to drive a message trhough the organization and he grabbed the most obvious and stereotypical thing he could find. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    The Symbian eco-system had just started to finally move into Qt as main development platform, Qt on Symbian got PIPS (POSIX compatibility layer), there was the third reboot of the Eclipse based IDE (Carbide), Symbian Java was getting JavaSE extensions, Python and Web Runtime were made available, Symbian Open Source project had just been made available. So everyone was putting the effort to move away from Symbian C++, J2ME into a more pleasant environment, and then comes Elop with that memo saying to everyone that all their efforts were gone to the trashcan and it was time to embrace Silverlight and XNA instead. Also from internal point of view, this memo was very bad, because until then Nokia had an heavy anti-Windows culture, and now everyone had to suck it up, leave HP-UX, Linux, Symbian behind and embrace Windows.
  - dirtydroog 7y ago
    I was in Nokia at the time. As soon as it was released onto the intranet news feed, a couple of thousand employees immediately stopped caring and were more focused on hanging around for their redundancy payment. The Nokia London office had an emergency Town Hall session in The Oval cricket ground building where execs tried to convince us that Symbian was safe. Those claims were met with actual laughter from the crowd.
- bitL 7y ago
  Not sure, if you look at how Elop (mis)managed the company piece-by-piece, first by sidelining MeeGo, then one by one closing Indian factories that made NOKIA independent (ask Indians how fun that was), then splitting off Qt to prevent any kind of internal competition to MS' platform, including the sell-off bonus Elop had in the contract, the Hanlon's razor applicability is pretty low. If you want to believe there wasn't some background deal between top management, rendering all NOKIA employees sacrificial lambs for MS, OK.
  - fsloth 7y ago
    Hanlon's razor becomes more credible once you understand how mismanaged Nokia already was at the point Elop took in the reins. He may have been in the boat when it sunk, but it already had lot of holes in it. Both Jorma Ollila (the Chair) and Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the CEO preceding Elop, were financial experts, not tech visionaries. The organization that had created the rise of Nokia was split to pieces before Elop took control with no understanding that you can't run an technology corporation like an investment bank. There are two pretty good books exploring this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Ringtone-Exploring-Nokia-Mobile-Phones-ebook/dp/B0799NX6VW https://www.amazon.com/Ringtone-Exploring-Nokia-Mobile-Phone... https://www.amazon.com/Transforming-NOKIA-Paranoid-Optimism-Colossal/dp/1260128725 https://www.amazon.com/Transforming-NOKIA-Paranoid-Optimism-... "rendering all NOKIA employees sacrificial lambs for MS" 'Sacrificial lamb' is quite hyperbolic. The laid of people enjoyed quite good benefits. You don't become an instant destitute in Finland just because you are temporarily out of a job. The way the handset business was going, Microsoft basically paid 8 billion for the privilege of a dead-in-the water platform and the nicety of laying off the staff . If there ever was an evil plot to steal value from Nokia's shareholders then it was thoroughly botched.
    - modo_mario 7y ago
      >The way the handset business was going, Microsoft basically paid 8 billion for the privilege of a dead-in-the water platform and the nicety of laying off the staff . It was having issues when Elop came in but still had potential for rebound and good market share. Elop just stomped any potential for that in the ground making it dead in the water.
makapuf 7y ago
"Its only competitive tech company" is a bit of an exaggeration. St (chips), nokiaEricsson, arm (maybe before being bought by Softbank...)
- fsloth 7y ago
  Nokia never was a 'tech' company in the sense we attribute the term nowadays. Their core expertise was in the areas that are now handled by an integrated Asian logistics and manufacturing network available to all. The mobile handset is only one part of the multiplicity that creates the mighty FAANG product and service portfolio and Nokia never had strong offerings in most of them.
  - type0 7y ago
    > Nokia never was a 'tech' company in the sense we attribute the term nowadays. In what sense? By the size alone, off course you can't compare it to the american and asian mega companies. The ambition to be a european mobile tech leader was still around in the mid 2000s. At least in Europe Nokia arguably had one of the most dedicated customer crowds in the handheld devices category. To piss all that away in one move left a big stain...
- bitL 7y ago
  Given NOKIA hosted Qt that was the only reasonable alternative to Java in Mobile, and the only threatening tech, it indeed was the only relevant European tech company. I met Haavard Nord at Googleplex just before he sold Qt to NOKIA and Google was in the play as well. Had Google acquired Qt, Android could have been Qt-based instead.
  - makapuf 7y ago
    Well, okayish if by "tech" you mean mobile-internet-client-side software tech (Maybe, I don't work in it anymore). Technology also applies for vastly broader fields (which I wont enumerate here).
dna_polymerase 7y ago
> NOKIA was used by Microsoft's investors as a way to get MS back into mobile game Also, patents. Microsoft earns from every Android sold (or at least they did for long time)
raverbashing 7y ago
Nokia's downfall was their own doing. And their telecom equipment division is still going strong. > EU lost its only competitive tech company Spotify, Angry Birds (Finnish even), several Fintechs, sends their regards.
- bitL 7y ago
  None of them has revenue comparable to NOKIA before Elop. Look at the unemployment level in Finland right after NOKIA went belly up. They were some of the worst in EU in that period. Now instead of one huge company you have hundreds small ones that combined can't even reach 10% of NOKIA's revenue. That must be felt in taxes.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  I wanted to add to this list but as it turns out, all of the EU's top companies (the top x list starts at around $22B revenue) aren't tech companies; oil and gas, automotive, utilities and financial services are the main ones. Mind you the list is from 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_companies_by_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_compa... Compare to the US (2019 figures), it has Apple in 3rd place, Amazon on 5th, Alphabet on 15th, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_the_United_States_by_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...
  - raverbashing 7y ago
    That's definitely valid criticism. Though not necessarily competitiveness is connected to size. I certainly wouldn't complain if the EU would have comparable companies to FAANG ones in size.
  - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
    It's true, but perhaps it's also worth mentioning that Europe has a large number of small and medium sized companies in general and high tech companies in particular. For instance, the Obama administration blocked the takeover of Aixtron by a Chinese company because Aixtron was so key to national security. The US Attorney General recommended a few days ago that the US take a share in Ericsson and Nokia, because they are the main 5G equipment suppliers besides Huawei. A recent takeover of Kuka, an industrial robot maker, has caused a lot of concern as well. Germany has a lot of small to medium sized high tech equipment makers that are mostly privatly owned. Robert Bosch, the largest car parts manufacturer in the world, is not a publicly listed company and not usually classed as a tech company, but it does make some of the most high tech parts that go in to cars. It's certainly no less of a tech company than, say, Facebook. Then of course there are companies like ARM, SAP, Siemens, ASML, Amadeus Group, Infineon, Vestas or Airbus. No, they are not the size of Apple and ARM is now owned by SoftBank. You see the pattern? Europe doesn't have consumer tech. It does have a lot of high tech equipment makers and parts suppliers. Europe is really bad at selling to consumers (apart from France's and Italy's luxury goods makers and traditionally auto makers that are now suffering as cars become software platforms), and that's exactly where network effects have created those giant tech companies that now dominate US stock indices. So yes, I think Europe is in a pretty bad place right now when it comes to tech, but it's not quite as bad as what you might think if you're just looking at the biggest components of stock indices.
Nition 7y ago
The N9 was so good. Meego was great, the all-swipe, no-buttons interface was way ahead of iOS and Android at the time. The hardware with its subtley curved screen was perfectly designed around it. The phone was the right size. I might still be using mine if it didn't have an unfortunate bug, which always came back eventually, where SMS messages would show up under the wrong person. Nokia said they'd support it until 2015 but that didn't happen, I think the last update was in 2012. The community made some fixes for other bugs, but not for that one.
- oblio 7y ago
  The Meego interface is better than what I have in my Android 10 phone... Those gestures are so awkward and bolted on. I haven't used an iPhone with gesture navigation but I imagine their navigation is only marginally better, also being bolted on later.
  - abdulmuhaimin 7y ago
    it is better. N9/Meego was designed with those gestures as the main navigation of the OS. So it somehow feel intuitive and natural to use it. In comparison the Android gesture is nice, buts its just a nice extra imo. I would probably still use N9 as my 2nd phone if its not broken.
- masklinn 7y ago
  > The N9 was so good. Meego was great, the all-swipe, no-buttons interface was way ahead of iOS and Android at the time. Sounds like it ripped off webos, like everybody else.
  - hajile 7y ago
    Not really. It uses a completely different paradigm. 3 screens next to each other. One is notifications, one is a list of installed programs, and the third is a scrollable list of open apps (somewhat similar to tabs in FF for Android). It was later used (and greatly refined) on the failed Blackberry QNX-based devices. SwipeUI winds up very usable on a phone, but basically unusable everywhere else. This is in stark contrast to the webOS paradigm which is much closer to a macOS desktop (dock at the bottom, menu always at the top left, settings always at top right, and modified/improved deck of cards "expose"). Because of this, scaling webOS to tablets or even desktops isn't difficult. If Steve Jobs had seen the webOS UI, the iPhone would definitely be using it today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaQM8vVjuE4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaQM8vVjuE4
ahartmetz 7y ago
If there was foul play involved, you'd have to pull back a few more curtains to find it. Information that transpired after it was all over was that the Nokia board hired Elop with the assignment to sell to Microsoft. The N9 is a really sad story. I had one, it was great. It did get some "better than iPhone" reviews. It was in development for too long, and when it was released and it was great, Nokia was too cowardly to bet on it.
- silvestrov 7y ago
  yeah, Nokia was a dead man walking when Elop was hired. They had no way of caching up to iPhone. Big product companies don't die from one day to another, they take a slow long time to fizzle out.
  - ahartmetz 7y ago
    The N9 did have a chance, I think. If you live in the US, you have no idea how big Nokia was. Problem was that the decision to sell to Microsoft was made before the N9 release. It would have taken a lot of courage to change course. People making that decision could have ended up looking like idiots. The N9's success was possible but not a sure thing.
- bitL 7y ago
  I am wondering if the surveillance capitalism we have now would have been impeded if NOKIA was still around in full force. I miss time when my phone didn't track everything I did. The only alternative I own now is running on SailfishOS, from MeeGo team members.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    It's not just your phone that spies on you, it's mostly the apps on it that do. With no Android to push it so hard and fast, perhaps surveillance capitalism would be a bit less developed by now, but I doubt the difference would be all that big. The allure of corrupt money is just too high, and the pressure is industry-wide.
slac 7y ago
Going from the N9 to the first IPhone (I jailbroke mine for use in Sweden) was a revelation. The N9 was a very complex beast to use and it was very laggy compared to the smooth graphics the iPhone offered. Even in the markets where it was available, it was a very rare sight. But grey import iPhones were everywhere in Stockholm.
- glormph 7y ago
  Maybe I'm mixing my timelines but when was this? I thought the N9 was released a couple of years after the first iphone? Around the time there was iphone4?
  - steveklabnik 7y ago
    * N9: Sept 2011 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9 * iPhone: June 2007 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone
  - sorenjan 7y ago
    They're probably referring to the Nokia N95.
kakoni 7y ago
And then there were also a team of McKinsey consultants in Keilaniemi (whos team lead had strong connections to Microsoft) (Chapter 9. https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52c5 https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52...)

by bitL 7y ago

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
      - numpad0 7y ago
        They did, and the company exploded in their hands. The shockwave lasted 2-3 milli-millennium, and was observed as far away as Seoul from Finland, but not Tokyo.
nmfisher 7y ago
> 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 just did some very superficial reading on the "Burning Platform" memo (the first time I had heard of it). I'm intrigued by the idea that the memo shows Elop was "out of his depth". Is there something I can read to explain why this was such a terrible management move? What would have been a better response?
- fsloth 7y ago
  The burning platform memo basically triggered the Osborne effect [0] on the whole range of Nokia's smartphone offerings. If you read crisis management literature this "burning platform" metaphor is literally in the "For dummies" section (at least what I recall). It implies he was desperately trying to find something to drive a message trhough the organization and he grabbed the most obvious and stereotypical thing he could find. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
- pjmlp 7y ago
  The Symbian eco-system had just started to finally move into Qt as main development platform, Qt on Symbian got PIPS (POSIX compatibility layer), there was the third reboot of the Eclipse based IDE (Carbide), Symbian Java was getting JavaSE extensions, Python and Web Runtime were made available, Symbian Open Source project had just been made available. So everyone was putting the effort to move away from Symbian C++, J2ME into a more pleasant environment, and then comes Elop with that memo saying to everyone that all their efforts were gone to the trashcan and it was time to embrace Silverlight and XNA instead. Also from internal point of view, this memo was very bad, because until then Nokia had an heavy anti-Windows culture, and now everyone had to suck it up, leave HP-UX, Linux, Symbian behind and embrace Windows.
- dirtydroog 7y ago
  I was in Nokia at the time. As soon as it was released onto the intranet news feed, a couple of thousand employees immediately stopped caring and were more focused on hanging around for their redundancy payment. The Nokia London office had an emergency Town Hall session in The Oval cricket ground building where execs tried to convince us that Symbian was safe. Those claims were met with actual laughter from the crowd.
bitL 7y ago
Not sure, if you look at how Elop (mis)managed the company piece-by-piece, first by sidelining MeeGo, then one by one closing Indian factories that made NOKIA independent (ask Indians how fun that was), then splitting off Qt to prevent any kind of internal competition to MS' platform, including the sell-off bonus Elop had in the contract, the Hanlon's razor applicability is pretty low. If you want to believe there wasn't some background deal between top management, rendering all NOKIA employees sacrificial lambs for MS, OK.
- fsloth 7y ago
  Hanlon's razor becomes more credible once you understand how mismanaged Nokia already was at the point Elop took in the reins. He may have been in the boat when it sunk, but it already had lot of holes in it. Both Jorma Ollila (the Chair) and Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the CEO preceding Elop, were financial experts, not tech visionaries. The organization that had created the rise of Nokia was split to pieces before Elop took control with no understanding that you can't run an technology corporation like an investment bank. There are two pretty good books exploring this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Ringtone-Exploring-Nokia-Mobile-Phones-ebook/dp/B0799NX6VW https://www.amazon.com/Ringtone-Exploring-Nokia-Mobile-Phone... https://www.amazon.com/Transforming-NOKIA-Paranoid-Optimism-Colossal/dp/1260128725 https://www.amazon.com/Transforming-NOKIA-Paranoid-Optimism-... "rendering all NOKIA employees sacrificial lambs for MS" 'Sacrificial lamb' is quite hyperbolic. The laid of people enjoyed quite good benefits. You don't become an instant destitute in Finland just because you are temporarily out of a job. The way the handset business was going, Microsoft basically paid 8 billion for the privilege of a dead-in-the water platform and the nicety of laying off the staff . If there ever was an evil plot to steal value from Nokia's shareholders then it was thoroughly botched.
  - modo_mario 7y ago
    >The way the handset business was going, Microsoft basically paid 8 billion for the privilege of a dead-in-the water platform and the nicety of laying off the staff . It was having issues when Elop came in but still had potential for rebound and good market share. Elop just stomped any potential for that in the ground making it dead in the water.

makapuf 7y ago

"Its only competitive tech company" is a bit of an exaggeration. St (chips), nokiaEricsson, arm (maybe before being bought by Softbank...)

fsloth 7y ago
Nokia never was a 'tech' company in the sense we attribute the term nowadays. Their core expertise was in the areas that are now handled by an integrated Asian logistics and manufacturing network available to all. The mobile handset is only one part of the multiplicity that creates the mighty FAANG product and service portfolio and Nokia never had strong offerings in most of them.
- type0 7y ago
  > Nokia never was a 'tech' company in the sense we attribute the term nowadays. In what sense? By the size alone, off course you can't compare it to the american and asian mega companies. The ambition to be a european mobile tech leader was still around in the mid 2000s. At least in Europe Nokia arguably had one of the most dedicated customer crowds in the handheld devices category. To piss all that away in one move left a big stain...
bitL 7y ago
Given NOKIA hosted Qt that was the only reasonable alternative to Java in Mobile, and the only threatening tech, it indeed was the only relevant European tech company. I met Haavard Nord at Googleplex just before he sold Qt to NOKIA and Google was in the play as well. Had Google acquired Qt, Android could have been Qt-based instead.
- makapuf 7y ago
  Well, okayish if by "tech" you mean mobile-internet-client-side software tech (Maybe, I don't work in it anymore). Technology also applies for vastly broader fields (which I wont enumerate here).

dna_polymerase 7y ago

> NOKIA was used by Microsoft's investors as a way to get MS back into mobile game Also, patents. Microsoft earns from every Android sold (or at least they did for long time)

raverbashing 7y ago

Nokia's downfall was their own doing. And their telecom equipment division is still going strong. > EU lost its only competitive tech company Spotify, Angry Birds (Finnish even), several Fintechs, sends their regards.

bitL 7y ago
None of them has revenue comparable to NOKIA before Elop. Look at the unemployment level in Finland right after NOKIA went belly up. They were some of the worst in EU in that period. Now instead of one huge company you have hundreds small ones that combined can't even reach 10% of NOKIA's revenue. That must be felt in taxes.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
I wanted to add to this list but as it turns out, all of the EU's top companies (the top x list starts at around $22B revenue) aren't tech companies; oil and gas, automotive, utilities and financial services are the main ones. Mind you the list is from 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_companies_by_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_compa... Compare to the US (2019 figures), it has Apple in 3rd place, Amazon on 5th, Alphabet on 15th, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_the_United_States_by_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...
- raverbashing 7y ago
  That's definitely valid criticism. Though not necessarily competitiveness is connected to size. I certainly wouldn't complain if the EU would have comparable companies to FAANG ones in size.
- fauigerzigerk 7y ago
  It's true, but perhaps it's also worth mentioning that Europe has a large number of small and medium sized companies in general and high tech companies in particular. For instance, the Obama administration blocked the takeover of Aixtron by a Chinese company because Aixtron was so key to national security. The US Attorney General recommended a few days ago that the US take a share in Ericsson and Nokia, because they are the main 5G equipment suppliers besides Huawei. A recent takeover of Kuka, an industrial robot maker, has caused a lot of concern as well. Germany has a lot of small to medium sized high tech equipment makers that are mostly privatly owned. Robert Bosch, the largest car parts manufacturer in the world, is not a publicly listed company and not usually classed as a tech company, but it does make some of the most high tech parts that go in to cars. It's certainly no less of a tech company than, say, Facebook. Then of course there are companies like ARM, SAP, Siemens, ASML, Amadeus Group, Infineon, Vestas or Airbus. No, they are not the size of Apple and ARM is now owned by SoftBank. You see the pattern? Europe doesn't have consumer tech. It does have a lot of high tech equipment makers and parts suppliers. Europe is really bad at selling to consumers (apart from France's and Italy's luxury goods makers and traditionally auto makers that are now suffering as cars become software platforms), and that's exactly where network effects have created those giant tech companies that now dominate US stock indices. So yes, I think Europe is in a pretty bad place right now when it comes to tech, but it's not quite as bad as what you might think if you're just looking at the biggest components of stock indices.

Nition 7y ago

The N9 was so good. Meego was great, the all-swipe, no-buttons interface was way ahead of iOS and Android at the time. The hardware with its subtley curved screen was perfectly designed around it. The phone was the right size. I might still be using mine if it didn't have an unfortunate bug, which always came back eventually, where SMS messages would show up under the wrong person. Nokia said they'd support it until 2015 but that didn't happen, I think the last update was in 2012. The community made some fixes for other bugs, but not for that one.

oblio 7y ago
The Meego interface is better than what I have in my Android 10 phone... Those gestures are so awkward and bolted on. I haven't used an iPhone with gesture navigation but I imagine their navigation is only marginally better, also being bolted on later.
- abdulmuhaimin 7y ago
  it is better. N9/Meego was designed with those gestures as the main navigation of the OS. So it somehow feel intuitive and natural to use it. In comparison the Android gesture is nice, buts its just a nice extra imo. I would probably still use N9 as my 2nd phone if its not broken.
masklinn 7y ago
> The N9 was so good. Meego was great, the all-swipe, no-buttons interface was way ahead of iOS and Android at the time. Sounds like it ripped off webos, like everybody else.
- hajile 7y ago
  Not really. It uses a completely different paradigm. 3 screens next to each other. One is notifications, one is a list of installed programs, and the third is a scrollable list of open apps (somewhat similar to tabs in FF for Android). It was later used (and greatly refined) on the failed Blackberry QNX-based devices. SwipeUI winds up very usable on a phone, but basically unusable everywhere else. This is in stark contrast to the webOS paradigm which is much closer to a macOS desktop (dock at the bottom, menu always at the top left, settings always at top right, and modified/improved deck of cards "expose"). Because of this, scaling webOS to tablets or even desktops isn't difficult. If Steve Jobs had seen the webOS UI, the iPhone would definitely be using it today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaQM8vVjuE4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaQM8vVjuE4

ahartmetz 7y ago

If there was foul play involved, you'd have to pull back a few more curtains to find it. Information that transpired after it was all over was that the Nokia board hired Elop with the assignment to sell to Microsoft. The N9 is a really sad story. I had one, it was great. It did get some "better than iPhone" reviews. It was in development for too long, and when it was released and it was great, Nokia was too cowardly to bet on it.

silvestrov 7y ago
yeah, Nokia was a dead man walking when Elop was hired. They had no way of caching up to iPhone. Big product companies don't die from one day to another, they take a slow long time to fizzle out.
- ahartmetz 7y ago
  The N9 did have a chance, I think. If you live in the US, you have no idea how big Nokia was. Problem was that the decision to sell to Microsoft was made before the N9 release. It would have taken a lot of courage to change course. People making that decision could have ended up looking like idiots. The N9's success was possible but not a sure thing.
bitL 7y ago
I am wondering if the surveillance capitalism we have now would have been impeded if NOKIA was still around in full force. I miss time when my phone didn't track everything I did. The only alternative I own now is running on SailfishOS, from MeeGo team members.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It's not just your phone that spies on you, it's mostly the apps on it that do. With no Android to push it so hard and fast, perhaps surveillance capitalism would be a bit less developed by now, but I doubt the difference would be all that big. The allure of corrupt money is just too high, and the pressure is industry-wide.

slac 7y ago

Going from the N9 to the first IPhone (I jailbroke mine for use in Sweden) was a revelation. The N9 was a very complex beast to use and it was very laggy compared to the smooth graphics the iPhone offered. Even in the markets where it was available, it was a very rare sight. But grey import iPhones were everywhere in Stockholm.

glormph 7y ago
Maybe I'm mixing my timelines but when was this? I thought the N9 was released a couple of years after the first iphone? Around the time there was iphone4?
- steveklabnik 7y ago
  * N9: Sept 2011 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9 * iPhone: June 2007 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone
- sorenjan 7y ago
  They're probably referring to the Nokia N95.

kakoni 7y ago

And then there were also a team of McKinsey consultants in Keilaniemi (whos team lead had strong connections to Microsoft) (Chapter 9. https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52c5 https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52...)