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What sealed Nokia's fate?
- CountSessine 16y agoWas it really bureaucracy? Nokia didn't seem to have any trouble producing nice looking, well engineered hardware. My N95 was probably the best cell phone I've ever owned. What it really looks like to me is that they were a hardware company whose upper-management didn't understand software very well. My N95 ran Symbian S60 3rd edition. At some point Nokia decided that they wanted to protect S60 users from malware, and that they were going to do it by requiring all applications to be cryptographically signed. Unlike Apple and Google, Nokia didn't want to shoulder the burden of running their own authentication infrastructure. Instead, the 'Symbian Signed' policy required applications to be signed with a TLS/SSL certificate. Those are typically pretty expensive. If you wanted anyone to use your little free S60 utility for auto-rotating the screen or setting location-aware themes, you had to stump up for a $700 TLS certificate to sign it. Guess what happened to the free-software ecosystem on S60. Later, Nokia had what seemed to be a pretty good start on a Linux-based OS called Maemo. What the article doesn't say is that Nokia inexplicably joined forces with Intel and sent Maemo on a long and probably pointless integration detour with Intel's mobile Linux solution, Moblin. Given that Nokia probably wasn't going to start making smart decisions wrt software anytime soon, getting software from someone else was better than being squeezed out of the smartphone business altogether.
- macco 16y agoI think the bureaucracy is right, because Nokia wasn't able to make focused decision. Actually I think this is a classical management problem. Control 132000 people.