14 ms·

Why Nokia failed: 'Wasted 2,000 man years' on UIs that didn't work

156 points by macco 16y ago

joebananas 16y ago
Or as JWZ put it 8 years ago, the CADT model of software development. http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
bad_user 16y ago
I would waist another 2000 man years than go with a company that released a credible competitor on October 21, 2010 ; although they've been doing it since at least year 2000 (i.e. working on handheld / mobile operating systems). That's not a good track record if you ask me - whereas both Apple and Google came out of nowhere and swept the market since the first versions released.
- barranger 16y ago
  While not specifically a phone, the iphone does have ancestry that didn't exactly "sweep the market" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)
  - protomyth 16y ago
    iOS has about as much to do with the Newton as it has to do with Go.
    - recoiledsnake 16y ago
      And Windows Phone 7 has barely anything to do with Windows Mobile. And no one can court developers like Microsoft(the big problem with Nokia). There are already close to 10,000 applications compared to close to 5,000 for WebOS which had a head start.
      - jamesgeck0 16y ago
        Windows Phone 7 is based on Windows CE 6 [1]. It has a lot more code in common with Windows Mobile than iOS has with the Newton. 1. http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/04/windows-phone-7-based-on-a-hybrid-windows-ce-6-compact-7-kerne/ http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/04/windows-phone-7-based-on-...
        recoiledsnake 16y ago
        Windows CE 6 is a complete redesign of Windows CE 5.2(on which Windows Mobile is based).
      - dexen 16y ago
        Windows Phone 7 is product of the same organization, staffed by mostly the same people, with only certain degree of improvement to development process since the CE 6. What makes you hope 7 will have better quality?
        seabee 16y ago
        Everything I've heard about the Zune HD (the only pure CE 6 device I'm aware of) is positive. Maybe you're getting confused with Windows Mobile 6.5, which is based on an older version. Besides, Windows 7 is of unquestionably better quality than Vista, so what's your point?
    - SoftwareMaven 16y ago
      The value of the Newton to iOS is not in shared technology (obviously, that is next to nothing), but in what Apple may have learned about the market. That is probably impossible to quantify in any way.
wvenable 16y ago
> With its mature and well-debugged phone stacks, it is better for phone calls than any other smartphone: it drops fewer calls, the calls sound better, and it uses the antenna better. I've heard this "fact" presented many times, but is there actually any meat to it? It seems to me there must be many mature and well-debugged phone stacks out there.
- nimrody 16y ago
  3G phones are complicated beasts. It takes years for an implementation to mature -- and the standardization bodies continue evolving the standards and adding complexity. In the past, Nokia was one of the first to have a prototype implementation -- hence, more time for testing and improving it. I would say this is no longer the case today -- but it's still probably one of the more mature implementations around.
- enjo 16y ago
  IIRC, the phone stack live completely outside of Symbian itself (I'm not sure how this looks in something like Android). So each vendor attempting to deploy a phone would have to provide their own telephony stack... I worked on at least two memorable projects where they just couldn't make that work. Now Nokia has put out hundreds of models of S60 phones, each largely sharing components. I would imagine that their telephony layer was rock solid. I have no idea if the assertion in the article is true or not, but it wouldn't surprise me. Nokia has always "gotten" the phone side... it's the UX side of a smartphone that has always vexed them.
  - l0nwlf 16y ago
    >Nokia has always "gotten" the phone side True, but my current phone N900 is weaker in terms of a phone. It is a hacker's delight with a real terminal, apt-get etc but the phone experience I never really enjoyed much. My earlier phone N95 was better than this.
  - edderly 16y ago
    The thing that didn't work iirc is that people other than Nokia tried to write their own Symbian Telephony server (TSY) and failed to get it working. What makes Android successful, was coming late to the party are QCOM & co having easier to integrate solutions with their baseband chipsets.
smogzer 16y ago
Also Nokia wanted to flood the market with cheap phones to curtain the people from seeing other brands. I guess this might have created them a support nightmare. New kids understand the concept of singularity and just strieve for perfection, lefting Nokia the land of the lost buttons.
- peterwwillis 16y ago
  That never happened in the US. It was only the past couple years that S60 phones got introduced to AT&T and other US carriers as bundled with contracts. And nobody's going to pay $400+ for a phone they know nothing about. I always decried the fact that Nokia's phones were more advanced than the iPhone when it came out, but nobody gave a crap (they also didn't know it existed).
  - 5teev 16y ago
    I admired Nokia's "noble" stand against carrier exclusivity deals and subsidized phones, but in retrospect it cost them a lot of their relevance in the US market.
recoiledsnake 16y ago
Well atleast they had a bubble inteface! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSRuY_9ZMsY&feature=player_embedded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSRuY_9ZMsY&feature=playe... I was reading a post by a Nokia employee that teams used to work on improving their own branches of Symbian that were never merged into the main one. This lead to fiefdoms and waste of duplicate effort.
Estragon 16y ago
It appears that this Register article is based on the following blog post from Mark Wilcox. Just in case you want it from the horse's mouth... strange that they cited this obliquely in the Register article, but didn't link to it... http://mobilesoftware.tumblr.com/ http://mobilesoftware.tumblr.com/
- rayval 16y ago
  The link is all the way at the end of the Register article. To be fair, the Register article does provide useful context that is missing from the Wilcox piece.
- rayval 16y ago
  The link is all the way at the end of the Register article. To be fair, the Register article does provide useful context that is missing from the Wilcox piece.
5teev 16y ago
"For want of a nail the kingdom was lost" overly diminishes the significance of UI. For users, the experience of using the phone is not a minor detail added onto a great device, it IS the device. Perhaps a better quote for Nokia's situation is, "My kingdom for a horse...."
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  They had 3 horses, which were trying to turn and eat each other.
ffffruit 16y ago
Back in the 90's, Nokia im my opinion has the best UI's by far compared to the competitors then. When Motorola phones did not even query the phone book to get the caller's name, Nokia was innovating with tabbed menus and whatnot. Its a shame they lagged.
ffffruit 16y ago
Back in the 90's, Nokia im my opinion has the best UI's by far compared to the competitors then. When Motorola phones did not even query the phone book to get the caller's name, Nokia was innovating with tabbed menus and whatnot. Its a shame they lagged.
philthy 16y ago
They were designing for the wrong hardware, Nokia hasn't had a single device that rivals the iPhone's technical capabilities. With that said Nokia's brick phones have some of the easiest interfaces to use of any device ever, which is a huge reason they are so popular in the developing world, that and they saturated the market.
- viraptor 16y ago
  > Nokia hasn't had a single device that rivals the iPhone's technical capabilities Which iPhone? Version 4? Of course not. 3GS? Have a look at N900. The hardware is pretty much comparable, with N900 being slightly better in many categories. More memory, 32GB storage in every model, twice the screen size, additional flash memory, 2MP more on the camera. Actually the only place where iPhone wins completely is the multitouch screen. So out of 4 released iPhones, only the most recent one is definitely better than N900.
  - micampe 16y ago
    > Actually the only place where iPhone wins completely is the multitouch screen. That's no small thing though. I had the N810, which I'm pretty sure used the same display and sensor as the N900 and the touch screen was just painful to use. I think an actually working touch screen sensor has been one of the biggest things the iPhone introduced (or popularized, mobile phones at the time all insisted on resistive sensors, probably because of lower costs).
    - viraptor 16y ago
      I'm not judging features here as more or less important. I just meant to point out that N900 can easily be a rival to all but the most recent iPhones from the technical point of view. I'm not sure about N810 screen - never used it. I'm ok with the N900 one, although yes, it could be more sensitive. But I'd honestly take resistive screen over the cap. one for the advantage of using it in gloves (my hands are easily getting cold ;) )
  - philthy 16y ago
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
tptacek 16y ago
I nearly spat out my drink when I read the sentence claiming that a team within Nokia working on a Linux version of the product tried to launch a UI/UX competitor to QT, even though Nokia had acquired Trolltech, the QT company, using... wait for it... GTK. Anyone want to put up odds that there were other UX "initiatives" there pushing Tcl/Tk? :)
- stcredzero 16y ago
  Pukey UI look and bad UX have killed more promising and cool technology than anything else, probably by more than an order of magnitude. Open source needs designers, badly.
  - CrLf 16y ago
    Opensource doesn't need designers, there are plenty of those (real designers, and programmers with decent design skills). What it needs is focus. The main problem with opensource UIs is the lack of attention to integration issues and detail, which results in a (serious) lack of polish. The proprietary model has the advantage that you can put someone in charge of this. Someone that will order people to polish stuff up. Opensource projects can't do this. Everyone does its own thing, and can't be bothered to do the boring work, or they'll leave. The mistake here is thinking that uniformization fixes the problem. Well, guess what, none of the successful UIs are uniform (violation of UI guidelines is the norm on Windows, and Apple also doesn't with increased frequency). But what they don't do is leave applications with misaligned components and such crap.
- follower 16y ago
  If I read it correctly, that was specifically in relation to the "declarative UI" approach not the whole UI. Also, to be fair, Nokia's acquisition of QT occurred when Nokia already had a GTK UI, it's not like the GTK UI didn't exist beforehand. (One of the interesting conspiracy theories someone shared with me was that the Symbian team orchestrated the Trolltech acquisition to give Symbian more time and slow down/make redundant the GTK-based effort. :) )
  - 16y ago
manishm 16y ago
Its not that it didnt work, People use to love Nokia it worked like charm. Nokia was the biggest mobile phone manufacturers until it stopped innovating and iterating their products. It wasn't new for them that Apple and Google are coming up with their phones and how they would be changing the mobile industry. Had Nokia took that up and changed their product to be up with the tech innovations they would have not lost the market share. Right said if you don't innovate or iterate you are going to Die.
- kennethh 16y ago
  Totally agree. I bought a Symbian phone in 2003 (Nokia 6600) and got a new one in 2008 and the user interface was almost the same. The only difference was better looking icons and more options. The applications was the same as before.
Fargren 16y ago
How many man hours are there to a man year? Is the unit supossed to concider how much hours a man works in a year, or is it just 365 * 24 a man hour?
- adolph 16y ago
  Don't forget that the measure is probably in metric too.
  - wmf 16y ago
    I guess you're joking, but a European person-year is definitely smaller than an American person-year (or PY as we call them at the office).
- mirkules 16y ago
  It's 40 hours * 52 weeks, according to http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/manyear.asp http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/manyear.asp Although, I think that number is closer to 40 hours * 50 weeks (vacation included)
  - glenjamin 16y ago
    50 weeks seems high, Finland gets a minimum of 5 weeks a year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_employment_leave_by_country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_emplo...
- oneguynick 16y ago
  149.7 Hours in a FTE month; so 1796.4 in a year
joe_the_user 16y ago
I wonder how many man-years Microsoft has spent on failed UIs? (and, yes, they've had successful ones too). Nokia had a broken development process. The answer clearly was to surrender and turn the company over to ... another company with a long history of broken processes. NOTE: I'm not saying everything in Microsoft is broken by any means. Microsoft has had processes which produced Windows ME and Windows Vista ... and they fixed their process and produced some better things. That might be evidence Nokia might have been able to do something similar.
stevenwei 16y ago
It's rather unfortunate because Qt Quick is a rather promising framework for mobile development, it just needed a bit more polish. The Symbian UI is really bad right now though, it actually defies many layers of common sense. The flagship Nokia N8, for example, still doesn't have a full qwerty keyboard in portrait mode. You have to rotate it to landscape mode in order to type, and the keyboard input takes up the entire screen. I'm not really sure how that device managed to get shipped without such basic functionality in place, not to mention the fact that it is March 2011 and still not available.
- ramy_d 16y ago
  I totally second the Qt Quick comment, I tried recently and it's very pleasing, especially if you're comming from javascript development.
- bergie 16y ago
  By the way, they just launched Qt Quick Components for desktop: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/03/10/qml-components-for-desktop/ http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/03/10/qml-components-for-deskt... Should make app development a lot easier...

156 points by macco 16y ago

Or as JWZ put it 8 years ago, the CADT model of software development. http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

bad_user 16y ago

I would waist another 2000 man years than go with a company that released a credible competitor on October 21, 2010 ; although they've been doing it since at least year 2000 (i.e. working on handheld / mobile operating systems). That's not a good track record if you ask me - whereas both Apple and Google came out of nowhere and swept the market since the first versions released.

barranger 16y ago
While not specifically a phone, the iphone does have ancestry that didn't exactly "sweep the market" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)
- protomyth 16y ago
  iOS has about as much to do with the Newton as it has to do with Go.
  - recoiledsnake 16y ago
    And Windows Phone 7 has barely anything to do with Windows Mobile. And no one can court developers like Microsoft(the big problem with Nokia). There are already close to 10,000 applications compared to close to 5,000 for WebOS which had a head start.
    - jamesgeck0 16y ago
      Windows Phone 7 is based on Windows CE 6 [1]. It has a lot more code in common with Windows Mobile than iOS has with the Newton. 1. http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/04/windows-phone-7-based-on-a-hybrid-windows-ce-6-compact-7-kerne/ http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/04/windows-phone-7-based-on-...
      - recoiledsnake 16y ago
        Windows CE 6 is a complete redesign of Windows CE 5.2(on which Windows Mobile is based).
    - dexen 16y ago
      Windows Phone 7 is product of the same organization, staffed by mostly the same people, with only certain degree of improvement to development process since the CE 6. What makes you hope 7 will have better quality?
      - seabee 16y ago
        Everything I've heard about the Zune HD (the only pure CE 6 device I'm aware of) is positive. Maybe you're getting confused with Windows Mobile 6.5, which is based on an older version. Besides, Windows 7 is of unquestionably better quality than Vista, so what's your point?
  - SoftwareMaven 16y ago
    The value of the Newton to iOS is not in shared technology (obviously, that is next to nothing), but in what Apple may have learned about the market. That is probably impossible to quantify in any way.

wvenable 16y ago

> With its mature and well-debugged phone stacks, it is better for phone calls than any other smartphone: it drops fewer calls, the calls sound better, and it uses the antenna better. I've heard this "fact" presented many times, but is there actually any meat to it? It seems to me there must be many mature and well-debugged phone stacks out there.

nimrody 16y ago
3G phones are complicated beasts. It takes years for an implementation to mature -- and the standardization bodies continue evolving the standards and adding complexity. In the past, Nokia was one of the first to have a prototype implementation -- hence, more time for testing and improving it. I would say this is no longer the case today -- but it's still probably one of the more mature implementations around.
enjo 16y ago
IIRC, the phone stack live completely outside of Symbian itself (I'm not sure how this looks in something like Android). So each vendor attempting to deploy a phone would have to provide their own telephony stack... I worked on at least two memorable projects where they just couldn't make that work. Now Nokia has put out hundreds of models of S60 phones, each largely sharing components. I would imagine that their telephony layer was rock solid. I have no idea if the assertion in the article is true or not, but it wouldn't surprise me. Nokia has always "gotten" the phone side... it's the UX side of a smartphone that has always vexed them.
- l0nwlf 16y ago
  >Nokia has always "gotten" the phone side True, but my current phone N900 is weaker in terms of a phone. It is a hacker's delight with a real terminal, apt-get etc but the phone experience I never really enjoyed much. My earlier phone N95 was better than this.
- edderly 16y ago
  The thing that didn't work iirc is that people other than Nokia tried to write their own Symbian Telephony server (TSY) and failed to get it working. What makes Android successful, was coming late to the party are QCOM & co having easier to integrate solutions with their baseband chipsets.

smogzer 16y ago

Also Nokia wanted to flood the market with cheap phones to curtain the people from seeing other brands. I guess this might have created them a support nightmare. New kids understand the concept of singularity and just strieve for perfection, lefting Nokia the land of the lost buttons.

peterwwillis 16y ago
That never happened in the US. It was only the past couple years that S60 phones got introduced to AT&T and other US carriers as bundled with contracts. And nobody's going to pay $400+ for a phone they know nothing about. I always decried the fact that Nokia's phones were more advanced than the iPhone when it came out, but nobody gave a crap (they also didn't know it existed).
- 5teev 16y ago
  I admired Nokia's "noble" stand against carrier exclusivity deals and subsidized phones, but in retrospect it cost them a lot of their relevance in the US market.

recoiledsnake 16y ago

Well atleast they had a bubble inteface! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSRuY_9ZMsY&feature=player_embedded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSRuY_9ZMsY&feature=playe... I was reading a post by a Nokia employee that teams used to work on improving their own branches of Symbian that were never merged into the main one. This lead to fiefdoms and waste of duplicate effort.

Estragon 16y ago

It appears that this Register article is based on the following blog post from Mark Wilcox. Just in case you want it from the horse's mouth... strange that they cited this obliquely in the Register article, but didn't link to it... http://mobilesoftware.tumblr.com/ http://mobilesoftware.tumblr.com/

rayval 16y ago
The link is all the way at the end of the Register article. To be fair, the Register article does provide useful context that is missing from the Wilcox piece.
rayval 16y ago
The link is all the way at the end of the Register article. To be fair, the Register article does provide useful context that is missing from the Wilcox piece.

5teev 16y ago

"For want of a nail the kingdom was lost" overly diminishes the significance of UI. For users, the experience of using the phone is not a minor detail added onto a great device, it IS the device. Perhaps a better quote for Nokia's situation is, "My kingdom for a horse...."

jacques_chester 16y ago
They had 3 horses, which were trying to turn and eat each other.

ffffruit 16y ago

Back in the 90's, Nokia im my opinion has the best UI's by far compared to the competitors then. When Motorola phones did not even query the phone book to get the caller's name, Nokia was innovating with tabbed menus and whatnot. Its a shame they lagged.

ffffruit 16y ago

philthy 16y ago

They were designing for the wrong hardware, Nokia hasn't had a single device that rivals the iPhone's technical capabilities. With that said Nokia's brick phones have some of the easiest interfaces to use of any device ever, which is a huge reason they are so popular in the developing world, that and they saturated the market.

viraptor 16y ago
> Nokia hasn't had a single device that rivals the iPhone's technical capabilities Which iPhone? Version 4? Of course not. 3GS? Have a look at N900. The hardware is pretty much comparable, with N900 being slightly better in many categories. More memory, 32GB storage in every model, twice the screen size, additional flash memory, 2MP more on the camera. Actually the only place where iPhone wins completely is the multitouch screen. So out of 4 released iPhones, only the most recent one is definitely better than N900.
- micampe 16y ago
  > Actually the only place where iPhone wins completely is the multitouch screen. That's no small thing though. I had the N810, which I'm pretty sure used the same display and sensor as the N900 and the touch screen was just painful to use. I think an actually working touch screen sensor has been one of the biggest things the iPhone introduced (or popularized, mobile phones at the time all insisted on resistive sensors, probably because of lower costs).
  - viraptor 16y ago
    I'm not judging features here as more or less important. I just meant to point out that N900 can easily be a rival to all but the most recent iPhones from the technical point of view. I'm not sure about N810 screen - never used it. I'm ok with the N900 one, although yes, it could be more sensitive. But I'd honestly take resistive screen over the cap. one for the advantage of using it in gloves (my hands are easily getting cold ;) )
- philthy 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

tptacek 16y ago

I nearly spat out my drink when I read the sentence claiming that a team within Nokia working on a Linux version of the product tried to launch a UI/UX competitor to QT, even though Nokia had acquired Trolltech, the QT company, using... wait for it... GTK. Anyone want to put up odds that there were other UX "initiatives" there pushing Tcl/Tk? :)

stcredzero 16y ago
Pukey UI look and bad UX have killed more promising and cool technology than anything else, probably by more than an order of magnitude. Open source needs designers, badly.
- CrLf 16y ago
  Opensource doesn't need designers, there are plenty of those (real designers, and programmers with decent design skills). What it needs is focus. The main problem with opensource UIs is the lack of attention to integration issues and detail, which results in a (serious) lack of polish. The proprietary model has the advantage that you can put someone in charge of this. Someone that will order people to polish stuff up. Opensource projects can't do this. Everyone does its own thing, and can't be bothered to do the boring work, or they'll leave. The mistake here is thinking that uniformization fixes the problem. Well, guess what, none of the successful UIs are uniform (violation of UI guidelines is the norm on Windows, and Apple also doesn't with increased frequency). But what they don't do is leave applications with misaligned components and such crap.
follower 16y ago
If I read it correctly, that was specifically in relation to the "declarative UI" approach not the whole UI. Also, to be fair, Nokia's acquisition of QT occurred when Nokia already had a GTK UI, it's not like the GTK UI didn't exist beforehand. (One of the interesting conspiracy theories someone shared with me was that the Symbian team orchestrated the Trolltech acquisition to give Symbian more time and slow down/make redundant the GTK-based effort. :) )
- 16y ago

manishm 16y ago

Its not that it didnt work, People use to love Nokia it worked like charm. Nokia was the biggest mobile phone manufacturers until it stopped innovating and iterating their products. It wasn't new for them that Apple and Google are coming up with their phones and how they would be changing the mobile industry. Had Nokia took that up and changed their product to be up with the tech innovations they would have not lost the market share. Right said if you don't innovate or iterate you are going to Die.

kennethh 16y ago
Totally agree. I bought a Symbian phone in 2003 (Nokia 6600) and got a new one in 2008 and the user interface was almost the same. The only difference was better looking icons and more options. The applications was the same as before.

Fargren 16y ago

How many man hours are there to a man year? Is the unit supossed to concider how much hours a man works in a year, or is it just 365 * 24 a man hour?

adolph 16y ago
Don't forget that the measure is probably in metric too.
- wmf 16y ago
  I guess you're joking, but a European person-year is definitely smaller than an American person-year (or PY as we call them at the office).
mirkules 16y ago
It's 40 hours * 52 weeks, according to http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/manyear.asp http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/manyear.asp Although, I think that number is closer to 40 hours * 50 weeks (vacation included)
- glenjamin 16y ago
  50 weeks seems high, Finland gets a minimum of 5 weeks a year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_employment_leave_by_country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_emplo...
oneguynick 16y ago
149.7 Hours in a FTE month; so 1796.4 in a year

joe_the_user 16y ago

I wonder how many man-years Microsoft has spent on failed UIs? (and, yes, they've had successful ones too). Nokia had a broken development process. The answer clearly was to surrender and turn the company over to ... another company with a long history of broken processes. NOTE: I'm not saying everything in Microsoft is broken by any means. Microsoft has had processes which produced Windows ME and Windows Vista ... and they fixed their process and produced some better things. That might be evidence Nokia might have been able to do something similar.

stevenwei 16y ago

It's rather unfortunate because Qt Quick is a rather promising framework for mobile development, it just needed a bit more polish. The Symbian UI is really bad right now though, it actually defies many layers of common sense. The flagship Nokia N8, for example, still doesn't have a full qwerty keyboard in portrait mode. You have to rotate it to landscape mode in order to type, and the keyboard input takes up the entire screen. I'm not really sure how that device managed to get shipped without such basic functionality in place, not to mention the fact that it is March 2011 and still not available.

ramy_d 16y ago
I totally second the Qt Quick comment, I tried recently and it's very pleasing, especially if you're comming from javascript development.
bergie 16y ago
By the way, they just launched Qt Quick Components for desktop: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/03/10/qml-components-for-desktop/ http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/03/10/qml-components-for-deskt... Should make app development a lot easier...