43 ms·

Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

266 points by sogen 4y ago

graton 4y ago
How Stephen Elop destroyed Nokia https://seekingalpha.com/article/916271-how-stephen-elop-destroyed-nokia https://seekingalpha.com/article/916271-how-stephen-elop-des...
- jll29 4y ago
  Ironically, it looks like Nokia, on the other hand, rescued Microsoft (out of its ideology-obsessed acting) by providing it with a great new CEO.
4pkjai 4y ago
You know it's going to be a bad memo when it starts with a LinkedIn story. Very sad they chose to jump instead of innovating their way out.
cmdrriker 4y ago
Boy, did Nokia elope after this with M$ft phone which was supposed to right Nokia's collective "ship". Elop joined the hallowed hall of fame of abysmal CEO's who ran their firms into the ground. Remember Lumia, Windows Phone 7,8 & 10 blehh. Was it Balmer that hired Elop?
- locallost 4y ago
  I had a Windows 8 phone from Nokia around 2015 or so and other than the lack of apps it was a phone like pretty much any other at the time or even these days. By that I mean I don't remember anything really bad about it, especially because I mostly use the web anyway. I have no idea why things succeed or fail and so I don't know for this either, but my guess is it was new, but didn't have anything that provoked an interest with mainstream users. And Microsoft does not have many faithful users.
  - mmsimanga 4y ago
    I wonder if they threw in the towel too soon. I too had a Nokia Windows phone and I loved it. They were popular in South Africa as Nokia was a recognised brand. Bandwidth is still expensive here so most people just need WhatsApp and Facebook and they are fine. Perhaps the developed market needed more apps.
  - donio 4y ago
    It didn't matter how good or bad it was, Windows was a toxic brand on mobile. A very large segment of potential customers was rejecting it off hand based on their desktop Windows experience. They may have been stuck with it on the desktop but on mobile even if they weren't sure what they wanted they definitely knew that it wasn't THAT.
asveikau 4y ago
Here's a contemporaneous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2195520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2195520 I'm surprised how positive HN was about this. I don't remember reading any positive coverage at the time. I personally thought the guy was an idiot. He wound up performing worse than my expectations.
- majormajor 4y ago
  Looks like that discussion was before Windows Phone was announced as the replacement. E.g. " The idea of a Nokia device running Android is pretty appealing. They've always had good hardware, but Symbian has become a develpment dead-end, and Meego isn't yet here. " Symbian definitely wasn't the way forward. MeeGo wasn't looking like it was gonna be an iOS or Android killer. Elop was right about needing to change horses. Terribly wrong about which one to pick, in retrospect. One could argue that MS fucked that up as much as Nokia, though - this was before MS continually screwed up their WP strategy for several subsequent years, like with the WP8 hard reset. Even best case, though, it was a high-risk/high-reward gamble to try to be "the" WP7 phone instead of one of many Android contenders. Would've been interesting to see them take on Samsung instead of just HTC and zombie Motorola, though.
  - varajelle 4y ago
    > Elop was right about needing to change horses. What was wrong with MeeGo? The memo just states: > at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market. But that's not soo bad considering that they started the platform in 2010. It's not like changing to a different platformbat this point would make things faster anyway.
    - oriolid 4y ago
      > What was wrong with MeeGo? The way I remember it was that at the time the management-forced merge of Maemo and Moblin to Meego and the sudden switch from Gtk to Qt were thought to be risky moves and it was well known that Symbian supporters are doing anything they can to sabotage other platforms. Later I was told that N9 was incredibly polished but Meego wasn't that great behind the scenes and would have required massive rewrites if development had continued (which isn't that different from stories about early iOS).
rob74 4y ago
Yeah, and then they jumped from this (allegedly) burning platform to a sinking platform - lot of good it did them...
CobaltFire 4y ago
I had a Nokia N9 as my daily driver for years (2011-2015 if I recall right) and still have it. That phone was absolutely top tier at the time. It lacked some apps but overall it was an amazing phone. Everyone always wanted to know what it was I was using. I wish they had continued pushing it forward.
- pengaru 4y ago
  It really was a nice device. Great size, took excellent photos for the time, and that AMOLED screen with the always-on clock and black blacks. I'd probably have one today if it were LTE capable. Qt/Sailfish worked well enough too but it definitely had its defects. My biggest complaint was they didn't ship complete source prepared for convenient reproduction of the firmware and out-of-box encouraged flashing of self-made builds. Then I would have been fixing the bugs I tripped over.
tananaev 4y ago
Nokia had a chance, but their developer experience was terrible. They should have invested in it. And also open source. They could have open sourced their platform and compete with Android. What did they do instead? They made an extremely stupid bet on Microsoft, which by that time was even further behind in mobile world than Nokia itself.
- toast0 4y ago
  Symbian was open sourced at one point and before that, available for others to make phones with, SonyEricsson had a couple, I think there were one or two others as well. The Nokia linux phones were open sourceish as well, in partnership with Intel. Open or closed source wasn't the problem, really.
  - justsomehnguy 4y ago
    > I think there were one or two others as well Motorola A925, Motorola A1000, Motorola RIZR Z8, Motorola RIZR Z10 (aka 'banana') https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Motorola+Z8&t=ffcm&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Motorola+Z8&t=ffcm&iar=images&iax=...
- panick21_ 4y ago
  If your platform is trash just opening it up doesn't matter. And their linux based phones were pretty open but they had no power in the organization and having an open source platform with no phones is pointless.
bawolff 4y ago
People pick on nokia for making the wrong choice, but i dont think they were wrong. Apps are important and they are a bit of a winner takes all market (or at least half). Nokia was screwed and i think the memo correctly identifies that. Unfortunately identifying the problem is only half the battle. Figuring out what to do next is the other half, and that is where nokia failed.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  As everybody at the time was pointing out. If you are unwilling to make your own platform (Maemo/MeGoo) work, then just make Andoird phones. It wasn't really tha difficult and many people had been screaming about this since 2009. But instead they just continued with the Symbian feature phones that nobody wanted.
ajb 4y ago
I remember thinking at the time that is was a great metaphor, and then reading on HN that its straight from some business school text on how to motivate change.
- handojin 4y ago
  "Leading Change" by John Kotter as far as I recall.
  - asplake 4y ago
    A great metaphor, unless it’s used inappropriately, which is like 99% of the time. And Kotter is the excuse for a ton of change-by-imposition too. As someone interested in change, I kinda wish that the 1990’s hadn’t happened. There is a lot that’s good and exciting in the organisation development space, but that metaphor and Kotter’s model are not representative of it.
wly_cdgr 4y ago
By the time they admitted this to themselves, it was like a decade too late to do anything about it
jeswin 4y ago
Switching to Microsoft seemed like the best decision at that time. Those criticizing are underestimating the software engineering effort required to build a modern OS and the app ecosystem. But what about Symbian and Ovi? I've had a bunch of Symbian devices with the Ovi store. They were simply not in the same league; the apps were basic because the development tools were just not good enough; and targeted basic low-end experiences. Windows Phone was the most modern OS out there (including the dev tooling); and had the best shot at competing with the Androids. I also bought the N800 (which ran Maemo) from Nokia in 2007. It was ok - but it never looked like a phone platform.
- zibby8 4y ago
  Why was Windows a better choice than Android? You mentioned that Windows had “the best shot of competing with Android”, but why was that desirable? The adage, if you can’t beat them, join them comes to mind.
  - jeswin 4y ago
    Maybe they concluded (rightly) that there are no margins in Android devices. Samsung is a rare exception, but by then the signs were clear that manufacturing (including the R&D around it) was shifting to East Asia.
    - _ea1k 4y ago
      Yeah, the only people making money on Android were the ones with great hardware and brand recognition.
      - p_j_w 4y ago
        So a company like Nokia then?
  - hedora 4y ago
    Oddly, Windows Phone 8 had the best user experience of any phone I've ever used, by far. I'd still be on it if it existed and wasn't laden with Windows 10 style telemetry. I don't care about having a wide selection of apps. I care about having a low-distraction, well organized UI that's optimized for specific tasks. For instance, opening an entry in the address book produced a cross-social-network feed of everything they sent you recently (including call logs, email, SMS, twitter, etc...). That was fantastic, but prepared to have your mind blown: Typing an address into the navigation app and hitting enter (or tapping on a destination) immediately started navigating. 8.1 was strictly a UI regression. I heard 8.5 was even worse.
eslaught 4y ago
I'm not saying this is a great letter, but he wasn't wrong. I owned both Symbian and Maemo devices, and the experience (both to use and develop) really was this bad. That's not to say everything about it was bad, or that there was nothing to like (as HN comments have often pointed out, there was), but it didn't hold a candle to iOS, or even Android. (And Android in those days was pretty hideous.) Now what Nokia did in response... that may not have been right either. But they had to do something.
- skavi 4y ago
  I think it’s simple enough to see why Nokia thought Windows would be the right choice. It was far more polished than Android at the time. It ran well on cheap hardware. And they would have Microsoft backing them.
  - addicted 4y ago
    I owned a WP7 and an Android around that time. Any WP7 polish advantage was skin deep at best. It took approximately 3-5 interactions for something to break in 3rd party apps and maybe twice that in first party apps.
    - jimmySixDOF 4y ago
      What apps ?! That store they had was practically vacant so the phone basically ran on what it came installed with. Android was not as slick at that time but at least you had a ton of software and cooked ROMs
  - stingraycharles 4y ago
    As someone who owned a Windows phone around that time, and knew others who did as well, the shared opinion was that it was a pile of crap. Nokia went for Windows because of the acquisition target, not because of quality of the OS. With that, they prioritized business strategy over product quality, and we all know what happened after.
    - 4y ago
seibelj 4y ago
My mother was one of 8 children born to Finnish immigrant parents in America. As an adult she used the local Mormon temple to research her ancestors, connected with them on Facebook, then re-established the family back into the old country. She then visited the matriarch and lived with her for 2 weeks as my distant cousins visited her and made their acquaintance. Most recently my cousin, whose daughter has an extremely debilitating incurable illness, emigrated back to Finland on his sick daughter’s request. The whole family is attempting to learn Finnish but it is apparently a struggle compared to other languages they learned. Totally off-topic, but Nokia is a sad story and Finland is a wonderful country with wonderful people.
Raziarazzi 4y ago
When compared to Android devices, Windows devices have more computing power, more memory, and a more powerful CPU. This is useful if you have a fat client with a lot of data for things like real-time visualizations and you want your devices to keep up with your users as they complete their tasks. However, all of this extra power means that the battery drains faster and the devices run hotter. When using a unit that is mounted or placed in a docking station with a constant power supply, this is not an issue.
ggm 4y ago
Great hw engineers let down by less than stellar software decisions. Nokia owned a significant slice of late stage pre internet telephony infrastructure level equipment, bridged over to the emerging mobile world and .. kinda missed the boat when Apple happend in with iPhone and then Android's emergence killed them. A lot of people loved their handsets. Just not enough in any single market to make up for some bad decisions. A similar fate: I wonder if the myriad of vendors who glued to the Japanese market regretted it, as that model shrank as internet rose?
- kevin_nisbet 4y ago
  The network / infrastructure side of Nokia still exists. When the handsets division was split or sold off, the network division continued as Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), and was rebranded to Nokia Networks I think after the merger with Alcatel-Lucent. So for the big mobile wireless telco's, the big players are basically Nokia, Erricson, and Huawei these days. My experience with Nokia's equipment did reflect the burning platform memo, but all the big players had lots to be desired in my experience with them. Note: I've been out of the industry for several years, so I'm not totally up to date on the vendors.
  - tuukkah 4y ago
    > the network division continued as Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), and was rebranded to Nokia Networks It wasn't just a rebranding. Nokia wisely bought Siemens out from the Networks joint venture already in 2013, before selling the phones to Microsoft. Then in 2015, they acquired Alcatel-Lucent (including Bell Labs) to the mix. This way, they stayed in Fortune Global 500 even without the phone business. And nowadays there are new Nokia branded feature phones as well as Android phones and tablets: https://www.nokia.com/phones/ https://www.nokia.com/phones/
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  <<A lot of people loved their handsets. That included me. I had fond memories of an near indestructible 3310 and I genuinely wish I did not miss the boat on N900 ( I just landed in US and phone was the least of my concerns then ). <<Just not enough in any single market to make up for some bad decisions. Sadly, clearly there are decisions that can sink even a dominant power in the market. He is not HP's Fiorina. He did have some wins in previous positions, which makes a person like me question whether the failures at Nokia was little more than a sabotage. Obviously, we will likely never really know.
aj7 4y ago
Is this a website that hasn't been updated in four years?
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  The memo is from 2011, so that hardly matters?
  - aj7 4y ago
    I'm really having trouble understanding why this is even relevant in 2022. Who cares what the excuses and problems were within Nokia in 2011? Is Nokia's inability to keep up with cell phone technology in 2011 and important part of technical history? Business history? If so, why? I didn't even really get the burning oil rig analogy. It was a pretty melodramatic way of describing being beaten by a competitor, which happens all the time in business history. Then I looked around the whole website, and there was interesting data. Which ended in 2018. The whole website seems abandoned.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      << I'm really having trouble understanding why this is even relevant in 2022. It is not intended to be flippant, but I believe this one time the entirety of the relevance boils down to the following: “Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it.” << It was a pretty melodramatic way of describing being beaten by a competitor, which happens all the time in business history. Yes, and I am certain MBAs review Nokia rise and fall in great detail as a result.
    - manmal 4y ago
      Many people loved Nokia and I guess still feel nostalgic about the brand. My first phone was a Nokia, and it was super reliable and, though quirky, enjoyable. Nokia also was the most successful European high tech brand. Losing it felt disheartening at the time. If not for Elop, I might now develop apps for Meego instead of iOS. So, I guess, there‘s a moral to the story: don’t let bad hires run your company to the ground?
    - 4y ago
dshep 4y ago
Nokia suffered from lack of direction from the top... They had both symbian and maemo, both officially blessed, but incompatible. Symbian was the past and maemo had promise, so what did management do... a hail mary bet on microsoft? It came out of nowhere and seemed desperate, I believe the market's reaction reflected this sadly.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  It wasn't also that well received inside, as we were pretty much a UNIX shop.
koiueo 4y ago
Nokia N9 was the best phone I have ever owned. To these days their gesture navigation implementation is the best. And they had Swype keyboard preinstalled. Speaking of apps: Here maps, SoundHound, amazing mail client and calendar... Gosh I miss that phone. I used mine for about 3 years, I think, and sold it for more than a half of its original price in literally a couple of hours (which means my price was too low). By the time the software started showing its age: no banking apps, browser failing to display more and more modern sites... I believe, they should have pushed with Meego. With vendor support their OS could've been a hit.
- alfiedotwtf 4y ago
  > Nokia N9 was the best phone I have ever owned. I'll counter with the Nokia N900. > I believe, they should have pushed with Meego. With vendor support their OS could've been a hit. So say we all.
  - pengaru 4y ago
    > I'll counter with the Nokia N900. I've never understood this about N900 fans. My experience with the N9 was great, and never left me wishing I could go back to something more like a Sharp Zaurus with modern cell connectivity. What is it that makes the N900 appealing? Is it strictly the physical keyboard? So the N950 would have been the N900 killer? Or was there something else about it?
    - pluijzer 4y ago
      The N900 was my favorite phone by far. Most of the reason come as a programmer, not all users might value them. First of all ot was a true Linux phone. Running a derivative of Debian, complete with apt etc. Most of the apps on it, even the app to make a phone call where preexisting open source Linux applications with a nice mobile UI. An UI that was clean and consistent without the need off branding that other platforms suffer from. I could simply write bash script for it to extend its functionality. For example I remember writing a script that would record and sent recordings of phone calls to my server. I installed Pidgin the chat client and used it to chat with my friends when MSN was still popular in my county. It truly felt like having a PC in your pocket. The keyboard was the best keyboard ever made in my opinion. I could actually type blind on it sensing a message without looking at the phone at all. I still own 3 N900's with the hope of every managing the find the enthusiasm to rig in the another phone or a pi.
tschwimmer 4y ago
I'm pretty sure the metaphorical platform had already fully melted down by 2011, they just hadn't realized it yet. Nokia was not dead on January 9th, 2007 but maybe by 2008 when the App Store launched or perhaps in 2010 when FaceTime launched with the iPhone 4. At that time Nokia made very solid utility devices that admirably did their jobs. What they failed to ever make and what I suspect they failed to realize that Apple was making was a desire object - something that was more than the sum of its parts. The N9000 and the N9 were technically very good (on paper even better than the iPhone) but they lacked the integrated and holistic design decisions that made the iPhone special.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  > Apple was making was a desire object - something that was more than the sum of its parts. It's harder to do now with iPhone's market size, but I think we're looking at it with rosy glasses. Where Apple succeeded is having a viable touch interface. That's where RIM, Nokia, Fujitsu, Compaq and countless other device makers failed at. Including Nokia. Otherwise the iPhone was buggy and crashing all the time, battery life was trash compared to other phones or the iPod, I don't know anyone actually relying on it to make "serious" calls (we kept our feature phones) it would straight ignore some of the incomming calls and we just were willing to go through all of that to get a usable touch UI.
  - kergonath 4y ago
    > I don't know anyone actually relying on it to make "serious" calls (we kept our feature phones) it would straight ignore some of the incomming calls I know there was a lot of noise about dropped calls and all that in the US, but this was not a thing here in Europe. I would assume that the issue was at least as much with AT&T than with the iPhone. Here there were controversies about a lot of things (for example, it became caught up in the electro-sensitivity pseudoscience argument, there was also some noise about the glass front being brittle), but not reception. At least not before the iPhone 4.
    - makeitdouble 4y ago
rektide 4y ago
I wish I could speak more to the experience directly. I eventually got a n900 used but after the fall, & I was a college kid with no real need for it. What was thrilling & exciting & totally different was that the n900 was a computer. A regular computer. Trying to learn how to make GNOME an ok experience, on very low res mobile. But we knew essentially what it was; it obeyed & played within the regularinux desktop environment world. it was a linux desktop environment, and that gave it open potential. Everything is/was orchestrateable/controllable by dbus, the user's control plane. All the apps exposed themselves over IPC. It played in the connected desktop world as best of breed. The failure of this situation to talk about how intensely stupid it was to give up on the platform is farcically bad. What was here was incredible. It needed improvement & work but the architecture was immensely omni-potential, more capable clearly & growing well known existing tech well, rather than alternate reality symbian or then counter respondes danger or android. weird new alternates to actual linux desktop. Selling out to MS was one of the most shortsighted sorry pathetic givings ups, in a time of vast growth with fantastically little belief in yourself & your people doing good. There was no technical reason to refocus. (But bad numbers, as most players saw). They should have kept going. This was a decision made by people who had faint sense, gailed to appreciate hope, missed clarity on what creating value was like, what value was. This was a pathetic ignorant stupid business decision, to end Maemo. Things rocked, that was a great could do possibility, the OLE COM competitor kf DBus was winning, the market just didnt see yet.
vincnetas 4y ago
Please update the title with [2011]
guai888 4y ago
I use to work for HTC. I was there when iPaq launched and saw the birth of first PocketPC phone, a black and white screen phone for Sagem/Mitsubishi. I would like to share my opinion on this issue of tech disruption. From my point of view, Nokia did not have enough resource and time to meet the challenge which was brought about by Apple and Google/Android. All the tech companies need at least one dominating advantage in order to survive. This dominating advantage needs to crush all challenger in that specific area. Apple has operating system. Samsung has display. Chinese phone makers have CCP. Nokia had nothing that matter. They had two choices, create one or buy one. They were not able to do either so they fade away.
- rasz 4y ago
  >Nokia had nothing that matter Nokia had extremely high hardware quality. Indestructible Nokia 3310 meme and all that.
  - guai888 4y ago
    High hardware quality is always important but it is not enough to build a moat to stop the competition. I remember a Siemens quality manager told me the high hardware quality of Siemens's phone when HTC was building a phone for Siemens. High hardware quality did not save Siemens's phone business either.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
shp0ngle 4y ago
I mean the Nokia-Microsoft phones were great Everyone who had one said so. It was the best of all the “third option” OS devices. All the WebOSes and such. But the market just doesn’t want a third option… even back then the Android and iOS were ossified
- Ndymium 4y ago
  Were they? I had a Lumia with WP7 and it had nearly zero apps, zero multitasking (accidentally click on the Bing button and your app state is lost) and near zero things to do. I remember a very visible metaphor for the whole device was the calendar's month view: it literally showed "Lorem ipsum" for the days you had some events. Supposedly due to performance concerns, and this lasted to WP8 as well. The only cool thing was the grid but that only goes skin deep. Otherwise I hated the phone. Maybe WP8+ devices were better but WP7 was a piece of crap. I didn't want to try WP8 and got myself a Jolla instead.
- black3r 4y ago
  The market's only thought about the OS is what features it supports. And lots of them are provided by 3rd party apps. Lots of people switch from Android to iPhone and back. People mostly just want to keep using their TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, ... It's the app developers (and their companies) who wouldn't be happy with a third option, because the existing two cause enough problems, just think about how many frameworks for cross-platform app development exist, they were created for a reason..., and even with them you still have to do OS-specific stuff to tackle different app store policies, different privacy features, updated APIs breaking your app on new OS versions... or you can have two entirely separate teams working on two separate codebases and try to keep the feature parity...
jll29 4y ago
I liked my Nokia phones - they were ergonomic but not innovative; they were great "just a phone"-type phones. My wife even purchased a re-make of one of their classic phones recently. But I loved my BlackBerries - they were the perfect tool for email/chat/calling and nothing else, the perfect complement to a laptop, whereas iPads partially overlap with both mobile phones AND laptops in terms of functionality, which is why at airports you now see so many people carrying three devices instead of one. So while I have fond memories of Nokia, I don't miss their devices, but I'd give my metaphorical leg for getting my BB back.
- BossingAround 4y ago
  Agreed on BB. I was interested when they moved to Android, and then they died. There still isn't a good, high-end Android with a keyboard from a company I know I can trust.
  - grumpyprole 4y ago
    I was interested that Blackberry didn't use Android - their QNX based OS had a lot of potential. At the time, my Android phone would get hot and drain the battery whenever a batch process decided to reindex my media.
ARandomerDude 4y ago
> We too, are standing on a “burning platform,” and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour. Aaaand that's where I would have decided to get a new job. I've survived two different "roll up your sleeves, plebs, the management set our house on fire" scenarios. Never again.
wodenokoto 4y ago
Looking at Nokia stock over the past 3 decades, you’d be hard pressed to pinpoint where the burning memo happened or say if it killed the company (I’d say it didn’t, the value is pretty flat from before the memo until now. It did kill the handset division). However, it is easy to find the iPhone. https://g.co/kgs/MVvYKr https://g.co/kgs/MVvYKr (click more -> max)
worik 4y ago
The comments here mostly have the flavour of "RIP Nokia". Nokia got out of the phone business in 2014. They still exist and are a mjor force in networking equipment. True, they are of less interest to people here as they do not make many hackable consumer devices, but an obituary is premature
Apocryphon 4y ago
Has any Nokia B9 user also tried Sailfish OS? Is it a proper successor to the Harmattan Meego distro the N9 had?
- cycomanic 4y ago
  > Has any Nokia B9 user also tried Sailfish OS? Is it a proper successor to the Harmattan Meego distro the N9 had? Yes I have it installed on a Sony Xperia. It's not my main phone (I have a work phone that I mainly use), but I would say it works very similar to the N9 so yes a proper successor. The major downside is a relatively small selection of native apps and that the platform did not progress as much as it could have. I would recommend that anyone who has a phone that can run it should try it out.
- saidinesh5 4y ago
  I ported it to a couple of Android devices and used it as a daily driver for a year or so. It is technically a successor, but it just wasn't there. App story was worse than N9 (without considering alien dalvik/anbox/waydroid). Some of the technical decisions they've made meant more headaches for developers (Old gcc version. Old Qt version. Repacking Fedora arm packages just to run on sfos wasn't fun). The browser was based on a very old and buggy Firefox version. At the end of the day, it wasn't even fully open source.. so you always had to play catch up with their updates just to keep your mods working. Despite all that, the community was vibrant and very talented. Oddly enough, it was also smoother to use and feels more well designed than Android on the same device. Even little things like double tap to wake, being easier for one hand usage
- oriolid 4y ago
  I had the Jolla phone back in the day. It was kind of similar to N9, but nowhere the almost magical experience N9 PR1.3 was. The lack of apps was starting to show, the on screen keyboard wasn't that good, the browser was just bad (to be honest, N9 wasn't keeping up with the standards either) and the hardware didn't do anything to improve the experience.
rishabhd 4y ago
Operation Elop is also a fascinating read. https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52c5 https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52...
phasersout 4y ago
I covered quite a few Nokia reviews back in the day and Nokia was by far the most arrogant company to deal with. Every company has it's rules and regulations regarding review devices but with Nokia you had to sign up to three forms just to do your work. Partly with ridiculous rules like a missing charger or cable was up to 50 Euros or so. And they let you very much know where in the pecking order you were regarding your publication and who would get the devices first and last. This was in Germany. Everybody at Nokia strived for not just being difficult but outright jerks to deal with... so when Apple came around and the disaster started to unfold it was quite the show to watch... "ah Nokia would like to invite you to this and that shebang..." ah no thanks I think I'm good. I'm not the guy who carries a grudge but Nokia really made it personal with their whole behavior. Apple and Samsung aren't perfect but their marketing people are always nice and super helpful.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Nokia has been one of the companies I had most fun working at, you just met the wrong folks.
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    You were on the other side of the table
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      That is obvious from my comment.
      - KennyBlanken 4y ago
        What's obvious is that you still don't Get It. Your experience as an employee is completely irrelevant to how Nokia treated the press. Plenty of companies have workforces that treat each other well but treat their customers, vendors, press, etc like they're subhuman annoyances.
jpalomaki 4y ago
The choice to go with Microsoft eventually saved Nokia. Offloading the Mobile Phone unit to Microsoft for nice $7 billion gave them room to breath. Without this, the losses from mobile phones might have dragged the whole company down and somebody could have acquired them for a small price.
veltas 4y ago
>At the lower-end price range, Chinese OEMs are cranking out a device much faster than, as one Nokia employee said only partially in jest, “the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation.” They are fast, they are cheap, and they are challenging us. Never forget that no matter how brilliant you think your company is, there are five of those companies in China, four of which are brand new and working in a playground of mass production at scales you can't comprehend. If the world ever shifts power and relevance to China the whole West will collectively have a burning platform situation. China's not just "cheap", and when people start trusting them for the occasional higher-quality product, and there's a market for it, they'll come for all of us. Make no mistake, China's industrial prowess will be the major game-changing force in the 2020's.
- mytailorisrich 4y ago
  Nokia was slow. That's part of what got them when Apple launched the iPhone. Chinese manufacturers are already doing top quality products. Huawei phone are/we're on par with the iPhone and were selling like hot cakes until the company was stopped "by any means necessary".
dools 4y ago
Anyone remember Nokia plan B? When that came out I created nokiaplanc.com https://web.archive.org/web/20110218174018/http://www.nokiaplanc.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110218174018/http://www.nokiap... Which was then followed by others creating nokiaplane.com and so on
emptyparadise 4y ago
Windows Phone was quite good, but Microsoft had a terrible case of chronically fucking everything up. They made everyone buy new phones for Windows Phone 8, which did not have any user-visible changes (though it did switch the OS to NT). They took multiple years to add basic functionality like a notification center, and by the time they did, it was too late. They actually shot themselves in the foot and had extremely poor Office support - behind even the competitor platforms that got a proper set of apps. They bought Nokia's phone business and then just gave up completely. What's a shame. I liked the minimalist Zune-like UI - it was perfect for a phone. And it just looked cool.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  I believe Microsoft literally ran an advertisement suggesting that people were spending too much time on their phones. This was an ad for their own smartphones. That's an interesting look into their corporate attitude at the time. You could say that their Office app monopoly sabotaged their web browser (and the web in general) and their desktop monopoly sabotaged their phones (and phones in general) but both the web and smartphones proved stronger in the end.
musesum 4y ago
It was somewhat of a 3-body problem: carriers, oems, and developers. Carriers wanted branding and bundling. OEMs wanted to market a distinction design. Developers wanted a platform. Three cooks with competing tastes. For example: the Moto-Q ran Windows, shoe-horned in some AT&T UX junk, and a huge nubin that stuck out in the middle. It pioneered the ever present "pocket dial." Was thinking of developing for it, but after a few dozen pocket dials, I wanted to go full Frisbee mode. Apple cut through the 3-body problem. They controlled the UX. Such as integrated voice-mail. The carrier didn't mess with the UX. After a few months, Apple provided a decent development environment -- maybe as a response to all the jailbreak apps that we were making. Around that time I was in a focus group. What struck me was a horror story from a Symbian developer. Their toolchain broke after an incremental update. Lost a week dealing with it. That kind-of put me off of Symbian. Maybe the real choice for Nokia was: either the burning platform or the sharks.
- enjo 4y ago
  I worked an application that was distributed as part of the OS for pretty much every nokia symbian phone. We hired quite a few folks who had worked directly for Symbian. The stories were crazy. There were major components people refused to even touch (like messaging) because the code was basically unmaintainable. An aggressive refactor of the entire OS was needed but they never really got comfortable with that. Symbian was originally essentially an operating system targeted at a calculator that outgrew itself several times over. The first modern slab phone I ever saw wasn’t an iPhone… it was a Nokia prototype in like 2005. If they had a real operating system in place maybe Nokia is the world’s most valuable company today.
  - bsimpson 4y ago
    I've heard rumors that Android was originally supposed to be an OS for digital cameras.
    - codeflo 4y ago
      That might be, and before the iPhone reveal, the vision was supposedly to target Nokia-style button phones. The difference could be that the technical foundation was more sound, and also, Google is institutionally capable of large refactorings in a way that I think few other companies are. People forget this, and it’s solved now, but it took Android several years and quite a few iterations of the rendering layer to get smooth scrolling working to the level of the iPhone 1. Look up “Project Butter” if you’re interested. Smooth scrolling is hard, but important for touch to feel perfectly right. I’m convinced that this is one of the places where it mattered that touch screens were an afterthought in the original architecture.
suction 4y ago
The difference is that no "developers are just tools that should be outsourced whenever cheaper" company has a chance against a true software company (which I count Apple towards even though they're more known for the hardware) deciding to enter the competition. Nokia was not a software company at all. They treated their OS and UX as an afterthought and put hardware features first. The same is currently happening in the automotive world with their in-car software. Auto makers aren't thinking of their OSs and UX and the people who develop them as the absolute center point of their industry, when they are.
tekkk 4y ago
I just bought a new Nokia phone. Part from nostalgia since the last one I owned was over 10 years ago, part because it seemed to be good value for its price (300€). Now, having used it for a while, I wouldn't say I'm impressed - design-wise Apple products for example are miles ahead. Yet I don't really have anything to complain about - it does what a modern phone should do. It's pretty big though so it's harder to put into your pocket but I guess that's just how phones are nowadays. I'll be more interested to see though how long the phone will last, my previous OnePlus endured 5 years before the electronics started to show their age. I hope Nokia still has its built-quality and this one will be rocking way past that with couple of drops to concrete in-between.
- sofixa 4y ago
  > its price (300€) > design-wise Apple products for example are miles ahead Well yes, of course. The cheapest iPhone, the SE, which is of an old design and with an old chip, costs 500€+. You can't expect 50%+ price difference to result in no difference in what you get. Premium Android phones closer to iPhone pricing are usually better design-wise.
  - tekkk 4y ago
    Well by design I meant in general its shape and feel. Like the logo at the bottom of the screen, the way it's positioned little asymmetrically between the lighted and darkened area is to me a little jarring. Or why it's there in the first place. And the bevel between screen and the frame, I think it could have been done better. So it's not really "of course, that's how it's supposed to be". I did not like the feel of some of the premium Android phones either, so I think it's just in general the vibe of the phone that I don't find that exciting. It's a fine phone but it feels the people who made the phone were not overly passionate about making it. Which makes sense but I had hoped more distinct personality out of it. Not just another generic mid-range Android phone.
iamflimflam1 4y ago
I can really recommend reading “Operation Elop” - https://asokan.org/operation-elop/ https://asokan.org/operation-elop/ it’s a fascinating look at everything that happened.
- zenogantner 4y ago
  As a former Nokia/HERE employee, I agree. A really interesting read! It is a book originally written in Finnish by two journalists who start out with the question of whether Elop was placed at Nokia with the goal of "handing over" the phone business to MS. Their final answer is "no": it is unlikely that this was the case, according to their research. Most decisions that were taken were rational and explainable, many of them risky but adequate given the desperate situation ... I was not at the company at the time of the memo, having joined in 2012. I do remember the morning when every employee at Nokia got an SMS on their phone saying that the phone business was sold to Microsoft. I was part of the maps division that was later sold to a consortium of German, an event that was way less spectacular ...
walterbell 4y ago
https://maemo-leste.github.io/ https://maemo-leste.github.io/ > Maemo Leste continues the legacy of Maemo ... based on Devuan Beowulf (Debian Buster) and all the supported devices ship with recent mainline Linux kernels. We are currently in the development phase and we are actively searching for developers. For some devices, we have development images available - such as the Nokia N900, Motorola Droid 4, and the PinePhone. There is also a 64bit virtual machine you can use to try out Maemo Leste. Software WIP status: https://leste.maemo.org/Status https://leste.maemo.org/Status
tus666 4y ago
> Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone Apple invented the smartphone. The fact Nokia didn't understand that shows why it failed.
- whizzter 4y ago
  No, they made a smartphone with UI/software first approach and thereby _matured_ it. The 2002 SonyEricsson p800 (and the p900, p910 followups) kinda sniffed on the form-factor (it was basically the same if you disconnected the numpad) and software had all the features incl a "proper" browser (but not nearly the same polish). Sadly it seems it was an isolated "enterprise" group that seems to have been hamstrung later (the followup phones made the form factor worse and the UI improvement was marginal compared to the leap the iPhone took).
- kcb 4y ago
  Apple should get the credit for making the smartphone industry what it is today but there's no need to rewrite history.
bborud 4y ago
They didn't lose when the iPhones and Androids came out. They lost when at their peak because they became complacent. It just took a few years to manifest itself. If the leadership had been worth their salaries they would have known with every fiber of their being that Symbian was already dead. Both due to where hardware was going and because of the rather obvious answer to "how do the next 5 billion people get online". Nokia was "old people in suits". I don't think the company was ever going to be capable of transformation.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  Funny how getting acquihired by Microsoft, pocketing $5bn+, and still making the best phones to this date, is considered "losing".
  - codeflo 4y ago
    Are you talking about individuals or the organization? I’m sure some employees in management “won” financially, there are very few failed companies where that isn’t the case.
  - bborud 4y ago
    You seem to misremember a few things. MSFT paid $7.2bn. After 3 years Microsoft wrote it off as a loss. That amount of money is roughly what the top two smart phone manufacturers make in one week of sales. The industry represents a multi trillion dollar combined market cap due to smart phone sales. Then there is all the new businesses it enabled, creating wealth for developers. Oh yes, Nokia lost. There really isn't any spin one can put on that.
drno123 4y ago
The best phone I owned was Nokia Lumia with Windows phone 7 OS. Too bad Microsoft was led by Ballmer at the time.
Nokinside 4y ago
Nokia's made institutional mistakes that doomed Nokia phones before hiring Elop. (I was there). In a sense Nokia was (organizationally) victim of its own success. During the dumb phone and feature phone era Nokia did everything better than others. Everything from the supply chain management, to the phone design and manufacturing worked so well. Why would you sideline leaders and organizations who build all that and wanted to build on that. When Netflix made the decision to move from mail-based rental to streaming, they did not allow leaders involved in rental business to any meetings involving the company future planning. It's one of the best organizational decisions ever made. Nokia had multiple choices to stay in game at the beginning. Adopt Android and be like Samsung. Create a new internal Linux based computing platform. Instead, Nokia allowed more senior leaders Symbian/Feature phone teams to interfere and sabotage in multiple big and small ways because their teams still made all the money. As a result, the response to Apple and Android was constant internal reorganization and failed American style compensation structure that caused talent to leave the company, not new stuff.
- codeflo 4y ago
  > When Netflix made the decision to move from mail-based rental to streaming, they did not allow leaders involved in rental business to any meetings involving the company future planning. I wonder, who was the “they” that successfully made such a decision? In most places, there wouldn’t be any senior leadership that isn’t “tainted”, so to speak, by the previous business model. Even a freshly appointed CEO is ineffective if not supported by the bulk of the organization. I wonder how Netflix managed to solve this.
  - simonh 4y ago
    Reed Hastings was a founder and principal initial investor. He owned 70% of the company, so it was probably down to him. There was a recent thread where Bezos was quoted as being against bet the company moves. I get where he’s coming from, ideally you’d avoid getting into that position, but faced with a fundamental technological shift like that, sometimes it’s just the right thing to do. As an aside I’ve been at two companies that were sunk by mismanaged bet the company moves. In both cases they actually had plenty of time to change course, but management was so heavily invested in their pet project that by the time reality has punched them in the face hard enough to wake them up, it was too late.
AdamCraven 4y ago
I worked at Nokia as a SWE in Berlin when that email dropped into my inbox. A few days later, it reached the press. We mostly thought ok, fine. What’s next? Before that, we’d been building an app for Nokia N97 handset users, an ever-decreasing market - all the engineers on the team had iPhones. We thought after that email that the next step would be to go on Android. Sure, Nokia would contract a little as it lost its platform, but the platform wasn’t that valuable. It was the great handsets - software wasn’t Nokia’s forte - the leadership structure just didn’t have the vision to bring it together. When the meeting rolled around, we all went to a big conference centre at the heart of Berlin to watch the announcement of the future vision. Stephen Elop appeared on a gigantic screen, talked a bit before laying down the new vision. It was going to be Android, right? It made perfect sense, the ecosystem was growing and aligned to Nokia. But, no - Stephen announced that the future of Nokia was with Microsoft. I walked out of the conference when I heard that - standing outside of the conference hall. I knew two things at that moment. One, there wasn’t going to be a future for Nokia - there was no way Microsoft under Ballmer’s leadership could produce an ecosystem. Secondly, I realised that Elop was still Microsoft’s man - He didn’t make the logical choice that fit with Nokia’s culture - It was going to be a takeover by Microsoft. The project I was working on soon got a new boss. We thought this would align with the new vision of the company. He took us into a room and projected a picture on the wall of a mountaintop surrounded by clouds. He said, “I know you must feel a bit like this, unclear about the direction, clouded about what the future holds. Don’t worry… I also feel like that, too”. The new boss did eventually make a decisive decision - the N97 app that we were building was to be kept, but it was going to be focused on an even smaller niche of the market, N97 users who were pro skiers. I left soon after. The takeover by Microsoft did eventually happen, and the rest is history.
- mxfh 4y ago
  It might even have worked out. Just that Microsoft still doesn't know how to run a proper app store besides the XBox Games one until this day. They flooded this thing with crappy apps anyone could submit for some weird incentives just to get their weird app store metrics up, making the user experience horrible. I wonder what would have happened, if they ran a properly curated platform, where they didn't allow for keyword spamming. At a time Windows Phone had pretty much all the apps you needed back then and a more then decent camera at a competetive price.
jasonhansel 4y ago
It seems like every tech company eventually reaches a similar fate of fading into irrelevance as more innovative competitors emerge (e.g. DEC, BlackBerry, Yahoo). Will today's tech giants suffer the same fate? If so, how soon?
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
Nokia had so many missed opportunities…
jrootabega 4y ago
With all this talk of tech and business, am I the only one who's wondering about safety measures on oil rigs? Can you climb up the legs to stay away from sharks? Do they have life rafts and emergency supplies on the bottom of the legs so you can wait for rescue?
Juliet245 4y ago

266 points by sogen 4y ago

How Stephen Elop destroyed Nokia https://seekingalpha.com/article/916271-how-stephen-elop-destroyed-nokia https://seekingalpha.com/article/916271-how-stephen-elop-des...

jll29 4y ago
Ironically, it looks like Nokia, on the other hand, rescued Microsoft (out of its ideology-obsessed acting) by providing it with a great new CEO.

4pkjai 4y ago

You know it's going to be a bad memo when it starts with a LinkedIn story. Very sad they chose to jump instead of innovating their way out.

cmdrriker 4y ago

Boy, did Nokia elope after this with M$ft phone which was supposed to right Nokia's collective "ship". Elop joined the hallowed hall of fame of abysmal CEO's who ran their firms into the ground. Remember Lumia, Windows Phone 7,8 & 10 blehh. Was it Balmer that hired Elop?

locallost 4y ago
I had a Windows 8 phone from Nokia around 2015 or so and other than the lack of apps it was a phone like pretty much any other at the time or even these days. By that I mean I don't remember anything really bad about it, especially because I mostly use the web anyway. I have no idea why things succeed or fail and so I don't know for this either, but my guess is it was new, but didn't have anything that provoked an interest with mainstream users. And Microsoft does not have many faithful users.
- mmsimanga 4y ago
  I wonder if they threw in the towel too soon. I too had a Nokia Windows phone and I loved it. They were popular in South Africa as Nokia was a recognised brand. Bandwidth is still expensive here so most people just need WhatsApp and Facebook and they are fine. Perhaps the developed market needed more apps.
- donio 4y ago
  It didn't matter how good or bad it was, Windows was a toxic brand on mobile. A very large segment of potential customers was rejecting it off hand based on their desktop Windows experience. They may have been stuck with it on the desktop but on mobile even if they weren't sure what they wanted they definitely knew that it wasn't THAT.

asveikau 4y ago

Here's a contemporaneous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2195520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2195520 I'm surprised how positive HN was about this. I don't remember reading any positive coverage at the time. I personally thought the guy was an idiot. He wound up performing worse than my expectations.

majormajor 4y ago
Looks like that discussion was before Windows Phone was announced as the replacement. E.g. " The idea of a Nokia device running Android is pretty appealing. They've always had good hardware, but Symbian has become a develpment dead-end, and Meego isn't yet here. " Symbian definitely wasn't the way forward. MeeGo wasn't looking like it was gonna be an iOS or Android killer. Elop was right about needing to change horses. Terribly wrong about which one to pick, in retrospect. One could argue that MS fucked that up as much as Nokia, though - this was before MS continually screwed up their WP strategy for several subsequent years, like with the WP8 hard reset. Even best case, though, it was a high-risk/high-reward gamble to try to be "the" WP7 phone instead of one of many Android contenders. Would've been interesting to see them take on Samsung instead of just HTC and zombie Motorola, though.
- varajelle 4y ago
  > Elop was right about needing to change horses. What was wrong with MeeGo? The memo just states: > at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market. But that's not soo bad considering that they started the platform in 2010. It's not like changing to a different platformbat this point would make things faster anyway.
  - oriolid 4y ago
    > What was wrong with MeeGo? The way I remember it was that at the time the management-forced merge of Maemo and Moblin to Meego and the sudden switch from Gtk to Qt were thought to be risky moves and it was well known that Symbian supporters are doing anything they can to sabotage other platforms. Later I was told that N9 was incredibly polished but Meego wasn't that great behind the scenes and would have required massive rewrites if development had continued (which isn't that different from stories about early iOS).

rob74 4y ago

Yeah, and then they jumped from this (allegedly) burning platform to a sinking platform - lot of good it did them...

CobaltFire 4y ago

I had a Nokia N9 as my daily driver for years (2011-2015 if I recall right) and still have it. That phone was absolutely top tier at the time. It lacked some apps but overall it was an amazing phone. Everyone always wanted to know what it was I was using. I wish they had continued pushing it forward.

pengaru 4y ago
It really was a nice device. Great size, took excellent photos for the time, and that AMOLED screen with the always-on clock and black blacks. I'd probably have one today if it were LTE capable. Qt/Sailfish worked well enough too but it definitely had its defects. My biggest complaint was they didn't ship complete source prepared for convenient reproduction of the firmware and out-of-box encouraged flashing of self-made builds. Then I would have been fixing the bugs I tripped over.

tananaev 4y ago

Nokia had a chance, but their developer experience was terrible. They should have invested in it. And also open source. They could have open sourced their platform and compete with Android. What did they do instead? They made an extremely stupid bet on Microsoft, which by that time was even further behind in mobile world than Nokia itself.

toast0 4y ago
Symbian was open sourced at one point and before that, available for others to make phones with, SonyEricsson had a couple, I think there were one or two others as well. The Nokia linux phones were open sourceish as well, in partnership with Intel. Open or closed source wasn't the problem, really.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  > I think there were one or two others as well Motorola A925, Motorola A1000, Motorola RIZR Z8, Motorola RIZR Z10 (aka 'banana') https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Motorola+Z8&t=ffcm&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Motorola+Z8&t=ffcm&iar=images&iax=...
panick21_ 4y ago
If your platform is trash just opening it up doesn't matter. And their linux based phones were pretty open but they had no power in the organization and having an open source platform with no phones is pointless.

bawolff 4y ago

People pick on nokia for making the wrong choice, but i dont think they were wrong. Apps are important and they are a bit of a winner takes all market (or at least half). Nokia was screwed and i think the memo correctly identifies that. Unfortunately identifying the problem is only half the battle. Figuring out what to do next is the other half, and that is where nokia failed.

panick21_ 4y ago
As everybody at the time was pointing out. If you are unwilling to make your own platform (Maemo/MeGoo) work, then just make Andoird phones. It wasn't really tha difficult and many people had been screaming about this since 2009. But instead they just continued with the Symbian feature phones that nobody wanted.

ajb 4y ago

I remember thinking at the time that is was a great metaphor, and then reading on HN that its straight from some business school text on how to motivate change.

handojin 4y ago
"Leading Change" by John Kotter as far as I recall.
- asplake 4y ago
  A great metaphor, unless it’s used inappropriately, which is like 99% of the time. And Kotter is the excuse for a ton of change-by-imposition too. As someone interested in change, I kinda wish that the 1990’s hadn’t happened. There is a lot that’s good and exciting in the organisation development space, but that metaphor and Kotter’s model are not representative of it.

wly_cdgr 4y ago

By the time they admitted this to themselves, it was like a decade too late to do anything about it

jeswin 4y ago

Switching to Microsoft seemed like the best decision at that time. Those criticizing are underestimating the software engineering effort required to build a modern OS and the app ecosystem. But what about Symbian and Ovi? I've had a bunch of Symbian devices with the Ovi store. They were simply not in the same league; the apps were basic because the development tools were just not good enough; and targeted basic low-end experiences. Windows Phone was the most modern OS out there (including the dev tooling); and had the best shot at competing with the Androids. I also bought the N800 (which ran Maemo) from Nokia in 2007. It was ok - but it never looked like a phone platform.

zibby8 4y ago
Why was Windows a better choice than Android? You mentioned that Windows had “the best shot of competing with Android”, but why was that desirable? The adage, if you can’t beat them, join them comes to mind.
- jeswin 4y ago
  Maybe they concluded (rightly) that there are no margins in Android devices. Samsung is a rare exception, but by then the signs were clear that manufacturing (including the R&D around it) was shifting to East Asia.
  - _ea1k 4y ago
    Yeah, the only people making money on Android were the ones with great hardware and brand recognition.
    - p_j_w 4y ago
      So a company like Nokia then?
- hedora 4y ago
  Oddly, Windows Phone 8 had the best user experience of any phone I've ever used, by far. I'd still be on it if it existed and wasn't laden with Windows 10 style telemetry. I don't care about having a wide selection of apps. I care about having a low-distraction, well organized UI that's optimized for specific tasks. For instance, opening an entry in the address book produced a cross-social-network feed of everything they sent you recently (including call logs, email, SMS, twitter, etc...). That was fantastic, but prepared to have your mind blown: Typing an address into the navigation app and hitting enter (or tapping on a destination) immediately started navigating. 8.1 was strictly a UI regression. I heard 8.5 was even worse.

eslaught 4y ago

I'm not saying this is a great letter, but he wasn't wrong. I owned both Symbian and Maemo devices, and the experience (both to use and develop) really was this bad. That's not to say everything about it was bad, or that there was nothing to like (as HN comments have often pointed out, there was), but it didn't hold a candle to iOS, or even Android. (And Android in those days was pretty hideous.) Now what Nokia did in response... that may not have been right either. But they had to do something.

skavi 4y ago
I think it’s simple enough to see why Nokia thought Windows would be the right choice. It was far more polished than Android at the time. It ran well on cheap hardware. And they would have Microsoft backing them.
- addicted 4y ago
  I owned a WP7 and an Android around that time. Any WP7 polish advantage was skin deep at best. It took approximately 3-5 interactions for something to break in 3rd party apps and maybe twice that in first party apps.
  - jimmySixDOF 4y ago
    What apps ?! That store they had was practically vacant so the phone basically ran on what it came installed with. Android was not as slick at that time but at least you had a ton of software and cooked ROMs
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  As someone who owned a Windows phone around that time, and knew others who did as well, the shared opinion was that it was a pile of crap. Nokia went for Windows because of the acquisition target, not because of quality of the OS. With that, they prioritized business strategy over product quality, and we all know what happened after.
  - 4y ago

seibelj 4y ago

My mother was one of 8 children born to Finnish immigrant parents in America. As an adult she used the local Mormon temple to research her ancestors, connected with them on Facebook, then re-established the family back into the old country. She then visited the matriarch and lived with her for 2 weeks as my distant cousins visited her and made their acquaintance. Most recently my cousin, whose daughter has an extremely debilitating incurable illness, emigrated back to Finland on his sick daughter’s request. The whole family is attempting to learn Finnish but it is apparently a struggle compared to other languages they learned. Totally off-topic, but Nokia is a sad story and Finland is a wonderful country with wonderful people.

Raziarazzi 4y ago

When compared to Android devices, Windows devices have more computing power, more memory, and a more powerful CPU. This is useful if you have a fat client with a lot of data for things like real-time visualizations and you want your devices to keep up with your users as they complete their tasks. However, all of this extra power means that the battery drains faster and the devices run hotter. When using a unit that is mounted or placed in a docking station with a constant power supply, this is not an issue.

ggm 4y ago

Great hw engineers let down by less than stellar software decisions. Nokia owned a significant slice of late stage pre internet telephony infrastructure level equipment, bridged over to the emerging mobile world and .. kinda missed the boat when Apple happend in with iPhone and then Android's emergence killed them. A lot of people loved their handsets. Just not enough in any single market to make up for some bad decisions. A similar fate: I wonder if the myriad of vendors who glued to the Japanese market regretted it, as that model shrank as internet rose?

kevin_nisbet 4y ago
The network / infrastructure side of Nokia still exists. When the handsets division was split or sold off, the network division continued as Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), and was rebranded to Nokia Networks I think after the merger with Alcatel-Lucent. So for the big mobile wireless telco's, the big players are basically Nokia, Erricson, and Huawei these days. My experience with Nokia's equipment did reflect the burning platform memo, but all the big players had lots to be desired in my experience with them. Note: I've been out of the industry for several years, so I'm not totally up to date on the vendors.
- tuukkah 4y ago
  > the network division continued as Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), and was rebranded to Nokia Networks It wasn't just a rebranding. Nokia wisely bought Siemens out from the Networks joint venture already in 2013, before selling the phones to Microsoft. Then in 2015, they acquired Alcatel-Lucent (including Bell Labs) to the mix. This way, they stayed in Fortune Global 500 even without the phone business. And nowadays there are new Nokia branded feature phones as well as Android phones and tablets: https://www.nokia.com/phones/ https://www.nokia.com/phones/
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
<<A lot of people loved their handsets. That included me. I had fond memories of an near indestructible 3310 and I genuinely wish I did not miss the boat on N900 ( I just landed in US and phone was the least of my concerns then ). <<Just not enough in any single market to make up for some bad decisions. Sadly, clearly there are decisions that can sink even a dominant power in the market. He is not HP's Fiorina. He did have some wins in previous positions, which makes a person like me question whether the failures at Nokia was little more than a sabotage. Obviously, we will likely never really know.

aj7 4y ago

Is this a website that hasn't been updated in four years?

thematrixturtle 4y ago
The memo is from 2011, so that hardly matters?
- aj7 4y ago
  I'm really having trouble understanding why this is even relevant in 2022. Who cares what the excuses and problems were within Nokia in 2011? Is Nokia's inability to keep up with cell phone technology in 2011 and important part of technical history? Business history? If so, why? I didn't even really get the burning oil rig analogy. It was a pretty melodramatic way of describing being beaten by a competitor, which happens all the time in business history. Then I looked around the whole website, and there was interesting data. Which ended in 2018. The whole website seems abandoned.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    << I'm really having trouble understanding why this is even relevant in 2022. It is not intended to be flippant, but I believe this one time the entirety of the relevance boils down to the following: “Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it.” << It was a pretty melodramatic way of describing being beaten by a competitor, which happens all the time in business history. Yes, and I am certain MBAs review Nokia rise and fall in great detail as a result.
  - manmal 4y ago
    Many people loved Nokia and I guess still feel nostalgic about the brand. My first phone was a Nokia, and it was super reliable and, though quirky, enjoyable. Nokia also was the most successful European high tech brand. Losing it felt disheartening at the time. If not for Elop, I might now develop apps for Meego instead of iOS. So, I guess, there‘s a moral to the story: don’t let bad hires run your company to the ground?
  - 4y ago

dshep 4y ago

Nokia suffered from lack of direction from the top... They had both symbian and maemo, both officially blessed, but incompatible. Symbian was the past and maemo had promise, so what did management do... a hail mary bet on microsoft? It came out of nowhere and seemed desperate, I believe the market's reaction reflected this sadly.

pjmlp 4y ago
It wasn't also that well received inside, as we were pretty much a UNIX shop.

koiueo 4y ago

Nokia N9 was the best phone I have ever owned. To these days their gesture navigation implementation is the best. And they had Swype keyboard preinstalled. Speaking of apps: Here maps, SoundHound, amazing mail client and calendar... Gosh I miss that phone. I used mine for about 3 years, I think, and sold it for more than a half of its original price in literally a couple of hours (which means my price was too low). By the time the software started showing its age: no banking apps, browser failing to display more and more modern sites... I believe, they should have pushed with Meego. With vendor support their OS could've been a hit.

alfiedotwtf 4y ago
> Nokia N9 was the best phone I have ever owned. I'll counter with the Nokia N900. > I believe, they should have pushed with Meego. With vendor support their OS could've been a hit. So say we all.
- pengaru 4y ago
  > I'll counter with the Nokia N900. I've never understood this about N900 fans. My experience with the N9 was great, and never left me wishing I could go back to something more like a Sharp Zaurus with modern cell connectivity. What is it that makes the N900 appealing? Is it strictly the physical keyboard? So the N950 would have been the N900 killer? Or was there something else about it?
  - pluijzer 4y ago
    The N900 was my favorite phone by far. Most of the reason come as a programmer, not all users might value them. First of all ot was a true Linux phone. Running a derivative of Debian, complete with apt etc. Most of the apps on it, even the app to make a phone call where preexisting open source Linux applications with a nice mobile UI. An UI that was clean and consistent without the need off branding that other platforms suffer from. I could simply write bash script for it to extend its functionality. For example I remember writing a script that would record and sent recordings of phone calls to my server. I installed Pidgin the chat client and used it to chat with my friends when MSN was still popular in my county. It truly felt like having a PC in your pocket. The keyboard was the best keyboard ever made in my opinion. I could actually type blind on it sensing a message without looking at the phone at all. I still own 3 N900's with the hope of every managing the find the enthusiasm to rig in the another phone or a pi.

tschwimmer 4y ago

I'm pretty sure the metaphorical platform had already fully melted down by 2011, they just hadn't realized it yet. Nokia was not dead on January 9th, 2007 but maybe by 2008 when the App Store launched or perhaps in 2010 when FaceTime launched with the iPhone 4. At that time Nokia made very solid utility devices that admirably did their jobs. What they failed to ever make and what I suspect they failed to realize that Apple was making was a desire object - something that was more than the sum of its parts. The N9000 and the N9 were technically very good (on paper even better than the iPhone) but they lacked the integrated and holistic design decisions that made the iPhone special.

makeitdouble 4y ago
> Apple was making was a desire object - something that was more than the sum of its parts. It's harder to do now with iPhone's market size, but I think we're looking at it with rosy glasses. Where Apple succeeded is having a viable touch interface. That's where RIM, Nokia, Fujitsu, Compaq and countless other device makers failed at. Including Nokia. Otherwise the iPhone was buggy and crashing all the time, battery life was trash compared to other phones or the iPod, I don't know anyone actually relying on it to make "serious" calls (we kept our feature phones) it would straight ignore some of the incomming calls and we just were willing to go through all of that to get a usable touch UI.
- kergonath 4y ago
  > I don't know anyone actually relying on it to make "serious" calls (we kept our feature phones) it would straight ignore some of the incomming calls I know there was a lot of noise about dropped calls and all that in the US, but this was not a thing here in Europe. I would assume that the issue was at least as much with AT&T than with the iPhone. Here there were controversies about a lot of things (for example, it became caught up in the electro-sensitivity pseudoscience argument, there was also some noise about the glass front being brittle), but not reception. At least not before the iPhone 4.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago

rektide 4y ago

I wish I could speak more to the experience directly. I eventually got a n900 used but after the fall, & I was a college kid with no real need for it. What was thrilling & exciting & totally different was that the n900 was a computer. A regular computer. Trying to learn how to make GNOME an ok experience, on very low res mobile. But we knew essentially what it was; it obeyed & played within the regularinux desktop environment world. it was a linux desktop environment, and that gave it open potential. Everything is/was orchestrateable/controllable by dbus, the user's control plane. All the apps exposed themselves over IPC. It played in the connected desktop world as best of breed. The failure of this situation to talk about how intensely stupid it was to give up on the platform is farcically bad. What was here was incredible. It needed improvement & work but the architecture was immensely omni-potential, more capable clearly & growing well known existing tech well, rather than alternate reality symbian or then counter respondes danger or android. weird new alternates to actual linux desktop. Selling out to MS was one of the most shortsighted sorry pathetic givings ups, in a time of vast growth with fantastically little belief in yourself & your people doing good. There was no technical reason to refocus. (But bad numbers, as most players saw). They should have kept going. This was a decision made by people who had faint sense, gailed to appreciate hope, missed clarity on what creating value was like, what value was. This was a pathetic ignorant stupid business decision, to end Maemo. Things rocked, that was a great could do possibility, the OLE COM competitor kf DBus was winning, the market just didnt see yet.

vincnetas 4y ago

Please update the title with [2011]

guai888 4y ago

I use to work for HTC. I was there when iPaq launched and saw the birth of first PocketPC phone, a black and white screen phone for Sagem/Mitsubishi. I would like to share my opinion on this issue of tech disruption. From my point of view, Nokia did not have enough resource and time to meet the challenge which was brought about by Apple and Google/Android. All the tech companies need at least one dominating advantage in order to survive. This dominating advantage needs to crush all challenger in that specific area. Apple has operating system. Samsung has display. Chinese phone makers have CCP. Nokia had nothing that matter. They had two choices, create one or buy one. They were not able to do either so they fade away.

rasz 4y ago
>Nokia had nothing that matter Nokia had extremely high hardware quality. Indestructible Nokia 3310 meme and all that.
- guai888 4y ago
  High hardware quality is always important but it is not enough to build a moat to stop the competition. I remember a Siemens quality manager told me the high hardware quality of Siemens's phone when HTC was building a phone for Siemens. High hardware quality did not save Siemens's phone business either.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

shp0ngle 4y ago

I mean the Nokia-Microsoft phones were great Everyone who had one said so. It was the best of all the “third option” OS devices. All the WebOSes and such. But the market just doesn’t want a third option… even back then the Android and iOS were ossified

Ndymium 4y ago
Were they? I had a Lumia with WP7 and it had nearly zero apps, zero multitasking (accidentally click on the Bing button and your app state is lost) and near zero things to do. I remember a very visible metaphor for the whole device was the calendar's month view: it literally showed "Lorem ipsum" for the days you had some events. Supposedly due to performance concerns, and this lasted to WP8 as well. The only cool thing was the grid but that only goes skin deep. Otherwise I hated the phone. Maybe WP8+ devices were better but WP7 was a piece of crap. I didn't want to try WP8 and got myself a Jolla instead.
black3r 4y ago
The market's only thought about the OS is what features it supports. And lots of them are provided by 3rd party apps. Lots of people switch from Android to iPhone and back. People mostly just want to keep using their TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, ... It's the app developers (and their companies) who wouldn't be happy with a third option, because the existing two cause enough problems, just think about how many frameworks for cross-platform app development exist, they were created for a reason..., and even with them you still have to do OS-specific stuff to tackle different app store policies, different privacy features, updated APIs breaking your app on new OS versions... or you can have two entirely separate teams working on two separate codebases and try to keep the feature parity...

jll29 4y ago

I liked my Nokia phones - they were ergonomic but not innovative; they were great "just a phone"-type phones. My wife even purchased a re-make of one of their classic phones recently. But I loved my BlackBerries - they were the perfect tool for email/chat/calling and nothing else, the perfect complement to a laptop, whereas iPads partially overlap with both mobile phones AND laptops in terms of functionality, which is why at airports you now see so many people carrying three devices instead of one. So while I have fond memories of Nokia, I don't miss their devices, but I'd give my metaphorical leg for getting my BB back.

BossingAround 4y ago
Agreed on BB. I was interested when they moved to Android, and then they died. There still isn't a good, high-end Android with a keyboard from a company I know I can trust.
- grumpyprole 4y ago
  I was interested that Blackberry didn't use Android - their QNX based OS had a lot of potential. At the time, my Android phone would get hot and drain the battery whenever a batch process decided to reindex my media.

ARandomerDude 4y ago

> We too, are standing on a “burning platform,” and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour. Aaaand that's where I would have decided to get a new job. I've survived two different "roll up your sleeves, plebs, the management set our house on fire" scenarios. Never again.

wodenokoto 4y ago

Looking at Nokia stock over the past 3 decades, you’d be hard pressed to pinpoint where the burning memo happened or say if it killed the company (I’d say it didn’t, the value is pretty flat from before the memo until now. It did kill the handset division). However, it is easy to find the iPhone. https://g.co/kgs/MVvYKr https://g.co/kgs/MVvYKr (click more -> max)

worik 4y ago

The comments here mostly have the flavour of "RIP Nokia". Nokia got out of the phone business in 2014. They still exist and are a mjor force in networking equipment. True, they are of less interest to people here as they do not make many hackable consumer devices, but an obituary is premature

Apocryphon 4y ago

Has any Nokia B9 user also tried Sailfish OS? Is it a proper successor to the Harmattan Meego distro the N9 had?

cycomanic 4y ago
> Has any Nokia B9 user also tried Sailfish OS? Is it a proper successor to the Harmattan Meego distro the N9 had? Yes I have it installed on a Sony Xperia. It's not my main phone (I have a work phone that I mainly use), but I would say it works very similar to the N9 so yes a proper successor. The major downside is a relatively small selection of native apps and that the platform did not progress as much as it could have. I would recommend that anyone who has a phone that can run it should try it out.
saidinesh5 4y ago
I ported it to a couple of Android devices and used it as a daily driver for a year or so. It is technically a successor, but it just wasn't there. App story was worse than N9 (without considering alien dalvik/anbox/waydroid). Some of the technical decisions they've made meant more headaches for developers (Old gcc version. Old Qt version. Repacking Fedora arm packages just to run on sfos wasn't fun). The browser was based on a very old and buggy Firefox version. At the end of the day, it wasn't even fully open source.. so you always had to play catch up with their updates just to keep your mods working. Despite all that, the community was vibrant and very talented. Oddly enough, it was also smoother to use and feels more well designed than Android on the same device. Even little things like double tap to wake, being easier for one hand usage
oriolid 4y ago
I had the Jolla phone back in the day. It was kind of similar to N9, but nowhere the almost magical experience N9 PR1.3 was. The lack of apps was starting to show, the on screen keyboard wasn't that good, the browser was just bad (to be honest, N9 wasn't keeping up with the standards either) and the hardware didn't do anything to improve the experience.

rishabhd 4y ago

Operation Elop is also a fascinating read. https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52c5 https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52...

phasersout 4y ago

I covered quite a few Nokia reviews back in the day and Nokia was by far the most arrogant company to deal with. Every company has it's rules and regulations regarding review devices but with Nokia you had to sign up to three forms just to do your work. Partly with ridiculous rules like a missing charger or cable was up to 50 Euros or so. And they let you very much know where in the pecking order you were regarding your publication and who would get the devices first and last. This was in Germany. Everybody at Nokia strived for not just being difficult but outright jerks to deal with... so when Apple came around and the disaster started to unfold it was quite the show to watch... "ah Nokia would like to invite you to this and that shebang..." ah no thanks I think I'm good. I'm not the guy who carries a grudge but Nokia really made it personal with their whole behavior. Apple and Samsung aren't perfect but their marketing people are always nice and super helpful.

pjmlp 4y ago
Nokia has been one of the companies I had most fun working at, you just met the wrong folks.
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  You were on the other side of the table
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    That is obvious from my comment.
    - KennyBlanken 4y ago
      What's obvious is that you still don't Get It. Your experience as an employee is completely irrelevant to how Nokia treated the press. Plenty of companies have workforces that treat each other well but treat their customers, vendors, press, etc like they're subhuman annoyances.

jpalomaki 4y ago

The choice to go with Microsoft eventually saved Nokia. Offloading the Mobile Phone unit to Microsoft for nice $7 billion gave them room to breath. Without this, the losses from mobile phones might have dragged the whole company down and somebody could have acquired them for a small price.

veltas 4y ago

>At the lower-end price range, Chinese OEMs are cranking out a device much faster than, as one Nokia employee said only partially in jest, “the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation.” They are fast, they are cheap, and they are challenging us. Never forget that no matter how brilliant you think your company is, there are five of those companies in China, four of which are brand new and working in a playground of mass production at scales you can't comprehend. If the world ever shifts power and relevance to China the whole West will collectively have a burning platform situation. China's not just "cheap", and when people start trusting them for the occasional higher-quality product, and there's a market for it, they'll come for all of us. Make no mistake, China's industrial prowess will be the major game-changing force in the 2020's.

mytailorisrich 4y ago
Nokia was slow. That's part of what got them when Apple launched the iPhone. Chinese manufacturers are already doing top quality products. Huawei phone are/we're on par with the iPhone and were selling like hot cakes until the company was stopped "by any means necessary".

dools 4y ago

Anyone remember Nokia plan B? When that came out I created nokiaplanc.com https://web.archive.org/web/20110218174018/http://www.nokiaplanc.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110218174018/http://www.nokiap... Which was then followed by others creating nokiaplane.com and so on

emptyparadise 4y ago

Windows Phone was quite good, but Microsoft had a terrible case of chronically fucking everything up. They made everyone buy new phones for Windows Phone 8, which did not have any user-visible changes (though it did switch the OS to NT). They took multiple years to add basic functionality like a notification center, and by the time they did, it was too late. They actually shot themselves in the foot and had extremely poor Office support - behind even the competitor platforms that got a proper set of apps. They bought Nokia's phone business and then just gave up completely. What's a shame. I liked the minimalist Zune-like UI - it was perfect for a phone. And it just looked cool.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I believe Microsoft literally ran an advertisement suggesting that people were spending too much time on their phones. This was an ad for their own smartphones. That's an interesting look into their corporate attitude at the time. You could say that their Office app monopoly sabotaged their web browser (and the web in general) and their desktop monopoly sabotaged their phones (and phones in general) but both the web and smartphones proved stronger in the end.

musesum 4y ago

It was somewhat of a 3-body problem: carriers, oems, and developers. Carriers wanted branding and bundling. OEMs wanted to market a distinction design. Developers wanted a platform. Three cooks with competing tastes. For example: the Moto-Q ran Windows, shoe-horned in some AT&T UX junk, and a huge nubin that stuck out in the middle. It pioneered the ever present "pocket dial." Was thinking of developing for it, but after a few dozen pocket dials, I wanted to go full Frisbee mode. Apple cut through the 3-body problem. They controlled the UX. Such as integrated voice-mail. The carrier didn't mess with the UX. After a few months, Apple provided a decent development environment -- maybe as a response to all the jailbreak apps that we were making. Around that time I was in a focus group. What struck me was a horror story from a Symbian developer. Their toolchain broke after an incremental update. Lost a week dealing with it. That kind-of put me off of Symbian. Maybe the real choice for Nokia was: either the burning platform or the sharks.

enjo 4y ago
I worked an application that was distributed as part of the OS for pretty much every nokia symbian phone. We hired quite a few folks who had worked directly for Symbian. The stories were crazy. There were major components people refused to even touch (like messaging) because the code was basically unmaintainable. An aggressive refactor of the entire OS was needed but they never really got comfortable with that. Symbian was originally essentially an operating system targeted at a calculator that outgrew itself several times over. The first modern slab phone I ever saw wasn’t an iPhone… it was a Nokia prototype in like 2005. If they had a real operating system in place maybe Nokia is the world’s most valuable company today.
- bsimpson 4y ago
  I've heard rumors that Android was originally supposed to be an OS for digital cameras.
  - codeflo 4y ago
    That might be, and before the iPhone reveal, the vision was supposedly to target Nokia-style button phones. The difference could be that the technical foundation was more sound, and also, Google is institutionally capable of large refactorings in a way that I think few other companies are. People forget this, and it’s solved now, but it took Android several years and quite a few iterations of the rendering layer to get smooth scrolling working to the level of the iPhone 1. Look up “Project Butter” if you’re interested. Smooth scrolling is hard, but important for touch to feel perfectly right. I’m convinced that this is one of the places where it mattered that touch screens were an afterthought in the original architecture.

suction 4y ago

The difference is that no "developers are just tools that should be outsourced whenever cheaper" company has a chance against a true software company (which I count Apple towards even though they're more known for the hardware) deciding to enter the competition. Nokia was not a software company at all. They treated their OS and UX as an afterthought and put hardware features first. The same is currently happening in the automotive world with their in-car software. Auto makers aren't thinking of their OSs and UX and the people who develop them as the absolute center point of their industry, when they are.

tekkk 4y ago

I just bought a new Nokia phone. Part from nostalgia since the last one I owned was over 10 years ago, part because it seemed to be good value for its price (300€). Now, having used it for a while, I wouldn't say I'm impressed - design-wise Apple products for example are miles ahead. Yet I don't really have anything to complain about - it does what a modern phone should do. It's pretty big though so it's harder to put into your pocket but I guess that's just how phones are nowadays. I'll be more interested to see though how long the phone will last, my previous OnePlus endured 5 years before the electronics started to show their age. I hope Nokia still has its built-quality and this one will be rocking way past that with couple of drops to concrete in-between.

sofixa 4y ago
> its price (300€) > design-wise Apple products for example are miles ahead Well yes, of course. The cheapest iPhone, the SE, which is of an old design and with an old chip, costs 500€+. You can't expect 50%+ price difference to result in no difference in what you get. Premium Android phones closer to iPhone pricing are usually better design-wise.
- tekkk 4y ago
  Well by design I meant in general its shape and feel. Like the logo at the bottom of the screen, the way it's positioned little asymmetrically between the lighted and darkened area is to me a little jarring. Or why it's there in the first place. And the bevel between screen and the frame, I think it could have been done better. So it's not really "of course, that's how it's supposed to be". I did not like the feel of some of the premium Android phones either, so I think it's just in general the vibe of the phone that I don't find that exciting. It's a fine phone but it feels the people who made the phone were not overly passionate about making it. Which makes sense but I had hoped more distinct personality out of it. Not just another generic mid-range Android phone.

iamflimflam1 4y ago

I can really recommend reading “Operation Elop” - https://asokan.org/operation-elop/ https://asokan.org/operation-elop/ it’s a fascinating look at everything that happened.

zenogantner 4y ago
As a former Nokia/HERE employee, I agree. A really interesting read! It is a book originally written in Finnish by two journalists who start out with the question of whether Elop was placed at Nokia with the goal of "handing over" the phone business to MS. Their final answer is "no": it is unlikely that this was the case, according to their research. Most decisions that were taken were rational and explainable, many of them risky but adequate given the desperate situation ... I was not at the company at the time of the memo, having joined in 2012. I do remember the morning when every employee at Nokia got an SMS on their phone saying that the phone business was sold to Microsoft. I was part of the maps division that was later sold to a consortium of German, an event that was way less spectacular ...

walterbell 4y ago

https://maemo-leste.github.io/ https://maemo-leste.github.io/ > Maemo Leste continues the legacy of Maemo ... based on Devuan Beowulf (Debian Buster) and all the supported devices ship with recent mainline Linux kernels. We are currently in the development phase and we are actively searching for developers. For some devices, we have development images available - such as the Nokia N900, Motorola Droid 4, and the PinePhone. There is also a 64bit virtual machine you can use to try out Maemo Leste. Software WIP status: https://leste.maemo.org/Status https://leste.maemo.org/Status

tus666 4y ago

> Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone Apple invented the smartphone. The fact Nokia didn't understand that shows why it failed.

whizzter 4y ago
No, they made a smartphone with UI/software first approach and thereby _matured_ it. The 2002 SonyEricsson p800 (and the p900, p910 followups) kinda sniffed on the form-factor (it was basically the same if you disconnected the numpad) and software had all the features incl a "proper" browser (but not nearly the same polish). Sadly it seems it was an isolated "enterprise" group that seems to have been hamstrung later (the followup phones made the form factor worse and the UI improvement was marginal compared to the leap the iPhone took).
kcb 4y ago
Apple should get the credit for making the smartphone industry what it is today but there's no need to rewrite history.

bborud 4y ago

They didn't lose when the iPhones and Androids came out. They lost when at their peak because they became complacent. It just took a few years to manifest itself. If the leadership had been worth their salaries they would have known with every fiber of their being that Symbian was already dead. Both due to where hardware was going and because of the rather obvious answer to "how do the next 5 billion people get online". Nokia was "old people in suits". I don't think the company was ever going to be capable of transformation.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hypertele-Xii 4y ago
Funny how getting acquihired by Microsoft, pocketing $5bn+, and still making the best phones to this date, is considered "losing".
- codeflo 4y ago
  Are you talking about individuals or the organization? I’m sure some employees in management “won” financially, there are very few failed companies where that isn’t the case.
- bborud 4y ago
  You seem to misremember a few things. MSFT paid $7.2bn. After 3 years Microsoft wrote it off as a loss. That amount of money is roughly what the top two smart phone manufacturers make in one week of sales. The industry represents a multi trillion dollar combined market cap due to smart phone sales. Then there is all the new businesses it enabled, creating wealth for developers. Oh yes, Nokia lost. There really isn't any spin one can put on that.

drno123 4y ago

The best phone I owned was Nokia Lumia with Windows phone 7 OS. Too bad Microsoft was led by Ballmer at the time.

Nokinside 4y ago

Nokia's made institutional mistakes that doomed Nokia phones before hiring Elop. (I was there). In a sense Nokia was (organizationally) victim of its own success. During the dumb phone and feature phone era Nokia did everything better than others. Everything from the supply chain management, to the phone design and manufacturing worked so well. Why would you sideline leaders and organizations who build all that and wanted to build on that. When Netflix made the decision to move from mail-based rental to streaming, they did not allow leaders involved in rental business to any meetings involving the company future planning. It's one of the best organizational decisions ever made. Nokia had multiple choices to stay in game at the beginning. Adopt Android and be like Samsung. Create a new internal Linux based computing platform. Instead, Nokia allowed more senior leaders Symbian/Feature phone teams to interfere and sabotage in multiple big and small ways because their teams still made all the money. As a result, the response to Apple and Android was constant internal reorganization and failed American style compensation structure that caused talent to leave the company, not new stuff.

codeflo 4y ago
> When Netflix made the decision to move from mail-based rental to streaming, they did not allow leaders involved in rental business to any meetings involving the company future planning. I wonder, who was the “they” that successfully made such a decision? In most places, there wouldn’t be any senior leadership that isn’t “tainted”, so to speak, by the previous business model. Even a freshly appointed CEO is ineffective if not supported by the bulk of the organization. I wonder how Netflix managed to solve this.
- simonh 4y ago
  Reed Hastings was a founder and principal initial investor. He owned 70% of the company, so it was probably down to him. There was a recent thread where Bezos was quoted as being against bet the company moves. I get where he’s coming from, ideally you’d avoid getting into that position, but faced with a fundamental technological shift like that, sometimes it’s just the right thing to do. As an aside I’ve been at two companies that were sunk by mismanaged bet the company moves. In both cases they actually had plenty of time to change course, but management was so heavily invested in their pet project that by the time reality has punched them in the face hard enough to wake them up, it was too late.

AdamCraven 4y ago

I worked at Nokia as a SWE in Berlin when that email dropped into my inbox. A few days later, it reached the press. We mostly thought ok, fine. What’s next? Before that, we’d been building an app for Nokia N97 handset users, an ever-decreasing market - all the engineers on the team had iPhones. We thought after that email that the next step would be to go on Android. Sure, Nokia would contract a little as it lost its platform, but the platform wasn’t that valuable. It was the great handsets - software wasn’t Nokia’s forte - the leadership structure just didn’t have the vision to bring it together. When the meeting rolled around, we all went to a big conference centre at the heart of Berlin to watch the announcement of the future vision. Stephen Elop appeared on a gigantic screen, talked a bit before laying down the new vision. It was going to be Android, right? It made perfect sense, the ecosystem was growing and aligned to Nokia. But, no - Stephen announced that the future of Nokia was with Microsoft. I walked out of the conference when I heard that - standing outside of the conference hall. I knew two things at that moment. One, there wasn’t going to be a future for Nokia - there was no way Microsoft under Ballmer’s leadership could produce an ecosystem. Secondly, I realised that Elop was still Microsoft’s man - He didn’t make the logical choice that fit with Nokia’s culture - It was going to be a takeover by Microsoft. The project I was working on soon got a new boss. We thought this would align with the new vision of the company. He took us into a room and projected a picture on the wall of a mountaintop surrounded by clouds. He said, “I know you must feel a bit like this, unclear about the direction, clouded about what the future holds. Don’t worry… I also feel like that, too”. The new boss did eventually make a decisive decision - the N97 app that we were building was to be kept, but it was going to be focused on an even smaller niche of the market, N97 users who were pro skiers. I left soon after. The takeover by Microsoft did eventually happen, and the rest is history.

mxfh 4y ago
It might even have worked out. Just that Microsoft still doesn't know how to run a proper app store besides the XBox Games one until this day. They flooded this thing with crappy apps anyone could submit for some weird incentives just to get their weird app store metrics up, making the user experience horrible. I wonder what would have happened, if they ran a properly curated platform, where they didn't allow for keyword spamming. At a time Windows Phone had pretty much all the apps you needed back then and a more then decent camera at a competetive price.

jasonhansel 4y ago

It seems like every tech company eventually reaches a similar fate of fading into irrelevance as more innovative competitors emerge (e.g. DEC, BlackBerry, Yahoo). Will today's tech giants suffer the same fate? If so, how soon?

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

Nokia had so many missed opportunities…

jrootabega 4y ago

With all this talk of tech and business, am I the only one who's wondering about safety measures on oil rigs? Can you climb up the legs to stay away from sharks? Do they have life rafts and emergency supplies on the bottom of the legs so you can wait for rescue?

Juliet245 4y ago