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I once read an interview with Anssi Vanjoki, who was one of the top executives at Nokia. He said indeed that when he first held an iPhone he knew it was over fo

I once read an interview with Anssi Vanjoki, who was one of the top executives at Nokia. He said indeed that when he first held an iPhone he knew it was over for Nokia. If I remember correctly, Nokia had good tech for smart phones, but no vision or courage to drive the market in that direction. It was not a well-managed company.

Veliladon 3y ago
That's the problem with being an established market leader. You're so terrified of blowing up your own market that you're afraid to disrupt with innovation.
- gumby 3y ago
  This is the topic of the famous book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” (one of the three or four business books actually worth reading, and unfortunately also the source of the overused word “disruption” in business)
  - snwt 3y ago
    Could you by any chance list the other books? Just finished reading The Innovator's Dilemma. Phenomenal read.
    - gumby 3y ago
      Two other important ones for entrepreneurs: - “Crossing the Chasm” in the end this book is really just a single drawing, but the text explains the problem: why early traction not only doesn’t imply future growth, but if misunderstood, can kill any future growth. Also very important for investors and people at big companies. - I really like the underrated “Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation” by Utterback. It’s kind of a complement to the other two, full of amazing market hacks to get a new product established. For example, 120 years ago, electric companies would put on demo sessions for the public, so the gas companies would send people with metal bars in their sleeves to short out the electrical systems (in a cloud of sparks of course!). So Edison (IIRC) got the clever idea to run the electric wiring through the gas conduit, both “for safety” and to take the gas out of service. We often don’t understand what the true characteristics and affordances of a new technology are — and neither do the customers. That’s what this book is about.
      - snwt 3y ago
        Thank you for the recommendation. I got into a rut in terms of just doing programming and reading technical content about a year ago. So, I started reading from a list of books mentioned in various HN posts. As I slowly make my way through the list, I feel both like an idiot for not having read these books earlier, and at the same time thoroughly happy that there are such beautiful concepts out there to learn that's not just programming or systems design. Hadn't heard about the Utterback one! Seems like it would be right up my alley.
macintux 3y ago
People have often indicated we would have consolidated on iPhone-like devices in Apple’s absence, but I’m not convinced. Apple was unique: they were willing to bet the company on a single form factor, they had a small but loyal and vocal fan base, and they had their own retail stores to give people the opportunity to experience the phone. Anyone else would have made it just one of a half dozen phones and it would have languished in a dusty corner of one of the crappy operator stores where no one knew how to use it or had any reason to push it.
- jakobson14 3y ago
  Read up on handspring. Their phone was the full modern smartphone years before the iphone. They're the ones who met with Larry Page and got him to make a mobile version of Google.com. Jobs met with handspring back when apple was focused on the mac PC. Jobs stood up at the whiteboard and drew a mac with all the aspects of a person's life around it. Handspring's CEO or CTO stood up and drew a handspring phone and all the same photos, music, www, etc around it. "Except you'll carry this with you everywhere you go." It was at that moment jobs realized he needed to build a phone and what it needed to look like. Thing is, while handspring got there ~5 years before jobs did, they didn't have anything to leverage. They were a small startup and completely at the mercy of the telco carriers with their existing cellular subscribers, who then proceeded to force changes to the interface and apps. Handspring actually had to risk it all on their vision of what a phone should be. Jobs had a healthy apple with a healthy mac computer lineup and billions in the bank. When apple went to the telcos all jobs had to do was ask "do you want access to our millions of ipod users?" and he got his way. Handed the concept and executed with essentially zero risk.
  - jolux 3y ago
    > When apple went to the telcos all jobs had to do was ask "do you want access to our millions of ipod users?" and he got his way That's actually not true, all of the telcos rejected the pitch except AT&T. There was considerable risk in it from their perspective, because Apple wanted total control over the user experience: no carrier logos on the handset, no carrier logos in the operating system, no preinstalled carrier software.
smugma 3y ago
I have a cousin who still fondly talks about how great Nokia was in its heyday. Great engineers, leading edge hardware and innovation, leading supply chain, etc. It’s always weird to hear. He blamed Nokia’s inability to come up with a decent mobile OS and get behind it. Horace Dediu has written a lot about both Apple and Nokia. I recall him saying Nokia did some things really well. I think they were caught totally flat footed, and the Symbian debacle did them in
bandergirl 3y ago
Nokia had vision and creativity, don’t forget the N-Gage, the first phone/smartphone/console hybrid. I think it just lacked in software investment. Nobody thought it was necessary or even possible to deliver that kind of experience on phones. The iPhone came out when Windows XP was the default PC experience for most of the world, why would anyone need anything like iPhoneOS on a damn phone? Talk about overkill.
foobarian 3y ago
There was some fancy 6 inch or so Nokia PDA from around that time that was supposed to be amazing. It had all the good hacker features - it ran Linux, it had driver support, you could ssh from it, etc. I remember turning it on and seeing kernel printk logs scrolling, followed by the plain X cross-thatch, and then some home grown window manager where you had to use a stylus to move the mouse cursor to click on stuff. That kinda summed up Nokia for me, developing 80s tech in the 2000s.
- JimDabell 3y ago
  Their S60 phones were based on Symbian and had a web browser based on WebCore and JavaScriptCore at the end of 2005. By all accounts they were good, hackable, general-purpose mobile devices. Then Steven Elop left Microsoft to become Nokia CEO; decided to move everything to Windows Phone; publicly pointed out everything was on fire; crashed the stock price by 85%; sold Nokia to Microsoft at a massive discount; and then finally rejoined Microsoft. If it wasn’t an act of corporate sabotage designed to obtain Microsoft an established phone vendor subsidiary at a fraction of its cost, then it’s hard to see how he could have done a better job on purpose.
  - karmakurtisaani 3y ago
    Well, Nokia also got a good chunk of cash for the phones division, and it didn't exactly turn into a cash cow for MS. So, maybe Nokia got the better end of that stick in the end.

Veliladon 3y ago

That's the problem with being an established market leader. You're so terrified of blowing up your own market that you're afraid to disrupt with innovation.

gumby 3y ago
This is the topic of the famous book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” (one of the three or four business books actually worth reading, and unfortunately also the source of the overused word “disruption” in business)
- snwt 3y ago
  Could you by any chance list the other books? Just finished reading The Innovator's Dilemma. Phenomenal read.
  - gumby 3y ago
    Two other important ones for entrepreneurs: - “Crossing the Chasm” in the end this book is really just a single drawing, but the text explains the problem: why early traction not only doesn’t imply future growth, but if misunderstood, can kill any future growth. Also very important for investors and people at big companies. - I really like the underrated “Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation” by Utterback. It’s kind of a complement to the other two, full of amazing market hacks to get a new product established. For example, 120 years ago, electric companies would put on demo sessions for the public, so the gas companies would send people with metal bars in their sleeves to short out the electrical systems (in a cloud of sparks of course!). So Edison (IIRC) got the clever idea to run the electric wiring through the gas conduit, both “for safety” and to take the gas out of service. We often don’t understand what the true characteristics and affordances of a new technology are — and neither do the customers. That’s what this book is about.
    - snwt 3y ago
      Thank you for the recommendation. I got into a rut in terms of just doing programming and reading technical content about a year ago. So, I started reading from a list of books mentioned in various HN posts. As I slowly make my way through the list, I feel both like an idiot for not having read these books earlier, and at the same time thoroughly happy that there are such beautiful concepts out there to learn that's not just programming or systems design. Hadn't heard about the Utterback one! Seems like it would be right up my alley.

macintux 3y ago

People have often indicated we would have consolidated on iPhone-like devices in Apple’s absence, but I’m not convinced. Apple was unique: they were willing to bet the company on a single form factor, they had a small but loyal and vocal fan base, and they had their own retail stores to give people the opportunity to experience the phone. Anyone else would have made it just one of a half dozen phones and it would have languished in a dusty corner of one of the crappy operator stores where no one knew how to use it or had any reason to push it.

jakobson14 3y ago
Read up on handspring. Their phone was the full modern smartphone years before the iphone. They're the ones who met with Larry Page and got him to make a mobile version of Google.com. Jobs met with handspring back when apple was focused on the mac PC. Jobs stood up at the whiteboard and drew a mac with all the aspects of a person's life around it. Handspring's CEO or CTO stood up and drew a handspring phone and all the same photos, music, www, etc around it. "Except you'll carry this with you everywhere you go." It was at that moment jobs realized he needed to build a phone and what it needed to look like. Thing is, while handspring got there ~5 years before jobs did, they didn't have anything to leverage. They were a small startup and completely at the mercy of the telco carriers with their existing cellular subscribers, who then proceeded to force changes to the interface and apps. Handspring actually had to risk it all on their vision of what a phone should be. Jobs had a healthy apple with a healthy mac computer lineup and billions in the bank. When apple went to the telcos all jobs had to do was ask "do you want access to our millions of ipod users?" and he got his way. Handed the concept and executed with essentially zero risk.
- jolux 3y ago
  > When apple went to the telcos all jobs had to do was ask "do you want access to our millions of ipod users?" and he got his way That's actually not true, all of the telcos rejected the pitch except AT&T. There was considerable risk in it from their perspective, because Apple wanted total control over the user experience: no carrier logos on the handset, no carrier logos in the operating system, no preinstalled carrier software.

smugma 3y ago

I have a cousin who still fondly talks about how great Nokia was in its heyday. Great engineers, leading edge hardware and innovation, leading supply chain, etc. It’s always weird to hear. He blamed Nokia’s inability to come up with a decent mobile OS and get behind it. Horace Dediu has written a lot about both Apple and Nokia. I recall him saying Nokia did some things really well. I think they were caught totally flat footed, and the Symbian debacle did them in

bandergirl 3y ago

Nokia had vision and creativity, don’t forget the N-Gage, the first phone/smartphone/console hybrid. I think it just lacked in software investment. Nobody thought it was necessary or even possible to deliver that kind of experience on phones. The iPhone came out when Windows XP was the default PC experience for most of the world, why would anyone need anything like iPhoneOS on a damn phone? Talk about overkill.

foobarian 3y ago

There was some fancy 6 inch or so Nokia PDA from around that time that was supposed to be amazing. It had all the good hacker features - it ran Linux, it had driver support, you could ssh from it, etc. I remember turning it on and seeing kernel printk logs scrolling, followed by the plain X cross-thatch, and then some home grown window manager where you had to use a stylus to move the mouse cursor to click on stuff. That kinda summed up Nokia for me, developing 80s tech in the 2000s.

JimDabell 3y ago
Their S60 phones were based on Symbian and had a web browser based on WebCore and JavaScriptCore at the end of 2005. By all accounts they were good, hackable, general-purpose mobile devices. Then Steven Elop left Microsoft to become Nokia CEO; decided to move everything to Windows Phone; publicly pointed out everything was on fire; crashed the stock price by 85%; sold Nokia to Microsoft at a massive discount; and then finally rejoined Microsoft. If it wasn’t an act of corporate sabotage designed to obtain Microsoft an established phone vendor subsidiary at a fraction of its cost, then it’s hard to see how he could have done a better job on purpose.
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  Well, Nokia also got a good chunk of cash for the phones division, and it didn't exactly turn into a cash cow for MS. So, maybe Nokia got the better end of that stick in the end.