19 ms·

Nokia made too many phones

251 points by shubhamjain 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
IAMMidway 3y ago
Yes they did. I miss them. But thats creative destruction. Nokia tried to do everything and ended up doing nothing. They could not compete with the joint assault by iPhone and Android.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Joint assault of iPhone, Android and hostile takeover (intended or not!) by Microsoft.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  Or by Microsoft. Nokia never understood the less-is-more thing that Apple are so good at. Hundreds of phones and an overcomplicated OS wuth political and technical problems - Symbian - were the result, not the cause, of a company that lacked focus and direction.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    Symbian was such a strange thing, from its history to dominance to irrelevant. A real outgrowth of 90s software culture.
  - jll29 3y ago
    It's interesting that Microsoft never succeeded with a smartphone, given that their other hardware products enjoy a decent reputation (keyboards, mice, tablets); I suspect it's because of the software side - stuck with the desktop metaphor and windows, which makes no sense on smartphones.
    - wvenable 3y ago
      At the time, Microsoft's software development was a bit of mess. But Windows Phone didn't have a desktop metaphor. Recently I had the opportunity to try one that was sitting in desk for a few years and it was pretty interesting and snappy. But they redesigned their mobile OS so many times, had no good developer experience, and came in late enough that it was all doomed.
    - CRConrad 3y ago
      > windows, which makes no sense on smartphones. The last version, the one on the Lumias, was actually quite OK on a phone from all I've heard -- and living in Finland, I knew more than a few people who used those back in the day. That's preciely why Windows 8 sucked so much on the desktop; it was intended to have as much as possible of the look-and-feel of Windows Phone. Windows 8 sucked on computers; apparently not so much on phones.
Ezhik 3y ago
That cliff drop after they Nokia phones division got bough out by Microsoft is a big oof.
kakoni 3y ago
> It’s interesting to see how Nokia succumbed to the bad strategy that had almost killed Apple in ‘97. Well, here is one take; > Nokia’s ultimate fall can be put down to internal politics. In short, Nokia people weakened Nokia people and thus made the company increasingly vulnerable to competitive forces. When fear permeated all levels, the lower rungs of the organisation turned inward to protect resources, themselves and their units, giving little away, fearing harm to their personal careers. Top managers failed to motivate the middle managers with their heavy-handed approaches and they were in the dark with what was really going on. [1] [1] https://alumnimagazine.insead.edu/who-killed-nokia-nokia-did/ https://alumnimagazine.insead.edu/who-killed-nokia-nokia-did...
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  Funny how well that applies to Microsoft and its internal battle over UI layers for the past two decades.
- Erratic6576 3y ago
  I like to think that it was Microsoft which destroyed Nokia from the inside in order to make Windows phone great at last https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/microsoft-nokia-deal-a-great-idea-that-came-too-late-and-killed-windows.html https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/microsoft-nokia-deal-a-...
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    Nokia was dead long before Microsoft thought about buying them.
  - jbverschoor 3y ago
    Nokia was long gone when they were acquired. They were beaten by RIM/BB They tried gaming, didn’t succeed. Later on messaging, but didn’t have the platform (ping)
    - secondcoming 3y ago
      Blackberry come nowhere close to beating Nokia. It was Apple.
lkadjal 3y ago
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hasmanean 3y ago
There was also conventional wisdom which had to be abandoned before the iPhone came out. Nokia phones had 1 week battery life. They were extending it to one month. The iPhone had a < 1 day battery life. Ultimately consumers decided that given the app experience available on the iPhone they could live with that. This was a bet Nokia would have never made—-they were not in the user interface business. The fact that Apple—who was not in the phone business—-entered their market was bonkers. But once you make your own silicon anything is possible. Plus they had already done the iPod.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  Nokia phones had a one-week battery life if you weren't using them like a smartphone. We had the Nokia 7650 in our family and if you used it as a camera, the battery life would definitely not be a week. The conventional wisdow that had to be abandoned was that a phone was a brick that you had in your pocket and that did text messages and phone calls, instead of it being a computer that you might sometimes use for text messages and phone calls.
  - hasmanean 3y ago
    So the breakthrough happened when Apple shrunk the computer into a phone, not when Nokia grew the phone…? Interesting. I remember writing apps for the iPhone and the biggest hurdle to getting it submitted was sizing the screens for the display variants. There would have been no chance of developing an app for the Nokia ecosystem with all the different screen sizes your app would have to support. Even downloading an app or ringtone required going through all these scammy websites and you had to enter your exact Exact model number and pay somehow…then they would text you a link or something. Apple really cleaned up the ecosystem with the App Store. It made apps safe to download.
    - pjc50 3y ago
      > So the breakthrough happened when Apple shrunk the computer into a phone, not when Nokia grew the phone…? I think the true breakthrough was actually the iPod; the true "first" Apple phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR#E1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR#E1 was a flop, partly because they allowed the various collaboration partners to hamstring its features. The iPhone took everything in-house. > Even downloading an app or ringtone required going through all these scammy websites and you had to enter your exact Exact model number and pay somehow…then they would text you a link or something. > Apple really cleaned up the ecosystem with the App Store. It made apps safe to download. Correct. People (rightly) hate on the restrictive and profiteering nature of the App Store, but the telcos were even worse.
bborud 3y ago
Nokia could both make too many phones and fail for other reasons. The article doesn’t say Nokia failed because it made too many phones. However, I do remember the first time my wife got an iPhone. Her Nokia was breaking down and she was trying to decide which Nokia would replace it. She spent a week comparing models. In the end she said “fuck this” and got an iPhone. What’s really funny was that Malcolm Gladwell did a TED talk about the importance of segmenting the shit out of markets - just as the market pushed back and demonstrated he was talking nonsense.
- amarant 3y ago
  Her Nokia was breaking down? What warzone had she been to? I remember dropping my old Nokia down a stairwell once. When I fetched it there was a crack - in the tile floor! Of course this was one of the older models, I think the marketing material included the phrase "supports SMS!" or something to that effect.. Good times!
  - bborud 3y ago
    I think it was the Nokia N70. The keyboard got dicky over time, the slide was rough and the camera had stopped working. Not all Nokia phones were built like tanks. My phone of choice in those days were the tiny Sony-Ericsson phones. I really liked the K750i and before that the T610. Not as rugged as the Nokias, but smaller and nicer.
    - amarant 3y ago
      Oh yeah, that was after the "tank era" of Nokia phones. I think the last real Nokia tank was the 3310, or maybe it was just such a success that all tanks after it have been forgotten (by me at least) I'm struggling to remember the model name of the absolute unit of a phone I dropped down that stairwell, but it was older than the 3310 at least(I later replaced it with the smaller and lighter 3310)
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Its funny they made to many phones but once they had the N900 they didn't make enough. And didn't care about the platform. And then didn't make another one for many more years, until the platform was dead anyway.
t_mann 3y ago
This just feels like ex-post rationalization. It's easy to come up with a story why something failed after the fact, but that doesn't mean the theory has any weight. If you want this to be interesting, put some skin in the game and make a prediction about currently successful companies based on your theory. Otherwise, I'll have to assume that what you'd have written in 2005 was how Nokia's approach was superior to eg Palm's (fyi, dominant in the 'handheld' market in the 90's, in steady decline throughout the 00's, already had an app ecosystem of sorts).
- regularfry 3y ago
  "Great at hardware, rubbish at software" was a very common refrain even at the time, and that was a manifestation of the same internal dysfunction. What wasn't clear was whether anyone could come along and fill the gap, or when they might. Because so much is software-based now, my counter would be that most companies that would have died because they failed to get their software operation in order have already done so.
  - t_mann 3y ago
    According to that theory, we should have expected Windows Phone to be a success, no? Microsoft was (and is) killing it at software, especially consumer-facing OS. If anything, your argument makes me even less convinced that we have any good explanation for Nokia's failure.
    - regularfry 3y ago
      MS was also internally dysfunctional, but focused on the business market for phones, and at the time of the iPhone was being roundly laughed at for the Zune. It was just different market segmentation. I'm not saying that all you need for success is competent software delivery, but lacking it in this sort of arena was definitely harmful. And I'd also question the "killing it at software" statement: remember that Windows Mobile (not Windows Phone, you've got to go to the product iteration before to make the dates line up) was catastrophically hamstrung by an inability to ship anything decent. I had a Windows Mobile 5 device myself, and it was rubbish. They were so focused on making it so you could run a spreadsheet on your phone that they forgot the thing had to be usable. The OS wasn't actually much good until post 6.5, well after the iPhone launch, and they never got to release the iteration that would have brought it up to scratch. They realised very late that they needed to focus on consumers, not businesses, because they could see that businesses would and did buy consumer devices if they were good enough, but the reverse would almost never happen. Once the iPhone was released and they realised how wrong they'd been they made a hard pivot to get Metro out, but they were starting from a very long way behind. More evidence against "killing it at software": this was the Windows Longhorn/Vista era. We all know how that went. Microsoft managed to survive for a long time on desktop and office suite monopoly momentum without being able to stick the landing on very many releases at all, compared to how much activity was going on. Even though the launches would go OK they'd often get killed later by internal politics. That was actually the era that got me to swear off the Windows ecosystem: you'd learn enough of an exciting new product to be useful, only for it to get sidelined with no updates a couple of months later. It was just exhausting. Half of me thinks that MS was lucky to survive Ballmer at all.
tetrisgm 3y ago
Nokia was incredibly political. But they were comfortably smug too. When we made games for Nokia platforms, we'd hear horror stories from engineers. Extreme management to engineer ratio (like 1 for 5 or less), non stop meetings and slide decks. One strategy that the engineers came up with to have peace was to get two or more project managers involved, so they could sest in meetings and calls all day and let people dev. They were also the biggest player in Finland. The best logistics. The most market share. They had so many devs in their rollodex. Clearly, they could ship an iPhone killer. Clearly they understood everything about mobile and knew everyone. They even had a cloud project (Ovi) that predated iCloud. I remember meeting them back in the NGage days and thinking who are these clowns making a portrait screen for games, with no dpad, and a phone you hold sideways. No focus on apps (Palm and other handheld had plenty of homebrew and emulators). The company was a juggernaut that could ship the old Nokia bricks, but never adapt to be good at software, or have a good mobile OS. It's a shame, because honestly the best industrial design and UX people I've seen were there.
- drunkenmagician 3y ago
  Do you have an example of Nokia UX you feel was better than the alternatives at the time? I was a long time Nokia user (ex telco / mobile messaging) and I don’t recall anything cutting edge on the UI/UX front. Their industrial design was good though (mostly).
  - tetrisgm 3y ago
    The Nokia N9 had a really polished UI that wad all gestures based. It wasn't until the iPhone X that we'd see this again.
- RandallBrown 3y ago
  I remember wanting an NGage so bad. I had a whole plan to get my gameboy and all the games together to trade in so I could get one from GameStop. Then I went and actually tried one. Having to remove the battery to swap out games was too much for me.
  - 3y ago
pavlov 3y ago
Around 2003 I did the art direction (mostly pixel-pushing...) for a game that shipped on a Nokia model. I have no recollection of what the phone looked like, but it was part of the "lifestyle" category described in this article. It wasn't one of the craziest form factors, just a candybar phone in pretty plastic with one of those early square color screens. Nokia Design sent a massive moodboard PDF, something like 100 pages, with endless visual ideas for what seemed practically like an Autumn/Winter lineup of plastic gadgets. But it was all about the moods. The actual phone's usability and software were a complete afterthought. Those were to be plugged in eventually by lowly engineers somewhere along the line, using whatever hardware and software combination would happen to fit the bill of materials for this lifestyle object. The game I designed was a "New York in Autumn" themed pinball. There were pictures of cappuccino, a couple walking in the park, and all the other clichés. It fit the moodboard exactly, the game shipped on the device, everyone was happy. Nobody at Nokia seemed to care about the actual game though. Of course the implication with these fashion devices was that they were almost disposable, and you'd buy a new one for the next season. This would be great for Nokia's business. Unfortunately their design department seemed consumed by becoming a fashion brand and forgot that they're still a technology company. Everyone knows what happened next.
- diggan 3y ago
  > Of course the implication with these fashion devices was that they were almost disposable, and you'd buy a new one for the next season. This would be great for Nokia's business. Unfortunately their design department seemed consumed by becoming a fashion brand and forgot that they're still a technology company. Everyone knows what happened next. Maybe Nokia was simply too early for the vision, or the execution was somehow lacking in some other aspect, as Apple made basically the same bet but seemed to have pulled it off. Maybe the design wasn't designy enough.
  - hasmanean 3y ago
    They brought a plastic case to a machined metal fight.
    - deleted 3y ago
kwhitefoot 3y ago
> Nokia Made Too Many Phones Too many for what? Would you really want the history of mobile phones to be merely the antiseptic aesthetic and walled garden of the iPhone? Why do you think people are buying folding phones, flip phones, phones with screens on the front and the back. So they ultimately failed, so what? The vast majority of companies of all sizes fail after some time.
thriftwy 3y ago
Nokia could not stick with a single platform, once their heirloom Symbian became inadequate they caved. Like the absolute majority of corporations, they did not understand platforms. Platforms require decade-long thinking, instead of "Q4 this year". N900 with its Maemo was pretty good phone. Too bad Nokia could not develop on the success. Then they have MeeGo and then the disastrous Windows Phone. MS had the same problem with Windows Mobile - Windows Phone 7 - Windows Phone 8. 15 years later, the Debian + Firefox + APT platform on which N900 was based is still alive and requires surprisingly few maintenance. If they went with it they will have a solid, hassle-free platform which could compete with early Android, especially as they could easily make it run Android apps as well.
blackoil 3y ago
It is easy to find such reasons now that Nokia has failed. But they ruled for a decade in part because of too many phones. They had phone at each budget range and demographic. What they missed was a move from hardware centric world to software centic. The attempts with Linux etc were too little too late.
- hasmanean 3y ago
  HW is hw and sw is SW…and never the twain shall meet. Hardware problems are low dimensional ones…”optimize this variable (usually clock speed), make this block functionally correct.” Software problems are high dimensional ones, especially the problem of designing an API the community will adopt. “What set of functions can I provide that will do X…and a subset of X…and a potential superset of X, on hardware generation H and H+1 and so on…all while taking security and OS privilege levels into account…” Oh and we must bow to aesthetics and programmer fashion as well as getting stuff into their hands as fast as possible…plus tools and documentation…plus outcompete everybody else in the world trying to steal the same devs as us. Sw is what it is because it has so many degrees of freedom.
- twelvechairs 3y ago
  Yes - iphone came out 2007 and Nokia was still the leading mobile phone company by sales in 2010, and Symbian had the largest OS share to 2012. In my view it was really the two big OS decisions they made - first in 2010 they ditched Symbian to focus on 'Meego' (a partnership with Intel) then in 2012 they ditched all of that for Windows Phone. Through those 2 years they moved outright owning the globally most popular OS to being the secondary manufacturer for the third best supported OS. And not trusted by users to provide any continuity.
  - roneythomas6 3y ago
    Android overtook Symbian globally in early 2011. In major markets Android overtook Symbian sometime in late 2009-2010.
- neom 3y ago
  This is exactly right imo. I was a teen during peak Nokia, and I always thought it was very clever how they had a phone for everyone, and more importantly, they really signaled to the consumer via features and marketing. I was in the UK and there was a time for a couple of years when all we talked about was football and Nokia models, we all had phones, some of us had TWO phones because we inherited an old business device from a parent etc. It was a super fun time from what I recall!
thih9 3y ago
A different POV, I'm bored of today's uniform, do-it-all smartphones and I enjoy using limited-purpose ergonomic devices with character. I often carry a dedicated camera, an e-ink reader, or a handheld console. I liked the colorful iPhone 5C, or smartphones with hardware keyboard - I miss this sometimes.
- kilroy123 3y ago
  Yup, I agree. I have an iPhone and it's no big deal. A bit yawn at this point. One of my all time favorite phones was the sidekick ii. Such a fun phone with character.
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
Too little respect for Nokia in this article. Their legacy for ever will be the unbreakable and no need to charge phone.
enqk 3y ago
Nokia never cared about input latency enough, their phones were dogs to operate..
helsinkiandrew 3y ago
> Nokia Made Too Many Phones Perhaps compared with today, but these weren't complex smart phones marketed globally. Global network technology wasn't as homogenous as now. Phones were usually sold by the phone networks who had specific requirements - technical and marketing. Different phones were also used to price phones differently around the world - from rural Africa to the rich west.
- nottorp 3y ago
  > these weren't complex smart phones marketed globally Yeah, they had like 4 "established" operating systems and on top of that some experimental OSes that only came out on a model or two and changed every year. Can't make a smart platform with apps when you have 7 current platforms.
ssivark 3y ago
I’m very suspicious of some post-hoc generalization that rhymes a little too conveniently with modern fads. Nokia made great phones during the mid/late 2000s. The N9 was a piece of beauty that continued to have a more cohesive and thought out experience than Android (and even iOS, in some ways) well into the mid 2010s. It was simply a joy to use. Why Nokia then fell apart might have a little something to do with Stephen Elop and Microsoft, I suspect.
- roneythomas6 3y ago
  By the time Nokia N9 came out Android was the dominant smartphone OS. Nokia even cancelled releasing N9 in select markets due to this. Not to mention the api’s were severely lacking compared to Android. Maybe if they released it in 2008-2009, there might have been a chance. So the choice was either to go Android or Windows and Microsoft paid them 1billion to be stay Windows Phone exclusive.
- parl_match 3y ago
  The N9 was too little, too late. Microsoft didn't destroy Nokia, they failed to rescue it. I think maybe the only company that could have saved Nokia was Google, and they weren't about to compete with their huge network of Android VARs. Why Nokia fell apart is because they didn't take the iPhone or Android seriously, repeatedly would say things like "nobody is going to spend $400 on a phone after subsidy", and had tremendous infighting over Symbian, MeeGo, and Windows - tons of engineers and management absolutely didn't want to learn the new thing. And then, Microsoft, not wanting to pour billions of dollars into what was already becoming a bitter duopoly fight, gave up. I have an N9 and an labeled windows phone dev kit from post-nokia on my shelf, both devices I used for a year+. They were fantastic.
- Paianni 3y ago
  S60 5th edition was a disaster for Symbian's and Nokia's reputation, especially the N97 incarnation. Its main issue was a lack of GPU acceleration for the GUI which wasn't really resolved until the Belle era, by which point it was far too late to resurrect.
benrutter 3y ago
> Not only the variety of devices was creating an incoherent user experience, but it also made it almost impossible to create an app market. I'm not sure I agree with this take - it seems to be based on the idea of comparing Nokia phones to something like the iPhone. But at the time these phones were all made, the experience of using a phone was: - Answer or reject incoming calls with the "answer/decline" button - Read and send messages using the screen and keyboard - That's basically it Nokia created so many freaky looking phones, in part at least, because they were just phones, and the narrowness of their use meant the novelty designs didn't have a seriously problematic effect of their usablility. I don't see any evidence that they (or anyone other than apple) even considered the possibility of an "app ecosystem" - so criticising them for not making one viable seems a little leftfield. Take something like the iPhone - all of the sudden you're not looking at a phone but instead a touch screen computer someone can use for banking, messaging, browsing, shopping etc. Supporting all those different use cases provides way more contraints on Apple's design than Nokia ever needed to consider. Which is a really long way of saying, Nokia phones where just a different category of things to iPhones, and we shouldn't compare them.
- rcarmo 3y ago
  Actually, large telcos had a decently profitable business setting up their own app stores and charging customers for game and ringtone/wallpaper downloads. And most of the devices that could actually do that properly were Nokias (MIDP was OK, but Nokias outsold MIDP phones ringtone-wise for an order of magnitude).
  - Eduard 3y ago
    > Actually, large telcos had a decently profitable business setting up their own app stores and charging customers for game and ringtone/wallpaper downloads. I don't remember app stores or game downloads existing up until iPhone and Android, let alone being profitable. There was MIDP and J2ME, but they were so niche, and I'm only aware of them because of an practical course during university, circa 2008. But maybe your regional context is different from mine (Germany).
rcarmo 3y ago
Nokia was a formidable logistics machine. As a smartphone product manager back in the 3G days, they never ceased to amaze me, because they would ship logo and firmware variants of the same device to different customers, at what I already knew to be a fairly high factory customization cost. They paid the price for part of that (the Symbian platform was never really unified so much as it was shared to smithereens), but they were notable in what they did.
lxgr 3y ago
Arguably they failed more due to the phone they didn't make (in time): One running Android.
tecleandor 3y ago
Well, Samsung is making even more. Although 10 years ago they said that 56 models a year were too much [0], they still released ~52 in 2022 [1] [0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/11/samsung-decides-56-smartphones-a-year-is-too-many-will-cut-lineup-by-30/ [1]: https://thelec.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=3574
usr1106 3y ago
That's not a convincing analysis. It's disputable whether Nokia was a master in logistics, in fashion/design or in RF-technology or all of them. However, it's undisputed that they did not master software. Management had no idea about software development, the tooling was awkward. Well, and for OSes, Symbian was from another decade, Linux too little, introduced too slowly because management believed in Symbian being the cash cow. It worked as long as phones were manufactured in their own factories with high margins. Once manufacturing was outsourced to low cost countries and software became more important, they were lost. Disclaimer: I was a software developer there for 10 years, but understood to leave well before the bitter end.
looping8 3y ago
The comparison to Apple is strange - Apple is literally only serving one phone and that's their brand's stand-out thing. Competitors like Xiaomi, Motorola, etc, all make different models. Of course 57 models a year is too much but few other companies make only one phone with minor variations. Nokia was working in a market with fast changing technology and higher number of competitors, they had to keep innovating and marketing new stuff.
zubairq 3y ago
I can confirm this as I worked at Nokia in the Helsinki head office in 2006 and they made so many phones, which were not tested properly and were just thrown out to different market segments. It was obvious at the time that they had no passion or craftsmanship for their products anymore (as a company, as there were still some brilliant individuals)
- hgomersall 3y ago
  It's interesting. I was exposed in a low level kind of way to Nokia technology around 2002, working for a former subsidiary of Nokia that had been sold. Then it seemed there was a legacy of technical excellence - Nokia pcbs were instantly recognisable for their neatness and having all the components on one side. Did that get lost at some point or did I have a flawed impression?
  - radomir_cernoch 3y ago
    I was only a user of Nokia 6150 and subsequent phones. Around me, they were considered as technically perfect devices.
  - zubairq 3y ago
    I don’t know what happened at Nokia as I was only there for a year, but nice to hear that they had nicely laid out PCBs in 2002. Shows me that someone had pride in their work
gumby 3y ago
This reminds me of Dell (are they still around? :-) with a million different indistinguishable SKUs. And when you went to the web site you had to categorize yourself by their criteria before you could even look at the offerings, which always made me feel that I was going to be ripped off. How do I know if I am a small business or medium business or whatever?
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Such a silly pattern. I wonder how many people just bailed out on Dell, at the very top of the sales funnel, just because those stupid segmentation questions. Customer: I have $1,000 burning a hole in my pocket and want to buy your laptop right now! Dell: Whoooa there, buddy, hold on. First tell me if you're a Small Business so I know what site to send you to...
liendolucas 3y ago
There is a very interesting documentary on Nokia on YouTube. I can't remember if it was already suggested here on HN in a previous thread. Here's the link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_1t15PNb468 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_1t15PNb468
gumby 3y ago
Jobs made great lemonade out of Apple's slimmed down line in his famous 2x2 matrix ({consumer,pro}x{desktop, portable}). Who cared that they also had the mac mini that didn't fit in? Everybody understood it (and it encouraged people to upsell themselves to "pro").
spullara 3y ago
It was crazy that you couldn't buy a phone with all the features. Had to find that perfect combination of features for you.
benedictevans 3y ago
Nokia thought that phones would be like cars. Most car companies have dozens of models with different characteristics and prices, and that's fine. Even BMW has 20(!) top-level model categories. Nokia was selling devices all the way from high-end camera/phones for $$$ right down to $10 (unsubsidised) with two week battery life for emerging markets. I think you can argue that 50 was too many, but 10 or 20 was reasonable and still is - plenty of successful Android OEMs have ranges like that. The real shift in phone design and in the range was that the screen took over the whole front of the device. That meant there was much less scope for different shapes and form-factors, and since you were no longer using most of the front for casing and keys there was less to design anyway. Meanwhile all the actual phones ran either Series 40, the classic feature phone OS that won them half the entire market as 'easy to use', or series 60, the smartphone OS, that was an actual platform but problematic (and fragmented) in lots of ways.
- earnesti 3y ago
  Personally, I think Nokia didn't really think anything. The management was just incompetent and they didn't have any real strategy. They had 100 teams of engineers each doing their own phone model, and were just too lazy to fire unnecessary teams and focus. Somewhere deep down they knew, that it is stupid way to do things. However the money kept flowing in, so who cares.
  - tonyhart7 3y ago
    I think its fine, the problem is they are too late to use Android OS which is favour their own OS like Symbian or whatever their PDA use at the time if only they can copy iphone fast enough they would be a "samsung" what is today
    - otherme123 3y ago
      This was it for me. I gave up on Nokia when everybody around was using their Android messaging apps while I had no apps for my Nokia, or they were a lesser version (like whatsapp). Then, if I recall correctly, they went with Windows, so every move was forcing their users into a lonely corner.
DanAtC 3y ago
I had never heard of Vertu. They still exist today in some form, hawking some real pricey crap: https://vertu.com/ https://vertu.com/ Looking at the Nokia-era models, none of them support LTE so they're basically worthless these days. People are still trying to sell them on eBay for 100s, though. What a waste.
kevsim 3y ago
As a fresh-out-of-university engineer in the earlier 2000s, I had a ton of fun working at Nokia and the sheer number of devices was actually part of that. It was a blast having a stack of all of the weird and whacky devices on your desk at any time. I remember visiting some sort of internal museum in Finland at some point where you could basically see all of the devices they'd ever made. Mind blowing. Of course getting to the software we were working on to actually run on the things was a different matter...
ijhuygft776 3y ago
All large phone companies make too many phones from the consumer point of view (consumers just don't know it apparently)... It's just a marketing strategy.
LeoPanthera 3y ago
A company makes one successful product and never moves on: Should have made more products. A company makes lots of different types of product, constantly iterating and experimenting with wild ideas: Should have made fewer products. You can't win, I guess.
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CSharpSteve 3y ago
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grishka 3y ago
Yes, Nokia made too many phones, and that was not a bad thing. Other phone manufacturers made some wild concept models too, sometimes. Phone design in general was much more diverse in the 00s. I actually enjoyed flipping through phone catalogs and reading reviews. Compare that to today, when every single phone out there is an awkwardly huge glass slab with minor design variations on the back side. > it also made it almost impossible to create an app market. All those Nokia phones form two categories in terms of the software they ran: the firmware that was basically the same across all Nokia non-smart phones (S40 it was called IIRC?), and Symbian. Both were capable of running J2ME apps, and Symbian also supported native ones.
fuzzy2 3y ago
Maybe! But here's another take: everyone else makes too few phones, nowadays. Exactly one, that is. Well, maybe two, if you count folding phones. After Palm and then HP failed with webOS, it's now all the same. How come this is the future? It's freaking boring.
- simonh 3y ago
  The phone should be boring and consistent. It’s just a platform for the software. That’s what should be interesting.
Zigurd 3y ago
This is debatable for a couple reasons: First, it is similar to saying Toyota makes too many cars. Nokia, like Toyota, made phones that fit a wide range of markets, and in each Nokia series, the insides and software were the same. Second, Nokia's problems crescendoed with Stephen Elop and the not-ready-for-prime-time Windows phone OSs that Elop insisted replace viable alternatives Nokia developed in-house. In light of the outcome, one could say Nokia made too few phones by not shipping more than one smartphone OS.
- fckgw 3y ago
  If Toyota had 57 different models we would all be saying Toyota has too many cars.
  - Zigurd 3y ago
    I didn't count them all. But between Toyota Daihatsu Hino and Lexus, of the 9.2 million vehicles they will make, there are more than 57 models. At its peak Nokia manufactured more than one phone per second, 24/7/365. I bet there were more than 57 models.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Elop was invited by the board. The Nokia board saw the end of the phones and wanted to dump the whole thing, and Microsoft was their mark. This wasn't a hostile takeover, rather a invited takeover. While I love the N9, by that point it would have been hard to compete with Android. Just as it was hard for Microsoft.
Zigurd 3y ago
For a different take google Tomi Ahonen. He chronicled the downfall. Can't vouch for completeness but a lot is archived here: https://redef.com/author/52f394ec8bfa8aec2e0001a5 https://redef.com/author/52f394ec8bfa8aec2e0001a5
miki123211 3y ago
Another problem with Nokia was that there was absolutely no logic to the model numbering. You could have an entry-level, 10-year-old handset with a higher model number than the latest and greatest Nokia had to offer. If somebody told you they had a Foo 206 and you had a Bar 398 Classic, you knew nothing about how their phone compared to yours. Not how old it was, not how good it was, nothing whatsoever. The sheer amount of phones available didn't help either, there were just so many of them you could not remember them all. Not that other manufacturers are any better than this, Apple is the only one that sort of gets this right, though I wish they used their normal numbering scheme for the SE models.
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  Honestly I never understand why so many corporations do exactly that error with their naming schemes. Sony does it for everything too, even though it's gotten better. It's just such a self own marketing wise, even if it makes it easier to differentiate between different variants of the same product. Samsung does the same for their TVs and appliances but at least they got it right with their phones: there's a "public" model name (for example, the Galaxy S23 Ultra) that is sequential and gives you a good idea of where exactly the phone sits in their line up. And then a model name that encodes the region specific variant (for example, SM-S912W for my S23U).
  - miki123211 3y ago
    Samsung gets it right, but only as long as you stay inside the same "model family". For example, "how does the S23 compare to the A53" isn't a question you can answer by looking at the model numbers alone. They could have used something like "S2X basic", or even keep the A/J/S distinction but make the numbering consistent.
treprinum 3y ago
While HMD learned from this mistake and released only a few phones a year, they stuck with ugly notches at the top of the screen that acted as a customer repellent and now they are dropping NOKIA branding as nobody was buying them. I recently bought a Nokia 7 Plus for my Unitree Go2 robodog controller and I absolutely love the design that complements ZenBook S UX393 I use for developing on Linux.
johnea 3y ago
They experimented too much! Every modern marketeer knows it's all about making 1 thing and convincing the idiot herd that this is _the_ thing. Twerk tick has been a really big help with that...
nikau 3y ago
A lot of those phones were just a new case with identical pcb or a very minor pcb rework. There were shops at the time who would change the green led to blue and swap the case to convert a lower end model to a more expensive one.
vitorgrs 3y ago
Nokia made a lot of failures, but having too many phones is not the one that affected them. Samsung makes like, the same amount. Xiaomi probably even more. The thing is, if you are in a developed country, you are not seeing half of Samsung phones. They launch a lot of cheaper/middle range phones on emerging market. If you want to be successful at emerging markets, you basically need a lot of phones. Because you can't put everything on a $180 device. So instead, the company create several $180 devices aimed at different people.
- magnetowasright 3y ago
  I once had to deal with supporting a barely functional version of samsung internet browser so international users could access the product. Samsung internet's market share of the targeted international audience was mind boggling. It makes total sense for the reason you highlighted. Samsung knew their target markets for sure.
- yen223 3y ago
  Apple is the odd one in terms of how narrow their product lineup is. Every other electronics company have market-segmented their product into 100s of devices. I have always wondered how a large company like Apple, with 161,000 employees operating in basically every market in the world, can maintain that level of focus.
  - JayPalm 3y ago
    Good management and a functional structure?
  - rldjbpin 3y ago
    not entirely correct. since iphone 7/8, they started having 3 or more new SKU per year. more importantly, now they treat older models as the lower segment SKU that they continue selling for many years to come. not to forget the even older SKUs that resellers offer in developing countries that come from somewhere. so realistically they got 8-10 SKU actively sold in their own stores, before you consider special "red" editions etc. to me this is not much different from the developing countries getting some budget SKU from the likes of Samsung and even Nokia in their heyday.
bemusedthrow75 3y ago
The main issue they had was fragmented Symbian versions. Oh that and they allowed themselves to listen to Stephen Elop. I admire their hardware innovation and I think it’s sad we lost it. My Nokia E61 is still one of my favourite past handsets (Sony’s second version of the Xperia Mini Pro, the iPhone X and the stunning Siemens S35 are the others). And now I probably gave away who I am to at least one person who knows me here.
- atleta 3y ago
  The main issue they had was Symbian. Period. And not willing to let it go. It was f*&^d up before Elop. Years before him.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    If they had concentrated on Series 60 they could easily have fixed Symbian over time. It was highly capable. For example it ran a full Webkit (yes really) browser before Apple shipped their own. That was genuinely useful. It even had code signing for apps in v3 (the version that shipped with the E61)
    - atleta 3y ago
      The problem was still Symbian under S60, if you like. Yes, it had code signing (which seemed like an unnecessary restriction at the time it was introduced) and a decent browser, and email that synced in the background (unlike in iPhone 1!) and background tasks in general, etc. But developing for Symbian was convoluted, very painful and slow. And it slowed down Nokia itself not to mention the 3rd party/external app developers. There was no reasonable way to fix Symbian as these issues stemmed from the very foundations. One of them being memory management, the other probably cooperative multitasking and callbacks. But the memory management thing was all over the code (think string handling, so everywhere) and it made using existing software hard too. Linux would have been the way to go, one way or another. Sure, they would have to have rebuilt most things for that platform but e.g. webkit would have been a no-brainer and they could have used a lot of existing open source software.
atleta 3y ago
I'm not sure that was a problem. Let's not forget that smartphones, as we know them, weren't really invented yet back then. So there wasn't really a common form factor and feature package that every customer was looking for. Sure, there were Symbian phones that could functionally do almost anything smartphones can do now (and do more than the first iPhone) but those weren't for everyone and those didn't use touch screens so there were multiple form factors. Like the full keyboard communicators (9210, 9300/9500), the Blackberry clone (E61, I think), the slide keyboard (7650?) and then all the non-Symbian phones (S40 OS, IIRC). And, of course cameras were new and shitty so not every phone had them. Now this could have caused a problem in itself and what the article says about the organization could also cause problems but (I keep saying this when this topic comes up) the real problem was that the Nokia management was too convenient/coward and didn't dare to switch away from Symbian. Especially since they have bought out Erinsson and Sony (again, IIRC), their former partners in the Symbian consortium in ~2004/5. There were eperiments with a linux based phone OS around that time. They created the Nokia 770 "internet tablet" [1] which was this PDA-like touch screen device with a landscape screen layout, a pen, and a removable front cover. Obviously it was an experiment (and later followed by the 810 then the 900, the latter being a phone). However no one in the management was brave enough to give a linux phone a go. Especially not committing to a strategy to switch over to linux. Symbian phones were selling great, Nokia was the market leader and you can't really do better than that... I remember, at one point, one team in the Helsinki office of NRC (Nokia Research Center) was coming up with the idea of creating a "unified architecture" (called the "Grand Unified Architecture") where they would create a uniform platform around the 3 operating systems: a linux based one, Symbian S60 and the (non-Symbian) S40. The genius idea was that they'd create a HAL (hardware abstraction layer) then above that would be one of the 3 OSs and above those would be a uniform API that could be used by all app developers. This would have been a great strategy to side-step an actual decision but other than that didn't make any sense, really. (Maybe you could argue back then that the S40 hardware was not capable of running linux, but there was no excuse for trying to keep both Symbian and linux while hiding them below a uniform API.) So the switch to linux never happened and Symbian was a pain in the ass to develop for. Just concatenating two strings took several lines of code in their C++-based API that hasn't even looked like actual C++. And this made developing in-house software slow and made 3rd party software pretty scarce. Nokia also had an aversion towards touch screens. One of the reasons must have been that back then only resistive touch screens were available (I think the oroginal iPhone was the first phone with a capacitive one, i.e. one that was an actual touch screen and not a press/push screen). The other reason must have been Symbian (and the S60 skin) that was really not designed for touch screen and was hard to develop. So Nokia just continued to enjoy being the market leader with the management not taking the risk to try to switch direction. And then the iPhone came and then Android came (who, after seeing an iPhone demo, very quickly changed direction because at first they thought they were competing with Blackberry, so their UI was similar to that and maybe Symbian). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet
fungiblecog 3y ago
bollocks. it was a new area ripe for experimentation. this always happens when a new market is created. now we're in a phase where there is no innovation and there hasn't beem for some time
mizzao 3y ago
For the reference of "business units" rather than functions in the comparison to Apple — can someone elaborate here on what a "functional" organization would look like?
kungreke 3y ago
This whole article is a single cause fallacy. There are many reasons Nokia failed in the smartphone market. This is one of them, but it is not the sole reason.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Exactly, I worked in Nokia Research around the time the iphone rumors were starting to circulate; just after Google bought an obscure company that made something called Android. Nokia was on top of the world at that time. Huge market share for what were then already called smart phones. Nokia making many products was how they did it. They tried to cover every segment and had gotten really good at creating bespoke phone products based on several internal platforms. They were doing dozens a year. S30 (not Symbian) for their still popular simple phones. S40 (also not Symbian) for their flip phones and other multi media phones. S60 (that one was Symbian) for their consumer oriented smart phones. S80 (also Symbian) for their business phones. Later, S80 and S60 kind of merged and they did a range of phones clearly intended to compete with the black berry. Meanwhile they were making unreasonable amounts of money with S40 covering a wide range of form factors as well as weird luxury phones intended for billionaires. And then they had a few experimental things. Notably a thing called Maemo that shipped in 2006 (2 years before the iphone, and even longer before Android and the ipad) that was a Debian Linux based touch screen tablet running a modern browser (mozilla) that you could update via apt-get. Amazing stuff. Except (on purpose) it lacked phone hardware so as to not piss off the operators. Those absolutely hated phones they could not control and bastardize and they would frustrate attempts to get new firmware approved. That's the platform they messed up. Because management thought the future was all the other stuff they were selling by the bucket loads. As it turned out, Motorola flip phone clones were not the future and blackberry did not make it either. And S60 once it pivoted back to touch screen phones (they killed S90 which was supposed to do that) proved to be simply inadequate. So, they dragged their heels on Maemo and declined to ship anything resembling a competitive phone based on it until after the damage had been done by Apple and Google. This was not because of technical limitations but because of indecisiveness, lack of vision, and misguided ideas about how to compete. The mistake Nokia made was having management without any clue whatsoever about software development while the market was pivoting towards generic rectangular slabs dominated by their software experience. They were hardware and radio specialists headed by a CEO who was a glorified bean counter without a clue. Early Android and Iphone devices weren't much to look at in terms of hardware. And they were so fragile, you'd cover them up in some fugly cover anyway. Very different than Nokia devices which proved highly resilient against daily abuse. I never broke a phone before I got a Nexus. And then I broke 3 in a row. It was the software that made the difference and the mistake Nokia made was being perpetually indifferent about the software they had. They'd happily ship unfinished or broken software. Or outdated forks of software they had improved for other models with serious bugs and regressions. And without OTA, updating was hard. Android borrowed heavily from Maemo. Same kernel. Early test devices were Nokia N800s. Nokia was fixing a lot of stuff in the ecosystem to make these devices run efficient. Unlike Nokia, Google was laser focused on getting Android done. That was when they could still get things done. Arguably, they've lost that ability. Nokia could have had an Android killer in the market years before Google got around to shipping Android; before the iphone launched. Declining to do that was what killed Nokia. It had everything needed to do this. Except leadership that understood it needed doing.
histories 3y ago
I miss all the unconventional designs, before every phone became a black rectangle. My old Nokia E65 was amazing design-wise and the best phone I had.
Ellatrones 3y ago
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StephenJGL 3y ago
This is a proven method of market discovery used by companies like Sony. If you watch Sony in early market entry they make a lot of different models. Then they let the market tell them which features sell. Then they collapse the models. Yes, it's expensive. It's also incredibly effective.
baud147258 3y ago
I remember somewhere in the late 00s/early 10s a blog post that was saying exactly the same thing, putting the blame on a market segmentation that was too agressive (and contrasting with Apple's direction, ofc)
Paianni 3y ago
The figures past 2015 don't seem to include basic phones.

251 points by shubhamjain 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Yes they did. I miss them. But thats creative destruction. Nokia tried to do everything and ended up doing nothing. They could not compete with the joint assault by iPhone and Android.

actionfromafar 3y ago
Joint assault of iPhone, Android and hostile takeover (intended or not!) by Microsoft.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
Or by Microsoft. Nokia never understood the less-is-more thing that Apple are so good at. Hundreds of phones and an overcomplicated OS wuth political and technical problems - Symbian - were the result, not the cause, of a company that lacked focus and direction.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Symbian was such a strange thing, from its history to dominance to irrelevant. A real outgrowth of 90s software culture.
- jll29 3y ago
  It's interesting that Microsoft never succeeded with a smartphone, given that their other hardware products enjoy a decent reputation (keyboards, mice, tablets); I suspect it's because of the software side - stuck with the desktop metaphor and windows, which makes no sense on smartphones.
  - wvenable 3y ago
    At the time, Microsoft's software development was a bit of mess. But Windows Phone didn't have a desktop metaphor. Recently I had the opportunity to try one that was sitting in desk for a few years and it was pretty interesting and snappy. But they redesigned their mobile OS so many times, had no good developer experience, and came in late enough that it was all doomed.
  - CRConrad 3y ago
    > windows, which makes no sense on smartphones. The last version, the one on the Lumias, was actually quite OK on a phone from all I've heard -- and living in Finland, I knew more than a few people who used those back in the day. That's preciely why Windows 8 sucked so much on the desktop; it was intended to have as much as possible of the look-and-feel of Windows Phone. Windows 8 sucked on computers; apparently not so much on phones.

Ezhik 3y ago

That cliff drop after they Nokia phones division got bough out by Microsoft is a big oof.

kakoni 3y ago

> It’s interesting to see how Nokia succumbed to the bad strategy that had almost killed Apple in ‘97. Well, here is one take; > Nokia’s ultimate fall can be put down to internal politics. In short, Nokia people weakened Nokia people and thus made the company increasingly vulnerable to competitive forces. When fear permeated all levels, the lower rungs of the organisation turned inward to protect resources, themselves and their units, giving little away, fearing harm to their personal careers. Top managers failed to motivate the middle managers with their heavy-handed approaches and they were in the dark with what was really going on. [1] [1] https://alumnimagazine.insead.edu/who-killed-nokia-nokia-did/ https://alumnimagazine.insead.edu/who-killed-nokia-nokia-did...

Mountain_Skies 3y ago
Funny how well that applies to Microsoft and its internal battle over UI layers for the past two decades.
Erratic6576 3y ago
I like to think that it was Microsoft which destroyed Nokia from the inside in order to make Windows phone great at last https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/microsoft-nokia-deal-a-great-idea-that-came-too-late-and-killed-windows.html https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/microsoft-nokia-deal-a-...
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  Nokia was dead long before Microsoft thought about buying them.
- jbverschoor 3y ago
  Nokia was long gone when they were acquired. They were beaten by RIM/BB They tried gaming, didn’t succeed. Later on messaging, but didn’t have the platform (ping)
  - secondcoming 3y ago
    Blackberry come nowhere close to beating Nokia. It was Apple.

lkadjal 3y ago

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hasmanean 3y ago

There was also conventional wisdom which had to be abandoned before the iPhone came out. Nokia phones had 1 week battery life. They were extending it to one month. The iPhone had a < 1 day battery life. Ultimately consumers decided that given the app experience available on the iPhone they could live with that. This was a bet Nokia would have never made—-they were not in the user interface business. The fact that Apple—who was not in the phone business—-entered their market was bonkers. But once you make your own silicon anything is possible. Plus they had already done the iPod.

Hamuko 3y ago
Nokia phones had a one-week battery life if you weren't using them like a smartphone. We had the Nokia 7650 in our family and if you used it as a camera, the battery life would definitely not be a week. The conventional wisdow that had to be abandoned was that a phone was a brick that you had in your pocket and that did text messages and phone calls, instead of it being a computer that you might sometimes use for text messages and phone calls.
- hasmanean 3y ago
  So the breakthrough happened when Apple shrunk the computer into a phone, not when Nokia grew the phone…? Interesting. I remember writing apps for the iPhone and the biggest hurdle to getting it submitted was sizing the screens for the display variants. There would have been no chance of developing an app for the Nokia ecosystem with all the different screen sizes your app would have to support. Even downloading an app or ringtone required going through all these scammy websites and you had to enter your exact Exact model number and pay somehow…then they would text you a link or something. Apple really cleaned up the ecosystem with the App Store. It made apps safe to download.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    > So the breakthrough happened when Apple shrunk the computer into a phone, not when Nokia grew the phone…? I think the true breakthrough was actually the iPod; the true "first" Apple phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR#E1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR#E1 was a flop, partly because they allowed the various collaboration partners to hamstring its features. The iPhone took everything in-house. > Even downloading an app or ringtone required going through all these scammy websites and you had to enter your exact Exact model number and pay somehow…then they would text you a link or something. > Apple really cleaned up the ecosystem with the App Store. It made apps safe to download. Correct. People (rightly) hate on the restrictive and profiteering nature of the App Store, but the telcos were even worse.

bborud 3y ago

Nokia could both make too many phones and fail for other reasons. The article doesn’t say Nokia failed because it made too many phones. However, I do remember the first time my wife got an iPhone. Her Nokia was breaking down and she was trying to decide which Nokia would replace it. She spent a week comparing models. In the end she said “fuck this” and got an iPhone. What’s really funny was that Malcolm Gladwell did a TED talk about the importance of segmenting the shit out of markets - just as the market pushed back and demonstrated he was talking nonsense.

amarant 3y ago
Her Nokia was breaking down? What warzone had she been to? I remember dropping my old Nokia down a stairwell once. When I fetched it there was a crack - in the tile floor! Of course this was one of the older models, I think the marketing material included the phrase "supports SMS!" or something to that effect.. Good times!
- bborud 3y ago
  I think it was the Nokia N70. The keyboard got dicky over time, the slide was rough and the camera had stopped working. Not all Nokia phones were built like tanks. My phone of choice in those days were the tiny Sony-Ericsson phones. I really liked the K750i and before that the T610. Not as rugged as the Nokias, but smaller and nicer.
  - amarant 3y ago
    Oh yeah, that was after the "tank era" of Nokia phones. I think the last real Nokia tank was the 3310, or maybe it was just such a success that all tanks after it have been forgotten (by me at least) I'm struggling to remember the model name of the absolute unit of a phone I dropped down that stairwell, but it was older than the 3310 at least(I later replaced it with the smaller and lighter 3310)
panick21_ 3y ago
Its funny they made to many phones but once they had the N900 they didn't make enough. And didn't care about the platform. And then didn't make another one for many more years, until the platform was dead anyway.

t_mann 3y ago

This just feels like ex-post rationalization. It's easy to come up with a story why something failed after the fact, but that doesn't mean the theory has any weight. If you want this to be interesting, put some skin in the game and make a prediction about currently successful companies based on your theory. Otherwise, I'll have to assume that what you'd have written in 2005 was how Nokia's approach was superior to eg Palm's (fyi, dominant in the 'handheld' market in the 90's, in steady decline throughout the 00's, already had an app ecosystem of sorts).

regularfry 3y ago
"Great at hardware, rubbish at software" was a very common refrain even at the time, and that was a manifestation of the same internal dysfunction. What wasn't clear was whether anyone could come along and fill the gap, or when they might. Because so much is software-based now, my counter would be that most companies that would have died because they failed to get their software operation in order have already done so.
- t_mann 3y ago
  According to that theory, we should have expected Windows Phone to be a success, no? Microsoft was (and is) killing it at software, especially consumer-facing OS. If anything, your argument makes me even less convinced that we have any good explanation for Nokia's failure.
  - regularfry 3y ago
    MS was also internally dysfunctional, but focused on the business market for phones, and at the time of the iPhone was being roundly laughed at for the Zune. It was just different market segmentation. I'm not saying that all you need for success is competent software delivery, but lacking it in this sort of arena was definitely harmful. And I'd also question the "killing it at software" statement: remember that Windows Mobile (not Windows Phone, you've got to go to the product iteration before to make the dates line up) was catastrophically hamstrung by an inability to ship anything decent. I had a Windows Mobile 5 device myself, and it was rubbish. They were so focused on making it so you could run a spreadsheet on your phone that they forgot the thing had to be usable. The OS wasn't actually much good until post 6.5, well after the iPhone launch, and they never got to release the iteration that would have brought it up to scratch. They realised very late that they needed to focus on consumers, not businesses, because they could see that businesses would and did buy consumer devices if they were good enough, but the reverse would almost never happen. Once the iPhone was released and they realised how wrong they'd been they made a hard pivot to get Metro out, but they were starting from a very long way behind. More evidence against "killing it at software": this was the Windows Longhorn/Vista era. We all know how that went. Microsoft managed to survive for a long time on desktop and office suite monopoly momentum without being able to stick the landing on very many releases at all, compared to how much activity was going on. Even though the launches would go OK they'd often get killed later by internal politics. That was actually the era that got me to swear off the Windows ecosystem: you'd learn enough of an exciting new product to be useful, only for it to get sidelined with no updates a couple of months later. It was just exhausting. Half of me thinks that MS was lucky to survive Ballmer at all.

tetrisgm 3y ago

Nokia was incredibly political. But they were comfortably smug too. When we made games for Nokia platforms, we'd hear horror stories from engineers. Extreme management to engineer ratio (like 1 for 5 or less), non stop meetings and slide decks. One strategy that the engineers came up with to have peace was to get two or more project managers involved, so they could sest in meetings and calls all day and let people dev. They were also the biggest player in Finland. The best logistics. The most market share. They had so many devs in their rollodex. Clearly, they could ship an iPhone killer. Clearly they understood everything about mobile and knew everyone. They even had a cloud project (Ovi) that predated iCloud. I remember meeting them back in the NGage days and thinking who are these clowns making a portrait screen for games, with no dpad, and a phone you hold sideways. No focus on apps (Palm and other handheld had plenty of homebrew and emulators). The company was a juggernaut that could ship the old Nokia bricks, but never adapt to be good at software, or have a good mobile OS. It's a shame, because honestly the best industrial design and UX people I've seen were there.

drunkenmagician 3y ago
Do you have an example of Nokia UX you feel was better than the alternatives at the time? I was a long time Nokia user (ex telco / mobile messaging) and I don’t recall anything cutting edge on the UI/UX front. Their industrial design was good though (mostly).
- tetrisgm 3y ago
  The Nokia N9 had a really polished UI that wad all gestures based. It wasn't until the iPhone X that we'd see this again.
RandallBrown 3y ago
I remember wanting an NGage so bad. I had a whole plan to get my gameboy and all the games together to trade in so I could get one from GameStop. Then I went and actually tried one. Having to remove the battery to swap out games was too much for me.
- 3y ago

pavlov 3y ago

Around 2003 I did the art direction (mostly pixel-pushing...) for a game that shipped on a Nokia model. I have no recollection of what the phone looked like, but it was part of the "lifestyle" category described in this article. It wasn't one of the craziest form factors, just a candybar phone in pretty plastic with one of those early square color screens. Nokia Design sent a massive moodboard PDF, something like 100 pages, with endless visual ideas for what seemed practically like an Autumn/Winter lineup of plastic gadgets. But it was all about the moods. The actual phone's usability and software were a complete afterthought. Those were to be plugged in eventually by lowly engineers somewhere along the line, using whatever hardware and software combination would happen to fit the bill of materials for this lifestyle object. The game I designed was a "New York in Autumn" themed pinball. There were pictures of cappuccino, a couple walking in the park, and all the other clichés. It fit the moodboard exactly, the game shipped on the device, everyone was happy. Nobody at Nokia seemed to care about the actual game though. Of course the implication with these fashion devices was that they were almost disposable, and you'd buy a new one for the next season. This would be great for Nokia's business. Unfortunately their design department seemed consumed by becoming a fashion brand and forgot that they're still a technology company. Everyone knows what happened next.

diggan 3y ago
> Of course the implication with these fashion devices was that they were almost disposable, and you'd buy a new one for the next season. This would be great for Nokia's business. Unfortunately their design department seemed consumed by becoming a fashion brand and forgot that they're still a technology company. Everyone knows what happened next. Maybe Nokia was simply too early for the vision, or the execution was somehow lacking in some other aspect, as Apple made basically the same bet but seemed to have pulled it off. Maybe the design wasn't designy enough.
- hasmanean 3y ago
  They brought a plastic case to a machined metal fight.
  - deleted 3y ago

kwhitefoot 3y ago

> Nokia Made Too Many Phones Too many for what? Would you really want the history of mobile phones to be merely the antiseptic aesthetic and walled garden of the iPhone? Why do you think people are buying folding phones, flip phones, phones with screens on the front and the back. So they ultimately failed, so what? The vast majority of companies of all sizes fail after some time.

thriftwy 3y ago

Nokia could not stick with a single platform, once their heirloom Symbian became inadequate they caved. Like the absolute majority of corporations, they did not understand platforms. Platforms require decade-long thinking, instead of "Q4 this year". N900 with its Maemo was pretty good phone. Too bad Nokia could not develop on the success. Then they have MeeGo and then the disastrous Windows Phone. MS had the same problem with Windows Mobile - Windows Phone 7 - Windows Phone 8. 15 years later, the Debian + Firefox + APT platform on which N900 was based is still alive and requires surprisingly few maintenance. If they went with it they will have a solid, hassle-free platform which could compete with early Android, especially as they could easily make it run Android apps as well.

blackoil 3y ago

It is easy to find such reasons now that Nokia has failed. But they ruled for a decade in part because of too many phones. They had phone at each budget range and demographic. What they missed was a move from hardware centric world to software centic. The attempts with Linux etc were too little too late.

hasmanean 3y ago
HW is hw and sw is SW…and never the twain shall meet. Hardware problems are low dimensional ones…”optimize this variable (usually clock speed), make this block functionally correct.” Software problems are high dimensional ones, especially the problem of designing an API the community will adopt. “What set of functions can I provide that will do X…and a subset of X…and a potential superset of X, on hardware generation H and H+1 and so on…all while taking security and OS privilege levels into account…” Oh and we must bow to aesthetics and programmer fashion as well as getting stuff into their hands as fast as possible…plus tools and documentation…plus outcompete everybody else in the world trying to steal the same devs as us. Sw is what it is because it has so many degrees of freedom.
twelvechairs 3y ago
Yes - iphone came out 2007 and Nokia was still the leading mobile phone company by sales in 2010, and Symbian had the largest OS share to 2012. In my view it was really the two big OS decisions they made - first in 2010 they ditched Symbian to focus on 'Meego' (a partnership with Intel) then in 2012 they ditched all of that for Windows Phone. Through those 2 years they moved outright owning the globally most popular OS to being the secondary manufacturer for the third best supported OS. And not trusted by users to provide any continuity.
- roneythomas6 3y ago
  Android overtook Symbian globally in early 2011. In major markets Android overtook Symbian sometime in late 2009-2010.
neom 3y ago
This is exactly right imo. I was a teen during peak Nokia, and I always thought it was very clever how they had a phone for everyone, and more importantly, they really signaled to the consumer via features and marketing. I was in the UK and there was a time for a couple of years when all we talked about was football and Nokia models, we all had phones, some of us had TWO phones because we inherited an old business device from a parent etc. It was a super fun time from what I recall!

thih9 3y ago

A different POV, I'm bored of today's uniform, do-it-all smartphones and I enjoy using limited-purpose ergonomic devices with character. I often carry a dedicated camera, an e-ink reader, or a handheld console. I liked the colorful iPhone 5C, or smartphones with hardware keyboard - I miss this sometimes.

kilroy123 3y ago
Yup, I agree. I have an iPhone and it's no big deal. A bit yawn at this point. One of my all time favorite phones was the sidekick ii. Such a fun phone with character.

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago

Too little respect for Nokia in this article. Their legacy for ever will be the unbreakable and no need to charge phone.

enqk 3y ago

Nokia never cared about input latency enough, their phones were dogs to operate..

helsinkiandrew 3y ago

> Nokia Made Too Many Phones Perhaps compared with today, but these weren't complex smart phones marketed globally. Global network technology wasn't as homogenous as now. Phones were usually sold by the phone networks who had specific requirements - technical and marketing. Different phones were also used to price phones differently around the world - from rural Africa to the rich west.

nottorp 3y ago
> these weren't complex smart phones marketed globally Yeah, they had like 4 "established" operating systems and on top of that some experimental OSes that only came out on a model or two and changed every year. Can't make a smart platform with apps when you have 7 current platforms.

ssivark 3y ago

I’m very suspicious of some post-hoc generalization that rhymes a little too conveniently with modern fads. Nokia made great phones during the mid/late 2000s. The N9 was a piece of beauty that continued to have a more cohesive and thought out experience than Android (and even iOS, in some ways) well into the mid 2010s. It was simply a joy to use. Why Nokia then fell apart might have a little something to do with Stephen Elop and Microsoft, I suspect.

roneythomas6 3y ago
By the time Nokia N9 came out Android was the dominant smartphone OS. Nokia even cancelled releasing N9 in select markets due to this. Not to mention the api’s were severely lacking compared to Android. Maybe if they released it in 2008-2009, there might have been a chance. So the choice was either to go Android or Windows and Microsoft paid them 1billion to be stay Windows Phone exclusive.
parl_match 3y ago
The N9 was too little, too late. Microsoft didn't destroy Nokia, they failed to rescue it. I think maybe the only company that could have saved Nokia was Google, and they weren't about to compete with their huge network of Android VARs. Why Nokia fell apart is because they didn't take the iPhone or Android seriously, repeatedly would say things like "nobody is going to spend $400 on a phone after subsidy", and had tremendous infighting over Symbian, MeeGo, and Windows - tons of engineers and management absolutely didn't want to learn the new thing. And then, Microsoft, not wanting to pour billions of dollars into what was already becoming a bitter duopoly fight, gave up. I have an N9 and an labeled windows phone dev kit from post-nokia on my shelf, both devices I used for a year+. They were fantastic.
Paianni 3y ago
S60 5th edition was a disaster for Symbian's and Nokia's reputation, especially the N97 incarnation. Its main issue was a lack of GPU acceleration for the GUI which wasn't really resolved until the Belle era, by which point it was far too late to resurrect.

benrutter 3y ago

> Not only the variety of devices was creating an incoherent user experience, but it also made it almost impossible to create an app market. I'm not sure I agree with this take - it seems to be based on the idea of comparing Nokia phones to something like the iPhone. But at the time these phones were all made, the experience of using a phone was: - Answer or reject incoming calls with the "answer/decline" button - Read and send messages using the screen and keyboard - That's basically it Nokia created so many freaky looking phones, in part at least, because they were just phones, and the narrowness of their use meant the novelty designs didn't have a seriously problematic effect of their usablility. I don't see any evidence that they (or anyone other than apple) even considered the possibility of an "app ecosystem" - so criticising them for not making one viable seems a little leftfield. Take something like the iPhone - all of the sudden you're not looking at a phone but instead a touch screen computer someone can use for banking, messaging, browsing, shopping etc. Supporting all those different use cases provides way more contraints on Apple's design than Nokia ever needed to consider. Which is a really long way of saying, Nokia phones where just a different category of things to iPhones, and we shouldn't compare them.

rcarmo 3y ago
Actually, large telcos had a decently profitable business setting up their own app stores and charging customers for game and ringtone/wallpaper downloads. And most of the devices that could actually do that properly were Nokias (MIDP was OK, but Nokias outsold MIDP phones ringtone-wise for an order of magnitude).
- Eduard 3y ago
  > Actually, large telcos had a decently profitable business setting up their own app stores and charging customers for game and ringtone/wallpaper downloads. I don't remember app stores or game downloads existing up until iPhone and Android, let alone being profitable. There was MIDP and J2ME, but they were so niche, and I'm only aware of them because of an practical course during university, circa 2008. But maybe your regional context is different from mine (Germany).

rcarmo 3y ago

Nokia was a formidable logistics machine. As a smartphone product manager back in the 3G days, they never ceased to amaze me, because they would ship logo and firmware variants of the same device to different customers, at what I already knew to be a fairly high factory customization cost. They paid the price for part of that (the Symbian platform was never really unified so much as it was shared to smithereens), but they were notable in what they did.

lxgr 3y ago

Arguably they failed more due to the phone they didn't make (in time): One running Android.

tecleandor 3y ago

Well, Samsung is making even more. Although 10 years ago they said that 56 models a year were too much [0], they still released ~52 in 2022 [1] [0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/11/samsung-decides-56-smartphones-a-year-is-too-many-will-cut-lineup-by-30/ [1]: https://thelec.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=3574

usr1106 3y ago

That's not a convincing analysis. It's disputable whether Nokia was a master in logistics, in fashion/design or in RF-technology or all of them. However, it's undisputed that they did not master software. Management had no idea about software development, the tooling was awkward. Well, and for OSes, Symbian was from another decade, Linux too little, introduced too slowly because management believed in Symbian being the cash cow. It worked as long as phones were manufactured in their own factories with high margins. Once manufacturing was outsourced to low cost countries and software became more important, they were lost. Disclaimer: I was a software developer there for 10 years, but understood to leave well before the bitter end.

looping8 3y ago

The comparison to Apple is strange - Apple is literally only serving one phone and that's their brand's stand-out thing. Competitors like Xiaomi, Motorola, etc, all make different models. Of course 57 models a year is too much but few other companies make only one phone with minor variations. Nokia was working in a market with fast changing technology and higher number of competitors, they had to keep innovating and marketing new stuff.

zubairq 3y ago

I can confirm this as I worked at Nokia in the Helsinki head office in 2006 and they made so many phones, which were not tested properly and were just thrown out to different market segments. It was obvious at the time that they had no passion or craftsmanship for their products anymore (as a company, as there were still some brilliant individuals)

hgomersall 3y ago
It's interesting. I was exposed in a low level kind of way to Nokia technology around 2002, working for a former subsidiary of Nokia that had been sold. Then it seemed there was a legacy of technical excellence - Nokia pcbs were instantly recognisable for their neatness and having all the components on one side. Did that get lost at some point or did I have a flawed impression?
- radomir_cernoch 3y ago
  I was only a user of Nokia 6150 and subsequent phones. Around me, they were considered as technically perfect devices.
- zubairq 3y ago
  I don’t know what happened at Nokia as I was only there for a year, but nice to hear that they had nicely laid out PCBs in 2002. Shows me that someone had pride in their work

gumby 3y ago

This reminds me of Dell (are they still around? :-) with a million different indistinguishable SKUs. And when you went to the web site you had to categorize yourself by their criteria before you could even look at the offerings, which always made me feel that I was going to be ripped off. How do I know if I am a small business or medium business or whatever?

ryandrake 3y ago
Such a silly pattern. I wonder how many people just bailed out on Dell, at the very top of the sales funnel, just because those stupid segmentation questions. Customer: I have $1,000 burning a hole in my pocket and want to buy your laptop right now! Dell: Whoooa there, buddy, hold on. First tell me if you're a Small Business so I know what site to send you to...

liendolucas 3y ago

There is a very interesting documentary on Nokia on YouTube. I can't remember if it was already suggested here on HN in a previous thread. Here's the link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_1t15PNb468 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_1t15PNb468

gumby 3y ago

Jobs made great lemonade out of Apple's slimmed down line in his famous 2x2 matrix ({consumer,pro}x{desktop, portable}). Who cared that they also had the mac mini that didn't fit in? Everybody understood it (and it encouraged people to upsell themselves to "pro").

spullara 3y ago

It was crazy that you couldn't buy a phone with all the features. Had to find that perfect combination of features for you.

benedictevans 3y ago

Nokia thought that phones would be like cars. Most car companies have dozens of models with different characteristics and prices, and that's fine. Even BMW has 20(!) top-level model categories. Nokia was selling devices all the way from high-end camera/phones for $$$ right down to $10 (unsubsidised) with two week battery life for emerging markets. I think you can argue that 50 was too many, but 10 or 20 was reasonable and still is - plenty of successful Android OEMs have ranges like that. The real shift in phone design and in the range was that the screen took over the whole front of the device. That meant there was much less scope for different shapes and form-factors, and since you were no longer using most of the front for casing and keys there was less to design anyway. Meanwhile all the actual phones ran either Series 40, the classic feature phone OS that won them half the entire market as 'easy to use', or series 60, the smartphone OS, that was an actual platform but problematic (and fragmented) in lots of ways.

earnesti 3y ago
Personally, I think Nokia didn't really think anything. The management was just incompetent and they didn't have any real strategy. They had 100 teams of engineers each doing their own phone model, and were just too lazy to fire unnecessary teams and focus. Somewhere deep down they knew, that it is stupid way to do things. However the money kept flowing in, so who cares.
- tonyhart7 3y ago
  I think its fine, the problem is they are too late to use Android OS which is favour their own OS like Symbian or whatever their PDA use at the time if only they can copy iphone fast enough they would be a "samsung" what is today
  - otherme123 3y ago
    This was it for me. I gave up on Nokia when everybody around was using their Android messaging apps while I had no apps for my Nokia, or they were a lesser version (like whatsapp). Then, if I recall correctly, they went with Windows, so every move was forcing their users into a lonely corner.

DanAtC 3y ago

I had never heard of Vertu. They still exist today in some form, hawking some real pricey crap: https://vertu.com/ https://vertu.com/ Looking at the Nokia-era models, none of them support LTE so they're basically worthless these days. People are still trying to sell them on eBay for 100s, though. What a waste.

kevsim 3y ago

As a fresh-out-of-university engineer in the earlier 2000s, I had a ton of fun working at Nokia and the sheer number of devices was actually part of that. It was a blast having a stack of all of the weird and whacky devices on your desk at any time. I remember visiting some sort of internal museum in Finland at some point where you could basically see all of the devices they'd ever made. Mind blowing. Of course getting to the software we were working on to actually run on the things was a different matter...

ijhuygft776 3y ago

All large phone companies make too many phones from the consumer point of view (consumers just don't know it apparently)... It's just a marketing strategy.

LeoPanthera 3y ago

A company makes one successful product and never moves on: Should have made more products. A company makes lots of different types of product, constantly iterating and experimenting with wild ideas: Should have made fewer products. You can't win, I guess.

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CSharpSteve 3y ago

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grishka 3y ago

Yes, Nokia made too many phones, and that was not a bad thing. Other phone manufacturers made some wild concept models too, sometimes. Phone design in general was much more diverse in the 00s. I actually enjoyed flipping through phone catalogs and reading reviews. Compare that to today, when every single phone out there is an awkwardly huge glass slab with minor design variations on the back side. > it also made it almost impossible to create an app market. All those Nokia phones form two categories in terms of the software they ran: the firmware that was basically the same across all Nokia non-smart phones (S40 it was called IIRC?), and Symbian. Both were capable of running J2ME apps, and Symbian also supported native ones.

fuzzy2 3y ago

Maybe! But here's another take: everyone else makes too few phones, nowadays. Exactly one, that is. Well, maybe two, if you count folding phones. After Palm and then HP failed with webOS, it's now all the same. How come this is the future? It's freaking boring.

simonh 3y ago
The phone should be boring and consistent. It’s just a platform for the software. That’s what should be interesting.

Zigurd 3y ago

This is debatable for a couple reasons: First, it is similar to saying Toyota makes too many cars. Nokia, like Toyota, made phones that fit a wide range of markets, and in each Nokia series, the insides and software were the same. Second, Nokia's problems crescendoed with Stephen Elop and the not-ready-for-prime-time Windows phone OSs that Elop insisted replace viable alternatives Nokia developed in-house. In light of the outcome, one could say Nokia made too few phones by not shipping more than one smartphone OS.

fckgw 3y ago
If Toyota had 57 different models we would all be saying Toyota has too many cars.
- Zigurd 3y ago
  I didn't count them all. But between Toyota Daihatsu Hino and Lexus, of the 9.2 million vehicles they will make, there are more than 57 models. At its peak Nokia manufactured more than one phone per second, 24/7/365. I bet there were more than 57 models.
panick21_ 3y ago
Elop was invited by the board. The Nokia board saw the end of the phones and wanted to dump the whole thing, and Microsoft was their mark. This wasn't a hostile takeover, rather a invited takeover. While I love the N9, by that point it would have been hard to compete with Android. Just as it was hard for Microsoft.

Zigurd 3y ago

For a different take google Tomi Ahonen. He chronicled the downfall. Can't vouch for completeness but a lot is archived here: https://redef.com/author/52f394ec8bfa8aec2e0001a5 https://redef.com/author/52f394ec8bfa8aec2e0001a5

miki123211 3y ago

Another problem with Nokia was that there was absolutely no logic to the model numbering. You could have an entry-level, 10-year-old handset with a higher model number than the latest and greatest Nokia had to offer. If somebody told you they had a Foo 206 and you had a Bar 398 Classic, you knew nothing about how their phone compared to yours. Not how old it was, not how good it was, nothing whatsoever. The sheer amount of phones available didn't help either, there were just so many of them you could not remember them all. Not that other manufacturers are any better than this, Apple is the only one that sort of gets this right, though I wish they used their normal numbering scheme for the SE models.

mardifoufs 3y ago
Honestly I never understand why so many corporations do exactly that error with their naming schemes. Sony does it for everything too, even though it's gotten better. It's just such a self own marketing wise, even if it makes it easier to differentiate between different variants of the same product. Samsung does the same for their TVs and appliances but at least they got it right with their phones: there's a "public" model name (for example, the Galaxy S23 Ultra) that is sequential and gives you a good idea of where exactly the phone sits in their line up. And then a model name that encodes the region specific variant (for example, SM-S912W for my S23U).
- miki123211 3y ago
  Samsung gets it right, but only as long as you stay inside the same "model family". For example, "how does the S23 compare to the A53" isn't a question you can answer by looking at the model numbers alone. They could have used something like "S2X basic", or even keep the A/J/S distinction but make the numbering consistent.

treprinum 3y ago

While HMD learned from this mistake and released only a few phones a year, they stuck with ugly notches at the top of the screen that acted as a customer repellent and now they are dropping NOKIA branding as nobody was buying them. I recently bought a Nokia 7 Plus for my Unitree Go2 robodog controller and I absolutely love the design that complements ZenBook S UX393 I use for developing on Linux.

johnea 3y ago

They experimented too much! Every modern marketeer knows it's all about making 1 thing and convincing the idiot herd that this is _the_ thing. Twerk tick has been a really big help with that...

nikau 3y ago

A lot of those phones were just a new case with identical pcb or a very minor pcb rework. There were shops at the time who would change the green led to blue and swap the case to convert a lower end model to a more expensive one.

vitorgrs 3y ago

Nokia made a lot of failures, but having too many phones is not the one that affected them. Samsung makes like, the same amount. Xiaomi probably even more. The thing is, if you are in a developed country, you are not seeing half of Samsung phones. They launch a lot of cheaper/middle range phones on emerging market. If you want to be successful at emerging markets, you basically need a lot of phones. Because you can't put everything on a $180 device. So instead, the company create several $180 devices aimed at different people.

magnetowasright 3y ago
I once had to deal with supporting a barely functional version of samsung internet browser so international users could access the product. Samsung internet's market share of the targeted international audience was mind boggling. It makes total sense for the reason you highlighted. Samsung knew their target markets for sure.
yen223 3y ago
Apple is the odd one in terms of how narrow their product lineup is. Every other electronics company have market-segmented their product into 100s of devices. I have always wondered how a large company like Apple, with 161,000 employees operating in basically every market in the world, can maintain that level of focus.
- JayPalm 3y ago
  Good management and a functional structure?
- rldjbpin 3y ago
  not entirely correct. since iphone 7/8, they started having 3 or more new SKU per year. more importantly, now they treat older models as the lower segment SKU that they continue selling for many years to come. not to forget the even older SKUs that resellers offer in developing countries that come from somewhere. so realistically they got 8-10 SKU actively sold in their own stores, before you consider special "red" editions etc. to me this is not much different from the developing countries getting some budget SKU from the likes of Samsung and even Nokia in their heyday.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago

The main issue they had was fragmented Symbian versions. Oh that and they allowed themselves to listen to Stephen Elop. I admire their hardware innovation and I think it’s sad we lost it. My Nokia E61 is still one of my favourite past handsets (Sony’s second version of the Xperia Mini Pro, the iPhone X and the stunning Siemens S35 are the others). And now I probably gave away who I am to at least one person who knows me here.

atleta 3y ago
The main issue they had was Symbian. Period. And not willing to let it go. It was f*&^d up before Elop. Years before him.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  If they had concentrated on Series 60 they could easily have fixed Symbian over time. It was highly capable. For example it ran a full Webkit (yes really) browser before Apple shipped their own. That was genuinely useful. It even had code signing for apps in v3 (the version that shipped with the E61)
  - atleta 3y ago
    The problem was still Symbian under S60, if you like. Yes, it had code signing (which seemed like an unnecessary restriction at the time it was introduced) and a decent browser, and email that synced in the background (unlike in iPhone 1!) and background tasks in general, etc. But developing for Symbian was convoluted, very painful and slow. And it slowed down Nokia itself not to mention the 3rd party/external app developers. There was no reasonable way to fix Symbian as these issues stemmed from the very foundations. One of them being memory management, the other probably cooperative multitasking and callbacks. But the memory management thing was all over the code (think string handling, so everywhere) and it made using existing software hard too. Linux would have been the way to go, one way or another. Sure, they would have to have rebuilt most things for that platform but e.g. webkit would have been a no-brainer and they could have used a lot of existing open source software.

atleta 3y ago

I'm not sure that was a problem. Let's not forget that smartphones, as we know them, weren't really invented yet back then. So there wasn't really a common form factor and feature package that every customer was looking for. Sure, there were Symbian phones that could functionally do almost anything smartphones can do now (and do more than the first iPhone) but those weren't for everyone and those didn't use touch screens so there were multiple form factors. Like the full keyboard communicators (9210, 9300/9500), the Blackberry clone (E61, I think), the slide keyboard (7650?) and then all the non-Symbian phones (S40 OS, IIRC). And, of course cameras were new and shitty so not every phone had them. Now this could have caused a problem in itself and what the article says about the organization could also cause problems but (I keep saying this when this topic comes up) the real problem was that the Nokia management was too convenient/coward and didn't dare to switch away from Symbian. Especially since they have bought out Erinsson and Sony (again, IIRC), their former partners in the Symbian consortium in ~2004/5. There were eperiments with a linux based phone OS around that time. They created the Nokia 770 "internet tablet" [1] which was this PDA-like touch screen device with a landscape screen layout, a pen, and a removable front cover. Obviously it was an experiment (and later followed by the 810 then the 900, the latter being a phone). However no one in the management was brave enough to give a linux phone a go. Especially not committing to a strategy to switch over to linux. Symbian phones were selling great, Nokia was the market leader and you can't really do better than that... I remember, at one point, one team in the Helsinki office of NRC (Nokia Research Center) was coming up with the idea of creating a "unified architecture" (called the "Grand Unified Architecture") where they would create a uniform platform around the 3 operating systems: a linux based one, Symbian S60 and the (non-Symbian) S40. The genius idea was that they'd create a HAL (hardware abstraction layer) then above that would be one of the 3 OSs and above those would be a uniform API that could be used by all app developers. This would have been a great strategy to side-step an actual decision but other than that didn't make any sense, really. (Maybe you could argue back then that the S40 hardware was not capable of running linux, but there was no excuse for trying to keep both Symbian and linux while hiding them below a uniform API.) So the switch to linux never happened and Symbian was a pain in the ass to develop for. Just concatenating two strings took several lines of code in their C++-based API that hasn't even looked like actual C++. And this made developing in-house software slow and made 3rd party software pretty scarce. Nokia also had an aversion towards touch screens. One of the reasons must have been that back then only resistive touch screens were available (I think the oroginal iPhone was the first phone with a capacitive one, i.e. one that was an actual touch screen and not a press/push screen). The other reason must have been Symbian (and the S60 skin) that was really not designed for touch screen and was hard to develop. So Nokia just continued to enjoy being the market leader with the management not taking the risk to try to switch direction. And then the iPhone came and then Android came (who, after seeing an iPhone demo, very quickly changed direction because at first they thought they were competing with Blackberry, so their UI was similar to that and maybe Symbian). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet

fungiblecog 3y ago

bollocks. it was a new area ripe for experimentation. this always happens when a new market is created. now we're in a phase where there is no innovation and there hasn't beem for some time

mizzao 3y ago

For the reference of "business units" rather than functions in the comparison to Apple — can someone elaborate here on what a "functional" organization would look like?

kungreke 3y ago

This whole article is a single cause fallacy. There are many reasons Nokia failed in the smartphone market. This is one of them, but it is not the sole reason.

jillesvangurp 3y ago
Exactly, I worked in Nokia Research around the time the iphone rumors were starting to circulate; just after Google bought an obscure company that made something called Android. Nokia was on top of the world at that time. Huge market share for what were then already called smart phones. Nokia making many products was how they did it. They tried to cover every segment and had gotten really good at creating bespoke phone products based on several internal platforms. They were doing dozens a year. S30 (not Symbian) for their still popular simple phones. S40 (also not Symbian) for their flip phones and other multi media phones. S60 (that one was Symbian) for their consumer oriented smart phones. S80 (also Symbian) for their business phones. Later, S80 and S60 kind of merged and they did a range of phones clearly intended to compete with the black berry. Meanwhile they were making unreasonable amounts of money with S40 covering a wide range of form factors as well as weird luxury phones intended for billionaires. And then they had a few experimental things. Notably a thing called Maemo that shipped in 2006 (2 years before the iphone, and even longer before Android and the ipad) that was a Debian Linux based touch screen tablet running a modern browser (mozilla) that you could update via apt-get. Amazing stuff. Except (on purpose) it lacked phone hardware so as to not piss off the operators. Those absolutely hated phones they could not control and bastardize and they would frustrate attempts to get new firmware approved. That's the platform they messed up. Because management thought the future was all the other stuff they were selling by the bucket loads. As it turned out, Motorola flip phone clones were not the future and blackberry did not make it either. And S60 once it pivoted back to touch screen phones (they killed S90 which was supposed to do that) proved to be simply inadequate. So, they dragged their heels on Maemo and declined to ship anything resembling a competitive phone based on it until after the damage had been done by Apple and Google. This was not because of technical limitations but because of indecisiveness, lack of vision, and misguided ideas about how to compete. The mistake Nokia made was having management without any clue whatsoever about software development while the market was pivoting towards generic rectangular slabs dominated by their software experience. They were hardware and radio specialists headed by a CEO who was a glorified bean counter without a clue. Early Android and Iphone devices weren't much to look at in terms of hardware. And they were so fragile, you'd cover them up in some fugly cover anyway. Very different than Nokia devices which proved highly resilient against daily abuse. I never broke a phone before I got a Nexus. And then I broke 3 in a row. It was the software that made the difference and the mistake Nokia made was being perpetually indifferent about the software they had. They'd happily ship unfinished or broken software. Or outdated forks of software they had improved for other models with serious bugs and regressions. And without OTA, updating was hard. Android borrowed heavily from Maemo. Same kernel. Early test devices were Nokia N800s. Nokia was fixing a lot of stuff in the ecosystem to make these devices run efficient. Unlike Nokia, Google was laser focused on getting Android done. That was when they could still get things done. Arguably, they've lost that ability. Nokia could have had an Android killer in the market years before Google got around to shipping Android; before the iphone launched. Declining to do that was what killed Nokia. It had everything needed to do this. Except leadership that understood it needed doing.

histories 3y ago

I miss all the unconventional designs, before every phone became a black rectangle. My old Nokia E65 was amazing design-wise and the best phone I had.

Ellatrones 3y ago

[dead]

StephenJGL 3y ago

This is a proven method of market discovery used by companies like Sony. If you watch Sony in early market entry they make a lot of different models. Then they let the market tell them which features sell. Then they collapse the models. Yes, it's expensive. It's also incredibly effective.

baud147258 3y ago

I remember somewhere in the late 00s/early 10s a blog post that was saying exactly the same thing, putting the blame on a market segmentation that was too agressive (and contrasting with Apple's direction, ofc)

Paianni 3y ago

The figures past 2015 don't seem to include basic phones.