20 ms·

Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

• jillesvangurp 2y ago
  I was there as this played out. Nokia had a lot of good software and software engineers but not the management structure to do anything good with that. Nokia was huge as an organization and parts of that organization recognized the threat early on. The problem was at the board and executive level. These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business. Lots of people with an electronics and radio background. Not a lot of people with software competence. And they had bought into the notion that Symbian was going to magically fix all their problems. A lot of effort was spent on looking for other solutions. And one of the things that was good (Linux) around 2005 was actually quite close to displacing Symbian as the key future proof replacement for their legacy platforms. Symbian was just rolling out for a few years and they had made a big investment in that. And management (those same people with a huge blind spot for software) backed the wrong horse. Linux never really died in Nokia but it wasn't allowed to prosper either. Devices were cancelled or repurposed for Symbian. This happened to the N8, for example. By the time they switched to windows phone, they actually had two Linux platforms (Meego and Meltemi) and an Android phone in the works as well. Meego had one last product phone launch and the team and platform were killed in the same week. Any devices for that platform were labeled as developer phones. Nokia never marketed them as a consumer phone. Meltemi never saw any product launch at all; it was aimed at feature phones. Both were good ideas but poorly executed. Nokia killed them along with Symbian in order to back windows phone. Classic baby and bathwater situation. And MS ended up killing the one Nokia Android phone that was launched shortly before they acquired the whole phone division. Kind of a desperate/ballsy move. I suspect Nokia did this as a stick to ensure MS followed through with the acquisition. That was their "oh we could just switch from windows phone to Android unless.. " move. Nokia was at point the only OEM that still believed in Windows Phone. MS killed the whole division shortly after Satya Nadella took over and was sorting out the mess left by Steve Ballmer. The iphone was solidly in charge by then and the rest of the market was Android. Courtesy of lots of Linux contributions by the Meego and Maemo team.
  • masom 2y ago
    Nokia also had a ex-Microsoft exec (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop) that had the goal of ensuring Windows Phone would succeed, and tanked Nokia with it. I was on the DVLUP project where Nokia and Microsoft attempted to inject energy into windows phone app development. We could see the tension between the two companies as we were a 3rd party contracted by Nokia to build the platform. The Nokia exec we were in contact with was fantastic, and really tried to make Windows Phone a success. Unfortunately the Nokia IT teams we worked with were not happy and essentially tried to sabotage through inactions (we just needed OAuth / SSO to link accounts and track app installs, it took over 3 months of email chains within Nokia).
    • actionfromafar 2y ago
      Now I can't find that poem about Elop sinking the Nokia ship or something like that.
      • alain94040 2y ago
        This one, the burning platform memo? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32698044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32698044
        • actionfromafar 2y ago
          No it was more like a song or poem or Ahab kind of thing.
    • bombcar 2y ago
      Was this around the time Microsoft kept switching what "windows phone" was? I remember that the one friend who got into it loved it, and then they released something completely incompatible and he abandoned the platform.
      • masom 2y ago
        Yes... If I remember we were aiming for the newly released "Windows 8"-based Phone OS, and the previous version was fully incompatible with it so all apps had to be redone. Tiles were the new thing to build for.
• lbourdages 2y ago
  I think the HN hug was too strong for this poor server...
  • pieix 2y ago
    Makes you wonder how many sites out there are just ~10k requests per hour away from being bricked.
    • alibarber 2y ago
      To be fair - it's a repository for academic documents at a reasonably-sized-but-still-quite-small university. Their priorities were probably closer to handling few complex requests and being able to manage obscure documents, not dealing with Netflix level traffic. It'll probably make for a cool story for the sysadmins there, but I doubt there will be a board meeting tomorrow to re-evaluate the web strategy.
      • pieix 2y ago
        Wasn't my intention at all to imply that they did something wrong and need to scramble to fix it. Just observing that a large portion of the web is built around the assumption that traffic is intermittent, where even a small burst of requests can knock it over. No shade — I've built plenty of sites like that.
• albert_e 2y ago
  Currently erroring out for me: > Error establishing a database connection How is this already at the top of HN frontpage with just 6 points and zero comments as of my writing
  • bananaflag 2y ago
    It's very recent
  • anilakar 2y ago
    Don't fret. The IT systems in Finland's top polytechnic grad school have always been shit.
  • anshumankmr 2y ago
    kiss of death for the poor server, might have been the highest traffic it has ever received
  • astrange 2y ago
    I get "There was a problem acquiring a content access token from the data service. If this problem persists, please notify your administrator." Which makes me wonder what a content access token is.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• kuschkufan 2y ago
  Looks like a competent analysis where they recognize the threat of the iPhone to Nokia. Whether the higher ups failed to act on it or whether they could not act on it, even after Microsoft bought them is unfortunately a different topic.
• rukshn 2y ago
  Alternative link to the presentation from a post on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hypponen_the-nokia-design-archive-contains-thousands-activity-7285332580021760004-rXHk/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hypponen_the-nokia-design-arc...
  • anshumankmr 2y ago
    Post linked has one slide, the other commenter has shared this: https://nokia-apple-iphone-was-launched-presentation.tiiny.site/ https://nokia-apple-iphone-was-launched-presentation.tiiny.s...
    • aanet 2y ago
      uhh.. looks like the PDF has disappeared?
    • jandrese 2y ago
      That link now 404s.
• heinrich5991 2y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20250115192305/https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a020-5205aeb4d4d5/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250115192305/https://repo.aalt... but doesn't seem to have the actual content. :(
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • alberto-m 2y ago
    The page seems online again: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a020-5205aeb4d4d5/ https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
• UndefinedRef 2y ago
  I was there at the time and until the end. That cartoon meme with the dog sitting with a cup of coffee or whatever and telling himself "This is fine", while everything is on fire, is probably the best way to describe how things felt at nokia back then.
  • llm_trw 2y ago
    Can you explain why every good phone that Nokia released during the period was killed instantly? To this day I've not seen a phone that felt more responsive than the Nokia N9, which also looked amazing. Yet it was killed pretty much the second it was released.
    • jampekka 2y ago
      It was born dead, or at least an orphan. Elop had started the Windows Phone strategy before it was launched.
  • yapyap 2y ago
    I believe it lol, in the presentation you can see they are still moving forward with the sms focused windowing design while the iphone was introducing the touch screen. Now of course I’m looking at it retrospectively but still
  • planb 2y ago
    This PDF does not read like "this is fine". I find the initial analysis in here to be on point. Of course it does not print "we are doomed" in bold letters on the front page, but management should have taken the points raised in this presentation very seriously. Do you know if Nokia appointed a "head of UI e.g. not tied to BG or platform" back then?
  • escapecharacter 2y ago
    I'm really curious! In hindsight, we can always point to when a pivot should have happened earlier, but on the other hand, we all know orgs that have pivoted too early or to a trend they shouldn't have, and then suffered. Do you remember any specifics arguments or conflicts about strategy?
• muglug 2y ago
  Direct link to file: https://repo.aalto.fi/download/file/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a020-5205aeb4d4d5 https://repo.aalto.fi/download/file/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
• amelius 2y ago
  (removed) Edit: because the article did not load my comment was based on someone's alternative link which did not show the entire presentation, so you can ignore my comment.
  • thechao 2y ago
    Classically, a CEO is an intern with a bald spot and an ulcer.
  • jvanderbot 2y ago
    Not really. Most (all?) of the insights here, probably delivered on short notice, were completely correct over the next 15 years. Don't let the clarity, brevity, and hindsight fool you - that's just how C-suite likes information presented and we have the benefit of looking back to know that all these things were "obviously true".
  • planb 2y ago
    Look at it again without the knowledge of the last 18 years! And from the position of a Nokia employee back then. This is an extremely well made executive summary for that time.
• ddalex 2y ago
  N800 is the future that never was - opem Linux-based mobile computing for the masses. It had developer support, cool form factor, big touchable screen, and no corp to love it.
  • bityard 2y ago
    I had one of those. It was interesting in that it ran Linux and you could (at the time) browse most web sites with it. Otherwise, it was slow, bulky, and had a pretty terrible resistive touch screen. (The stylus was NOT optional.) And you still had to carry your flip phone in another pocket. In the end I was mainly using mine to listen to podcasts (before they were called that). An iPod Touch eventually replaced it until Android phones got a lot better.
    • fifilura 2y ago
      Yes, that platform was set to compete with iOS and Android and with fine timing. I think they fumbled with the developer relations when first choosing Gtk for the UI and then jumped to QT. That made developers angry. And then of course the Microsoft steamroller killed it.
      • joezydeco 2y ago
        And it pretty much fucked up the Qt project afterward.
    • apricot 2y ago
      I had one too (and a 770 before it). Great idea, so-so implementation. It was slow (and slowness is a cardinal sin, since you're always reminded that you're using a machine -- in my opinion, the way Apple products react so much faster to user input than competing products is a huge factor in their success, and Apple knows it) and the touch screen was terrible.
    • broken-kebab 2y ago
      >And you still had to carry your flip phone in another pocket. UPDATE: Memory failure! I meant N900, not N800 Why? I had N800 as my only mobile, and was more than happy with it. Stylus was not optional for things like browsing. But most of the time I took it from my pocket, I used it for text input, and physical keyboard made it comfortable to the point no other device has been able to offer me ever since I retired my N800
• badlibrarian 2y ago
  My personal moment of "CEO's -- they're just like us!" was walking into a Kinko's in Santa Monica to drop off a package, and seeing a sweaty Stephen Elop frantically photocopying documents the week his part in this debacle came to a head.
  • sitkack 2y ago
    For those not in the know, this is the Ex CIO of Boston Chicken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop
    • selimthegrim 2y ago
      Stephen Elop’s good a$$ barbecue and foot massage
    • matthewdgreen 2y ago
      Clearly in retrospect these were transferable skills.
    • 1123581321 2y ago
      The bawk stops here.
      • sitkack 2y ago
        You can get both a SMS message and meal at the same time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
  • cf100clunk 2y ago
    Mobile phone industry analyst Tomi Ahonen's voluminous blog from back then contained an entire section devoted to Elop, who he called the "worst CEO in history", with data and evidence galore: https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/elop/ https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/elop/
• Aissen 2y ago
  > - No mention of[…] Java support. Lack of Java would shut out a big mass of existing SW
  • philipwhiuk 2y ago
    Which was true, but developers decided it was worth writing new SW for iPhone when the App Store was unveiled (which was significantly later).
  • Ensorceled 2y ago
    Java was a bonus compared to ObjC, but we looked into supporting Blackberry and it was a nightmare to support all the different versions of java, frameworks, and screen types. Much easier to teach someone ObjC and produce one iPhone version.
• 0gb 2y ago
  [flagged]
• LiamPowell 2y ago
  Mirror since the 3 already posted don't actually work: https://archive.org/details/document_20250116 https://archive.org/details/document_20250116
  • kristjansson 2y ago
    The host must be 404-ing high-traffic files?
    • echoangle 2y ago
      That's probably what happens once the traffic quota is exceeded, I would guess.
  • pinkfox 2y ago
    Thanks!
  • froh 2y ago
    thanks! FWIW I found it on-site by searching for "Apple iPhone was launched" on https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html leading with some clicks to https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=A0123 https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=A0123 which took me to a site that worked.
• jaustin 2y ago
  This is fascinating. A reminder that being (broadly) right in your analysis doesn't necessarily mean you can execute to turn things around. They note the impact to the high-end, the fact that UI is crucial, they even had a good guess at 2008 sales numbers (estimate 14m, looks like real was 13m). I was intrigued by this bullet point on how their Maemo platform could help: * Cellular development of the maemo platform and the politics surrounding it? Any folks from Nokia in this time care to shed more light on that? I always felt the N9 was a beautiful piece of design and implementation - just late and under-supported.
  • jampekka 2y ago
    > Any folks from Nokia in this time care to shed more light on that? Cellular connection was not allowed for the Linux devices so they don't compete with the Symbian phones. Nokia had deeply dysfunctional internal politics at that point.
    • Cumpiler69 2y ago
      >Nokia had deeply dysfunctional internal politics at that point. Tell me a large company other than Apple that wasn't completely dysfunctional.
      • jampekka 2y ago
        Google was doing quite well?
        • scarface_74 2y ago
          Doing well and being dysfunctional are not mutually exclusive. Google is still a dysfunctional company. At one point they had five different messaging apps. They bought Motorola and then sold it for pennies, quickly abandoned the Nexus line before then, and the Pixel isn’t taking the world by storm. Their efforts in the home have been scattershot, they have three separate OS initiatives that are not based on the same platform, and have all but abandoned Flutter. Also remember that RIMs stock price was at its peak around 2010 - 3 years after the iPhone came out.
• auggierose 2y ago
  It is clear that the presentation doesn't really get it. There would be no iPhone mini. This WAS the iPhone mini.
  • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
    It's 3.5", 135g :) Those were the days!
  • jansan 2y ago
    In hindsight it is funny that Apple used someone with very big hands holding the first iPhone in their 2007 ads to make it look smaller. Nobody at that time could imagine that phones would only get bigger.
    • matthewdgreen 2y ago
      iPhones got bigger in terms of screen size, but Apple remained obsessed with lighter and thinner phones for many years after that. It's hard to remember this, but some of the earlier smartphones like the Palm Trio were giant awful bricks. You can't really convey weight in a picture, but you can convey size.
      • whis-kiss 2y ago
        Wow I'm just remembering the girth of those devices. My family had some later palm and similar devices... closer to an address book or gaming devices in thickness. My mom's case was like 3/4 an inch deep, 3-4 in wide and like ~6in deep. Not light, and kinda fragile.
  • wodenokoto 2y ago
    In all fairness, Apple didn't expect the market to want giant phones, and were very late with big screens. Releatedly: It's fun to look at old Futurama episodes, where they joke about phones becoming so small you accidentally inhale them while talking. We all really thought size was going one way and that was down.
• anonu 2y ago
  I was expecting sort of the opposite, for Nokia to deride the whole iPhone thing. But it was quite the opposite, they understand what they were facing. Ultimately, the could not meet the challenge fast enough.
  • ceejayoz 2y ago
    Blackberry took that approach. https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/05/26/blackberry-iphone-book/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/05/26/blackberr... > Instead they comforted themselves with reminders that the iPhone's keyboard was difficult to use and the battery life, terrible. BlackBerry was leading the pack, after all.
    • mixdup 2y ago
      I would kill to see the presentation from RIM This is to Nokia's credit. It didn't work out, but they also weren't arrogant like RIM or Microsoft
      • nickpeterson 2y ago
        I think even when companies project arrogance from their c-suite, it’s more to keep the market happy and calm nerves. I’d be shocked if RIM wasn’t also sweating bullets internally after that iPhone presentation. They weren’t morons, and saw what happened with iPods.
        • Ensorceled 2y ago
          I know people who were at RIM at the time, including someone who was in the room when they passed around the first iPhone they got a hold of. They firmly believed the iPhone was dead on arrival both because the product was "terrible" (no keyboard, no battery life, etc. etc.) and, more importantly, because they were so confident Apple would not be able to pull off the networking required and people wouldn't be able to use the device at all.
          • 2y ago
• gyomu 2y ago
  Super prescient analysis, kind of ironically. Great example that there's a point of organizational no return that no amount of awareness and intelligent analysis can fix. When the barbarians are at the gate, it's too late.
• willvarfar 2y ago
  I remember the normal engineering mood inside Symbian, Motorola and Sony Ericsson when the iPhone launched. We immediately knew we were toast. We used to say that the iphone made us irrelevant and android made us redundant.
  • criticalfault 2y ago
    I think we can see the same thing happening today. BYD+CATL are the new iphone and other manufacturers are Symbian, Motorola and Sony Ericsson VW, Toyota and friends cannot change fast enough. They should have started with big battery investments 10-15y ago and RnDing then, not now when Market is flooded.
    • repler 2y ago
      I wouldn't count Toyota out. Their mega battery plant in North Carolina is coming online this year, and the biggest drag on their current EV/PHEV lineup is the batteries. New EV/PHEV models are on the way, and frankly if they just update what they have with better batteries they will be absolutely phenomenal because they are currently great to drive and run extremely well despite lackluster battery range.
      • f001 2y ago
        For the PHEVs yes they are battery constrained. They have great products and a ton of demand and difficulty keeping up manufacturing due to limited batteries. For their EV, they have yet to make something that is competitive. Their EV is slow to charge, slow to accelerate, somewhat short in range, and quite expensive before they started adding—-in some cases five figure—-incentives to move them. It even had a recall for the wheels coming off.
      • vladslav 2y ago
        Not just Toyota; the U.S. will have dozens of battery plants because it is strategic, like having our own chips.
    • wegwerfbenutzer 2y ago
• JSR_FDED 2y ago
  To my mind the key insight from the presentation is this sentence: “The 1% volume share target could translate into 4% value share, taking ~ 30% share of the >300 € price Band” That’s Apple’s superpower in a nutshell - get the majority of the profit in the market, while everyone else battles each over over market share (and earn low margins in the process).
  • alt227 2y ago
    > get the majority of the profit in the market But they werent able to just do this from the begining. It took a lot of building on the success and positive consumer appeal of the iPod.
    • dialup_sounds 2y ago
      The iPod applied the same strategy. When it launched it only worked on Macs with a FireWire port, meaning <10% of the personal computer market.
      • jandrese 2y ago
        Also less space than a Nomad. The killer feature of the iPod was the iTunes music store. Everybody was sick of the hoops the companies made you jump through to buy songs. Singles were basically out of fashion thanks to the domination of the CD, but most bands only released one or two good songs on a CD meaning each song cost like $5 and you had to rip it yourself and transfer it to whatever device you had, which was a lot of work. Apple realized people would buy a ton of music if you cut out the bullshit and price it reasonably, a strategy that had been previously untried in the market and no doubt caused a lot of CEO heartburn.
        • duskwuff 2y ago
          > The killer feature of the iPod was the iTunes music store. That wasn't launched until 2003, two years after the iPod, and it took a while for all the big music labels to sign on. (Hell, it took until 2010 for the Beatles to show up.) The iPod was a success even without the music store; while it wasn't the only portable digital music player on the market, or even the first, it was the first good one.
• neom 2y ago
  "User interface has been a big strength for Nokia — consumer research indicates this is in decline." - Funny, they pointed to both why the iPhone came out and what to do about it - then went on to really focus much more on feature for feature and existing players like Sony etc. They really focus on beating apple by competing on features vs thinking about it like a shift towards portable personal computing rather than competition in the telephony market. They seem to have somewhat understood apple flipped the script, but then reading through, their work around the fact that is true seems a bit... remedial. CEOs take note, good lessons in here. :)
• cs702 2y ago
  2007. The presentation reads like an eerily accurate crystal-ball prediction of what actually happened in subsequent years. Evidently, Nokia executives knew well in advance what the iPhone could do to their company. Evidently, they knew they needed to do "something" to avoid an implosion of their mobile-phone business. Evidently, despite their prescience and best efforts, they were unable to avoid disaster. It's as if they were in the Titanic, and saw the dangerous iceberg well in advance, but somehow were unable to turn the steering wheel and change course.
  • turnsout 2y ago
    This is spot-on, and it's a remarkably common pattern when dominant players are faced with a seismic shift—even when it comes from within. Kodak essentially invented the modern digital camera, and had a phenomenal lead going into the 90s. It was not a little side project—they hired IDEO to do vision work, design enclosures and create on-camera UIs. They poured money in, and did ship products. I'd love to know what happened internally, but externally they simply didn't move as quickly and aggressively as they needed to. Very similar story at Polaroid—it's not like they didn't see the iceberg. On the computing side, we have Xerox. Just couldn't figure out how to monetize any of the world-changing innovations from PARC. Someone should really interview all these key players while they're (mostly) still alive and put together some kind of unified field theory of corporate disruption.
    • hyperbovine 2y ago
      Kodak also bought Ofoto in 2001. So basically they had over a decade lead on Instagram. What did they do with it? Try to drive people to print more photos, on Kodak paper. I don't think they ever really embraced digital, maybe isolated parts of the company did, but the film/print cultural inertia was just too strong.
    • smitty1110 2y ago
      I worked with an ex-Kodak guy, and he related the following story to me from the 80’s or early 90’s. Xerox was kicking their ass, they were completely owning the copier market. But it was a natural fit for Kodak, they knew imaging better than everybody, why couldn’t they get into this market? This guy was on a crack team of engineers a VP assembled to create a competing product. 9 months later, they demo a fully digital copy machine, working, ready to go, with competitive pricing and features. But the higher ups at Kodak were incensed. They told the product needs a redesign, because Kodak was a film company, so the product needed to use film for copying. The revised product was a complete failure, and was the reason said engineer left Kodak shortly thereafter. My take is devotion to brand identity is death during these critical inflection points. YMMV
• EngineeringStuf 2y ago
  I'm surprised that Nokia found out through the keynote presentation from Steve Jobs. LG and Prada announced their phone a little earlier and it had been shown already at the IF Design Awards a few months earlier. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada If Nokia had paid attention to those design awards then they too could have moved quickly on a similar device. Is this a case where Nokia thought they had a moat?
• EngineeringStuf 2y ago
  I'm surprised that Nokia found out through the keynote presentation from Steve Jobs. LG and Prada announced their phone a little earlier and it had been shown already at the IF Design Awards a few months earlier. Google "LG Prada Phone" for the Wikipedia article. If Nokia had paid attention to those design awards then they too could have moved quickly on a similar device. Is this a case where Nokia thought they had a moat?
  • sampo 2y ago
    > If Nokia had paid attention to those design awards then they too could have moved quickly on a similar device. Nokia had their Maemo project [1]. A Linux-based OS for mobile touchscreen devices. They published their first device already in 2005 [2]. But the Maemo department was small, and the old Symbian department inside Nokia was big. The large number of managers and executives in the Symbian department played corporate politics, and kept the size and resources of the Maemo department small, as they perceived it an internal competitor threatening their position and the dominance of Symbian inside Nokia. Nokia's CEO at the time (Jorma Ollila) had a background in investment banking and financial engineering. His previous post in Nokia was CFO. He didn't have the kind of passion and insight to software and user experience like Apple's Steve Jobs had. Today, nobody would expect to get visionary tech leadership if recruiting from the corporate's finance department. At its soul, Apple is a software company that also makes their own hardware. Nokia was a hardware company that also made their own software. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet
    • ylee 2y ago
      >At its soul, Apple is a software company that also makes their own hardware. Nokia was a hardware company that also made their own software. ... and bad software, of course. Worse than that, multiple versions of bad software. Apple is the only company in history to build consistently good hardware and good software and UI. Not IBM, not DEC or the other Seven Dwarfs. It really does go all the way back to the Woz-Jobs duo providing a maniacal focus on UX and one of the most brilliant engineering minds of the century. (I'm told that Tesla also qualifies.)
• oyster143 2y ago
  Just to add to the party: Microsoft deck for Nokia acquisition https://www.slidebook.io/company/microsoft/presentation/f64609d82f09eaf3b9d62b68f4c45fa4/ https://www.slidebook.io/company/microsoft/presentation/f646...
  • Thorrez 2y ago
    That doesn't look like an internal presentation though.
• joshdavham 2y ago
  I’m getting a search error on the page.
• lifefeed 2y ago
  I cant find the quote and article now, but I read that before it was released no one else believed a computer like that could have any reasonable battery life. Then they opened it up and discovered the iPhone was really just a battery with a small logic board attached to it, and a lot of the heavy computational lifting was done when it connected to your computer.
  • carlosjobim 2y ago
    Can you expand on what you mean? What heavy computational lifting?
    • lifefeed 2y ago
      I wish I could find the original article, it was a link from a link from the bibliography of Chip War. I think it was things like how you couldn't initially purchase music, and had to sync to iTunes to do that. I think there was more. I did find this article, on iPhone being basically just a battery: https://mathiasmikkelsen.com/2011/05/blackberry-makers-thought-the-original-iphone-was-impossible-to-make/ https://mathiasmikkelsen.com/2011/05/blackberry-makers-thoug...
      • carlosjobim 2y ago
        Thanks! Very interesting.
  • tmnvdb 2y ago
    The first iphone indeed had rather poor battery performance, epsecially at that steep price of 500$..
• jervant 2y ago
  "Cingular has allowed Apple to launch a device with WLAN and inbuilt services" Ugh, that "allowed". It's wild how much Apple shook up the mobile phone market and pushed phone companies back to just being dumb data carriers.
  • bombcar 2y ago
    Jobs sticking to his guns here and breaking the shitware monopoly on pre-installed phones is probably a bigger part of the full story than the phone itself (as likely the black rectangle would be developed by someone eventually, phone carcinization).
    • Lammy 2y ago
      > as likely the black rectangle would be developed by someone eventually, phone carcinization Relevant: LG Prada (2006) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
  • pjc50 2y ago
    This was so critical - in the US market. The first Apple phone was a very interesting market test that proved why this was needed, before the iPhone.
  • indrora 2y ago
    Stuff like this goes back YEARS. Back in the days of the Bell System, the upper management at AT&T believed that it was going to be circuit-switched forever, even as Bell Labs was building packet-switched audio networks and it was becoming clear that packet-switching was a vastly more efficient solution to moving large amounts of mixed data around at a time. The development of efficient switching networks [0] was fundamentally resulting in continually building bigger networks that took up more space -- it was the Strowger step-by-step problem all over again. Moving to a packet-switched system meant that you could have an infinite number of "circuits" so long as you kept track of the paths taken. But even as AT&T Long Lines implemented this, upper AT&T management was firm that the fundamental design of the network was not to shuffle packets around but instead to connect point A and point B with services on either end for the subscriber. Even when they did eventually try to accept the packet-switched system, ISDN was too big and bulky, too slow for anything practical, and by the time it was useful, Ethernet/IP came along and ate its lunch. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonblocking_minimal_spanning_switch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonblocking_minimal_spanning_s...
• strangescript 2y ago
  These presentations often serve as a comfort blanket rather than a plan of action. Oh man something incredibly disruptive is happening to us. Lets talk about it. Whew, okay, we understand it, lets go back to being complacent. Years later, "man we tried, we had that meeting and everything, we just couldn't compete"
  • tmnvdb 2y ago
    They actually managed to act on most of the problems identified here but missed the move to software-based ecosystem-centric market started by the app store launched the next year.
• deleted 2y ago
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• deskr 2y ago
  If you strip this text to the bare-bones meaning, it reads: "Holy shit, we're f'cked, but here is the best positive spin we can put on it." They saw the writing on the wall. They didn't want to compete on that level, but rather try to kill it. From "summary of actions": "5. Kill market for such an expensive device by filling mid-range with own/Google/Yahoo experiences"
  • tmnvdb 2y ago
    This is a rather poor reading of the presentation, which seems very serious about the threat and the need to adopt similar changes, as well as trying to keep the iphone at bay by offering similar features at a lower price.
• jx0950 2y ago
  I read this after doing a time travel back to 2007. I was using Blackberry/Nokia E## at the time. Remember thinking about a phone without a full keyboard! Seems like Nokia had a good grasp of what had happened. Also a sense of immediacy to act. But then - Nokia, Palm, Blackberry....
• ubermonkey 2y ago
  That's a great time capsule. I'd love to see a similar document from the same period from Microsoft, because I really wonder if Ballmer's much-lampooned interview after the iPhone's intro was bluster or a real position held by the mobile unit at MSFT. "<laughs> $500 fully subsidized with a plan? That is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine." It's a take that has aged like milk, but Ballmer wasn't (and isn't) an idiot. The rest of the market looked at the iPhone and saw the future, and moved accordingly. I mean, the first major users I saw of the iPhone were BUSINESS users, in point of fact. So I've always wondered if that was just bluster, or he really was drinking so much Redmond-flavored Kool-aid that he didn't, or couldn't, see what was about to happen. (In re: Kool-aid, in 2009-ish, my company did a joint deal at a large client with MSFT; we had complimentary products, so we were pitching as a unit. The MSFT guys were genuinely vexed that we had iPhones. Like, personally affronted. And this was in Kansas, far from the mothership. At the time, WinMo was AWFUL. It couldn't even do IMAP without a 3rd party client -- it was Exchange or POP only. None of us had ever really used a WinMo phone for very long, because (at that time) a Treo was still a great option, and RIM hadn't fully wet the bed, so WinMo was pretty thin on the ground unless your paycheck said "Microsoft" on it.)
  • bsimpson 2y ago
    It's funny to see $500 being expensive for a phone here, because I absolutely remember it being so far above the market that it was rare to see the first generation in the world (and they had a price cut shortly thereafter). There has been some nasty inflation in these past years, but $500 is a budget phone these days!
    • tmnvdb 2y ago
      Well, $500 in 2007 is $756 in 2025, not exactly a "budget phone" price.
    • dagw 2y ago
      It was $500 with an expensive mandatory 2-year contract. With an expensive 2-year contract you can get most budget phones for 'free'.
• kristianc 2y ago
  "Nokia impact minimal in terms of financials, but may impede US penetration or success" Now there's a gem of a line...
  • GoToRO 2y ago
    there's another one, users still prefer buttons...
• gatnoodle 2y ago
  _Evaluate the partnership with Microsoft (the enemy of your enemy...)_
• edejong 2y ago
  "Even though Steve Jobs emphasised iPhone superiority to "Buttons", it is to be expected that the consumer QWERTY category will continue to succeed." Their key mistake.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • ttepasse 2y ago
    I don't know. 17 years on and my fingers still miss hardware keyboards a little bit. My dream smartphone would be a black rectangle, but with a landscape hardware keyboard to slide out from underneath. And in an ideal world OLED keys for changing the layout and a touch sensitivity for moving a text cursor. What I miss from the 2000s is the big differentiation in phone form factors. Granted, a lot of them were weird, but there was at least experimentation and optimising for different use cases. What if the current standard of a black rectangle is just a local maximum and there is something better ahead?
    • nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
      I still think Motorola's Droid (and Droid 2) were the pinnacle of the smartphone form factor. I distinctly recall the prevailing view among friends at the time was that even with the keyboard-less smartphones becoming the norm that the keyboard approach would become the standard interface, as Blackberry still existed and had majority market share (it seemed; my region had few iPhones at the time).
• ylee 2y ago
  I helped cover IT hardware companies including Apple at a bulge-bracket investment bank. Not just Nokia, but the entire phone industry was caught flatfooted by iPhone as willvarfar and anonu said, despite rumors going around the industry. (The joke slide in Jobs' announcement presentation showing an iPod with phone dial was not too far off what we and most people expected.) Thoughts on the presentation: * "There is not much coolness left for Motorola" - The day of the announcement, I saw a press release from Motorola come across the wire, in which the company announced yet another phone with a keyboard. I felt pity for the unfortunate souls who had designed it, worked on its launch, and wrote the copy for the press release, and who now had to see their efforts fly into Hurricane iPhone. * Predictions of lower-priced iPhones - Average iPhone prices of course rose, as opposed to falling. As JSR_FDED said, Apple has always played upmarket. I heard Apple's CFO say at a Citigroup-hosted investor conference that his company could release a $799 computer "but we don't want to". (That said, it is quite possible to find deals, at least in the US. I got my iPhone 13 by agreeing to pay $200 over 30 months on top of my already super-cheap T-Mobile plan. The iPhone before that, I bought carrier refurbished for $100 from Sprint.) And of course, there never was an iPhone mini with a fundamentally different UI. Despite the repeated commitment to improving on UI, etc., I guess it would have been too much to ask a company like Nokia, the king of releasing a new model with new UI and new form factor weekly, to imagine that another company would just not play the infinite-SKU game. (Conversely, it's not hard to imagine that had Apple entered the phone market in the 1990s during the years of endless indistinguishable Performa models, it might have tried to play along.) * The MVNO mention is regarding rumors of Apple launching its phone in conjunction with an MVNO. We thought this was quite possible, but it was based on Apple having the credibility to immediately have millions of customers switch to it as their carrier, and not because Apple—of all companies—could not get whatever it wanted from carriers. * Third-party app support - Most have forgotten that Apple really did expect webapps to be the app experience for iPhone's first year. But even that would have been an improvement over what things was like before iPhone. I speak as one who purchased my share of Palm apps. $20 was the norm for, say, DateBk6 (which, by the way, has at least one function that MacOS's Calendar just got with Sequoia). * "Expect RIM and Palm to suffer" - I never liked using my company-issued Blackberries. I didn't leave Palm until 3GS in 2009; besides DateBk6, I also liked being able to tether my computer to my Palm Treo 700p. * I'm pretty sure there was no sharing of data revenue or iTunes revenue. Apple got what it wanted from Cingular/AT&T regarding marketing and in-store push without having to preload bloatware or the carrier's brand name all over the device/packaging, and the carrier got the exclusive of the decade. Remember, Deutsche Telekom deciding to sell T-Mobile in 2011 was directly because it didn't have iPhone (so that tells you how the repeated mention in the presentation of T-Mobile turned out).
• jl6 2y ago
  One can imagine the feeling of realizing the asteroid will hit in 6 months but your anti-asteroid solution will take 3 years to build.
• dschuetz 2y ago
  Nokia saw the iPhone, fast-forward to 2014, Nokia just gives up and sells their dead horse cellphone business to Microsoft. Microsoft casts a few necromancy spells and also just gives up 3 years later, and kills the same dead horse again. The end.
  • nsteel 2y ago
    ...and then to HMD, and then they gave up. The end (again)?
  • dialup_sounds 2y ago
    ...and then they made some Android foldables that went nowhere. The end? I expect to see a new Windows Phone in around 2030.
• alt227 2y ago
  > Nokia needs to develop touch UI to fight back. S60 should be focus, but Maemo platform can be a critical strength due to openness. If only history went this way, Maemo could be a full OS competing with the big boys by now.
• deleted 2y ago
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• benrutter 2y ago
  Like some other commenters, I'm amazed at how well thought out Nokia's insight into the iPhone was at the time. They seemed pretty aware it was a major threat, and a game changer that needed to be responded to. I'd be curious about an alternative history where Nokia hadn't tied itself so strongly to the burning reckage that was Windows Phone. Would Nokia have wound up as a solid android phone producer somewhere similar to where Samsung are now? I guess we'll never know.
  • tmnvdb 2y ago
    My understanding is that the microsoft partnership was more like a late last ditch effort. The market was changing to one where hardware was produced in asia and phones are loaded with ecosystem-centric software from Google or Apple (the real game changer, the app store, was launched next year). Nokia did not really have a place in either of those and did not manage to adapt to this fundamental change. They did actually manage to adapt to the UI revolution of the first iphone.
• krastanov 2y ago
  It is really saddening for me to see how much N800/N900 and the Maemo platform are mentioned here, as an example of Nokia actually being first to introduce many of these technologies, but then Nokia dropped them a few years later. I still occasionally boot my N900, I wish I had a use for it -- it still works great as a general purpose computer and a good phone.
• deleted 2y ago
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• abhayhegde 2y ago
  Nokia correctly predicted that iPhone would stand for "coolness" factor. It's amazing how Apple carried that brand since its inception and precisely what allows it to levy "Apple tax". The execs even noted that the downside of iPhone would be non-removable battery. It is commendable that Apple changed the industry standard to something worse without even being in the top 10 in 2008.
• kombine 2y ago
  I was working as a Qt developer at the time and really rooted for Maemo to succeed, because Qt was and still is a truly an amazing piece of technology. Unfortunately, Nokia squandered this opportunity.
• ongytenes 2y ago
  Got a 404 at tiiny.host after following your link.
• sefke 2y ago
  I've been reading these Nokia archives for the whole day. It's so interesting to see what they did behind the scenes.
• yread 2y ago
  > Based on highly speculative iPhone sales of 6.5 million during 2007 and 14 million during 2008. Actual sales: 2007: 1.4M, 2008: 12M. Pretty spot on.
• cf100clunk 2y ago
  Me too, I was there. For those who wish to deep dive into the mobile phone industry's history from the late 1990s and subsequent decades, I highly recommend industry analyst Tomi Ahonen's voluminous (I'm not kidding) blog from back then. I'm providing a link here about Nokia in particular: https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/nokia/ https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/nokia/ and especially his scathing take on the events of the Microsoft-Nokia timeframe, wherein as events transpired he frequently reframed his belief that Elop was the "Worst CEO In History".
• unwiredben 2y ago
  I was at Palm when the iPhone launched, and one note from this analysis summed up Apple's new power in the market and how they really changed the landscape. "Cingular has allowed Apple to launch a device with WLAN and inbuilt services" At that time, the carriers controlled so much of the cell phone experience. We certainly would have loved to have launched Palm Treo phones with WiFi radios, but our carrier partners wanted the only way to get data in and out of the devices to be through their monetized data plans. They also wanted to control what you did with that data so they could charge for their own email or messaging systems or web portals. The same applied to app stores. Palm OS didn't have a unified app store at that time, just sideloading and some third-party methods, and some carriers had started making their own stores where you could buy apps billed through your cell phone bill. They hated the idea of a platform owning that, and I expect that was part of the reason Apple originally released it with no app store. They needed the phone to be a massive hit in order to gain the power to also bypass that wall that the cell companies put up. Palm did benefit from the iPhone launch -- it had us uplevel our efforts away from the post-Palm OS phones that we were in the middle of developing that were aimed at the RIM market and instead try something radical with webOS, and when the Pre launched, it actually had WiFi on board, although the Sprint-exclusive Pixi phone lacked WiFi due to carrier request. There was some momentum there for a while, but then HP bought us, hit its own set of brick walls with carriers, and ditched the hardware business shortly after Apple started launching on other carriers.
  • dboreham 2y ago
    Exactly this. Also why I bought Apple stock the day the iPhone was announced (I had never seen an iPhone and knew nothing about how cool it was, but I took notice that Jobs had been able to blast through the carrier moat concerning data service).
  • jandrese 2y ago
    I read that as a failure of Palm's management, notably the ones that were negotiating with phone carriers. Jobs isn't the only guy who could have negotiated that kind of deal. Apple was a second run computer company that had almost no previous phone experience. They were not exactly negotiating from a position of strength, and the fact that only one carrier took them up on the offer shows just how tough it was. It sounds like they really needed to say "Stop. We are the ones building the phone, you are the ones providing the service. We don't tell you how to build towers, you don't tell us how to build the handset, at least not the user facing part of the handset."
• jjallen 2y ago
  Content doesn't exist for me
• wslh 2y ago
  When I loook on this [recent] history, the business and technical strategies Apple and Google employed in mobile were truly amazing. In my view, Apple and Google managed to reinvent themselves (organically or otherwise), while Nokia and Microsoft were weighed down by their attachments to the past. Blackberry is in the same ship. In hindsight it seems they should have embraced Android as early as possible (thinking in the success of the Samsung S II (2011)).
• phgn 2y ago
  Does anyone have a PDF link that works?
• dagmx 2y ago
  The link doesn’t work anymore but this one does for me https://aalto.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a020-5205aeb4d4d5/ https://aalto.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/IO_926740c...
• gurjeet 2y ago
  This seems to have been originally posted on Reddit, and the link posted there seems to be online, whereas this post's link seems to be now dead. https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a020-5205aeb4d4d5/ https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0... https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/comments/1i2pijr/nokias_internal_presentation_after_iphone_was/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/comments/1i2pijr/nokias_...
  • codetrotter 2y ago
    It seems the other way around for the particular post you are linking. This was posted to HN, then a bit picked it up from RSS and cross posted the same link to r/hackernews on Reddit (your Reddit link). Then the repo.aalto.fi site was temporarily hugged by too much traffic. Then someone reuploaded the PDF to this other tiiny site. Then the link on HN was changed to that. Then the file on the tiiny site disappeared. Regardless, thanks for the link. The repo.aalto.fi link currently works for me. Probably because it’s getting much less traffic now.
• joshmarinacci 2y ago
  Sometimes a company can know the problem is real and be unable to address it. I was at Palm when HP bought us. HP knew the future was mobile and wanted to not be just a low margin OEM for someone else’s software platform. Buying Palm was a way for them to control their own destiny again. Unfortunately the driver of this dream at HP was fired by the board before it got going and his replacement didn’t share the vision. A year later HP took a massive writedown and turned it all off. (Then he was fired by the board as well. The circle of life continues).
• maCDzP 2y ago
  I doubt todays management would read a PowerPoint that dense.
• deleted 2y ago
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• hackerstyle 2y ago
  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mZ_S3R53bmVpvxixavkMPmMorCjPtdN7/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mZ_S3R53bmVpvxixavkMPmMorCj...
• EtienneK 2y ago
  When things like this pop up, I always think back to Joel Spolsky's review of the Nokia E71 and how he compared it to the iPhone 3G: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/08/22/a-review-of-the-nokia-e71/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/08/22/a-review-of-the-no... The E71 was arguably Nokia's best phone ever; and it was indeed better than the iPhone 3G. But Nokia just couldn't keep up the momentum.
• kbouck 2y ago
  Worked at Nokia when iPhone was released. No strategy/management insight, but I recall the jokes made by my colleagues as I showed off my iPhone 1: "Cool, but can it make phone calls" On internal message boards, some employees advocated staying loyal to Nokia products, and others advocated buying the best product (iPhone) to challenge Nokia. Wish they had navigated this one better...
• toastau 2y ago
  Uploaded the PDF here: https://files.catbox.moe/y94qdz.pdf https://files.catbox.moe/y94qdz.pdf
• pkaye 2y ago
  Anyone have a working link?
• TradingPlaces 2y ago
  They got so much right and still got swamped.
• aanet 2y ago
  As others have noted, the original presentation is here: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a020-5205aeb4d4d5/ https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
• sebmellen 2y ago
  From the second to last page: > Apple is most probably using the first Application Processor of nVidia in iPhone. Was this true?
  • markus92 2y ago
    Nope, used a Samsung CPU with PowerVR GPU.
• GoToRO 2y ago
  If we go only by this presentation, it seems that they tried to understand the forest by looking at every leaf in detail and then try to guess if the forest is beautiful or not.
• haeberli 2y ago
  New pdf link broken as well, as far as I can tell
• wodenokoto 2y ago
  No one’s gonna mention the weird “copyright 2005” on every slide?
• haeberli 2y ago
  New pdf link is broken, as far as I can tell.
• Ancapistani 2y ago
  Huh - the implications of this time period reach much farther than I would have expected. I recall switching from a small, regional cellular carrier to Cingular with the launch of the iPhone 3G. It only now occurred to me that I'm still there. I stayed with Cingular when it became AT&T, and still have service through them. For that matter, the service has significantly expanded; I now have tablets, watches, and four phones for family members... some of whom weren't even alive when I switched carriers. My bill is ~$450 / month. If I assume an average monthly bill of $300 (it started around $100, but has been as high as $550), there have been 196 months that I've paid that bill. $58,800 in revenue from me alone, that would have gone to someone else had Cingular not allowed Apple to launch on their network in 2007.
  • lotsofpulp 2y ago
    A good portion of your monthly bill goes toward paying the debt incurred from massively overpaying DirectTV and Time Warner shareholders in the 2010s. I don't understand how the entire ATT board and leadership were not ejected. I think it was something on the order of $100B lost just on those two transactions.
    • Ancapistani 2y ago
      I'm no fan of the company itself, but I've been too pleased with the service to really want to switch. About a year ago I needed a SIM for an (older) Android phone for my daughter, who didn't need a capable smartphone or anything. They sent me one, but when I activated it over the phone the CS rep made a mistake and it ended up blacklisted. I told them I was activating it because my daughter was going on a trip in a couple of days, and they escalated it. I ended up with an AT&T employee driving 1.5 hours to my house to hand-deliver a new SIM and make sure the phone was activated and working the next day. In addition, they gave me a $500 bill credit without prompting at all. So... yeah. It's not ideal, but I honestly feel like I'm getting what I'm paying for.
  • yreg 2y ago
    A bit off the topic, but your bill is bonkers to me. We have unlimited data + unlimited calls for 39€.
• catchmeifyoucan 2y ago
  I have to share that my career as a software engineer started with Windows Phone. They used to give super nice Nokia phones out if you made an app. And free backpacks :) Developing for Windows phone was easy as drag and drop. I honestly think no other native platform had that good of a DevEx. If you were already an app developer, I can see how it's hard to learn something new. But if it was your first time, this was prolly the easiest platform to start. Eventually the platform died, and I found a career with Xamarin using a similar stack (C#, XAML) and built for other platforms as well. I miss Windows Phone. Honestly some of the cleanest devices ever built with the carl zeiss lens and raised screen.
• lifestyleguru 2y ago
  One thing that makes me anxious is it looks like right now the entire EU has its "Nokia in 2007" moment.
• digitalsurgeonz 2y ago
  there are parallels to the Ukraine war in this story. Nokia = Ukraine, MSFT = USA. Things played out similarly in both cases.
  • throw_pm23 2y ago
    Who are Apple, Android, Samsung, etc. in this analogy?
• micheljansen 2y ago
  I was doing mobile development on a home healthcare product during this period. The product was built around Nokia’s line of phones with NFC built in, so we had good ties with them and would always get prototypes of their next generation of NFC-capable device ahead of time to get the software ready ahead of launch. Shortly after the launch of the iPhone, Nokia canned the prototype S60 model we were working on without announcing any alternative. I always imagined they scrapped the whole pipeline of successors they had planned. The iPhone was at least 2 generations ahead of the unreleased prototype. Ended up having to port the whole thing to a different device from Samsung.
• lxe 2y ago
  Wow! Nokia understood exactly what was happening and what needed to be done but failed to execute.
• r00fus 2y ago
  Thoughts: 1) References to Java on device and "lack of OTA" and the importance of "iTunes" indicated the presenters had little understanding of the possibility of the App Store which was a seismic shift in the industry that was apparently not foreseen. 2) They noticed some important missing features (3G, OTA updates, etc) but all of them were addressed with the next version (3G). 3) They were panicking about "iPhone mini" and thought it would be a feature reduction (like iPod interface) but in the end Apple just cannibalized its own profits and just lower the price on the full-featured 3G.
• deleted 2y ago
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• carlosjobim 2y ago
  The analysis is fascinating. The iPod had already been a huge success for some time, retailing for hundreds of dollars. Of course Apple would make a phone. Even if it would have just been an iPod with feature phone ... features. Nokia goes on and on about pricing in the report. How could they not get into their thick skulls that there was a good market for more expensive, better devices? Then the tragedy with the Nokia N9, which both in hardware design and software UI design looks and feels more modern than Apple and Android devices from 2024. I think Nokia owners and leadership simply gave up when they saw the iPhone launch, decided to cash out their money to offshore accounts, and hired some shady fellows from Microsoft to cover up by staging bad business decisions doomed to fail.
• fgblanch 2y ago
  It is painful to read. To me in retrospective the major mistake in the presentation is that it barely talks about end users and how the iPhone enabled a new world of use cases. It is only about business/corporate, features and specs. When analyzing the iphone on those dimensions all the reactive action items are doomed. They had not a chance to compete with that analysis.
• urbandw311er 2y ago
  Looking back, it’s astonishing how long it actually took the competition to catch up in terms of developing an equally responsive touchscreen that felt anything like as intuitive.
• yencabulator 2y ago
  My personal theory is where Nokia failed was worrying too much about Osborne effect[1] of their Linux-based phones on their Symbian business, or there being some behind-the-scenes contract clauses that tied them to Symbian too much. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect Background/disclaimer: My business partner made a prototype touchscreen keyboard for Nokia, running on unreleased Linux hardware. Nokia had a significant Linux codebase very early on.
• Seanambers 2y ago
  Site is flagged by basically everything for phishing.
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