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I remember when the iPhone 1 was introduced there were comments here that it will inevitably kill Nokia. At the time I was wondering what those guys are smoking

I remember when the iPhone 1 was introduced there were comments here that it will inevitably kill Nokia. At the time I was wondering what those guys are smoking :)

joezydeco 12y ago
If you combine 2007 and 2008, Nokia sold nearly 1,000,000,000 handsets in those two years. That's One Capital-B Billion. Nobody thought an 800-lb gorilla like Nokia could ever be unseated. Looking back, it's still boggling that the collapse took a mere seven years.
- sendmorbutt 12y ago
  True. It's still mind boggling when I think about that.
x0x0 12y ago
Me too, but I thought that because I assumed the ceo of Nokia would order his engineers to drop whatever the fuck they where doing this second, start a death march, and build him an iphone.
- xorcist 12y ago
  I think they already had one, in the N800 line that was to become Maemo/Meego/Tizen/Sailfish. They just didn't want to put all wood behind that arrow. I never understood why, exactly, and I still don't.
  - zurn 12y ago
    It's probably hard to make a leap of faith that will leave 95% of your engineers fumbling in the dark after being robbed of their Symbian/Windows environment, while that organisation is making record profits. The iPhone 1 was just a glorified iPod without 3rd party apps, it excited mostly Mac users, not obviously something to "drop everything" over. Even now iPhone has less than 15% market share. Android was arguably a more obvious threat.
    - x0x0 12y ago
      I have to disagree. I worked with someone who got an iphone the first week they where available; it probably involved standing in line for a day or something ridiculous. But while the videos that Jobs did where pretty amazing, when you held it in your hand and played with it, my thoughts where 1 - holy shit I need this, and 2 - using fb on this thing is going to be like crack. Maybe I was over optimistic, but I was pretty confident everyone with an ipod or a train/bus commute was going to have one pretty soon. I still believe any ceo of a cell phone manufacturer who got one (and they all should have purchased an iphone on the first day) and didn't immediately see the future unfolding in front of them is incompetent.
      - vidarh 12y ago
        I'm not so surprised, because if you followed the market at that time closely, the iPhone was much less of an obvious innovation than it is in retrospect. For starters, we'd had PDAs with touch screens for years, and they were hot in the business market for a while, but remained a niche product. Even when they got built in phones. We'd had tablets since at least '99 (I worked on the software for one in '99 and we were certainly not first), and they'd remained a niche - either underpowered or overpriced (the latter typically being pretty much laptops with a swivel display). When we tried to build interest from partners in our tablet in '99, it quickly became clear the market was not at all ready. People didn't understand why they'd need or want a product like that. Ericssons "Screen Phone" suffered the same fate, and quietly disappeared. (Though both the tablet I worked on, and the Ericsson Screen Phone were limited severely by being tied to ISDN base stations rather than truly mobile). And it stayed like that for several years. If you'd played with that stuff, the iPhone looked like an evolutionary step of a niche product. If you were intimately involved with these markets at the time, it'd be easy to assume that the tepid response was still going to be the case when the iPhone arrived, and that at least you'd have plenty of time to see how the market was maturing before needing to respond. Let someone else make the expensive market lessons for you. It's one of those cases where being too close to the technology was a disadvantage for many, because it meant not so easily seeing that this was the evolutionary step that finally would tip things over into creating excitement amongst regular people.
  - joezydeco 12y ago
    Because Nokia was selling billions of phones and most of them were not full-feature smartphones. In Nokia's mindset, especially on a continent where people paid full price for phones and didn't get subsidies from the carriers like US users, web enabled smartphones were a high-end luxury or business item. The cash was still in the meaty part of the curve, selling candybars and semi-feature phones to economy users and the 2nd-3rd world. Perhaps the iPhone wouldn't have been as big an initial smash if everyone had to pay $800-$1200 out of the gate.
    - nostrademons 12y ago
      You could argue that the cash is still in the meaty part of the curve - much of Android's growth has come from smaller, lower-powered phones, and the biggest change in KitKat was reduced memory usage so that the latest Android features could fit on low-end phones that had previously been limited to Gingerbread. I guess Nokia didn't figure on Google managing to fit an iPhone-like interface on commodity hardware.
    - ulfw 12y ago
      Actually the 'continent' (I assume you mean Europe - if not, sorry then I am wrong) without subsidies where people pay full price for phones is a bit of an urban myth. At least for the time. In fact in at least the larger countries (Germany, UK, France) people very much had to rely on anywhere between 12-24 months contracts to get subsidized phones. Remember, even (the higher end Nokia or Ericsson) feature phones cost several hundred dollars then. I remember having paid 200 DM for my Ericsson T28 way back in the day which would have cost 3x as much if I didn't get it with a contract.

I remember when the iPhone 1 was introduced there were comments here that it will inevitably kill Nokia. At the time I was wondering what those guys are smoking :)

joezydeco 12y ago

If you combine 2007 and 2008, Nokia sold nearly 1,000,000,000 handsets in those two years. That's One Capital-B Billion. Nobody thought an 800-lb gorilla like Nokia could ever be unseated. Looking back, it's still boggling that the collapse took a mere seven years.

sendmorbutt 12y ago
True. It's still mind boggling when I think about that.

x0x0 12y ago

Me too, but I thought that because I assumed the ceo of Nokia would order his engineers to drop whatever the fuck they where doing this second, start a death march, and build him an iphone.

xorcist 12y ago
I think they already had one, in the N800 line that was to become Maemo/Meego/Tizen/Sailfish. They just didn't want to put all wood behind that arrow. I never understood why, exactly, and I still don't.
- zurn 12y ago
  It's probably hard to make a leap of faith that will leave 95% of your engineers fumbling in the dark after being robbed of their Symbian/Windows environment, while that organisation is making record profits. The iPhone 1 was just a glorified iPod without 3rd party apps, it excited mostly Mac users, not obviously something to "drop everything" over. Even now iPhone has less than 15% market share. Android was arguably a more obvious threat.
  - x0x0 12y ago
    I have to disagree. I worked with someone who got an iphone the first week they where available; it probably involved standing in line for a day or something ridiculous. But while the videos that Jobs did where pretty amazing, when you held it in your hand and played with it, my thoughts where 1 - holy shit I need this, and 2 - using fb on this thing is going to be like crack. Maybe I was over optimistic, but I was pretty confident everyone with an ipod or a train/bus commute was going to have one pretty soon. I still believe any ceo of a cell phone manufacturer who got one (and they all should have purchased an iphone on the first day) and didn't immediately see the future unfolding in front of them is incompetent.
    - vidarh 12y ago
      I'm not so surprised, because if you followed the market at that time closely, the iPhone was much less of an obvious innovation than it is in retrospect. For starters, we'd had PDAs with touch screens for years, and they were hot in the business market for a while, but remained a niche product. Even when they got built in phones. We'd had tablets since at least '99 (I worked on the software for one in '99 and we were certainly not first), and they'd remained a niche - either underpowered or overpriced (the latter typically being pretty much laptops with a swivel display). When we tried to build interest from partners in our tablet in '99, it quickly became clear the market was not at all ready. People didn't understand why they'd need or want a product like that. Ericssons "Screen Phone" suffered the same fate, and quietly disappeared. (Though both the tablet I worked on, and the Ericsson Screen Phone were limited severely by being tied to ISDN base stations rather than truly mobile). And it stayed like that for several years. If you'd played with that stuff, the iPhone looked like an evolutionary step of a niche product. If you were intimately involved with these markets at the time, it'd be easy to assume that the tepid response was still going to be the case when the iPhone arrived, and that at least you'd have plenty of time to see how the market was maturing before needing to respond. Let someone else make the expensive market lessons for you. It's one of those cases where being too close to the technology was a disadvantage for many, because it meant not so easily seeing that this was the evolutionary step that finally would tip things over into creating excitement amongst regular people.
- joezydeco 12y ago
  Because Nokia was selling billions of phones and most of them were not full-feature smartphones. In Nokia's mindset, especially on a continent where people paid full price for phones and didn't get subsidies from the carriers like US users, web enabled smartphones were a high-end luxury or business item. The cash was still in the meaty part of the curve, selling candybars and semi-feature phones to economy users and the 2nd-3rd world. Perhaps the iPhone wouldn't have been as big an initial smash if everyone had to pay $800-$1200 out of the gate.
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    You could argue that the cash is still in the meaty part of the curve - much of Android's growth has come from smaller, lower-powered phones, and the biggest change in KitKat was reduced memory usage so that the latest Android features could fit on low-end phones that had previously been limited to Gingerbread. I guess Nokia didn't figure on Google managing to fit an iPhone-like interface on commodity hardware.
  - ulfw 12y ago
    Actually the 'continent' (I assume you mean Europe - if not, sorry then I am wrong) without subsidies where people pay full price for phones is a bit of an urban myth. At least for the time. In fact in at least the larger countries (Germany, UK, France) people very much had to rely on anywhere between 12-24 months contracts to get subsidized phones. Remember, even (the higher end Nokia or Ericsson) feature phones cost several hundred dollars then. I remember having paid 200 DM for my Ericsson T28 way back in the day which would have cost 3x as much if I didn't get it with a contract.