"The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable."
The management got too rosy picture of what Windows Phone 7 was (a quick hackish MVP, nothing more, like the first iPhone few years earlier) and they were really surprised when upgrade path to Windows Phone 8 was really hard.
I firmly believe that the messy transition from WP7.5 to 8, Microsoft focusing on the internals of the OS versus much-requested user-facing features is what doomed the OS.
I recognize that the transition was necessary, but between the lackluster functionality (notification center, for example, was the #1 requested feature for years), lack of updates (8.0 to 8.1 took 20 months), and, of course, lack of developer support, I'm wondering if Windows Phone had a chance at all.
I will never stop being upset over the death of Zune HD and WP7 era Metro UI, though.
And basically developers needed to remake (more or less) the apps from WP7.* to WP8. Nowadays they need to port apps from WP or from Desktop Windows to Windows Universal Apps, so what's the point if nobody's using those apps? :D
This is a very extended assumption which is quite wrong.
When Nokia opted for MS all paths were already downhill. Going with Android would have meant and injection of money from Google, but clearly Nokia was not prepared to land in the highly dense Android ecosystem, fighting for a tiny piece of the cake with giants like Samsung. There was no way that Nokia would have a success in Android that would put out the fire.
MS in turned meant to have most of the Windows Phone market for itself and a BIG partner behind. As terrible as WP was at the beginning, it bought Nokia a LOT of time. Nokia reorganized its business in the meantime, separated the location business (what is now HERE), the NSN side and consolidated its patent portfolio and research divisions.
This way, they managed in the end to sell Devices to Microsoft, which was a huge burden. And then sell HERE (which wasn't really profitable) to the automotive consortium. With this two moves they kept the company afloat, along with many great assets that actually make and will make money (the research division and NSN ), and the brand.
Had Nokia opted for Android back then, it would have ended much worse (Blackberry maker comes to mind). I think from the point of view of share-holders, Nokia escaped dodged a terrible future. Basically they took their things and left the platform in the rescue boat, while the rescuers (MS) burn with it.
I always despise such theories of what would have happened had Nokia selected Android instead of Windows. You have absolutely no idea what would have happened. What we do know is that selecting a single OS from a company that had ulterior motives was a key to their demise. It's clear the Microsoft decision was a failure and anything else is just rampant speculation. It was nice, though, to see Nokia get the last laugh by selling their device division to MS for 7+ Billion dollars.
As for Nokia, well, we'll see how they do when they re-enter the smartphone market in late 2016 free of Microsoft.
They should have released an android phone when android came out. They lost a lot of time trying to make symbian work as a smartphone and later using windows phone os which is the smallest ecosystem among the 3 (iOS, Android, WP)
At the time, the Finns seemed to be rather proud of the "management by perkele" culture.
Also, the traditional industrial product development cycle (requirement specifications document driven waterfall) does not produce good design, as it takes many iterations to figure out what's good in reality. It's hard to change an engineering culture.
By this you mean management would better understand how their extreme perkele is forcing those under them to lie, and they could construct a better view of reality through better adjustments of how they view those lies???
How about focusing on creating a culture where the people under you don't have to lie, who's jobs and careers, and therefore families, aren't threatened when they tell the truth to those above them?
As one middle manager pointed out to us, at Apple the top managers are engineers. “We make everything into a business case and use figures to prove what’s good, whereas Apple is engineer-driven.” Top managers acknowledged to us that “there was no real software competence in the top management team”.
That stood out for me. Whenever I've worked with managers who didn't understand the field, interactions have always gone something like this:
Manager: Can we deliver X?
Team: Sure, it will take 3 months.
Manager: Can we deliver X in 2 months?
Team: No, I told you 3 months.
Manager: I need it done in 2...
And how it proceeded depended a lot on how bone-headed the manager was. Sometimes they would effectively let someone competent on the team do the management. Sometimes they would just try to bully until they got the answer they were looking for.
Oh, that's from very long ago. And most of them weren't that bad. And I have had good managers, really good ones who added value, but only 3-4 really qualify (in 35 years).
I work in a flat organization now. No managers at all. So it's an interesting perspective.
Whenever I've worked with managers who didn't understand the field, interactions have always gone something like this
I've seen that, but there's something even worse. It's when a manager who doesn't understand something thinks that it must be simple and/or easy.
Where I experienced it firsthand was working for a VP of Engineering who was from a hardware background. He didn't grok software and therefore believed that it should be easy to do. I didn't mind, I was one of the hardware guys. But that meant that the software guys at the company were sucking hind tit.
Hey, at least its better than working for a company run by sales and/or marketing people. They have contempt for both the hardware guys and the software guys.
So much this. I have been working in a company which was run by sales, who thought 'how hard can it be?' all the time. Sales did not sell, company was sinking, sales disagreed. I left.
Astonishing especially in the startup world. Where your product better get the respect of other innovators and early adoptors, or you're sunk. Yet sales asks for mainstream average performance/features. And can't seem to find any traction. I've unfortunately experienced more than one startup failure due to sales getting control.
Nokia had long term plan which looked promising: They bought first Trolltech for QT and after that started doing Meego* (albeit too slowly) but the idea was to have one development platform for all their new and old phone platforms and QT fit the bill really nicely. But in the end the QT plan was really half-assed because getting it into Symbian took too long time and Meego was even slower project.
The first Meego phone N9 and it's unpublished sibling N950 (with the best qwerty hardware ever) were better phones than Android phones at that time, but when they released the N9 it was already known that Nokia will switch to Windows Phone and there was no point in buying N9 or developing apps for it.
They even had the QT + QT Quick setup working and showing lots of promise for writing javascript apps for different platforms. Sigh.
So if they've had the guts to execute the QT plan and Meego as a first priority projects + skipping Elop, the situation could be a lot different. Meego still feels more Linuxy than Android.
* Of course creating first Maemo on top of GTK and after that switching to QT sounded weird and with Meego there was other parties like Samsung and Intel meddling around so they lost lot of steam in that transition too.
Edit: snark aside, I'm not sure how this would be a factor in what makes a mobile platform successful. It feels like the sort of comment that would be made right after saying "year of desktop linux!"
Well it was build on top of normal Linux tool chain instead of Java, but it was really easy to use, responsive and had all the smart phone features of that day. Much better than Android 2.2 which was the hot thing then. Quite close to iPhone in terms of responsiveness and ease of use.
> Of course creating first Maemo on top of GTK and after that switching to QT sounded weird and with Meego there was other parties like Samsung and Intel meddling around so they lost lot of steam in that transition too.
From my perspective one of the problems was that there wasn't just one major transition, but instead there were two. First was the GTK->Qt transition, and then just as that was stabilizing came new transition from Maemo to Meego which never really succeeded. I think the reason for the latters failure was that while there was a lot of reasons to be exited about Qt (over GTK), there was very little to be exited in Meego (over Maemo).
From the end-user perspective both Maemo and Meego phones felt really good but the Meego seemed to have a bit more innovative and more fluid UX. Liked both of them and would've gladly bought them if there would've been any promise of continuity.
Then came Intel's Moblin in an attempt at pushing Atom for mobile devices (reason being that Intel had opted to forgo PCI on that variant to save power, and Microsoft balked at doing Windows on a x86 chip without PCI). Mobilin 1.0 was also Debian based.
So at that point it seemed sensible for Nokia and Intel to combine their efforts and create Meego.
But just as the jointed project was unveiled, Intel finalized Moblin 2.0. And it was RPM based. And Intel was heavily pushing for Meego to be that as well.
Never mind that the N9 was really a last gen Maemo with some additions to make it Meego compatible.
It's hilarious because the problem for Nokia here was that they focused too much on technology and not enough on business. The reverse of what their earlier problem was.
By the team Meego was announced, Apple and Android (Google et al) were already pouring their wealth of engineering talent into their platforms. And the strength of iOS' link with OSX and Android's access to Google services meant they were never going to compete.
The smart business strategy would've been very early on to switch to Android around the same time Samsung did.
The N9 was one of the best designed phones I've ever seen [1]. It's really frustrating Nokia did not follow the Maemo/Meego path. As a developer I'm not so fond of smartphones because they are not little computers, but locked down devices. Nokia's view was aligned with mine, as the first device of the series was an "Internet Tablet" (N770, released Q2 2005!)
Why they followed an erratic path instead of going full steam ahead with their Maemo/Meego platform is quite well described by the article, but does not sound less stupid to an outsider. They had a device that was in some fronts superior to iPhone much earlier, but they got stuck with Symbian first and Microsoft afterwards.
At the time of PW 808 the OS was on the level of iOS, but nobody cared then, not even Nokia (the 808 wasn't really advertised, and was hard to get...).
They have done awesome job but the Jolla Phone is old (and was low-end even when it was published compared to its price) and their tablet crowdsourcing project suffered quite badly as they lost some other funding for a moment and their device manufacturers sold the devices elsewhere as Android devices.
Basically Jolla has promised to refund the crowdsourcing funds within this year, but still it was big setback for the project. I've tested the tablet and it was surprisingly solid in H/W and S/W sense. Just hoping they'll survive and can get meaningful market share somehow. Kudos to them anyway.
IIRC N9 was banned from being sold in US/UK/Germany etc., all major markets in order to justify killing off Meego later in favor of WP. I remember Germans had to order it in Switzerland. It was clear Elop was playing politics by doing gradual phase out of everything that was Nokia in favor of MS, i.e. first restrict Meego to an unwanted child (yet they still sold more N9s than Lumias with WP7 so that part didn't work out), stop future development, make own factories redundant and later justifying selling off Qt as the only internal platform capable of challenging MS. Please remove your rose tinted glasses, this was a pre-mediated and carefully executed destruction of Nokia.
>Nokia needed a better operating system for its phones to match Apple’s iOS
I strongly disagree. Symbian just needed a few optimisation, which it got. It got them too late, but it did. Maemo/MeeGo was probably more capable than iOS is today. And what exactly are those "quality problems of N95" they speak of?
Nokia was indeed wounded by incompetent management, but Microsoft was the one who stepped in and finished the job.
Maemo was a more capable Mobile OS that iOS 9.x... that's an ... interesting... opinion. Care to provide some details on what you think makes that the case?
My experience of Maemo on the N900 was that it wasn't really very polished and needed development which it, unfortunately, didn't get from Nokia
Well, sure. If you consider how nice an OS looks and how many "apps" there are for it the main parameter of "capability of an OS", then iOS is definitely more capable.
It leaves you in control. You can do anything with the OS, install anything, develop anything for it. Without an iTunes/Google/MS account. It's not limited to some proprietary connection over USB. There are so many things... As it is, no need to "jailbreak" it or something.
Obviously it's not as fast, user-friendly, or easy to develop for.
sure if what you want in a mobile phone is mobile linux, then I'd agree maemo is better.
But when designing a device for the mass-market (which is where I'd suggest a flagship smartphone should be looking at), is that really better than something which is faster, more user-friendly and easier to develop for?
Heh, of course not. Making a power-user focused flagship doesn't make a lot of business sense. From that point of view, iOS is more capable (of making money) and better in general due to ease of use.
But "ease of use" is not the primary thing I'm looking for when I think of smartphones.
> Maemo/MeeGo was probably more capable than iOS is today
This is just a ridiculous statement.
The iOS security architecture alone is more sophisticated and capable than Meego was. When you add all the various Frameworks and Kits iOS is an extremely broad operating system that even Android can't keep up with.
> but Microsoft was the one who stepped in and finished the job
No. There simply isn't room in the marketplace for more than three platforms. And Microsoft having better services, better engineers and a lot more money was always going to take that third spot.
Security architecture of iOS, as far as I know, is that same as that of WP - close everything. That inherently means that it's a lot less capable than it could be.
>There simply isn't room in the marketplace for more than three platforms.
Hah! Just like there "isn't room" for more than two parties in American politics, right? You can pull out any arbitrary number to claim something cannot be otherwise just because it happens to be the case right now.
I think "more capable" meant that Maemo was just a regular GNU/Linux running in your pocket, adjusted just enough to work well in such form factor. The system was yours just like it is on your PC.
iOS, when compared to that, is a child's toy, designed to keep you from breaking it.
My feeling for what went wrong for Nokia, which kind of chimes with what's here is that the problem is that they couldn't decide a strategic platform and stick with it. There was a lot of differences between the Symbian crew and the Maemo crew.
The prime example of this , for me, was the Nokia N900. It was their flagship phone, I got one in their store in London and within 6 months it was pretty much unsupported, as Nokia changed focus again.
Also whilst the hardware was good the software wasn't great quality...
One of the things Apple changed was how the software was perceived for phones.
Nokia (or the others) didn't update that much the firmwares for the old models. They just fixed the problems and added features to the new models. They were coming from simple phones that were not flashable in the beginning and they just wanted to sell more phones instead of supporting the old ones.
It's ironic how Apple is selling amazing amounts of phones with just few models and upgrading the software and features few times a year.
The Internet Tablet series, which is what N900 came from, actually was a bit different. Nokia N800 got an update from OS2007 to OS2008, and Nokia 770, while officially supported from OS2005 to OS2006, has been updated via semi-official "Hacker Editions" all the way to OS2008. It was N900's Maemo 5 (Fremantle) where they finally stopped supporting earlier models.
It's interesting that Samsung were in a similar position around that time (and also had Bada in the works at the time). But around 2010-2011 they just hopped on the Android bandwagon and went all in with it, and won big time.
Which reminds me, what's up with Tizen? Are they still trying to push it?
It seems they are keeping Bada -> Tizen around just to have some leverage over Google. If some negoatiations are really tough with Google, they can say "hey, let's forget the whole thing and we'll start using Tizen instead of Android". They don't really want to do that but it's a good plan B.
It's also a good way to commit business suicide. Plan B would relegate them to a has been in the smartphone market as the others rush in to fill the void.
The hardware of N95 was the pinnacle of Nokia engineering. They stuffed lots of new stuff there like A-GPS receiver, accelerometer, 3D-accelerated GPU, lots of flash storage, better camera etc but the Symbian UX was horrible (it was from the beginning but tech feature -driven engineers didn't understand that at all).
N95 had so much of features that nobody used them. They just were happy with all the stuff they never used. Been talking about the subject to lots of people who bought the phone then.
N95 was released the same year Apple demoed iPhone first time. N95 sold really well then. Nokia's old management has told afterwards they were so lulled by the success of N95 they were not worried about iPhone at all. They did N96 which was even more stuffed than N95 but with the same UX flaws.
I think the biggest mistake in their engineering execution was skimping on the specs of their phones. For example, the "flagship" N97 was released with a resistive screen, 433Mhz ARM11 processor, and without a GPU (they already had GPUs in some earlier models). N97 would have been a "decent" phone with modern specs, and bought them more time to innovate in software.
Yep that was one their problems. Bought an used Sony Ericsson P800 running UIQ and used it for years because it had ten times more ram than new Nokia Symbian phones in 2005-2007. Something like 10 MB vs 128. Of course the UIQ system was iPhone of the early 2000s but quite few noticed it and in Finland everybody were chanting Nokia Nokia Nokia.
EDIT: Forgot to say that few earlier Nokia models had accelerated GPU but the OS and the developers didn't use those, so they just stopped adding the GPUs later on ;D
A colleague who worked with some early Ericsson smart/feature phones told me they had a model with dual processors. Then they designed a cheaper version of it, and cut costs by dropping one cpu. It turned out the interprocessor communication added so much overhead, the cheaper model ran faster.
The UX design of the P* line and M600 was really something at the day. The last ones P1i and M600 started converting more and more of the UI to finger touch instead of stylus control. And it ran so smoothly on nowadays obsoleted hardware <3
the "flagship" N97 was released with a resistive screen
I had a similar experience working with another company. It was after the iPhone was available. But they still wanted to support a resistive screen in a high end product that wouldn't debut until years later.
I just couldn't believe the cognitive dissonance. Once the iPhone screen appeared, resistive screens were deader than Kurt Cobain. People in the trenches understood it clearly. But somehow top management either didn't get the memo or managed to rationalize it away.
To this day I strongly prefer N900's resistive screen than any other capacitive screen when it comes to mobile phones.
While it's easy to find crappy resistive screens, and in such case capacitive ones clearly win, I definitely wouldn't replace N900's screen with one from iPhone - it'd feel like a downgrade for me.
Yes. Personally I don't really miss it, but it would still be nice to have. However, multitouch resistive screens exist, and even most of the older singletouch ones can simulate basic multitouch gestures like pinching, swiping or rotating (which is what Neo900 wants to do using original N900 digitizer).
This article seems to have a personal axe to grind.
Building an OS is hard, building an SDK is hard and so is building an IDE to go with it. Nokia is not a software company. It could not have competed with Google, Apple or Microsoft on the software platform. These companies have their own OS. They have their own browsers and even programming languages they can claim their own. They have massive developer ecosystems.
The fact that Nokia failed has little to do with Nokia itself and more to do with the disruptive power of software.
It really had just two options. Get acquired or adopt a third-party platform. Google was not interested post Motorola acquisition. Microsoft had its own demons to deal with. There was little wiggle room.
Had Motorola not been acquired, it would have gone the same route, fizzled into oblivion. RIMM is going the same route.
For all their trying, these companies don't have the software DNA.
According to rumors Nokia had lots of discussion with MS and Google about which platform they should take. Got the impression that the proposition from MS was somehow better and at least initially gave more room to move for Nokia. Later on got the impression that lots of things didn't went as was promised.
But, Nokia is still alive and the situation seems to be a lot rosier for them after selling the mobile phone business. They got good price and got really cheap loan from Microsoft as part of the deal. Of course in PR side Nokia didn't have to kick out the phone engineers. Microsoft is handling that still and getting the negative PR from that.
One has to remember that earlier Ericsson quit the phone business as well by selling that to Sony. Actually those phones got better after that :)
Yes, that's exactly right. Ballmer wanted to react to Google's Motorola acquisition and Nokia got a good deal out of it. Ballmer was heavily criticized (by the board no less) and the acquisition was mostly a write-off [1]. Compare this to Google's Motorola acquisition, it's clear that Nokia was a bad buy and Elop netted the company the most amount of money possible so all in all a good outcome for Nokia. As per Don Harrison, head of M&A at Google: [2]
> I think the Motorola transaction has been a success for us. Financially, we bought the asset for $12.5 billion. It had $3 billion in cash; we were able to sell the Home division for $2.5 billion; we ended selling the handset division for $3 billion. There were some other tax assets as well. When you work through the math, you realize we spent between $2.5 billion and $3.5 billion for the patent assets. At the time, the nearest comparable transaction was the Nortel patent auction where Microsoft and Apple teamed up to buy that asset for $4.5 billion. And there’s a good argument that the Motorola patent portfolio is a better portfolio.
Which is why the INSEAD article seems so off base.
Yes, but Nokia had a big head start with Maemo/Meego but they were playing with it for too long without focus while the Symbian people treated Maemo as a toy
It is much more complex than this. Nokia invested heavily in the open source world but failed to catch on to the consumers.
The work that was done on Maemo was impressive and they tried to create libraries that were cross-factor; the same library that you would use on your PC to read and write openoffice files, you would use on your mobile phone as well.
You claim for example that Apple and Google have their own browsers. Guess what, the first thing Apple had to do when they started working on webkit, was to decouple it from Qt (you know, TrollTech's and then Nokia's framework). Of course khtml/kjs weren't developed by Nokia, but Nokia was closer to this and many other technologies from the start.
Even on Symbian there was software that took many years for Apple and Google to catch up with.
An example would be muvee, an automatic video creator using videos, images and mp3s on your phone, in 2005.
Another one, my brother's 6600 at 2004 had pseudo augmented-reality games. They even had a fitness app (sport tracker) in 2004.
My theory about Nokia's fall is that it was primarily driven by the company's inability to succeed in the United States.
The first iPhone was indeed good, but still it wasn't a clear win for Apple. Nokia had impressive software and features that took many years for the competitors to catch up.
In the same time, Nokia would have to catch up to the iPhone's (usable) touch interface but couldn't make it in time.
Apple (and other US companies) have a huge marketing machine; hollywood, various tv programs, music industry etc. Once this marketing machine worked for Apple, Nokia had no chance of success since it hadn't an established audience in the US to keep the company's image afloat until it delivered something better.
I believe this is also the reason the shareholders accepted so easily Microsoft and/or Elop. Elop did the worst possible move imho, during a period of heavy competition, he changed the company's roadmap, without thinking about the implications. You just can't pivot that fast on such a complex product. Also by doing this he alienated the company's audience in Europe.
It is exactly the same what is happening to Nokia Networks. What saves them is fact that mobile networks market is pretty much closed and there is very high barrier of entry.
If the market would be more open (patents!) - Nokia wouldn't survive a day there.
Nokia top management have no clue about technology, they are not engineers so you can sell them any s##t you what if you have smooth talk.
Nokia suffers also from politics and internal battles between sites and organizations (basically Finns vs everybody else). This results in ubiquitous NIH syndrome. Nokia Net reinvents wheel all the time, and almost every time they get a square.
Rather than allow the share price to slump some and their CEO to put his long term play in to action, the board ousted him and brought in a short term sock puppet. And he was given one objective, goose the share price.
You will find this behavior up and down the tech world.
Take a look at HP for example. They went through 3 CEOs in nearly as many years. From that we have an aborted attempt at getting into the mobile business with WebOS as just one example.
Hell, consider what Dell said after buying back his namesake company. That now they were free to pursue less profitable long term goals.
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[ 1445 ms ] story [ 1330 ms ] thread"The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable."
I remember the day it came out, it was the day everyone who I knew at Nokia realised that they'd soon need new jobs.
http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/02/09/full-text-nokia-...
I recognize that the transition was necessary, but between the lackluster functionality (notification center, for example, was the #1 requested feature for years), lack of updates (8.0 to 8.1 took 20 months), and, of course, lack of developer support, I'm wondering if Windows Phone had a chance at all.
I will never stop being upset over the death of Zune HD and WP7 era Metro UI, though.
When Nokia opted for MS all paths were already downhill. Going with Android would have meant and injection of money from Google, but clearly Nokia was not prepared to land in the highly dense Android ecosystem, fighting for a tiny piece of the cake with giants like Samsung. There was no way that Nokia would have a success in Android that would put out the fire.
MS in turned meant to have most of the Windows Phone market for itself and a BIG partner behind. As terrible as WP was at the beginning, it bought Nokia a LOT of time. Nokia reorganized its business in the meantime, separated the location business (what is now HERE), the NSN side and consolidated its patent portfolio and research divisions.
This way, they managed in the end to sell Devices to Microsoft, which was a huge burden. And then sell HERE (which wasn't really profitable) to the automotive consortium. With this two moves they kept the company afloat, along with many great assets that actually make and will make money (the research division and NSN ), and the brand.
Had Nokia opted for Android back then, it would have ended much worse (Blackberry maker comes to mind). I think from the point of view of share-holders, Nokia escaped dodged a terrible future. Basically they took their things and left the platform in the rescue boat, while the rescuers (MS) burn with it.
As for Nokia, well, we'll see how they do when they re-enter the smartphone market in late 2016 free of Microsoft.
Also, the traditional industrial product development cycle (requirement specifications document driven waterfall) does not produce good design, as it takes many iterations to figure out what's good in reality. It's hard to change an engineering culture.
How about focusing on creating a culture where the people under you don't have to lie, who's jobs and careers, and therefore families, aren't threatened when they tell the truth to those above them?
That stood out for me. Whenever I've worked with managers who didn't understand the field, interactions have always gone something like this:
Manager: Can we deliver X?
Team: Sure, it will take 3 months.
Manager: Can we deliver X in 2 months?
Team: No, I told you 3 months.
Manager: I need it done in 2...
And how it proceeded depended a lot on how bone-headed the manager was. Sometimes they would effectively let someone competent on the team do the management. Sometimes they would just try to bully until they got the answer they were looking for.
"Five months."
"You guys are too slow. I'm going to give it to team B over there. They say they can do it in two months, no problem."
"You'll be asking us to help out that team in about a year."
It is amazing how little value most managers add.
I don't consider my employer to be exceptionally great, but at least there's no managers stupid enough to act like that, or developers to tolerate it.
I work in a flat organization now. No managers at all. So it's an interesting perspective.
I've seen that, but there's something even worse. It's when a manager who doesn't understand something thinks that it must be simple and/or easy.
Where I experienced it firsthand was working for a VP of Engineering who was from a hardware background. He didn't grok software and therefore believed that it should be easy to do. I didn't mind, I was one of the hardware guys. But that meant that the software guys at the company were sucking hind tit.
Hey, at least its better than working for a company run by sales and/or marketing people. They have contempt for both the hardware guys and the software guys.
The first Meego phone N9 and it's unpublished sibling N950 (with the best qwerty hardware ever) were better phones than Android phones at that time, but when they released the N9 it was already known that Nokia will switch to Windows Phone and there was no point in buying N9 or developing apps for it.
They even had the QT + QT Quick setup working and showing lots of promise for writing javascript apps for different platforms. Sigh.
So if they've had the guts to execute the QT plan and Meego as a first priority projects + skipping Elop, the situation could be a lot different. Meego still feels more Linuxy than Android.
* Of course creating first Maemo on top of GTK and after that switching to QT sounded weird and with Meego there was other parties like Samsung and Intel meddling around so they lost lot of steam in that transition too.
...is that supposed to be a good thing?
Edit: snark aside, I'm not sure how this would be a factor in what makes a mobile platform successful. It feels like the sort of comment that would be made right after saying "year of desktop linux!"
Is androids java mess a good thing?
From my perspective one of the problems was that there wasn't just one major transition, but instead there were two. First was the GTK->Qt transition, and then just as that was stabilizing came new transition from Maemo to Meego which never really succeeded. I think the reason for the latters failure was that while there was a lot of reasons to be exited about Qt (over GTK), there was very little to be exited in Meego (over Maemo).
Maemo had from the early days been Debian based.
Then came Intel's Moblin in an attempt at pushing Atom for mobile devices (reason being that Intel had opted to forgo PCI on that variant to save power, and Microsoft balked at doing Windows on a x86 chip without PCI). Mobilin 1.0 was also Debian based.
So at that point it seemed sensible for Nokia and Intel to combine their efforts and create Meego.
But just as the jointed project was unveiled, Intel finalized Moblin 2.0. And it was RPM based. And Intel was heavily pushing for Meego to be that as well.
Never mind that the N9 was really a last gen Maemo with some additions to make it Meego compatible.
By the team Meego was announced, Apple and Android (Google et al) were already pouring their wealth of engineering talent into their platforms. And the strength of iOS' link with OSX and Android's access to Google services meant they were never going to compete.
The smart business strategy would've been very early on to switch to Android around the same time Samsung did.
Why they followed an erratic path instead of going full steam ahead with their Maemo/Meego platform is quite well described by the article, but does not sound less stupid to an outsider. They had a device that was in some fronts superior to iPhone much earlier, but they got stuck with Symbian first and Microsoft afterwards.
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2011/10/22/2506376/nokia-n9-review
http://n8delight.blogspot.co.uk/
At the time of PW 808 the OS was on the level of iOS, but nobody cared then, not even Nokia (the 808 wasn't really advertised, and was hard to get...).
Basically Jolla has promised to refund the crowdsourcing funds within this year, but still it was big setback for the project. I've tested the tablet and it was surprisingly solid in H/W and S/W sense. Just hoping they'll survive and can get meaningful market share somehow. Kudos to them anyway.
I strongly disagree. Symbian just needed a few optimisation, which it got. It got them too late, but it did. Maemo/MeeGo was probably more capable than iOS is today. And what exactly are those "quality problems of N95" they speak of?
Nokia was indeed wounded by incompetent management, but Microsoft was the one who stepped in and finished the job.
My experience of Maemo on the N900 was that it wasn't really very polished and needed development which it, unfortunately, didn't get from Nokia
But I was more interested in what made you think that Maemo was more capable that iOS (i.e. what do you think it did better than iOS)?
Obviously it's not as fast, user-friendly, or easy to develop for.
But when designing a device for the mass-market (which is where I'd suggest a flagship smartphone should be looking at), is that really better than something which is faster, more user-friendly and easier to develop for?
But "ease of use" is not the primary thing I'm looking for when I think of smartphones.
This is just a ridiculous statement.
The iOS security architecture alone is more sophisticated and capable than Meego was. When you add all the various Frameworks and Kits iOS is an extremely broad operating system that even Android can't keep up with.
> but Microsoft was the one who stepped in and finished the job
No. There simply isn't room in the marketplace for more than three platforms. And Microsoft having better services, better engineers and a lot more money was always going to take that third spot.
>There simply isn't room in the marketplace for more than three platforms.
Hah! Just like there "isn't room" for more than two parties in American politics, right? You can pull out any arbitrary number to claim something cannot be otherwise just because it happens to be the case right now.
iOS, when compared to that, is a child's toy, designed to keep you from breaking it.
Of course for some it's a feature.
The prime example of this , for me, was the Nokia N900. It was their flagship phone, I got one in their store in London and within 6 months it was pretty much unsupported, as Nokia changed focus again.
Also whilst the hardware was good the software wasn't great quality...
Nokia (or the others) didn't update that much the firmwares for the old models. They just fixed the problems and added features to the new models. They were coming from simple phones that were not flashable in the beginning and they just wanted to sell more phones instead of supporting the old ones.
It's ironic how Apple is selling amazing amounts of phones with just few models and upgrading the software and features few times a year.
Which reminds me, what's up with Tizen? Are they still trying to push it?
I had an N95, I thought it was quite a good piece of kit.
What people never seem to mention is that the iPhone had a generous data plan, whereas I was paying by the byte.
That is a massive difference in use case.
N95 had so much of features that nobody used them. They just were happy with all the stuff they never used. Been talking about the subject to lots of people who bought the phone then.
N95 was released the same year Apple demoed iPhone first time. N95 sold really well then. Nokia's old management has told afterwards they were so lulled by the success of N95 they were not worried about iPhone at all. They did N96 which was even more stuffed than N95 but with the same UX flaws.
In hardware design sense it's really well engineered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N950
EDIT: Forgot to say that few earlier Nokia models had accelerated GPU but the OS and the developers didn't use those, so they just stopped adding the GPUs later on ;D
I had a similar experience working with another company. It was after the iPhone was available. But they still wanted to support a resistive screen in a high end product that wouldn't debut until years later.
I just couldn't believe the cognitive dissonance. Once the iPhone screen appeared, resistive screens were deader than Kurt Cobain. People in the trenches understood it clearly. But somehow top management either didn't get the memo or managed to rationalize it away.
While it's easy to find crappy resistive screens, and in such case capacitive ones clearly win, I definitely wouldn't replace N900's screen with one from iPhone - it'd feel like a downgrade for me.
I'd really miss that feature of the iPhone if it were taken away. Presumably the N900 has alternative ways of implementing equivalent features.
[1] https://www.starryhope.com/15-ways-nokias-n900-is-better-tha...
Building an OS is hard, building an SDK is hard and so is building an IDE to go with it. Nokia is not a software company. It could not have competed with Google, Apple or Microsoft on the software platform. These companies have their own OS. They have their own browsers and even programming languages they can claim their own. They have massive developer ecosystems.
The fact that Nokia failed has little to do with Nokia itself and more to do with the disruptive power of software.
It really had just two options. Get acquired or adopt a third-party platform. Google was not interested post Motorola acquisition. Microsoft had its own demons to deal with. There was little wiggle room.
Had Motorola not been acquired, it would have gone the same route, fizzled into oblivion. RIMM is going the same route.
For all their trying, these companies don't have the software DNA.
But, Nokia is still alive and the situation seems to be a lot rosier for them after selling the mobile phone business. They got good price and got really cheap loan from Microsoft as part of the deal. Of course in PR side Nokia didn't have to kick out the phone engineers. Microsoft is handling that still and getting the negative PR from that.
One has to remember that earlier Ericsson quit the phone business as well by selling that to Sony. Actually those phones got better after that :)
> I think the Motorola transaction has been a success for us. Financially, we bought the asset for $12.5 billion. It had $3 billion in cash; we were able to sell the Home division for $2.5 billion; we ended selling the handset division for $3 billion. There were some other tax assets as well. When you work through the math, you realize we spent between $2.5 billion and $3.5 billion for the patent assets. At the time, the nearest comparable transaction was the Nortel patent auction where Microsoft and Apple teamed up to buy that asset for $4.5 billion. And there’s a good argument that the Motorola patent portfolio is a better portfolio.
Which is why the INSEAD article seems so off base.
[1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/satya-nadella-just-undid-stev... [2]: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/02/12/a-peek-at-googles-ma-...
They had the n800 6 months before the iPhone
The work that was done on Maemo was impressive and they tried to create libraries that were cross-factor; the same library that you would use on your PC to read and write openoffice files, you would use on your mobile phone as well.
You claim for example that Apple and Google have their own browsers. Guess what, the first thing Apple had to do when they started working on webkit, was to decouple it from Qt (you know, TrollTech's and then Nokia's framework). Of course khtml/kjs weren't developed by Nokia, but Nokia was closer to this and many other technologies from the start.
Even on Symbian there was software that took many years for Apple and Google to catch up with. An example would be muvee, an automatic video creator using videos, images and mp3s on your phone, in 2005. Another one, my brother's 6600 at 2004 had pseudo augmented-reality games. They even had a fitness app (sport tracker) in 2004.
The first iPhone was indeed good, but still it wasn't a clear win for Apple. Nokia had impressive software and features that took many years for the competitors to catch up. In the same time, Nokia would have to catch up to the iPhone's (usable) touch interface but couldn't make it in time.
Apple (and other US companies) have a huge marketing machine; hollywood, various tv programs, music industry etc. Once this marketing machine worked for Apple, Nokia had no chance of success since it hadn't an established audience in the US to keep the company's image afloat until it delivered something better.
I believe this is also the reason the shareholders accepted so easily Microsoft and/or Elop. Elop did the worst possible move imho, during a period of heavy competition, he changed the company's roadmap, without thinking about the implications. You just can't pivot that fast on such a complex product. Also by doing this he alienated the company's audience in Europe.
Nokia top management have no clue about technology, they are not engineers so you can sell them any s##t you what if you have smooth talk.
Nokia suffers also from politics and internal battles between sites and organizations (basically Finns vs everybody else). This results in ubiquitous NIH syndrome. Nokia Net reinvents wheel all the time, and almost every time they get a square.
Rather than allow the share price to slump some and their CEO to put his long term play in to action, the board ousted him and brought in a short term sock puppet. And he was given one objective, goose the share price.
You will find this behavior up and down the tech world.
Take a look at HP for example. They went through 3 CEOs in nearly as many years. From that we have an aborted attempt at getting into the mobile business with WebOS as just one example.
Hell, consider what Dell said after buying back his namesake company. That now they were free to pursue less profitable long term goals.