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.
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).
The board recruited and invited Stephen Elop. Part of his appointment was the board handing over the company on a silver platter to the new CEO. Negotiations for the acquisition started almost right away in secret. And most likely there were high level discussions ongoing with Microsoft and Steve Ballmer before Elop's appointment.
Jorma Ollila retired as a CEO around 2006; he wasn't really pushed out and Nokia was still performing well. He handed the keys to the company to a non technical CEO with a financial background (Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, aka, OPK internally). That was the first mistake. OPK was a bit hands off throughout the Iphone and Android rollout. There was no vision, no leadership, just a lot of infighting between heads of various units.
The second mistake was selling out to Microsoft and all the share value implosion that came with that. Microsoft bought several companies over the years. Nokia was one of the smaller ones. That's how bad it had gotten. At the peak Nokia was worth 150 billion or so. MS bought the phone unit for 5 billion. The later Linkedin and Github acquisitions were worth more.
By the time Stephen Elop was brought in (by the board, headed by Ollila) to fix things, it was too late. There were a lot of internal battles as well between the big business units. A whole string of CTOs with no power whatsoever that were appointed and let go. Including Scott McNealy who never really made any impact and was there only briefly.
I wouldn't say that Ollila had a technical background either. Ollila has 3 MSc degrees, 2 in economics and 1 in engineering. But after graduating for the 2nd time, he worked first in an investment bank (Citibank), then in the finance department in Nokia before rising to the executive level. I would say he has a financial background.
2010: Windows Phone 7 was still WinCE, but they removed full access to WinCE APIs, and got rid of PC style multitasking. They had a new UI framework for first party apps. Then for third party apps they had a port of Silverlight that imitated the new UI style. The latter had really terrible performance.
They had to base this release on WinCE because the NT kernel port to ARM wasn't ready yet. Blocking access to "good" APIs could be seen as a way to ensure app compatibility for the next release.
2012: Windows Phone 8 had the NT kernel. Also, windows 8 and windows RT shipped. But the silverlight-inspired UI framework of Windows 8 was different from the Silverlight fork from Phone 7. So you had yet another UI framework rewrite to cope with.
The first iPhone had a 400Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM. It was so resource constrained that you couldn’t put a picture on your home screen because it would have taken too much memory.
It could barely run Safari. If you scrolled too fast, you would see checker boxes while trying to render the screen.
When Flash did finally come to mobile on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM. The first iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.
Even then on Android, Flash ran horribly and killed your battery. I had a high end Android phone on Sprint back then.
I have not so pleasant memories of having a few different versions of their plugin and I'd try to figure out which one worked for a given website, symlink the right one and restart the browser. And that was the way to watch videos online...
The consumer demand for Flash on mobile seemed to be mostly about video streaming, because at the time Flash was experiencing sort of a second life as the least-bad way to do streaming video on the web. In that context Apple's point of view of "as an industry let's finally fix browser-native video streaming, rather than being stuck with Flash forever" seems pretty reasonable.
I do remember writing CMS backends for Flash websites in 2001, but that was the early time I think, before AS3 and really cool stuff.
I think it got to be so common that firefox supported reloading the library without restarting the browser if you changed the symlink and opened the "about:plugins" page.
And then they started releasing both 32-bit and 64-bit versions...
It worked on Maemo years before that though, with 600MHz Cortex-A8 CPU and 256 MB RAM. Nokia N900 had out-of-box support for Flash in its Gecko-based browser.
I believe Symbian had some support before that too, but I don't remember and haven't checked the details.
It was that a pseudo-machine/VM approach put the VM IP owner (Adobe, Sun/Oracle) in driver's seat for control of the product's precious HW resources while letting their affiliates define the UI. What could go wrong, knowing that to invite in the vampire of their bloat & risk was to give those IP owners a competitive leg up to override all your design choices and serve their own markets, contrary to everything Jobs had done to rescue Apple from its clone wars.
Oh, and that Flash and Java were the world's most popular malware/APT delivery vehicles at that that continued to wreck PCs for many years after 2007.
But it wasn't about performance!
Or why Jobs choose to not drive a stake into his own heart to defend from vampires.
It would be interesting to see a companion presentation from the POV of Cingular/ATT. They likely also were very surprised and entertained by Jobs' device!
Now we run electron apps which are a pretty similar idea.
Apparently the whole Windows UI mess is also related to Microsoft not able to hire new folks with Windows development experience, probably they only saw Win32 after joining Microsoft, funny how things come around.
> It was so resource constrained that you couldn’t put a picture on your home screen because it would have taken too much memory.
Clearly you drank the Apple koolaid that later artificially limited wallpapers to 3GS (or 3G?) and above when they introduced the feature in later iPhone OS updates.
We had wallpapers and great homescreen and dock themes on jailbroken iPhones without a significant perf impact.
P.S. Contemporary Windows Mobile phones had Texas Instruments OMAP ~200MHz processor IIRC with less RAM and iPhone (2G) was comparatively great.
Untrue. There was a noticeable UI lag when scrolling between app pages. I've tried it in both the iPod touch and previous generations iPhones. It felt like how Android used to feel like back then.
Was Safari with Flash going to run well when Safari without Flash could barely run?
And he was proven correct
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash
But back to wallpapers - while the jail breaking community didn’t care, between performance (lot easier to redraw a black background), memory and battery life, background images would have adverse affects on the iPhone. it wasn’t that it couldn’t be done.
This is the sentence in your original comment I had responded to (and I quoted it in my original comment, not sure where's the misunderstanding here). iPhone was resource-constrained, but not that resource-constrained.
I do agree with your characterization of Flash being slow and clunky at the time for the most part, hence prefacing my comment as "nit," although I do not for one second believe that's the primary reason Jobs killed it. If he wanted a fast Flash, he would have made Adobe dance to his standards.
> Untrue. There was a noticeable UI lag when scrolling between app pages. I've tried it in both the iPod touch and previous generations iPhones. It felt like how Android used to feel like back then.
How was Jobs going to force Adobe to get Flash to run on a first gen iPhone when they could barely get it to run 4 years later on phones with 8x the memory and 2.5x faster?
Apple struggled to get Safari to run.
As another counterpoint. Google and Motorola tried to release an “iPad Killer” with the Motorola Xoom promising it would have 4g and Flash. Adobe was late releasing Flash for Android tablets leaving the Xoom in the unenviable position that you couldn’t visit the Xoom product page from the Xoom itself because it required Flash.
Adobe Flash on mobile was always a clusterfuck
[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgOX9mb7V4o
PS: In reality the stuttering masses were probably using a respectable device that actually provided long term value (and probably had longer OS support than the Xoom haha).
There are dozens of us !
I miss so many things besides the UI. seamless integration of Cortana with in-car bluetooth to read incoming SMS, live tiles, fantastic cameras in Nokia devices.
Nokia could have succeeded in the smartphone market. They had the 770 since late 2005. But they were a typical corporation, conservative and plagued by internal politics. Bringing Elop on board, with his Windows agenda, didn't help either.
But Microsoft was too greedy with their licensing schemes and demanding too much adaptation from the hardware and chip manufacturers. You’d think they would adapt their OS and drivers, but no, you had to tape out new silicon for them. So they’ve lost the mobile OS market.
It feels like something like this may happen with the AI OS now. They are pushing hardware manufacturers to conform to their standards while Linux is adapting to what is available and working already.
Besides, WinCE PDAs were very much a power user / enthusiast device, with relatively few around. People who used them and thus were familiar with the old UI would be well aware that WP7 was completely different, and people that didn't use them weren't exposed to the old UI in the first place.
Amusingly Microsoft is still trying to make the walled garden happen. Lots of cheap Windows laptops and Desktops ship in what is called "Windows S" mode where only Microsoft Store apps are allowed to run. But again because PC owners don't abide that kind of bullcrap they also have to supply a way to tear down the walls (it's surprisingly easy, albeit permanent: just download and run a free app from the Windows store) if you want to use the machine in a normal way.
At each step they left the majority of devices behind.
What was equally worse was the triple (quadruple?) switch of app frameworks. If I remember correctly it was a dotnet abomination, then ?? then WPF and finally Xamarin.
Good luck convincing your platform 3rd party developers to entirely relearn and rebuild their app four times over in the span of a few years.
Interestingly enough, Windows Phone itself was far ahead of it's time. Buttersmooth UI, flat UI, built-in global and app dark modes, all in the early 2010s.
Windows Phone 7 had Silverlight as the app framework, which, to remind, was itself basically a rewrite of a subset of WPF in native code for perf (although the public API remained .NET).
And then after that it was WinRT / UWP, which was effectively further evolution of Silverlight in terms of how it looked to app devs.
WP7 was a really low point for the series because not only the new app dev story was completely and utterly incompatible with anything done before, it also had a very limited feature set in terms of what you could actually do inside the app - much worse than the iOS sandbox.
WP7 -> WinRT transition was easier because WinRT was so similar to Silverlight in terms of APIs (in some simple cases you literally just had to change the using-namespace declaration to compile). It also added enough functionality for more interesting apps to be viable. But by then, the reputation hit from both devs (who were being told to again rewrite everything they already rewrote for WP7) and users (who were being told again that their devices won't get the new OS, and the new apps are incompatible with the old OS) was too much for the platform, IMO.
And then on top of all that Google actively sabotaged it by refusing to make apps for its popular services - such as YouTube - and actively pursuing third-party apps that tried to fill that gap.
After WinRT transition, Microsoft sabotaged themselves, due to the way WP 8 => WP 8.1 => WP 10 happened to be, with rewrites, promised upgrades that didn't happen, deprecation of C++/CX, and plenty of other missteps.
Also the keyboard was incredibly good.
Both look and feel awesome, not cheap at all. At the time, Microsoft were paying developers to port apps to Windows Phone. There were developers who took the effort to make their app look native, and I'd say Windows Phone 7 had the best UX to this day.
Nokia was a great hardware company that missed the boat when the market changed to be based around software. When the market changed again to be based around ecosystems, Nokia was beyond saving.
In my opinion Microsoft fumbled the app store by bloating it with questionable KPIs on number of added apps by anyone able to submit templates apps, while not getting key apps like WhatsApp on board. S\so it was a hard sell to have people's ecosystems. Same syndrome as with Zune, Tablet PC, and Microsoft Store on Windows.
Build quality and hardware of the Lumias was second only to iPhones and definitly better experience than Android.
The old Nokias had no chance compared to those, and I agree with the assessment that Nokia as Android-Vendor would have made little sense either.
Worse than that. IIRC, Microsoft ran contests which specifically incentivized developers to create as many apps as possible, and most of the apps they got as a result were garbage (like copies of developer examples with some of the text changed).
They released an android phone that sold... many years too late.
If they released it much earlier (no microsoft) probablh Nokia would still be here - competing with Samsung, or in worst case the tier3 brand cheaper smartphones.
As someone on the Networks side, with occasional visits to Finland headquarters, Nokia Mobiles would have done alright, if they kept down the Symbian/Linux path.
The Burning Memo killed the remaining trusth from app developers, in a company and ecosystem that was pretty much anti-Microsoft, just made the transition to have Qt properly integrated in Symbian, with PIPS and nicer Eclipse based IDE than the previous experience.
Only to be told to throw away all that developer experience, adopt Windows and .NET.
You think if they made just a single decision different and bet on Android instead of Windows, they would be in the same spot today? I wouldn't be so sure. Samsung hedged their bets across both and succeeded. Both weren't great at in-house software and Nokia made better hardware.
I don't think that would have succeeded against Samsung and the Nexus phones.
But TBH I think going with Android would have a better move than what Elop did.
More specifically, he said that even he would push for investment and innovation in one area, but that as the decision made its way through the org, it became something else. It was an odd moment to see a CEO say something like this, and was a clear indicator to me that we didn't have what was necessary to really pivot the way we needed.
I had to import one from Australia. It was totally worth it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7610#/media/File:Nokia76...
and I was able to download an NES emulator for it! I remember playing Mario 3 on my way to my first post-university job. I really felt like I was living in the future compared to the phones others had. And then Symbian just... never got better.
I was ambivalent about the MS purchase of Nokia but I was still optimistic about a lot of it. Nokia always made top-notch hardware but it was obvious from the outside that they just didn't have the software talent (the N900 was a wonderful device for the tech set but it had no mass market viability). I maintain that when it was released Windows Phone was the best mobile OS going. But Microsoft fumbled hard by reinventing the wheel with Windows Phone 8 and destroying an already emaciated App Store. Arguably they fumbled before they even released Windows Phone, spending $1bn on the Kin and then almost immediately nixing it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin
Looking back at it all today... iOS is fine. Android is fine. But man do I wish we still had a couple of other viable competitors in there.
I also bought a Garmin license where I could install Garmin on my Symbian phone to do car navigation on my phone, this was at a time where most people had specific hardware for GPS navigation, now we're used to having apps on our phones, but it felt quite special back then!
They were mind-bendingly, staggeringly, bureaucratic - like to an extent and in a way you absolutely could not imagine if you had not actually seen it with your own eyes.
Nokia never really had a chance--the N-series was a mess of patched software, they had no real Linux alternative, and their supply chain was fragmented six ways from Sunday because they churned out dozens of SKUs.
Then everyone went into denial because they couldn't believe Apple would be successful by going outside established norms (like refusing to customize the homescreen or packaging for telcos, etc.).
A few telcos tried to respond by picking their own champion smartphone (Verizon did that in the US). I ended up having to talk my CMO out of going all out on promoting the Blackberry Storm (which was a dud of epic proportions).
I later became the product manager for the iPhone as well, and that was an amazing roller coaster I will eventually write about (it's been around 17 years, so I think I'll get to it sometime soon).
But I would recommend folk interested in the intervening years to read Operation Elop: https://asokan.org/operation-elop/
I also had a front row seat to that...
Nit: the iPhone was only "in charge" for a brief year or two, and then Android ate its lunch in terms of marketshare.
What is very interesting is that Apple has displayed twice over ( MacBooks and iPhones) that a minority marketshare can capture the vast majority of profits in that market. OEMs like HTC and LG made a few bucks profit off of any phone, sometimes even losing money on the cheaper models. And that's with Google footing almost all the cost of developing the OS.
This is true worldwide, but there are significant regions where iOS quite handily beats Android (such as the US, Japan, and even some parts of Europe).
Extracting $100 in surplus profit from someone who's not on the poverty line is easier than extracting $10 from someone who is.
Marketshare is less interesting than wallet share for many products.
> a minority marketshare can capture the vast majority of profits
Ah, yes, exactly, there it is.
iPhone offers wallet share, and continues to eat Android's lunch in both total spend and ARPU.
There are two cohorts to be in charge of, for two business models: selling something, or giving it away to show ads.
This looks like Android dominates until you get to the section "iPhone vs Android App Spending" and start doing the math that it's winning on total dollars never mind the number of devices.
https://backlinko.com/iphone-vs-android-statistics
Even then, advertisers tend to advertise because they want to sell something. Advertisers marketing something everyone buys, Android audience is best to advertise to. Advertisers with something that depends on extra cash in the wallet before the buyer considers it, iOS audience makes sense. Ad rates reflect this.
Astonishingly, even on the handset makers themselves, there were years Apple captured over 100% of the revenue. That sounds nuts till you dig and see it's as simple as Apple made money, while so many other handset makers lost so much money.
Edit: Airpods also has a majority market share, so probably it's not the third in this list.
and it was glorious; the intent-system and Notifications drawers were Androids calling card. Intents were a blessing and a curse: being able to replace apps was great, but the variety in design language, not so much.
Being able to reach into apps' storage was insecure, but freeing one's data from SQLite files was fantastic.
iPhone did and still does run the market, everyone else is a follower.
One wonders whether at any point anybody will ask any tough questions about where Europe is heading as far as technology goes.
When the iPhone launched it showed Nokia was woefully behind. All their devices instantly felt like they were from a previous age.
Delaware State Lost Property says I still have a bunch of Nokia shares to collect apparently lol
I believe Sony failed to transition for similar reasons. They really owned the hardware era with its own kind of ui, pattern ... but everything they did in software was lacking.
They don't think of software as a major component of their brand. They don't think of software as the user's interface to (and perception of) the product. They don't think of software as an ecosystem with updates, a changing security landscape, and third party developers and integrators. It's just one of 500 things on the BOM that gets sourced and assembled.
I've seen companies where each branch in the software repo is named with a part number, and they're all somewhat similar, copy-pasted around from one another, but with no real concept of what's an earlier or later version or updates, no concept of where the codebase came from or is going, and no real structure other than "This software blob is part 003-2291-54 for product 003-2291-00. The product is shipped and we will never look at the code again."
As I use my TV, I sometimes think about how many engineers, QA test leads, product managers, and leadership at the manufacturer signed off on this software as acceptable. "Barely functional enough so the customer doesn't return it" is apparently the quality bar.
The PPT was supposedly about the iPhone but the (well put together) slides for that don't start until page 14. Credit was given to Timo Partanen, along with contributions from Scott Cooper, Gordon Murray-Smith and Sanna Puha.
Pages 3 through 11 were market analysis. Boring and irrelevant. The only message that should have been given is that iPhone will disrupt the market and Nokia desperately needs to create a competitive "cool" product. The presentation said several times the iPhone was "cool" because of its UI and touch interface versus "buttons". But I think they missed the point. The iPhone was a new category i.e. it was more of a computer than a phone with some computing abilities.
The "recommended" actions slide is on page 12 & 13. I assume this was created by Peter Bryer as his name was listed on top of the first page. It lists 10 recommendations along with sub recommendations. For a large bureaucratic company, good luck getting one recommendation executed. Besides, all ten recommendations missed the point. This was the automobile replacing the horse and buggy. Nokia wanted to tweak their way through. They eventually tried to partner with a "software" company in Microsoft; but Microsoft at that time was the geriatric helping the geriatric. I would argue Nokia would have given themselves a better chance of success by creating a "skunk works". Assemble their best engineers and designers into one team and free from interference from all the internal politics. Their goal would be to create a POC that could rival the iPhone's "cool factor". And do it in 6 months.
Especially given how much prevalent the UNIX culture was at Nokia.
A very common story in European tech and automobile companies.
I still think they should have kept going with it.
These have always been the real crimes in my mind.
Ballmer wasn't an idea guy, he was a top-tier salesman / cheerleader, and he definitely "understood" what actually made Microsoft successful (put out a product, then allow third-party developers and support to extend it / support / learn it inside out and be a VAR).
Ballmer made the same mistake a lot of people in that era made, which is that they didn't realize the software was the most important component. The era of "killer hardware" never actually existed in the smartphone space, because you had a limited form factor to begin with. You couldn't cram an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra in your phone, so your software had to be useful and on-point.
I think Satya saw the entire Windows Phone debacle as a failed experiment and probably looked at Apple / Google and just threw his hands up in frustration.
Getting developers onboard for Windows Phone was critical and not enough time, money, and attention was spent doing that. I think there was a degree of Microsoft arrogance there, along the lines of, "We're Microsoft, of course they're going to develop for our platform..." Meanwhile, in 2024, the Windows App Store is still a barren hellscape compared to even the App Store for OS X and you don't even want to talk about Google Play Store and iOS App Store vs Windows Store.
The prophecy was fulfilled - software will eat the world.
Also, they put plenty of effort into getting developers to onboard windows phone. They even created multiple platforms that allowed devs to create a single app that worked across all windows devices(pc, phone, xbox) but developers decided, with some very influential devs being extremely vocal, that is was some sort of power grab to force devs to only deliver their software through the windows store.
So they still have a bunch of valuable and successful businesses even though their consumer business went to crap.
That talent found great use in cellular base stations. Nokia has been making them for a long time, no real pivot involved, more like a split of a conglomerate into per-vertical businesses. Fun fact: Nokia started as a pulp mill, they made tires and rubber boots, and so on. Think Mitsubishi or such.
Imagine a world where Meego, a proper Linux, took over instead of Android. And I like Android as a product, but the software stack is so strange...
Really? I remember Symbian had the crappiest and most shoestring C++ dev stack ever.
Almost no other tech company that I can think of has been able to resist bureaucratic ossification. (Perhaps Adobe - to an extent?)
Apple's new products are surprisingly often failures, for their background. Vision Pro anyone?
"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.
The river of money from Macs, iPods and iTunes gave Steve Jobs a completely different kind of leverage in those carrier negotiations. Device only companies like Palm and RIM couldn't have broken that carrier strangle even if they did have the technology.
Unlike RIM or Palm, Apple could realistically choose not to sell their device at all, or at least not sell it for a while, and so they were able to break the carrier oligopsony. It also didn't hurt that Steve Jobs was, well, Steve Jobs. A one-of-one business negotiator.
Then when the leader started seeing customers lead. Apple could have the same terms with them.
The hardware was very well done, and I could type faster on my Pre than I still can today on any screen. I was never a Blackberry person, but I expect it was a simlar experience.
Even at launch, WebOS was a pleasure to use, and the architecture of essentially easy-to-make installable web apps was revolutionary at the time. It's a damn shame it never made it further than it did.
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."
This is a debatable claim.
> Apple was a second run computer company that had almost no previous phone experience. They were not exactly negotiating from a position of strength
The iPhone was not a mobile Mac. It was an iPod with an inbuilt cellphone. iPod was HUGE. That was their upper hand.
It was huge as a consumer product. And that was the only thing that could convince a carrier to take a bet with Apple: they wanted exclusivity on the “next iPod”.
It didn’t even last 4 years.
Moreover, Apple had prestige. It wasn't that big but it already the high-end computer maker. And Apple had the already successful ipod which served as the basis for the original iphone. And the handset makers had been fundamentally dependent on carriers in determining what features made it to the final phones - which would have had to made them essentially weaklings.
Which is to say, I think there's reason to think Apple had strength in it's negotiation position relative to a random handset maker.
But aside from that everyone was carrying around an iPod everywhere along with a dumbphone even if you were a Windows user. We all hated using the dumbphones and loved the iPod.
In English-speaking countries, maybe. But I remember at least Windows Mobile PDAs that had both a cellular radio and wifi before the iPhone launched. At least Russian carriers never cared at all what kind of phone or other device you were using on their network. You bought it unlocked for the full price from somewhere else anyway. There were various attempts to do US-style carrier-locked phones with 2-year commitment with no or little upfront payment, but none of that really stuck. The only exception to that was SkyLink, Russia's only CDMA carrier. They sold their own branded phones but even those, iirc, were for the full price upfront.
This might actually be a partial explanation why some of Apple’s Executives held back on trying to convince Jobs until after they shipped, but initially, Steve Jobs was truly against the idea of running third-party apps on iPhones and had to be convinced.
I love sharing this trivia with people because really, can you imagine an iPhone without apps? It’s crazy to me to even think about, and back then during that first year and for many subsequent years after until this became public knowledge, I thought the only reason there wasn’t an SDK was because the first iPhone as a minimum-viable product for Apple’s vision of a cell phone and an SDK was always in the cards from before the start. Because why wouldn’t it? They had Cocoa! And a small but enthusiastic base of indie Mac devs that knew how to use it.
The BlackBerry Z10 was also a great device but by that point there was no way BlackBerry to deploy a competing ecosystem to iPhone and Android for it to matter.
"Apple iPhone was launched" on https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html
leading with some clicks to
https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=A0123
which took me to a site that worked.
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.
The entire point of an organization is to systematize, standardize, and make reliable something that is working.
When that thing stops working, and the wind changes, that organization is now a giant anchor full of the wrong people doing the wrong stuff inside the wrong systems on autopilot.
I’m sure in Finnish business schools they spend a lot of time hand wringing over the question of why their domestic champion Nokia failed. What they should instead be focused on is why the disruptor wasn’t also cultivated domestically.
I was an intern at BlackBerry (then RIM) Jan-Apr 2008 and it was astonishing to me how little anyone seemed to care or be taking the threat seriously. Obviously as a student I wasn’t in any of the high level war room discussions, but from what I could see it really did seem like the company was drinking its own marketing koolaid as far as the iPhone not being a relevant competitor because it was missing, like, cut and paste and encrypted email.
Steve knew that the customers did. not. care. And that the carriers would build more cell stations if they had to.
Although they attempted to make improvements, they failed to recognize what Apple understood: ordinary people wanted to walk into a store and purchase a visually appealing phone that was easy to set up and use, everything in 20 minutes max. Nokia had an overwhelming number of models, catering to everyone from older individuals to tech enthusiasts. If you wanted to buy a new phone, you had to be prepared to spend weeks searching for the right model.
But it also showed they didn't actually understand the significance of what was happening.
They thought essentially "all this fancy stuff will redefine 'cool', the 'high end'". They imagined a mid-range phone with special email features could slow the iPhone - ie, they imagined phone makers dribbling out features per dollar. But the real lesson of the iPhone was "the 'phone' is going to become a general purpose computing device with multiple connections to the world and hardware features controlled by general purpose software".
Even if they came up with a strong response, it would still involve innovation and execution, and probably disruptions to their go to market strategy. All things that have large chances for failure.
Also, Apple at the top of it's game from the iPhone to the iPhone 4. If they were facing a competitor that was strong, but not quite so remarkable, they'd have had more room to maneuver.
- Has no changeable battery
- Has no physical keyboard
- Is too expensive
- Has no support for Java applications
They clearly thought that these might be potential vectors for attacking the newcomer, but none of it worked out. Rather than having to play the game that the legacy phone makers like Nokia were playing, Apple just changed the entire game, and now Nokia et al were suddenly playing at a disadvantage where their existing knowledge and experience didn't really matter.
- Forces devs to release their apps as open software, HTML5 apps that anyone can just install the home screen from anywhere*, no marketplace gatekeeper needed, no 70% rev share to the telcos.
* This remains true, except if you really want to you can pay 30% in year one and 15% thereafter for shelf space, mobile apps PaaS, billing/subscription management, and end user app payments support. If you don't want to, you can still just release HTML5 apps like the Xbox Cloud player from Microsoft, downloadable direct from their web site, no App Store involved. And the HTML5 locally installable PacMan game from 2007 still works.
RIM with their minimal OS and a bunch of Java crap on top of it, just wasn't gone cut it.
Expensive is the only good point. But the issue with expensive is that, if everybody wants it, like 10% of the population will get it, and the other 90% will want it. And then you have product everybody is trying to get.
"If we built a product like this it will cannibalize some of our existing and profitable divisions, and those existing divisions have a lot more clout internally than we do. The CEO worked his way up from those divisions. We can't make this."
Then someone else makes that product and eats your lunch anyway.
I think this is where they went wrong. They got scared of the new cool kid in school and immediately dropped all their prices, essentially marketing themselves as budget to Apples premium.
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.
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
I think Microsoft is a notable exception. I was impressed how they went all in on Cloud Computing (at the cost of installed software business like Windows and classic Office) and think it‘s now doing the same with AI. Maybe it‘s because they almost missed the internet revolution and arguably lost in mobile.
In one fell swoop, the small form factor iPod switched from a tiny hard disk to flash memory and the former model was discontinued, before competitors had even really come close to catching up.
I think it comes from underestimating the role of process, structure, and competency, which are the DNA and codebase of a company.
Old, tired companies with lots of sunk costs and old employees are at a disadvantage.
Kodak does not need to become a cellphone company. You can take your dividends from Kodak and invest in Apple. When Kodak profits go to zero, you sell the the assets and move on.
Maybe Kodak was right in the traditional telling of the story? What if the best course would have been to ignore digital entirely, milk film for all it's worth, and then go down with the ship?
https://hbr.org/2016/07/kodaks-downfall-wasnt-about-technolo...
Today, in 2025, Fujifilm makes more money from selling film (Instax instant photo film) than they do from digital, even though they "won" in digital over Kodak to some extent.
1. "Work closely with T-Mobile"
2. "Prioritize touch UI development, simplifying basic functionality and PC suite development very high."
4. "Analyse what could be Apple’s next release of “iPhone mini” to mass market price points and plan counter-measures for it."
5. "Kill market for such an expensive device by filling mid-range with own/Google/Yahoo experiences"
6. "Accelerate Nokia's own free push e-mail project and make it less hidden within the company."
7. "Investigate and play hard in possible IPR infringements"
8. "Drive key partnerships to highlight Nokia's superior strength in the market, keeping things in perspective."
10. "Highlight potential weaknesses of the iPhone"
This whole report shows exactly why Nokia failed.
“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).
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.
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.
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.
(and 4% /= majority, although I assume you were being poetic)
We immediately knew we were toast. We used to say that the iphone made us irrelevant and android made us redundant.
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.
Sure they are more nimble and have higher margins. But the products they make are still just copies of what those other dinosaurs are making. And for a car I'm still very reluctant to buy a Chinese one. Politics aside, what I'm buying is a 5-10 year long service experience where the Volvo dealer is 1km away and where the BYD service location is I'm honestly not sure. It might be around the corner too, but I don't know because it hasn't been there for 50 years yet. It's a much harder market to break into. The easiest way to do it is probably the way Geely and SAIC did it - Buy a brand and/or service network.
You can look at a BYD and a Nissan and make a decision based on minor trade-offs between different aspects of the car. You couldn't do the same between iPhone and a Sony Ericsson.
BYD car division has multiple departments doing independent R&D and releasing independent lines. They were first with 360° tank turn and now a jumping supercar. They are trying hard to deliver things others like Musk keep promising down the line.
A killer feature for a car would be FSD but that’s not an “iPhone” thing.
BYD and the other Chinese manage to sell good EVs for great prices but I don’t see them irreplaceable like the iPhone.
Maybe they are the new Toyota but not the iPhone.
Same goes with Tesla though it’s more complicated because Tesla keeps promising FSD.
The iPhone didn’t promise anything. It just delivered.
Anyone should be able to bring to mind giant marketing blitz for products that died horribly.
Model S launched 12 years ago. Apple replaced Nokia in 4 years. Model Y was the second best selling car worldwide, supposedly, after a Toyota and followed by a Toyota. Tesla has market share of about 2.3% globally and stays out of top 10.
iPhone became de facto definition of a phone. In less than 5 years from nothing. Tesla is... not that.
Apple launched in a market with comprehensive cellular coverage.
The charging stations grid is still being built out, so Tesla was in a completely different situation circa 2013.
Same just didn't happen with Tesla.
iPhone got all the press, all the attention, all the developers, and made all the money.
Tesla is run by a bigot, far right extremist. I would never send money to them, no matter their offerings.
Not so with Apple.
These companies do not have nearly the same value proposition relative their intended market as Apple did.
BYD or Tesla are still just cars. An iPhone completely changed what a "phone" was. And did so in a way that required the rest of the industry to take time to replicate.
BYD is more just Toyota. Which is awesome for BYD. I realize that a lot of people would like to be "just" Toyota in their market. But it's not the same as being Apple.
Tesla? Yeah, they're nothing like Apple. Maybe if they delivered on FSD? But even then, it's not like Apple. Apple made something that no one else was working on as more than maybe a research project. Tesla FSD development doesn't have the same advantage. Everyone is working on FSD. Since we're American, we're hoping Tesla, (or one of the big three), gets it first. But that's more of a hope, not necessarily the way things will pan out.
That's the essential difference between Tesla and Apple. Apple doesn't talk a big game. In fact, they famously and frustratingly say nothing at all. They just deliver. Tesla is still talking about FSD.
And in the FSD space I don’t think there is much first mover advantage anyway. The iPhone came out of left field. The path to FSD has been highly iterative with many steps taken by a bunch of different players.
Even if Tesla gets FSD first, it won’t be much longer before others get it to and they’ll all be roughly the same interface and feature set.
iPhone was significantly different than what was there before and as you or somebody said, nobody else was working on anything similar. It was a different business model—one that took away substantial power from the cell phone carriers and turned the phone into a software platform on par with a regular computer. It turned carriers into dumb pipes and they hated that!
FSD doesn’t really change the fundamental business model of any car manufacturers out there. It’s just another feature for the same familiar players to sell.
What would throw a wrench in the existing crop of manufacturers would be street legal FSD cars you could order on Amazon for a fraction of the cost or something. Ones made by the same crew that make all the other random flee market brands sold there. Or maybe if the whole market switched to on-demand pay per mile service with a completely vertically integrated company—but even then I don’t think that upsets the apple cart too much.
It not being mediocre is how it ate the world.
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.
The average consumer replaces their smartphone about every 3 years (at least in the western world, places like India are on an even shorter cycle). Additionally, the global average price of a smartphone is about 400 USD. That's a much faster moving market than cars and the investment is much lower.
BYD is very impressive, but I wouldn't look at the situation as the same.
People will continue to buy brands they know and whose marketing aligns with how they see themselves. Not everyone will switch to BEVs for a variety of reasons - cost, lack of infrastructure, or hell, even contrarianism.
VW, Renault, Nissan, Stellantis, Toyota can change fast enough before BEVs are the only thing on the market. All of them already have models in various sizes (e.g. Renault make very good and adequate cheap EVs nobody else comes even close to in the big EU markets) and varying quality. It's easier for VW to improve their EVs than it is for Tesla to launder their image.
A Rolls-Royce is a BMW, a Chrysler is a Fiat, an Aston Martin is a Ford, a Jaguar is a Tata, a Lamborghini is an Audi. And a Porsche is a Volkswagen.
Or by buying a brand. Happens all the time. BYD already bought full control of the luxury brand Denza from the Mercedes-Benz joint venture.
Unless these two companies change the laws of physics in order to exponentially improve the overall performance of batteries (exponentially faster charging times, from hours to 5-10 minutes, exponentially cheaper batteries that would last longer) then, no, they won't be the next Apple. Just ask VW, they almost bet it all on EVs and now they're already with one foot in the grave because of that.
Not without some coercion. It was part of the settlement from when they cheated on emissions tests by running the engines more efficiently if the steering angle was touched or the non-drive wheels moved.
People from Future Crew (Finland) and Triton (Sweden) should have been running these teams. Half ;-).
You see this attitude a lot today. ("AI? LOL, it can't even count the letters in 'Strawberry.'") People have a mental block when it comes to understanding that the value of something new doesn't matter as much as its time derivative.
My memory is that Apple _charged_ developers to make apps :)
I remember a lot of delusion the first year that then turned into bitterness - but I don't have the inside perspective, just hints of it from my then position at a software supplier to both.
They were stuck in their post-Windows 95 world, and did not understand that multimedia CD-ROMs were clunky and dying.
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.
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_s...
Relevant: LG Prada (2006) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
Parts of the deck suggest that they didn't fully understand what they were facing.
For example, the bullet "scaling the user experience to lower HW specs may be challenging. iPhone mini may be closer to iPod UI" comment still suggests they were stuck in the mindset of the time. They thought it was unlikely that Apple could deliver a horizontal platform, rather Apple would be launch a series of individual phones at different prices, each with bespoke interfaces, just like all the players had been doing, over and over.
With that perspective, the choice to keep developing parallel product lines (Maemo, Meltemi, Symbian, etc.) rather than throwing all their eggs into one basket is more understandable I guess, though ultimately completely wrong.
Indeed. I referred to it at the time as the 50-model strategy.
The biggest one to note is the somewhat-hopeful comment that the lack of Java support was cutting off the iPhone from a "large swath of existing software" ... that barely anyone enjoyed using, and didn't amount to much mindshare or incumbent advantage.
There is almost no understanding of the software needed for an iPhone UI.
We should remember the original iPhone was more a tech demonstrator than anything else. It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, but you couldn't really DO that much with it. There wasn't even an app store! You still needed to buy a digital camera and a garmin GPS and so on. This was a telephone in the old sense of the word (For younger readers, "telephone" used to mean a thing you made calls with).
The fact we pay 2-3 times as much now for premium smartphones is no wonder. Now it's a PC power thing with a better camera. By the time the iPhone 3G arrived it was a marvel. It had ironed out most of the kinks of the early versions, added the GPS, App Store etc. But by then, the other dinosaurs were already dying. They murdered them with the initial versions of the iPhone, which really weren't even that impressive.
The presentation shows they were aware of what was happening. But that Nokia didn't just make their portfolio two lines (really simple cheap feature phones and really expensive all-glass smartphones) on the day after this presentation came out, is strange.
You glossed over the one killer feature of the original iPhone: It had a fully functional web browser and enough compute power to just barely run it. This was the thing that made all previous smartphones instantly obsolete. No goddamn WAP proxy. No needing 3-4 minutes to get Yahoo to render. It didn't completely trash the layout of every other page. It was an actually useful web browser.
It's not hard to see why the iPhone 3G was a major success. It smoothed over so many of the rough edges from the original iPhone.
I still remember seeing the demo of maps and the user being able to pan and zoom and was just floored. I really think the screen is what sold it then, even if it didn't have the apps, you could still browse the full internet on it which was a complete game changer.
IMO the screen + multi touch is what drove sales of the first iPhone.
When i whipped it out in public, take a photo at concerts, etc. random people would come up to me and ask me to play with it -- thats when i knew for sure Apple were on to something, a complete game changer that captured the attention of the public.
It had the screen and the software do do that but not the bandwidth. But I guess people were more patient back then.
I don’t recall any of my older phones having software updates that had major new features. Any update would have been some esoteric bug fixes or something.
The idea that the phone was just another general purpose computer with an operating system that could be updated to a significantly changed interface was not a concept that existed in the mainstream at the time.
All the players before were hardware manufacturers who were deeply in bed with the carriers. Phones were locked with whatever software happened to be installed at the time. Each phone had very different software that was fixed and unchanging. The entire ecosystem was built around that and Apple came along and made that model obsolete.
I imagine that there were several people in Nokia that understood the potential of a phone that could also act like a mini-computer.
In the end they did that too, of course, and the N9 was an astonishingly good phone, with a slick zero-button interface and silky smooth scrolling and multitouch gestures. And a terminal and reasonably-privileged root access if you were so inclined. I used a normal ssh/screen/irssi combo to IRC. It’s such a fucking shame that Maemo/Meego was killed.
I, for one, would love a return to "smaller is cooler" with small screens and big numeric keypads. I have an elderly relative whose only use for a smartphone is calls (it's a phone after all) and text messaging (SMS and WhatsApp); these don't need a big screen.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070114215511/https://blogs.mot...
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.
This is to Nokia's credit. It didn't work out, but they also weren't arrogant like RIM or Microsoft
> In the summer of 2007, however, Lazaridis cracked open a phone that gave him pause. “They’ve put a Mac in this thing,” he marvelled after peering inside one of the new iPhones.
> Lazaridis shared the revelation with his handset engineers, who had been pushing to expand BlackBerry’s Internet reach for years. Before, Lazaridis had waved them off. Carriers wouldn’t allow RIM to include more than a simple browser because it would crash their networks. After his iPhone autopsy, however, he realized the smartphone race was in danger of shifting. If consumers and carriers continued to embrace the iPhone, BlackBerry would need more than its efficient e-mail and battery to lead the market. “If this thing catches on, we’re competing with a Mac, not a Nokia,” he said. The new battleground was mobile computing. Lazaridis figured RIM’s core corporate market was safe because the iPhone couldn’t match BlackBerry’s reliable keyboard and in-house network delivery of secure e-mails. But in the consumer market, where the Pearl phone was competing, RIM needed a full Web browser. BlackBerry was a sensation because it put e-mail in people’s pockets. Now, iPhone was offering the full Internet. If BlackBerry was to prevail, he told RIM’s engineers, “We have to fix everything that’s wrong with the iPhone.”
It was a real issue and a real opportunity - I remember for years after the iPhone came out the blackberry die-hards were insisting that they'd easily be able to make something that was "iPhone like with a blackberry keyboard" - but during those years more and more people started carrying two phones, an iPhone for home and a blackberry for work.
That was the beginning of the end.
Part of the problem is that there were not enough of them to sustain a company the size of RIM. The vast majority of the market did not care and instead valued the other side of the tradeoff, the things you can do with a touch screen but not with a physical keyboard.
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.
I'm interested in understanding what you meant here?
To my understanding, the N800 was released in 2007 according to Wikipedia[1] and the first craze of podcasts was in the first half of the 00's, with the most notable fact being the official support of podcasts in iTunes in 2004[2]. They then lost their fame before knowing a second wave of popularity starting in the second half of the 10's.
Are you talking about something else?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#History
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
Sure you're not thinking of the N900? The N800 didn't have any cellular connectivity, only wifi and bluetooth.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(Apple)#History
Not denying how important it was, but the App Store wasn't "invented". It was created because Apple listened to what developers wanted.
I can't tell for sure, but I would bet the app store concept was inspired from Cydia for jailbroken iPhones that used APT to download apps from a central software repository, which was already common in the Linux world at the time.
App Store as a central place to download apps was a really important concept for the iPhone ecosystem because it was a distribution and a marketing channel. Developers didn't asked for that and, for the better and the worst, we can give Apple some credit for building it that way.
It didn’t have a hell of a lot in it, but I remember grabbing a cute little game (hex-a-hop) and … maybe an Angry Birds demo on it?
— edit - I’m thinking of the N900
Nokia boomers squandered the opportunity they had with Maemo and kept insisting on the sinking ship (or burning platform) of Symbian
But to be really honest Maemo was also a dud. Because they didn't have the sharp focus of Android and kept a lot of crap from Linux (like X11 sigh)
X11 let them use existing apps outright and made porting easy. What else would they have used at that time and what advantage would it give them?
https://xonx.sourceforge.net/ “XFree86, a free implementation of the X Window System, has been ported to Darwin and Mac OS X. […] Our work has been included in Apple's X11 for Mac OS X. ”
Because if it was good enough why didn't Android keep it?
Ok bro.
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.
Years later, "man we tried, we had that meeting and everything, we just couldn't compete"
[1]: 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.
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.
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.
Now of course I’m looking at it retrospectively but still
Do you remember any specifics arguments or conflicts about strategy?
Soon after Jo Harlow came to give a presentation that was held in The Oval cricket ground. I remember a couple of her statements drew subdued laughter from those attending. I felt a little sorry for her.
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.
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/comments/1i2pijr/nokias_...
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.
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.
My Galaxy 5 and 6 were the last the worked well one handed. The "small" phones available are still larger than those most of the time! Guess the demand just isn't there, tho I wish some were still available. Can't imagine how tiny ladies with small hands deal.
Here's an interesting paper on hand size and height: Guerra, R., Fonseca, I., Pichel, F. et al. Hand length as an alternative measurement of height. Eur J Clin Nutr 68, 229–233 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/ejcn.2013.220.
Here's what they did:
> A cross-sectional study was conducted using a consecutive sample of 465 inpatients (19–91 years), from a university hospital. Participants were randomly divided into a development sample of 311 individuals and a cross-validation one. A linear regression model was used to formulate the equation. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) for single measures and differences between measured height (MH) and PH and between BMI calculated with MH (BMIMH) and with PH (BMIPH) were determined.
and here were the results:
> The regression equation for PH is: PH (cm)=80.400+5.122 × hand length (cm)—0.195 × age (years)+6.383 × gender (gender: women 0, men 1) (R=0.87, s.e. of the estimate=4.98 cm). MH and PH were strongly correlated, ICCs: 0.67-0.74 (P<0.001). Differences were small, mean difference±s.d., ⩽−0.6±4.4 cm (P⩾0.24). BMIMH and BMIPH were strongly correlated, ICCs: 0.94-0.96 (P<0.001). Differences were small, ⩽0.3±1.7 kg/m2 (P⩾0.10).
Here's that regression equation in easy to read form, where H is the predicted height in cm, H is hand length in cm, G is 0 for women and 6.383 for men, and A is age in years:
H = 80.400 + 5.122 L - 0.195 A + G
Going the other way, from my hand size, age, and gender my predicted height is 5'8".
Small phones certainly make sense early on when phones were an additional computer for most people. Fast forward to now and for many people they are their only computer and have a greater need of the versatility that a larger screen can provide.
> Analyse what could be Apple’s next release of “iPhone mini” to mass market price points and plan counter-measures for it.
The only thing they got wrong was that it wasn't Apple that released this mass market priced smartphone, it was Android that filled the "iPhone mini" role. But for the purposes of this presentation, that's the same thing: a non-Nokia competitor dominating this niche.
https://www.slidebook.io/company/microsoft/presentation/f646...
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"
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.
Where I live is quite rural, with my county having a population density of ~35 people/mile^2 (or ~13.5 people/km^2). Median income here is low relative to most of the US, but not compared to Europe.
Note that this is not all cellular service; I typically buy contract-subsidized devices. There's really no reason not to, as it's the same cost as buying them elsewhere but paid over two years. The effect of inflation alone on that deferred debt is about the same as what I could save on service by changing carriers.
Also, I and my family use our devices extensively. It's not uncommon for us to hit 1TB of cellular data in a month.
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.
Their key mistake.
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?
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).
If only history went this way, Maemo could be a full OS competing with the big boys by now.
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.
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.
Until Elop canceled everything Symbian was still selling - declining sales, but still millions of units. So while the situation was bad slowly phasing out Symbian for taking all the money you could make with that, while hoping N9 software stack sticks sounded like a more sensible approach than "cancel everything, go for Windows". Elop did respond to criticism from Developers (including a mail I've sent him with colleagues), but had made up his mind.
This blog post is a byproduct of that discussion, and was referenced by Felipe in internal mailing lists back then:
https://felipec.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/meego-scales-becaus...
I have no idea how successfull it'd have been in the end - the UI was great, parts of the softwarestack were problematic (though we've been doing quite well with parts of that at Jolla later on). The planned hardware for the future models was less than ideal, though.
No developer dared to touch Maemo because its future was so uncertain due to the switch to WP. My dad was one of the early Lumia adopters and it was so limiting in what it can do.
Series 60 was the dominant Nokia UI at the time, but then that received a shake-up with Belle?
Fun fact: Until Nokia bought them, Symbian devs never got actually see any phones that were being built, unless you worked in a specific team that had access restrictions to even enter.
Compared to Nokia's symbian phones and earlier Maemo efforts, it felt revolutionary and I'd agree Nokia had a device which could have paved the way for a post-symbian future. It definitely felt like, with continued investment, it would have been a real iPhone competitor, and in just the nick of time.
Elop's strategy was a disaster.
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.
I was probably one of the first people to ever possess[ß] a Nokia device running Linux. A research unit in US wrote a library to interface with the baseband modem and provided the whole thing as a single, mostly-statically linked binary that could be used for phonecall functionality. A skunkworks team in Finland wrote a bootloader for N95 to use a Linux kernel. And an ex team member helped put together the initial Debian-based userland.
I wrote the wrapper library that under the hood ran the baseband binary, exposing a sane state machine you could then rely on from "regular" userspace. And I wrote the first, really rough contact book to make/receive calls from the prototype UI. The UI was built with a very early version of libflutter, a GL-based widget library. We built our own layer on top of it.
The prototype became known as the "Flower Phone", thanks to its default background screen. A few months after the device having been showed off our team was provided with about a dozen bright orange[0] N95 devices that ran Linux, booted off of a userspace we had built, and came with our prototype UI. We used them for on-device debugging and developing the UI layer further. Making real calls with them was a core piece of functionality.
From what I understand, the phone functionality in N900 became a reality thanks to that little project.
ß: wasn't mine, it firmly remained property of Nokia. But I used it for experimentation and making real calls.
0: the colour was used to signal the devices were prototypes.
Tell me a large company other than Apple that wasn't completely dysfunctional.
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.
When an entire organization is built around executing on one local maxima hypothesis well, and there's no tangible threat to it that most individuals feel, it is hard for that org to take the temporary hit to change tacks.
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.
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.
Actual sales: 2007: 1.4M, 2008: 12M. Pretty spot on.
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-thoug...
but doesn't seem to have the actual content. :(
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.
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.
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.
I expect to see a new Windows Phone in around 2030.
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/
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".
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).
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?
"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...
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?
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.
... 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.)
And in all my years of using Nokia phones I can’t remember a software bug. But of course we wanted more from our phones than just stability, we wanted features and better UI.
> 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
Which makes me wonder what a content access token is.
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
Seems like Nokia had a good grasp of what had happened. Also a sense of immediacy to act.
But then - Nokia, Palm, Blackberry....
"<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.)
There has been some nasty inflation in these past years, but $500 is a budget phone these days!
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).
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.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hypponen_the-nokia-design-arc...
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.
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.