I was there as this played out. Nokia had a lot of good software and software engineers but not the management structure to do anything good with that.
Nokia was huge as an organization and parts of that organization recognized the threat early on. The problem was at the board and executive level. These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business. Lots of people with an electronics and radio background. Not a lot of people with software competence. And they had bought into the notion that Symbian was going to magically fix all their problems.
A lot of effort was spent on looking for other solutions. And one of the things that was good (Linux) around 2005 was actually quite close to displacing Symbian as the key future proof replacement for their legacy platforms. Symbian was just rolling out for a few years and they had made a big investment in that. And management (those same people with a huge blind spot for software) backed the wrong horse.
Linux never really died in Nokia but it wasn't allowed to prosper either. Devices were cancelled or repurposed for Symbian. This happened to the N8, for example. By the time they switched to windows phone, they actually had two Linux platforms (Meego and Meltemi) and an Android phone in the works as well. Meego had one last product phone launch and the team and platform were killed in the same week. Any devices for that platform were labeled as developer phones. Nokia never marketed them as a consumer phone. Meltemi never saw any product launch at all; it was aimed at feature phones. Both were good ideas but poorly executed. Nokia killed them along with Symbian in order to back windows phone. Classic baby and bathwater situation.
And MS ended up killing the one Nokia Android phone that was launched shortly before they acquired the whole phone division. Kind of a desperate/ballsy move. I suspect Nokia did this as a stick to ensure MS followed through with the acquisition. That was their "oh we could just switch from windows phone to Android unless.. " move. Nokia was at point the only OEM that still believed in Windows Phone.
MS killed the whole division shortly after Satya Nadella took over and was sorting out the mess left by Steve Ballmer. The iphone was solidly in charge by then and the rest of the market was Android. Courtesy of lots of Linux contributions by the Meego and Maemo team.
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).
People blame Stephen Elop. But the person in control of the Nokia board was former CEO Jorma Ollila who headed Nokia through its glory days and had a lot of power. Nothing happened in Nokia without his approval during that period.
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.
> 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
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.
Was this around the time Microsoft kept switching what "windows phone" was? I remember that the one friend who got into it loved it, and then they released something completely incompatible and he abandoned the platform.
2009 and earlier: Windows Mobile was based on WinCE. The UI was garbage but the innards were pretty functional, and there was desktop-like multitasking. Unpopular opinion: they should have just done a UI refresh of that thing and moved it to an NT kernel. There were a lot of cool third party hacks on this platform.
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.
At the time Steve Jobs was putting his foot down against allowing Flash on the iPhone because the performance was so pants, Microsoft was going all in on Silverlight which had exactly the same problem.
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.
It's easy to forget how popular flash was in that decade. A lot of us found it annoying on desktops too. Not to mention Linux, where we'd deal with binary blobs that were pretty unstable, not because we liked it but because you needed it to interact with the world.
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...
Flash as an animation tool and applet platform was already on the downswing when the iPhone happened, though.
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.
Yes, I also think around 2008 or so the most widespread use of Flash might already have been newgrounds et al. I don't remember really ever caring for Flash on Linux though.
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.
Oh, the flashbacks.. (pun intended). Same here. Every new flash release, download, extract, rename to have a version number, copy to "folder of last 10-15 released flash .so files", symlink, restart browser and hope it works.
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...
> When Flash did finally come to mobile on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM.
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.
I remember having a Flash app on Nokia E70. I never used it. The phone was lauched in 2006, but I don't know if the app was there from the beginning because I bought it second-hand in 2008.
Wait, it wasn't about performance, but it was about Performance?
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!
Your 90s area PC also had disk swapping and wasn’t running on a tiny battery. The Flash of 2007 was much more processor intensive and in the 90s, I doubt you were streaming quality video with Flash.
Mostly because a whole generation lost that part, and finds cool putting Web everywhere, saying this as someone that also does Web projects, I only don't see a value using it as a hammer for all kinds of nails.
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.
> We had wallpapers and great homescreen and dock themes on jailbroken iPhones without a significant perf impact.
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.
Yes “I drank the Kool aid” when Adobe couldn’t get Flash to run decently on a 1Ghz/1Gb RAM Android. But it was going to run smoothly on a 400Mhz, 128Mb RAM first gen iPhone?
Was Safari with Flash going to run well when Safari without Flash could barely run?
I didn't read a word about flash in the comment you replied to. They commented on the mention of wallpapers in your comment about flash, but they didn't mention flash at all. What they said is that you believed things that Apple said, that weren't true, about why they wouldn't allow wallpapers. They characterized this as a nitpick.
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.
> It was so resource constrained that you couldn’t put a picture on your home screen because it would have taken too much memory.
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.
And it made the UI slower - as confirmed by another comment and used battery.
> 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.
Haha I remember the Xoom. Company bought one at the time to test our product on, since it might be a big deal. Several of us were intrigued and negotiated who would get to take it home after work. After about 3 days it became clear that it was terrible and it was relegated to a drawer.
Wait...you're telling me I can't charm a cute girl with the Motorola Xoom and its amazing capability of being able to play a Youtube video in full screen?
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).
I had the original iPhone, then swapped it for a flagship android and hated it. I tried Windows Phone out a few years later and loved it and had two of them over the years. Some apps didn't exist for it and that sucked, but the OS was snappy and something different that I really liked. The Nokia windows phones were great. I knew it was doomed though as when I got them from the carrier, I was apparently like the only person despite it having its own wall at the brick and mortar store lol. I still miss it.
A relative of mine had a Windows Phone and kept it running at least until the mid 10s. It was fast but he could basically only do calls and SMSes with it because nobody wrote apps for that OS. Everybody in app development (devs and their customers) was keen to see Windows Phone die quickly so they could spare time and money and develop only for two OSes.
Thy were really great on supporting a bunch of less popular platforms (feature phones and the like) WhatsApp supported Blackberry for a long time. WhatsApp probably supported a potato for quite a long time.
Yes, the Windows Nokia Phone was quite an interesting alternative. Though I never owned one I played with one and was pleasantly surprised, the 'workflow' was very good, the UI as was nice, it was snappy. If they were around today I'd probably think about owning one.
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.
My cousin says the same thing... 25 year IT veteran. Early adopter for almost all new tech. He says his 1000-whatever Lumia phone was one of the best phones he ever owned. I know it ran Windows Phone OS, and I remember playing with it a bit.
The Lumia was essentially a N9 ported from Linux to Windows. The N9 was the best phone I have ever owned. The UI was fantastic. In particular, the offline navigation application was incredible.
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.
I had forgotten the name, but yeah, I had a Lumia for my first one. Hardly anyone I knew had one, but the ~5 I knew were absolutely in love with theirs.
I remember having a Windows PDA when I was in college, and developing a bit on top of Windows M. It was a reasonable platform.
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.
I don't think so. As I recall, the different UI (not just from older MS stuff, but also from iPhone) was really front and center of Microsoft's pitch at the time.
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.
I think the issue was some people never even got around to seeing the different UI. They heard Windows + Phone and immediately thought of the older tech and noped out.
Yes... If I remember we were aiming for the newly released "Windows 8"-based Phone OS, and the previous version was fully incompatible with it so all apps had to be redone. Tiles were the new thing to build for.
Microsoft tried to do the same thing on the Desktop side too, but on the desktop they were forced to keep the backwards compatibility in place so it didn't finish off the platform the way it did on the Phone side.
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.
If memory serves, it was a custom kernel and OS, then a semi-custom kernel with a few OS components shared with Windows 8, and then the Windows 10 'core' kernel (same as on the Xbox One?) with many shared OS components.
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.
WinCE (which was rebranded as Windows Mobile at one point) basically had a cut-down version of Win32 as its app framework. There was also .NET complete with a WinForms port.
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.
It was incredibly smooth. The Windows Phone 7 browser was also very smooth compared to the iPhone/Android browsers of the time. Some miracles worked somewhere.
I had a few Windows phones, and butter isn't a word I'd ever use to describe the performance of the UI. Heck, I wouldn't even use the word margarine to describe my experience with it.
Didn't it end up as UWP? At one point they were trying to pitch running the same app on mobile and on desktop, and it .. kind of worked, although obviously very sandboxed and restricted in APIs.
I had two Lumia flagship phones - Lumia 800 with Windows Phone 7 and Lumia 930 with Windows Phone 8 (which I later upgraded to 10).
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.
I couldn't believe my eyes when I read that they had hired Elop and was concentrating on Windows phones. I immediately knew that was the end. Unbelievably incompetent by the board.
I think it was actually a good idea. I think they correctly predicted the Android market and saw Windows Phone was a good way to differentiate their phones from everybody else. If you look at the history of Android manufacturers, it was a long slog of brands trading off popularity and hardly making any profit until Samsung eventually became the only mainstream player.
Nokia was dead company walking before Stephen Elop. Elop saw the writing on the wall and made one of the choices available. A different CEO would have made a different choice but ultimately at that point it would still have been too late to save Nokia.
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.
Was there with the company as intern and junior during Nokia and Microsoft days for Nokia Maps.
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.
> 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
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).
Nokia with android vendor would mean Nokia would survive until today - just due to the brand (it was big) and build quality.
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.
Nokia is still around, because NSN survived this mess.
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.
> made a different choice but ultimately at that point it would still have been too late to save Nokia.
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 Nokia at that point would have gone with Android with Google services which what the market wanted. They would have gone with Android with their own services (Maps etc) and app store.
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.
I was also at Nokia during this time and recall OPK (Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo), during a visit to the Beijing office, giving a talk where he talked about the difficulties of pushing new things through the organization.
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.
The Linux based Nokia N900 was the best phone I ever owned. With a bit of polish, finish and maturity it could have also been the best phone for the masses. RIP.
I loved my N810, but Maemo had so many little issues all over the place, it was reaching "Death by a thousand papercuts" territory. iPhone did what Apple used to do so well, which was obsess about the user experience.
I'm very late to the party here, but as a smartphone product manager at Vodafone I had a front-row seat to the entire arc--which actually started with many telcos being angry at Nokia for their arrogance and near-monopoly, before the iPhone came out.
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).
That’s how I remember Nokia in the first half of the 2000’s: peak arrogance. Even if Steve Jobs himself would have given them the iPhone for free, they would have rejected it.
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:
The N-series were great too, I loved both my N73 and later a N82, both with Gameboy emulators.
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.
I love Finland and the Fins. But there is a certain type in that population that is extremely bureaucratic. The only country in Europe that has a contingent that comes near is Switzerland, also a great place to live.
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.
> the iPhone was only "in charge" for a brief year or two, and then Android ate its lunch in terms of marketshare.
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).
> Nit: the iPhone was only "in charge" for a brief year or two, and then Android ate its lunch in terms of marketshare.
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.
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.
I was a day one Android fan (got the Nexus One) but I'd actually debate what "in charge" means... to me it doesn't necessarily mean dominating market share. I think the iPhone defined the touch-based smartphone when it came out and continues to do so. These days Android has a much more cohesive concept (in the form of Material UI and so on) but in the early days it was just a hodgepodge mess of ideas, even if it dominated the market.
> ...in the early days it was just a hodgepodge mess of ideas, even if it dominated the market.
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.
it dominated the market because they seized the 'budget' smartphone market. Back in they hayday everyone dreaded a new android app coming into the shop because of all the absolute shit phones (slow cpus, tiny screens) the client wanted us to support because there were so many in the market (overseas).
iPhone did and still does run the market, everyone else is a follower.
This is probably the most important bifurcation point in the history of European tech. Today's malaise and grasping for direction has much to do with the demise of this pioneering enterprise. And the fact that it does not appear to have been pre-ordained adds poignancy.
European tech was doomed in late the 90s when the EU decided to throw in with Microsoft et al instead of supporting building out a homegrown alternative ecosystem based around open source software.
No, the national champions model is the problem. If Apple failed the US still has Android and potentially many other startups. Europe just doesn't have the risk capital or ecosystem.
I would put Novo Nordisk up there too. Not sure how Eli Lilly is doing so much better though, which I presume for both is due to advancing GLP-1s, but I thought Novo was first to market.
I was working externally for Nokia around 2004~2006. They were already competing with Apple at this point. Nokia were scared by the iPod and the Rokr. They wanted to secure the mobile and online music market. They were trying to beat Apple at iTunes, to the point where they gobbled up one of Apple's biggest competitors in the music space (OD2-Loudeye).
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
> These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business
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.
So many manufacturing companies fail at software. They think of software like it's any other component on the BOM. As if it's just like a screw or a piece of molded plastic: Build the cheapest "software part" that meets the requirements (or buy it from a "supplier"), and then bolt it onto the product some time during assembly.
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."
This is very visible in places like TVs/set-top-boxes, which are always chronically awful and slow, and now cars are filling up with terrible software. Which they want to charge a subscription for.
My TV's menus consist of what I would charitably describe as clip art. The icons that are supposed to be aligned row-wise are sometimes off by 1 pixel. Text is not consistently aligned with icons. They can't even get left justification right. Some of the UI elements have borders around them, but the bottom border is sometimes 3px thick and the top border is 2px thick. Interaction with the menus generally takes about 500-2500ms from the time I push the button on the remote. Yet everything is animated (using a CPU that is obviously not powerful enough to even keep up with the animation).
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.
And the problem is, people buy this. The markets are completely broken. And the worst of it - it's unlikely this will be addressed, most likely it'll only get worse.
I remember that, too. Nokia even had an "app store" on a lot of their business series devices (the E-series), but it was clunky to use, had no payment options and was not really friendly for 3rd party developers. There was probably a window where, had Nokia pushed to compete with apple on that field, they could have gotten a leg up and kept Symbian and symbian apps in the race for (way) longer. But that invest and speed needed for software was probably not doable in the behemoth that was Nokia at that time.
The worst thing with their store was the 3rd party review and signing process. For a time you also had to pay (a lot more than $99) to receive a developer certificate.
As someone who was there, I recall numerous projects instituted to reduce the number of steps it took to even install an app on the device. It was mind-numbing to see what they were trying to extract themselves from.
The presentation is evidence itself that Nokia was bureaucratic and unlikely to stay competitive.
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.
>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.
A very common story in European tech and automobile companies.
I had the N800 and then the N810 which was one of my favorite devices ever. Then I got the N900 and what a disappointment it was. I wish I could get an N810 with modern internals.
> MS killed the whole division shortly after Satya Nadella took over and was sorting out the mess left by Steve Ballmer.
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.
Ballmer, the person who pushed for and created the entire Microsoft Enterprise focus, is not an idea guy that understood what made Microsoft successful? This idea that Ballmer was some goof when he was actually considered a co-founder by Bill Gates which is why he received like 17% of the company when he joined.
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.
Yes and no. Too late to take on Apple, but Microsoft could have persisted as a loss leader and finally at least had Enterprise Mobile in its pocket. Just don't actively burn third party developers. It would have been too late for courting hardware OEMs by then I reckon, though.
I was there during the end of the Windows Phone era and can confirm. There were even efforts for additional Linux based OSes post windows phone. Nokia just never had software in their DNA.
Nokia has a pretty successful business in things like cellular base stations, carrier networking, etc. - for example they brought their joint venture with Siemens (Nokia Siemens Networks) back in-house by buying Siemens' part out, and that does a lot of optical network stuff (DWDM backhaul equipment, etc), already had a cellular base-station business but then also bought competitor Alcatel Lucent, and a lot of provider network stuff came in with that (like FTTH equipment on the provider side). They also got Alcatel's undersea cable laying division.
So they still have a bunch of valuable and successful businesses even though their consumer business went to crap.
Nokia had, for example, excellent RF engineering talent. Personal anecdote: back in the day a Nokia phone would get a call through when other brands didn't, on the same telco.
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.
Something clicked for me when I read your comment: the most amazing thing about Apple is that despite their corporate immensity, they still continue to ship generation after generation of cool products that compete and sell on their own merits. You don't have to be a fanboy to appreciate that.
Almost no other tech company that I can think of has been able to resist bureaucratic ossification. (Perhaps Adobe - to an extent?)
Really? To me, for example iPhones haven't changed at all in a long time, they get spec bumps but are essentially the same product, and people buy replacements mostly because of batteries going bad / apps bloating / fashion.
Apple's new products are surprisingly often failures, for their background. Vision Pro anyone?
Consumers always have the choice to buy a different phone. And in the case of buying an iPhone, they have the choice to buy a much cheaper phone. That so many of us continue to buy iPhones is proof that Apple is doing something very right. And that shows, and this is my main point, that they have impressively avoided being bogged down by megacorp bureaucracy.
I was at Palm when the iPhone launched, and one note from this analysis summed up Apple's new power in the market and how they really changed the landscape.
"Cingular has allowed Apple to launch a device with WLAN and inbuilt services"
At that time, the carriers controlled so much of the cell phone experience. We certainly would have loved to have launched Palm Treo phones with WiFi radios, but our carrier partners wanted the only way to get data in and out of the devices to be through their monetized data plans. They also wanted to control what you did with that data so they could charge for their own email or messaging systems or web portals. The same applied to app stores. Palm OS didn't have a unified app store at that time, just sideloading and some third-party methods, and some carriers had started making their own stores where you could buy apps billed through your cell phone bill. They hated the idea of a platform owning that, and I expect that was part of the reason Apple originally released it with no app store. They needed the phone to be a massive hit in order to gain the power to also bypass that wall that the cell companies put up.
Palm did benefit from the iPhone launch -- it had us uplevel our efforts away from the post-Palm OS phones that we were in the middle of developing that were aimed at the RIM market and instead try something radical with webOS, and when the Pre launched, it actually had WiFi on board, although the Sprint-exclusive Pixi phone lacked WiFi due to carrier request. There was some momentum there for a while, but then HP bought us, hit its own set of brick walls with carriers, and ditched the hardware business shortly after Apple started launching on other carriers.
I was at RIM at that time and saw _exactly_ the same thing. When I started in 2008, in addition to WiFi and apps they were squabbling with carriers about whether or not the Blackberry needed an antenna. Carriers were micromanaging devices to an astonishing degree.
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.
Were virtual network operators (?) - VNOs - a thing back then, and could a VNO make its own rules? If so, could Apple (or Palm or RIM) launch their devices without carrier compromise by also owning a virtual network? I guess this would have required a lot of
money. Maybe Nokia could have done it?
No, the carrier leverage did not come from network policy, it came from sales-channel. That is to say, in those days one way or another every device passed through a carrier's hands before reaching the customer. So carriers controlled pricing, and to a large degree, marketing. If they didn't like your device they would refuse to sell it and then you were stuck.
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.
That’s not exactly true. What Apple did in every market was make deals with the #2 or #3 carrier that was desperate to steal market share from the leader.
Then when the leader started seeing customers lead. Apple could have the same terms with them.
The Pre was absolutely rad - and to this day the only phone I miss from a UI perspective, and the only UX and hardware that I thought had a chance of "out Apple'ing Apple".
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.
I read that as a failure of Palm's management, notably the ones that were negotiating with phone carriers. Jobs isn't the only guy who could have negotiated that kind of deal. Apple was a second run computer company that had almost no previous phone experience. They were not exactly negotiating from a position of strength, and the fact that only one carrier took them up on the offer shows just how tough it was.
It sounds like they really needed to say "Stop. We are the ones building the phone, you are the ones providing the service. We don't tell you how to build towers, you don't tell us how to build the handset, at least not the user facing part of the handset."
Apple in 2006 wasn’t a computer company, they were the iPod company.
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”.
I would expect that being a computer company gave Apple more leverage than the handset makers. Apple could afford to have none of the providers say yes.
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.
The resurgence of the Mac was already well under way at that point as well. Intel Macs had launched before the iPhone. Developer buy in to the Mac was pretty big by then.
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.
> At that time, the carriers controlled so much of the cell phone experience.
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.
> 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.
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.
Though I never used a Pre, I got to use webOS on an HP Touchpad. In many ways, I still think it’s better than what we currently have and wish it had won out instead of the iOS and Android.
The Pre and WebOS were hands down the best non iPhone experience at the time. The mistake Palm made was going exclusive instead of pushing it everywhere. I don't think the Pre ever recovered from that in the USA.
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.
Exactly this. Also why I bought Apple stock the day the iPhone was announced (I had never seen an iPhone and knew nothing about how cool it was, but I took notice that Jobs had been able to blast through the carrier moat concerning data service).
2007. The presentation reads like an eerily accurate crystal-ball prediction of what actually happened in subsequent years.
Evidently, Nokia executives knew well in advance what the iPhone could do to their company.
Evidently, they knew they needed to do "something" to avoid an implosion of their mobile-phone business.
Evidently, despite their prescience and best efforts, they were unable to avoid disaster.
It's as if they were in the Titanic, and saw the dangerous iceberg well in advance, but somehow were unable to turn the steering wheel and change course.
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.
My pet theory is that this is the natural lifecycle of almost all companies and the reason for that is that they underappreciate the luck involved in their first success. There are a few exceptions in the form of zombies (typically relying on a monopoly or legislative help), but there are very few repeatedly innovative companies.
There was another thread (I think on HN today) about investment strategies, and the ones that earned the most over the longest term were basically broad index funds rather than picking winners. I'd wager your point has a lot to do with why this investment strategy is best.
Doesn’t need to be a pet theory, that’s just an accurate assessment of reality.
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.
It’s nice to see that they got it even if they weren’t ultimately capable of doing anything about it.
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.
Yup. I remember saying to someone at the time, BlackBerry can scream "tools not toys" all they want, but I'm pretty sure Apple will have no problem adding encrypted work email to the iPhone whenever it becomes a priority... but the effort required to reinvent BlackBerry into a friendly, approachable device that people actually want to use, on the other hand, yeah.
The comparison to the Titanic was quite fitting. I was with Nokia then, and there was an overly large administration, excessive politics, and far too many managers and meetings for anything to be done on time. If I recall correctly, we spent 1-2 weeks in meetings just to discuss replacing apache with nginx as a web proxy for a less critical service. The actual work for that change would take about 10-15 minutes.
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.
I think the presentation was enough to show they knew they were in trouble.
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".
Quickly and accurately understanding the competitive landscape is hard, to their credit, and not sufficient.
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.
Well, there are also a lot of assumptions and complaints about the iPhone and its impact that were commonly made at the time that ultimately didn't matter:
- 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.
Not supporting Flash and Java was an advantage. Having apps written in an actual performant language made sense.
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.
They caused their own disaster with the Microsoft marriage. Nokia was still huge, market share and coffer wise, and had plenty of options, but killed them all for MS.
"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.
> N-Series and SEMC Walkman probably need to clearly undercut iPhone pricing to succeed in the market.
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.
They needed to cut prices because phones could had a fully usable browser on mobile broadband with GPS that no one else did. There simply wasn’t a competitor for at least a few years, and it could even be due to the deal Apple made with ATT to make sure all iPhones came with unlimited 3G mobile broadband.
This is spot-on, and it's a remarkably common pattern when dominant players are faced with a seismic shift—even when it comes from within.
Kodak essentially invented the modern digital camera, and had a phenomenal lead going into the 90s. It was not a little side project—they hired IDEO to do vision work, design enclosures and create on-camera UIs. They poured money in, and did ship products. I'd love to know what happened internally, but externally they simply didn't move as quickly and aggressively as they needed to.
Very similar story at Polaroid—it's not like they didn't see the iceberg.
On the computing side, we have Xerox. Just couldn't figure out how to monetize any of the world-changing innovations from PARC.
Someone should really interview all these key players while they're (mostly) still alive and put together some kind of unified field theory of corporate disruption.
I worked with an ex-Kodak guy, and he related the following story to me from the 80’s or early 90’s.
Xerox was kicking their ass, they were completely owning the copier market. But it was a natural fit for Kodak, they knew imaging better than everybody, why couldn’t they get into this market? This guy was on a crack team of engineers a VP assembled to create a competing product. 9 months later, they demo a fully digital copy machine, working, ready to go, with competitive pricing and features.
But the higher ups at Kodak were incensed. They told the product needs a redesign, because Kodak was a film company, so the product needed to use film for copying. The revised product was a complete failure, and was the reason said engineer left Kodak shortly thereafter.
My take is devotion to brand identity is death during these critical inflection points. YMMV
The problem was that Kodak essentially was a film chemical production company pretending to be an imaging company. The switch to digital meant they could no longer get the fat recurring profits from selling film that they were used to. Kodak's value peaked at $31 billion in 1996 ($58 billion in 2025 dollars) while the total value of the digital camera industry today is around $8 billion (https://www.researchandmarkets.com/report/digital-camera). Even if Kodak had pulled off a masterful pivot to digital and captured the entire market, it would have been disastrous for the company and led to it shedding most of its employees.
I think camera is a major smartphone selling point and certainly cannibalized the digital camera business. Kodak could have upgraded from camera to phone like Apple upgraded from mp3 player.
I doubt that Kodak could have built a complete phone. But they certainly could have been a tier-1 supplier of camera components and software to Apple and other phone manufacturers. It seems like Kodak didn't even really try.
Digital was disaster so the plan after 1996 was delay and deny. The question is: did it do enough extra business in those transitional years to make up for going bankrupt in 2012? And was it better ultimately for shareholders?
This sounds like an apocryphal story. Kodak did actually make copiers in the 80s/90s, I know because my elementary school had one (early 90s, in a suburb of Rochester). It was one of the very large models that do duplex, stapling, ~100 copies per minute, etc. They just presumably weren’t good enough/cheap enough to get much market share vs. Xerox and Canon. I’m not aware of any of their copiers using film, not even sure how that would work.
Large companies struggle to cannibalize their cash cows from within. Powerful managers step up and fight against change.
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.
That's fascinating. It really seems that a lot of businesses end up hyper-optimized to deliver what they already offer, up until the point where anything that isn't a current offer is attacked by corporate antibodies. And that's when the growth they've optimized for suddenly stops.
There's way too much worship of Steve Jobs, but one thing he had right - either you develop the product that eats your cash cow, or someone else is going to do it.
I’ll never not talk about how he killed their most successful product ever at the time, in 2005— the iPod mini.
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.
They did continue to sell iPod Classic in parallel to iPod touch for a while afterward, and even revamped the UI on the nano to look and feel more like iOS. But yeah, there was obvious cannibalism there, no question about it.
Kodak also bought Ofoto in 2001. So basically they had over a decade lead on Instagram. What did they do with it? Try to drive people to print more photos, on Kodak paper. I don't think they ever really embraced digital, maybe isolated parts of the company did, but the film/print cultural inertia was just too strong.
Yeah, this is classic disruption. The amazing part is, I can almost guarantee that execs at Kodak read The Innovator's Dilemma, but it didn't help. Same goes for Nokia. Knowledge of the problem is apparently insufficient.
Sometimes there is no clear path from A to B. There is some weird fallacy where people tend to think every single company can make every single product if they simply hired the right engineers and throw money at it.
I think it comes from underestimating the role of process, structure, and competency, which are the DNA and codebase of a company.
Moreover, sometimes the most efficient outcome for owners is milk what you can from the business then close up shop. The idea of a public market with fractional ownership is you dont have to keep all your eggs in one basket.
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.
I'm definitely not saying any company can make any product, but it is striking when a company which is making a product refuses to believe the product category is going to evolve—even when they themselves are doing the original R&D to evolve it.
I was basically agreeing with you earlier post. I do think that there is a bias where people tend to conflate a failure to believe for legitimate concerns. Both happen.
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?
One of the problems for Kodak was that selling people digital cameras was always going to be just a fraction of the profit of selling them film.
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.
The whole report shows that it was a company being run by bearcats and middle-managers who focused on sales rather than product. The detailed out exactly what was coming and why it was great and their general response is atrocious. Some of the highlights of the presentation which stood out to me (on page 12):
1. "Work closely with T-Mobile"
Your competitor just launched a superior product and your response is to 'work closely' with T-Mobile?? Are you kidding me?.
2. "Prioritize touch UI development, simplifying basic functionality and PC suite development very high."
Response here was spot on and highlighted that they needed to hire a new chief UI-designer and work on prioritizing touch development -- this should have been number 1 without a question and it looks to me like they put it on the back-burner.
4. "Analyse what could be Apple’s next release of “iPhone mini” to mass market price points and plan counter-measures for it."
Anytime you're focusing on your 'response' to a competitor, you're behind in the game (by miles) and you've lost already -- especially if you're responding with 'counter-measures.' Once again - are you kidding me?
5. "Kill market for such an expensive device by filling mid-range with own/Google/Yahoo experiences"
Incredibly stupid response -- you're planning to kill something the market may demand massively by...filling your product / experience with 3rd party integrations. Idiocy at its very finest.
6. "Accelerate Nokia's own free push e-mail project and make it less hidden within the company."
This is a great sign of a company being run by middle-managers - secret projects with no evidence that they will push your product boundary nor satisfy consumer demand and why in the world would you keep anything here 'secret' - sheer idiocy.
7. "Investigate and play hard in possible IPR infringements"
Another sign of a company being run by idiots.
8. "Drive key partnerships to highlight Nokia's superior strength in the market, keeping things in perspective."
Wow - use partnerships (i.e. relationships / sales) to counter a superior product. These guys sure are on the ball /sarcasm.
10. "Highlight potential weaknesses of the iPhone"
Whenever you respond to a threat and one of your highlights is to once again 'talk' your way our of it by highlighting your competitors' weaknesses -- it's usually an indication that your organization is being run by middle-managers or absolute morons.
To my mind the key insight from the presentation is this sentence:
“The 1% volume share target could translate into 4% value share, taking ~ 30% share of the >300 € price Band”
That’s Apple’s superpower in a nutshell - get the majority of the profit in the market, while everyone else battles each over over market share (and earn low margins in the process).
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.
> The killer feature of the iPod was the iTunes music store.
That wasn't launched until 2003, two years after the iPod, and it took a while for all the big music labels to sign on. (Hell, it took until 2010 for the Beatles to show up.) The iPod was a success even without the music store; while it wasn't the only portable digital music player on the market, or even the first, it was the first good one.
The first couple of generations of the iPod were a modest success, and then more as a fashion accessory than as a practical device. Lots of cultural cred, but the sales figures were pitiful compared to the subsequent generations.
I think we can see the same thing happening today.
BYD+CATL are the new iphone and other manufacturers are Symbian, Motorola and Sony Ericsson
VW, Toyota and friends cannot change fast enough. They should have started with big battery investments 10-15y ago and RnDing then, not now when Market is flooded.
In what way is a BYD a completely different/revolutionary product compared to, say a KIA or Volvo EV? This comparison seems a bit strange tbh.
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.
I would say it's more that BYD is a battery company that started making cars. They (alongside CATL and arguably Tesla) are the world leaders in battery cells, specifically LFP, so they have strong advantage in the core underlying tech that enables EVs.
I don't see the comparison. BYD is a decent car for an impressive price, but they're ... just cars. The iPhone wasn't "just a phone" that was cheaper than its contemporaries and a little better in very specific areas, it was a complete overhaul of the entire market.
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 is a decent car for an impressive price, but they're ... just cars.
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.
Cool I am probably never going to buy a jumping supercar so that's not very relevant. The iPhone and the smartphone in general wasn't a revolution because it was a super cool R&D project that would cost ridiculous amounts of money to buy; it was a revolution because everyone bought one. If even as much as 10% of the market buys a "jumping supercar" (which would be absolutely INSANE) then there's still plenty of space in the market for traditional cars. There isn't plenty space in the market for "traditional phones" anymore.
It's all about marketing. You buy the thing that has the best marketing, not the best thing. That's how Apple replaced all these other smartphone vendors.
IMO it's shocking that this _did not_ happen in cars, in past tense.
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.
1) Cars are vastly more expensive and regulated. 2) Consequently the sales cycle is slower (usually people last at least 2-3 years for a lease). 3) EVs became politicized very quickly as they impacted politically active industries (oil).
Bullshit. iPod touch, which was a low end model that followed iPhone, wiped out mp3 players, undone viability of portable game consoles, and roadkilled Windows CE, all without cellular just fine.
The iPod mini and then Nano had already taken out mo3 players except the cheap knockoffs before the iPhone. The original iPod Touch maxed out at 32GB and with that amount of storage, it was much more expensive than most MP3 players
I don't understand where this trust comes from. Just like any other large company, Apple will not stand up for your civil rights when it seriously threatens the bottom line.
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.
> 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.
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.
By borrowing your analogy, the general sentiment with the iPhone was excitement and interest when it came out. I just don't see it in the folks around me regarding EVs (price is high, charging is pain). Yes, it's the future, but a future that is way ahead. We aren't even at the point where those old "devices" start to show their age. I'd say Symbians and Ericssons still have time.
People also forget that the iPhone wasn't what we have today - it was an iPod that made phone calls, and that alone was enough "for most people" - huge swaths of people had iPods and a cell phone so even if it had been mediocre it would have succeeded.
I wouldn't count Toyota out. Their mega battery plant in North Carolina is coming online this year, and the biggest drag on their current EV/PHEV lineup is the batteries. New EV/PHEV models are on the way, and frankly if they just update what they have with better batteries they will be absolutely phenomenal because they are currently great to drive and run extremely well despite lackluster battery range.
For the PHEVs yes they are battery constrained. They have great products and a ton of demand and difficulty keeping up manufacturing due to limited batteries.
For their EV, they have yet to make something that is competitive. Their EV is slow to charge, slow to accelerate, somewhat short in range, and quite expensive before they started adding—-in some cases five figure—-incentives to move them. It even had a recall for the wheels coming off.
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.
I disagree. Cars are much more entrenched status symbols than phones were back then. A Porsche is a Porsche, a truck to show you're manly and outdoorsy is a truck.
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.
Also keep in mind that the iPhone was far from starting at zero: they did not so much enter the phone market as a newcomer as they did pull the phone market into the existing and utterly dominated iPod market. Dominated so much that I don't even dare calling it the mp3 player market.
If anything, that helps my point. People still buy Porsches even if they know it's the same car as a VW or Seat, just fancier and with a more prestigious badge.
Status symbols can be shifted with marketing. BEVs are heavy as fuck, and (at least theoretically) torquey as fuck at zero speed - both of those seem pretty manly if you put the right spin on them.
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.
> 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.
I worked at SE when the iPhone was released and that is not how I remember it. :) The mood was more like "lol, it has no buttons!", "too expensive!" and "it can't work without a stylus!" I think many seriously misjudged how "cool" Apple was back then (and consequently how much they'd be willing to spend on status symbols) and how good a snappy touch ui could be.
Did you work with Symbian/UIQ software, feature phone software or something else? The feature phone team actually showed signs of getting the idea of no-jank and a rich UI very early.
Lund working on feature phones! My job was writing and managing test suites for verifying the J2ME implementation. It was a top secret collaboration with Motorola. They took QA work extremely seriously and bugs could delay major launches. Unfortunately for them, "rock solid J2ME" wasn't really what customers were after. :)
(Nokia's also worked but was slow. Everyone else's implementations tended to be both broken and slow. A particular shoutout to Samsung - they must have had 6+ separate, broken implementations.)
The fact that they did J2ME multitasking on a feature phone better than Symbian S60 did multitasking of native apps, and did it before the iPhone got any form of multitasking at all always impressed me.
Not to pile on... but let me pile on: symbian seemed eternally bureaucratic, lost in OO abstraction hell and lacked enough demo scene people who knew that a solid 60/72 fps is what mattered.
People from Future Crew (Finland) and Triton (Sweden) should have been running these teams. Half ;-).
A lot of people made the same mistake. They didn't understand -- simply couldn't understand for some reason -- that the imperfect iPhone that was launched in 2007 was the worst one that would ever exist.
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.
Not related to phone companies, but some software companies were in denial about it. I remember purchasing one of the first HTC/Android smartphone, and I told my boss at the time that my new cheap phone could replace all the applications of the company but cheaper, more convenient, in my pocket, and without a computer. He made fun of me and laughed. I knew Java pretty well and whipped up a few POCs to see by myself if we were really doomed, but I didn't told anyone about it. In less than 2 weeks I replace the whole company with 2 or 3 applications with crappy UIs. I quit in less than a month and the company obviously closed soon after that because that was the only sensible thing to do.
In the very end. It all boils down to who got the developers on platform for free. ( From Apple's context, while devs cost a lot, they just marketed well and even made them pay something to list apps )
To publish something on a feature phone was much more costly, including five-figure quality approvals. The App Store was a true revolution and probably needed new players that were not as entrenched with carriers like Nokia, and Siemens.
Do you think non-SW engineering types in e.g. Nokia and Sony Ericsson also immediately knew?
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.
As a developer, I remember a few bosses that thought "who needs a stupid phone? no one will buy that" except that Android could already do most of what Windows was capable of, and the bonus was that the SDK was free and Java was an easy language.
They were stuck in their post-Windows 95 world, and did not understand that multimedia CD-ROMs were clunky and dying.
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.
Jobs sticking to his guns here and breaking the shitware monopoly on pre-installed phones is probably a bigger part of the full story than the phone itself (as likely the black rectangle would be developed by someone eventually, phone carcinization).
I was expecting sort of the opposite, for Nokia to deride the whole iPhone thing. But it was quite the opposite, they understand what they were facing. Ultimately, the could not meet the challenge fast enough.
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.
> 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.
Indeed. I referred to it at the time as the 50-model strategy.
> Parts of the deck suggest that they didn't fully understand what they were facing.
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.
That Apple succeeded in having people pay $500 and up for a phone that was cool but frankly not very useful, was amazing.
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.
> It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, but you couldn't really DO that much with it.
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.
As I remember it there was a time before and after 3G for web browsing. The fidelity of the iPhone Safari early on was great, but those early 2 generations didn't really have the bandwidth to do much with it. Still, I agree it was a leap ahead of the rest.
It's not unfair to say the first generation iPhone was a bit of an aspirational device. It helped a lot if you found some working public WiFi, but even then the speed wasn't entirely the fault of the radio, the processor and especially RAM on the phone hurt performance.
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.
Agree on this. As a layman in Australia, i had a friend who was coming back from the USA and asked him to buy me an iPhone before its release in AU (late-2007 iirc, iPhone 3G launched in Australia in 2008) and promptly jailbroke it so i could get it on an Australian carrier.
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.
Oh how we forget... Phones at the time were HORRIBLE. To you, today, it looks like the iPhone couldn't do much. Back then it was revolutionary that a phone could simply render a proper website or connect to your home wifi.
The thing was all the faults with that iPhone was software. You can update software. Lack of copy & paste was a software feature that was no doubt in some product backlog for a while before getting picked up. And once it got picked up and shipped, suddenly every device people bought had that feature.
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.
Nokia produced several early smartphones. Most ran SymbianOS that showed what was possible. The connectivity wasn't there to make it really useful and this was the age of "smaller is cooler" mobile phones, so they tried to keep the screens small.
I imagine that there were several people in Nokia that understood the potential of a phone that could also act like a mini-computer.
The first Nokia phone-mini-computer was the original Communicator, with a 640x200 resolution and a full keyboard, launched in 1996(!) Of course at that time it was targeted purely for business users, but by 2007 they already had a well-established high-end consumer smartphone selection (the N series – rather more advanced than the first iPhones). They just weren’t able to pivot to the touchscreen form factor, largely due to betting on Symbian – I can see how writing an entirely new OS userland from scratch wasn’t a terribly attractive idea.
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.
> and this was the age of "smaller is cooler" mobile phones, so they tried to keep the screens small.
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.
The CTO of Motorola was dismissive of the iPhone in her first review and acted like Apple was a little child just learning how to take its first baby steps. I remember reading this and just shaking my head at her cockiness. She left the company before the year was out.
This section: “There is nothing revolutionary or disruptive about any of the technologies. Touch interface, movement sensors, accelerometer, morphing, gesture recognition, 2-megapixel camera, built in MP3 player, WiFi, Bluetooth, are already available in products from leaders in the mobile industry” has to rival “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.” In the early impressions that didn’t age well category.
> 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.
I think even when companies project arrogance from their c-suite, it’s more to keep the market happy and calm nerves. I’d be shocked if RIM wasn’t also sweating bullets internally after that iPhone presentation. They weren’t morons, and saw what happened with iPods.
> 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.”
I know people who were at RIM at the time, including someone who was in the room when they passed around the first iPhone they got a hold of. They firmly believed the iPhone was dead on arrival both because the product was "terrible" (no keyboard, no battery life, etc. etc.) and, more importantly, because they were so confident Apple would not be able to pull off the networking required and people wouldn't be able to use the device at all.
People forget just how powerful RIM was in the business world, and the keyboard WAS a real stickler (even today, you can go to any large conference and ask "who here misses the blackberry keyboard" and you'll get a decent show of hands).
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.
> 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"
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.
My personal moment of "CEO's -- they're just like us!" was walking into a Kinko's in Santa Monica to drop off a package, and seeing a sweaty Stephen Elop frantically photocopying documents the week his part in this debacle came to a head.
Mobile phone industry analyst Tomi Ahonen's voluminous blog from back then contained an entire section devoted to Elop, who he called the "worst CEO in history", with data and evidence galore:
N800 is the future that never was - opem Linux-based mobile computing for the masses. It had developer support, cool form factor, big touchable screen, and no corp to love it.
I had one of those. It was interesting in that it ran Linux and you could (at the time) browse most web sites with it. Otherwise, it was slow, bulky, and had a pretty terrible resistive touch screen. (The stylus was NOT optional.) And you still had to carry your flip phone in another pocket.
In the end I was mainly using mine to listen to podcasts (before they were called that). An iPod Touch eventually replaced it until Android phones got a lot better.
> In the end I was mainly using mine to listen to podcasts (before they were called that)
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.
I temporarily forgot that the iPod came out way before the iPhone. So yes, I guess they were called that then. But in my defense, I listened to MP3 files of radio shows that I downloaded manually, so I guess I wasn't quite using them as "podcasts" at that point.
>And you still had to carry your flip phone in another pocket.
UPDATE: Memory failure! I meant N900, not N800
Why? I had N800 as my only mobile, and was more than happy with it. Stylus was not optional for things like browsing. But most of the time I took it from my pocket, I used it for text input, and physical keyboard made it comfortable to the point no other device has been able to offer me ever since I retired my N800
I never had a N800, but I still have a working N900 used as my secondary phone and while it has a stylus holder, I have never pulled it out of there for many many years except to stim. Its resistive touch screen was excellent and I liked it more than today's capacitive screens. The only issue I have with it is that it's ageing and developing problems over years and eventually I may end up out of spare parts.
I had one too (and a 770 before it). Great idea, so-so implementation. It was slow (and slowness is a cardinal sin, since you're always reminded that you're using a machine -- in my opinion, the way Apple products react so much faster to user input than competing products is a huge factor in their success, and Apple knows it) and the touch screen was terrible.
Yes, that platform was set to compete with iOS and Android and with fine timing.
I think they fumbled with the developer relations when first choosing Gtk for the UI and then jumped to QT. That made developers angry. And then of course the Microsoft steamroller killed it.
But with no app store. (As a programmer, I never in a billion years would have invented the app store. Yet it was the most important component of the iphone ecosystem).
The App Store didn't exist for the first iPhone. It launched with the iPhone 3G. The original plan was for everyone to develop web apps; the SDK was added due to external developer demand.
I don't think developers wanted App Store, they wanted to build native apps. Has Apple just allowed them to ship their own .dmg files from their website, as they used to do in MacOS, they would be happy.
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.
That and also the N9 were great, wish they were not abandoned. The design language on the N9 was way ahead of its time too. I still haven't seen a time picker as good as the MeeGo time picker, and now a decade later my Samsung has similar App icons as the N9 had in 2011.
I loved the N800 and was happy to see it make an appearance in that presentation. In fact I still have one in my desk drawer beside me I turn on from time-to-time. Yes it was a bit cumbersome, but I could do more with that device than any other handheld I have ever had and carried it with me for years. I wish the N900 and other smartphones on Maemo had caught on.
Their Lumia with the Windows OS was great too. Unfortunately no market => no apps => death. But I loved it when I had it. They made great phones no doubt.
Yea, no one believes me when I tell them that the Lumia with Windows Phone 8.1 or 10 was one of my favourite phones ever. WP 8.1+ was such an underrated OS. Unfortunately it had virtually no support from anybody, even Microsoft quickly stopped caring.
Barely. It was originally a XFree86 project called XDarwin, adopted by Apple as a beta release for Jagwire in 2002, was an optional install in Panther and Tiger, default install in Leopard~Lion, and then was abandoned again in favor of the community-supported XQuartz after 2011:
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. ”
Actually that's an interesting question; why didn't Android use X11? A few minutes of web searching don't seem to turn up anybody commenting on it; do you happen to know how I would check what their reasons were?
If I see another one of these insane "explainations", I'm gonna have a stroke. Nokia - dominating the mobile phone market for years - is evidence that Europeans are just fundamentally incapable of innovation!
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.
These presentations often serve as a comfort blanket rather than a plan of action. Oh man something incredibly disruptive is happening to us. Lets talk about it. Whew, okay, we understand it, lets go back to being complacent.
Years later, "man we tried, we had that meeting and everything, we just couldn't compete"
They actually managed to act on most of the problems identified here but missed the move to software-based ecosystem-centric market started by the app store launched the next year.
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.
Can you explain why every good phone that Nokia released during the period was killed instantly?
To this day I've not seen a phone that felt more responsive than the Nokia N9, which also looked amazing. Yet it was killed pretty much the second it was released.
This PDF does not read like "this is fine". I find the initial analysis in here to be on point. Of course it does not print "we are doomed" in bold letters on the front page, but management should have taken the points raised in this presentation very seriously. Do you know if Nokia appointed a "head of UI e.g. not tied to BG or platform" back then?
I believe it lol, in the presentation you can see they are still moving forward with the sms focused windowing design while the iphone was introducing the touch screen.
Now of course I’m looking at it retrospectively but still
I'm really curious! In hindsight, we can always point to when a pivot should have happened earlier, but on the other hand, we all know orgs that have pivoted too early or to a trend they shouldn't have, and then suffered.
Do you remember any specifics arguments or conflicts about strategy?
Me too. Once the 'Burning Platform' memo was released on the intranet everyone stopped giving a fuck, and were hanging around waiting for redundancy payments.
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.
To be fair - it's a repository for academic documents at a reasonably-sized-but-still-quite-small university. Their priorities were probably closer to handling few complex requests and being able to manage obscure documents, not dealing with Netflix level traffic.
It'll probably make for a cool story for the sysadmins there, but I doubt there will be a board meeting tomorrow to re-evaluate the web strategy.
Wasn't my intention at all to imply that they did something wrong and need to scramble to fix it. Just observing that a large portion of the web is built around the assumption that traffic is intermittent, where even a small burst of requests can knock it over. No shade — I've built plenty of sites like that.
It is really saddening for me to see how much N800/N900 and the Maemo platform are mentioned here, as an example of Nokia actually being first to introduce many of these technologies, but then Nokia dropped them a few years later. I still occasionally boot my N900, I wish I had a use for it -- it still works great as a general purpose computer and a good phone.
"User interface has been a big strength for Nokia — consumer research indicates this is in decline." - Funny, they pointed to both why the iPhone came out and what to do about it - then went on to really focus much more on feature for feature and existing players like Sony etc. They really focus on beating apple by competing on features vs thinking about it like a shift towards portable personal computing rather than competition in the telephony market. They seem to have somewhat understood apple flipped the script, but then reading through, their work around the fact that is true seems a bit... remedial. CEOs take note, good lessons in here. :)
Well it is annoying as a 6ft 2 guitar player(I'm saying I have big flexible hands) I still need both hands to do most phone things, like type this.
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.
Being a 6'2" tall guitar player doesn't actually say big hands. There is some correlation between hand size and height, but plenty of variation. I'm a 6'1" tall guitar player and I have small hands.
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
Plugging in my H, A, and G and solving for L I get 21.8 cm. My actual hand size is 19.5 cm.
Going the other way, from my hand size, age, and gender my predicted height is 5'8".
Perhaps Apple didn't want to cannibalize iPad or Mac sales? I don't know the timeline on this.
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.
It is clear that a lot of people commenting about this (here and in other threads) don't really get it. The iPhone mini wasn't (mainly) about the form factor, it was about pricing and market segmentation. They even say:
> 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.
In hindsight it is funny that Apple used someone with very big hands holding the first iPhone in their 2007 ads to make it look smaller. Nobody at that time could imagine that phones would only get bigger.
iPhones got bigger in terms of screen size, but Apple remained obsessed with lighter and thinner phones for many years after that. It's hard to remember this, but some of the earlier smartphones like the Palm Trio were giant awful bricks. You can't really convey weight in a picture, but you can convey size.
Wow I'm just remembering the girth of those devices. My family had some later palm and similar devices... closer to an address book or gaming devices in thickness. My mom's case was like 3/4 an inch deep, 3-4 in wide and like ~6in deep. Not light, and kinda fragile.
My personal theory is where Nokia failed was worrying too much about Osborne effect[1] of their Linux-based phones on their Symbian business, or there being some behind-the-scenes contract clauses that tied them to Symbian too much.
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.
This is a rather poor reading of the presentation, which seems very serious about the threat and the need to adopt similar changes, as well as trying to keep the iphone at bay by offering similar features at a lower price.
Huh - the implications of this time period reach much farther than I would have expected.
I recall switching from a small, regional cellular carrier to Cingular with the launch of the iPhone 3G. It only now occurred to me that I'm still there. I stayed with Cingular when it became AT&T, and still have service through them. For that matter, the service has significantly expanded; I now have tablets, watches, and four phones for family members... some of whom weren't even alive when I switched carriers. My bill is ~$450 / month.
If I assume an average monthly bill of $300 (it started around $100, but has been as high as $550), there have been 196 months that I've paid that bill. $58,800 in revenue from me alone, that would have gone to someone else had Cingular not allowed Apple to launch on their network in 2007.
Sure, but those are totally different economies, geography, and demographics.
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.
I pay $360 a month on T-Mobile. That is for 5 cell phones, 3 iPads, and 2 Watches with unlimited data and 2 phone contracts. Without the 2 phone contracts it would be $300/month
that should all run you sub-$200/month (I have 5 phones, 4 watches, 1 tablet - $178/month (which I think it is still to high and am getting ready to call att to negotiate again or switch))
I really don't think so. I've shopped around several times, and while I could cut it a bit, I'm not getting more than a ~15% reduction overall.
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.
A good portion of your monthly bill goes toward paying the debt incurred from massively overpaying DirectTV and Time Warner shareholders in the 2010s. I don't understand how the entire ATT board and leadership were not ejected. I think it was something on the order of $100B lost just on those two transactions.
I'm no fan of the company itself, but I've been too pleased with the service to really want to switch.
About a year ago I needed a SIM for an (older) Android phone for my daughter, who didn't need a capable smartphone or anything. They sent me one, but when I activated it over the phone the CS rep made a mistake and it ended up blacklisted. I told them I was activating it because my daughter was going on a trip in a couple of days, and they escalated it. I ended up with an AT&T employee driving 1.5 hours to my house to hand-deliver a new SIM and make sure the phone was activated and working the next day. In addition, they gave me a $500 bill credit without prompting at all.
So... yeah. It's not ideal, but I honestly feel like I'm getting what I'm paying for.
I don't know. 17 years on and my fingers still miss hardware keyboards a little bit.
My dream smartphone would be a black rectangle, but with a landscape hardware keyboard to slide out from underneath. And in an ideal world OLED keys for changing the layout and a touch sensitivity for moving a text cursor.
What I miss from the 2000s is the big differentiation in phone form factors. Granted, a lot of them were weird, but there was at least experimentation and optimising for different use cases. What if the current standard of a black rectangle is just a local maximum and there is something better ahead?
I still think Motorola's Droid (and Droid 2) were the pinnacle of the smartphone form factor.
I distinctly recall the prevailing view among friends at the time was that even with the keyboard-less smartphones becoming the norm that the keyboard approach would become the standard interface, as Blackberry still existed and had majority market share (it seemed; my region had few iPhones at the time).
I was working as a Qt developer at the time and really rooted for Maemo to succeed, because Qt was and still is a truly an amazing piece of technology. Unfortunately, Nokia squandered this opportunity.
This is fascinating. A reminder that being (broadly) right in your analysis doesn't necessarily mean you can execute to turn things around.
They note the impact to the high-end, the fact that UI is crucial, they even had a good guess at 2008 sales numbers (estimate 14m, looks like real was 13m).
I was intrigued by this bullet point on how their Maemo platform could help:
* Cellular development of the maemo platform and the politics surrounding it?
Any folks from Nokia in this time care to shed more light on that? I always felt the N9 was a beautiful piece of design and implementation - just late and under-supported.
N9 was very close to launch when Elop came, so that went ahead, but the rest of the development got cancelled immediately to focus on Windows phone: N9 would've otherwise been the first in a series of devices to slowly take over from Symbian.
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:
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.
Elop was the trojan horse that killed Nokia. He worked at MSFT prior to this and single handedly destroyed Nokia. The N9 was revolutionary on its own; GPU accelerated UI, sleek looks, Maemo OS, it is a device people would actually want over the limping Symbian that never fully adapted to touch-only, or the useless Windows Phone 7.
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.
Symbian was the core OS, phone manufacturers build the GUI on top of it.
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.
I bought an N9 in 2011 and it was an incredible phone. The design and UI were gorgeous and it was a joy to use. I still miss the swipe-driven UI - it was clever, intuitive and well thought out. The phone itself had Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Spotify clients, and MS Exchange support for calendaring and email (I believe Nokia developed or ported many of these in-house) and was completely usable day-to-day.
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.
There was even the Qt strategy for making the transition smoother (and better hedged) by having apps portable across the different OSs. It was of course killed too because it could have challenged Windows Phone.
I worked in Nokia at the time and played with the N9. Meego was actually really good. It could have been competitive with the iPhone and Nokia could have stayed at the top and been where Samsung is now.
> Any folks from Nokia in this time care to shed more light on that?
Cellular connection was not allowed for the Linux devices so they don't compete with the Symbian phones. Nokia had deeply dysfunctional internal politics at that point.
That was a big source of contention, but admittedly there was plenty of skunkworks going around internally to experiment with the officially forbidden material.
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.
Doing well and being dysfunctional are not mutually exclusive. Google is still a dysfunctional company.
At one point they had five different messaging apps. They bought Motorola and then sold it for pennies, quickly abandoned the Nexus line before then, and the Pixel isn’t taking the world by storm.
Their efforts in the home have been scattershot, they have three separate OS initiatives that are not based on the same platform, and have all but abandoned Flutter.
Also remember that RIMs stock price was at its peak around 2010 - 3 years after the iPhone came out.
A set of individuals being broadly correct in their analysis at an organization doesn't mean that that organization will be able to execute a pivot, even if that organization is pretty competent.
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.
It is painful to read. To me in retrospective the major mistake in the presentation is that it barely talks about end users and how the iPhone enabled a new world of use cases. It is only about business/corporate, features and specs. When analyzing the iphone on those dimensions all the reactive action items are doomed. They had not a chance to compete with that analysis.
Like some other commenters, I'm amazed at how well thought out Nokia's insight into the iPhone was at the time. They seemed pretty aware it was a major threat, and a game changer that needed to be responded to.
I'd be curious about an alternative history where Nokia hadn't tied itself so strongly to the burning reckage that was Windows Phone. Would Nokia have wound up as a solid android phone producer somewhere similar to where Samsung are now? I guess we'll never know.
My understanding is that the microsoft partnership was more like a late last ditch effort.
The market was changing to one where hardware was produced in asia and phones are loaded with ecosystem-centric software from Google or Apple (the real game changer, the app store, was launched next year).
Nokia did not really have a place in either of those and did not manage to adapt to this fundamental change. They did actually manage to adapt to the UI revolution of the first iphone.
I cant find the quote and article now, but I read that before it was released no one else believed a computer like that could have any reasonable battery life. Then they opened it up and discovered the iPhone was really just a battery with a small logic board attached to it, and a lot of the heavy computational lifting was done when it connected to your computer.
I was doing mobile development on a home healthcare product during this period. The product was built around Nokia’s line of phones with NFC built in, so we had good ties with them and would always get prototypes of their next generation of NFC-capable device ahead of time to get the software ready ahead of launch.
Shortly after the launch of the iPhone, Nokia canned the prototype S60 model we were working on without announcing any alternative. I always imagined they scrapped the whole pipeline of successors they had planned. The iPhone was at least 2 generations ahead of the unreleased prototype. Ended up having to port the whole thing to a different device from Samsung.
I have to share that my career as a software engineer started with Windows Phone. They used to give super nice Nokia phones out if you made an app. And free backpacks :)
Developing for Windows phone was easy as drag and drop. I honestly think no other native platform had that good of a DevEx. If you were already an app developer, I can see how it's hard to learn something new. But if it was your first time, this was prolly the easiest platform to start.
Eventually the platform died, and I found a career with Xamarin using a similar stack (C#, XAML) and built for other platforms as well.
I miss Windows Phone. Honestly some of the cleanest devices ever built with the carl zeiss lens and raised screen.
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.
Nokia saw the iPhone, fast-forward to 2014, Nokia just gives up and sells their dead horse cellphone business to Microsoft. Microsoft casts a few necromancy spells and also just gives up 3 years later, and kills the same dead horse again. The end.
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:
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".
Java was a bonus compared to ObjC, but we looked into supporting Blackberry and it was a nightmare to support all the different versions of java, frameworks, and screen types. Much easier to teach someone ObjC and produce one iPhone version.
Sometimes a company can know the problem is real and be unable to address it. I was at Palm when HP bought us. HP knew the future was mobile and wanted to not be just a low margin OEM for someone else’s software platform. Buying Palm was a way for them to control their own destiny again.
Unfortunately the driver of this dream at HP was fired by the board before it got going and his replacement didn’t share the vision. A year later HP took a massive writedown and turned it all off. (Then he was fired by the board as well. The circle of life continues).
I'm surprised that Nokia found out through the keynote presentation from Steve Jobs. LG and Prada announced their phone a little earlier and it had been shown already at the IF Design Awards a few months earlier.
I'm surprised that Nokia found out through the keynote presentation from Steve Jobs. LG and Prada announced their phone a little earlier and it had been shown already at the IF Design Awards a few months earlier.
Google "LG Prada Phone" for the Wikipedia article.
If Nokia had paid attention to those design awards then they too could have moved quickly on a similar device.
Is this a case where Nokia thought they had a moat?
> If Nokia had paid attention to those design awards then they too could have moved quickly on a similar device.
Nokia had their Maemo project [1]. A Linux-based OS for mobile touchscreen devices. They published their first device already in 2005 [2].
But the Maemo department was small, and the old Symbian department inside Nokia was big. The large number of managers and executives in the Symbian department played corporate politics, and kept the size and resources of the Maemo department small, as they perceived it an internal competitor threatening their position and the dominance of Symbian inside Nokia.
Nokia's CEO at the time (Jorma Ollila) had a background in investment banking and financial engineering. His previous post in Nokia was CFO. He didn't have the kind of passion and insight to software and user experience like Apple's Steve Jobs had. Today, nobody would expect to get visionary tech leadership if recruiting from the corporate's finance department.
At its soul, Apple is a software company that also makes their own hardware. Nokia was a hardware company that also made their own software.
>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.
Nokia did had software chops, just on another metric than UI: According to a presentation at my university they were very deep in testing and verification and had a lot of expertise there.
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.
Worked at Nokia when iPhone was released. No strategy/management insight, but I recall the jokes made by my colleagues as I showed off my iPhone 1:
"Cool, but can it make phone calls"
On internal message boards, some employees advocated staying loyal to Nokia products, and others advocated buying the best product (iPhone) to challenge Nokia.
Looking back, it’s astonishing how long it actually took the competition to catch up in terms of developing an equally responsive touchscreen that felt anything like as intuitive.
I read this after doing a time travel back to 2007. I was using Blackberry/Nokia E## at the time. Remember thinking about a phone without a full keyboard!
Seems like Nokia had a good grasp of what had happened. Also a sense of immediacy to act.
If we go only by this presentation, it seems that they tried to understand the forest by looking at every leaf in detail and then try to guess if the forest is beautiful or not.
That's a great time capsule. I'd love to see a similar document from the same period from Microsoft, because I really wonder if Ballmer's much-lampooned interview after the iPhone's intro was bluster or a real position held by the mobile unit at MSFT.
"<laughs> $500 fully subsidized with a plan? That is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine."
It's a take that has aged like milk, but Ballmer wasn't (and isn't) an idiot. The rest of the market looked at the iPhone and saw the future, and moved accordingly. I mean, the first major users I saw of the iPhone were BUSINESS users, in point of fact.
So I've always wondered if that was just bluster, or he really was drinking so much Redmond-flavored Kool-aid that he didn't, or couldn't, see what was about to happen.
(In re: Kool-aid, in 2009-ish, my company did a joint deal at a large client with MSFT; we had complimentary products, so we were pitching as a unit. The MSFT guys were genuinely vexed that we had iPhones. Like, personally affronted. And this was in Kansas, far from the mothership. At the time, WinMo was AWFUL. It couldn't even do IMAP without a 3rd party client -- it was Exchange or POP only. None of us had ever really used a WinMo phone for very long, because (at that time) a Treo was still a great option, and RIM hadn't fully wet the bed, so WinMo was pretty thin on the ground unless your paycheck said "Microsoft" on it.)
It's funny to see $500 being expensive for a phone here, because I absolutely remember it being so far above the market that it was rare to see the first generation in the world (and they had a price cut shortly thereafter).
There has been some nasty inflation in these past years, but $500 is a budget phone these days!
I helped cover IT hardware companies including Apple at a bulge-bracket investment bank. Not just Nokia, but the entire phone industry was caught flatfooted by iPhone as willvarfar and anonu said, despite rumors going around the industry. (The joke slide in Jobs' announcement presentation showing an iPod with phone dial was not too far off what we and most people expected.)
Thoughts on the presentation:
* "There is not much coolness left for Motorola" - The day of the announcement, I saw a press release from Motorola come across the wire, in which the company announced yet another phone with a keyboard. I felt pity for the unfortunate souls who had designed it, worked on its launch, and wrote the copy for the press release, and who now had to see their efforts fly into Hurricane iPhone.
* Predictions of lower-priced iPhones - Average iPhone prices of course rose, as opposed to falling. As JSR_FDED said, Apple has always played upmarket. I heard Apple's CFO say at a Citigroup-hosted investor conference that his company could release a $799 computer "but we don't want to".
(That said, it is quite possible to find deals, at least in the US. I got my iPhone 13 by agreeing to pay $200 over 30 months on top of my already super-cheap T-Mobile plan. The iPhone before that, I bought carrier refurbished for $100 from Sprint.)
And of course, there never was an iPhone mini with a fundamentally different UI. Despite the repeated commitment to improving on UI, etc., I guess it would have been too much to ask a company like Nokia, the king of releasing a new model with new UI and new form factor weekly, to imagine that another company would just not play the infinite-SKU game. (Conversely, it's not hard to imagine that had Apple entered the phone market in the 1990s during the years of endless indistinguishable Performa models, it might have tried to play along.)
* The MVNO mention is regarding rumors of Apple launching its phone in conjunction with an MVNO. We thought this was quite possible, but it was based on Apple having the credibility to immediately have millions of customers switch to it as their carrier, and not because Apple—of all companies—could not get whatever it wanted from carriers.
* Third-party app support - Most have forgotten that Apple really did expect webapps to be the app experience for iPhone's first year. But even that would have been an improvement over what things was like before iPhone. I speak as one who purchased my share of Palm apps. $20 was the norm for, say, DateBk6 (which, by the way, has at least one function that MacOS's Calendar just got with Sequoia).
* "Expect RIM and Palm to suffer" - I never liked using my company-issued Blackberries. I didn't leave Palm until 3GS in 2009; besides DateBk6, I also liked being able to tether my computer to my Palm Treo 700p.
* I'm pretty sure there was no sharing of data revenue or iTunes revenue. Apple got what it wanted from Cingular/AT&T regarding marketing and in-store push without having to preload bloatware or the carrier's brand name all over the device/packaging, and the carrier got the exclusive of the decade. Remember, Deutsche Telekom deciding to sell T-Mobile in 2011 was directly because it didn't have iPhone (so that tells you how the repeated mention in the presentation of T-Mobile turned out).
Oh man… I forgot about the software branding on pre-iPhones. Everything had the carriers brand on it from the boot screen to all the “special apps” and crap. iPhone had none of that and it absolutely pissed off the carriers. Apple turned them all into dumb pipes and they hated that.
Looks like a competent analysis where they recognize the threat of the iPhone to Nokia. Whether the higher ups failed to act on it or whether they could not act on it, even after Microsoft bought them is unfortunately a different topic.
The analysis is fascinating. The iPod had already been a huge success for some time, retailing for hundreds of dollars. Of course Apple would make a phone. Even if it would have just been an iPod with feature phone ... features.
Nokia goes on and on about pricing in the report. How could they not get into their thick skulls that there was a good market for more expensive, better devices?
Then the tragedy with the Nokia N9, which both in hardware design and software UI design looks and feels more modern than Apple and Android devices from 2024.
I think Nokia owners and leadership simply gave up when they saw the iPhone launch, decided to cash out their money to offshore accounts, and hired some shady fellows from Microsoft to cover up by staging bad business decisions doomed to fail.
When I loook on this [recent] history, the business and technical strategies Apple and Google employed in mobile were truly amazing. In my view, Apple and Google managed to reinvent themselves (organically or otherwise), while Nokia and Microsoft were weighed down by their attachments to the past. Blackberry is in the same ship. In hindsight it seems they should have embraced Android as early as possible (thinking in the success of the Samsung S II (2011)).
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.
Look at it again without the knowledge of the last 18 years! And from the position of a Nokia employee back then. This is an extremely well made executive summary for that time.
Not really. Most (all?) of the insights here, probably delivered on short notice, were completely correct over the next 15 years. Don't let the clarity, brevity, and hindsight fool you - that's just how C-suite likes information presented and we have the benefit of looking back to know that all these things were "obviously true".
Nokia correctly predicted that iPhone would stand for "coolness" factor. It's amazing how Apple carried that brand since its inception and precisely what allows it to levy "Apple tax".
The execs even noted that the downside of iPhone would be non-removable battery. It is commendable that Apple changed the industry standard to something worse without even being in the top 10 in 2008.
I was there as this played out. Nokia had a lot of good software and software engineers but not the management structure to do anything good with that.
Nokia was huge as an organization and parts of that organization recognized the threat early on. The problem was at the board and executive level. These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business. Lots of people with an electronics and radio background. Not a lot of people with software competence. And they had bought into the notion that Symbian was going to magically fix all their problems.
A lot of effort was spent on looking for other solutions. And one of the things that was good (Linux) around 2005 was actually quite close to displacing Symbian as the key future proof replacement for their legacy platforms. Symbian was just rolling out for a few years and they had made a big investment in that. And management (those same people with a huge blind spot for software) backed the wrong horse.
Linux never really died in Nokia but it wasn't allowed to prosper either. Devices were cancelled or repurposed for Symbian. This happened to the N8, for example. By the time they switched to windows phone, they actually had two Linux platforms (Meego and Meltemi) and an Android phone in the works as well. Meego had one last product phone launch and the team and platform were killed in the same week. Any devices for that platform were labeled as developer phones. Nokia never marketed them as a consumer phone. Meltemi never saw any product launch at all; it was aimed at feature phones. Both were good ideas but poorly executed. Nokia killed them along with Symbian in order to back windows phone. Classic baby and bathwater situation.
And MS ended up killing the one Nokia Android phone that was launched shortly before they acquired the whole phone division. Kind of a desperate/ballsy move. I suspect Nokia did this as a stick to ensure MS followed through with the acquisition. That was their "oh we could just switch from windows phone to Android unless.. " move. Nokia was at point the only OEM that still believed in Windows Phone.
MS killed the whole division shortly after Satya Nadella took over and was sorting out the mess left by Steve Ballmer. The iphone was solidly in charge by then and the rest of the market was Android. Courtesy of lots of Linux contributions by the Meego and Maemo team.
Nokia also had a ex-Microsoft exec (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop) that had the goal of ensuring Windows Phone would succeed, and tanked Nokia with it.
I was on the DVLUP project where Nokia and Microsoft attempted to inject energy into windows phone app development. We could see the tension between the two companies as we were a 3rd party contracted by Nokia to build the platform. The Nokia exec we were in contact with was fantastic, and really tried to make Windows Phone a success. Unfortunately the Nokia IT teams we worked with were not happy and essentially tried to sabotage through inactions (we just needed OAuth / SSO to link accounts and track app installs, it took over 3 months of email chains within Nokia).
People blame Stephen Elop. But the person in control of the Nokia board was former CEO Jorma Ollila who headed Nokia through its glory days and had a lot of power. Nothing happened in Nokia without his approval during that period.
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.
> 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
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.
Was this around the time Microsoft kept switching what "windows phone" was? I remember that the one friend who got into it loved it, and then they released something completely incompatible and he abandoned the platform.
2009 and earlier: Windows Mobile was based on WinCE. The UI was garbage but the innards were pretty functional, and there was desktop-like multitasking. Unpopular opinion: they should have just done a UI refresh of that thing and moved it to an NT kernel. There were a lot of cool third party hacks on this platform.
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.
At the time Steve Jobs was putting his foot down against allowing Flash on the iPhone because the performance was so pants, Microsoft was going all in on Silverlight which had exactly the same problem.
That’s a popular misconception.
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.
It's easy to forget how popular flash was in that decade. A lot of us found it annoying on desktops too. Not to mention Linux, where we'd deal with binary blobs that were pretty unstable, not because we liked it but because you needed it to interact with the world.
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...
Flash as an animation tool and applet platform was already on the downswing when the iPhone happened, though.
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.
Yes, I also think around 2008 or so the most widespread use of Flash might already have been newgrounds et al. I don't remember really ever caring for Flash on Linux though.
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.
Oh, the flashbacks.. (pun intended). Same here. Every new flash release, download, extract, rename to have a version number, copy to "folder of last 10-15 released flash .so files", symlink, restart browser and hope it works.
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...
> When Flash did finally come to mobile on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM.
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.
I remember having a Flash app on Nokia E70. I never used it. The phone was lauched in 2006, but I don't know if the app was there from the beginning because I bought it second-hand in 2008.
That was “Flash light” not full Flash.
The Symbian one, yep. Maemo had the full Flash though.
Wait, it wasn't about performance, but it was about Performance?
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!
My 90s PC had similar specs and ran Flash websites just fine. It also supported desktop backgrounds and animated screensavers just fine.
Your 90s area PC also had disk swapping and wasn’t running on a tiny battery. The Flash of 2007 was much more processor intensive and in the 90s, I doubt you were streaming quality video with Flash.
Suddenly I remember circa ie4 or ie5 that had the "active desktop" feature that made even well spec'd machines grind.
Now we run electron apps which are a pretty similar idea.
Mostly because a whole generation lost that part, and finds cool putting Web everywhere, saying this as someone that also does Web projects, I only don't see a value using it as a hammer for all kinds of nails.
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.
iirc IE4 was actually good and then it was all down hill from there.
nit:
> 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.
> We had wallpapers and great homescreen and dock themes on jailbroken iPhones without a significant perf impact.
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.
Yes “I drank the Kool aid” when Adobe couldn’t get Flash to run decently on a 1Ghz/1Gb RAM Android. But it was going to run smoothly on a 400Mhz, 128Mb RAM first gen iPhone?
Was Safari with Flash going to run well when Safari without Flash could barely run?
I didn't read a word about flash in the comment you replied to. They commented on the mention of wallpapers in your comment about flash, but they didn't mention flash at all. What they said is that you believed things that Apple said, that weren't true, about why they wouldn't allow wallpapers. They characterized this as a nitpick.
They never said that about wallpaper. They did say that about Flash - my original comment.
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.
> It was so resource constrained that you couldn’t put a picture on your home screen because it would have taken too much memory.
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.
And it made the UI slower - as confirmed by another comment and used battery.
> 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
Haha I remember the Xoom. Company bought one at the time to test our product on, since it might be a big deal. Several of us were intrigued and negotiated who would get to take it home after work. After about 3 days it became clear that it was terrible and it was relegated to a drawer.
Wait...you're telling me I can't charm a cute girl with the Motorola Xoom and its amazing capability of being able to play a Youtube video in full screen?
[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).
And yet Microsoft figured they could make Silverlight work on devices with even less impressive specs.
I had the original iPhone, then swapped it for a flagship android and hated it. I tried Windows Phone out a few years later and loved it and had two of them over the years. Some apps didn't exist for it and that sucked, but the OS was snappy and something different that I really liked. The Nokia windows phones were great. I knew it was doomed though as when I got them from the carrier, I was apparently like the only person despite it having its own wall at the brick and mortar store lol. I still miss it.
A relative of mine had a Windows Phone and kept it running at least until the mid 10s. It was fast but he could basically only do calls and SMSes with it because nobody wrote apps for that OS. Everybody in app development (devs and their customers) was keen to see Windows Phone die quickly so they could spare time and money and develop only for two OSes.
WhatsApp supported windows phone through 2019.
Thy were really great on supporting a bunch of less popular platforms (feature phones and the like) WhatsApp supported Blackberry for a long time. WhatsApp probably supported a potato for quite a long time.
Yes, the Windows Nokia Phone was quite an interesting alternative. Though I never owned one I played with one and was pleasantly surprised, the 'workflow' was very good, the UI as was nice, it was snappy. If they were around today I'd probably think about owning one.
>I still miss it.
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.
My cousin says the same thing... 25 year IT veteran. Early adopter for almost all new tech. He says his 1000-whatever Lumia phone was one of the best phones he ever owned. I know it ran Windows Phone OS, and I remember playing with it a bit.
The Lumia was essentially a N9 ported from Linux to Windows. The N9 was the best phone I have ever owned. The UI was fantastic. In particular, the offline navigation application was incredible.
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.
I had forgotten the name, but yeah, I had a Lumia for my first one. Hardly anyone I knew had one, but the ~5 I knew were absolutely in love with theirs.
I remember having a Windows PDA when I was in college, and developing a bit on top of Windows M. It was a reasonable platform.
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.
Windows Phone had pretty much nothing in common with WinCE/WinMo PDAs that preceded it, at least from user and app developer perspective.
I think this hurt Windows Phone a lot as a lot of people thought it was just the PDA interface on a smart phone.
I don't think so. As I recall, the different UI (not just from older MS stuff, but also from iPhone) was really front and center of Microsoft's pitch at the time.
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.
I think the issue was some people never even got around to seeing the different UI. They heard Windows + Phone and immediately thought of the older tech and noped out.
Yes... If I remember we were aiming for the newly released "Windows 8"-based Phone OS, and the previous version was fully incompatible with it so all apps had to be redone. Tiles were the new thing to build for.
Microsoft tried to do the same thing on the Desktop side too, but on the desktop they were forced to keep the backwards compatibility in place so it didn't finish off the platform the way it did on the Phone side.
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.
If memory serves, it was a custom kernel and OS, then a semi-custom kernel with a few OS components shared with Windows 8, and then the Windows 10 'core' kernel (same as on the Xbox One?) with many shared OS components.
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.
WinCE (which was rebranded as Windows Mobile at one point) basically had a cut-down version of Win32 as its app framework. There was also .NET complete with a WinForms port.
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.
Not only Silverlight, XNA was used for games.
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.
Buttersmooth UI is how I'd describe it too. I loved the themes at the time too.
It was incredibly smooth. The Windows Phone 7 browser was also very smooth compared to the iPhone/Android browsers of the time. Some miracles worked somewhere.
Also the keyboard was incredibly good.
I had a few Windows phones, and butter isn't a word I'd ever use to describe the performance of the UI. Heck, I wouldn't even use the word margarine to describe my experience with it.
Out of curiosity...why did you have several? Were they budget models?
I wouldn't exactly call flat UI a good thing. They are one of the horrible flaws of our current UI design trends.
Didn't it end up as UWP? At one point they were trying to pitch running the same app on mobile and on desktop, and it .. kind of worked, although obviously very sandboxed and restricted in APIs.
As I recall it, calling Windows Phone "buttery smooth" is quite an overstatement. I remember it looking drab dull and cheap at the time.
I had two Lumia flagship phones - Lumia 800 with Windows Phone 7 and Lumia 930 with Windows Phone 8 (which I later upgraded to 10).
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.
It's hard to take someone seriously when they overexaggerate like that. Windows phone was never butter or margarine smooth.
I couldn't believe my eyes when I read that they had hired Elop and was concentrating on Windows phones. I immediately knew that was the end. Unbelievably incompetent by the board.
I think it was actually a good idea. I think they correctly predicted the Android market and saw Windows Phone was a good way to differentiate their phones from everybody else. If you look at the history of Android manufacturers, it was a long slog of brands trading off popularity and hardly making any profit until Samsung eventually became the only mainstream player.
Nokia was dead company walking before Stephen Elop. Elop saw the writing on the wall and made one of the choices available. A different CEO would have made a different choice but ultimately at that point it would still have been too late to save Nokia.
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.
Was there with the company as intern and junior during Nokia and Microsoft days for Nokia Maps.
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.
> 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
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).
Nokia with android vendor would mean Nokia would survive until today - just due to the brand (it was big) and build quality.
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.
Nokia is still around, because NSN survived this mess.
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.
> made a different choice but ultimately at that point it would still have been too late to save Nokia.
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 Nokia at that point would have gone with Android with Google services which what the market wanted. They would have gone with Android with their own services (Maps etc) and app store.
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.
Now I can't find that poem about Elop sinking the Nokia ship or something like that.
This one, the burning platform memo? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32698044
No it was more like a song or poem or Ahab kind of thing.
Do not let the saboteurs in...
I was also at Nokia during this time and recall OPK (Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo), during a visit to the Beijing office, giving a talk where he talked about the difficulties of pushing new things through the organization.
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.
The Linux based Nokia N900 was the best phone I ever owned. With a bit of polish, finish and maturity it could have also been the best phone for the masses. RIP.
I loved my N810, but Maemo had so many little issues all over the place, it was reaching "Death by a thousand papercuts" territory. iPhone did what Apple used to do so well, which was obsess about the user experience.
The follow up N9 was that. It was great. Elop canned it.
I had to import one from Australia. It was totally worth it.
I miss my N9 so badly! Without a doubt the best phone I've ever owned.
I wanted one, but then Elop killed it. I took quite a long time for Android to become as good.
I'm very late to the party here, but as a smartphone product manager at Vodafone I had a front-row seat to the entire arc--which actually started with many telcos being angry at Nokia for their arrogance and near-monopoly, before the iPhone came out.
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...
That’s how I remember Nokia in the first half of the 2000’s: peak arrogance. Even if Steve Jobs himself would have given them the iPhone for free, they would have rejected it.
I had a Nokia Symbian phone, the 7610. I loved how 'quirky' it was:
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.
The N-series were great too, I loved both my N73 and later a N82, both with Gameboy emulators.
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!
I worked, briefly, at Symbian.
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.
I love Finland and the Fins. But there is a certain type in that population that is extremely bureaucratic. The only country in Europe that has a contingent that comes near is Switzerland, also a great place to live.
> The iphone was solidly in charge by then
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.
> the iPhone was only "in charge" for a brief year or two, and then Android ate its lunch in terms of marketshare.
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).
This is pretty much just describing the bimodal nature of most markets.
Extracting $100 in surplus profit from someone who's not on the poverty line is easier than extracting $10 from someone who is.
> Nit: the iPhone was only "in charge" for a brief year or two, and then Android ate its lunch in terms of marketshare.
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.
~Thrice. Airpods.~
Edit: Airpods also has a majority market share, so probably it's not the third in this list.
This is such an important lesson!
I was a day one Android fan (got the Nexus One) but I'd actually debate what "in charge" means... to me it doesn't necessarily mean dominating market share. I think the iPhone defined the touch-based smartphone when it came out and continues to do so. These days Android has a much more cohesive concept (in the form of Material UI and so on) but in the early days it was just a hodgepodge mess of ideas, even if it dominated the market.
> ...in the early days it was just a hodgepodge mess of ideas, even if it dominated the market.
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.
it dominated the market because they seized the 'budget' smartphone market. Back in they hayday everyone dreaded a new android app coming into the shop because of all the absolute shit phones (slow cpus, tiny screens) the client wanted us to support because there were so many in the market (overseas).
iPhone did and still does run the market, everyone else is a follower.
This is probably the most important bifurcation point in the history of European tech. Today's malaise and grasping for direction has much to do with the demise of this pioneering enterprise. And the fact that it does not appear to have been pre-ordained adds poignancy.
European tech was doomed in late the 90s when the EU decided to throw in with Microsoft et al instead of supporting building out a homegrown alternative ecosystem based around open source software.
No, the national champions model is the problem. If Apple failed the US still has Android and potentially many other startups. Europe just doesn't have the risk capital or ecosystem.
Yes, but now it doesn't even have national champions. The last one standing with some pretense at being still with the times is probably ASML.
One wonders whether at any point anybody will ask any tough questions about where Europe is heading as far as technology goes.
Lots of people are. The answer appears to be “down the drain”.
People forget that for a long time ASML was government backed
I would put Novo Nordisk up there too. Not sure how Eli Lilly is doing so much better though, which I presume for both is due to advancing GLP-1s, but I thought Novo was first to market.
Which is exacly why Finland should have blocked the MS deal. Nokia was a HUGE percentage of Finland's GDP.
I was working externally for Nokia around 2004~2006. They were already competing with Apple at this point. Nokia were scared by the iPod and the Rokr. They wanted to secure the mobile and online music market. They were trying to beat Apple at iTunes, to the point where they gobbled up one of Apple's biggest competitors in the music space (OD2-Loudeye).
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
> These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business
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.
So many manufacturing companies fail at software. They think of software like it's any other component on the BOM. As if it's just like a screw or a piece of molded plastic: Build the cheapest "software part" that meets the requirements (or buy it from a "supplier"), and then bolt it onto the product some time during assembly.
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."
This is exactly how a german-car-maker manager put it: just an item on a BOM. Their cars have hilarious bad software.
This is very visible in places like TVs/set-top-boxes, which are always chronically awful and slow, and now cars are filling up with terrible software. Which they want to charge a subscription for.
My TV's menus consist of what I would charitably describe as clip art. The icons that are supposed to be aligned row-wise are sometimes off by 1 pixel. Text is not consistently aligned with icons. They can't even get left justification right. Some of the UI elements have borders around them, but the bottom border is sometimes 3px thick and the top border is 2px thick. Interaction with the menus generally takes about 500-2500ms from the time I push the button on the remote. Yet everything is animated (using a CPU that is obviously not powerful enough to even keep up with the animation).
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.
And the problem is, people buy this. The markets are completely broken. And the worst of it - it's unlikely this will be addressed, most likely it'll only get worse.
I remember that, too. Nokia even had an "app store" on a lot of their business series devices (the E-series), but it was clunky to use, had no payment options and was not really friendly for 3rd party developers. There was probably a window where, had Nokia pushed to compete with apple on that field, they could have gotten a leg up and kept Symbian and symbian apps in the race for (way) longer. But that invest and speed needed for software was probably not doable in the behemoth that was Nokia at that time.
The worst thing with their store was the 3rd party review and signing process. For a time you also had to pay (a lot more than $99) to receive a developer certificate.
As someone who was there, I recall numerous projects instituted to reduce the number of steps it took to even install an app on the device. It was mind-numbing to see what they were trying to extract themselves from.
The presentation is evidence itself that Nokia was bureaucratic and unlikely to stay competitive.
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.
BTW, an actual skunk-works project that delivered is the only way that current nokia hasn't collapsed yet again.
Same here, I was in Espoo the week after the Burning Memo, and not a single person I met was happy with it.
Especially given how much prevalent the UNIX culture was at Nokia.
I really liked Windows phone. Had a Lumia 800. Nice phone.
I still think they should have kept going with it.
>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.
A very common story in European tech and automobile companies.
So Microsoft also killed linux on phones basically. I had a n900. Best phone ever.
I had the N800 and then the N810 which was one of my favorite devices ever. Then I got the N900 and what a disappointment it was. I wish I could get an N810 with modern internals.
> MS killed the whole division shortly after Satya Nadella took over and was sorting out the mess left by Steve Ballmer.
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.
Ballmer, the person who pushed for and created the entire Microsoft Enterprise focus, is not an idea guy that understood what made Microsoft successful? This idea that Ballmer was some goof when he was actually considered a co-founder by Bill Gates which is why he received like 17% of the company when he joined.
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.
Wasn’t it already too late by the time Ballmer left?
Yes and no. Too late to take on Apple, but Microsoft could have persisted as a loss leader and finally at least had Enterprise Mobile in its pocket. Just don't actively burn third party developers. It would have been too late for courting hardware OEMs by then I reckon, though.
I was there during the end of the Windows Phone era and can confirm. There were even efforts for additional Linux based OSes post windows phone. Nokia just never had software in their DNA.
Why didn't Nokia go bankrupt afterwards? They have Bell Labs, but don't make any interesting products.
Nokia has a pretty successful business in things like cellular base stations, carrier networking, etc. - for example they brought their joint venture with Siemens (Nokia Siemens Networks) back in-house by buying Siemens' part out, and that does a lot of optical network stuff (DWDM backhaul equipment, etc), already had a cellular base-station business but then also bought competitor Alcatel Lucent, and a lot of provider network stuff came in with that (like FTTH equipment on the provider side). They also got Alcatel's undersea cable laying division.
So they still have a bunch of valuable and successful businesses even though their consumer business went to crap.
So they gained a reputation for reliability/durability and pivoted to infra?
Nokia had, for example, excellent RF engineering talent. Personal anecdote: back in the day a Nokia phone would get a call through when other brands didn't, on the same telco.
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.
Ugh, Meego was so good. I still remember watching the presentation, then Nokia tanking when it was announced they were switching to Windows.
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...
> Symbian was going to magically fix all their problems.
Really? I remember Symbian had the crappiest and most shoestring C++ dev stack ever.
Something clicked for me when I read your comment: the most amazing thing about Apple is that despite their corporate immensity, they still continue to ship generation after generation of cool products that compete and sell on their own merits. You don't have to be a fanboy to appreciate that.
Almost no other tech company that I can think of has been able to resist bureaucratic ossification. (Perhaps Adobe - to an extent?)
Really? To me, for example iPhones haven't changed at all in a long time, they get spec bumps but are essentially the same product, and people buy replacements mostly because of batteries going bad / apps bloating / fashion.
Apple's new products are surprisingly often failures, for their background. Vision Pro anyone?
Consumers always have the choice to buy a different phone. And in the case of buying an iPhone, they have the choice to buy a much cheaper phone. That so many of us continue to buy iPhones is proof that Apple is doing something very right. And that shows, and this is my main point, that they have impressively avoided being bogged down by megacorp bureaucracy.
I was at Palm when the iPhone launched, and one note from this analysis summed up Apple's new power in the market and how they really changed the landscape.
"Cingular has allowed Apple to launch a device with WLAN and inbuilt services"
At that time, the carriers controlled so much of the cell phone experience. We certainly would have loved to have launched Palm Treo phones with WiFi radios, but our carrier partners wanted the only way to get data in and out of the devices to be through their monetized data plans. They also wanted to control what you did with that data so they could charge for their own email or messaging systems or web portals. The same applied to app stores. Palm OS didn't have a unified app store at that time, just sideloading and some third-party methods, and some carriers had started making their own stores where you could buy apps billed through your cell phone bill. They hated the idea of a platform owning that, and I expect that was part of the reason Apple originally released it with no app store. They needed the phone to be a massive hit in order to gain the power to also bypass that wall that the cell companies put up.
Palm did benefit from the iPhone launch -- it had us uplevel our efforts away from the post-Palm OS phones that we were in the middle of developing that were aimed at the RIM market and instead try something radical with webOS, and when the Pre launched, it actually had WiFi on board, although the Sprint-exclusive Pixi phone lacked WiFi due to carrier request. There was some momentum there for a while, but then HP bought us, hit its own set of brick walls with carriers, and ditched the hardware business shortly after Apple started launching on other carriers.
I was at RIM at that time and saw _exactly_ the same thing. When I started in 2008, in addition to WiFi and apps they were squabbling with carriers about whether or not the Blackberry needed an antenna. Carriers were micromanaging devices to an astonishing degree.
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.
Were virtual network operators (?) - VNOs - a thing back then, and could a VNO make its own rules? If so, could Apple (or Palm or RIM) launch their devices without carrier compromise by also owning a virtual network? I guess this would have required a lot of money. Maybe Nokia could have done it?
No, the carrier leverage did not come from network policy, it came from sales-channel. That is to say, in those days one way or another every device passed through a carrier's hands before reaching the customer. So carriers controlled pricing, and to a large degree, marketing. If they didn't like your device they would refuse to sell it and then you were stuck.
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.
That’s not exactly true. What Apple did in every market was make deals with the #2 or #3 carrier that was desperate to steal market share from the leader.
Then when the leader started seeing customers lead. Apple could have the same terms with them.
The Pre was absolutely rad - and to this day the only phone I miss from a UI perspective, and the only UX and hardware that I thought had a chance of "out Apple'ing Apple".
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.
I read that as a failure of Palm's management, notably the ones that were negotiating with phone carriers. Jobs isn't the only guy who could have negotiated that kind of deal. Apple was a second run computer company that had almost no previous phone experience. They were not exactly negotiating from a position of strength, and the fact that only one carrier took them up on the offer shows just how tough it was.
It sounds like they really needed to say "Stop. We are the ones building the phone, you are the ones providing the service. We don't tell you how to build towers, you don't tell us how to build the handset, at least not the user facing part of the handset."
> Jobs isn't the only guy who could have negotiated that kind of deal
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.
Apple in 2006 wasn’t a computer company, they were the iPod company.
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”.
But Cingular/AT&T clearly didn’t sign a lifetime exclusivity contract with Apple?
It didn’t even last 4 years.
I would expect that being a computer company gave Apple more leverage than the handset makers. Apple could afford to have none of the providers say yes.
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.
Steve Jobs could say that but as the old saying goes, you are not Steve Jobs.
By the time that the iPhone was introduced, Apple was riding high on the iPod.
The resurgence of the Mac was already well under way at that point as well. Intel Macs had launched before the iPhone. Developer buy in to the Mac was pretty big by then.
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.
> At that time, the carriers controlled so much of the cell phone experience.
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.
> 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.
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.
Though I never used a Pre, I got to use webOS on an HP Touchpad. In many ways, I still think it’s better than what we currently have and wish it had won out instead of the iOS and Android.
The Pre and WebOS were hands down the best non iPhone experience at the time. The mistake Palm made was going exclusive instead of pushing it everywhere. I don't think the Pre ever recovered from that in the USA.
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.
As an outsider very interested in Palm devices, this was always my impression/suspicion. Thanks for confirming what I’ve long thought was going on.
Exactly this. Also why I bought Apple stock the day the iPhone was announced (I had never seen an iPhone and knew nothing about how cool it was, but I took notice that Jobs had been able to blast through the carrier moat concerning data service).
Mirror since the 3 already posted don't actually work: https://archive.org/details/document_20250116
thanks! FWIW I found it on-site by searching for
"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.
The host must be 404-ing high-traffic files?
That's probably what happens once the traffic quota is exceeded, I would guess.
Thanks!
2007. The presentation reads like an eerily accurate crystal-ball prediction of what actually happened in subsequent years.
Evidently, Nokia executives knew well in advance what the iPhone could do to their company.
Evidently, they knew they needed to do "something" to avoid an implosion of their mobile-phone business.
Evidently, despite their prescience and best efforts, they were unable to avoid disaster.
It's as if they were in the Titanic, and saw the dangerous iceberg well in advance, but somehow were unable to turn the steering wheel and change course.
Classic innovators dilemma.
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.
My pet theory is that this is the natural lifecycle of almost all companies and the reason for that is that they underappreciate the luck involved in their first success. There are a few exceptions in the form of zombies (typically relying on a monopoly or legislative help), but there are very few repeatedly innovative companies.
There was another thread (I think on HN today) about investment strategies, and the ones that earned the most over the longest term were basically broad index funds rather than picking winners. I'd wager your point has a lot to do with why this investment strategy is best.
Doesn’t need to be a pet theory, that’s just an accurate assessment of reality.
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.
It’s nice to see that they got it even if they weren’t ultimately capable of doing anything about it.
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.
Remember Jim B. scoffing at how you had to plug an iPhone in every night? And how much more efficient BlackBerrys were with data?
Steve knew that the customers did. not. care. And that the carriers would build more cell stations if they had to.
Yup. I remember saying to someone at the time, BlackBerry can scream "tools not toys" all they want, but I'm pretty sure Apple will have no problem adding encrypted work email to the iPhone whenever it becomes a priority... but the effort required to reinvent BlackBerry into a friendly, approachable device that people actually want to use, on the other hand, yeah.
The comparison to the Titanic was quite fitting. I was with Nokia then, and there was an overly large administration, excessive politics, and far too many managers and meetings for anything to be done on time. If I recall correctly, we spent 1-2 weeks in meetings just to discuss replacing apache with nginx as a web proxy for a less critical service. The actual work for that change would take about 10-15 minutes.
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.
I think the presentation was enough to show they knew they were in trouble.
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".
Quickly and accurately understanding the competitive landscape is hard, to their credit, and not sufficient.
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.
Well, there are also a lot of assumptions and complaints about the iPhone and its impact that were commonly made at the time that ultimately didn't matter:
- 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.
- Can't play Flash.
- 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.
Not supporting Flash and Java was an advantage. Having apps written in an actual performant language made sense.
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.
They caused their own disaster with the Microsoft marriage. Nokia was still huge, market share and coffer wise, and had plenty of options, but killed them all for MS.
Classic big company problems.
"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.
> N-Series and SEMC Walkman probably need to clearly undercut iPhone pricing to succeed in the market.
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.
They needed to cut prices because phones could had a fully usable browser on mobile broadband with GPS that no one else did. There simply wasn’t a competitor for at least a few years, and it could even be due to the deal Apple made with ATT to make sure all iPhones came with unlimited 3G mobile broadband.
This is spot-on, and it's a remarkably common pattern when dominant players are faced with a seismic shift—even when it comes from within.
Kodak essentially invented the modern digital camera, and had a phenomenal lead going into the 90s. It was not a little side project—they hired IDEO to do vision work, design enclosures and create on-camera UIs. They poured money in, and did ship products. I'd love to know what happened internally, but externally they simply didn't move as quickly and aggressively as they needed to.
Very similar story at Polaroid—it's not like they didn't see the iceberg.
On the computing side, we have Xerox. Just couldn't figure out how to monetize any of the world-changing innovations from PARC.
Someone should really interview all these key players while they're (mostly) still alive and put together some kind of unified field theory of corporate disruption.
I worked with an ex-Kodak guy, and he related the following story to me from the 80’s or early 90’s.
Xerox was kicking their ass, they were completely owning the copier market. But it was a natural fit for Kodak, they knew imaging better than everybody, why couldn’t they get into this market? This guy was on a crack team of engineers a VP assembled to create a competing product. 9 months later, they demo a fully digital copy machine, working, ready to go, with competitive pricing and features.
But the higher ups at Kodak were incensed. They told the product needs a redesign, because Kodak was a film company, so the product needed to use film for copying. The revised product was a complete failure, and was the reason said engineer left Kodak shortly thereafter.
My take is devotion to brand identity is death during these critical inflection points. YMMV
The problem was that Kodak essentially was a film chemical production company pretending to be an imaging company. The switch to digital meant they could no longer get the fat recurring profits from selling film that they were used to. Kodak's value peaked at $31 billion in 1996 ($58 billion in 2025 dollars) while the total value of the digital camera industry today is around $8 billion (https://www.researchandmarkets.com/report/digital-camera). Even if Kodak had pulled off a masterful pivot to digital and captured the entire market, it would have been disastrous for the company and led to it shedding most of its employees.
I think camera is a major smartphone selling point and certainly cannibalized the digital camera business. Kodak could have upgraded from camera to phone like Apple upgraded from mp3 player.
I doubt that Kodak could have built a complete phone. But they certainly could have been a tier-1 supplier of camera components and software to Apple and other phone manufacturers. It seems like Kodak didn't even really try.
Digital was disaster so the plan after 1996 was delay and deny. The question is: did it do enough extra business in those transitional years to make up for going bankrupt in 2012? And was it better ultimately for shareholders?
Yea, but, like, phones are digital cameras…
If Kodak were to have survived, it should have kept Eastman Chemical and morphed into that as imagining declined.
This sounds like an apocryphal story. Kodak did actually make copiers in the 80s/90s, I know because my elementary school had one (early 90s, in a suburb of Rochester). It was one of the very large models that do duplex, stapling, ~100 copies per minute, etc. They just presumably weren’t good enough/cheap enough to get much market share vs. Xerox and Canon. I’m not aware of any of their copiers using film, not even sure how that would work.
Large companies struggle to cannibalize their cash cows from within. Powerful managers step up and fight against change.
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.
That's fascinating. It really seems that a lot of businesses end up hyper-optimized to deliver what they already offer, up until the point where anything that isn't a current offer is attacked by corporate antibodies. And that's when the growth they've optimized for suddenly stops.
There's way too much worship of Steve Jobs, but one thing he had right - either you develop the product that eats your cash cow, or someone else is going to do it.
I’ll never not talk about how he killed their most successful product ever at the time, in 2005— the iPod mini.
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.
Not to mention the iPhone, which erased the iPod. He also seemed to make that move with zero regret.
They did continue to sell iPod Classic in parallel to iPod touch for a while afterward, and even revamped the UI on the nano to look and feel more like iOS. But yeah, there was obvious cannibalism there, no question about it.
Kodak also bought Ofoto in 2001. So basically they had over a decade lead on Instagram. What did they do with it? Try to drive people to print more photos, on Kodak paper. I don't think they ever really embraced digital, maybe isolated parts of the company did, but the film/print cultural inertia was just too strong.
If you aren’t already familiar, Clayton Christensen’s theories on this, on innovation and disruption, are widely praised.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Christensen
Yeah, this is classic disruption. The amazing part is, I can almost guarantee that execs at Kodak read The Innovator's Dilemma, but it didn't help. Same goes for Nokia. Knowledge of the problem is apparently insufficient.
Sometimes there is no clear path from A to B. There is some weird fallacy where people tend to think every single company can make every single product if they simply hired the right engineers and throw money at it.
I think it comes from underestimating the role of process, structure, and competency, which are the DNA and codebase of a company.
Sometimes the market says the most efficient outcome is for your company to die and a replacement rise from the ground elsewhere.
Old, tired companies with lots of sunk costs and old employees are at a disadvantage.
Moreover, sometimes the most efficient outcome for owners is milk what you can from the business then close up shop. The idea of a public market with fractional ownership is you dont have to keep all your eggs in one basket.
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.
I'm definitely not saying any company can make any product, but it is striking when a company which is making a product refuses to believe the product category is going to evolve—even when they themselves are doing the original R&D to evolve it.
I was basically agreeing with you earlier post. I do think that there is a bias where people tend to conflate a failure to believe for legitimate concerns. Both happen.
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...
One of the problems for Kodak was that selling people digital cameras was always going to be just a fraction of the profit of selling them film.
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.
Same like 3Dfx and many others. Miracles happen too often........
The whole report shows that it was a company being run by bearcats and middle-managers who focused on sales rather than product. The detailed out exactly what was coming and why it was great and their general response is atrocious. Some of the highlights of the presentation which stood out to me (on page 12):
Your competitor just launched a superior product and your response is to 'work closely' with T-Mobile?? Are you kidding me?. Response here was spot on and highlighted that they needed to hire a new chief UI-designer and work on prioritizing touch development -- this should have been number 1 without a question and it looks to me like they put it on the back-burner. Anytime you're focusing on your 'response' to a competitor, you're behind in the game (by miles) and you've lost already -- especially if you're responding with 'counter-measures.' Once again - are you kidding me? Incredibly stupid response -- you're planning to kill something the market may demand massively by...filling your product / experience with 3rd party integrations. Idiocy at its very finest. This is a great sign of a company being run by middle-managers - secret projects with no evidence that they will push your product boundary nor satisfy consumer demand and why in the world would you keep anything here 'secret' - sheer idiocy. Another sign of a company being run by idiots. Wow - use partnerships (i.e. relationships / sales) to counter a superior product. These guys sure are on the ball /sarcasm. Whenever you respond to a threat and one of your highlights is to once again 'talk' your way our of it by highlighting your competitors' weaknesses -- it's usually an indication that your organization is being run by middle-managers or absolute morons.This whole report shows exactly why Nokia failed.
To my mind the key insight from the presentation is this sentence:
“The 1% volume share target could translate into 4% value share, taking ~ 30% share of the >300 € price Band”
That’s Apple’s superpower in a nutshell - get the majority of the profit in the market, while everyone else battles each over over market share (and earn low margins in the process).
> get the majority of the profit in the market
But they werent able to just do this from the begining. It took a lot of building on the success and positive consumer appeal of the iPod.
The iPod applied the same strategy. When it launched it only worked on Macs with a FireWire port, meaning <10% of the personal computer market.
Also less space than a Nomad.
The killer feature of the iPod was the iTunes music store. Everybody was sick of the hoops the companies made you jump through to buy songs. Singles were basically out of fashion thanks to the domination of the CD, but most bands only released one or two good songs on a CD meaning each song cost like $5 and you had to rip it yourself and transfer it to whatever device you had, which was a lot of work. Apple realized people would buy a ton of music if you cut out the bullshit and price it reasonably, a strategy that had been previously untried in the market and no doubt caused a lot of CEO heartburn.
> The killer feature of the iPod was the iTunes music store.
That wasn't launched until 2003, two years after the iPod, and it took a while for all the big music labels to sign on. (Hell, it took until 2010 for the Beatles to show up.) The iPod was a success even without the music store; while it wasn't the only portable digital music player on the market, or even the first, it was the first good one.
The first couple of generations of the iPod were a modest success, and then more as a fashion accessory than as a practical device. Lots of cultural cred, but the sales figures were pitiful compared to the subsequent generations.
It took Apple 2 years to ship the first million. It wasn’t successful at all until it came to Windows
Value share /= profit share
(and 4% /= majority, although I assume you were being poetic)
I remember the normal engineering mood inside Symbian, Motorola and Sony Ericsson when the iPhone launched.
We immediately knew we were toast. We used to say that the iphone made us irrelevant and android made us redundant.
I think we can see the same thing happening today.
BYD+CATL are the new iphone and other manufacturers are Symbian, Motorola and Sony Ericsson
VW, Toyota and friends cannot change fast enough. They should have started with big battery investments 10-15y ago and RnDing then, not now when Market is flooded.
In what way is a BYD a completely different/revolutionary product compared to, say a KIA or Volvo EV? This comparison seems a bit strange tbh.
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.
I would say it's more that BYD is a battery company that started making cars. They (alongside CATL and arguably Tesla) are the world leaders in battery cells, specifically LFP, so they have strong advantage in the core underlying tech that enables EVs.
I don't see the comparison. BYD is a decent car for an impressive price, but they're ... just cars. The iPhone wasn't "just a phone" that was cheaper than its contemporaries and a little better in very specific areas, it was a complete overhaul of the entire market.
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 is a decent car for an impressive price, but they're ... just cars.
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.
Cool I am probably never going to buy a jumping supercar so that's not very relevant. The iPhone and the smartphone in general wasn't a revolution because it was a super cool R&D project that would cost ridiculous amounts of money to buy; it was a revolution because everyone bought one. If even as much as 10% of the market buys a "jumping supercar" (which would be absolutely INSANE) then there's still plenty of space in the market for traditional cars. There isn't plenty space in the market for "traditional phones" anymore.
I somehow fail to see this as the most I want in a car is confort and perhaps space not screen time.
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.
It's all about marketing. You buy the thing that has the best marketing, not the best thing. That's how Apple replaced all these other smartphone vendors.
This is a very narrow and simplistic view on the extremely complex topics of market dynamics and consumer behaviour.
Also, utterly wrong. The iPhone is very good at being a phone + lots more.
Marketing can get you a leap and a start, but if the product isn't at least usable, it'll die out.
Anyone should be able to bring to mind giant marketing blitz for products that died horribly.
IMO it's shocking that this _did not_ happen in cars, in past tense.
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.
1) Cars are vastly more expensive and regulated. 2) Consequently the sales cycle is slower (usually people last at least 2-3 years for a lease). 3) EVs became politicized very quickly as they impacted politically active industries (oil).
Cellular is to smartphones that charging is to EV's.
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.
Bullshit. iPod touch, which was a low end model that followed iPhone, wiped out mp3 players, undone viability of portable game consoles, and roadkilled Windows CE, all without cellular just fine.
Same just didn't happen with Tesla.
The iPod touch didn’t outsold the iPhone, and wouldn’t have done well if it weren’t for its big brother paving the way.
iPhone got all the press, all the attention, all the developers, and made all the money.
The iPod mini and then Nano had already taken out mo3 players except the cheap knockoffs before the iPhone. The original iPod Touch maxed out at 32GB and with that amount of storage, it was much more expensive than most MP3 players
BYD+CATL is Android. Tesla is Apple.
Bet everyone has a different prespective. And thats what makes this world amazing. One is really free to pick any.
I respectfully disagree.
Tesla is run by a bigot, far right extremist. I would never send money to them, no matter their offerings.
Not so with Apple.
I don't understand where this trust comes from. Just like any other large company, Apple will not stand up for your civil rights when it seriously threatens the bottom line.
Good grief. Yes, Musk is a raging asshole. But so soon we apparently forget that Jobs was also a raging asshole.
China
Nah.
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.
> 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.
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.
By borrowing your analogy, the general sentiment with the iPhone was excitement and interest when it came out. I just don't see it in the folks around me regarding EVs (price is high, charging is pain). Yes, it's the future, but a future that is way ahead. We aren't even at the point where those old "devices" start to show their age. I'd say Symbians and Ericssons still have time.
People also forget that the iPhone wasn't what we have today - it was an iPod that made phone calls, and that alone was enough "for most people" - huge swaths of people had iPods and a cell phone so even if it had been mediocre it would have succeeded.
It not being mediocre is how it ate the world.
I wouldn't count Toyota out. Their mega battery plant in North Carolina is coming online this year, and the biggest drag on their current EV/PHEV lineup is the batteries. New EV/PHEV models are on the way, and frankly if they just update what they have with better batteries they will be absolutely phenomenal because they are currently great to drive and run extremely well despite lackluster battery range.
For the PHEVs yes they are battery constrained. They have great products and a ton of demand and difficulty keeping up manufacturing due to limited batteries.
For their EV, they have yet to make something that is competitive. Their EV is slow to charge, slow to accelerate, somewhat short in range, and quite expensive before they started adding—-in some cases five figure—-incentives to move them. It even had a recall for the wheels coming off.
Not just Toyota; the U.S. will have dozens of battery plants because it is strategic, like having our own chips.
Are we seeing the same thing, though?
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.
In developing countries, from what I could find, the ASP is around $160
No, these are not disruptors. Substantial incremental improvements, but part of the larger battle.
I disagree. Cars are much more entrenched status symbols than phones were back then. A Porsche is a Porsche, a truck to show you're manly and outdoorsy is a truck.
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.
Also keep in mind that the iPhone was far from starting at zero: they did not so much enter the phone market as a newcomer as they did pull the phone market into the existing and utterly dominated iPod market. Dominated so much that I don't even dare calling it the mp3 player market.
> A Porsche is a Porsche, a truck to show you're manly and outdoorsy is a truck.
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.
If anything, that helps my point. People still buy Porsches even if they know it's the same car as a VW or Seat, just fancier and with a more prestigious badge.
Status symbols can be shifted with marketing. BEVs are heavy as fuck, and (at least theoretically) torquey as fuck at zero speed - both of those seem pretty manly if you put the right spin on them.
> Status symbols can be shifted with marketing
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.
> BYD+CATL
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.
They bet the farm on hiding diesel emissions before that.
> 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.
What about Hyundai? They also went big on EVs and now are competing even in China
CATL has 5C batteries and svolt 6C. BYD also is working on similar tech. So 10 mins should be possible by year end or early next year.
I worked at SE when the iPhone was released and that is not how I remember it. :) The mood was more like "lol, it has no buttons!", "too expensive!" and "it can't work without a stylus!" I think many seriously misjudged how "cool" Apple was back then (and consequently how much they'd be willing to spend on status symbols) and how good a snappy touch ui could be.
Did you work with Symbian/UIQ software, feature phone software or something else? The feature phone team actually showed signs of getting the idea of no-jank and a rich UI very early.
Lund working on feature phones! My job was writing and managing test suites for verifying the J2ME implementation. It was a top secret collaboration with Motorola. They took QA work extremely seriously and bugs could delay major launches. Unfortunately for them, "rock solid J2ME" wasn't really what customers were after. :)
SE's J2ME implementation was top notch. It just worked and it was fast.
(Nokia's also worked but was slow. Everyone else's implementations tended to be both broken and slow. A particular shoutout to Samsung - they must have had 6+ separate, broken implementations.)
The fact that they did J2ME multitasking on a feature phone better than Symbian S60 did multitasking of native apps, and did it before the iPhone got any form of multitasking at all always impressed me.
Not to pile on... but let me pile on: symbian seemed eternally bureaucratic, lost in OO abstraction hell and lacked enough demo scene people who knew that a solid 60/72 fps is what mattered.
People from Future Crew (Finland) and Triton (Sweden) should have been running these teams. Half ;-).
A lot of people made the same mistake. They didn't understand -- simply couldn't understand for some reason -- that the imperfect iPhone that was launched in 2007 was the worst one that would ever exist.
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.
Not related to phone companies, but some software companies were in denial about it. I remember purchasing one of the first HTC/Android smartphone, and I told my boss at the time that my new cheap phone could replace all the applications of the company but cheaper, more convenient, in my pocket, and without a computer. He made fun of me and laughed. I knew Java pretty well and whipped up a few POCs to see by myself if we were really doomed, but I didn't told anyone about it. In less than 2 weeks I replace the whole company with 2 or 3 applications with crappy UIs. I quit in less than a month and the company obviously closed soon after that because that was the only sensible thing to do.
In the very end. It all boils down to who got the developers on platform for free. ( From Apple's context, while devs cost a lot, they just marketed well and even made them pay something to list apps )
Can you elaborate?
My memory is that Apple _charged_ developers to make apps :)
To publish something on a feature phone was much more costly, including five-figure quality approvals. The App Store was a true revolution and probably needed new players that were not as entrenched with carriers like Nokia, and Siemens.
Interesting. Nowdays people put more money to lure devs to their platforms.
They still charge those 99$ a year, don't they?
I think so. But I meant no work contracts and lots of employees.
Imagine Apple even got paid by developers and not pay them
Do you think non-SW engineering types in e.g. Nokia and Sony Ericsson also immediately knew?
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.
As a developer, I remember a few bosses that thought "who needs a stupid phone? no one will buy that" except that Android could already do most of what Windows was capable of, and the bonus was that the SDK was free and Java was an easy language.
They were stuck in their post-Windows 95 world, and did not understand that multimedia CD-ROMs were clunky and dying.
"Cingular has allowed Apple to launch a device with WLAN and inbuilt services"
Ugh, that "allowed". It's wild how much Apple shook up the mobile phone market and pushed phone companies back to just being dumb data carriers.
Stuff like this goes back YEARS.
Back in the days of the Bell System, the upper management at AT&T believed that it was going to be circuit-switched forever, even as Bell Labs was building packet-switched audio networks and it was becoming clear that packet-switching was a vastly more efficient solution to moving large amounts of mixed data around at a time. The development of efficient switching networks [0] was fundamentally resulting in continually building bigger networks that took up more space -- it was the Strowger step-by-step problem all over again. Moving to a packet-switched system meant that you could have an infinite number of "circuits" so long as you kept track of the paths taken.
But even as AT&T Long Lines implemented this, upper AT&T management was firm that the fundamental design of the network was not to shuffle packets around but instead to connect point A and point B with services on either end for the subscriber.
Even when they did eventually try to accept the packet-switched system, ISDN was too big and bulky, too slow for anything practical, and by the time it was useful, Ethernet/IP came along and ate its lunch.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonblocking_minimal_spanning_s...
Wasnt ISDN still circuit switched?
Kinda-Sorta. Ish. It's a weird hybrid between circuit and not
Jobs sticking to his guns here and breaking the shitware monopoly on pre-installed phones is probably a bigger part of the full story than the phone itself (as likely the black rectangle would be developed by someone eventually, phone carcinization).
> as likely the black rectangle would be developed by someone eventually, phone carcinization
Relevant: LG Prada (2006) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
This was so critical - in the US market. The first Apple phone was a very interesting market test that proved why this was needed, before the iPhone.
I was expecting sort of the opposite, for Nokia to deride the whole iPhone thing. But it was quite the opposite, they understand what they were facing. Ultimately, the could not meet the challenge fast enough.
>they understand what they were facing
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.
> 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.
Indeed. I referred to it at the time as the 50-model strategy.
the mention of lack of Java was also very indicative of the mindset
> Parts of the deck suggest that they didn't fully understand what they were facing.
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.
also that most of the deck is about the hardware.
There is almost no understanding of the software needed for an iPhone UI.
However "Develop Touch UI" is point #2 on their action item list, after partnering with TMobile.
That Apple succeeded in having people pay $500 and up for a phone that was cool but frankly not very useful, was amazing.
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.
> It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, but you couldn't really DO that much with it.
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.
As I remember it there was a time before and after 3G for web browsing. The fidelity of the iPhone Safari early on was great, but those early 2 generations didn't really have the bandwidth to do much with it. Still, I agree it was a leap ahead of the rest.
It's not unfair to say the first generation iPhone was a bit of an aspirational device. It helped a lot if you found some working public WiFi, but even then the speed wasn't entirely the fault of the radio, the processor and especially RAM on the phone hurt performance.
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.
> It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes,
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.
Agree on this. As a layman in Australia, i had a friend who was coming back from the USA and asked him to buy me an iPhone before its release in AU (late-2007 iirc, iPhone 3G launched in Australia in 2008) and promptly jailbroke it so i could get it on an Australian carrier.
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.
> you could still browse the full internet on it which was a complete game changer.
It had the screen and the software do do that but not the bandwidth. But I guess people were more patient back then.
It had WiFi, which was rare in mobile phones back then (carriers wouldn’t generally allow it)
Oh how we forget... Phones at the time were HORRIBLE. To you, today, it looks like the iPhone couldn't do much. Back then it was revolutionary that a phone could simply render a proper website or connect to your home wifi.
The thing was all the faults with that iPhone was software. You can update software. Lack of copy & paste was a software feature that was no doubt in some product backlog for a while before getting picked up. And once it got picked up and shipped, suddenly every device people bought had that feature.
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.
Nokia produced several early smartphones. Most ran SymbianOS that showed what was possible. The connectivity wasn't there to make it really useful and this was the age of "smaller is cooler" mobile phones, so they tried to keep the screens small.
I imagine that there were several people in Nokia that understood the potential of a phone that could also act like a mini-computer.
The first Nokia phone-mini-computer was the original Communicator, with a 640x200 resolution and a full keyboard, launched in 1996(!) Of course at that time it was targeted purely for business users, but by 2007 they already had a well-established high-end consumer smartphone selection (the N series – rather more advanced than the first iPhones). They just weren’t able to pivot to the touchscreen form factor, largely due to betting on Symbian – I can see how writing an entirely new OS userland from scratch wasn’t a terribly attractive idea.
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.
> and this was the age of "smaller is cooler" mobile phones, so they tried to keep the screens small.
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.
The CTO of Motorola was dismissive of the iPhone in her first review and acted like Apple was a little child just learning how to take its first baby steps. I remember reading this and just shaking my head at her cockiness. She left the company before the year was out.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070114215511/https://blogs.mot...
This section: “There is nothing revolutionary or disruptive about any of the technologies. Touch interface, movement sensors, accelerometer, morphing, gesture recognition, 2-megapixel camera, built in MP3 player, WiFi, Bluetooth, are already available in products from leaders in the mobile industry” has to rival “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.” In the early impressions that didn’t age well category.
Not that it hurt her career in any way, looking at her Wikipedia article. Failing upwards is a thing.
Blackberry took that approach.
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.
I would kill to see the presentation from RIM
This is to Nokia's credit. It didn't work out, but they also weren't arrogant like RIM or Microsoft
I think even when companies project arrogance from their c-suite, it’s more to keep the market happy and calm nerves. I’d be shocked if RIM wasn’t also sweating bullets internally after that iPhone presentation. They weren’t morons, and saw what happened with iPods.
Losing the Signal: How BlackBerry’s bid to one-up the iPhone failed: https://archive.ph/IgW6s
> 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.”
Mike Lazaridis is may have his blind spots, but he is a great engineer by all accounts.
Right guy for the right time, but no longer the right guy later on.
I know people who were at RIM at the time, including someone who was in the room when they passed around the first iPhone they got a hold of. They firmly believed the iPhone was dead on arrival both because the product was "terrible" (no keyboard, no battery life, etc. etc.) and, more importantly, because they were so confident Apple would not be able to pull off the networking required and people wouldn't be able to use the device at all.
People forget just how powerful RIM was in the business world, and the keyboard WAS a real stickler (even today, you can go to any large conference and ask "who here misses the blackberry keyboard" and you'll get a decent show of hands).
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.
> 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"
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.
Some part understood, and those people started the Maemo project. It got a tiny fraction of the available resources.
My personal moment of "CEO's -- they're just like us!" was walking into a Kinko's in Santa Monica to drop off a package, and seeing a sweaty Stephen Elop frantically photocopying documents the week his part in this debacle came to a head.
Mobile phone industry analyst Tomi Ahonen's voluminous blog from back then contained an entire section devoted to Elop, who he called the "worst CEO in history", with data and evidence galore:
https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/elop/
For those not in the know, this is the Ex CIO of Boston Chicken.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop
The bawk stops here.
You can get both a SMS message and meal at the same time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
Clearly in retrospect these were transferable skills.
Stephen Elop’s good a$$ barbecue and foot massage
N800 is the future that never was - opem Linux-based mobile computing for the masses. It had developer support, cool form factor, big touchable screen, and no corp to love it.
I had one of those. It was interesting in that it ran Linux and you could (at the time) browse most web sites with it. Otherwise, it was slow, bulky, and had a pretty terrible resistive touch screen. (The stylus was NOT optional.) And you still had to carry your flip phone in another pocket.
In the end I was mainly using mine to listen to podcasts (before they were called that). An iPod Touch eventually replaced it until Android phones got a lot better.
> In the end I was mainly using mine to listen to podcasts (before they were called that)
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
I temporarily forgot that the iPod came out way before the iPhone. So yes, I guess they were called that then. But in my defense, I listened to MP3 files of radio shows that I downloaded manually, so I guess I wasn't quite using them as "podcasts" at that point.
>And you still had to carry your flip phone in another pocket.
UPDATE: Memory failure! I meant N900, not N800
Why? I had N800 as my only mobile, and was more than happy with it. Stylus was not optional for things like browsing. But most of the time I took it from my pocket, I used it for text input, and physical keyboard made it comfortable to the point no other device has been able to offer me ever since I retired my N800
Why? I had N800 as my only mobile
Sure you're not thinking of the N900? The N800 didn't have any cellular connectivity, only wifi and bluetooth.
Yes, my bad, it was 900. After all these years numbers getting blurry in memory I guess
I really wanted the N900. I was saving money for it and resolved that the follow of the N900 would be my next buy. And then that never ever happened.
I never had a N800, but I still have a working N900 used as my secondary phone and while it has a stylus holder, I have never pulled it out of there for many many years except to stim. Its resistive touch screen was excellent and I liked it more than today's capacitive screens. The only issue I have with it is that it's ageing and developing problems over years and eventually I may end up out of spare parts.
I had one too (and a 770 before it). Great idea, so-so implementation. It was slow (and slowness is a cardinal sin, since you're always reminded that you're using a machine -- in my opinion, the way Apple products react so much faster to user input than competing products is a huge factor in their success, and Apple knows it) and the touch screen was terrible.
Yes, that platform was set to compete with iOS and Android and with fine timing.
I think they fumbled with the developer relations when first choosing Gtk for the UI and then jumped to QT. That made developers angry. And then of course the Microsoft steamroller killed it.
And it pretty much fucked up the Qt project afterward.
But with no app store. (As a programmer, I never in a billion years would have invented the app store. Yet it was the most important component of the iphone ecosystem).
The App Store didn't exist for the first iPhone. It launched with the iPhone 3G. The original plan was for everyone to develop web apps; the SDK was added due to external developer demand.
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 don't think developers wanted App Store, they wanted to build native apps. Has Apple just allowed them to ship their own .dmg files from their website, as they used to do in MacOS, they would be happy.
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.
I suppose the tricky thing is knowing when to listen to others and when you know more than everyone else.
As a Linux user, it just felt like a locked-down package repository to me.
Pretty sure there was some sort of App Store.
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
That and also the N9 were great, wish they were not abandoned. The design language on the N9 was way ahead of its time too. I still haven't seen a time picker as good as the MeeGo time picker, and now a decade later my Samsung has similar App icons as the N9 had in 2011.
I loved the N800 and was happy to see it make an appearance in that presentation. In fact I still have one in my desk drawer beside me I turn on from time-to-time. Yes it was a bit cumbersome, but I could do more with that device than any other handheld I have ever had and carried it with me for years. I wish the N900 and other smartphones on Maemo had caught on.
Don't forget the N900 as well! :)
Their Lumia with the Windows OS was great too. Unfortunately no market => no apps => death. But I loved it when I had it. They made great phones no doubt.
Yea, no one believes me when I tell them that the Lumia with Windows Phone 8.1 or 10 was one of my favourite phones ever. WP 8.1+ was such an underrated OS. Unfortunately it had virtually no support from anybody, even Microsoft quickly stopped caring.
If anyone wants to know why Europe has issues with innovation needs to look no further than here
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)
> 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?
X11 support was also part of the early Mac OS X – even part of marketing pages, afair.
Barely. It was originally a XFree86 project called XDarwin, adopted by Apple as a beta release for Jagwire in 2002, was an optional install in Panther and Tiger, default install in Leopard~Lion, and then was abandoned again in favor of the community-supported XQuartz after 2011:
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. ”
https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/x11-jaguar
https://www.xquartz.org/
I don't disagree with this, it had a lot of advantages. But at the same time I don't think it was good enough for the purpose
Because if it was good enough why didn't Android keep it?
Actually that's an interesting question; why didn't Android use X11? A few minutes of web searching don't seem to turn up anybody commenting on it; do you happen to know how I would check what their reasons were?
probably because it's to complex. I think the earliest android demos were probably just writing to the framebuffer.
If I see another one of these insane "explainations", I'm gonna have a stroke. Nokia - dominating the mobile phone market for years - is evidence that Europeans are just fundamentally incapable of innovation!
Ok bro.
Steve Jobs was a boomer.
Boomer isn't age related anymore, it's a mindset
Direct link to file: https://repo.aalto.fi/download/file/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
Super prescient analysis, kind of ironically.
Great example that there's a point of organizational no return that no amount of awareness and intelligent analysis can fix. When the barbarians are at the gate, it's too late.
These presentations often serve as a comfort blanket rather than a plan of action. Oh man something incredibly disruptive is happening to us. Lets talk about it. Whew, okay, we understand it, lets go back to being complacent.
Years later, "man we tried, we had that meeting and everything, we just couldn't compete"
They actually managed to act on most of the problems identified here but missed the move to software-based ecosystem-centric market started by the app store launched the next year.
Uploaded the PDF here: https://files.catbox.moe/y94qdz.pdf
I was there at the time and until the end.
That cartoon meme with the dog sitting with a cup of coffee or whatever and telling himself "This is fine", while everything is on fire, is probably the best way to describe how things felt at nokia back then.
Can you explain why every good phone that Nokia released during the period was killed instantly?
To this day I've not seen a phone that felt more responsive than the Nokia N9, which also looked amazing. Yet it was killed pretty much the second it was released.
It was born dead, or at least an orphan. Elop had started the Windows Phone strategy before it was launched.
This PDF does not read like "this is fine". I find the initial analysis in here to be on point. Of course it does not print "we are doomed" in bold letters on the front page, but management should have taken the points raised in this presentation very seriously. Do you know if Nokia appointed a "head of UI e.g. not tied to BG or platform" back then?
I believe it lol, in the presentation you can see they are still moving forward with the sms focused windowing design while the iphone was introducing the touch screen.
Now of course I’m looking at it retrospectively but still
I'm really curious! In hindsight, we can always point to when a pivot should have happened earlier, but on the other hand, we all know orgs that have pivoted too early or to a trend they shouldn't have, and then suffered.
Do you remember any specifics arguments or conflicts about strategy?
Me too. Once the 'Burning Platform' memo was released on the intranet everyone stopped giving a fuck, and were hanging around waiting for redundancy payments.
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.
I think the HN hug was too strong for this poor server...
Makes you wonder how many sites out there are just ~10k requests per hour away from being bricked.
To be fair - it's a repository for academic documents at a reasonably-sized-but-still-quite-small university. Their priorities were probably closer to handling few complex requests and being able to manage obscure documents, not dealing with Netflix level traffic.
It'll probably make for a cool story for the sysadmins there, but I doubt there will be a board meeting tomorrow to re-evaluate the web strategy.
Wasn't my intention at all to imply that they did something wrong and need to scramble to fix it. Just observing that a large portion of the web is built around the assumption that traffic is intermittent, where even a small burst of requests can knock it over. No shade — I've built plenty of sites like that.
It is really saddening for me to see how much N800/N900 and the Maemo platform are mentioned here, as an example of Nokia actually being first to introduce many of these technologies, but then Nokia dropped them a few years later. I still occasionally boot my N900, I wish I had a use for it -- it still works great as a general purpose computer and a good phone.
"User interface has been a big strength for Nokia — consumer research indicates this is in decline." - Funny, they pointed to both why the iPhone came out and what to do about it - then went on to really focus much more on feature for feature and existing players like Sony etc. They really focus on beating apple by competing on features vs thinking about it like a shift towards portable personal computing rather than competition in the telephony market. They seem to have somewhat understood apple flipped the script, but then reading through, their work around the fact that is true seems a bit... remedial. CEOs take note, good lessons in here. :)
This seems to have been originally posted on Reddit, and the link posted there seems to be online, whereas this post's link seems to be now dead.
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/comments/1i2pijr/nokias_...
It seems the other way around for the particular post you are linking.
This was posted to HN, then a bit picked it up from RSS and cross posted the same link to r/hackernews on Reddit (your Reddit link).
Then the repo.aalto.fi site was temporarily hugged by too much traffic.
Then someone reuploaded the PDF to this other tiiny site. Then the link on HN was changed to that. Then the file on the tiiny site disappeared.
Regardless, thanks for the link. The repo.aalto.fi link currently works for me. Probably because it’s getting much less traffic now.
It is clear that the presentation doesn't really get it. There would be no iPhone mini. This WAS the iPhone mini.
In all fairness, Apple didn't expect the market to want giant phones, and were very late with big screens.
Releatedly: It's fun to look at old Futurama episodes, where they joke about phones becoming so small you accidentally inhale them while talking.
We all really thought size was going one way and that was down.
Well it is annoying as a 6ft 2 guitar player(I'm saying I have big flexible hands) I still need both hands to do most phone things, like type this.
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.
Being a 6'2" tall guitar player doesn't actually say big hands. There is some correlation between hand size and height, but plenty of variation. I'm a 6'1" tall guitar player and I have small hands.
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:
Plugging in my H, A, and G and solving for L I get 21.8 cm. My actual hand size is 19.5 cm.Going the other way, from my hand size, age, and gender my predicted height is 5'8".
Perhaps Apple didn't want to cannibalize iPad or Mac sales? I don't know the timeline on this.
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.
iOS and the apps were all written for a single dude screens. It wasn’t until around iOS 5/ios 6 that iOS could handle multiple screen sizes
It is clear that a lot of people commenting about this (here and in other threads) don't really get it. The iPhone mini wasn't (mainly) about the form factor, it was about pricing and market segmentation. They even say:
> 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.
It's 3.5", 135g :) Those were the days!
In hindsight it is funny that Apple used someone with very big hands holding the first iPhone in their 2007 ads to make it look smaller. Nobody at that time could imagine that phones would only get bigger.
iPhones got bigger in terms of screen size, but Apple remained obsessed with lighter and thinner phones for many years after that. It's hard to remember this, but some of the earlier smartphones like the Palm Trio were giant awful bricks. You can't really convey weight in a picture, but you can convey size.
Wow I'm just remembering the girth of those devices. My family had some later palm and similar devices... closer to an address book or gaming devices in thickness. My mom's case was like 3/4 an inch deep, 3-4 in wide and like ~6in deep. Not light, and kinda fragile.
Just to add to the party: Microsoft deck for Nokia acquisition
https://www.slidebook.io/company/microsoft/presentation/f646...
That doesn't look like an internal presentation though.
My personal theory is where Nokia failed was worrying too much about Osborne effect[1] of their Linux-based phones on their Symbian business, or there being some behind-the-scenes contract clauses that tied them to Symbian too much.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
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.
If you strip this text to the bare-bones meaning, it reads: "Holy shit, we're f'cked, but here is the best positive spin we can put on it."
They saw the writing on the wall. They didn't want to compete on that level, but rather try to kill it. From "summary of actions":
"5. Kill market for such an expensive device by filling mid-range with own/Google/Yahoo experiences"
This is a rather poor reading of the presentation, which seems very serious about the threat and the need to adopt similar changes, as well as trying to keep the iphone at bay by offering similar features at a lower price.
Huh - the implications of this time period reach much farther than I would have expected.
I recall switching from a small, regional cellular carrier to Cingular with the launch of the iPhone 3G. It only now occurred to me that I'm still there. I stayed with Cingular when it became AT&T, and still have service through them. For that matter, the service has significantly expanded; I now have tablets, watches, and four phones for family members... some of whom weren't even alive when I switched carriers. My bill is ~$450 / month.
If I assume an average monthly bill of $300 (it started around $100, but has been as high as $550), there have been 196 months that I've paid that bill. $58,800 in revenue from me alone, that would have gone to someone else had Cingular not allowed Apple to launch on their network in 2007.
A bit off the topic, but your bill is bonkers to me. We have unlimited data + unlimited calls for 39€.
Sure, but those are totally different economies, geography, and demographics.
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.
With both T-Mobile and the MVNOs you can get unlimited data and calls for $40-$50.
I pay $360 a month on T-Mobile. That is for 5 cell phones, 3 iPads, and 2 Watches with unlimited data and 2 phone contracts. Without the 2 phone contracts it would be $300/month
that should all run you sub-$200/month (I have 5 phones, 4 watches, 1 tablet - $178/month (which I think it is still to high and am getting ready to call att to negotiate again or switch))
I really don't think so. I've shopped around several times, and while I could cut it a bit, I'm not getting more than a ~15% reduction overall.
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.
Through who? I'm paying $450 a month for 5 iphones and 4 watches.
wow madness!!! at&t! I did spend a bunch of my time negotiating over the phone but I think even what I pay is too much :)
A good portion of your monthly bill goes toward paying the debt incurred from massively overpaying DirectTV and Time Warner shareholders in the 2010s. I don't understand how the entire ATT board and leadership were not ejected. I think it was something on the order of $100B lost just on those two transactions.
I'm no fan of the company itself, but I've been too pleased with the service to really want to switch.
About a year ago I needed a SIM for an (older) Android phone for my daughter, who didn't need a capable smartphone or anything. They sent me one, but when I activated it over the phone the CS rep made a mistake and it ended up blacklisted. I told them I was activating it because my daughter was going on a trip in a couple of days, and they escalated it. I ended up with an AT&T employee driving 1.5 hours to my house to hand-deliver a new SIM and make sure the phone was activated and working the next day. In addition, they gave me a $500 bill credit without prompting at all.
So... yeah. It's not ideal, but I honestly feel like I'm getting what I'm paying for.
"Even though Steve Jobs emphasised iPhone superiority to "Buttons", it is to be expected that the consumer QWERTY category will continue to succeed."
Their key mistake.
I don't know. 17 years on and my fingers still miss hardware keyboards a little bit.
My dream smartphone would be a black rectangle, but with a landscape hardware keyboard to slide out from underneath. And in an ideal world OLED keys for changing the layout and a touch sensitivity for moving a text cursor.
What I miss from the 2000s is the big differentiation in phone form factors. Granted, a lot of them were weird, but there was at least experimentation and optimising for different use cases. What if the current standard of a black rectangle is just a local maximum and there is something better ahead?
I still think Motorola's Droid (and Droid 2) were the pinnacle of the smartphone form factor.
I distinctly recall the prevailing view among friends at the time was that even with the keyboard-less smartphones becoming the norm that the keyboard approach would become the standard interface, as Blackberry still existed and had majority market share (it seemed; my region had few iPhones at the time).
> Nokia needs to develop touch UI to fight back. S60 should be focus, but Maemo platform can be a critical strength due to openness.
If only history went this way, Maemo could be a full OS competing with the big boys by now.
I was working as a Qt developer at the time and really rooted for Maemo to succeed, because Qt was and still is a truly an amazing piece of technology. Unfortunately, Nokia squandered this opportunity.
When things like this pop up, I always think back to Joel Spolsky's review of the Nokia E71 and how he compared it to the iPhone 3G: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/08/22/a-review-of-the-no...
The E71 was arguably Nokia's best phone ever; and it was indeed better than the iPhone 3G. But Nokia just couldn't keep up the momentum.
This is fascinating. A reminder that being (broadly) right in your analysis doesn't necessarily mean you can execute to turn things around.
They note the impact to the high-end, the fact that UI is crucial, they even had a good guess at 2008 sales numbers (estimate 14m, looks like real was 13m).
I was intrigued by this bullet point on how their Maemo platform could help:
* Cellular development of the maemo platform and the politics surrounding it?
Any folks from Nokia in this time care to shed more light on that? I always felt the N9 was a beautiful piece of design and implementation - just late and under-supported.
N9 was very close to launch when Elop came, so that went ahead, but the rest of the development got cancelled immediately to focus on Windows phone: N9 would've otherwise been the first in a series of devices to slowly take over from Symbian.
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.
Elop was the trojan horse that killed Nokia. He worked at MSFT prior to this and single handedly destroyed Nokia. The N9 was revolutionary on its own; GPU accelerated UI, sleek looks, Maemo OS, it is a device people would actually want over the limping Symbian that never fully adapted to touch-only, or the useless Windows Phone 7.
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.
Symbian was the core OS, phone manufacturers build the GUI on top of it.
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.
Symbian^3 (Anna and Belle) introduced Qt for the strategy for smooth transition from Symbian to MeeGo. This was killed to go all in on Windows Phone.
I bought an N9 in 2011 and it was an incredible phone. The design and UI were gorgeous and it was a joy to use. I still miss the swipe-driven UI - it was clever, intuitive and well thought out. The phone itself had Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Spotify clients, and MS Exchange support for calendaring and email (I believe Nokia developed or ported many of these in-house) and was completely usable day-to-day.
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.
There was even the Qt strategy for making the transition smoother (and better hedged) by having apps portable across the different OSs. It was of course killed too because it could have challenged Windows Phone.
I worked in Nokia at the time and played with the N9. Meego was actually really good. It could have been competitive with the iPhone and Nokia could have stayed at the top and been where Samsung is now.
I had one, used it for years. It’s still in the draw, still looks fantastic, still works, although it’s a bit slow these days.
> Any folks from Nokia in this time care to shed more light on that?
Cellular connection was not allowed for the Linux devices so they don't compete with the Symbian phones. Nokia had deeply dysfunctional internal politics at that point.
That was a big source of contention, but admittedly there was plenty of skunkworks going around internally to experiment with the officially forbidden material.
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.
Oh. That brings so much into perspective. They wouldn't cannibalize their own sales, so someone else did. Classic. How deeply Kodak of them.
If you don’t eat your own lunch, someone else will…
>Nokia had deeply dysfunctional internal politics at that point.
Tell me a large company other than Apple that wasn't completely dysfunctional.
Google was doing quite well?
Doing well and being dysfunctional are not mutually exclusive. Google is still a dysfunctional company.
At one point they had five different messaging apps. They bought Motorola and then sold it for pennies, quickly abandoned the Nexus line before then, and the Pixel isn’t taking the world by storm.
Their efforts in the home have been scattershot, they have three separate OS initiatives that are not based on the same platform, and have all but abandoned Flutter.
Also remember that RIMs stock price was at its peak around 2010 - 3 years after the iPhone came out.
maybe it can be argued that it was a lot less dysfunctional way back in 2007
There are two google eras, before they killed Google Reader and after they killed Google Reader.
I work with Google and dysfunctional is too kind.
Definitely not the Apple of 10 years before.
A set of individuals being broadly correct in their analysis at an organization doesn't mean that that organization will be able to execute a pivot, even if that organization is pretty competent.
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.
It is painful to read. To me in retrospective the major mistake in the presentation is that it barely talks about end users and how the iPhone enabled a new world of use cases. It is only about business/corporate, features and specs. When analyzing the iphone on those dimensions all the reactive action items are doomed. They had not a chance to compete with that analysis.
Like some other commenters, I'm amazed at how well thought out Nokia's insight into the iPhone was at the time. They seemed pretty aware it was a major threat, and a game changer that needed to be responded to.
I'd be curious about an alternative history where Nokia hadn't tied itself so strongly to the burning reckage that was Windows Phone. Would Nokia have wound up as a solid android phone producer somewhere similar to where Samsung are now? I guess we'll never know.
My understanding is that the microsoft partnership was more like a late last ditch effort.
The market was changing to one where hardware was produced in asia and phones are loaded with ecosystem-centric software from Google or Apple (the real game changer, the app store, was launched next year).
Nokia did not really have a place in either of those and did not manage to adapt to this fundamental change. They did actually manage to adapt to the UI revolution of the first iphone.
> Based on highly speculative iPhone sales of 6.5 million during 2007 and 14 million during 2008.
Actual sales: 2007: 1.4M, 2008: 12M. Pretty spot on.
I cant find the quote and article now, but I read that before it was released no one else believed a computer like that could have any reasonable battery life. Then they opened it up and discovered the iPhone was really just a battery with a small logic board attached to it, and a lot of the heavy computational lifting was done when it connected to your computer.
The first iphone indeed had rather poor battery performance, epsecially at that steep price of 500$..
Can you expand on what you mean? What heavy computational lifting?
I wish I could find the original article, it was a link from a link from the bibliography of Chip War.
I think it was things like how you couldn't initially purchase music, and had to sync to iTunes to do that. I think there was more.
I did find this article, on iPhone being basically just a battery: https://mathiasmikkelsen.com/2011/05/blackberry-makers-thoug...
One can imagine the feeling of realizing the asteroid will hit in 6 months but your anti-asteroid solution will take 3 years to build.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250115192305/https://repo.aalt...
but doesn't seem to have the actual content. :(
The page seems online again: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
"Nokia impact minimal in terms of financials, but may impede US penetration or success"
Now there's a gem of a line...
there's another one, users still prefer buttons...
I was doing mobile development on a home healthcare product during this period. The product was built around Nokia’s line of phones with NFC built in, so we had good ties with them and would always get prototypes of their next generation of NFC-capable device ahead of time to get the software ready ahead of launch.
Shortly after the launch of the iPhone, Nokia canned the prototype S60 model we were working on without announcing any alternative. I always imagined they scrapped the whole pipeline of successors they had planned. The iPhone was at least 2 generations ahead of the unreleased prototype. Ended up having to port the whole thing to a different device from Samsung.
I have to share that my career as a software engineer started with Windows Phone. They used to give super nice Nokia phones out if you made an app. And free backpacks :)
Developing for Windows phone was easy as drag and drop. I honestly think no other native platform had that good of a DevEx. If you were already an app developer, I can see how it's hard to learn something new. But if it was your first time, this was prolly the easiest platform to start.
Eventually the platform died, and I found a career with Xamarin using a similar stack (C#, XAML) and built for other platforms as well.
I miss Windows Phone. Honestly some of the cleanest devices ever built with the carl zeiss lens and raised screen.
Thoughts:
1) References to Java on device and "lack of OTA" and the importance of "iTunes" indicated the presenters had little understanding of the possibility of the App Store which was a seismic shift in the industry that was apparently not foreseen.
2) They noticed some important missing features (3G, OTA updates, etc) but all of them were addressed with the next version (3G).
3) They were panicking about "iPhone mini" and thought it would be a feature reduction (like iPod interface) but in the end Apple just cannibalized its own profits and just lower the price on the full-featured 3G.
Nokia saw the iPhone, fast-forward to 2014, Nokia just gives up and sells their dead horse cellphone business to Microsoft. Microsoft casts a few necromancy spells and also just gives up 3 years later, and kills the same dead horse again. The end.
...and then they made some Android foldables that went nowhere. The end?
I expect to see a new Windows Phone in around 2030.
...and then to HMD, and then they gave up. The end (again)?
Me too, I was there.
For those who wish to deep dive into the mobile phone industry's history from the late 1990s and subsequent decades, I highly recommend industry analyst Tomi Ahonen's voluminous (I'm not kidding) blog from back then. I'm providing a link here about Nokia in particular:
https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/nokia/
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".
> - No mention of[…] Java support. Lack of Java would shut out a big mass of existing SW
Java was a bonus compared to ObjC, but we looked into supporting Blackberry and it was a nightmare to support all the different versions of java, frameworks, and screen types. Much easier to teach someone ObjC and produce one iPhone version.
Which was true, but developers decided it was worth writing new SW for iPhone when the App Store was unveiled (which was significantly later).
Sometimes a company can know the problem is real and be unable to address it. I was at Palm when HP bought us. HP knew the future was mobile and wanted to not be just a low margin OEM for someone else’s software platform. Buying Palm was a way for them to control their own destiny again.
Unfortunately the driver of this dream at HP was fired by the board before it got going and his replacement didn’t share the vision. A year later HP took a massive writedown and turned it all off. (Then he was fired by the board as well. The circle of life continues).
Does anyone have a PDF link that works?
I'm surprised that Nokia found out through the keynote presentation from Steve Jobs. LG and Prada announced their phone a little earlier and it had been shown already at the IF Design Awards a few months earlier.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
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?
I'm surprised that Nokia found out through the keynote presentation from Steve Jobs. LG and Prada announced their phone a little earlier and it had been shown already at the IF Design Awards a few months earlier.
Google "LG Prada Phone" for the Wikipedia article.
If Nokia had paid attention to those design awards then they too could have moved quickly on a similar device.
Is this a case where Nokia thought they had a moat?
> If Nokia had paid attention to those design awards then they too could have moved quickly on a similar device.
Nokia had their Maemo project [1]. A Linux-based OS for mobile touchscreen devices. They published their first device already in 2005 [2].
But the Maemo department was small, and the old Symbian department inside Nokia was big. The large number of managers and executives in the Symbian department played corporate politics, and kept the size and resources of the Maemo department small, as they perceived it an internal competitor threatening their position and the dominance of Symbian inside Nokia.
Nokia's CEO at the time (Jorma Ollila) had a background in investment banking and financial engineering. His previous post in Nokia was CFO. He didn't have the kind of passion and insight to software and user experience like Apple's Steve Jobs had. Today, nobody would expect to get visionary tech leadership if recruiting from the corporate's finance department.
At its soul, Apple is a software company that also makes their own hardware. Nokia was a hardware company that also made their own software.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet
>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.)
Nokia did had software chops, just on another metric than UI: According to a presentation at my university they were very deep in testing and verification and had a lot of expertise there.
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.
Worked at Nokia when iPhone was released. No strategy/management insight, but I recall the jokes made by my colleagues as I showed off my iPhone 1:
"Cool, but can it make phone calls"
On internal message boards, some employees advocated staying loyal to Nokia products, and others advocated buying the best product (iPhone) to challenge Nokia.
Wish they had navigated this one better...
Got a 404 at tiiny.host after following your link.
Currently erroring out for me:
> Error establishing a database connection
How is this already at the top of HN frontpage with just 6 points and zero comments as of my writing
I get "There was a problem acquiring a content access token from the data service. If this problem persists, please notify your administrator."
Which makes me wonder what a content access token is.
kiss of death for the poor server, might have been the highest traffic it has ever received
It's very recent
Don't fret. The IT systems in Finland's top polytechnic grad school have always been shit.
The link doesn’t work anymore but this one does for me https://aalto.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/IO_926740c...
As others have noted, the original presentation is here:
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
Looking back, it’s astonishing how long it actually took the competition to catch up in terms of developing an equally responsive touchscreen that felt anything like as intuitive.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mZ_S3R53bmVpvxixavkMPmMorCj...
I read this after doing a time travel back to 2007. I was using Blackberry/Nokia E## at the time. Remember thinking about a phone without a full keyboard!
Seems like Nokia had a good grasp of what had happened. Also a sense of immediacy to act.
But then - Nokia, Palm, Blackberry....
If we go only by this presentation, it seems that they tried to understand the forest by looking at every leaf in detail and then try to guess if the forest is beautiful or not.
That's a great time capsule. I'd love to see a similar document from the same period from Microsoft, because I really wonder if Ballmer's much-lampooned interview after the iPhone's intro was bluster or a real position held by the mobile unit at MSFT.
"<laughs> $500 fully subsidized with a plan? That is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine."
It's a take that has aged like milk, but Ballmer wasn't (and isn't) an idiot. The rest of the market looked at the iPhone and saw the future, and moved accordingly. I mean, the first major users I saw of the iPhone were BUSINESS users, in point of fact.
So I've always wondered if that was just bluster, or he really was drinking so much Redmond-flavored Kool-aid that he didn't, or couldn't, see what was about to happen.
(In re: Kool-aid, in 2009-ish, my company did a joint deal at a large client with MSFT; we had complimentary products, so we were pitching as a unit. The MSFT guys were genuinely vexed that we had iPhones. Like, personally affronted. And this was in Kansas, far from the mothership. At the time, WinMo was AWFUL. It couldn't even do IMAP without a 3rd party client -- it was Exchange or POP only. None of us had ever really used a WinMo phone for very long, because (at that time) a Treo was still a great option, and RIM hadn't fully wet the bed, so WinMo was pretty thin on the ground unless your paycheck said "Microsoft" on it.)
It's funny to see $500 being expensive for a phone here, because I absolutely remember it being so far above the market that it was rare to see the first generation in the world (and they had a price cut shortly thereafter).
There has been some nasty inflation in these past years, but $500 is a budget phone these days!
Well, $500 in 2007 is $756 in 2025, not exactly a "budget phone" price.
It was $500 with an expensive mandatory 2-year contract. With an expensive 2-year contract you can get most budget phones for 'free'.
_Evaluate the partnership with Microsoft (the enemy of your enemy...)_
I doubt todays management would read a PowerPoint that dense.
They got so much right and still got swamped.
I've been reading these Nokia archives for the whole day. It's so interesting to see what they did behind the scenes.
Wow! Nokia understood exactly what was happening and what needed to be done but failed to execute.
From the second to last page:
> Apple is most probably using the first Application Processor of nVidia in iPhone.
Was this true?
Nope, used a Samsung CPU with PowerVR GPU.
I helped cover IT hardware companies including Apple at a bulge-bracket investment bank. Not just Nokia, but the entire phone industry was caught flatfooted by iPhone as willvarfar and anonu said, despite rumors going around the industry. (The joke slide in Jobs' announcement presentation showing an iPod with phone dial was not too far off what we and most people expected.)
Thoughts on the presentation:
* "There is not much coolness left for Motorola" - The day of the announcement, I saw a press release from Motorola come across the wire, in which the company announced yet another phone with a keyboard. I felt pity for the unfortunate souls who had designed it, worked on its launch, and wrote the copy for the press release, and who now had to see their efforts fly into Hurricane iPhone.
* Predictions of lower-priced iPhones - Average iPhone prices of course rose, as opposed to falling. As JSR_FDED said, Apple has always played upmarket. I heard Apple's CFO say at a Citigroup-hosted investor conference that his company could release a $799 computer "but we don't want to".
(That said, it is quite possible to find deals, at least in the US. I got my iPhone 13 by agreeing to pay $200 over 30 months on top of my already super-cheap T-Mobile plan. The iPhone before that, I bought carrier refurbished for $100 from Sprint.)
And of course, there never was an iPhone mini with a fundamentally different UI. Despite the repeated commitment to improving on UI, etc., I guess it would have been too much to ask a company like Nokia, the king of releasing a new model with new UI and new form factor weekly, to imagine that another company would just not play the infinite-SKU game. (Conversely, it's not hard to imagine that had Apple entered the phone market in the 1990s during the years of endless indistinguishable Performa models, it might have tried to play along.)
* The MVNO mention is regarding rumors of Apple launching its phone in conjunction with an MVNO. We thought this was quite possible, but it was based on Apple having the credibility to immediately have millions of customers switch to it as their carrier, and not because Apple—of all companies—could not get whatever it wanted from carriers.
* Third-party app support - Most have forgotten that Apple really did expect webapps to be the app experience for iPhone's first year. But even that would have been an improvement over what things was like before iPhone. I speak as one who purchased my share of Palm apps. $20 was the norm for, say, DateBk6 (which, by the way, has at least one function that MacOS's Calendar just got with Sequoia).
* "Expect RIM and Palm to suffer" - I never liked using my company-issued Blackberries. I didn't leave Palm until 3GS in 2009; besides DateBk6, I also liked being able to tether my computer to my Palm Treo 700p.
* I'm pretty sure there was no sharing of data revenue or iTunes revenue. Apple got what it wanted from Cingular/AT&T regarding marketing and in-store push without having to preload bloatware or the carrier's brand name all over the device/packaging, and the carrier got the exclusive of the decade. Remember, Deutsche Telekom deciding to sell T-Mobile in 2011 was directly because it didn't have iPhone (so that tells you how the repeated mention in the presentation of T-Mobile turned out).
Oh man… I forgot about the software branding on pre-iPhones. Everything had the carriers brand on it from the boot screen to all the “special apps” and crap. iPhone had none of that and it absolutely pissed off the carriers. Apple turned them all into dumb pipes and they hated that.
No one’s gonna mention the weird “copyright 2005” on every slide?
Looks like a competent analysis where they recognize the threat of the iPhone to Nokia. Whether the higher ups failed to act on it or whether they could not act on it, even after Microsoft bought them is unfortunately a different topic.
New pdf link broken as well, as far as I can tell
New pdf link is broken, as far as I can tell.
Content doesn't exist for me
Anyone have a working link?
there are parallels to the Ukraine war in this story. Nokia = Ukraine, MSFT = USA. Things played out similarly in both cases.
Who are Apple, Android, Samsung, etc. in this analogy?
The analysis is fascinating. The iPod had already been a huge success for some time, retailing for hundreds of dollars. Of course Apple would make a phone. Even if it would have just been an iPod with feature phone ... features.
Nokia goes on and on about pricing in the report. How could they not get into their thick skulls that there was a good market for more expensive, better devices?
Then the tragedy with the Nokia N9, which both in hardware design and software UI design looks and feels more modern than Apple and Android devices from 2024.
I think Nokia owners and leadership simply gave up when they saw the iPhone launch, decided to cash out their money to offshore accounts, and hired some shady fellows from Microsoft to cover up by staging bad business decisions doomed to fail.
One thing that makes me anxious is it looks like right now the entire EU has its "Nokia in 2007" moment.
I’m getting a search error on the page.
When I loook on this [recent] history, the business and technical strategies Apple and Google employed in mobile were truly amazing. In my view, Apple and Google managed to reinvent themselves (organically or otherwise), while Nokia and Microsoft were weighed down by their attachments to the past. Blackberry is in the same ship. In hindsight it seems they should have embraced Android as early as possible (thinking in the success of the Samsung S II (2011)).
Alternative link to the presentation from a post on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hypponen_the-nokia-design-arc...
Post linked has one slide, the other commenter has shared this: https://nokia-apple-iphone-was-launched-presentation.tiiny.s...
That link now 404s.
uhh.. looks like the PDF has disappeared?
(removed)
Edit: because the article did not load my comment was based on someone's alternative link which did not show the entire presentation, so you can ignore my comment.
Look at it again without the knowledge of the last 18 years! And from the position of a Nokia employee back then. This is an extremely well made executive summary for that time.
Not really. Most (all?) of the insights here, probably delivered on short notice, were completely correct over the next 15 years. Don't let the clarity, brevity, and hindsight fool you - that's just how C-suite likes information presented and we have the benefit of looking back to know that all these things were "obviously true".
Classically, a CEO is an intern with a bald spot and an ulcer.
Nokia correctly predicted that iPhone would stand for "coolness" factor. It's amazing how Apple carried that brand since its inception and precisely what allows it to levy "Apple tax".
The execs even noted that the downside of iPhone would be non-removable battery. It is commendable that Apple changed the industry standard to something worse without even being in the top 10 in 2008.