I honestly believe Nokia would have been bankrupt by now if Microsoft hadn't bailed them out. And if Nokia hadn't adopted Windows Phone, they wouldn't have had Ballmer's ear to convince him to sign on such a bad deal. Elop deserves more recognition for this manoeuvre than he gets.
They were the ones not wanting to make handsets with GNU/Linux originally, allowed some internal political wars between Symbian and GNU/Linux camps when they finally went for it and the best of it was having a contract clause for Elop giving him a bonus if he managed to sell the company.
I'd love to find out more. I've spoken to a couple of former employees, and I was told that what really stopped Nokia from responding to Apple effectively was that they had started to outsource engineering.
Has anybody written anything reliable on the subject?
However the had so many reboots that scared the developers away.
On one side they went
J2ME -> Symbian C++ / Java -> Symbian C++ with PIPS -> Symbian C++ / Qt -> Symbian is now open source -> Sorry use .NET instead
On the other side the Maemo was Gtk+, but then the team decided to move to C++ and port it to Qt.
These actions angered everyone that was trying to earn their money targeting Nokia devices.
Ah and don't get me started on Symbian C++ with its quirks copied from Win16 days and Palm OS.
The Apple without Steve Jobs wasn't that great and it still remains to be seen how they will do now.
After all, for how long can they keep selling new iPhones and Macs only?
Of course, they have the bank full and can afford to make a few errors for the time being.
The Register has a few good stories on it.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/21/nokia_hildon_the_gre...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/12/symbian_history_part...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/09/symbian_developers_m...
As you might imagine not everyone wants to disclose what went wrong on public forums.
They had all the money, all the opportunity, and they thought if they keep pumping out the same stuff, people will stay with them.
Oh, but they pretended to. Just like Samsung today.
Top management really needs to have people with deep and true understanding about software.
And perhaps top management needs also someone with a good sense about design. Many of them seem think they're Steve Jobs... Their failing tends to always be very consumer oriented (meaning they're not makers, maybe they're just using nicely designed products) and shallow understanding of the problem and especially possibility / innovation space.
Samsung, our new Nokia. I wonder if next chapters play out likewise.
And even that wasn't anything to write home about -- though they did experiment with nicer cameras...
I think Asphalt was the game chosen to demo it.
Had chosen something else most likely OpenGL ES would never had taken off, given how lousy it was supported across mobiles back then.
I had the N82 candybar model with a great camera and real xeon flash.
That said, Nokia had indeed some exceptional (for their era) devices, namely the Nokia Communicator.
The Finnish tech industry is still filled to the brim with ex-Nokia folk who simply do not understand what was better about the iPhone. Even today.
Some things were better about the iPhone, notably the UX, browsing and the app ecosystem which was starting to pick up (but was nowhere near what we have today).
Some thing were worse, and this is where many people seem to have developed selective memory issues. In particular the E72 didn't drop calls if one held it wrong, had a battery life at least double that of the iPhone and was less than half its price.
The N8 had a great camera and free offline maps. With Opera mobile it had a pretty damn good browsing experience. It was far from a complete dud.
The N9 could compete toe to toe with the 4S also on the UX, but by then it was too late. Nokia didn't have the foresight and guts to kill Symbian and bet the company on Maemo/Meego while they still had the possibility to build an ecosystem around it.
Apple invested all their effort into the iPhone and incrementally turned it from a good browsing device albeit average smartphone into a superb mobile computer while Nokia was starting and restarting four projects to compete with it.
Thanks to Opera? Mobile Safari on the first iPhone was the first browser that actually made sense and showed the web as you should.
Safari was impressive back then for sure, but feature-wise it's pretty bad even today.
It was obvious to anyone with eyes and fingers that iPhones were far superior to what Nokia was creating. Some random features I remember him showing: you could plug a mouse into the phone and it would vibrate during walking directions. They probably realized they couldn't make a better product, so they tried to make a differentiated one with some things that people don't care about.
http://www.hs.fi/kuukausiliite/a1381288411564?jako=8ca7cf121...
This is a letter a finnish journalist sent to Nokia in 2008. He was blown away by the iPhone! The letter was circulated internally and different managers called him to explain Nokias strategy. He meets up with the bosses and the following ensues:
----------------
The manager started to brief me on the backgrounds of Nokia's strategy. The idea was that people are different, and therefore, they need different kinds of telephones. I became agitated: "The kind of person who wants to use a bad telephone does not exist!", I said. THIS SPARKED AN argument. I explained in different ways how dreadful my new telephone was, and the manager spoke in its defence. All of a sudden he went silent. He looked directly in my eyes and said: "This conversation is in confidence, isn't it?"
I assured him that it was.
He continued:
"I agree completely with everything that you wrote in your letter and with what you have said now."
I was astounded.
"I agree completely with you and I want to apologise on behalf of Nokia for producing a bad telephone for you."
----------------
5 Years later (2013) he meets the manager again. He tells a story so disarmingly cute Apple should print it as advertising:
----------------
He told me that when the iPhones came out in the United States in the summer of 2007, the situation was followed at Nokia with keen interest. A large number of iPhones were immediately delivered to Nokia's head offices in Espoo by courier.
The manager took his own iPhone home that same evening. He studied it so enthusiastically that it caught the interest of his four-year-old daughter. As an experiment, he gave the telephone to his daughter, and she learned to use it immediately.
In the evening as the parents were going to bed, the drowsy four-year-old appeared at their bedroom door with a question:
"Can I take that magic telephone and put it under my pillow tonight?"
It was at that was the moment that the Nokia executive understood that his company was in trouble.
Look at HTC. What do they do besides great hardware? In the early days of Android, they were the go-to vendor for a close-to-stock Android experience. That could have been Nokia.
Now HTC is making the best VR headset and has a fairly bright future.
I'm looking at HTC - what I see is a company that did great with Android for a short while, then got chewed up as Apple and Samsung ran away with the high end of the market while the Chinese manufacturers gobbled up the bottom end. All the "Nokia should've gone with Android!" comments I see around the internet never try to explain how they think Nokia would've fared any better than HTC (or Sony, or Motorola).
> Now HTC is making the best VR headset and has a fairly bright future.
You and I see HTC's future very differently. The Vive is the thread they're hanging by, and as soon as Valve doesn't need them anymore, it's going to be over (http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/07/can-we-stop-pretend...)
Back in the day Nokia had good hardware, a 40% marketshare, brand recognition, a loyal customer base and a wide distribution network. Certainly noone knows what Android could have done for them, but theoretically they were at a better position to take advantage of it than HTC/Sony/Motorola.
For example I'm typing this on a Nexus 6 1st gen. A phone that when I bought it, I had to replace it in warranty because the color temperature of the screen was uneven and extremely annoying. And I paid at the time the price for a high end phone and got a subpar camera, a screen that doesn't have the contrast of other phones in its generation and a design that feels cheap and bulky. Well, at least it has stock Android on it. I got basically fooled in buying it, thinking it is a Nexus.
And I could say similar things about Sony. And about LG for that matter. For instance LG had big hits in LG G3 and in Nexus 4 & 5. My wife wanted an LG G5, but apparently it gets overheated, with the customer rep telling us they've had multiple returns. So she went with the Galaxy S7 Edge, because it was the safe choice.
Here's the big problem: if we are talking about exceptional hardware, none of these companies produce good products consistently. Do you know who does that? Apple and Samsung. And back in the day Nokia as well.
My friends and relatives with Samsung phones have had around 4 of them since that time because they always break.
That's not exactly a high bar regarding what we're talking about...
Lose money on their phone business?
>Now HTC is making the best VR headset and has a fairly bright future.
Not so sure about it. Even the best VR headset would be a niche product for the next 5 years at least. At best it can get to Wii kind of success for HTC, but that's not sustainable. And when the big players (Apple, Samsung) and the Chinese commoditizers come into VR, what will HTC have?
You could say this about basically anything for any company. The threat of competition is always there. How about you give some examples of what HTC could be doing where the threat of competition doesn't exist.
Nope, you can't say it for entrenched companies (and companies with diverse revenue sources).
You can't say it for Apple, you can't say it for Facebook, you can't say it for GM, you can't say for Samsung, ...
The threat of competition is always there. How about you give some examples of what HTC could be doing where the threat of competition doesn't exist.
They cripple said hardware with awful software.
Do a lot of people think this? After using a bunch of Android devices for 4 or 5 years, HTC is my "never again."
Was it? They had some nice models for the early smartphone era, and nice camera/lenses, but aside from that?
Plus, Nokia was king of featurephones, with tons of crappy, low margin models...
Meanwhile they were drowning the market with S60 and S40 phones what ultimately nobody wanted.
Edit: and by the time Maemo was actually running on a _phone_ it was head-to-head against iOS and WebOS. I think you could actually make a good case for WebOS being the greatest ever, but compared to those two Maemo was awful.
Can't touch anything, touch targets are all too small, so you are forced to use the stylus. Visually it looks like the love child of BeOS and KDE. can't tell from a static screenshot but everything was unbelievably slow.
That looks decent.
Maemo was shit compared to a Palm Pilot.
On the other hand, having an ACTUAL Linux command line with ACTUAL root and an ACTUAL keyboard was worth gold, and still sorely missed today.
Maybe IOs is more forgiving. But how would a terminal emulator help?
N900 was released in 2009.
iOS was leaps and bounds better even at 2007 in the original iPhone introduction. Heck, even Android was better than Maemo in 2009.
Well, that pretty much disqualifies any further point.
As for the OS itself, I just remember being surprised at how what seemed (naively) to me to be a lot of RAM for a small device just wasn't enough. Hardly a fault that was unique to Maemo, though. So much bloatware today...
Edit: Maybe I speak from a position of ignorance about the industry. But I also remember thinking how greatly awesome it would have been if I could run Android on the new Lumia hardware. I also remember the fact that Nokia was worth 30 bn before the new ceo, ex microsoft employee, came in and within years it was left worth 9 bn; pop culture facts I suppose.