Nokia had all sorts of structural issues, true, and a bewildering array of self-competing products, but it also had a lot to work with and the brand recognition was absolutely enormous. He effectively flushed it all down the toilet for a punt on Windows Mobile, which was already looking like an "also-ran" by that point. When it (predictably) didn't work out, MS took the brand and some of the company, then ran it into the ground.
A sad end to what had been a huge success story.
(I'm not challenging the idea that nokia was on a downward slope by the point he came along, but he just accelerated it, see e.g. the burning platforms memo)
Are you updating the maps manually or is it still being updated through some web app interface?
I guess abandoning Symbian to switch to Microsoft should be considered a significant misstep, even if motivated by the then financial motives.
(Maemo, the precursor to Meego, was originally a GTK-based platform. The Symbian faction of Nokia acquired Trolltech in order to be able to advocate for Qt to be a shared development platform for both Series 60 and Maemo, which meant throwing out large parts of the existing Maemo codebase and starting again. This delayed Maemo significantly, and somewhat ignored the fact that there were basically 0 apps on Symbian that anyone cared about in the slightest)
That's not fully correct. Symbian was the leading smartphone operating system years 2000 - 2008 or so in Europe and some parts of Asia. Skype, browsers, games existed. I remember Skype offering me a refund when they discontinued the app.
I remember visiting software conferences in the US maybe 2005:ish and all the Americans had only feature phones. They seriously told me "All I want to do is call and text, I don't need anything else". The truth was that packet data coverage sucked in the US in those days.
These were Smartphones with keypad navigation (qwerty models also existed). They had packet data and the possibility to install apps, both native Symbian and Java (J2ME MIDP).
The problem was that developing for Symbian was too difficult for many programmers. Not only outside Nokia but also inside. I would claim that at least 40% of the Symbian developers did not fully understand how strings worked. Which had several types, none of which was called string and conversion between them or using the wrong one was a continuous source of bugs.
MIDP was too limited in its sandbox to build truly competitive apps.
When the iPhone came and capacitive touch started to win Nokia had nothing to offer. They had a couple of models with resisitive touch (requiring a pen or long nails), but all too little and too late.
When the Smartphone development started in the US Nokia was just obsolete. No competitive hardware and a difficult software platform. So Apple and Google conquered the world.
Depends on the time. It must have been christmas 2002 that I took my first skiing videos using the video recording app. Probably still in beta then. And I sent the app to the recipient by Email. Sending the videos went by MMS. Max size 50 KB IIRC, maybe 100 KB but I believe that came only in the next model.
Yeah, those smart phones came only with a still camera. But being able to build a video recorder show the strength of the platform. Of course there was no security model, access control or anything at the time, which made things easier.
Of course in 2010, being able to build a video recording app was no longer a competitive advantage.
Around 2003:ish Nokia was the only Symbian licensee left and they had even 3 UIs: Series 60, Series 80 and Series 90. Only Series 60 survived. Series 80 had 2 products and Series 90 one public prototype. Series 90 was the only with touch input originally. Series 60 got touch after the iPhone, but that was too late.
Yes, Symbian C++ was too difficult even inside Nokia. Productivity was very low, many products got cancelled before seeing the market and those who did were massively delayed.
That's definitely not true. I joined Symbian in 2005 and there were lots of licensees around. I think 2005/2006 were the glory years of the company.
Agree with the ugly. Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some say it was an engineering master piece of the 1990s. But it was different from everything else and it was difficult, I don't think this can be disputed.
The no good reason is not the whole truth:
* When Symbian (then called EPOC32) was developed there was no C++ compiler that supported exceptions without major problems. "Don't use them" was typical in style guides at the time. So EPOC came up with their own macro hackeries instead, which worked when used correctly. The latter was too difficult for many developers.
* Early devices had just single digits of megabytes of RAM. So 500 times less than a phone of today. More macro trickeries to save Bytes were the answer.
Porting Symbian UI to Qt meant that they could at least merge surface-level stuff and have core apps that ran on both Maemo/Meego and Symbian, then retire Symbian when no one would care or notice.
I think this is correct. It had a traditional market base but was already hopelessly noncompetitive except for old reputation and brand value (see my other comments here) and on a steep decline. Compared to iPhone and Android which were more modern and on a steep growth path.
https://gigaom.com/2009/10/23/symbian-executives-rips-into-g...
Around the official death of Windows Mobile, most of us just wanted them to launch hardware that wasn't a joke.
That's the problem with anecdotes... they only represent your very narrow window of experience while ignoring literally every other person on the planet.
> but I don't know a single person that wanted a Windows phone
I only represent a single person, and I make no claims about anyone else!
...no apps. Windows Mobile just couldn't attract quality developers to its platform. After witnessing that - I fully understood why Android went with Java (the language): there was already a deep pool of seasoned Java developers.
For instance, Apple forced people to write iPhone apps in Objective-C for years and nobody avoided the platform because of that, even buying Macs and paying 99 dollars a year for the privilege of writing and selling iOS apps.
>That's the problem with anecdotes
I'm not saying those problems affected Windows phone, but that's the association customers have with Windows as a brand due to decades of facing those problems with desktop Windows.
I like not having apps pester me for updates or pollute my notifications, when all I care about is email, websites and phonecalls (oh and offline maps, I almost forgot)
I guess I am a very boring person!
The discipline also extended to heavy sandboxing of the apps so a lot of functionality was simply unimplemetable, such as reminders for missed notifications.
But the phone worked, the UI was intiutive and responsive, and the only reason to move on, other than general phone obsolescence like the 5MP camera, was the lack of mainstream apps.
We had a brief experience with WP10 on another phone, and it seemed spiffier but less stable. WP8 was the high point.
I appreciated the consistency in design and that even the cheap devices like the 635 felt quite snappy. They also seemed a bit more coherent with update support. Yes, the no WP7->8 update path was a huge mistake, but I think by the end they were updating the OS for all WP devices (capable of being updated) centrally, rather than relying on the OEMs; the WP10 update betas I tried seemed competent enough but there was a growing sense their heart wasn't in it.
With each new generation of Windows Phone, Microsoft not only closes the gap with iOS and Android in important ways, but it also differentiates in important ways
WINDOWS PHONE 8 REVIEW
https://www.theverge.com/2012/10/29/3570494/windows-phone-8-...
On its heyday (approaching 10% in Europe), Windows Phones were seen as the alternative for those that wanted an Android alternative and didn't care about iPhone.
This is Android based on my eight years with them.
I won't argue with you on iPhone, it's a great "I just want it to work" option. And since there's no other alternative, it's what I carry today.
But Windows Mobile was a breath of competency in a market of basically all bad Google phones.
The first modern Windows Mobile phone launched in November 2015. The market of Google phones at that point in time was the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 5X, and Nexus 6.
Now I'm not a huge fan of the Nexus 6 (though I certainly wouldn't call it "bad"), but the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 are still to this date the best value smartphones ever released.
Everything else outside of the Chinese market has Google Play Services with root access to the system and as controlled by Google's MADA agreement with manufacturers which has already been found illegal in multiple jurisdictions across the globe.
Convention dictates that "Google phones" specifically means e.g., Nexus/Pixel devices.
Fortunately, if you're unwilling to distinguish between hardware and software, there's already a very convenient and unambiguous term for mobile devices that run Google's OS. In fact, you just used it in the same sentence!
The critics and the customers loved N9. I would have loved to own one. Instead, it was silently killed off without even being given a chance.
N9 was Nokia adapting to the smartphone/touchscreen ecosystem.
(a) N9's sales were a drop in the ocean. It is like if you have a game with 100% good customer reviews. But there are only 50 reviews. The tiny but vocal segment who loves it, loves it. That doesn't matter.
(b) There was no room for a third ecosystem. Developers were busy writing apps for Android and iPhone. Nobody would write apps for (random 3rd OS that has a couple of million phones). It wouldn't matter if the N9 had had working desktop fusion and teleportation. The platform was dead.
The N9 had a very good reception, and with Nokia's prestige and loyal customer base it would have been possible to compete against the iPhone. The N9 built on top of the N700 series, which was launched ahead of the iPhone. It was essentially Debian running in your pocket. It already had a huge "app store", all Linux repositories. Polishing this was not that hard, given that they also controlled Qt. Qt also meant a simple migration path for Symbian applications.
People don't realize how mature the N9 was. Read some reviews. Their maps application had incredibly good offline coverage and offline routing in 2011. So good, I've been using it for that purpose till 2020 as nothing compares. Mind that Google Maps still licenses lots of mapping data from Navteq, which was Nokia's mapping spinoff.
Aside from this, even if they wanted to go with Windows Mobile, it sounds like a really bad strategic move not to have a backup. Especially because going with Windows Mobile was a bigger gamble, which ended up failing spectacularly. Going ahead with the N9 didn't use many resources. Windows Mobile devices by Nokia would eventually reuse the same hardware. Why not selling both.
> It was essentially Debian running in your pocket. It already had a huge "app store", all Linux repositories.
They dropped Debian as a base and switched to Moblin, which was one of the problems. Also it is telling that you refer the community repos as app store, and ignore that it also had actual proper app store too ("Nokia store"). The utter failure of Nokia store was another glaring issue that they never figured out. Critically the community repos, no matter how awesome, did not support commercial apps in any way, nor did it bring any income to Nokia.
> Polishing this was not that hard, given that they also controlled Qt
Yeah, nope. 80/20 etc.
Did you mean N900?
(I'd tend to agree with the second point that MeeGo would have had difficulties and likely would have failed later, even if they'd focused on MeeGo and the N9, but there was something to it)
The sales of a future hypothetical Windows phone were far less at that point.
> There was no room for a third ecosystem. Developers were busy writing apps for Android and iPhone.
Yet Nokia was attempting to launch a third ecosystem, just not the one that anybody wanted.
If you agree Windows phone was never going to work, then you need a story how Meego could have worked when Nokia had a fraction of the resources to put into it.
Windows phone was not going to work because the brand is herpes, and Microsoft makes technical decisions based on business strategy rather than merit (and everybody know it.) It had nothing to do with the amount of resources put into it, which I'm sure were vast; Microsoft is happy to lose money in markets for a decade or two in order to block new entrants, waiting for the market leader to make a mistake. If people wanted a phone that would trap them into a rent-seeking ecosystem, they already had a choice in iPhones that was at least attractive and common.
Meego phones could have slotted into the nerd/serious phone category that various Android distributions have awkwardly tried to fit in. It would have also been a non-US alternative for markets like Europe and China. They also could run Android apps within a VM.
https://dominiescommunicate.wordpress.com/2012/09/01/n9-outs...
For context: less than 18 months earlier the phone manufacturers had finally agreed, after a long consumer campaign, to all support combined data and power over a single cable. This allowed to get rid of custom chargers everybody hated.
Verizon's specs at the time still mandated that any phone they sold had to have separate power and data sockets. How do I remember? I spotted this brilliant piece of malice in their specs and raised it with the project lead, who then took it higher up.
Compared to iPhone, N9 had a practically zero marketing budget, and an announcement at launch that the platform has no future as Nokia is going all-in on a Microsoft partnership.
As far as an apples-to-oranges comparison can be made, N9 did great.
However, management had reasons. There was no room for a third platform.
I also note the unfalsifiability of some of these claims. On the one hand if N9 beat the Windows phone, that shows how awesome it was. On the other hand, if it was destroyed by the iPhone, well, it was sabotaged.
I call that BS.
The market was shifting to Android. Industry veterans like Jean-Louis Gassée wrote that during OPK era, he was approached by Nokia board asking for advice, and he told them to go Android. The board refused, and it was decided to bet the company on Windows Phone. Not for some technical or organizational/cultural reason, but purely for strategic reasons.
https://web.archive.org/web/20121225214448/http://www.comput...
German carmakers are waking up late to electric vehicles, but they are acting now to pivot to the winning technology, before their marketshare reaches 3%. Nokia bound themselves for a multi-year exclusive contract with Microsoft, that even Microsoft folks were surprised they would enter at such a minimal payment for MS. I remember reading reports that the Microsoft negotiations team was authorized to go considerably higher than what they ended up paying.
So it was overconfidence on Nokia's part to what extent they would be able to sell the turd that was Windows Phone, coupled with the lack of exit strategy if that didn't work out. And that's even before talking about Elop's financial incentives to run the smartphone business into the ground and sell it to Microsoft.
Jobs was able to bring his team and technology from NeXT to become the new core at Apple, and fire everyone who didn't want to play along. Elop had no such luxury.
I wish I could blow my failed ventures so horribly. And it indeed was a failed venture by the time Elop got there.
Nokia kept the parts of their business that actually were worth something, and used the MS money to buy more marketshare in networks. It was a good deal.
From what I’m aware, Jobs instead actually came back and axed the vast majority of projects that were being worked upon. I’m fact, there’s a relatively famous town hall where a Mac user complains about this and Jobs explains why he needed to cut nearly everything.
That said, he did make a large number of unforced errors, mostly notably the Burning Platform memo, which accelerated the decline.
That also seems quite an oversimplification, and one that shifts the blame from leadership to the employees.
But he wasn't and he didn't. Everything else is 'could be'.
In 2006, my girlfriend at the time worked in HR at Nokia's US headquarters in Irving, Texas. The writing as on the wall and the company was preparing for a major layoff because Nokia's mobile phone business in the US was tanking. Luckily for her, she was able to transfer to Nokia-Siemens Networks. This was before the iPhone was released and before Elop joined the company in September 2010.