Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
(nokia-apple-iphone-was-launched-presentation.tiiny.site)489 points by late 2 days ago
489 points by late 2 days ago
>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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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:
For those not in the know, this is the Ex CIO of Boston Chicken.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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. ”
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?
Direct link to file: https://repo.aalto.fi/download/file/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
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"
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'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...
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.
Uploaded the PDF here: https://files.catbox.moe/y94qdz.pdf
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:
H = 80.400 + 5.122 L - 0.195 A + G
Going the other way, from my hand size, age, and gender my predicted height is 5'8".
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.
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.
[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.
Just to add to the party: Microsoft deck for Nokia acquisition
https://www.slidebook.io/company/microsoft/presentation/f646...
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"
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
>Nokia had deeply dysfunctional internal politics at that point.
Tell me a large company other than Apple that wasn't completely dysfunctional.
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.
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...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250115192305/https://repo.aalt...
but doesn't seem to have the actual content. :(
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.
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".
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).
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.
>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...
kiss of death for the poor server, might have been the highest traffic it has ever received
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.
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....
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!
No one’s gonna mention the weird “copyright 2005” on every slide?
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.
there are parallels to the Ukraine war in this story. Nokia = Ukraine, MSFT = USA. Things played out similarly in both cases.
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.
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...
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 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.