Comment by jillesvangurp

Comment by jillesvangurp 2 days ago

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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.

masom 2 days ago

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).

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  • jillesvangurp 2 days ago

    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.

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    • sampo 2 days ago

      > 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.

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  • bombcar 2 days ago

    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.

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    • asveikau 2 days ago

      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.

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      • jandrese 2 days ago

        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.

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    • 7thaccount 2 days ago

      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.

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      • pmontra 2 days ago

        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.

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      • tartoran a day ago

        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.

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      • muststopmyths a day ago

        >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.

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      • cbozeman 2 days ago

        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.

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    • masom 2 days ago

      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.

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      • jandrese 2 days ago

        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.

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    • jorvi 2 days ago

      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.

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      • int_19h 2 days ago

        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.

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        • pjmlp a day ago

          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.

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      • 7thaccount 2 days ago

        Buttersmooth UI is how I'd describe it too. I loved the themes at the time too.

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      • bigstrat2003 2 days ago

        I wouldn't exactly call flat UI a good thing. They are one of the horrible flaws of our current UI design trends.

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      • pjc50 2 days ago

        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.

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      • delusional 2 days ago

        As I recall it, calling Windows Phone "buttery smooth" is quite an overstatement. I remember it looking drab dull and cheap at the time.

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  • Tommix11 2 days ago

    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.

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    • dev_daftly 2 days ago

      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.

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  • spiralpolitik 2 days ago

    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.

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    • mxfh 2 days ago

      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.

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      • duskwuff 2 days ago

        > 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).

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      • rvba a day ago

        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.

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    • pjmlp 21 hours ago

      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.

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    • tgma 2 days ago

      > 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.

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      • spiralpolitik 2 days ago

        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.

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mindtricks 2 days ago

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.

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holri 2 days ago

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.

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  • Twirrim 2 days ago

    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.

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  • badgersnake 2 days ago

    The follow up N9 was that. It was great. Elop canned it.

    I had to import one from Australia. It was totally worth it.

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    • jayelbe 2 days ago

      I miss my N9 so badly! Without a doubt the best phone I've ever owned.

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      • zeroc8 2 days ago

        I wanted one, but then Elop killed it. I took quite a long time for Android to become as good.

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rcarmo 2 days ago

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...

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  • yabatopia 2 days ago

    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.

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afavour 2 days ago

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.

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  • kawsper 2 days ago

    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!

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casenmgreen 2 days ago

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.

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  • PeterStuer 2 days ago

    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.

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jorvi 2 days ago

> 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.

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  • mrtranscendence 2 days ago

    > 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).

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  • naming_the_user 2 days ago

    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.

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  • Terretta 2 days ago

    > 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.

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  • rdsubhas 2 days ago

    ~Thrice. Airpods.~

    Edit: Airpods also has a majority market share, so probably it's not the third in this list.

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  • hilux 2 days ago

    This is such an important lesson!

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  • afavour 2 days ago

    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.

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    • sangnoir 2 days ago

      > ...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.

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    • sleepybrett 2 days ago

      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.

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openrisk 2 days ago

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.

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  • spiralpolitik 2 days ago

    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.

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  • wbl 2 days ago

    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.

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    • openrisk 2 days ago

      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.

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      • CalRobert 2 days ago

        Lots of people are. The answer appears to be “down the drain”.

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      • fire_lake a day ago

        People forget that for a long time ASML was government backed

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      • lotsofpulp 2 days ago

        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.

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    • PeterStuer 2 days ago

      Which is exacly why Finland should have blocked the MS deal. Nokia was a HUGE percentage of Finland's GDP.

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qingcharles 2 days ago

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

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agumonkey 2 days ago

> 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.

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  • ryandrake 2 days ago

    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."

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    • GoToRO 2 days ago

      This is exactly how a german-car-maker manager put it: just an item on a BOM. Their cars have hilarious bad software.

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    • pjc50 2 days ago

      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.

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      • ryandrake 2 days ago

        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.

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      • drdaeman 2 days ago

        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.

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jagermo 2 days ago

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.

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  • zekica 2 days ago

    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.

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  • mindtricks 2 days ago

    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.

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rawgabbit 2 days ago

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.

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  • SSLy a day ago

    BTW, an actual skunk-works project that delivered is the only way that current nokia hasn't collapsed yet again.

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pjmlp a day ago

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.

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teekert 2 days ago

I really liked Windows phone. Had a Lumia 800. Nice phone.

I still think they should have kept going with it.

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freetonik 2 days ago

>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.

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asimovfan 2 days ago

So Microsoft also killed linux on phones basically. I had a n900. Best phone ever.

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  • burnte 2 days ago

    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.

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cbozeman 2 days ago

> 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.

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  • dev_daftly 2 days ago

    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.

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  • jjfoooo4 2 days ago

    Wasn’t it already too late by the time Ballmer left?

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    • actionfromafar 2 days ago

      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.

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joshmarinacci 2 days ago

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.

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b8 2 days ago

Why didn't Nokia go bankrupt afterwards? They have Bell Labs, but don't make any interesting products.

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  • stephen_g a day ago

    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.

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    • hnuser123456 16 hours ago

      So they gained a reputation for reliability/durability and pivoted to infra?

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      • yencabulator 13 hours ago

        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.

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dismalaf 2 days ago

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...

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clippy99 2 days ago

> Symbian was going to magically fix all their problems.

Really? I remember Symbian had the crappiest and most shoestring C++ dev stack ever.

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hilux 2 days ago

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?)

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  • yencabulator 13 hours ago

    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?

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    • hilux 13 hours ago

      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.

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