Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where Is Nokia Now?

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 109 posts

Re: Where Is Nokia Now?

#61

Post by jamesblonde »

Nanite wrote: post #59

Nokia fits in a bigger picture of large European tech firms which stumbled over the last 20 year, sold off and shut down divisions before radically restructuring and reemerging as a smaller but more nimble companies. What is very worrying however that unlike in the US, which had similar scenarios with HP and IBM, hardly anything close to new giants of the likes of Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon appeared during that timef…

We haven't done software right in Europe. Really, we only have SAP and computer games companies as massive software companies. We have been terrible at software. It's very worrying for the remaining industries that software will soon eat: automobiles and trucks. We're way behind there. Deja vu all over again, maybe?

Re: Where Is Nokia Now?

#62

Post by chrisseaton »

abritinthebay wrote: post #46
kaybe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think, but the setup and configuration on these things can take forever. And nevermind the things that can and occasionally do go wrong and need fixing.

It took literally 5 minutes to set up my scale to connect to Wifi and I've had to change the battery once in 3 years. You're vastly overestimating the friction here.

Yes I don't think connected devices are always the best, but the person I was replying to was doing the classic informercial black-and-white video impression of someone pretending something is more difficult than it actually is.

Re: Where Is Nokia Now?

#63

Post by samsolomon »

pidge wrote: post #35
newobj wrote: post #2

Where are they now? Acquiring and aggressively ruining my Withings Body Composition scale, that's where.

What did they mess up? I have one and all I noticed is that the iPhone app got an update that imparts a cleaner UI design, reminiscent of Nokia's golden age (i.e. Marko-Ahtisaari-esque).

I've found the app cleaner, but more difficult to use. I have several complaints about this new app:

- Heart rate used to show on a chart that would show normal range and your history. Now it's a single number. I have to swipe to see my history.

- I can no longer swipe pinch to customize the date range.

- They removed one of my features, a running average of my weight over time. If you zoom out to three-month view, you can still see an average. However, I liked seeing it always.

I think they could have updated the fonts and made the background colors shades of white and gray. This would have made it felt clean without removing a ton of functionality. Perhaps mocking up a redesign will be a weekend project for me.

Re: Where Is Nokia Now?

#64

Post by jpalomaki »

I haven't figured out the actual arrangement behind HDM Global, but can't helping thinking this is just some temporary arrangement and Nokia will acquire it if the phones turn out to be a success. I would say they are definitely planning a real comeback to consumer market.

Re: Where Is Nokia Now?

#65

Post by 5_minutes »

I can't help but thinking that Nokia is horribly managed. The amount of inferior products they sold to their loyal audience over and over again, until we were all so fed up with it: different proprietary cables on same-years' devices, stagnant software development and replacing durable with cheap plastics and materials.

Much of the nostalgia connected with this brand is from its early phone days, it's been an utter mess since.

To that extend, there are very little highlights since then.

Re: Where Is Nokia Now?

#66

Post by noir_lord »

jamesblonde wrote: post #61
Nanite wrote: post #59

Nokia fits in a bigger picture of large European tech firms which stumbled over the last 20 year, sold off and shut down divisions before radically restructuring and reemerging as a smaller but more nimble companies. What is very worrying however that unlike in the US, which had similar scenarios with HP and IBM, hardly anything close to new giants of the likes of Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon appeared during that timef…

We haven't done software right in Europe. Really, we only have SAP and computer games companies as massive software companies. We have been terrible at software. It's very worrying for the remaining industries that software will soon eat: automobiles and trucks. We're way behind there. Deja vu all over again, maybe?

UK has a few large ones - though we are trying hard to get out of Europe at the moment...

Sage and Sophos are pretty well known.

Generally though I agree and it's something Europe should/could be good at since they are high paying jobs that require a good thorough educational system.

Re: Where Is Nokia Now?

#67

Post by pavlov »

dijit wrote: post #6

Every time the fall of Nokia is mentioned I always retell the feelings I had sitting in Ruholahti, Helsinki on February 2011- the Friday of my first week at the company; and hearing the news that R&D was shutting down in favour of Windows Phone. Many considered it an inferior product, many had just lost the work of their lives. Most just went to the bar across the street. I feel the heart and soul of Nokia, just like…

...telling stories of how great things were and could have been.

They're deluding themselves. Things were not great at Nokia before February 2011. The product pipeline of mostly Symbian-based smartphones was an unfolding disaster.

Re: Where Is Nokia Now?

#68

Post by jpalomaki »

wwweston wrote: post #21

Sometimes when I'm in the mood for a little self-congratulation, I look back on a blog piece I wrote shortly after the Burning Platform memo and subsequent move towards Windows Phone: http://weston.canncentral.org/writing/index.php?2011/02/18/0... I was pretty ignorant of the rest of Nokia's business outside of mobile devices, and there are some particulars that differed a bit, but I think I called basic trajectory t…

Can't help thinking that selling the phones to Microsoft was the plan-B all along and one of the reasons why they brought in Elop and decided to go with Windows.

Selling to Microsoft when things went bad was a pretty big thing. If they had not been able to sell the mobile phone business for decent price, it might have taken down the whole company. Considering what happened, the outcome for Nokia was (IMHO) pretty spectacular.

Re: Where Is Nokia Now?

#69

Post by wolfgke »

jamesblonde wrote: post #61
Nanite wrote: post #59

Nokia fits in a bigger picture of large European tech firms which stumbled over the last 20 year, sold off and shut down divisions before radically restructuring and reemerging as a smaller but more nimble companies. What is very worrying however that unlike in the US, which had similar scenarios with HP and IBM, hardly anything close to new giants of the likes of Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon appeared during that timef…

We haven't done software right in Europe. Really, we only have SAP and computer games companies as massive software companies. We have been terrible at software. It's very worrying for the remaining industries that software will soon eat: automobiles and trucks. We're way behind there. Deja vu all over again, maybe?

> We haven't done software right in Europe. Really, we only have SAP and computer games companies as massive software companies. We have been terrible at software. It's very worrying for the remaining industries that software will soon eat: automobiles and trucks. We're way behind there. Deja vu all over again, maybe?

As a German I say: I would not say we can't do software or we are bad at it. "Getting really big" is not the typical German culture - so instead we have software companies from mittelstand that are quite successful in their niche, but if you don't work in the specific industry, you surely have never heard of.

What we are really bad at is internet-based (cloud-based) services. On one hand in Germany there are strong data protection laws which make some kind of monetization harder - but only people from Germany and neighboring countries seem to care about what is done with their data. On the other hand there existed German companies that tried to provide similar services to GMail, Dropbox etc., but they simply did not have the large financial backing that is necessary to provide such a service with large capacities for free in the hope that some time in the future they will make money on it. So they had to do monetization attempts much earlier on which did not work out well.

Re: Where Is Nokia Now?

#70

Post by wolfgke »

5_minutes wrote: post #65

I can't help but thinking that Nokia is horribly managed. The amount of inferior products they sold to their loyal audience over and over again, until we were all so fed up with it: different proprietary cables on same-years' devices, stagnant software development and replacing durable with cheap plastics and materials. Much of the nostalgia connected with this brand is from its early phone days, it's been an utter m…

> Much of the nostalgia connected with this brand is from its early phone days, it's been an utter mess since.

In the early times there were great phones by Nokia, but also among the later ones there were great ones. Just mention "Nokia N900" on HN and get detailed explanations... ;-)

Post reply on HN