> instead of making better phone than Nokia he would make something that no one at Nokia or anywhere else even dreamed of.
This oversells what Apple
did and undersells just how much Nokia dropped the ball. Nokia wasn’t blindsided by the iPhone or touch screen interfaces. They knew about touchscreen interfaces and actively chose not to persue it. “Because people want tactile keyboards” essentially they Listened to much to their own engineers who were in love with blackberries. While Apple mindlessly perused a vision that notably had already failed them once in the Newton, and which every business major would say was a suicide mission “because the iPhone will canibalice the iPod market”.
The reason Nokia failed was because management was just horribly bad. Not only did they have 500 different models of phones with every team competing internally, the were proud of it.
Apple went out with “we have one phone and one phone only” at that time. And Nokia engineers laughed them off saying “how the hell will they ever complete with us, they have just one phone!?”, and of cause they also laughed at the price point, saying that trying to sell expensive phones in North America was concept that was dead at birth. No, to them true market dominance was to sell cheap phones in India and China.
On the engineering side, that point in time was also when Nokia had extremely shitty software, again this wasn’t a mistake, they were proud of it. The N95 had like 4 different menu systems to reach the same screens. The iPhone didn’t do much before it had the web and apps, but it was simple, people intuitively understood it. But Nokia didn’t care. They didn’t even consider Apple a competitor even after iPhone started to gain popularity. They didn’t care about the high end market segment and only cared about Google as a competitor.