Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

> That his letter pointed out a real problem never seemed controversial.

Only in retrospect. At the time, the internet was full of people who thought Symbian was Just Fine. And they had sales figures of millions of (mostly 12-key) "smartphones[0]" to prove it. And then this shifted to "Lost Causeism" when whatever MooMooMo platform never got off the ground.

[0] Okay, I had one of these and you could check your email or do a google search, but obviously the iphone it was not.

> Apple was making was a desire object - something that was more than the sum of its parts.

It's harder to do now with iPhone's market size, but I think we're looking at it with rosy glasses.

Where Apple succeeded is having a viable touch interface. That's where RIM, Nokia, Fujitsu, Compaq and countless other device makers failed at. Including Nokia.

Otherwise the iPhone was buggy and crashing all the time, battery life was trash compared to other phones or the iPod, I don't know anyone actually relying on it to make "serious" calls (we kept our feature phones) it would straight ignore some of the incomming calls and we just were willing to go through all of that to get a usable touch UI.

It is not intended to be flippant, but I believe this one time the entirety of the relevance boils down to the following:

“Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it.”

Yes, and I am certain MBAs review Nokia rise and fall in great detail as a result.

I wish I could speak more to the experience directly. I eventually got a n900 used but after the fall, & I was a college kid with no real need for it. What was thrilling & exciting & totally different was that the n900 was a computer. A regular computer. Trying to learn how to make GNOME an ok experience, on very low res mobile. But we knew essentially what it was; it obeyed & played within the regularinux desktop environment world. it was a linux desktop environment, and that gave it open potential. Everything is/was orchestrateable/controllable by dbus, the user's control plane. All the apps exposed themselves over IPC. It played in the connected desktop world as best of breed.

The failure of this situation to talk about how intensely stupid it was to give up on the platform is farcically bad. What was here was incredible. It needed improvement & work but the architecture was immensely omni-potential, more capable clearly & growing well known existing tech well, rather than alternate reality symbian or then counter respondes danger or android. weird new alternates to actual linux desktop. Selling out to MS was one of the most shortsighted sorry pathetic givings ups, in a time of vast growth with fantastically little belief in yourself & your people doing good. There was no technical reason to refocus. (But bad numbers, as most players saw). They should have kept going. This was a decision made by people who had faint sense, gailed to appreciate hope, missed clarity on what creating value was like, what value was. This was a pathetic ignorant stupid business decision, to end Maemo. Things rocked, that was a great could do possibility, the OLE COM competitor kf DBus was winning, the market just didnt see yet.

I use to work for HTC. I was there when iPaq launched and saw the birth of first PocketPC phone, a black and white screen phone for Sagem/Mitsubishi. I would like to share my opinion on this issue of tech disruption. From my point of view, Nokia did not have enough resource and time to meet the challenge which was brought about by Apple and Google/Android. All the tech companies need at least one dominating advantage in order to survive. This dominating advantage needs to crush all challenger in that specific area. Apple has operating system. Samsung has display. Chinese phone makers have CCP. Nokia had nothing that matter. They had two choices, create one or buy one. They were not able to do either so they fade away.