I remember thinking at the time that is was a great metaphor, and then reading on HN that its straight from some business school text on how to motivate change.
"Leading Change" by John Kotter as far as I recall.
Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
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Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
#72The comments here mostly have the flavour of "RIP Nokia".
Nokia got out of the phone business in 2014. They still exist and are a mjor force in networking equipment.
True, they are of less interest to people here as they do not make many hackable consumer devices, but an obituary is premature
Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
#73Here's a contemporaneous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2195520 I'm surprised how positive HN was about this. I don't remember reading any positive coverage at the time. I personally thought the guy was an idiot. He wound up performing worse than my expectations.
Looks like that discussion was before Windows Phone was announced as the replacement. E.g. " The idea of a Nokia device running Android is pretty appealing. They've always had good hardware, but Symbian has become a develpment dead-end, and Meego isn't yet here. " Symbian definitely wasn't the way forward. MeeGo wasn't looking like it was gonna be an iOS or Android killer. Elop was right about needing to change horse…
> Elop was right about needing to change horses.
What was wrong with MeeGo?
The memo just states:
> at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.
But that's not soo bad considering that they started the platform in 2010.
It's not like changing to a different platformbat this point would make things faster anyway.
Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
#74I'm not saying this is a great letter, but he wasn't wrong. I owned both Symbian and Maemo devices, and the experience (both to use and develop) really was this bad. That's not to say everything about it was bad, or that there was nothing to like (as HN comments have often pointed out, there was), but it didn't hold a candle to iOS, or even Android. (And Android in those days was pretty hideous.) Now what Nokia did i…
I think it’s simple enough to see why Nokia thought Windows would be the right choice. It was far more polished than Android at the time. It ran well on cheap hardware. And they would have Microsoft backing them.
They brought in a trojan horse with Elop. Any sensible company at the time would have bet on both horses. E.g. Samsung and HTC had both Android and Windows Phone devices. IIRC there was even one Samsung model (I think a Samsung ATIV) that you could install both Android and Windows Phone 8 on.
Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm really having trouble understanding why this is even relevant in 2022. Who cares what the excuses and problems were within Nokia in 2011? Is Nokia's inability to keep up with cell phone technology in 2011 and important part of technical history? Business history? If so, why? I didn't even really get the burning oil rig analogy. It was a pretty melodramatic way of describing being beaten by a competitor, which hap…
You weren't the target for that memo. It was written to motivate Nokia employees and prepare them for strategic shifts. It showed employees there was an overarching plan in place for the changes that were to come. I'm sure you can find parallels from that to a website run by a VC for current, past, and potential investees.
Wasn’t it plainly obvious to everyone at the time? Elop did everything he could to devalue Nokia in preparation for a Microsoft buyout, with the outcome that Elop would be a Microsoft executive for a little while - before Microsoft inevitably “pivots” to some new shiny thing and discontinues everything under Elop’s remit. I can’t imagine how anyone expected anything else.
Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
#76Has any Nokia B9 user also tried Sailfish OS? Is it a proper successor to the Harmattan Meego distro the N9 had?
Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
#77Nokia N9 was the best phone I have ever owned. To these days their gesture navigation implementation is the best. And they had Swype keyboard preinstalled. Speaking of apps: Here maps, SoundHound, amazing mail client and calendar... Gosh I miss that phone. I used mine for about 3 years, I think, and sold it for more than a half of its original price in literally a couple of hours (which means my price was too low). B…
> Here maps
HERE was spun off, and is a great platform today. HERE WeGo is available for Android and iOS, plus web.
Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
#78I'm not saying this is a great letter, but he wasn't wrong. I owned both Symbian and Maemo devices, and the experience (both to use and develop) really was this bad. That's not to say everything about it was bad, or that there was nothing to like (as HN comments have often pointed out, there was), but it didn't hold a candle to iOS, or even Android. (And Android in those days was pretty hideous.) Now what Nokia did i…
I think it’s simple enough to see why Nokia thought Windows would be the right choice. It was far more polished than Android at the time. It ran well on cheap hardware. And they would have Microsoft backing them.
> I think it’s simple enough to see why Nokia thought Windows would be the right choice. It was far more polished than Android at the time
Everyone knew at the time Elop had made a terrible choice crafted to sell Nokia to Microsoft. Here's a nice HN comment I saved that was written a few days after the memo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2206437
And then the Nokia transition was supposed to take two years! Posting a memo like this and then taking two years to transition while expecting customers to buy inventory on the old platform? That's just a way to kill a company.
Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
#79Has any Nokia B9 user also tried Sailfish OS? Is it a proper successor to the Harmattan Meego distro the N9 had?
> Has any Nokia B9 user also tried Sailfish OS? Is it a proper successor to the Harmattan Meego distro the N9 had?
Yes I have it installed on a Sony Xperia. It's not my main phone (I have a work phone that I mainly use), but I would say it works very similar to the N9 so yes a proper successor. The major downside is a relatively small selection of native apps and that the platform did not progress as much as it could have. I would recommend that anyone who has a phone that can run it should try it out.
Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
#80I mean the Nokia-Microsoft phones were great Everyone who had one said so. It was the best of all the “third option” OS devices. All the WebOSes and such. But the market just doesn’t want a third option… even back then the Android and iOS were ossified
Were they? I had a Lumia with WP7 and it had nearly zero apps, zero multitasking (accidentally click on the Bing button and your app state is lost) and near zero things to do. I remember a very visible metaphor for the whole device was the calendar's month view: it literally showed "Lorem ipsum" for the days you had some events. Supposedly due to performance concerns, and this lasted to WP8 as well.
The only cool thing was the grid but that only goes skin deep. Otherwise I hated the phone. Maybe WP8+ devices were better but WP7 was a piece of crap. I didn't want to try WP8 and got myself a Jolla instead.