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Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

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Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#171

Post by AdamCraven »

I worked at Nokia as a SWE in Berlin when that email dropped into my inbox. A few days later, it reached the press. We mostly thought ok, fine. What’s next?

Before that, we’d been building an app for Nokia N97 handset users, an ever-decreasing market - all the engineers on the team had iPhones.

We thought after that email that the next step would be to go on Android. Sure, Nokia would contract a little as it lost its platform, but the platform wasn’t that valuable. It was the great handsets - software wasn’t Nokia’s forte - the leadership structure just didn’t have the vision to bring it together.

When the meeting rolled around, we all went to a big conference centre at the heart of Berlin to watch the announcement of the future vision. Stephen Elop appeared on a gigantic screen, talked a bit before laying down the new vision. It was going to be Android, right? It made perfect sense, the ecosystem was growing and aligned to Nokia. But, no - Stephen announced that the future of Nokia was with Microsoft.

I walked out of the conference when I heard that - standing outside of the conference hall. I knew two things at that moment. One, there wasn’t going to be a future for Nokia - there was no way Microsoft under Ballmer’s leadership could produce an ecosystem. Secondly, I realised that Elop was still Microsoft’s man - He didn’t make the logical choice that fit with Nokia’s culture - It was going to be a takeover by Microsoft.

The project I was working on soon got a new boss. We thought this would align with the new vision of the company. He took us into a room and projected a picture on the wall of a mountaintop surrounded by clouds. He said, “I know you must feel a bit like this, unclear about the direction, clouded about what the future holds. Don’t worry… I also feel like that, too”.

The new boss did eventually make a decisive decision - the N97 app that we were building was to be kept, but it was going to be focused on an even smaller niche of the market, N97 users who were pro skiers. I left soon after.

The takeover by Microsoft did eventually happen, and the rest is history.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#172

Post by simonh »

Nokinside wrote: post #167

Nokia's made institutional mistakes that doomed Nokia phones before hiring Elop. (I was there). In a sense Nokia was (organizationally) victim of its own success. During the dumb phone and feature phone era Nokia did everything better than others. Everything from the supply chain management, to the phone design and manufacturing worked so well. Why would you sideline leaders and organizations who build all that and w…

I’d not heard that about Netflix before but it makes a lot of sense. The Apple case is an interesting counterpoint though. They seem to have a pretty solid culture of consensus and collaboration between teams at the top. But then they have an unusual functional organisation structure rather than being organised around product divisions. This means the functional teams have a stake in (basically) all the products, so don’t have as much of an incentive to play favourites. It’s just a different approach to addressing the same issue.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#173

Post by codeflo »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #169
bborud wrote: post #156

They didn't lose when the iPhones and Androids came out. They lost when at their peak because they became complacent. It just took a few years to manifest itself. If the leadership had been worth their salaries they would have known with every fiber of their being that Symbian was already dead. Both due to where hardware was going and because of the rather obvious answer to "how do the next 5 billion people get onlin…

Funny how getting acquihired by Microsoft, pocketing $5bn+, and still making the best phones to this date, is considered "losing".

Are you talking about individuals or the organization? I’m sure some employees in management “won” financially, there are very few failed companies where that isn’t the case.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#174

Post by pjmlp »

metacritic12 wrote: post #125
pjmlp wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do get it alright. Some people had a bad experience with a couple of folks and decided to extrapolate to everyone in the company. Every single company has such pearls. If they don't, they aren't yet big enough.

No you still don't. It's not about which Nokia employee. It's about whether they were external vs internal facing. E.g. I can perfectly believe the employees of the DMV are super sweet to each other, while being the bane of customers.

Have you stop for a second to wonder what might have been my set of roles, or what kind of relationship I might have had with Nokia customers?

Same applies to thousands of other employees.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#175

Post by mariusor »

idonotknowwhy wrote: post #128
mariusor wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you try the Jolla phones? They tried to carry the Meego torch in their Sailfish OS (which currently works well with "last year's" Sony phones). Even though it has different UI decisions than the N9 I found it reasonably good over time, and today some of it's decisions (like using swipes for navigation) made their way into other mainstream mobile OSes.

I bought the Xperia X and paid for Jolla with android support. It's a horrible buggy mess. Nothing like the smooth experience of the meego/Maemo n9

Weird, I had an Xperia XA2 for a long time and it was the opposite, no bugs to speak of. Now with a Xperia 10 III it's still pretty good.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#176

Post by pjmlp »

IntelMiner wrote: post #150
pjmlp wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is obvious from my comment.

The point was your experiences are not reflective of reality of outside partners

For that you need to actually know what my experiences with outside partners happened to be like, but you don't.

A couple of people got some bad seeds and pretend everyone on the customer business units behave the same way.

No that wasn't my unit, but it also wasn't pure internal engineering bubble with zero customer contact.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#177

Post by exodust »

idonotknowwhy wrote: post #127
koiueo wrote: post #38

Nokia 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…

Agreed. I loved my Nokia N9. The software was great! The Nokia N9 alarm clock was the best alarm clock app I've ever used. Android have copied some elements of this but it's nowhere near as simple! The hardware was fantastic as well. I dropped mine several times without a case and it never broke. The TI dac sounded great with my Sony XBA-3 iems I had at the time. I did hate the USB port cover though. And hated that t…

The N9 was a regrettable purchase for me. I even feel that Nokia owes me, all these years later!

Paid a lot for the 64 gig N9. Soon after Nokia abandoned the OS, and I felt ripped off.

I remember the flash refused to stay off. I would disable flash for a photo, but next time I used camera the flash was back on. This was enough to move to a phone that remembered the flash setting.

Years later I tried to start my N9 but it was demanding a password that I didn't know. Some kind of recovery password I never knew I had set up. There was no way I could find to reset the phone even to factory settings. It's basically bricked with no way to restore, so I couldn't even sell it as a working phone.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#178

Post by simonh »

codeflo wrote: post #170
Nokinside wrote: post #167

Nokia's made institutional mistakes that doomed Nokia phones before hiring Elop. (I was there). In a sense Nokia was (organizationally) victim of its own success. During the dumb phone and feature phone era Nokia did everything better than others. Everything from the supply chain management, to the phone design and manufacturing worked so well. Why would you sideline leaders and organizations who build all that and w…

> When Netflix made the decision to move from mail-based rental to streaming, they did not allow leaders involved in rental business to any meetings involving the company future planning. I wonder, who was the “they” that successfully made such a decision? In most places, there wouldn’t be any senior leadership that isn’t “tainted”, so to speak, by the previous business model. Even a freshly appointed CEO is ineffect…

Reed Hastings was a founder and principal initial investor. He owned 70% of the company, so it was probably down to him.

There was a recent thread where Bezos was quoted as being against bet the company moves. I get where he’s coming from, ideally you’d avoid getting into that position, but faced with a fundamental technological shift like that, sometimes it’s just the right thing to do.

As an aside I’ve been at two companies that were sunk by mismanaged bet the company moves. In both cases they actually had plenty of time to change course, but management was so heavily invested in their pet project that by the time reality has punched them in the face hard enough to wake them up, it was too late.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#179

Post by codeflo »

bsimpson wrote: post #141
enjo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked an application that was distributed as part of the OS for pretty much every nokia symbian phone. We hired quite a few folks who had worked directly for Symbian. The stories were crazy. There were major components people refused to even touch (like messaging) because the code was basically unmaintainable. An aggressive refactor of the entire OS was needed but they never really got comfortable with that. Symbi…

I've heard rumors that Android was originally supposed to be an OS for digital cameras.

That might be, and before the iPhone reveal, the vision was supposedly to target Nokia-style button phones.

The difference could be that the technical foundation was more sound, and also, Google is institutionally capable of large refactorings in a way that I think few other companies are.

People forget this, and it’s solved now, but it took Android several years and quite a few iterations of the rendering layer to get smooth scrolling working to the level of the iPhone 1. Look up “Project Butter” if you’re interested.

Smooth scrolling is hard, but important for touch to feel perfectly right. I’m convinced that this is one of the places where it mattered that touch screens were an afterthought in the original architecture.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#180

Post by squarefoot »

skavi wrote: post #22
eslaught wrote: post #15

I'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 already had Meego which was a true Linux distribution, already more polished than Android and fully Open Source; unfortunately the deal with Microsoft implied the termination of any further development of it in favor of Windows Mobile, and the rest is history.
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