Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011) • Hacker News Board

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#181

Post by codeflo » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 9:59 AM UTC

simonh wrote: post #178

codeflo wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Even many founders find it hard to turn around the ship that they built, the forces of institutional inertia work against them as well. I wonder if he simply ignored most of the existing organization and management, and more or less stealth-founded a new startup inside the old one. Even that is not easy.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#182

Post by mxfh » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 10:01 AM UTC

AdamCraven wrote: post #171

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…

It might even have worked out. Just that Microsoft still doesn't know how to run a proper app store besides the XBox Games one until this day.

They flooded this thing with crappy apps anyone could submit for some weird incentives just to get their weird app store metrics up, making the user experience horrible. I wonder what would have happened, if they ran a properly curated platform, where they didn't allow for keyword spamming. At a time Windows Phone had pretty much all the apps you needed back then and a more then decent camera at a competetive price.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#183

Post by theshrike79 » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 10:10 AM UTC

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…

The teams that did Maemo stuff etc. weren't allowed to ship any features before the Symbian side (which had more political and monetary power) had achieved feature parity...

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#184

Post by jayceedenton » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 10:13 AM UTC

AdamCraven wrote: post #171

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…

If anyone wants to know what it was like at the time, for SWEs working anywhere in Nokia's phone division, this post captures it perfectly.

People sometimes think that we can see Android was the right route only with hindsight. No, every engineer at the time knew that Android was the right way to go and that there was huge opportunity for Nokia there. Sure enough, in the following years we all had to read reviews of Nokia's phone that always concluded: "The handset is fantastic, if only it was running Android". I won't bother going into all the reasons that Windows Phone was a disaster. Elop used some nonsense justification that Android would be a 'failure to differentiate'.

Ultimately though, I take a different view about what the real strategy was. The Nokia board had seen their phones business drop in value from around $120b to around a third of that. They wanted to get out, whilst there was still something left to sell. Choosing Windows Phone effectively saddled Microsoft with the risk too (a joint future), and at that point it was obvious they would have buy the unit entirely in time. Elop wasn't a Trojan horse, the Nokia board saw Microsoft flailing in phones and used their riches to get out.

It's sad because Nokia could have been an Android powerhouse. Particularly getting in early, with really interesting hardware innovation. But someone wanted to cash out. They weren't happy to risk having a phone business worth not 40bn but nothing at all.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#185

Post by iamflimflam1 » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 10:17 AM UTC

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…

He wasn’t wrong, but he didn’t seem to understand what the impact this memo would have on the world outside of Nokia. Nokia relies on orders for phones from network operators and this memo pulled the rug from under those orders.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#186

Post by makeitdouble » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 10:23 AM UTC

kergonath wrote: post #164

makeitdouble wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 l…

> 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 I know there was a lot of noise about dropped calls and all that in the US, but this was not a thing here in Europe. I would assume that the issue was at least as much with AT&T than with the iPhone. Here there were controversies about a lot of things (for example, it…

Yes, it might the difference on the network stacks. Perhaps it was decent on GSM ?

In asia it was the same deal (from iPhone 3G, not the original one). Most of the issues seemed to be when the phone ran from too long and/or was low on battery. From my understanding memory was leaking all over the place, and as the phone app isn't isolated from the system it was affected too (even if the network chip is a separate hardware and OS)

Basically rebooting every now and then was a good idea at the time.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#187

Post by vishnugupta » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 10:30 AM UTC

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…

A different example, from Amazon. The top down directive from Jeff was to build every new initiative in total secrecy completely cut off from rest of the organization. To an extent even the building would be cordoned off for other employees. Kindle reader, Eco line of devices, AWS and so on.

I guess the reason was to let them move fast and deliver 0-1 product without being shackled by existing strictures, including the leaders with vested interests. They would hire whole division worth of people within weeks. The downside was a whole bunch of duplicate systems, as everyone would build their own payment processor, order management, UI etc. The results are starting to show as AWS is struggling to piece everything together as coherent higher order offerings. Like there are some two dozen ways to control access, a dozen ways to deliver notifications and so on.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#188

Post by morsch » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 10:33 AM UTC

Joeri wrote: post #86

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here maps HERE was spun off, and is a great platform today. HERE WeGo is available for Android and iOS, plus web.

Nokia transit / HERE transit was my favorite public transit app back when I used windows phone. It had a unique way [1] of presenting transit options that was far more convenient than the simple list that every other app does. Sadly the current HERE WeGo app also does the simple scrolling list, so I see no reason to use it. [1] https://mspoweruser.com/nokia-here-transit-now-covers-46-uk-...

Oeffi presents transit options in the same way. Don't know if the style has a name.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.schildbach....

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#189

Post by arpa » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 10:40 AM UTC

flomo wrote: post #42

_ea1k wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That his letter pointed out a real problem never seemed controversial. The shocking part was tying themselves to MS without a reasonable backup plan. They thought they couldn't build hardware good enough to compete with other Android makers, but somehow convinced themselves that the solution to that was to put their less competitive hardware onto a less competitive platform.

> 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…

the "MooMooMo" platform community is still alive, funnily enough.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#190

Post by rasz » Sat, Sep 03, 2022, 10:43 AM UTC

guai888 wrote: post #50

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…

>Nokia had nothing that matter

Nokia had extremely high hardware quality. Indestructible Nokia 3310 meme and all that.