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Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

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Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#201

Post by seba_dos1 »

guai888 wrote: post #199
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 am not sure Android could have saved Nokia. Samsung survived in smart phone business because of their display and memory. Chinese smart phone makers was able to compete because of the enormous support from CCP. I was on another oil platform call "HTC" when Nokia platform was "burning". Eventually HTC went down too.

Android itself probably not, but their Maemo efforts were far ahead of Android already.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#202

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

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…

> but it was going to be focused on an even smaller niche of the market, N97 users who were pro skiers.

I can’t stop laughing at this.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#203

Post by guai888 »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #201
guai888 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure Android could have saved Nokia. Samsung survived in smart phone business because of their display and memory. Chinese smart phone makers was able to compete because of the enormous support from CCP. I was on another oil platform call "HTC" when Nokia platform was "burning". Eventually HTC went down too.

Android itself probably not, but their Maemo efforts were far ahead of Android already.

Nokia had made Maemo success then they might had a chance.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#205

Post by yobbo »

simonh wrote: post #172
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…

> The Apple case is an interesting counterpoint though

Isn't the story that iphone development was a secret project with competing teams, one of which proposed the touch-screen interface?

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#206

Post by seba_dos1 »

prox wrote: post #121
RajT88 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Symbian was the biggest problem with Nokia phones. The hardware was always amazing. I owned a Communicator 9290, and have yet to have a phone that performed as well on speaker. Bar none. Noise cancelling and volume both. I had an e90, and although it was less amazing on that front, the build quality, and look at feel just was... Great! I'd pay iPhone Pro prices for (basically) an e90 running Android with a decent cam…

I wonder if we ever going to see anything other than Android or iOS. A third ecosystem wouldn’t be so bad.

My phone runs Debian (PureOS to be exact) and I'm perfectly happy with it.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#207

Post by bborud »

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".

You seem to misremember a few things. MSFT paid $7.2bn. After 3 years Microsoft wrote it off as a loss.

That amount of money is roughly what the top two smart phone manufacturers make in one week of sales. The industry represents a multi trillion dollar combined market cap due to smart phone sales. Then there is all the new businesses it enabled, creating wealth for developers.

Oh yes, Nokia lost. There really isn't any spin one can put on that.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#209

Post by spookie »

jonasdegendt wrote: post #192
mxfh wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 key…

I got a ton of free Nokia phones back in the day through these weird incentive programs. I was told at a meetup by one of the employees that each Microsoft division was to get N number of new apps in their local store each quarter, and they’d have developer programs along the line of “publish 5 Windows Phone apps, get a free Lumia phone.” There were zero requirements other than publish N number of apps, there was zer…

To be fair, let's not forget that Google had their apps in there and then got them out. At least the YouTube-like app I used had YouTube premium features at no cost, I guess.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#210

Post by seba_dos1 »

sicelo wrote: post #163
pengaru wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll counter with the Nokia N900. I've never understood this about N900 fans. My experience with the N9 was great, and never left me wishing I could go back to something more like a Sharp Zaurus with modern cell connectivity. What is it that makes the N900 appealing? Is it strictly the physical keyboard? So the N950 would have been the N900 killer? Or was there something else about it?

> I've never understood this about N900 fans. > Or was there something else about it? It's pretty simple: hacker vs. user points of view i used both N9 and N900. N9 was a way more polished, user-centric device. I love the UX and even how the device looks however, for (low-level) hackers, N9/N950 was a bit hostile environment compared to N900. The first major stumbling block was Aegis (somewhat similar to Samsung's Kn…

Yup, that's spot on. N9 felt good to use, but it was a disappointing device once you got used to the level of openness in a commercially supported product that N900 provided.

Still better than pretty much every alternative at that time though.

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