Super prescient analysis, kind of ironically.
Great example that there's a point of organizational no return that no amount of awareness and intelligent analysis can fix. When the barbarians are at the gate, it's too late.
Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
31–40 of 538 posts
Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
#32I remember the normal engineering mood inside Symbian, Motorola and Sony Ericsson when the iPhone launched.
We immediately knew we were toast. We used to say that the iphone made us irrelevant and android made us redundant.
Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
#33To my mind the key insight from the presentation is this sentence:
“The 1% volume share target could translate into 4% value share, taking ~ 30% share of the >300 € price Band”
That’s Apple’s superpower in a nutshell - get the majority of the profit in the market, while everyone else battles each over over market share (and earn low margins in the process).
Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
#34N800 is the future that never was - opem Linux-based mobile computing for the masses. It had developer support, cool form factor, big touchable screen, and no corp to love it.
I had one of those. It was interesting in that it ran Linux and you could (at the time) browse most web sites with it. Otherwise, it was slow, bulky, and had a pretty terrible resistive touch screen. (The stylus was NOT optional.) And you still had to carry your flip phone in another pocket.
In the end I was mainly using mine to listen to podcasts (before they were called that). An iPod Touch eventually replaced it until Android phones got a lot better.
Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
#35I was there at the time and until the end. That cartoon meme with the dog sitting with a cup of coffee or whatever and telling himself "This is fine", while everything is on fire, is probably the best way to describe how things felt at nokia back then.
This PDF does not read like "this is fine". I find the initial analysis in here to be on point. Of course it does not print "we are doomed" in bold letters on the front page, but management should have taken the points raised in this presentation very seriously. Do you know if Nokia appointed a "head of UI e.g. not tied to BG or platform" back then?
Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
#36This is fascinating. A reminder that being (broadly) right in your analysis doesn't necessarily mean you can execute to turn things around. They note the impact to the high-end, the fact that UI is crucial, they even had a good guess at 2008 sales numbers (estimate 14m, looks like real was 13m). I was intrigued by this bullet point on how their Maemo platform could help: * Cellular development of the maemo platform a…
A set of individuals being broadly correct in their analysis at an organization doesn't mean that that organization will be able to execute a pivot, even if that organization is pretty competent.
When an entire organization is built around executing on one local maxima hypothesis well, and there's no tangible threat to it that most individuals feel, it is hard for that org to take the temporary hit to change tacks.
Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
#37This is fascinating. A reminder that being (broadly) right in your analysis doesn't necessarily mean you can execute to turn things around. They note the impact to the high-end, the fact that UI is crucial, they even had a good guess at 2008 sales numbers (estimate 14m, looks like real was 13m). I was intrigued by this bullet point on how their Maemo platform could help: * Cellular development of the maemo platform a…
N9 was very close to launch when Elop came, so that went ahead, but the rest of the development got cancelled immediately to focus on Windows phone: N9 would've otherwise been the first in a series of devices to slowly take over from Symbian.
Until Elop canceled everything Symbian was still selling - declining sales, but still millions of units. So while the situation was bad slowly phasing out Symbian for taking all the money you could make with that, while hoping N9 software stack sticks sounded like a more sensible approach than "cancel everything, go for Windows". Elop did respond to criticism from Developers (including a mail I've sent him with colleagues), but had made up his mind.
This blog post is a byproduct of that discussion, and was referenced by Felipe in internal mailing lists back then:
https://felipec.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/meego-scales-becaus...
I have no idea how successfull it'd have been in the end - the UI was great, parts of the softwarestack were problematic (though we've been doing quite well with parts of that at Jolla later on). The planned hardware for the future models was less than ideal, though.
Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
#38I was there at the time and until the end. That cartoon meme with the dog sitting with a cup of coffee or whatever and telling himself "This is fine", while everything is on fire, is probably the best way to describe how things felt at nokia back then.
I'm really curious! In hindsight, we can always point to when a pivot should have happened earlier, but on the other hand, we all know orgs that have pivoted too early or to a trend they shouldn't have, and then suffered.
Do you remember any specifics arguments or conflicts about strategy?
Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Any folks from Nokia in this time care to shed more light on that? Cellular connection was not allowed for the Linux devices so they don't compete with the Symbian phones. Nokia had deeply dysfunctional internal politics at that point.
>Nokia had deeply dysfunctional internal politics at that point. Tell me a large company other than Apple that wasn't completely dysfunctional.
Google was doing quite well?
Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Any folks from Nokia in this time care to shed more light on that? Cellular connection was not allowed for the Linux devices so they don't compete with the Symbian phones. Nokia had deeply dysfunctional internal politics at that point.
>Nokia had deeply dysfunctional internal politics at that point. Tell me a large company other than Apple that wasn't completely dysfunctional.
Definitely not the Apple of 10 years before.