Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

nokia-apple-iphone-was-launched-presentation.tiiny.site

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 538 posts

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#121

Post by usrusr »

sofixa wrote: post #85
criticalfault wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we can see the same thing happening today. BYD+CATL are the new iphone and other manufacturers are Symbian, Motorola and Sony Ericsson VW, Toyota and friends cannot change fast enough. They should have started with big battery investments 10-15y ago and RnDing then, not now when Market is flooded.

I disagree. Cars are much more entrenched status symbols than phones were back then. A Porsche is a Porsche, a truck to show you're manly and outdoorsy is a truck. People will continue to buy brands they know and whose marketing aligns with how they see themselves. Not everyone will switch to BEVs for a variety of reasons - cost, lack of infrastructure, or hell, even contrarianism. VW, Renault, Nissan, Stellantis, To…

Also keep in mind that the iPhone was far from starting at zero: they did not so much enter the phone market as a newcomer as they did pull the phone market into the existing and utterly dominated iPod market. Dominated so much that I don't even dare calling it the mp3 player market.

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#123

Post by secondcoming »

vachina wrote: post #51
finaard wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Elop was the trojan horse that killed Nokia. He worked at MSFT prior to this and single handedly destroyed Nokia. The N9 was revolutionary on its own; GPU accelerated UI, sleek looks, Maemo OS, it is a device people would actually want over the limping Symbian that never fully adapted to touch-only, or the useless Windows Phone 7. No developer dared to touch Maemo because its future was so uncertain due to the switch…

Symbian was the core OS, phone manufacturers build the GUI on top of it.

Series 60 was the dominant Nokia UI at the time, but then that received a shake-up with Belle?

Fun fact: Until Nokia bought them, Symbian devs never got actually see any phones that were being built, unless you worked in a specific team that had access restrictions to even enter.

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#124

Post by kalaksi »

flir wrote: post #45
ddalex wrote: post #12

N800 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.

But with no app store. (As a programmer, I never in a billion years would have invented the app store. Yet it was the most important component of the iphone ecosystem).

As a Linux user, it just felt like a locked-down package repository to me.

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#125

Post by AlanYx »

anonu wrote: post #29

I was expecting sort of the opposite, for Nokia to deride the whole iPhone thing. But it was quite the opposite, they understand what they were facing. Ultimately, the could not meet the challenge fast enough.

>they understand what they were facing

Parts of the deck suggest that they didn't fully understand what they were facing.

For example, the bullet "scaling the user experience to lower HW specs may be challenging. iPhone mini may be closer to iPod UI" comment still suggests they were stuck in the mindset of the time. They thought it was unlikely that Apple could deliver a horizontal platform, rather Apple would be launch a series of individual phones at different prices, each with bespoke interfaces, just like all the players had been doing, over and over.

With that perspective, the choice to keep developing parallel product lines (Maemo, Meltemi, Symbian, etc.) rather than throwing all their eggs into one basket is more understandable I guess, though ultimately completely wrong.

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#126

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

raverbashing wrote: post #63
ddalex wrote: post #12

N800 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.

If anyone wants to know why Europe has issues with innovation needs to look no further than here Nokia boomers squandered the opportunity they had with Maemo and kept insisting on the sinking ship (or burning platform) of Symbian But to be really honest Maemo was also a dud. Because they didn't have the sharp focus of Android and kept a lot of crap from Linux (like X11 sigh )

> Because they didn't have the sharp focus of Android and kept a lot of crap from Linux (like X11 sigh)

X11 let them use existing apps outright and made porting easy. What else would they have used at that time and what advantage would it give them?

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#127

Post by cesarb »

sybercecurity wrote: post #68
anonu wrote: post #29

I was expecting sort of the opposite, for Nokia to deride the whole iPhone thing. But it was quite the opposite, they understand what they were facing. Ultimately, the could not meet the challenge fast enough.

Nokia produced several early smartphones. Most ran SymbianOS that showed what was possible. The connectivity wasn't there to make it really useful and this was the age of "smaller is cooler" mobile phones, so they tried to keep the screens small. I imagine that there were several people in Nokia that understood the potential of a phone that could also act like a mini-computer.

> and this was the age of "smaller is cooler" mobile phones, so they tried to keep the screens small.

I, for one, would love a return to "smaller is cooler" with small screens and big numeric keypads. I have an elderly relative whose only use for a smartphone is calls (it's a phone after all) and text messaging (SMS and WhatsApp); these don't need a big screen.

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#128

Post by sampo »

EngineeringStuf wrote: post #76

I'm surprised that Nokia found out through the keynote presentation from Steve Jobs. LG and Prada announced their phone a little earlier and it had been shown already at the IF Design Awards a few months earlier. Google "LG Prada Phone" for the Wikipedia article. If Nokia had paid attention to those design awards then they too could have moved quickly on a similar device. Is this a case where Nokia thought they had a…

> If Nokia had paid attention to those design awards then they too could have moved quickly on a similar device.

Nokia had their Maemo project [1]. A Linux-based OS for mobile touchscreen devices. They published their first device already in 2005 [2].

But the Maemo department was small, and the old Symbian department inside Nokia was big. The large number of managers and executives in the Symbian department played corporate politics, and kept the size and resources of the Maemo department small, as they perceived it an internal competitor threatening their position and the dominance of Symbian inside Nokia.

Nokia's CEO at the time (Jorma Ollila) had a background in investment banking and financial engineering. His previous post in Nokia was CFO. He didn't have the kind of passion and insight to software and user experience like Apple's Steve Jobs had. Today, nobody would expect to get visionary tech leadership if recruiting from the corporate's finance department.

At its soul, Apple is a software company that also makes their own hardware. Nokia was a hardware company that also made their own software.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#129

Post by wiether »

bityard wrote: post #34
ddalex wrote: post #12

N800 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 u…

> In the end I was mainly using mine to listen to podcasts (before they were called that)

I'm interested in understanding what you meant here?

To my understanding, the N800 was released in 2007 according to Wikipedia[1] and the first craze of podcasts was in the first half of the 00's, with the most notable fact being the official support of podcasts in iTunes in 2004[2]. They then lost their fame before knowing a second wave of popularity starting in the second half of the 10's.

Are you talking about something else?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#History

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#130

Post by secondcoming »

UndefinedRef wrote: post #9

I 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.

Me too. Once the 'Burning Platform' memo was released on the intranet everyone stopped giving a fuck, and were hanging around waiting for redundancy payments.

Soon after Jo Harlow came to give a presentation that was held in The Oval cricket ground. I remember a couple of her statements drew subdued laughter from those attending. I felt a little sorry for her.

Post reply on HN