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

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

#171

Post by alt227 »

cs702 wrote: post #59

2007. The presentation reads like an eerily accurate crystal-ball prediction of what actually happened in subsequent years. Evidently, Nokia executives knew well in advance what the iPhone could do to their company. Evidently, they knew they needed to do "something" to avoid an implosion of their mobile-phone business. Evidently, despite their prescience and best efforts, they were unable to avoid disaster. It's as i…

> N-Series and SEMC Walkman probably need to clearly undercut iPhone pricing to succeed in the market.

I think this is where they went wrong. They got scared of the new cool kid in school and immediately dropped all their prices, essentially marketing themselves as budget to Apples premium.

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

#172

Post by lysace »

bjourne wrote: post #148
lysace wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you work with Symbian/UIQ software, feature phone software or something else? The feature phone team actually showed signs of getting the idea of no-jank and a rich UI very early.

Lund working on feature phones! My job was writing and managing test suites for verifying the J2ME implementation. It was a top secret collaboration with Motorola. They took QA work extremely seriously and bugs could delay major launches. Unfortunately for them, "rock solid J2ME" wasn't really what customers were after. :)

SE's J2ME implementation was top notch. It just worked and it was fast.

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

#174

Post by KeplerBoy »

willvarfar wrote: post #112
simultsop wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the very end. It all boils down to who got the developers on platform for free. ( From Apple's context, while devs cost a lot, they just marketed well and even made them pay something to list apps )

Can you elaborate? My memory is that Apple _charged_ developers to make apps :)

They still charge those 99$ a year, don't they?

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

#175

Post by edejong »

criticalfault wrote: post #46
willvarfar wrote: post #32

I 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.

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.

No, these are not disruptors. Substantial incremental improvements, but part of the larger battle.

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

#176

Post by [deleted] »

willvarfar wrote: post #112
simultsop wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the very end. It all boils down to who got the developers on platform for free. ( From Apple's context, while devs cost a lot, they just marketed well and even made them pay something to list apps )

Can you elaborate? My memory is that Apple _charged_ developers to make apps :)

[deleted]

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

#177

Post by jorvi »

bombcar wrote: post #143
masom wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nokia also had a ex-Microsoft exec ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop ) that had the goal of ensuring Windows Phone would succeed, and tanked Nokia with it. I was on the DVLUP project where Nokia and Microsoft attempted to inject energy into windows phone app development. We could see the tension between the two companies as we were a 3rd party contracted by Nokia to build the platform. The Nokia exec we we…

Was this around the time Microsoft kept switching what "windows phone" was? I remember that the one friend who got into it loved it, and then they released something completely incompatible and he abandoned the platform.

If memory serves, it was a custom kernel and OS, then a semi-custom kernel with a few OS components shared with Windows 8, and then the Windows 10 'core' kernel (same as on the Xbox One?) with many shared OS components.

At each step they left the majority of devices behind.

What was equally worse was the triple (quadruple?) switch of app frameworks. If I remember correctly it was a dotnet abomination, then ?? then WPF and finally Xamarin.

Good luck convincing your platform 3rd party developers to entirely relearn and rebuild their app four times over in the span of a few years.

Interestingly enough, Windows Phone itself was far ahead of it's time. Buttersmooth UI, flat UI, built-in global and app dark modes, all in the early 2010s.

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

#178

Post by ylee »

sampo wrote: post #128
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 co…

>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.

... and bad software, of course. Worse than that, multiple versions of bad software.

Apple is the only company in history to build consistently good hardware and good software and UI. Not IBM, not DEC or the other Seven Dwarfs. It really does go all the way back to the Woz-Jobs duo providing a maniacal focus on UX and one of the most brilliant engineering minds of the century.

(I'm told that Tesla also qualifies.)

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

#179

Post by benrutter »

Like some other commenters, I'm amazed at how well thought out Nokia's insight into the iPhone was at the time. They seemed pretty aware it was a major threat, and a game changer that needed to be responded to.

I'd be curious about an alternative history where Nokia hadn't tied itself so strongly to the burning reckage that was Windows Phone. Would Nokia have wound up as a solid android phone producer somewhere similar to where Samsung are now? I guess we'll never know.

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

#180

Post by simultsop »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #174
willvarfar wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? My memory is that Apple _charged_ developers to make apps :)

They still charge those 99$ a year, don't they?

I think so. But I meant no work contracts and lots of employees.
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