201–210 of 538 posts
These presentations often serve as a comfort blanket rather than a plan of action. Oh man something incredibly disruptive is happening to us. Lets talk about it. Whew, okay, we understand it, lets go back to being complacent. Years later, "man we tried, we had that meeting and everything, we just couldn't compete"
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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.
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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.
> BYD+CATL Unless these two companies change the laws of physics in order to exponentially improve the overall performance of batteries (exponentially faster charging times, from hours to 5-10 minutes, exponentially cheaper batteries that would last longer) then, no, they won't be the next Apple. Just ask VW, they almost bet it all on EVs and now they're already with one foot in the grave because of that.
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That's fascinating. It really seems that a lot of businesses end up hyper-optimized to deliver what they already offer, up until the point where anything that isn't a current offer is attacked by corporate antibodies. And that's when the growth they've optimized for suddenly stops.
There's way too much worship of Steve Jobs, but one thing he had right - either you develop the product that eats your cash cow, or someone else is going to do it.
In one fell swoop, the small form factor iPod switched from a tiny hard disk to flash memory and the former model was discontinued, before competitors had even really come close to catching up.
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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.
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 simil…
The market was changing to one where hardware was produced in asia and phones are loaded with ecosystem-centric software from Google or Apple (the real game changer, the app store, was launched next year).
Nokia did not really have a place in either of those and did not manage to adapt to this fundamental change. They did actually manage to adapt to the UI revolution of the first iphone.
The execs even noted that the downside of iPhone would be non-removable battery. It is commendable that Apple changed the industry standard to something worse without even being in the top 10 in 2008.
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.
Their Lumia with the Windows OS was great too. Unfortunately no market => no apps => death. But I loved it when I had it. They made great phones no doubt.
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It's all about marketing. You buy the thing that has the best marketing, not the best thing. That's how Apple replaced all these other smartphone vendors.
This is a very narrow and simplistic view on the extremely complex topics of market dynamics and consumer behaviour.