https://web.archive.org/web/20250115192305/https://repo.aalt... but doesn't seem to have the actual content. :(
The page seems online again: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
221–230 of 538 posts
Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 lau…
That Apple succeeded in having people pay $500 and up for a phone that was cool but frankly not very useful, was amazing. We should remember the original iPhone was more a tech demonstrator than anything else. It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, but you couldn't really DO that much with it. There wasn't even an app store! You still needed to buy a digital camera and a garmin GPS and so on. This was a telephon…
> It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes,
I still remember seeing the demo of maps and the user being able to pan and zoom and was just floored. I really think the screen is what sold it then, even if it didn't have the apps, you could still browse the full internet on it which was a complete game changer.
IMO the screen + multi touch is what drove sales of the first iPhone.
Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
#223I've been reading these Nokia archives for the whole day. It's so interesting to see what they did behind the scenes.
Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
#224"Even though Steve Jobs emphasised iPhone superiority to "Buttons", it is to be expected that the consumer QWERTY category will continue to succeed." Their key mistake.
I don't know. 17 years on and my fingers still miss hardware keyboards a little bit.
My dream smartphone would be a black rectangle, but with a landscape hardware keyboard to slide out from underneath. And in an ideal world OLED keys for changing the layout and a touch sensitivity for moving a text cursor.
What I miss from the 2000s is the big differentiation in phone form factors. Granted, a lot of them were weird, but there was at least experimentation and optimising for different use cases. What if the current standard of a black rectangle is just a local maximum and there is something better ahead?
Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
#225> Based on highly speculative iPhone sales of 6.5 million during 2007 and 14 million during 2008.
Actual sales: 2007: 1.4M, 2008: 12M. Pretty spot on.
Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
#2262007. 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…
This is spot-on, and it's a remarkably common pattern when dominant players are faced with a seismic shift—even when it comes from within. Kodak essentially invented the modern digital camera, and had a phenomenal lead going into the 90s. It was not a little side project—they hired IDEO to do vision work, design enclosures and create on-camera UIs. They poured money in, and did ship products. I'd love to know what ha…
One of the problems for Kodak was that selling people digital cameras was always going to be just a fraction of the profit of selling them film.
Today, in 2025, Fujifilm makes more money from selling film (Instax instant photo film) than they do from digital, even though they "won" in digital over Kodak to some extent.
Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
#227I was there as this played out. Nokia had a lot of good software and software engineers but not the management structure to do anything good with that. Nokia was huge as an organization and parts of that organization recognized the threat early on. The problem was at the board and executive level. These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business. Lots of people with…
I had a Nokia Symbian phone, the 7610. I loved how 'quirky' it was:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7610#/media/File:Nokia76...
and I was able to download an NES emulator for it! I remember playing Mario 3 on my way to my first post-university job. I really felt like I was living in the future compared to the phones others had. And then Symbian just... never got better.
I was ambivalent about the MS purchase of Nokia but I was still optimistic about a lot of it. Nokia always made top-notch hardware but it was obvious from the outside that they just didn't have the software talent (the N900 was a wonderful device for the tech set but it had no mass market viability). I maintain that when it was released Windows Phone was the best mobile OS going. But Microsoft fumbled hard by reinventing the wheel with Windows Phone 8 and destroying an already emaciated App Store. Arguably they fumbled before they even released Windows Phone, spending $1bn on the Kin and then almost immediately nixing it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin
Looking back at it all today... iOS is fine. Android is fine. But man do I wish we still had a couple of other viable competitors in there.
Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think even when companies project arrogance from their c-suite, it’s more to keep the market happy and calm nerves. I’d be shocked if RIM wasn’t also sweating bullets internally after that iPhone presentation. They weren’t morons, and saw what happened with iPods.
I know people who were at RIM at the time, including someone who was in the room when they passed around the first iPhone they got a hold of. They firmly believed the iPhone was dead on arrival both because the product was "terrible" (no keyboard, no battery life, etc. etc.) and, more importantly, because they were so confident Apple would not be able to pull off the networking required and people wouldn't be able to…
People forget just how powerful RIM was in the business world, and the keyboard WAS a real stickler (even today, you can go to any large conference and ask "who here misses the blackberry keyboard" and you'll get a decent show of hands).
It was a real issue and a real opportunity - I remember for years after the iPhone came out the blackberry die-hards were insisting that they'd easily be able to make something that was "iPhone like with a blackberry keyboard" - but during those years more and more people started carrying two phones, an iPhone for home and a blackberry for work.
That was the beginning of the end.
Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
#2292007. 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…
They caused their own disaster with the Microsoft marriage. Nokia was still huge, market share and coffer wise, and had plenty of options, but killed them all for MS.
Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the national champions model is the problem. If Apple failed the US still has Android and potentially many other startups. Europe just doesn't have the risk capital or ecosystem.
Yes, but now it doesn't even have national champions. The last one standing with some pretense at being still with the times is probably ASML. One wonders whether at any point anybody will ask any tough questions about where Europe is heading as far as technology goes.
Lots of people are. The answer appears to be “down the drain”.