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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]

#371

Post by jandrese »

scarface_74 wrote: post #345
jandrese wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the time Steve Jobs was putting his foot down against allowing Flash on the iPhone because the performance was so pants, Microsoft was going all in on Silverlight which had exactly the same problem.

That’s a popular misconception. The first iPhone had a 400Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM. It was so resource constrained that you couldn’t put a picture on your home screen because it would have taken too much memory. It could barely run Safari. If you scrolled too fast, you would see checker boxes while trying to render the screen. When Flash did finally come to mobile on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1G…

And yet Microsoft figured they could make Silverlight work on devices with even less impressive specs.

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

#372

Post by sofixa »

jampekka wrote: post #262
sofixa wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> A Porsche is a Porsche, a truck to show you're manly and outdoorsy is a truck. A Rolls-Royce is a BMW, a Chrysler is a Fiat, an Aston Martin is a Ford, a Jaguar is a Tata, a Lamborghini is an Audi. And a Porsche is a Volkswagen.

If anything, that helps my point. People still buy Porsches even if they know it's the same car as a VW or Seat, just fancier and with a more prestigious badge.

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

#373

Post by spiralpolitik »

openrisk wrote: post #160
jillesvangurp wrote: post #93

I 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…

This is probably the most important bifurcation point in the history of European tech. Today's malaise and grasping for direction has much to do with the demise of this pioneering enterprise. And the fact that it does not appear to have been pre-ordained adds poignancy.

European tech was doomed in late the 90s when the EU decided to throw in with Microsoft et al instead of supporting building out a homegrown alternative ecosystem based around open source software.

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

#374

Post by calvinmorrison »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #264
raverbashing wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with this, it had a lot of advantages. But at the same time I don't think it was good enough for the purpose Because if it was good enough why didn't Android keep it?

Actually that's an interesting question; why didn't Android use X11? A few minutes of web searching don't seem to turn up anybody commenting on it; do you happen to know how I would check what their reasons were?

probably because it's to complex. I think the earliest android demos were probably just writing to the framebuffer.

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

#376

Post by PlunderBunny »

seanc wrote: post #353
unwiredben wrote: post #241

I was at Palm when the iPhone launched, and one note from this analysis summed up Apple's new power in the market and how they really changed the landscape. "Cingular has allowed Apple to launch a device with WLAN and inbuilt services" At that time, the carriers controlled so much of the cell phone experience. We certainly would have loved to have launched Palm Treo phones with WiFi radios, but our carrier partners w…

I was at RIM at that time and saw _exactly_ the same thing. When I started in 2008, in addition to WiFi and apps they were squabbling with carriers about whether or not the Blackberry needed an antenna. Carriers were micromanaging devices to an astonishing degree. The river of money from Macs, iPods and iTunes gave Steve Jobs a completely different kind of leverage in those carrier negotiations. Device only companies…

Were virtual network operators (?) - VNOs - a thing back then, and could a VNO make its own rules? If so, could Apple (or Palm or RIM) launch their devices without carrier compromise by also owning a virtual network? I guess this would have required a lot of money. Maybe Nokia could have done it?

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

#377

Post by spiralpolitik »

unwiredben wrote: post #241

I was at Palm when the iPhone launched, and one note from this analysis summed up Apple's new power in the market and how they really changed the landscape. "Cingular has allowed Apple to launch a device with WLAN and inbuilt services" At that time, the carriers controlled so much of the cell phone experience. We certainly would have loved to have launched Palm Treo phones with WiFi radios, but our carrier partners w…

The Pre and WebOS were hands down the best non iPhone experience at the time. The mistake Palm made was going exclusive instead of pushing it everywhere. I don't think the Pre ever recovered from that in the USA.

The BlackBerry Z10 was also a great device but by that point there was no way BlackBerry to deploy a competing ecosystem to iPhone and Android for it to matter.

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

#378

Post by wmf »

jandrese wrote: post #327
unwiredben wrote: post #241

I was at Palm when the iPhone launched, and one note from this analysis summed up Apple's new power in the market and how they really changed the landscape. "Cingular has allowed Apple to launch a device with WLAN and inbuilt services" At that time, the carriers controlled so much of the cell phone experience. We certainly would have loved to have launched Palm Treo phones with WiFi radios, but our carrier partners w…

I read that as a failure of Palm's management, notably the ones that were negotiating with phone carriers. Jobs isn't the only guy who could have negotiated that kind of deal. Apple was a second run computer company that had almost no previous phone experience. They were not exactly negotiating from a position of strength, and the fact that only one carrier took them up on the offer shows just how tough it was. It so…

Steve Jobs could say that but as the old saying goes, you are not Steve Jobs.

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

#379

Post by 4fterd4rk »

alkonaut wrote: post #196
AlanYx wrote: post #125

Earlier 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…

Oh how we forget... Phones at the time were HORRIBLE. To you, today, it looks like the iPhone couldn't do much. Back then it was revolutionary that a phone could simply render a proper website or connect to your home wifi.

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

#380

Post by tgma »

spiralpolitik wrote: post #366
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…

Nokia was dead company walking before Stephen Elop. Elop saw the writing on the wall and made one of the choices available. A different CEO would have made a different choice but ultimately at that point it would still have been too late to save Nokia. Nokia was a great hardware company that missed the boat when the market changed to be based around software. When the market changed again to be based around ecosystem…

> made a different choice but ultimately at that point it would still have been too late to save Nokia.

You think if they made just a single decision different and bet on Android instead of Windows, they would be in the same spot today? I wouldn't be so sure. Samsung hedged their bets across both and succeeded. Both weren't great at in-house software and Nokia made better hardware.

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