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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]

#511
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…

Well, there are also a lot of assumptions and complaints about the iPhone and its impact that were commonly made at the time that ultimately didn't matter: - Has no changeable battery - Has no physical keyboard - Is too expensive - Has no support for Java applications They clearly thought that these might be potential vectors for attacking the newcomer, but none of it worked out. Rather than having to play the game t…

Not supporting Flash and Java was an advantage. Having apps written in an actual performant language made sense.

RIM with their minimal OS and a bunch of Java crap on top of it, just wasn't gone cut it.

Expensive is the only good point. But the issue with expensive is that, if everybody wants it, like 10% of the population will get it, and the other 90% will want it. And then you have product everybody is trying to get.

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

#512
post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it made the UI slower - as confirmed by another comment and used battery. > Untrue. There was a noticeable UI lag when scrolling between app pages. I've tried it in both the iPod touch and previous generations iPhones. It felt like how Android used to feel like back then. How was Jobs going to force Adobe to get Flash to run on a first gen iPhone when they could barely get it to run 4 years later on phones with 8…

Haha I remember the Xoom. Company bought one at the time to test our product on, since it might be a big deal. Several of us were intrigued and negotiated who would get to take it home after work. After about 3 days it became clear that it was terrible and it was relegated to a drawer.

Wait...you're telling me I can't charm a cute girl with the Motorola Xoom and its amazing capability of being able to play a Youtube video in full screen?

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgOX9mb7V4o

PS: In reality the stuttering masses were probably using a respectable device that actually provided long term value (and probably had longer OS support than the Xoom haha).

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

#513
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Losing the Signal: How BlackBerry’s bid to one-up the iPhone failed : https://archive.ph/IgW6s > In the summer of 2007, however, Lazaridis cracked open a phone that gave him pause. “They’ve put a Mac in this thing,” he marvelled after peering inside one of the new iPhones. > Lazaridis shared the revelation with his handset engineers, who had been pushing to expand BlackBerry’s Internet reach for years. Before, Lazari…

Mike Lazaridis is may have his blind spots, but he is a great engineer by all accounts.

Right guy for the right time, but no longer the right guy later on.

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

#514
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And you still had to carry your flip phone in another pocket. UPDATE: Memory failure! I meant N900, not N800 Why? I had N800 as my only mobile, and was more than happy with it. Stylus was not optional for things like browsing. But most of the time I took it from my pocket, I used it for text input, and physical keyboard made it comfortable to the point no other device has been able to offer me ever since I retired m…

Why? I had N800 as my only mobile Sure you're not thinking of the N900? The N800 didn't have any cellular connectivity, only wifi and bluetooth.

I really wanted the N900. I was saving money for it and resolved that the follow of the N900 would be my next buy. And then that never ever happened.

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

#515
post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A relative of mine had a Windows Phone and kept it running at least until the mid 10s. It was fast but he could basically only do calls and SMSes with it because nobody wrote apps for that OS. Everybody in app development (devs and their customers) was keen to see Windows Phone die quickly so they could spare time and money and develop only for two OSes.

WhatsApp supported windows phone through 2019.

Thy were really great on supporting a bunch of less popular platforms (feature phones and the like) WhatsApp supported Blackberry for a long time. WhatsApp probably supported a potato for quite a long time.

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

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

By the time that the iPhone was introduced, Apple was riding high on the iPod.

The resurgence of the Mac was already well under way at that point as well. Intel Macs had launched before the iPhone. Developer buy in to the Mac was pretty big by then.

But aside from that everyone was carrying around an iPod everywhere along with a dumbphone even if you were a Windows user. We all hated using the dumbphones and loved the iPod.

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

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nokia has a pretty successful business in things like cellular base stations, carrier networking, etc. - for example they brought their joint venture with Siemens (Nokia Siemens Networks) back in-house by buying Siemens' part out, and that does a lot of optical network stuff (DWDM backhaul equipment, etc), already had a cellular base-station business but then also bought competitor Alcatel Lucent, and a lot of provid…

So they gained a reputation for reliability/durability and pivoted to infra?

Nokia had, for example, excellent RF engineering talent. Personal anecdote: back in the day a Nokia phone would get a call through when other brands didn't, on the same telco.

That talent found great use in cellular base stations. Nokia has been making them for a long time, no real pivot involved, more like a split of a conglomerate into per-vertical businesses. Fun fact: Nokia started as a pulp mill, they made tires and rubber boots, and so on. Think Mitsubishi or such.

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

#518
post #434

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…

Something clicked for me when I read your comment: the most amazing thing about Apple is that despite their corporate immensity, they still continue to ship generation after generation of cool products that compete and sell on their own merits. You don't have to be a fanboy to appreciate that. Almost no other tech company that I can think of has been able to resist bureaucratic ossification. (Perhaps Adobe - to an ex…

Really? To me, for example iPhones haven't changed at all in a long time, they get spec bumps but are essentially the same product, and people buy replacements mostly because of batteries going bad / apps bloating / fashion.

Apple's new products are surprisingly often failures, for their background. Vision Pro anyone?

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

#519
post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something clicked for me when I read your comment: the most amazing thing about Apple is that despite their corporate immensity, they still continue to ship generation after generation of cool products that compete and sell on their own merits. You don't have to be a fanboy to appreciate that. Almost no other tech company that I can think of has been able to resist bureaucratic ossification. (Perhaps Adobe - to an ex…

Really? To me, for example iPhones haven't changed at all in a long time, they get spec bumps but are essentially the same product, and people buy replacements mostly because of batteries going bad / apps bloating / fashion. Apple's new products are surprisingly often failures, for their background. Vision Pro anyone?

Consumers always have the choice to buy a different phone. And in the case of buying an iPhone, they have the choice to buy a much cheaper phone. That so many of us continue to buy iPhones is proof that Apple is doing something very right. And that shows, and this is my main point, that they have impressively avoided being bogged down by megacorp bureaucracy.

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

#520

"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,…

I still think Motorola's Droid (and Droid 2) were the pinnacle of the smartphone form factor.

I distinctly recall the prevailing view among friends at the time was that even with the keyboard-less smartphones becoming the norm that the keyboard approach would become the standard interface, as Blackberry still existed and had majority market share (it seemed; my region had few iPhones at the time).

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