Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon • Hacker News Board

Re: Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

#11

Post by rjrjrjrj » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

My recollection of the mid-2000s is that Nokia simply had no idea how to be a platform provider. They had 2 or 3 main operating systems, but within each of those there were numerous different versions. Most handsets didn't get updated, so you had to download a zillion different SDKs just to do basic testing.

And the bugs... one whopper in particular that I remember was redirect after POST didn't work.

Re: Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

#12

Post by fineIllregister » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:48 PM UTC

let_rec wrote: post #8

Why do people assume that MeeGo would have been a big success?

It wouldn't have been. I had an N9, it was amazing, but even before the "burning platform", it was clearly too late to the market share and app races. Consider that it didn't really have much of a head start over the Windows phone, which MS poured so much money into, and even they couldn't get their foot in the door.

Re: Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

#13

Post by simonh » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

let_rec wrote: post #8

Why do people assume that MeeGo would have been a big success?

Because they cannot comprehend the factors that meant it took the Android team 3 to 5 years working flat out to even vaguely approximate technical parity with the iPhone OS of the time.

Even given that the Android team actually did understand what they needed to do to achieve that. Nobody else in the industry did. They thought that if you just ported an OS the job was done. That’s barely even the start.

Re: Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

#14

Post by dataAI » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:55 PM UTC

Those were the days. Former Nokia (N9 Meego) employees formed Jolla and it is still alive. They nowadays sell tens of thousands of Linux phones, so not taking over the phone market.

Re: Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

#15

Post by B1FF_PSUVM » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

RiverCrochet wrote: post #6

From the article: "Elop oversaw the 2011 launch of a Linux-based smartphone, the Nokia N9. The N9 ran on a distribution of Linux called MeeGo. Reviewers at the time praised the new smartphone direction the Finnish phone maker had taken. 'Possibly the most beautiful phone ever made,' wrote one reviewer about the N9 for Engadget. But the N9’s accolades did not ultimately carry the day. Nokia announced its Lumia line of…

Not far. Not even MS had the clout to impose a third alternative in phones, and it was needed.

And WindowsPhone was actually a good design for user interaction, with the exception of some underlying clunkiness of settings.

Re: Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

#16

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:59 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #2

I think the biggest mistake was adopting Windows as their OS. It negated any technical advantages they could have over Android.

No, their biggest mistake was having no clue what they were doing or, why.

Nokia were a tech slop factory - one new model roughly every two weeks, with no obvious strategy or rationale, many only superficially different.

Every so often they'd produce a classic that was ahead of its time, like the Communicator series, then by the time the surrounding infra had caught up they'd moved on and allowed a competitor to eat that space.

iPhone and Android were both killing them, and they had no idea how to respond.

Elop was the undertaker, and much hated for reasonable reasons. But the brand was already a zombie by that point.

Re: Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

#17

Post by hedgehog » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:59 PM UTC

RiverCrochet wrote: post #6

From the article: "Elop oversaw the 2011 launch of a Linux-based smartphone, the Nokia N9. The N9 ran on a distribution of Linux called MeeGo. Reviewers at the time praised the new smartphone direction the Finnish phone maker had taken. 'Possibly the most beautiful phone ever made,' wrote one reviewer about the N9 for Engadget. But the N9’s accolades did not ultimately carry the day. Nokia announced its Lumia line of…

It wouldn't necessarily have been better, a major reason the Windows phone stuff failed is it didn't have market share to justify app development. Android barely made it work as a well-funded #2. Palm WebOS, MeeGo, there were various efforts that were better than Android and even iOS in a lot of ways but app availability seems to have been the biggest factor in the lack of platform diversity.

Edit: And consistent with sibling comment Microsoft was even paying companies to build apps for their platform, and it _still_ wasn't enough.

Re: Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

#18

Post by arjie » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 6:00 PM UTC

They really didn't have a chance. Technology had moved past them. The capacitive touch screen, multi-touch, fast mobile processors and the move to the web meant that mobile phones were becoming platforms. And Nokia wasn't a platforms business. To paraphrase Bill Gates, a platform requires that the economic value to the other participants exceeds that of the value to the platform. Nokia was never like that. In aggregate the organization had a fragmentation of SDKs, no single device domination, and didn't really value the other participants on their ecosystem.

Apple (or Steve Jobs) understood the value of the web (one of the crucial 3 pieces of the iPhone when it debuted) as a platform - though Apple pivoted over time to have iOS and the App Store itself.

That's just how organizations work. No one inside Nokia could realistically have acquired the power to make the decision in time. The company wasn't shaped to do this. They were doomed as soon as the tech caught up.

Re: Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

#19

Post by mempko » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 6:06 PM UTC

I was working for a Nokia subsidiary called HERE maps at the time this was happening. All I can say is MeeGo was a great OS and would have competed really well with iOS. They released one phone with it called the N9 in some smaller countries and then discontinued that year in favor of Windows.

The heart of MeeGo continues on in Sailfish OS created by Jolla. They are again releasing a phone in Europe. I wish they released it in the US.

Re: Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

#20

Post by storus » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 6:06 PM UTC

arjie wrote: post #18

They really didn't have a chance. Technology had moved past them. The capacitive touch screen, multi-touch, fast mobile processors and the move to the web meant that mobile phones were becoming platforms. And Nokia wasn't a platforms business. To paraphrase Bill Gates, a platform requires that the economic value to the other participants exceeds that of the value to the platform. Nokia was never like that. In aggrega…

Capacitive screens were out of possibility for them as Apple bought 2 year production in advance, a trick Tim deployed repeatedly in many areas. MeeGo had a chance but US funds didn't want to allow a state where an EU company would rule the fastest growing market of that time and their darling MS slips into irrelevance and its trojan horse killed it off quickly.