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

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

#51

Post by PopePompus »

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…

I loved Nokia's Linux phones, and bought several of them. I drove to New York (from Boston) twice to get an N900 as early as possible. But I wonder what they would have had to do to make that line of phones a mass-market success. Users of the N900 had root privilege. Can you imagine a support nightmare that would have been for T-Mobile et al.? To sell Linux phones to the general public, I think they would have had to lock down the OS to the point that it resembled what Android is today.

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

#52

Post by VulgarExigency »

afavour wrote: post #3
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.

I'm not so sure. There will always be viable alternative histories of course but their existing Symbian OS was already long in the tooth and would have required a lot of work to catch up to the smartphone world and I'm just not convinced they had it in them. Arguably they should have just gone with Android, and it's easy to say that in hindsight. But Android was a horrible mess in its 2.x era, Windows Phone seemed li…

As others have said, they had Maemo/Meego. As the owner of a N900 myself, it was really good, but they decided not to bet on it for some inexplicable reason.

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

#53

Post by afavour »

VulgarExigency wrote: post #52
afavour wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure. There will always be viable alternative histories of course but their existing Symbian OS was already long in the tooth and would have required a lot of work to catch up to the smartphone world and I'm just not convinced they had it in them. Arguably they should have just gone with Android, and it's easy to say that in hindsight. But Android was a horrible mess in its 2.x era, Windows Phone seemed li…

As others have said, they had Maemo/Meego. As the owner of a N900 myself, it was really good, but they decided not to bet on it for some inexplicable reason.

I think the reason was a lack of thriving app ecosystem. Microsoft seemed like a much better bet in that regard, they just messed it up in incredible ways.

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

#54

Post by ksec »

presbyterian wrote: post #49
ksec wrote: post #46

And may be a some other context. Steve Jobs initially only wanted 1% of the mobile phone market. Nokia wasn't at all worried, they still have a few Smartphone 1.0 design ready to deploy. Remember iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. There were plenty of them before hand. Windows Mobile from OEM of HTC , Palm, Sony Ericsson P900s etc. By the time they realise it was a completely different genre and game it was too late…

> There are a few Social Media Apps, Messenger Apps, Banking Apps which I consider essential to every day users and cover 80 - 90% of their usage. Who will make these apps for the new platform? They have no need to develop for a new platform in hopes it becomes popular, and very few of them have open APIs for the platform to make their own third-party apps.

The platform owner themselves. Obviously it wouldn't be an idea for startup. But OpenAI, Meta, or Tesla could have enough leverage to do so. Or even Amazon.

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

#55

Post by wmf »

pzo wrote: post #28
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…

I think they would still fail with MeeGo, same like Blackberry failed even though they had really good OS. I remember was going to their conference in amsterdam and were giving their new Blackberry Tablet for free to attract developers to make any app. If Nokia and Blackberry team up they maybe would succeed. Nokia Mobile still could be around if instead choosing Windows Phone would release Android phone back then.

BlackBerry didn't have a really good OS until 2011 or later which was too late.

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

#56

Post by jauntywundrkind »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #37
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…

> We were so close to having literal plain Linux phones. IIRC, the dominant position back then was "Android is Linux". Shuttleworth closed his famous #1 bug on Canonical that was their mission in 2013 because now Android/Linux is more popular than Windows and the future is mobile[1]. Also Google still had a lot of good will in the OSS/Linux community back then so most "Mobile Linux" attempts were met with "Just use A…

Android may be a Linux but it (if we are feeling generous) sure as heck is not the user's. It's someone else's Linux that they let us run some non-Linux apps in in extremely tight sandboxes.

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

#57

Post by hedgehog »

storus wrote: post #22
hedgehog wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

Windows Phone aesthetics was repulsive to most people at that time; we finally got TrueColor 4k screens and all MS could do was to use 10 colors everywhere and start the flat fad that destroyed UX on most systems. What a waste.

I don't think that's quite accurate, the screens of the time were more like 480px wide and I don't think most people had a strong aesthetic opinion. Just look at Android. The major problem is that whatever app you cared about, whether it was your bank, Facebook, sport news, or Uber, or Google Maps, or whatever, it was on iOS and maybe Android. So at least in rich countries the decision tree was: buy iOS if you can afford it, buy Android if you can't. Apple basically got extremely lucky that the native app thing took off instead of their original vision of everything via the browser.

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

#58

Post by seba_dos1 »

afavour wrote: post #53
VulgarExigency wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have said, they had Maemo/Meego. As the owner of a N900 myself, it was really good, but they decided not to bet on it for some inexplicable reason.

I think the reason was a lack of thriving app ecosystem. Microsoft seemed like a much better bet in that regard, they just messed it up in incredible ways.

Microsoft was a horrible bet in that regard. Maemo was a natural development platform for many products (just straight out of my head: Mozilla, VMware and Rovio have all chosen it organically), to the point where there was plenty of notable stuff that was first developed on Nokia N900 and ported to Android/iOS afterwards, but only officially released for iOS and Android because Maemo was already abandoned as a consumer platform. Windows Phone had no such gravitational pull at all and its lack of software eventually became an internet meme.

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

#59

Post by wmf »

simonh wrote: post #13
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.

IIRC the N9 did have approximate technical parity (not business parity) with the iPhone and it did take Nokia 3-4 years (2007-2011). As other commenters have said, they lost out due to timing and lack of platform strategy.

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

#60

Post by seba_dos1 »

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…

> We were so close to having literal plain Linux phones.

We had that and we still do. Back in 2008 I was wondering whether I should spend my first-earned money on the first Android phone (HTC Dream, aka T1) or a "plain Linux phone" (Neo Freerunner) and I've chosen the latter. Ultimately it was a good choice, as Android quickly turned out to be not what I wanted and only got worse over time, while the other path had me eventually go through Nokia N900 and Librem 5, and both of them worked well as mobile phones and pocket-sized computers. They feel like actual smartphones compared to Android and iOS which feel more like appliances that have largely replaced the so called feature-phones of the past.

That said, Nokia N9 was already strafing away from that path, with its Aegis framework that attempted to lock the device down in hopes to, basically, enforce a form of DRM. It turned out not to be very effective, but it would undoubtedly have kept being improved in later iterations, slowly eroding that unrestricted agency of the user that the N900 was famous for.

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