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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

#61

Post by afavour »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #58
afavour wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consum…

I'm not convinced by that. If Maemo was a natural fit then Microsoft surely was equally so, given they already had Windows Mobile. They also had a large army of developers familiar with Microsoft APIs and the financial backing a large tech company can provide (IIRC MS literally paid people to make apps for Windows Phone). That's the kind of thing you'd need to catch up in an app library race you're already losing.

Yeah, we can look back in retrospect and say it was an obvious failure but that's because of the various insane choices MS made over the years. In the moment I'd argue the decision was nowhere near as clear cut.

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

#62

Post by seba_dos1 »

afavour wrote: post #61
seba_dos1 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consum…

I'm not convinced by that. If Maemo was a natural fit then Microsoft surely was equally so, given they already had Windows Mobile. They also had a large army of developers familiar with Microsoft APIs and the financial backing a large tech company can provide (IIRC MS literally paid people to make apps for Windows Phone). That's the kind of thing you'd need to catch up in an app library race you're already losing. Ye…

They had no developers familiar with these Microsoft APIs as Windows Phone was starting from scratch with new APIs that were incompatible with neither Win32 nor WinCE/Windows Mobile. The only thing that could save them that they were betting on was that these new APIs were also made available on desktops, but were pretty much ignored by developers there as well and ended up largely replaced with an even newer set of technologies.

Compare that with Maemo, where both GTK+ and Qt were first class citizens and which had an army of developers familiar with Unix and X11 before Maemo even existed.

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

#63

Post by rbanffy »

afavour wrote: post #7
TFNA wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today the vast majority of people I know rarely use the browser on their phones. They interact with the internet through apps from various walled gardens, and even for news on the open web they are likely to install someone's app. Windows wouldn't have stood a chance if app development became so quickly an iOS/Android duoply. Same goes for Nokia's Maemo and Meego. We nerds loved those OSs for being full-blown compute…

> Windows wouldn't have stood a chance if app development became so quickly an iOS/Android duoply. That was always the problem. But IMO Microsoft were probably the company best placed to compete there, given the existing developer mindshare they had. But they just messed it up, over and over. Incredibly to look back on, really.

Their Windows CE developer mindshare didn’t make the translation to post iPhone software. There was so little in common between the two worlds one would need to start from scratch.

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

#64

Post by rbanffy »

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 am sure the reason came from Microsoft. They have mastered outplacement as an offensive weapon.

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

#65

Post by RiverCrochet »

PopePompus wrote: post #51
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…

Most of the Windows CE phones of that era (pre-Windows Phone 7) were also basically "rooted" - i.e. you could install any .CAB and there was nothing stopping you. But Linux is a real operating system and Windows CE is basically on the same level as Windows 95 from an architecture standpoint.

A friend of mine worked at a cell phone repair shop and it was fairly common for someone to bring in their bulky keyboard-slideout HTC PDA that had frozen and typically the only recourse was a "hard reset" - reverting the phone to factory settings and removing all stored data (which was in the MB those days). Of course WinMo on most PDAs of the time was quite capable of keeling over all by itself without the aid of third-party programs, so the user couldn't always be blamed.

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

#66

Post by purpleidea »

What a badly written article. How could you leave out the N900 and the development history that came before it? If it wasn't for Elop and Microsoft, Nokia could have dominated and we wouldn't be stuck with mostly proprietary phones.

We're still waiting to solve that problem...

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

#67

Post by calgoo »

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 loved the tiled Windows phone ui, felt years ahead of the already aging android look and the god awful iOS look. I use android and iOS daily, and luckily I have been able to add a tiled launcher, with live tiles in android.

Also, had ms continued production and not burned goodwill at each turn, as well as skipped the crapshow that was windows 8, we could at least had had 3 providers instead of two.

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

#68

Post by no_time »

purpleidea wrote: post #66

What a badly written article. How could you leave out the N900 and the development history that came before it? If it wasn't for Elop and Microsoft, Nokia could have dominated and we wouldn't be stuck with mostly proprietary phones. We're still waiting to solve that problem...

>Nokia could have dominated and we wouldn't be stuck with mostly proprietary phones.

In an alternative timeline with Nokia winning, linux would still have GPLv2 which has no answer for proprietary drivers and tivoization. Also, the desire to dominate enduser devices by corporations/governments would still be there.

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

#69

Post by calgoo »

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.

The blackberry tablet was amazing at the time, especially if you had a blackberry phone as well. The issue was App development was a pain in a rear if i remember correctly, where it felt like you had to reinvent the wheel for everything you needed to do.

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

#70

Post by xorcist »

hedgehog wrote: post #17
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 wit…

There was also Tizen, FirefoxOS and a whole slew of others. It was a remarkable time.

But it is true that the app-based future, that didn't exist yet, probably came with market dynamics that limits the number of platforms to two or three. It just wasn't clear which those were at the time.

What a vanilla Linux-based platform, and Meego, Maemo, Moblin and Mer were just iterations of the same thing, would have had going for it was that it could have had much better long time support and not just for hardware for software. Linux famously do not break userspace, and can regularly run 30 year old applications. For a phone you would be surprised if a 3 year old app worked.

Microsoft did this so much worse than both Apple or Android, even if they all suffer from it. Every release of the operating system came not just with new design language, never earth-shattering but often interesting, but new GUI toolkits and application packaging. Just a recompile of your application often wasn't enough, you were expected to rewrite your application to fit in with the new. They really shot themselves in the foot with that, and they did it over and over again despite never having leading market share and everbody seeing where things were heading. It was (and perhaps still is) probably the only way they could operate as a company.

The vanilla Linux-based platforms mentioned above had their own problems which should be obvious from the naming scheme alone, which would have compounded had their marketshare grown bigger. It was a forkfest. But that's the issue with corporate open source, there is rightfully an inherent skepticism where a single company dominates what is an open source project. This is also why Linus never took a job with the big Linux providers. It wasn't for a lack of opportunitites, but he knew that had he worked for Red Hat, people would always suspect even technical decisions to be made for the benefit of his employer. The most successful open source projects are vendor neutral. That is not in telecom companies culture, they had a very hard time understanding that and tend to form alliances instead. Not the same thing.

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