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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

#111

Post by rickdeckard »

> Partanen was also at Nokia’s post-iPhone launch meeting, and recalls that there was little concern in the room. “We felt okay,” he says.

Which is a perfectly reasonable reaction, the first iPhone was an iPod with a sub-par Browser and a bad mobile phone, in a device which barely managed to last one day on a charge.

Others also had sub-par browsers, comparable/more versatile Media Players and MUCH better phones, running a week or longer on a single charge.

The way Apple destroyed the competition was by creating so much hype around their product that they could demand concessions from carriers, most of all revenue-share (and a scheme where the ~1000USD device-price included marketing budget the carrier could then "consume" from Apple), two moves which decoupled Apple from Market-pressure and created an incredible influx of money into their R&D.

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

#112

Post by jzwinck »

ZuLuuuuuu wrote: post #103

A lot of people attribute the Windows Phone switch as the end of Nokia but that would only be true if people did not like Windows Phone. On the contrary, Windows phones were loved by their users. And I say this as a person who used Symbian Belle, then Meego (I had the piano white Nokia N9!) and then Windows Phone. Meego was fantastic, but Windows Phone was fantastic as well. And arguably it had more reach: modern Win…

Did Windows Phone solve the problem that Windows Mobile had where libraries like the .net runtime were incomplete? I remember trying to build an app for Windows Mobile 6.0 and not being able to use third party libraries because some of the basic functions of Windows were missing on mobile. I'm not even talking about UI, more like networking and other backend features.

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

#113

Post by ACCount37 »

brookst wrote: post #100
ACCount37 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tivoization should have been strangled in its crib. "Secure boot" as it's used today is the death knell of user freedom.

It’s all tradeoffs. Secure boot sucks for enthusiasts but wow would the phone security / root kit scene be a nightmare without it.

Would it?

A bootkit doesn't give you any more access - only more persistence. At the price of having to tailor a payload to a hardware and software platform very carefully. For most attackers, that's just not worth it.

Now, if what you want to "secure" is your ability to gatekeep what software users can and can't install? What sources they can and can't consume media from? What system-level spyware and adware users can and can't remove? What operators users can and can't connect to? Then, suddenly, "secure boot" makes an awful lot of sense.

Which is exactly how "secure boot" is treated by vendors nowadays. It's there to "secure" something alright. It's there to chain device software to the device vendor securely.

There's a reason why modern "secure boot" originated on gaming consoles and TV boxes.

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

#114

Post by rickdeckard »

rickdeckard wrote: post #111

> Partanen was also at Nokia’s post-iPhone launch meeting, and recalls that there was little concern in the room. “We felt okay,” he says. Which is a perfectly reasonable reaction, the first iPhone was an iPod with a sub-par Browser and a bad mobile phone, in a device which barely managed to last one day on a charge. Others also had sub-par browsers, comparable/more versatile Media Players and MUCH better phones, run…

For YEARS to come, carriers refused to rectify this skewed market, so while Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, Samsung, LG had to continue jumping through hoops and could only earn money at the point of sale, while Apple's monthly income accumulated based on the total amount of active devices.

In the end, it also wasn't the carriers who rectified that situation either. After Apple was technically ready to support more carriers, they moved away from their "one carrier per country" exclusivity-model, so they also had to concede on revenue-share compensation.

But by that time Apple already had the search-deal with Google, so revenue-share continued to from the search-traffic generated in Safari.

All of those were genius moves, disrupting the economy of an industry which separated the product from provided services, ultimately gaining total control over the user and all services provided, degrading the carrier to a mere ISP (who was even happy about it because the average revenue per user was higher).

Nonetheless, it destroyed the entire mobile phone ecosystem (especially outside of US, where market-forces were less in control of the carriers)

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

#115

Post by internet2000 »

ZuLuuuuuu wrote: post #103

A lot of people attribute the Windows Phone switch as the end of Nokia but that would only be true if people did not like Windows Phone. On the contrary, Windows phones were loved by their users. And I say this as a person who used Symbian Belle, then Meego (I had the piano white Nokia N9!) and then Windows Phone. Meego was fantastic, but Windows Phone was fantastic as well. And arguably it had more reach: modern Win…

Windows Phone wasn't really good, because it inherited desktop Windows' bad developer experience and constantly broken promises. The write once run everywhere story wasn't as rosy as you remember. Windows Phone wasn't good, wasn't getting better fast enough, and regressed due to some unforced errors later in life.

And I say that as someone with a (blue) N9 and Lumia 900 within a few feet of me in a drawer.

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

#116

Post by baybal2 »

pavlov wrote: post #99
msh wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nokia was already in deep trouble before windows phone. If they did not go windows phone they would have ended up a android OEM (still better for them than what ended up happening) but there was no realistic way for them to "domination" at that point. That would have required them to change strategy years before they first saw the iphone.

> still better for them than what ended up happening Microsoft paid $7.2 billion for Nokia's loss making phone division in 2013. There's no way anybody would have paid that much for just another Android OEM. As much as Nokia fans hated it, the Windows Phone strategy actually extracted the best value out of the rotting assets of Nokia Mobile Phones. And Nokia the networking company remains a $70B corporation today. Th…

[dead]

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

#117

Post by mjg59 »

rickdeckard wrote: post #111

> Partanen was also at Nokia’s post-iPhone launch meeting, and recalls that there was little concern in the room. “We felt okay,” he says. Which is a perfectly reasonable reaction, the first iPhone was an iPod with a sub-par Browser and a bad mobile phone, in a device which barely managed to last one day on a charge. Others also had sub-par browsers, comparable/more versatile Media Players and MUCH better phones, run…

Oh, come on. Yes, compared to any modern device the iPhone was a piece of shit (no cut and paste when shipped? No 3G?), but as someone who owned a high end S60 device at the time, the iPhone was a breath of fresh air - the Maps experience on its own was enough of an improvement to justify it. The problem Nokia and others had is that they were judging potential iPhone buyers against the people buying their smartphones, not against the market waiting for a smartphone that wasn't an absolute piece of shit from a UX perspective.

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

#118

Post by rickdeckard »

pavlov wrote: post #99
msh wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nokia was already in deep trouble before windows phone. If they did not go windows phone they would have ended up a android OEM (still better for them than what ended up happening) but there was no realistic way for them to "domination" at that point. That would have required them to change strategy years before they first saw the iphone.

> still better for them than what ended up happening Microsoft paid $7.2 billion for Nokia's loss making phone division in 2013. There's no way anybody would have paid that much for just another Android OEM. As much as Nokia fans hated it, the Windows Phone strategy actually extracted the best value out of the rotting assets of Nokia Mobile Phones. And Nokia the networking company remains a $70B corporation today. Th…

> Microsoft paid $7.2 billion for Nokia's loss making phone division in 2013. There's no way anybody would have paid that much for just another Android OEM.

They paid for a fully operating Windows Phone company with competitive devices and an established brand, at a time when Microsoft had a strong hardware-strategy.

It was the perfect move for both Microsoft and Nokia.

Microsoft even tried to bargain that Nokia had no alternative to sell because of their dependency on Windows Phone OS, so Nokia demonstrated that this is not true by announcing the "Nokia X", a device with skinned fork of Android without Google and Nokia's own App-store in Feb'2014, JUST to close the acquisition deal with Microsoft.

> As much as Nokia fans hated it, the Windows Phone strategy actually extracted the best value out of the rotting assets of Nokia Mobile Phones.

Not to forget, Nokia kept almost ALL of their patents AND ownership of the brand in that deal.

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

#119

Post by nextos »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #79
cdud3 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to that: Elop announced the end of N9 weeks before it's release and more then a year before the first Lumina was available. Dead on arrival not even shipped in major markets. Yet the N9 was years ahead any competition of that time.

Elop knew what his job was. Sell Nokia to Microsoft.

And he effectively killed the last EU platform. Will we ever see another one?

I miss these simpler times when devices were made to serve users, and not the other way round.

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

#120

Post by pavlov »

jzwinck wrote: post #112
ZuLuuuuuu wrote: post #103

A lot of people attribute the Windows Phone switch as the end of Nokia but that would only be true if people did not like Windows Phone. On the contrary, Windows phones were loved by their users. And I say this as a person who used Symbian Belle, then Meego (I had the piano white Nokia N9!) and then Windows Phone. Meego was fantastic, but Windows Phone was fantastic as well. And arguably it had more reach: modern Win…

Did Windows Phone solve the problem that Windows Mobile had where libraries like the .net runtime were incomplete? I remember trying to build an app for Windows Mobile 6.0 and not being able to use third party libraries because some of the basic functions of Windows were missing on mobile. I'm not even talking about UI, more like networking and other backend features.

Windows Phone solved it by supporting only Silverlight apps... No Windows APIs.

I also loved the Windows Phone 7 UI. But the app story was always a mess, and the competitive situation with Google meant that 2012's super-important apps like YouTube would never appear on the platform, whatever they did.

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