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Nokia made too many phones
11–20 of 337 posts
Re: Nokia made too many phones
#12Yes they did. I miss them. But thats creative destruction. Nokia tried to do everything and ended up doing nothing. They could not compete with the joint assault by iPhone and Android.
Or by Microsoft.
Nokia never understood the less-is-more thing that Apple are so good at. Hundreds of phones and an overcomplicated OS wuth political and technical problems - Symbian - were the result, not the cause, of a company that lacked focus and direction.
Re: Nokia made too many phones
#13There was also conventional wisdom which had to be abandoned before the iPhone came out.
Nokia phones had 1 week battery life. They were extending it to one month.
The iPhone had a given the app experience available on the iPhone they could live with that.
This was a bet Nokia would have never made—-they were not in the user interface business. The fact that Apple—who was not in the phone business—-entered their market was bonkers. But once you make your own silicon anything is possible. Plus they had already done the iPod.
Re: Nokia made too many phones
#14Nokia could both make too many phones and fail for other reasons. The article doesn’t say Nokia failed because it made too many phones.
However, I do remember the first time my wife got an iPhone. Her Nokia was breaking down and she was trying to decide which Nokia would replace it. She spent a week comparing models. In the end she said “fuck this” and got an iPhone.
What’s really funny was that Malcolm Gladwell did a TED talk about the importance of segmenting the shit out of markets - just as the market pushed back and demonstrated he was talking nonsense.
Re: Nokia made too many phones
#15> It’s interesting to see how Nokia succumbed to the bad strategy that had almost killed Apple in ‘97. Well, here is one take; > Nokia’s ultimate fall can be put down to internal politics. In short, Nokia people weakened Nokia people and thus made the company increasingly vulnerable to competitive forces. When fear permeated all levels, the lower rungs of the organisation turned inward to protect resources, themselve…
I like to think that it was Microsoft which destroyed Nokia from the inside in order to make Windows phone great at last https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/microsoft-nokia-deal-a-...
Nokia's then CEO's Elop's "burning platform" memo leak in 2011 seemed to hurt Nokia a lot by painting their existing and upcoming phones as inferior.
> I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform.
https://www.engadget.com/2011-02-08-nokia-ceo-stephen-elop-r...
Re: Nokia made too many phones
#16This just feels like ex-post rationalization. It's easy to come up with a story why something failed after the fact, but that doesn't mean the theory has any weight. If you want this to be interesting, put some skin in the game and make a prediction about currently successful companies based on your theory. Otherwise, I'll have to assume that what you'd have written in 2005 was how Nokia's approach was superior to eg Palm's (fyi, dominant in the 'handheld' market in the 90's, in steady decline throughout the 00's, already had an app ecosystem of sorts).
Re: Nokia made too many phones
#17Nokia was incredibly political. But they were comfortably smug too.
When we made games for Nokia platforms, we'd hear horror stories from engineers. Extreme management to engineer ratio (like 1 for 5 or less), non stop meetings and slide decks.
One strategy that the engineers came up with to have peace was to get two or more project managers involved, so they could sest in meetings and calls all day and let people dev.
They were also the biggest player in Finland. The best logistics. The most market share. They had so many devs in their rollodex. Clearly, they could ship an iPhone killer. Clearly they understood everything about mobile and knew everyone. They even had a cloud project (Ovi) that predated iCloud.
I remember meeting them back in the NGage days and thinking who are these clowns making a portrait screen for games, with no dpad, and a phone you hold sideways. No focus on apps (Palm and other handheld had plenty of homebrew and emulators).
The company was a juggernaut that could ship the old Nokia bricks, but never adapt to be good at software, or have a good mobile OS.
It's a shame, because honestly the best industrial design and UX people I've seen were there.
Re: Nokia made too many phones
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like to think that it was Microsoft which destroyed Nokia from the inside in order to make Windows phone great at last https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/microsoft-nokia-deal-a-...
Nokia was long gone when they were acquired. They were beaten by RIM/BB They tried gaming, didn’t succeed. Later on messaging, but didn’t have the platform (ping)
Blackberry come nowhere close to beating Nokia. It was Apple.
Re: Nokia made too many phones
#19Around 2003 I did the art direction (mostly pixel-pushing...) for a game that shipped on a Nokia model. I have no recollection of what the phone looked like, but it was part of the "lifestyle" category described in this article. It wasn't one of the craziest form factors, just a candybar phone in pretty plastic with one of those early square color screens.
Nokia Design sent a massive moodboard PDF, something like 100 pages, with endless visual ideas for what seemed practically like an Autumn/Winter lineup of plastic gadgets. But it was all about the moods. The actual phone's usability and software were a complete afterthought. Those were to be plugged in eventually by lowly engineers somewhere along the line, using whatever hardware and software combination would happen to fit the bill of materials for this lifestyle object.
The game I designed was a "New York in Autumn" themed pinball. There were pictures of cappuccino, a couple walking in the park, and all the other clichés. It fit the moodboard exactly, the game shipped on the device, everyone was happy. Nobody at Nokia seemed to care about the actual game though.
Of course the implication with these fashion devices was that they were almost disposable, and you'd buy a new one for the next season. This would be great for Nokia's business. Unfortunately their design department seemed consumed by becoming a fashion brand and forgot that they're still a technology company. Everyone knows what happened next.
Re: Nokia made too many phones
#20> Nokia Made Too Many Phones
Too many for what? Would you really want the history of mobile phones to be merely the antiseptic aesthetic and walled garden of the iPhone? Why do you think people are buying folding phones, flip phones, phones with screens on the front and the back.
So they ultimately failed, so what? The vast majority of companies of all sizes fail after some time.