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Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

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Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#231

Post by afavour »

jorvi wrote: post #157
jillesvangurp wrote: post #93

I was there as this played out. Nokia had a lot of good software and software engineers but not the management structure to do anything good with that. Nokia was huge as an organization and parts of that organization recognized the threat early on. The problem was at the board and executive level. These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business. Lots of people with…

> The iphone was solidly in charge by then Nit: the iPhone was only "in charge" for a brief year or two, and then Android ate its lunch in terms of marketshare. What is very interesting is that Apple has displayed twice over ( MacBooks and iPhones) that a minority marketshare can capture the vast majority of profits in that market. OEMs like HTC and LG made a few bucks profit off of any phone, sometimes even losing m…

I was a day one Android fan (got the Nexus One) but I'd actually debate what "in charge" means... to me it doesn't necessarily mean dominating market share. I think the iPhone defined the touch-based smartphone when it came out and continues to do so. These days Android has a much more cohesive concept (in the form of Material UI and so on) but in the early days it was just a hodgepodge mess of ideas, even if it dominated the market.

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#232

Post by danillonunes »

jjmarr wrote: post #67
flir wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But with no app store. (As a programmer, I never in a billion years would have invented the app store. Yet it was the most important component of the iphone ecosystem).

The App Store didn't exist for the first iPhone. It launched with the iPhone 3G. The original plan was for everyone to develop web apps; the SDK was added due to external developer demand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(Apple)#History Not denying how important it was, but the App Store wasn't "invented". It was created because Apple listened to what developers wanted.

I don't think developers wanted App Store, they wanted to build native apps. Has Apple just allowed them to ship their own .dmg files from their website, as they used to do in MacOS, they would be happy.

I can't tell for sure, but I would bet the app store concept was inspired from Cydia for jailbroken iPhones that used APT to download apps from a central software repository, which was already common in the Linux world at the time.

App Store as a central place to download apps was a really important concept for the iPhone ecosystem because it was a distribution and a marketing channel. Developers didn't asked for that and, for the better and the worst, we can give Apple some credit for building it that way.

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#233

Post by cf100clunk »

Me too, I was there.

For those who wish to deep dive into the mobile phone industry's history from the late 1990s and subsequent decades, I highly recommend industry analyst Tomi Ahonen's voluminous (I'm not kidding) blog from back then. I'm providing a link here about Nokia in particular:

https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/nokia/

and especially his scathing take on the events of the Microsoft-Nokia timeframe, wherein as events transpired he frequently reframed his belief that Elop was the "Worst CEO In History".

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#234

Post by kalleboo »

lysace wrote: post #172
bjourne wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lund working on feature phones! My job was writing and managing test suites for verifying the J2ME implementation. It was a top secret collaboration with Motorola. They took QA work extremely seriously and bugs could delay major launches. Unfortunately for them, "rock solid J2ME" wasn't really what customers were after. :)

SE's J2ME implementation was top notch. It just worked and it was fast.

The fact that they did J2ME multitasking on a feature phone better than Symbian S60 did multitasking of native apps, and did it before the iPhone got any form of multitasking at all always impressed me.

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#235

Post by hammock »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #33

To my mind the key insight from the presentation is this sentence: “The 1% volume share target could translate into 4% value share, taking ~ 30% share of the >300 € price Band” That’s Apple’s superpower in a nutshell - get the majority of the profit in the market, while everyone else battles each over over market share (and earn low margins in the process).

Value share /= profit share

(and 4% /= majority, although I assume you were being poetic)

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#236

Post by lifefeed »

carlosjobim wrote: post #120
lifefeed wrote: post #83

I cant find the quote and article now, but I read that before it was released no one else believed a computer like that could have any reasonable battery life. Then they opened it up and discovered the iPhone was really just a battery with a small logic board attached to it, and a lot of the heavy computational lifting was done when it connected to your computer.

Can you expand on what you mean? What heavy computational lifting?

I wish I could find the original article, it was a link from a link from the bibliography of Chip War.

I think it was things like how you couldn't initially purchase music, and had to sync to iTunes to do that. I think there was more.

I did find this article, on iPhone being basically just a battery: https://mathiasmikkelsen.com/2011/05/blackberry-makers-thoug...

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#237

Post by bombcar »

jervant wrote: post #86

"Cingular has allowed Apple to launch a device with WLAN and inbuilt services" Ugh, that "allowed". It's wild how much Apple shook up the mobile phone market and pushed phone companies back to just being dumb data carriers.

Jobs sticking to his guns here and breaking the shitware monopoly on pre-installed phones is probably a bigger part of the full story than the phone itself (as likely the black rectangle would be developed by someone eventually, phone carcinization).

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#238

Post by zekica »

jagermo wrote: post #135
jillesvangurp wrote: post #93

I was there as this played out. Nokia had a lot of good software and software engineers but not the management structure to do anything good with that. Nokia was huge as an organization and parts of that organization recognized the threat early on. The problem was at the board and executive level. These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business. Lots of people with…

I remember that, too. Nokia even had an "app store" on a lot of their business series devices (the E-series), but it was clunky to use, had no payment options and was not really friendly for 3rd party developers. There was probably a window where, had Nokia pushed to compete with apple on that field, they could have gotten a leg up and kept Symbian and symbian apps in the race for (way) longer. But that invest and sp…

The worst thing with their store was the 3rd party review and signing process. For a time you also had to pay (a lot more than $99) to receive a developer certificate.

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#239

Post by s1artibartfast »

turnsout wrote: post #146
macintux wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren’t already familiar, Clayton Christensen’s theories on this, on innovation and disruption, are widely praised. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Christensen

Yeah, this is classic disruption. The amazing part is, I can almost guarantee that execs at Kodak read The Innovator's Dilemma, but it didn't help. Same goes for Nokia. Knowledge of the problem is apparently insufficient.

Sometimes there is no clear path from A to B. There is some weird fallacy where people tend to think every single company can make every single product if they simply hired the right engineers and throw money at it.

I think it comes from underestimating the role of process, structure, and competency, which are the DNA and codebase of a company.

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#240

Post by cbozeman »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #93

I was there as this played out. Nokia had a lot of good software and software engineers but not the management structure to do anything good with that. Nokia was huge as an organization and parts of that organization recognized the threat early on. The problem was at the board and executive level. These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business. Lots of people with…

> MS killed the whole division shortly after Satya Nadella took over and was sorting out the mess left by Steve Ballmer.

These have always been the real crimes in my mind.

Ballmer wasn't an idea guy, he was a top-tier salesman / cheerleader, and he definitely "understood" what actually made Microsoft successful (put out a product, then allow third-party developers and support to extend it / support / learn it inside out and be a VAR).

Ballmer made the same mistake a lot of people in that era made, which is that they didn't realize the software was the most important component. The era of "killer hardware" never actually existed in the smartphone space, because you had a limited form factor to begin with. You couldn't cram an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra in your phone, so your software had to be useful and on-point.

I think Satya saw the entire Windows Phone debacle as a failed experiment and probably looked at Apple / Google and just threw his hands up in frustration.

Getting developers onboard for Windows Phone was critical and not enough time, money, and attention was spent doing that. I think there was a degree of Microsoft arrogance there, along the lines of, "We're Microsoft, of course they're going to develop for our platform..." Meanwhile, in 2024, the Windows App Store is still a barren hellscape compared to even the App Store for OS X and you don't even want to talk about Google Play Store and iOS App Store vs Windows Store.

The prophecy was fulfilled - software will eat the world.

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