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Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

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Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#251

Post by toast0 »

Aleksdev wrote: post #225
Nokinside wrote: post #167

Nokia's made institutional mistakes that doomed Nokia phones before hiring Elop. (I was there). In a sense Nokia was (organizationally) victim of its own success. During the dumb phone and feature phone era Nokia did everything better than others. Everything from the supply chain management, to the phone design and manufacturing worked so well. Why would you sideline leaders and organizations who build all that and w…

Perhaps, this a silly question but since you are an insider I would love to know why did Nokia not beat Apple to the smart phone punch?

They did, Nokia launched their first Symbian smartphone in 2001, the Nokia 7650. iPhone was launched in 2007. The Newton of 1997 is not exactly a phone, so I don't think it counts here, but if it does, so does the Nokia Communicator 9000 of 1996. Either way, Nokia was first to market.

Apple had the advantage of a nicer product, and was building products for the US first, rather than US maybe later. Tech news is mostly (but not completely) based in the US, so Nokia smartphones got little coverage as they were often unavailable or non functional in the US. Different GSM frequencies meant different builds, and CDMA was an even more different build. And Nokia had messed up relations with US carriers at a time when phones selling through carriers was the primary method of reaching customers.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#252

Post by asveikau »

majormajor wrote: post #9
asveikau wrote: post #5

Here's a contemporaneous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2195520 I'm surprised how positive HN was about this. I don't remember reading any positive coverage at the time. I personally thought the guy was an idiot. He wound up performing worse than my expectations.

Looks like that discussion was before Windows Phone was announced as the replacement. E.g. " The idea of a Nokia device running Android is pretty appealing. They've always had good hardware, but Symbian has become a develpment dead-end, and Meego isn't yet here. " Symbian definitely wasn't the way forward. MeeGo wasn't looking like it was gonna be an iOS or Android killer. Elop was right about needing to change horse…

> MeeGo wasn't looking like it was gonna be an iOS or Android killer.

I had an n900 in 2009. I think they theoretically had a winner there.

But they never prioritized it above Symbian.

Then between the n900 and the n9, they totally rewrote the UI on a new toolkit, wasting resources and making it clear that if you write an app for it they may completely discard 95% of the app platform from release to release.

If they had iterated on Maemo 5 in that time and put all hands on deck behind it they could have used those ~3 years more productively and been more competitive. Maemo 5 was actually pretty close to what they needed.

Blackberry had a similar situation. Like meego, in bb10 they had a qt based platform in the early 2010s. But it was too late. The biggest blunder is not doing it sooner, before Android solidified.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#253

Post by vesinisa »

AdamCraven wrote: post #171

I worked at Nokia as a SWE in Berlin when that email dropped into my inbox. A few days later, it reached the press. We mostly thought ok, fine. What’s next? Before that, we’d been building an app for Nokia N97 handset users, an ever-decreasing market - all the engineers on the team had iPhones. We thought after that email that the next step would be to go on Android. Sure, Nokia would contract a little as it lost its…

Elop gets lots of shit for his role in this but to be fair, he was just the front man. The real power was with the board and in particular the ex-CEO Jorma Ollila. It was the board who hired Elop and it was the board who weighted and eventually made the call to go with Windows Phone instead of Android.

In a proper public company, crucial strategic decisions like these are not CEO-level but board-level. The CEO is called chief executive officer exactly because he executes the strategy set by the shareholders, whom the board represents. And that's exactly how it went down here. You can read it all from the 2014 book "Operation Elop" by Pekka Nykänen and Merina Salminen, Teos Publishing.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#254

Post by toast0 »

mxfh wrote: post #182
AdamCraven wrote: post #171

I worked at Nokia as a SWE in Berlin when that email dropped into my inbox. A few days later, it reached the press. We mostly thought ok, fine. What’s next? Before that, we’d been building an app for Nokia N97 handset users, an ever-decreasing market - all the engineers on the team had iPhones. We thought after that email that the next step would be to go on Android. Sure, Nokia would contract a little as it lost its…

It might even have worked out. Just that Microsoft still doesn't know how to run a proper app store besides the XBox Games one until this day. They flooded this thing with crappy apps anyone could submit for some weird incentives just to get their weird app store metrics up, making the user experience horrible. I wonder what would have happened, if they ran a properly curated platform, where they didn't allow for key…

Crappy apps might be a problem, but what was a bigger problem was that every major release of the platform came with a new application framework, and developers would have to pick between using the old framework to keep existing customers and live with suboptimal experience on new devices, use the new one and drop support for old devices, or spend even more effort on supporting both (or really all three). Compare to iOS, where most users update to latest OS within months, or desktop Windows where win32 works for everything, or Android where version gated features don't usually require massive changes to enable.

It would have been nice if they didn't copy Apple so hard, leaving out copy and paste and restricting browsers in the store weren't the best decisions for an upstart platform. Mozilla had been excited to port Firefox early on, but Microsoft told them no, so WP users were stuck with Mobile IE and much later in WM10, the amazingly worse Mobile Edge.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#255

Post by speeder »

Nokinside wrote: post #167

Nokia's made institutional mistakes that doomed Nokia phones before hiring Elop. (I was there). In a sense Nokia was (organizationally) victim of its own success. During the dumb phone and feature phone era Nokia did everything better than others. Everything from the supply chain management, to the phone design and manufacturing worked so well. Why would you sideline leaders and organizations who build all that and w…

I am Brazillian, and here this Nokia strategy was working just fine.

Android back then was crap, iPhone and Blackberry too expensive.

Symbian phones were spreading like wildfire in dry grass, people were switching from dumbphones to Symbian, and the community was having great growth, I saw children looking online for tutorials how to learn coding so they could make Symbian games, there was even a bootleg Counter-Strike for Symbian.

As soon the demo came out, Symbian sales tanked, and people switched instead to random cheap and crap Chinese phones, a popular one was "hiphone".

The effect in my view was devastating, all the hacking community that was starting, suddenly died, what proliferated now was poor quality phones or people doing crazy things (one waiter sold his kidneys to buy an iPhone, literally). Nokia had a very confortable first place in market share in Brazil, in a few months they had became irrelevant.

And now the effects are still felt, in Brazil it is hard to get a decent phone without going into debt, a lot of good phones with interesting features are not sold here, and you can't import them either, because the proliferation of chinese cheap phones that caused all sorts of trouble, the national regulator decided that they will ban from the cell towers any phone that they detect that doesn't have official permission to be sold in the country, this means there is no FairPhone in Brazil, no Shift phone, no Jolla, and so on.

And sadly, not even Nokia themselves are bothering with us anymore, they recently released some fairly interesting phones with WhatsAPP support using FireFox OS (KaiOS), and didn't bother asking permission to sell them here, so they can't be imported.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#256

Post by FreezingKeeper »

codeflo wrote: post #179
bsimpson wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard rumors that Android was originally supposed to be an OS for digital cameras.

That might be, and before the iPhone reveal, the vision was supposedly to target Nokia-style button phones. The difference could be that the technical foundation was more sound, and also, Google is institutionally capable of large refactorings in a way that I think few other companies are. People forget this, and it’s solved now, but it took Android several years and quite a few iterations of the rendering layer to g…

I remember them publicly demoing the BlackBerry clone from this article https://www.pcworld.com/article/464050/original_android_prot...

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#257

Post by speeder »

asveikau wrote: post #5

Here's a contemporaneous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2195520 I'm surprised how positive HN was about this. I don't remember reading any positive coverage at the time. I personally thought the guy was an idiot. He wound up performing worse than my expectations.

Heh, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2195785 seemly that post and Sahaj response to it unfortunately were the ones that were correct.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#258

Post by antiterra »

trelane wrote: post #220
Nokinside wrote: post #167

Nokia's made institutional mistakes that doomed Nokia phones before hiring Elop. (I was there). In a sense Nokia was (organizationally) victim of its own success. During the dumb phone and feature phone era Nokia did everything better than others. Everything from the supply chain management, to the phone design and manufacturing worked so well. Why would you sideline leaders and organizations who build all that and w…

Sounds like classic Innovator's Dilemma: The money was in the old tech, the market was moving to new tech. They listened to where they money was instead of where it was going. I had an early Nokia Linux tablet (770, I think?), and I really liked it. I was very sad when Elop turned over the keys to Microsoft. Not surprised, though.

> They listened to where they money was instead of where it was going.

You have to do both. A company pivoting to a new technology too quickly can run out of steam if there’s no adoption and no stable business to keep it afloat. The challenge is to make sure that your legacy team doesn’t stifle your innovation team yet remains profitable as long as it is strategically beneficial.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#259

Post by simonh »

yobbo wrote: post #205
simonh wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d not heard that about Netflix before but it makes a lot of sense. The Apple case is an interesting counterpoint though. They seem to have a pretty solid culture of consensus and collaboration between teams at the top. But then they have an unusual functional organisation structure rather than being organised around product divisions. This means the functional teams have a stake in (basically) all the products, so…

> The Apple case is an interesting counterpoint though Isn't the story that iphone development was a secret project with competing teams, one of which proposed the touch-screen interface?

That’s true, but only for very early prototypes. Once the decision had been made which to go with, that was it. Yes the iPhone team was isolated, that’s not unusual for a stealth project at Apple, but the iPhone software team still reported to the head of the Software org who also ran the Mac software team for example, the iPhone hardware guys still reported to the head of the hardware org responsible for Mac hardware as well.

There was no real separate Mac product team from the iPhone team, the head of hardware was responsible for the hardware for both so he didn’t have a conflict of interest. Whichever succeeded, to whatever degree, he would succeed. He would have no incentive for either to fail or to spike one in favour of the other.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#260

Post by zxspectrum1982 »

oriolid wrote: post #134
KronisLV wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Symbian was the biggest problem with Nokia phones. I actually miss it, those were simpler times where your phone didn't spam you with ads or notifications or didn't get outdated every 2 years. No constant data collection or surveillance to the scales we deal with now. More so, I actually miss the feeling of how new everything was, in the sense that is you wanted to play some games you'd sometimes scour WAP sites fo…

The problem with Symbian was not the usability but the developer experience. SDK available only for Windows and really awkward to install and use? Check. Pre-11 C++ but without exceptions and something called cleanup stack and ELeave macro instead? Check. Ok, a whole periodic table of string classes instead of std::string (which would still have been terrible because it was before C++11)? Check. GUI API that was desi…

All of that is true, and that's why Nokia acquired Trolltech: Qt solved all those problems on Symbian, and provided an easy, mostly OS-independent, way to rebuild the apps for Maemo/MeeGo.
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