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Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

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Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#281

Post by panick21_ »

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #248
trelane wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically correct, but this doesn't contradict what I said.

An interesting point is that Nokia managed to sell its phone business to MS for a good amount. It was a sinking ship and MS phones never really took off, so who stooged whom is a good question.

I mean, given the potential the price wasn't that amazing. And had they manged to continue to finance MeGoo development with their phone line that could have also result in sale of tablets, laptops and potentially other devices.

Even if Nokia market share would have dropped to less then 10%, that would still have been profitable business for them, and would have made them a major player.

Going from being the dominate player in a major growing market to getting a few billion for it, is not really a success.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#282

Post by panick21_ »

etempleton wrote: post #268
nextos wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood this memo. All they had to do was to switch to MeeGo. There was no burning platform. Hardware was great and software was great, but needed a bit more polish. MeeGo was more advanced than iOS in many ways at the time of this memo, and Maemo had been released way before the iPhone. The 770 was released in late 2005 and it was totally futuristic. However, Elop had no interest in going this route. When…

Similarly it seemed obvious early on, to me, that RIM should switch blackberry to Android with some customization aand port some apps over. They could still be a major player if they had done so. Instead they doubled down and buried their heads in the sand.

RIM was far smaller then Nokia. Nokia actually had resources and scale to make an Android/IOS competitor.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#283

Post by panick21_ »

zxspectrum1982 wrote: post #244
mlajtos wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

N9 (and N950) were Qt-based, not Gtk.

Glib, Gtk+ and various Gnome components were still running in Maemo and MeeGo. N9 was released in 2011, by that time Nokia was already dead. Trolltech was acquired in 2008. Nokia could have have a modern alternative to iOS and Android from day 1 but they made the terrible mistake of reinventing the wheel and trusting Gnome.

Can you send some links of what you are talking about?

And what the problems were with gnome? In 2009, the N900 was based on GTK and was a solid base to build on.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#284

Post by panick21_ »

zxspectrum1982 wrote: post #250
dsr_ wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's compare the Nokia N900 (Nov 2009) to the Motorola Droid (Oct 2009). They arrived at about the same time. They used the same CPU. They both had (approximately) 800x480 screens, which at the time was flagship class. They both used slide-out keyboards, removable batteries, a 5MP camera, 256MB of RAM, and some on-board storage plus a microSD slot. They weighed within 20g of each other. The N900 had a resistive touc…

The N900 had 32 GB of storage, which was absurdly huge at the moment. That phone could have seen sold at $300-400 with 2-4 GB of storage, which was more than enough at the time. My first Android phone, in 2010, had 0.5 GB of storage.

I think partly this was because they wanted only the highest end phones not using Symbian.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#285

Post by panick21_ »

speeder wrote: post #255
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-Stri…

I agree, you can't just kill it. They clearly had to migrate to Megoo on the high end, but they should have continued both systems for some time to come.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#286

Post by panick21_ »

guai888 wrote: post #199
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 not sure Android could have saved Nokia. Samsung survived in smart phone business because of their display and memory. Chinese smart phone makers was able to compete because of the enormous support from CCP. I was on another oil platform call "HTC" when Nokia platform was "burning". Eventually HTC went down too.

> because of the enormous support from CCP.

People claim this about literally every single thing China was successful at. A government can't just magically make its companies successful in every single industry.

What did the CCP do exactly to make these phones better?

Edit:

Also, HTC didn't exactly have the market dominance of Nokia. So not sure the situations are comparable.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#287

Post by panick21_ »

jayceedenton wrote: post #184
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…

If anyone wants to know what it was like at the time, for SWEs working anywhere in Nokia's phone division, this post captures it perfectly. People sometimes think that we can see Android was the right route only with hindsight. No, every engineer at the time knew that Android was the right way to go and that there was huge opportunity for Nokia there. Sure enough, in the following years we all had to read reviews of…

So they went from 120b$ business to a 7 billion $ sale. Not exactly amazing.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#288

Post by panick21_ »

BossingAround wrote: post #96
coffee_beqn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux and Nokia were at one point the Crown Jewels of Finnish tech. One still remains. Would’ve been a match made in heaven but I believe they needed Microsoft’s cash to keep the company running. I remember testing the N900 at their store and was really impressed but I think it was too little too late

N900 was awesome, but it wasn't what the masses wanted. It had a lot of quirks, like UI freezing when someone calls you so you couldn't answer the call and suffering from slowing down over a relatively short period of time while being price competitive with the other high end phones. N900 was a great beta. We never got a 1.0 though.

I really wanted the N900 and was ready to buy the next version. But it never came. By the time the N9 arrived it was already clear that it was dead.

Some of the bugs you describe could have been fixed with simple software updates.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#289

Post by panick21_ »

pharmakom wrote: post #160
koiueo wrote: post #38

Nokia N9 was the best phone I have ever owned. To these days their gesture navigation implementation is the best. And they had Swype keyboard preinstalled. Speaking of apps: Here maps, SoundHound, amazing mail client and calendar... Gosh I miss that phone. I used mine for about 3 years, I think, and sold it for more than a half of its original price in literally a couple of hours (which means my price was too low). B…

How would Meego have succeeded where Windows Phone, which had Microsoft’s backing, failed?

Microsoft backing is a help? Seems to me having the backing of the Linux community would have been way better.

Making UI for mostly existing apps, porting lots of existing apps over. Lots of free continues investments. Like you get other companies on board who use the same basic distro and apps and help with bug fixes and so on.

You can use the same distro on phones, tables and even sell laptops with that software on it.

And you can do all of that for no cost to anybody. Every single Nokia with Windows gives money away to Microsoft.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#290

Post by panick21_ »

eslaught wrote: post #15

I'm not saying this is a great letter, but he wasn't wrong. I owned both Symbian and Maemo devices, and the experience (both to use and develop) really was this bad. That's not to say everything about it was bad, or that there was nothing to like (as HN comments have often pointed out, there was), but it didn't hold a candle to iOS, or even Android. (And Android in those days was pretty hideous.) Now what Nokia did i…

The Maemo/Megoo devices did a ton of stuff better then android. The multitasking was amazing in comparison. Some of basic apps were better.

And there is a pretty clear path to making an android comparability layer.

Also, even if you want to switch to Android (or Windows) just 'burn it all down' is a bad strategy. That was a profitable business and still had huge market share. Just pissing all over it wasn't a good plan.

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