Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nokia made too many phones

textquery.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 337 posts

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#281

Post by bdavbdav »

trm42 wrote: post #276
kipchak wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree the user interface was a huge difference, but Nokia did have high spec-ed and priced battery burners like the N95. They even sold quite well, for example over their lifetimes there were 10 million N95s sold and 6 million iPhone 1s.

The N95 was super awkward to use. It had all the bells and whistles that you could cram into a phone at that point and it all was in small menus under menus under menus etc. N95 being a best seller was one of the reasons why Nokia was so sure that iPhone would fail. It lulled them into false security and proved to them that things were going great. I happened to review the N95 and it felt horrible after seeing Jobs d…

I think that was largely a Symbian thing - having used the Symbian phones before the N95, it felt sensible (and more akin to a desktop OS, with context menus etc)

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#282

Post by kungreke »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #271
kungreke wrote: post #264

This whole article is a single cause fallacy. There are many reasons Nokia failed in the smartphone market. This is one of them, but it is not the sole reason.

Exactly, I worked in Nokia Research around the time the iphone rumors were starting to circulate; just after Google bought an obscure company that made something called Android. Nokia was on top of the world at that time. Huge market share for what were then already called smart phones. Nokia making many products was how they did it. They tried to cover every segment and had gotten really good at creating bespoke pho…

It is quite ironic. Because I have a Sony with sailfish on it. If Nokia had gotten their act together sooner the market could have looked very differently. It is just an old story repeating itself, IBM was once a behemoth in the personal computer industry as well, both hardware and software wise. And much like Nokia they failed to adapt to a changing market.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#283

Post by usrusr »

acdha wrote: post #219
usrusr wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No other brand could have had much reach beyond a tiny luxury niche at the price point required to build the iPhone in 2007. It was the iPod that paved the way in the early aughts, when it was quite literally the only way to liberate ones entire Napster hoard from the confines of the minitower. Had the market not been primed by that freak wave incident, those telco execs' predictions might have well become true.

The iPod was key but not for the reason you’re thinking: it wasn’t the device itself as LG and Nokia had devices in 2007 which were pricier (LG’s Prada even beat Apple to the touchscreen market) but rather that the iPod’s dominant status as the prestige music player meant that AT&T wanted the “iPod phone” badly enough that they were willing to give up the control which carrier greed had used to strangle the American…

Right, there was a lot of bending over carrier side riding on the waning but still strong "white earbud cables" ad image. Carriers were still dreaming of being able to recreate the glory days of paid SMS I guess. The project that got us from zero cameras in phones to zero phones without cameras in what felt like weeks, MMS, was still pretending to not be quite dead yet.

An interesting perspective. From that angle it looks very much like the "not a smartphone because no apps" wasn't Apple not being ready yet, but Apple deliberately pretending to get a foot in the door.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#284

Post by rldjbpin »

yen223 wrote: post #228
vitorgrs wrote: post #213

Nokia made a lot of failures, but having too many phones is not the one that affected them. Samsung makes like, the same amount. Xiaomi probably even more. The thing is, if you are in a developed country, you are not seeing half of Samsung phones. They launch a lot of cheaper/middle range phones on emerging market. If you want to be successful at emerging markets, you basically need a lot of phones. Because you can't…

Apple is the odd one in terms of how narrow their product lineup is. Every other electronics company have market-segmented their product into 100s of devices. I have always wondered how a large company like Apple, with 161,000 employees operating in basically every market in the world, can maintain that level of focus.

not entirely correct. since iphone 7/8, they started having 3 or more new SKU per year.

more importantly, now they treat older models as the lower segment SKU that they continue selling for many years to come. not to forget the even older SKUs that resellers offer in developing countries that come from somewhere. so realistically they got 8-10 SKU actively sold in their own stores, before you consider special "red" editions etc.

to me this is not much different from the developing countries getting some budget SKU from the likes of Samsung and even Nokia in their heyday.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#285

Post by kmmlng »

hasmanean wrote: post #13

There 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 mark…

I remember this transition and funnily enough, the shorter battery life actually made for better user experience. Before, your battery would run out at some point. It was always kind of unexpected and then you couldn't use your phone. With smartphones, it became easier, because you could (and needed to) just charge it every night and you would be fine. It allowed you to set up a routine.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#286

Post by Lio »

magnuspaaske wrote: post #123
robocat wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The actual phone's usability and software were a complete afterthought. Yet it seems that Nokia phones were loved for their UI. Keypad UIs are hard to create - and competitors certainly had some toxically useless UIs. Somebody at Nokia got something right somewhere along the way? Maybe the engineers? After all presumably the engineers were eating their dogfood.

It might have helped that the Nordics were pretty advanced with developing mobile networks and mobile network technology. There was also SonyEricson in the region and it kind of makes sense that companies making network technology would also make handsets in the early innings and only later would people realise those are actually two different skillsets and market and need different companies.

You mean Ericsson. It only became SonyEricsson after the Ericsson management fucked up handling a fire at their supplier Philips.

The story I heard was that Ericsson had a culture of not handing bad news up the management change unless it was a real problem. Senior management didn't want to be bothered by small details.

By the time they realised it was a massive problem it was too late to buy on the open market and they were forced to spin out the mobile business into a join venture with Sony.

I don't think that was down to "differences in skillsets". It was generic short sighted management that killed Ericsson's handset business and it could just as easily have killed the network infrastructure side of the company if the problem had it happened there first.

If management don't won't accept hearing bad news from their subordinates they won't be told it.

Yes-Men kill you in the long run.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#287

Post by Lio »

nikau wrote: post #191
robocat wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're hallucinating a narrative about me based on your stereotypes. I think we all can identify people with Stockholm syndrome love, arising from their past technology abusers. You could be generically correct. However I never bought a Nokia and I haven't used one much. I am not a Nokia apologist. I lived through the period, and I'm commenting on what I saw at the time. Sometimes there are fans of a product or brand…

The Nokia n95 was way more advanced than the original iPhone except for the screen. It's just that consumers wanted the big screen over everything else. N95 photos still look decent even by today's standards, the original iPhone was a potato in comparison.

I had an N95 when it first came out. It wasn't the screen so much that lured me to an iPhone but the web browsing experience.

Trying to use the browser on the N95 was difficult it was slow to load pages and the reformatting was barely usable most of the time. Everything was high latency even on wifi.

With the iPhone it didn't really reformat websites so much as allow you to render it normally and then zoom and centre on to the bit you wanted to read. This was pre-responsive web design so everything stayed roughly the same as a desktop screen layout.

That and the multi-touch screen were the bits that made it superior enough for me to swap by the time the iPhone 3G came out.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#288

Post by nsteel »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #242
magnetowasright wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best phones I have ever owned were Sony Ericssons. How I yearn for a slightly modernised phone from them! My favourite was one that had a slide-out play station controller. That thing was awesome for wasting time on.

Yep, k700i, k750i, w902 — all superb phones, sometimes I even miss them a bit. Funny that a few years before that I was a big Palm/Clie enthousiaste, so the idea of "all screen no keyboard" wasn't new to me. Yet I gave up after Tungsten T5 and stayed with just Sony Ericssons for several years with no desire to but a PDA or smartphone.

I had all those phones! And also the "cool" white matrix-style slide-out one. They were really great, except the joystick/navigation thing always failed. Even when you cleaned them out, so annoying.

I miss the jog-dial ones. At least, I remember it very fondly but I would probably hate it now.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#289

Post by panick21_ »

romwell wrote: post #252
pavlov wrote: post #19

Around 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…

>Everyone knows what happened next. ...Microsoft did a hostile takeover with the help of an "ex"-Microsoft Elop being appointed Nokia CEO? Might I say, MS and Nokia eloped . Oh, and cancelled the very much beloved Linux-based handset without even advertising it.

Not really. In fact, its the opposite. The board broad in Elop because they wanted to be taken. Its not so much a hostile takeover but a 'invitation' of takeover.

Think about the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#290

Post by panick21_ »

t_mann wrote: post #57
regularfry wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Great at hardware, rubbish at software" was a very common refrain even at the time, and that was a manifestation of the same internal dysfunction. What wasn't clear was whether anyone could come along and fill the gap, or when they might. Because so much is software-based now, my counter would be that most companies that would have died because they failed to get their software operation in order have already done s…

According to that theory, we should have expected Windows Phone to be a success, no? Microsoft was (and is) killing it at software, especially consumer-facing OS. If anything, your argument makes me even less convinced that we have any good explanation for Nokia's failure.

Microsoft is successful when they are early at something. Coming many years after iOS and Android.

Microsoft now is successful because of cloud and working with cooperations. Not because they made the best OS. Their Microsoft Mobile wasn't very impressive. And their second attempt was ok, but very late.

The were gifted a monopoly by IBM so they constant fuckups that cost them many millions or billions of $ couldn't kill them off like it could other companies.

Taking full advantage of a monopoly isn't the same as being actually good. The beat their office competitors by leveraging their OS monopoly with very cheap bundling deals. They spun the OS monopoly into a 3D interface near-monopoly that made games only work on their platform. The list goes on.

Post reply on HN