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Nokia made too many phones

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Re: Nokia made too many phones

#41

Post by pjc50 »

hasmanean wrote: post #29
Hamuko wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nokia phones had a one-week battery life if you weren't using them like a smartphone. We had the Nokia 7650 in our family and if you used it as a camera, the battery life would definitely not be a week. The conventional wisdow that had to be abandoned was that a phone was a brick that you had in your pocket and that did text messages and phone calls, instead of it being a computer that you might sometimes use for tex…

So the breakthrough happened when Apple shrunk the computer into a phone, not when Nokia grew the phone…? Interesting. I remember writing apps for the iPhone and the biggest hurdle to getting it submitted was sizing the screens for the display variants. There would have been no chance of developing an app for the Nokia ecosystem with all the different screen sizes your app would have to support. Even downloading an a…

> So the breakthrough happened when Apple shrunk the computer into a phone, not when Nokia grew the phone…?

I think the true breakthrough was actually the iPod; the true "first" Apple phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR#E1 was a flop, partly because they allowed the various collaboration partners to hamstring its features. The iPhone took everything in-house.

> Even downloading an app or ringtone required going through all these scammy websites and you had to enter your exact Exact model number and pay somehow…then they would text you a link or something.

> Apple really cleaned up the ecosystem with the App Store. It made apps safe to download.

Correct. People (rightly) hate on the restrictive and profiteering nature of the App Store, but the telcos were even worse.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#42

Post by lou1306 »

diggan wrote: post #28
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…

> 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. Maybe Nokia was simply too early for the vision, or the execution was s…

I don't really think that the average iPhone user (at least in Europe) gets a new device every season. Actually the opposite is true: Apple does gives you the opportunity to stick to your old device, if you want. iOS 15 still gets updates and can run on an iPhone 6S.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#43

Post by regularfry »

t_mann wrote: post #16

This 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…

"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 so.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#45

Post by panick21_ »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #12
IAMMidway wrote: post #2

Yes 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.

Symbian was such a strange thing, from its history to dominance to irrelevant. A real outgrowth of 90s software culture.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#46

Post by helsinkiandrew »

> Nokia Made Too Many Phones

Perhaps compared with today, but these weren't complex smart phones marketed globally.

Global network technology wasn't as homogenous as now. Phones were usually sold by the phone networks who had specific requirements - technical and marketing. Different phones were also used to price phones differently around the world - from rural Africa to the rich west.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#47

Post by panick21_ »

bborud wrote: post #14

Nokia 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…

Its funny they made to many phones but once they had the N900 they didn't make enough. And didn't care about the platform. And then didn't make another one for many more years, until the platform was dead anyway.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#48

Post by hasmanean »

panick21_ wrote: post #35
bborud wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Apple succeeded because they were outsiders. I worked for a telco 2 years after the iPhone came out and for years I met a lot of people who denied what was happening while it was happening. Because “we know how this works”. 15 years ago a lot of telco execs thought smart phones would be a small niche for the next 10 years. And would play only a minuscule role in “emerging markets”.

This also comes out in the Blackberry story. They were like 'AppStore' the Telcos will never allow that. And Apple just pushed the idea threw and got it done.

I remember being excited by the potential of apps when I heard about Symbian…but some part of me knew that any product named Symbian would never succeed. It’s the type of name you come up with in round 3 of a name-brainstorming session, when the perfect name will only be found in round 10. They obviously gave up too early.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#49

Post by ssivark »

I’m very suspicious of some post-hoc generalization that rhymes a little too conveniently with modern fads.

Nokia made great phones during the mid/late 2000s. The N9 was a piece of beauty that continued to have a more cohesive and thought out experience than Android (and even iOS, in some ways) well into the mid 2010s. It was simply a joy to use.

Why Nokia then fell apart might have a little something to do with Stephen Elop and Microsoft, I suspect.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#50

Post by midasuni »

ifwinterco wrote: post #31
secondcoming wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blackberry come nowhere close to beating Nokia. It was Apple.

In the UK there was a brief period from 2009-2011 where everyone seemed to replace their Nokia with a Blackberry before iPhones became common (BBM was a big thing)

BBM was big and blamed for the london riots in 2011

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/aug/08/london-riots-f...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/blackberry/8688651/Lo...

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