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Nokia made too many phones

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Re: Nokia made too many phones

#51

Post by squarefoot »

Erratic6576 wrote: post #6
kakoni wrote: post #4

> It’s interesting to see how Nokia succumbed to the bad strategy that had almost killed Apple in ‘97. Well, here is one take; > Nokia’s ultimate fall can be put down to internal politics. In short, Nokia people weakened Nokia people and thus made the company increasingly vulnerable to competitive forces. When fear permeated all levels, the lower rungs of the organisation turned inward to protect resources, themselve…

I like to think that it was Microsoft which destroyed Nokia from the inside in order to make Windows phone great at last https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/microsoft-nokia-deal-a-...

Well, the Linux based Maemo OS I had in 2005 0r 2006 on my Nokia 770 was already promising, although the hardware was quite slow and limited, but it was an open system one would have root access to out of the box. Then it evolved into Meego, which was even better and was then employed by the Nokia N9. Nokia already had the OS to transition to from the old Symbian, but after the Microsoft deal, they scrapped it to adopt Windows Mobile, and the rest is history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#52

Post by bborud »

hasmanean wrote: post #48
panick21_ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It wasn't so much the name as it was that you needed a special cable and a PC to install one of the dozen or so apps that existed for Symbian phones. (There were probably more, but in all honesty, none of them were worth the cost of the cable).

In fact, at the time I would argue that only perhaps 1-3% of people who owned Nokia phones even knew their phone ran Symbian. It wasn't your pocket computer back then - it was the phone that isn't tethered to the wall. People just didn't spend a lot of time obsessing over it.

I remember pointing out to someone at Nokia that perhaps the app install experience should be streamlined a bit. His response was something along the lines "well, there isn't much call for third party applications on mobile phones" and then went on to explain how it is silly to develop a more streamlined download and install experience until a clear demand for third party apps materializes.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#53

Post by benrutter »

> Not only the variety of devices was creating an incoherent user experience, but it also made it almost impossible to create an app market.

I'm not sure I agree with this take - it seems to be based on the idea of comparing Nokia phones to something like the iPhone. But at the time these phones were all made, the experience of using a phone was:

- Answer or reject incoming calls with the "answer/decline" button

- Read and send messages using the screen and keyboard

- That's basically it

Nokia created so many freaky looking phones, in part at least, because they were just phones, and the narrowness of their use meant the novelty designs didn't have a seriously problematic effect of their usablility. I don't see any evidence that they (or anyone other than apple) even considered the possibility of an "app ecosystem" - so criticising them for not making one viable seems a little leftfield.

Take something like the iPhone - all of the sudden you're not looking at a phone but instead a touch screen computer someone can use for banking, messaging, browsing, shopping etc. Supporting all those different use cases provides way more contraints on Apple's design than Nokia ever needed to consider.

Which is a really long way of saying, Nokia phones where just a different category of things to iPhones, and we shouldn't compare them.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#54

Post by tetrisgm »

drunkenmagician wrote: post #32
tetrisgm wrote: post #17

Nokia was incredibly political. But they were comfortably smug too. When we made games for Nokia platforms, we'd hear horror stories from engineers. Extreme management to engineer ratio (like 1 for 5 or less), non stop meetings and slide decks. One strategy that the engineers came up with to have peace was to get two or more project managers involved, so they could sest in meetings and calls all day and let people de…

Do you have an example of Nokia UX you feel was better than the alternatives at the time? I was a long time Nokia user (ex telco / mobile messaging) and I don’t recall anything cutting edge on the UI/UX front. Their industrial design was good though (mostly).

The Nokia N9 had a really polished UI that wad all gestures based. It wasn't until the iPhone X that we'd see this again.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#55

Post by bborud »

amarant wrote: post #24
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…

Her Nokia was breaking down? What warzone had she been to? I remember dropping my old Nokia down a stairwell once. When I fetched it there was a crack - in the tile floor! Of course this was one of the older models, I think the marketing material included the phrase "supports SMS!" or something to that effect.. Good times!

I think it was the Nokia N70. The keyboard got dicky over time, the slide was rough and the camera had stopped working. Not all Nokia phones were built like tanks.

My phone of choice in those days were the tiny Sony-Ericsson phones. I really liked the K750i and before that the T610. Not as rugged as the Nokias, but smaller and nicer.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#56

Post by hennell »

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…

Not sure if it's a difference to era, or a just a earlier stage for Apple in the same cycle. Apple made good phones that work and last well, then 'fashionedised' them with different colours leaning into the newest model as a status symbol.

But arguably Nokia did the same, at the time Nokia was a decent phone even if they had no standards between models - no one else did either. Blackberry found more consistency then lent into the status symbol approach.

I suspect that there's probably a common pattern with brands building a decent product, becoming renowned for that, then becoming more fashion like to play up their new status. Eventually someone else able focusing on the product features over the name steals the market.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#57

Post by t_mann »

regularfry wrote: post #43
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 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.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#58

Post by twelvechairs »

blackoil wrote: post #30

It is easy to find such reasons now that Nokia has failed. But they ruled for a decade in part because of too many phones. They had phone at each budget range and demographic. What they missed was a move from hardware centric world to software centic. The attempts with Linux etc were too little too late.

Yes - iphone came out 2007 and Nokia was still the leading mobile phone company by sales in 2010, and Symbian had the largest OS share to 2012.

In my view it was really the two big OS decisions they made - first in 2010 they ditched Symbian to focus on 'Meego' (a partnership with Intel) then in 2012 they ditched all of that for Windows Phone.

Through those 2 years they moved outright owning the globally most popular OS to being the secondary manufacturer for the third best supported OS. And not trusted by users to provide any continuity.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#59

Post by amarant »

bborud wrote: post #55
amarant wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Her Nokia was breaking down? What warzone had she been to? I remember dropping my old Nokia down a stairwell once. When I fetched it there was a crack - in the tile floor! Of course this was one of the older models, I think the marketing material included the phrase "supports SMS!" or something to that effect.. Good times!

I think it was the Nokia N70. The keyboard got dicky over time, the slide was rough and the camera had stopped working. Not all Nokia phones were built like tanks. My phone of choice in those days were the tiny Sony-Ericsson phones. I really liked the K750i and before that the T610. Not as rugged as the Nokias, but smaller and nicer.

Oh yeah, that was after the "tank era" of Nokia phones. I think the last real Nokia tank was the 3310, or maybe it was just such a success that all tanks after it have been forgotten (by me at least)

I'm struggling to remember the model name of the absolute unit of a phone I dropped down that stairwell, but it was older than the 3310 at least(I later replaced it with the smaller and lighter 3310)

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#60

Post by rcarmo »

Nokia was a formidable logistics machine. As a smartphone product manager back in the 3G days, they never ceased to amaze me, because they would ship logo and firmware variants of the same device to different customers, at what I already knew to be a fairly high factory customization cost.

They paid the price for part of that (the Symbian platform was never really unified so much as it was shared to smithereens), but they were notable in what they did.

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