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Nokia made too many phones

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Re: Nokia made too many phones

#61

Post by rcarmo »

benrutter wrote: post #53

> 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 - Re…

Actually, large telcos had a decently profitable business setting up their own app stores and charging customers for game and ringtone/wallpaper downloads. And most of the devices that could actually do that properly were Nokias (MIDP was OK, but Nokias outsold MIDP phones ringtone-wise for an order of magnitude).

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#62

Post by pavlov »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #38
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…

Yes this I think is the core issue: while Nokia phones were all a bit different, they were different in superficial and frankly, low-effort ways. Form that did not follow function, phones that looked liked some flashy "original-but-not-really-original" design study straight out of a bachelor's Product Design class. They could never have invented the iPhone, even if they were organised differently. The culture just wa…

That’s basically it. Instead of the perfect phone, most of Nokia wanted to build the phone that makes you want to buy another phone soon.

I made them a cappuccino-themed pinball game. The underlying idea was that when the customer is bored with the autumn colors and fabric edges and whatever, they’re buying the next Nokia for the new experience.

Apple made a phone whose physical form was adaptable to any software experience. They didn’t need to put in a cappuccino pinball on the device because users could get that, and a million other experiences, from the app store, and mold their own experience.

Some parts of Nokia understood this — Symbian was actually a capable smartphone OS under the clunky UI — but the company DNA kept thinking of smartphones as just another feature column for the plastic fantastic market segment games.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#63

Post by Hamuko »

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.

iOS was called "iPhone OS" for the first three years of its life. I don't think operating system names are much of an issue.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#64

Post by seba_dos1 »

panick21_ wrote: post #33
rusticpenn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nokia N900 was pretty awesome and Maemo was a great OS. Unfortunately killed by internal politics.

On of the big tech letdowns in my life. I was excited about the N900, but to young to really drop that amount of cash on a new fancy phone and I didn't want to buy the first product of the platform. But then it just sort of died. There was one more release but by then it was clear where it was going. It wasn't even released widely. Such a sad end.

I'm not sure if I'd call a phone that served me well for a decade a "letdown". There were hardly any phones around worth switching to from N900 for this whole time.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#65

Post by seba_dos1 »

bborud wrote: post #52
hasmanean wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

That would be good, because the vast majority of Nokia phones ran S40 rather than Symbian-based S60.

Symbian appeared in lower-end phones only at the very end with Symbian^3. Earlier it was pretty much exclusively used in higher-end and business-oriented models.

Also, I'm pretty sure that all you needed to install either .sis packages (on S60) or .jad apps (on both S40 and S60) was the built-in browser, and it was already like that since at least Nokia 3410.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#66

Post by seba_dos1 »

panick21_ wrote: post #47
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.

This is what actually killed Nokia.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#67

Post by regularfry »

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.

MS was also internally dysfunctional, but focused on the business market for phones, and at the time of the iPhone was being roundly laughed at for the Zune. It was just different market segmentation. I'm not saying that all you need for success is competent software delivery, but lacking it in this sort of arena was definitely harmful.

And I'd also question the "killing it at software" statement: remember that Windows Mobile (not Windows Phone, you've got to go to the product iteration before to make the dates line up) was catastrophically hamstrung by an inability to ship anything decent. I had a Windows Mobile 5 device myself, and it was rubbish. They were so focused on making it so you could run a spreadsheet on your phone that they forgot the thing had to be usable. The OS wasn't actually much good until post 6.5, well after the iPhone launch, and they never got to release the iteration that would have brought it up to scratch. They realised very late that they needed to focus on consumers, not businesses, because they could see that businesses would and did buy consumer devices if they were good enough, but the reverse would almost never happen. Once the iPhone was released and they realised how wrong they'd been they made a hard pivot to get Metro out, but they were starting from a very long way behind.

More evidence against "killing it at software": this was the Windows Longhorn/Vista era. We all know how that went. Microsoft managed to survive for a long time on desktop and office suite monopoly momentum without being able to stick the landing on very many releases at all, compared to how much activity was going on. Even though the launches would go OK they'd often get killed later by internal politics. That was actually the era that got me to swear off the Windows ecosystem: you'd learn enough of an exciting new product to be useful, only for it to get sidelined with no updates a couple of months later. It was just exhausting. Half of me thinks that MS was lucky to survive Ballmer at all.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#68

Post by t_mann »

regularfry wrote: post #67
t_mann wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MS was also internally dysfunctional, but focused on the business market for phones, and at the time of the iPhone was being roundly laughed at for the Zune. It was just different market segmentation. I'm not saying that all you need for success is competent software delivery, but lacking it in this sort of arena was definitely harmful. And I'd also question the "killing it at software" statement: remember that Windo…

I actually share the sentiment about Ballmer, but then the actually shared characteristic is poor management, no? MS just happened to have enough legs to limp out of a bad management episode on.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#69

Post by mrweasel »

bborud wrote: post #23
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 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”.

When the first iPhone came out I worked for a large regional telco, and you're correct, they did not believe in that thing at all. We where having lunch with one of the sales people and she gave the iPhone three months, something like that, arguing that a new BlackBerry was on the way and once that hit the shelves everyone would forget about the iPhone.

Fun detail, one of my coworkers where tasked with implementing the unlocking feature, customers could either pay to have their iPhone unlocked or was entitled to after six months. He absolutely hated Apples API, which seemed weird, because it was totally reasonable, just really secure and radically different than anything else in the telco world.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#70

Post by 24t »

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…

I remember playing that! It would have been on a Nokia 6300 though, I wasn't very adventurous with phone colours
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