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Nokia made too many phones

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Re: Nokia made too many phones

#91

Post by lotsofpulp »

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 was (and is) killing it at software, especially consumer-facing OS.

What? Blue screens of death. Malware. ctrl shift del being known by lay people. People being able to use the excuse that their Windows computer is randomly updating as a reason they cannot do the work they want to do. Not being able to create/edit/sign pdfs without downloading sketchy 3rd party programs.

Amount of time spent being tech support for family members when they were all using Windows computers was magnitudes more than the amount of time spent being tech support for family members after they switched to MacBook Airs (10+ years ago).

I am not saying Microsoft is bad at software, but certainly would not claim they kill it at consumer facing OS.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#92

Post by neom »

HeckFeck wrote: post #76
neom wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly right imo. I was a teen during peak Nokia, and I always thought it was very clever how they had a phone for everyone, and more importantly, they really signaled to the consumer via features and marketing. I was in the UK and there was a time for a couple of years when all we talked about was football and Nokia models, we all had phones, some of us had TWO phones because we inherited an old business de…

The closest competitor to Nokias during 2007-2009 I recall was the Sony Ericssons, especially the walkman phones or the slider phones. At least if you were like me and always had to have something different. I still wish I’d kept my W910i. Unreliable software that would reboot randomly, but a surprisingly sturdy piece of kit that survived many drops and skids. And it was the best camera I had for a while, delivering…

That's right, I forgot about Sony Ericsson but you're correct, very much less common among my friend group, I only recall older people having them...Was Sony Ericsson considered a more premium device?

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#93

Post by usr1106 »

killerstorm wrote: post #75
pavlov wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exp…

Symbian forced people to code in a weird dialect of C++: no exceptions, no RAII, custom stdlib. It didn't have analogs of std::string and std::vector, grow-able containers were considered too complex.

When Symbian, then called EPOC32, was developed there was no C++ standard library and no compiler that could handle exceptions without severe problems. So they had macro kludges.

They were so unintuitive that some 75% of their coders could not handle strings without severe errors. It did not help that they hired coders directly out of the university (many without a degree yet) and every good coder was promoted to management tasks.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#94

Post by jll29 »

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.

It's interesting that Microsoft never succeeded with a smartphone, given that their other hardware products enjoy a decent reputation (keyboards, mice, tablets); I suspect it's because of the software side - stuck with the desktop metaphor and windows, which makes no sense on smartphones.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#95

Post by hgomersall »

zubairq wrote: post #89

I can confirm this as I worked at Nokia in the Helsinki head office in 2006 and they made so many phones, which were not tested properly and were just thrown out to different market segments. It was obvious at the time that they had no passion or craftsmanship for their products anymore (as a company, as there were still some brilliant individuals)

It's interesting. I was exposed in a low level kind of way to Nokia technology around 2002, working for a former subsidiary of Nokia that had been sold. Then it seemed there was a legacy of technical excellence - Nokia pcbs were instantly recognisable for their neatness and having all the components on one side. Did that get lost at some point or did I have a flawed impression?

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#96

Post by [deleted] »

hasmanean wrote: post #40
diggan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

They brought a plastic case to a machined metal fight.

[deleted]

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#97

Post by kipchak »

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 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.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#99

Post by Nition »

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…

> They could never have invented the iPhone

I would like to mention here though that Apple eventually introduced a fair amount of things that Nokia did first with the Nokia N9 (especially once they went buttonless with the iPhone X). Once Nokia had Apple's example to work from, they actually kind of leapt ahead of them for a brief moment, then immediately gave up.

Re: Nokia made too many phones

#100

Post by robocat »

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…

> 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.

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