[HN Gopher] Nokia made too many phones
___________________________________________________________________
Nokia made too many phones
Author : shubhamjain
Score : 115 points
Date : 2024-02-13 08:35 UTC (14 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (textquery.app)
| IAMMidway wrote:
| 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Joint assault of iPhone, Android and hostile takeover (intended
| or not!) by Microsoft.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Symbian was such a strange thing, from its history to
| dominance to irrelevant. A real outgrowth of 90s software
| culture.
| jll29 wrote:
| 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.
| wvenable wrote:
| At the time, Microsoft's software development was a bit of
| mess. But Windows Phone didn't have a desktop metaphor.
| Recently I had the opportunity to try one that was sitting
| in desk for a few years and it was pretty interesting and
| snappy. But they redesigned their mobile OS so many times,
| had no good developer experience, and came in late enough
| that it was all doomed.
| Ezhik wrote:
| That cliff drop after they Nokia phones division got bough out by
| Microsoft is a big oof.
| kakoni wrote:
| > 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, themselves and their units, giving
| little away, fearing harm to their personal careers. Top managers
| failed to motivate the middle managers with their heavy-handed
| approaches and they were in the dark with what was really going
| on. [1]
|
| [1] https://alumnimagazine.insead.edu/who-killed-nokia-nokia-
| did...
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Funny how well that applies to Microsoft and its internal
| battle over UI layers for the past two decades.
| Erratic6576 wrote:
| 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-...
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Nokia was dead long before Microsoft thought about buying
| them.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Nokia was long gone when they were acquired.
|
| They were beaten by RIM/BB
|
| They tried gaming, didn't succeed. Later on messaging, but
| didn't have the platform (ping)
| secondcoming wrote:
| Blackberry come nowhere close to beating Nokia. It was
| Apple.
| ifwinterco wrote:
| 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)
| midasuni wrote:
| 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...
| HeckFeck wrote:
| I can remember one Christmas, perhaps 2010, where my
| Facebook feed was just folks posting their BBM pins. Ah,
| what a throwback.
|
| In retrospect, a better idea than giving out your phone
| number as WhatsApp requires. And indeed, people were more
| willing to share BBM pins than phone numbers.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| In the UK + US they did.. In the EU, Nokia was king, but
| there were many other brands and OSes (windows mobile).
| Japan always had a different market though.
|
| Nokia was still a large player, but was loosing ground.
|
| Android at the time (the betas) resembled blackberry, and
| didn't feature any touch capabilities.
|
| Right after the iPhone was released, Android changed its
| UI.
| rusticpenn wrote:
| Not outside USA
| mikko-apo wrote:
| Nokia's then CEO's Elop's "burning platform" memo leak in
| 2011 seemed to hurt Nokia a lot by painting their existing
| and upcoming phones as inferior.
|
| > I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform.
|
| https://www.engadget.com/2011-02-08-nokia-ceo-stephen-
| elop-r...
| vdaea wrote:
| Which is what they were. It's 2024 and Android phones still
| don't hold a candle to Apple phones...
| kurkkumopo wrote:
| Karaportti 4 lyfe
| squarefoot wrote:
| 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
| hasmanean wrote:
| 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 < 1 day battery life. Ultimately consumers
| decided that _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 market was bonkers. But once you
| make your own silicon anything is possible. Plus they had already
| done the iPod.
| Hamuko wrote:
| 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 text messages and phone calls.
| hasmanean wrote:
| 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 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > 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_.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| > Correct. People (rightly) hate on the restrictive and
| profiteering nature of the App Store, but the telcos were
| even worse.
|
| The now-hotly-debated 30% cut was seen as a reprieve from
| telco distribution and brick-and-mortar, where the
| retailer was taking 60-70% of the purchase price.
| bborud wrote:
| 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".
| rusticpenn wrote:
| Nokia N900 was pretty awesome and Maemo was a great OS.
| Unfortunately killed by internal politics.
| panick21_ wrote:
| 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.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| 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.
| tekla wrote:
| The N900 and Maemo was almost immediately abandoned
| following launch (<2 Years). Not even Nokia cared
| panick21_ wrote:
| Yes. That just shows how promising it was. But if you
| only bring out an initial modal and then basically never
| follow it up, you are simply not competing against
| competitors who bring out new hard-ware and soft-ware
| every year and also do hardware-software co-design.
|
| Its nice that it served you personally, but as a platform
| it was a gigantic bust.
| badgersnake wrote:
| It wasn't the end, the N9 was the more refined and
| frankly quite brilliant follow up. Unfortunately they
| failed to launch it in any major markets because they'd
| pivoted to Windows.
|
| Had to ship mine from Australia. For me when it launched
| it was the best phone you could buy. Apple caught up
| quick though.
| losvedir wrote:
| Eh, I had one and in the end I just didn't find it that
| great. It was slow, the resistive touch screen was finicky,
| and there wasn't good apps or software for it. I remember
| being in a bar once with a friend and we were racing to get
| directions on our phone to the next bar we were going to
| (maps and directions on the phone was a magical thing back
| then), and his iPhone had the results on google maps before
| I had managed to finish waking up the phone and loading...
| Here (?) Maps, or whatever it was called.
|
| In the end, I just gave the thing away to a random HN
| user[0] (gosh, more than 10 years ago! Wow).
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6647864
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I had a friend who used his N900 as a server at home,
| with an USB network card and all :D
|
| The N950 was a lot better and even the N9 had its
| moments. But like the GP said, both were killed by
| internal politics and the move to Windows Mobile. Which
| eventually tanked their whole mobile phone business unit.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Oh I remember having a netbook during Maemo times, as a
| Linux user was really hoping it would succeed and bring a
| true Linux experience to mobile world
| panick21_ wrote:
| 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.
| hasmanean wrote:
| 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.
| bborud wrote:
| 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.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| > 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.
| Hamuko wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > any product named Symbian
|
| I mean, it's almost the name of a sex toy.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| rvense wrote:
| I grew up on the internet in the late 90's and I have to
| admit I really underestimated how big of an appetite
| "normies" would develop for being constantly bombarded with
| "content".
| al_borland wrote:
| Facebook played a huge role in that. The growth of Facebook
| happened at the perfect time with the iPhone, where I think
| they really helped each other grow.
|
| Zuckerberg said Photos was the killer app inside of
| Facebook that really made it blow up. Smart phones are the
| perfect device to feed photo sharing sites.
| magnuspaaske wrote:
| The beautiful thing with the iPhone was that it wasn't a
| "smartphone" per se, but rather just a beautiful new kind of
| device and then people would get used to the smart features
| later. I had a PDA a couple of years before the iPhone and
| while it was certainly novel to have a digital planner as a
| teenager the "electronic calendar" or "email on the go" use
| cases just weren't really big. Listening to music and reading
| news on the go were great use cases though
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I remember when the iPhone came out there were hundreds of
| articles about how the iPhone was specifically _not_ a
| smartphone.
| rxyz wrote:
| Of course it wasn't a smartphone before the App Store
| update.
| badgersnake wrote:
| You're literally describing the Nokia N900. 1 days battery,
| many apps. They did everything, which as the article says was
| part of the problem.
| loosescrews wrote:
| Mine lasted close to a week on a charge. It was a great
| device.
| kipchak wrote:
| 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.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Nokia had multiple internet tablets running Linux.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet This
| was developed to a phone os. Nokia didn't do great choices but
| the criticism could be historical...
| bborud wrote:
| 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 a TED talk
| about the importance of segmenting the shit out of markets - just
| as the market pushed back and demonstrated he was talking
| nonsense.
| amarant wrote:
| 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!
| bborud wrote:
| 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.
| amarant wrote:
| 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)
| panick21_ wrote:
| 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.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| This is what _actually_ killed Nokia.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Even had they moved big on this, success was not assured.
| But it would have made them a real contender. Not just a
| sinking ship.
| t_mann wrote:
| 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 Palm's (fyi,
| dominant in the 'handheld' market in the 90's, in steady decline
| throughout the 00's, already had an app ecosystem of sorts).
| regularfry wrote:
| "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.
| t_mann wrote:
| 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.
| regularfry wrote:
| 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.
| t_mann wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >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.
| roneythomas6 wrote:
| Microsoft was still struggling with the fallout from Vista.
| Microsoft scrambling for that Vista SP1 and you would think
| they have time for Windows Mobile. Not to mention they were
| missing earnings and revenues going into 2008.
| leshokunin wrote:
| 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 dev.
|
| They were also the biggest player in Finland. The best logistics.
| The most market share. They had so many devs in their rollodex.
| Clearly, they could ship an iPhone killer. Clearly they
| understood everything about mobile and knew everyone. They even
| had a cloud project (Ovi) that predated iCloud.
|
| I remember meeting them back in the NGage days and thinking who
| are these clowns making a portrait screen for games, with no
| dpad, and a phone you hold sideways. No focus on apps (Palm and
| other handheld had plenty of homebrew and emulators).
|
| The company was a juggernaut that could ship the old Nokia
| bricks, but never adapt to be good at software, or have a good
| mobile OS.
|
| It's a shame, because honestly the best industrial design and UX
| people I've seen were there.
| drunkenmagician wrote:
| 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).
| leshokunin wrote:
| 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.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I remember wanting an NGage _so bad_. I had a whole plan to get
| my gameboy and all the games together to trade in so I could
| get one from GameStop. Then I went and actually tried one.
|
| Having to _remove the battery_ to swap out games was too much
| for me.
| pavlov wrote:
| 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
| pages, with endless visual ideas for what seemed practically like
| an Autumn/Winter lineup of plastic gadgets. But it was all about
| the moods. The actual phone's usability and software were a
| complete afterthought. Those were to be plugged in eventually by
| lowly engineers somewhere along the line, using whatever hardware
| and software combination would happen to fit the bill of
| materials for this lifestyle object.
|
| The game I designed was a "New York in Autumn" themed pinball.
| There were pictures of cappuccino, a couple walking in the park,
| and all the other cliches. It fit the moodboard exactly, the game
| shipped on the device, everyone was happy. Nobody at Nokia seemed
| to care about the actual game though.
|
| 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.
| diggan wrote:
| > 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 somehow lacking in some other aspect, as Apple
| made basically the same bet but seemed to have pulled it off.
| Maybe the design wasn't designy enough.
| hasmanean wrote:
| They brought a plastic case to a machined metal fight.
| beenBoutIT wrote:
| Unlike Apple Nokia built their devices to resist breaking
| and be 100% serviceable down to the smallest parts. Apple
| uses metal because it's significantly heavier than plastic
| and makes phones heavy enough to shatter glass screens and
| damage their internals when dropped.
|
| Any iPhone could replace its metal housing with an equally
| strong polymer and become exponentially more difficult to
| break.
| lou1306 wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I just went from a 6S+ to a 15 Pro, so I'm an example of
| this. However, there are some apps that just don't work on
| the older devices. Snapchat would not work on the 6S+ with
| the latest OS available. Eventually, the camera took enough
| tumbles that I'm assuming the lenses were no longer aligned
| as nothing was in focus.
|
| Also, an iPhone provides so much more utilitarian purposes
| than anything Nokia ever released. Something as simple as
| those devices would be much less noticeable if replaced by
| mood.
| doubled112 wrote:
| This is how I'm hoping my 13 Mini works out. I can just
| keep using it until it's ancient.
| briankelly wrote:
| I switched to Apple specifically because Androids I owned
| aged quickly and badly. Some people can't drop the kool aid
| drinking caricature view on iPhone users they hold.
| FpUser wrote:
| Interesting. I have 3 years old Pixel 6 Pro I use as a
| phone, 6 years old Redmi MIUI I use to control my various
| gizmos and 8 years old Galaxy S6 Edge to do yet another
| set of gizmos. So far all work like charm.
|
| Do tell me what kool aid did I drink?
| hennell wrote:
| 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.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I'm not sure they are _that_ similar.
|
| There were so many significantly different Nokia phones at
| one point. I'm talking about after 3310, like 3220, 6600,
| 7610, 3660, 7600, each design is unique.
|
| Apple has like two models (small and larger) at a time, and
| you can get them in a couple of different colors. The big
| design revolution is that they add rose gold or purple or
| whatever color each year so that the few people who care
| about showing off their latest model can do so.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Apple has 8 different phones you can buy right now counting
| all the max/plus models (SE, 13, 14, 15, 15 pro). If you
| add in the storage differences it is 24 unique circuit
| boards/phone internals, and colors bring it to over 100
| different unique products.
|
| From an inventory and logistics perspective, that's
| actually pretty wild!
| agumonkey wrote:
| Maybe it's a matter of doing things in order ? Nokia had
| no strong image, they were well established but not like
| Apple, and also iPhones are flagships with a lot of
| advanced capabilities.. nokia lineups at the time were
| very much mainstream/average (the notion of advanced
| device was also limited at the time).
|
| When you're on top of the industry, you may have a shot
| at selling lifestyle.
| nwiswell wrote:
| > SE, 13, 14, 15, 15 pro
|
| This more analogous to different model years of a car,
| rather than entirely different car models.
|
| The customer immediately and intuitively understands 14
| is better than 13, 15 is better than 14, etc.
|
| The main thing clear to me is that the "mental flow
| chart" involved in selecting an Apple phone is much, much
| clearer than it would be for selecting a Nokia.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Yeah, but they only release like 4 or so new models a
| year, excluding storage/color differences, which are
| relatively trivial, despite making many billions of
| dollars.
|
| Apple made almost $200B from iPhone in 2023, for example;
| per model, even including the older ones, that's an
| insane revenue per model. Not sure I can think of any
| other product at that level.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Nokias problem was exactly what OP described. The whole
| company didn't talk to each other.
|
| Software did their own thing, design their own and the poor
| industrial designers tried to keep up.
|
| Apple's secret sauce was proper vertical and horizontal
| integration so that every design feature was also supported
| by software.
|
| Sauce: Worked at Nokia in the "let's release 200 phones a
| year" -times.
| usrusr wrote:
| Any other company, if they had the iPhone, would have failed
| selling it in numbers. Because only at Apple it was preceded
| by the iPod that set a unique precedent in how much more
| expensive than all competitors a device could be. And that
| shift in price perception was deeply connected to the brand.
| It's easy to forget just how much more expensive the iPhone
| was than other phones that reached a meaningfully wide
| audience (or would have, in absence of the iPhone).
|
| Not indulging in the fancy moodboard stuff wouldn't have
| helped Nokia the tiniest bit.
|
| (edit: reply might have better fit GP directly)
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Was this the different coloured cases campaign? - I remember it
| being a little before 2003, but I was working at a company
| doing work where we had frequent contact with Nokia product
| managers talking about shipping a news/financial data HDML/WAP
| app, they didn't partner with us eventually because they needed
| to concentrate on delivering different coloured removable back
| case panels - both with the phone and after sale extra packs,
| so teenagers could choose their phone style.
|
| Quite a humbling experience
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| 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 wasn't there. The
| herculean drive to simplify, beautify and improve and NOT
| ACCEPT HALF-BAKED CRAP that propels Apple is impossible to
| replicate if it is not part of your DNA and vigorously enforced
| from the very top.
|
| Nokia wanted to "segment markets", Apple wanted to build the
| perfect phone.
| pavlov wrote:
| 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.
| killerstorm wrote:
| 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.
| usr1106 wrote:
| 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.
| epx wrote:
| Symbian was terrible. Working with it was worse than mining
| asbestos.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I had a crash course on Symbian at school by a Nokia
| engineer. Decided to do my all not to have to work with
| that POS ever. I succeeded.
|
| I know first hand multiple people (some of them my
| classmates) who decided otherwise and either burned out or
| quit. The ecosystem was just _horrible_ from the start. The
| amount of different phone form factors didn't help in the
| least.
| Nition wrote:
| > 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.
| Andrex wrote:
| That's kinda the problem though: the N9 was a drop in the
| Nokia bucket, so no one noticed.
|
| The iPhone X's big splash is easily explained.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I had a buddy with a Nokia Lumia Windows phone. The
| hardware and OS was on par or better than the most of the
| contemporary phones, but it suffered from a lack of third
| party apps. The Lumia was a pretty kickass phone stuck in a
| dead ecosystem.
| 24t wrote:
| I remember playing that! It would have been on a Nokia 6300
| though, I wasn't very adventurous with phone colours
| beretguy wrote:
| Do you still have that game? Can you publish it somewhere
| (internet archive?) and gives us link?
| robocat wrote:
| > 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.
| indymike wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Yes, for making calls, texting, taking pictures and changing
| settings, Nokia phones were really nice. The whole games
| (Java) and apps (WAP) side wasn't the greatest. To be fair,
| no one had a decent game and app experience until the iPhone
| and G1 (Android) hit.
| monknomo wrote:
| snake was fine
| magnuspaaske wrote:
| 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.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| > Yet it seems that Nokia phones were loved for their UI.
|
| I think you're suffering from a kind of observation bias
| specific to forums like HN, which have a disproportionate
| number of people with a chip on their shoulder about defunct
| tech products and companies. The people who _liked_ Nokia 's
| UI are loud and visible about it, especially when it lets
| them gripe about Microsoft/Apple/whatever, while the people
| who didn't like it don't feel the need to talk about it.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| As I remember it, it was the classic Nokia UI that was
| loved in comparison to the plethora of awkward intermediate
| UIs that were attempted by Nokia and others until
| iPhone/Android emerged. It really did feel like phones were
| getting worse for a few years for negligible benefits.
| robocat wrote:
| 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 for good reasons.
|
| Perhaps one of Nokia's major skills was familiarity between
| their models - especially for keeping the same menu
| structure and keyboard shortcuts. Familiarity is a powerful
| force. Oh, and they reliably worked - a definite plus!
|
| I did own mobiles from other manufacturers and I have the
| scars from dealing with their (edit) painful UIs (Sony,
| Kyocera*, Motorola, Dell). A keypad and small screen (or
| worse a one-line numeric display) create some difficult
| constraints.
|
| Cordless and Voip phones proudly continued the tradition of
| crappy handset UIs well into the age of iPhone.
|
| * I loved my Kyocera Palm Pilot phone - there was even a
| LISP App that you could program a simple UI in -magic!
| Although my first love was an Atari Portfolio DOS handheld
| (not a phone):
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio
| treflop wrote:
| You're both right. Nokia nailed it.
|
| But then someone else invented the steam engine. Hard to go
| back to horses.
| neuralRiot wrote:
| We are seeing the history backwards, from present day ro past
| but remember that cellphones were phones with other computing
| purposes added, not personal computers with phone
| capabilities as they are today.
| zokier wrote:
| Sure, the classic UI in 3310 etc ("Series 20") was great, and
| even "Series 30" was okay. But Series 40 and especially
| Series 60 were distinctly less well received.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| I loved my Nokia function phone firstly because it was
| indestructible. A Jeep Cherokee ran it over after it fell
| through a hole in my bicycle shirt one day. Big scratches on
| the back of the case but it still worked.
|
| Secondly that Nokia model was just a nice piece of hardware
| that was easy to use without unnecessary complexity. Plus if
| you turned off the ringer it would buzz and hop around on the
| table like a small but enraged weasel. It was hard not to
| feel affection for it.
|
| Edit: typo
| notatoad wrote:
| some portion of nokia definitely did care about technology,
| form factors, usability, and all the other things that made
| phones a tech product. their continual wild experiments prove
| that.
|
| but they also had their normal phones with broad appeal, and
| could make a good business out of mood-board variants of
| them. if they _didn 't_ make a business out of selling the
| 3310 in the current season's fashionable colours, they'd have
| been doing something wrong.
| Y-bar wrote:
| > Those were to be plugged in eventually by lowly engineers
| somewhere along the line, using whatever hardware and software
| combination would happen to fit the bill of materials for this
| lifestyle object.
|
| At an industrial design conference in Gothenburg (spring 2005
| iirc) I met a senior designer from Nokia around that time, he
| had a doctorates in ergonomics and interaction design. He
| lamented that he was not allowed to so any user interface work,
| only do the aesthetics. Management from up far had decided that
| design was only about what it looked like, form was not allowed
| to work with function.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The irony is that Apple today acts kind of like a fashion
| brand. Nokia was a fashion brand without a clear vision,
| though.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > Nokia Made Too Many Phones
|
| Too many for what? Would you really want the history of mobile
| phones to be merely the antiseptic aesthetic and walled garden of
| the iPhone? Why do you think people are buying folding phones,
| flip phones, phones with screens on the front and the back.
|
| So they ultimately failed, so what? The vast majority of
| companies of all sizes fail after some time.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Nokia could not stick with a single platform, once their heirloom
| Symbian became inadequate they caved. Like the absolute majority
| of corporations, they did not understand platforms. Platforms
| require decade-long thinking, instead of "Q4 this year".
|
| N900 with its Maemo was pretty good phone. Too bad Nokia could
| not develop on the success. Then they have MeeGo and then the
| disastrous Windows Phone. MS had the same problem with Windows
| Mobile - Windows Phone 7 - Windows Phone 8.
|
| 15 years later, the Debian + Firefox + APT platform on which N900
| was based is still alive and requires surprisingly few
| maintenance. If they went with it they will have a solid, hassle-
| free platform which could compete with early Android, especially
| as they could easily make it run Android apps as well.
| blackoil wrote:
| 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.
| hasmanean wrote:
| HW is hw and sw is SW...and never the twain shall meet.
|
| Hardware problems are low dimensional ones..."optimize this
| variable (usually clock speed), make this block functionally
| correct."
|
| Software problems are high dimensional ones, especially the
| problem of designing an API the community will adopt. "What set
| of functions can I provide that will do X...and a subset of
| X...and a potential superset of X, on hardware generation H and
| H+1 and so on...all while taking security and OS privilege
| levels into account..." Oh and we must bow to aesthetics and
| programmer fashion as well as getting stuff into their hands as
| fast as possible...plus tools and documentation...plus
| outcompete everybody else in the world trying to steal the same
| devs as us.
|
| Sw is what it is because it has so many degrees of freedom.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| 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.
| roneythomas6 wrote:
| Android overtook Symbian globally in early 2011. In major
| markets Android overtook Symbian sometime in late 2009-2010.
| neom wrote:
| 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 device from a
| parent etc. It was a super fun time from what I recall!
| HeckFeck wrote:
| 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 a wonderful 2MP.
| neom wrote:
| 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?
| HeckFeck wrote:
| That's interesting, I mostly remember old folks sticking
| to flip phones. The SEs were all that could be found
| among my peers. We would've been in our mid teens at the
| time.
|
| Then they were supplanted by early non-Android Samsung
| phones with the bad touchscreens, then by 2012 everyone
| had either an iPhone or Android.
|
| It was only the space of a few years but seemed much
| longer back then!
| neom wrote:
| Where in the world were you located at that time? We'd be
| around the same age I think, I was in Scotland and bought
| everything from Argos.
| thih9 wrote:
| A different POV, I'm bored of today's uniform, do-it-all
| smartphones and I enjoy using limited-purpose ergonomic devices
| with character. I often carry a dedicated camera, an e-ink
| reader, or a handheld console. I liked the colorful iPhone 5C, or
| smartphones with hardware keyboard - I miss this sometimes.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| Too little respect for Nokia in this article.
|
| Their legacy for ever will be the unbreakable and no need to
| charge phone.
| enqk wrote:
| Nokia never cared about input latency enough, their phones were
| dogs to operate..
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| > 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| > these weren't complex smart phones marketed globally
|
| Yeah, they had like 4 "established" operating systems and on
| top of that some experimental OSes that only came out on a
| model or two and changed every year.
|
| Can't make a smart platform with apps when you have 7 current
| platforms.
| ssivark wrote:
| 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.
| roneythomas6 wrote:
| By the time Nokia N9 came out Android was the dominant
| smartphone OS. Nokia even cancelled releasing N9 in select
| markets due to this. Not to mention the api's were severely
| lacking compared to Android. Maybe if they released it in
| 2008-2009, there might have been a chance. So the choice was
| either to go Android or Windows and Microsoft paid them
| 1billion to be stay Windows Phone exclusive.
| parl_match wrote:
| The N9 was too little, too late. Microsoft didn't destroy
| Nokia, they failed to rescue it. I think maybe the only company
| that could have saved Nokia was Google, and they weren't about
| to compete with their huge network of Android VARs.
|
| Why Nokia fell apart is because they didn't take the iPhone or
| Android seriously, repeatedly would say things like "nobody is
| going to spend $400 on a phone after subsidy", and had
| tremendous infighting over Symbian, MeeGo, and Windows - tons
| of engineers and management absolutely didn't want to learn the
| new thing.
|
| And then, Microsoft, not wanting to pour billions of dollars
| into what was already becoming a bitter duopoly fight, gave up.
|
| I have an N9 and an labeled windows phone dev kit from post-
| nokia on my shelf, both devices I used for a year+. They were
| fantastic.
| benrutter wrote:
| > 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.
| rcarmo wrote:
| 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).
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >novelty designs didn't have a seriously problematic effect of
| their usablility.
|
| In my case, I got the weird Nokia (3650?) with the round,
| rotary phone-layout of the numbers because it would reliably
| sync contacts with my Mac at the time and could be used as a
| cellular modem.
|
| The novelty design was... not great. But the usability was
| exactly what I needed.
| rcarmo wrote:
| 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.
| lxgr wrote:
| Arguably they failed more due to the phone they didn't make (in
| time): One running Android.
| usr1106 wrote:
| That's not a convincing analysis.
|
| It's disputable whether Nokia was a master in logistics, in
| fashion/design or in RF-technology or all of them.
|
| However, it's undisputed that they did not master software.
| Management had no idea about software development, the tooling
| was awkward. Well, and for OSes, Symbian was from another decade,
| Linux too little, introduced too slowly because management
| believed in Symbian being the cash cow.
|
| It worked as long as phones were manufactured in their own
| factories with high margins. Once manufacturing was outsourced to
| low cost countries and software became more important, they were
| lost.
|
| Disclaimer: I was a software developer there for 10 years, but
| understood to leave well before the bitter end.
| tecleandor wrote:
| Well, Samsung is making even more.
|
| Although 10 years ago they said that 56 models a year were too
| much [0], they still released ~52 in 2022 [1]
| [0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/11/samsung-
| decides-56-smartphones-a-year-is-too-many-will-cut-lineup-by-30/
| [1]: https://thelec.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=3574
| looping8 wrote:
| The comparison to Apple is strange - Apple is literally only
| serving one phone and that's their brand's stand-out thing.
| Competitors like Xiaomi, Motorola, etc, all make different
| models. Of course 57 models a year is too much but few other
| companies make only one phone with minor variations. Nokia was
| working in a market with fast changing technology and higher
| number of competitors, they had to keep innovating and marketing
| new stuff.
| zubairq wrote:
| 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)
| hgomersall wrote:
| 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?
| radomir_cernoch wrote:
| I was only a user of Nokia 6150 and subsequent phones. Around
| me, they were considered as technically perfect devices.
| gumby wrote:
| This reminds me of Dell (are they still around? :-) with a
| million different indistinguishable SKUs. And when you went to
| the web site you had to categorize yourself _by their criteria_
| before you could even look at the offerings, which always made me
| feel that I was going to be ripped off. How do I know if I am a
| small business or medium business or whatever?
| ryandrake wrote:
| Such a silly pattern. I wonder how many people just bailed out
| on Dell, at the very top of the sales funnel, just because
| those stupid segmentation questions.
|
| Customer: I have $1,000 burning a hole in my pocket and want to
| buy your laptop right now!
|
| Dell: Whoooa there, buddy, hold on. First tell me if you're a
| Small Business so I know what site to send you to...
| liendolucas wrote:
| There is a very interesting documentary on Nokia on YouTube. I
| can't remember if it was already suggested here on HN in a
| previous thread. Here's the link:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_1t15PNb468
| gumby wrote:
| Jobs made great lemonade out of Apple's slimmed down line in his
| famous 2x2 matrix ({consumer,pro}x{desktop, portable}). Who cared
| that they also had the mac mini that didn't fit in? Everybody
| understood it (and it encouraged people to upsell themselves to
| "pro").
| spullara wrote:
| It was crazy that you couldn't buy a phone with all the features.
| Had to find that perfect combination of features for you.
| benedictevans wrote:
| Nokia thought that phones would be like cars. Most car companies
| have dozens of models with different characteristics and prices,
| and that's fine. Even BMW has 20(!) top-level model categories.
| Nokia was selling devices all the way from high-end camera/phones
| for $$$ right down to $10 (unsubsidised) with two week battery
| life for emerging markets. I think you can argue that 50 was too
| many, but 10 or 20 was reasonable and still is - plenty of
| successful Android OEMs have ranges like that.
|
| The real shift in phone design and in the range was that the
| screen took over the whole front of the device. That meant there
| was much less scope for different shapes and form-factors, and
| since you were no longer using most of the front for casing and
| keys there was less to design anyway.
|
| Meanwhile all the actual phones ran either Series 40, the classic
| feature phone OS that won them half the entire market as 'easy to
| use', or series 60, the smartphone OS, that was an actual
| platform but problematic (and fragmented) in lots of ways.
| earnesti wrote:
| Personally, I think Nokia didn't really think anything. The
| management was just incompetent and they didn't have any real
| strategy. They had 100 teams of engineers each doing their own
| phone model, and were just too lazy to fire unnecessary teams
| and focus. Somewhere deep down they knew, that it is stupid way
| to do things. However the money kept flowing in, so who cares.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| I think its fine, the problem is they are too late to use
| Android OS which is favour their own OS like Symbian or
| whatever their PDA use at the time
|
| if only they can copy iphone fast enough they would be a
| "samsung" what is today
| DanAtC wrote:
| I had never heard of Vertu. They still exist today in some form,
| hawking some _real_ pricey crap: https://vertu.com/
|
| Looking at the Nokia-era models, none of them support LTE so
| they're basically worthless these days. People are still trying
| to sell them on eBay for 100s, though. What a waste.
| kevsim wrote:
| As a fresh-out-of-university engineer in the earlier 2000s, I had
| a ton of fun working at Nokia and the sheer number of devices was
| actually part of that. It was a blast having a stack of all of
| the weird and whacky devices on your desk at any time. I remember
| visiting some sort of internal museum in Finland at some point
| where you could basically see all of the devices they'd ever
| made. Mind blowing.
|
| Of course getting to the software we were working on to actually
| run on the things was a different matter...
| ijhuygft776 wrote:
| All large phone companies make too many phones from the consumer
| point of view (consumers just don't know it apparently)... It's
| just a marketing strategy.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| A company makes one successful product and never moves on: Should
| have made more products.
|
| A company makes lots of different types of product, constantly
| iterating and experimenting with wild ideas: Should have made
| fewer products.
|
| You can't win, I guess.
| grishka wrote:
| Yes, Nokia made too many phones, and that was not a bad thing.
| Other phone manufacturers made some wild concept models too,
| sometimes. Phone design in general was _much_ more diverse in the
| 00s. I actually enjoyed flipping through phone catalogs and
| reading reviews.
|
| Compare that to today, when every single phone out there is an
| awkwardly huge glass slab with minor design variations on the
| back side.
|
| > it also made it almost impossible to create an app market.
|
| All those Nokia phones form two categories in terms of the
| software they ran: the firmware that was basically the same
| across all Nokia non-smart phones (S40 it was called IIRC?), and
| Symbian. Both were capable of running J2ME apps, and Symbian also
| supported native ones.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Maybe! But here's another take: everyone else makes too few
| phones, nowadays. Exactly one, that is. Well, maybe two, if you
| count folding phones. After Palm and then HP failed with webOS,
| it's now all the same.
|
| How come this is the future? It's freaking boring.
| simonh wrote:
| The phone should be boring and consistent. It's just a platform
| for the software. That's what should be interesting.
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