[HN Gopher] Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launc...
___________________________________________________________________
Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007)
[pdf]
Author : late
Score : 422 points
Date : 2025-01-16 13:23 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nokia-apple-iphone-was-launched-presentation.tiiny.site)
(TXT) w3m dump (nokia-apple-iphone-was-launched-presentation.tiiny.site)
| lbourdages wrote:
| I think the HN hug was too strong for this poor server...
| pieix wrote:
| Makes you wonder how many sites out there are just ~10k
| requests per hour away from being bricked.
| alibarber wrote:
| To be fair - it's a repository for academic documents at a
| reasonably-sized-but-still-quite-small university. Their
| priorities were probably closer to handling few complex
| requests and being able to manage obscure documents, not
| dealing with Netflix level traffic.
|
| It'll probably make for a cool story for the sysadmins there,
| but I doubt there will be a board meeting tomorrow to re-
| evaluate the web strategy.
| pieix wrote:
| Wasn't my intention at all to imply that they did something
| wrong and need to scramble to fix it. Just observing that a
| large portion of the web is built around the assumption
| that traffic is intermittent, where even a small burst of
| requests can knock it over. No shade -- I've built plenty
| of sites like that.
| albert_e wrote:
| Currently erroring out for me:
|
| > Error establishing a database connection
|
| How is this already at the top of HN frontpage with just 6 points
| and zero comments as of my writing
| bananaflag wrote:
| It's very recent
| anilakar wrote:
| Don't fret. The IT systems in Finland's top polytechnic grad
| school have always been shit.
| anshumankmr wrote:
| kiss of death for the poor server, might have been the highest
| traffic it has ever received
| astrange wrote:
| I get "There was a problem acquiring a content access token
| from the data service. If this problem persists, please notify
| your administrator."
|
| Which makes me wonder what a content access token is.
| kuschkufan wrote:
| Looks like a competent analysis where they recognize the threat
| of the iPhone to Nokia. Whether the higher ups failed to act on
| it or whether they could not act on it, even after Microsoft
| bought them is unfortunately a different topic.
| rukshn wrote:
| Alternative link to the presentation from a post on LinkedIn:
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hypponen_the-nokia-design-arc...
| anshumankmr wrote:
| Post linked has one slide, the other commenter has shared this:
| https://nokia-apple-iphone-was-launched-presentation.tiiny.s...
| aanet wrote:
| uhh.. looks like the PDF has disappeared?
| jandrese wrote:
| That link now 404s.
| heinrich5991 wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250115192305/https://repo.aalt...
|
| but doesn't seem to have the actual content. :(
| alberto-m wrote:
| The page seems online again:
| https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
| mads wrote:
| I was there at the time and until the end.
|
| That cartoon meme with the dog sitting with a cup of coffee or
| whatever and telling himself "This is fine", while everything is
| on fire, is probably the best way to describe how things felt at
| nokia back then.
| llm_trw wrote:
| Can you explain why every good phone that Nokia released during
| the period was killed instantly?
|
| To this day I've not seen a phone that felt more responsive
| than the Nokia N9, which also looked amazing. Yet it was killed
| pretty much the second it was released.
| jampekka wrote:
| It was born dead, or at least an orphan. Elop had started the
| Windows Phone strategy before it was launched.
| yapyap wrote:
| I believe it lol, in the presentation you can see they are
| still moving forward with the sms focused windowing design
| while the iphone was introducing the touch screen.
|
| Now of course I'm looking at it retrospectively but still
| planb wrote:
| This PDF does not read like "this is fine". I find the initial
| analysis in here to be on point. Of course it does not print
| "we are doomed" in bold letters on the front page, but
| management should have taken the points raised in this
| presentation very seriously. Do you know if Nokia appointed a
| "head of UI e.g. not tied to BG or platform" back then?
| escapecharacter wrote:
| I'm really curious! In hindsight, we can always point to when a
| pivot should have happened earlier, but on the other hand, we
| all know orgs that have pivoted too early or to a trend they
| shouldn't have, and then suffered.
|
| Do you remember any specifics arguments or conflicts about
| strategy?
| secondcoming wrote:
| Me too. Once the 'Burning Platform' memo was released on the
| intranet everyone stopped giving a fuck, and were hanging
| around waiting for redundancy payments.
|
| Soon after Jo Harlow came to give a presentation that was held
| in The Oval cricket ground. I remember a couple of her
| statements drew subdued laughter from those attending. I felt a
| little sorry for her.
| muglug wrote:
| Direct link to file:
| https://repo.aalto.fi/download/file/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
| amelius wrote:
| (removed)
|
| Edit: because the article did not load my comment was based on
| someone's alternative link which did not show the entire
| presentation, so you can ignore my comment.
| thechao wrote:
| Classically, a CEO is an intern with a bald spot and an ulcer.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Not really. Most (all?) of the insights here, probably
| delivered on short notice, were completely correct over the
| next 15 years. Don't let the clarity, brevity, and hindsight
| fool you - that's just how C-suite likes information presented
| and we have the benefit of looking back to know that all these
| things were "obviously true".
| planb wrote:
| Look at it again without the knowledge of the last 18 years!
| And from the position of a Nokia employee back then. This is an
| extremely well made executive summary for that time.
| ddalex wrote:
| N800 is the future that never was - opem Linux-based mobile
| computing for the masses. It had developer support, cool form
| factor, big touchable screen, and no corp to love it.
| bityard wrote:
| I had one of those. It was interesting in that it ran Linux and
| you could (at the time) browse most web sites with it.
| Otherwise, it was slow, bulky, and had a pretty terrible
| resistive touch screen. (The stylus was NOT optional.) And you
| still had to carry your flip phone in another pocket.
|
| In the end I was mainly using mine to listen to podcasts
| (before they were called that). An iPod Touch eventually
| replaced it until Android phones got a lot better.
| fifilura wrote:
| Yes, that platform was set to compete with iOS and Android
| and with fine timing.
|
| I think they fumbled with the developer relations when first
| choosing Gtk for the UI and then jumped to QT. That made
| developers angry. And then of course the Microsoft
| steamroller killed it.
| joezydeco wrote:
| And it pretty much fucked up the Qt project afterward.
| apricot wrote:
| I had one too (and a 770 before it). Great idea, so-so
| implementation. It was slow (and slowness is a cardinal sin,
| since you're always reminded that you're using a machine --
| in my opinion, the way Apple products react so much faster to
| user input than competing products is a huge factor in their
| success, and Apple knows it) and the touch screen was
| terrible.
| broken-kebab wrote:
| >And you still had to carry your flip phone in another
| pocket.
|
| UPDATE: Memory failure! I meant N900, not N800
|
| Why? I had N800 as my only mobile, and was more than happy
| with it. Stylus was not optional for things like browsing.
| But most of the time I took it from my pocket, I used it for
| text input, and physical keyboard made it comfortable to the
| point no other device has been able to offer me ever since I
| retired my N800
| dagw wrote:
| _Why? I had N800 as my only mobile_
|
| Sure you're not thinking of the N900? The N800 didn't have
| any cellular connectivity, only wifi and bluetooth.
| broken-kebab wrote:
| Yes, my bad, it was 900. After all these years numbers
| getting blurry in memory I guess
| wiether wrote:
| > In the end I was mainly using mine to listen to podcasts
| (before they were called that)
|
| I'm interested in understanding what you meant here?
|
| To my understanding, the N800 was released in 2007 according
| to Wikipedia[1] and the first craze of podcasts was in the
| first half of the 00's, with the most notable fact being the
| official support of podcasts in iTunes in 2004[2]. They then
| lost their fame before knowing a second wave of popularity
| starting in the second half of the 10's.
|
| Are you talking about something else?
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800 [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#History
| m4rtink wrote:
| Don't forget the N900 as well! :)
| flir wrote:
| But with no app store. (As a programmer, I never in a billion
| years would have invented the app store. Yet it was the most
| important component of the iphone ecosystem).
| Nursie wrote:
| Pretty sure there was some sort of App Store.
|
| It didn't have a hell of a lot in it, but I remember grabbing
| a cute little game (hex-a-hop) and ... maybe an Angry Birds
| demo on it?
|
| -- edit - I'm thinking of the N900
| jjmarr wrote:
| The App Store didn't exist for the first iPhone. It launched
| with the iPhone 3G. The original plan was for everyone to
| develop web apps; the SDK was added due to external developer
| demand.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(Apple)#History
|
| Not denying how important it was, but the App Store wasn't
| "invented". It was created because Apple listened to what
| developers wanted.
| danillonunes wrote:
| I don't think developers wanted App Store, they wanted to
| build native apps. Has Apple just allowed them to ship
| their own .dmg files from their website, as they used to do
| in MacOS, they would be happy.
|
| I can't tell for sure, but I would bet the app store
| concept was inspired from Cydia for jailbroken iPhones that
| used APT to download apps from a central software
| repository, which was already common in the Linux world at
| the time.
|
| App Store as a central place to download apps was a really
| important concept for the iPhone ecosystem because it was a
| distribution and a marketing channel. Developers didn't
| asked for that and, for the better and the worst, we can
| give Apple some credit for building it that way.
| jjmarr wrote:
| I suppose the tricky thing is knowing when to listen to
| others and when you know more than everyone else.
| kalaksi wrote:
| As a Linux user, it just felt like a locked-down package
| repository to me.
| raverbashing wrote:
| If anyone wants to know why Europe has issues with innovation
| needs to look no further than here
|
| Nokia boomers squandered the opportunity they had with Maemo
| and kept insisting on the sinking ship (or burning platform) of
| Symbian
|
| But to be really honest Maemo was also a dud. Because they
| didn't have the sharp focus of Android and kept a lot of crap
| from Linux (like X11 _sigh_ )
| creaturemachine wrote:
| Steve Jobs was a boomer.
| anomaly_ wrote:
| Boomer isn't age related anymore, it's a mindset
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Because they didn't have the sharp focus of Android and
| kept a lot of crap from Linux (like X11 sigh)
|
| X11 let them use existing apps outright and made porting
| easy. What else would they have used at that time and what
| advantage would it give them?
| raverbashing wrote:
| I don't disagree with this, it had a lot of advantages. But
| at the same time I don't think it was good enough for the
| purpose
|
| Because if it was good enough why didn't Android keep it?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Actually that's an interesting question; why _didn 't_
| Android use X11? A few minutes of web searching don't
| seem to turn up anybody commenting on it; do you happen
| to know how I would check what their reasons were?
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| probably because it's to complex. I think the earliest
| android demos were probably just writing to the
| framebuffer.
| ttepasse wrote:
| X11 support was also part of the early Mac OS X - even part
| of marketing pages, afair.
| Lammy wrote:
| Barely. It was originally a XFree86 project called
| XDarwin, adopted by Apple as a beta release for Jagwire
| in 2002, was an optional install in Panther and Tiger,
| default install in Leopard~Lion, and then was abandoned
| again in favor of the community-supported XQuartz after
| 2011:
|
| https://xonx.sourceforge.net/ "XFree86, a free
| implementation of the X Window System, has been ported to
| Darwin and Mac OS X. [...] Our work has been included in
| Apple's X11 for Mac OS X. "
|
| https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/x11-jaguar
|
| https://www.xquartz.org/
| tmnvdb wrote:
| If I see another one of these insane "explainations", I'm
| gonna have a stroke. Nokia - dominating the mobile phone
| market for years - is evidence that Europeans are just
| fundamentally incapable of innovation!
|
| Ok bro.
| chengiz wrote:
| Their Lumia with the Windows OS was great too. Unfortunately no
| market => no apps => death. But I loved it when I had it. They
| made great phones no doubt.
| dagw wrote:
| Yea, no one believes me when I tell them that the Lumia with
| Windows Phone 8.1 or 10 was one of my favourite phones ever.
| WP 8.1+ was such an underrated OS. Unfortunately it had
| virtually no support from anybody, even Microsoft quickly
| stopped caring.
| gtk40 wrote:
| I loved the N800 and was happy to see it make an appearance in
| that presentation. In fact I still have one in my desk drawer
| beside me I turn on from time-to-time. Yes it was a bit
| cumbersome, but I could do more with that device than any other
| handheld I have ever had and carried it with me for years. I
| wish the N900 and other smartphones on Maemo had caught on.
| audeyisaacs wrote:
| That and also the N9 were great, wish they were not abandoned.
| The design language on the N9 was way ahead of its time too. I
| still haven't seen a time picker as good as the MeeGo time
| picker, and now a decade later my Samsung has similar App icons
| as the N9 had in 2011.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| My personal moment of "CEO's -- they're just like us!" was
| walking into a Kinko's in Santa Monica to drop off a package, and
| seeing a sweaty Stephen Elop frantically photocopying documents
| the week his part in this debacle came to a head.
| sitkack wrote:
| For those not in the know, this is the Ex CIO of Boston
| Chicken.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Clearly in retrospect these were transferable skills.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| The bawk stops here.
| sitkack wrote:
| You can get both a SMS message and meal at the same time
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Stephen Elop's good a$$ barbecue and foot massage
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Mobile phone industry analyst Tomi Ahonen's voluminous blog
| from back then contained an entire section devoted to Elop, who
| he called the "worst CEO in history", with data and evidence
| galore:
|
| https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/elop/
| Aissen wrote:
| > - No mention of[...] Java support. Lack of Java would shut out
| a big mass of existing SW
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Which was true, but developers decided it was worth writing new
| SW for iPhone when the App Store was unveiled (which was
| significantly later).
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Java was a bonus compared to ObjC, but we looked into
| supporting Blackberry and it was a nightmare to support all the
| different versions of java, frameworks, and screen types. Much
| easier to teach someone ObjC and produce one iPhone version.
| 0gb wrote:
| I reuploaded the PDF here - https://nokia-apple-iphone-was-
| launched-presentation.tiiny.s...
| LiamPowell wrote:
| Mirror since the 3 already posted don't actually work:
| https://archive.org/details/document_20250116
| kristjansson wrote:
| The host must be 404-ing high-traffic files?
| echoangle wrote:
| That's probably what happens once the traffic quota is
| exceeded, I would guess.
| pinkfox wrote:
| Thanks!
| froh wrote:
| thanks! FWIW I found it on-site by searching for
|
| "Apple iPhone was launched" on
| https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html
|
| leading with some clicks to
|
| https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=A0123
|
| which took me to a site that worked.
| jaustin wrote:
| This is fascinating. A reminder that being (broadly) right in
| your analysis doesn't necessarily mean you can execute to turn
| things around.
|
| They note the impact to the high-end, the fact that UI is
| crucial, they even had a good guess at 2008 sales numbers
| (estimate 14m, looks like real was 13m).
|
| I was intrigued by this bullet point on how their Maemo platform
| could help:
|
| * Cellular development of the maemo platform and the politics
| surrounding it?
|
| Any folks from Nokia in this time care to shed more light on
| that? I always felt the N9 was a beautiful piece of design and
| implementation - just late and under-supported.
| jampekka wrote:
| > Any folks from Nokia in this time care to shed more light on
| that?
|
| Cellular connection was not allowed for the Linux devices so
| they don't compete with the Symbian phones. Nokia had deeply
| dysfunctional internal politics at that point.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> Nokia had deeply dysfunctional internal politics at that
| point._
|
| Tell me a large company other than Apple that wasn't
| completely dysfunctional.
| jampekka wrote:
| Google was doing quite well?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Doing well and being dysfunctional are not mutually
| exclusive. Google is still a dysfunctional company.
|
| At one point they had five different messaging apps. They
| bought Motorola and then sold it for pennies, quickly
| abandoned the Nexus line before then, and the Pixel isn't
| taking the world by storm.
|
| Their efforts in the home have been scattershot, they
| have three separate OS initiatives that are not based on
| the same platform, and have all but abandoned Flutter.
|
| Also remember that RIMs stock price was at its peak
| around 2010 - 3 years after the iPhone came out.
| agos wrote:
| maybe it can be argued that it was a lot less
| dysfunctional way back in 2007
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| There are two google eras, before they killed Google
| Reader and after they killed Google Reader.
| tmnvdb wrote:
| I work with Google and dysfunctional is too kind.
| lolive wrote:
| Definitely not the Apple of 10 years before.
| flir wrote:
| _Oh_. That brings so much into perspective. They wouldn 't
| cannibalize their own sales, so someone else did. Classic.
| How deeply Kodak of them.
| seventytwo wrote:
| If you don't eat your own lunch, someone else will...
| escapecharacter wrote:
| A set of individuals being broadly correct in their analysis at
| an organization doesn't mean that that organization will be
| able to execute a pivot, even if that organization is pretty
| competent.
|
| When an entire organization is built around executing on one
| local maxima hypothesis well, and there's no tangible threat to
| it that most individuals feel, it is hard for that org to take
| the temporary hit to change tacks.
| finaard wrote:
| N9 was very close to launch when Elop came, so that went ahead,
| but the rest of the development got cancelled immediately to
| focus on Windows phone: N9 would've otherwise been the first in
| a series of devices to slowly take over from Symbian.
|
| Until Elop canceled everything Symbian was still selling -
| declining sales, but still millions of units. So while the
| situation was bad slowly phasing out Symbian for taking all the
| money you could make with that, while hoping N9 software stack
| sticks sounded like a more sensible approach than "cancel
| everything, go for Windows". Elop did respond to criticism from
| Developers (including a mail I've sent him with colleagues),
| but had made up his mind.
|
| This blog post is a byproduct of that discussion, and was
| referenced by Felipe in internal mailing lists back then:
|
| https://felipec.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/meego-scales-becaus...
|
| I have no idea how successfull it'd have been in the end - the
| UI was great, parts of the softwarestack were problematic
| (though we've been doing quite well with parts of that at Jolla
| later on). The planned hardware for the future models was less
| than ideal, though.
| vachina wrote:
| Elop was the trojan horse that killed Nokia. He worked at
| MSFT prior to this and single handedly destroyed Nokia. The
| N9 was revolutionary on its own; GPU accelerated UI, sleek
| looks, Maemo OS, it is a device people would actually want
| over the limping Symbian that never fully adapted to touch-
| only, or the useless Windows Phone 7.
|
| No developer dared to touch Maemo because its future was so
| uncertain due to the switch to WP. My dad was one of the
| early Lumia adopters and it was so limiting in what it can
| do.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Symbian was the core OS, phone manufacturers build the GUI
| on top of it.
|
| Series 60 was the dominant Nokia UI at the time, but then
| that received a shake-up with Belle?
|
| Fun fact: Until Nokia bought them, Symbian devs never got
| actually see any phones that were being built, unless you
| worked in a specific team that had access restrictions to
| even enter.
| jampekka wrote:
| Symbian^3 (Anna and Belle) introduced Qt for the strategy
| for smooth transition from Symbian to MeeGo. This was
| killed to go all in on Windows Phone.
| mempko wrote:
| I worked in Nokia at the time and played with the N9. Meego
| was actually really good. It could have been competitive with
| the iPhone and Nokia could have stayed at the top and been
| where Samsung is now.
| badgersnake wrote:
| I had one, used it for years. It's still in the draw, still
| looks fantastic, still works, although it's a bit slow
| these days.
| jampekka wrote:
| There was even the Qt strategy for making the transition
| smoother (and better hedged) by having apps portable across
| the different OSs. It was of course killed too because it
| could have challenged Windows Phone.
| jayelbe wrote:
| I bought an N9 in 2011 and it was an incredible phone. The
| design and UI were gorgeous and it was a joy to use. I still
| miss the swipe-driven UI - it was clever, intuitive and well
| thought out. The phone itself had Facebook, Twitter,
| WhatsApp, and Spotify clients, and MS Exchange support for
| calendaring and email (I believe Nokia developed or ported
| many of these in-house) and was completely usable day-to-day.
|
| Compared to Nokia's symbian phones and earlier Maemo efforts,
| it felt revolutionary and I'd agree Nokia had a device which
| could have paved the way for a post-symbian future. It
| definitely felt like, with continued investment, it would
| have been a real iPhone competitor, and in just the nick of
| time.
|
| Elop's strategy was a disaster.
| auggierose wrote:
| It is clear that the presentation doesn't really get it. There
| would be no iPhone mini. This WAS the iPhone mini.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| It's 3.5", 135g :) Those were the days!
| jansan wrote:
| In hindsight it is funny that Apple used someone with very big
| hands holding the first iPhone in their 2007 ads to make it
| look smaller. Nobody at that time could imagine that phones
| would only get bigger.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| iPhones got bigger in terms of screen size, but Apple
| remained obsessed with lighter and thinner phones for many
| years after that. It's hard to remember this, but some of the
| earlier smartphones like the Palm Trio were giant awful
| bricks. You can't really convey weight in a picture, but you
| can convey size.
| whis-kiss wrote:
| Wow I'm just remembering the girth of those devices. My
| family had some later palm and similar devices... closer to
| an address book or gaming devices in thickness. My mom's
| case was like 3/4 an inch deep, 3-4 in wide and like ~6in
| deep. Not light, and kinda fragile.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| In all fairness, Apple didn't expect the market to want giant
| phones, and were very late with big screens.
|
| Releatedly: It's fun to look at old Futurama episodes, where
| they joke about phones becoming so small you accidentally
| inhale them while talking.
|
| We all really thought size was going one way and that was down.
| whis-kiss wrote:
| Well it is annoying as a 6ft 2 guitar player(I'm saying I
| have big flexible hands) I still need both hands to do most
| phone things, like type this.
|
| My Galaxy 5 and 6 were the last the worked well one handed.
| The "small" phones available are still larger than those most
| of the time! Guess the demand just isn't there, tho I wish
| some were still available. Can't imagine how tiny ladies with
| small hands deal.
| tzs wrote:
| Being a 6'2" tall guitar player doesn't actually say big
| hands. There is some correlation between hand size and
| height, but plenty of variation. I'm a 6'1" tall guitar
| player and I have small hands.
|
| Here's an interesting paper on hand size and height:
| Guerra, R., Fonseca, I., Pichel, F. et al. Hand length as
| an alternative measurement of height. Eur J Clin Nutr 68,
| 229-233 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/ejcn.2013.220.
|
| Here's what they did:
|
| > A cross-sectional study was conducted using a consecutive
| sample of 465 inpatients (19-91 years), from a university
| hospital. Participants were randomly divided into a
| development sample of 311 individuals and a cross-
| validation one. A linear regression model was used to
| formulate the equation. Intraclass correlation coefficients
| (ICCs) for single measures and differences between measured
| height (MH) and PH and between BMI calculated with MH
| (BMIMH) and with PH (BMIPH) were determined.
|
| and here were the results:
|
| > The regression equation for PH is: PH (cm)=80.400+5.122 x
| hand length (cm)--0.195 x age (years)+6.383 x gender
| (gender: women 0, men 1) (R=0.87, s.e. of the estimate=4.98
| cm). MH and PH were strongly correlated, ICCs: 0.67-0.74
| (P<0.001). Differences were small, mean difference+-s.d.,
| -0.6+-4.4 cm (P0.24). BMIMH and BMIPH were strongly
| correlated, ICCs: 0.94-0.96 (P<0.001). Differences were
| small, 0.3+-1.7 kg/m2 (P0.10).
|
| Here's that regression equation in easy to read form, where
| H is the predicted height in cm, H is hand length in cm, G
| is 0 for women and 6.383 for men, and A is age in years:
| H = 80.400 + 5.122 L - 0.195 A + G
|
| Plugging in my H, A, and G and solving for L I get 21.8 cm.
| My actual hand size is 19.5 cm.
|
| Going the other way, from my hand size, age, and gender my
| predicted height is 5'8".
| reginald78 wrote:
| Perhaps Apple didn't want to cannibalize iPad or Mac sales? I
| don't know the timeline on this.
|
| Small phones certainly make sense early on when phones were
| an additional computer for most people. Fast forward to now
| and for many people they are their only computer and have a
| greater need of the versatility that a larger screen can
| provide.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| It is clear that a lot of people commenting about this (here
| and in other threads) don't really get it. The iPhone mini
| wasn't (mainly) about the form factor, it was about pricing and
| market segmentation. They even say:
|
| > Analyse what could be Apple's next release of "iPhone mini"
| to mass market price points and plan counter-measures for it.
|
| The only thing they got wrong was that it wasn't Apple that
| released this mass market priced smartphone, it was _Android_
| that filled the "iPhone mini" role. But for the purposes of
| this presentation, that's the same thing: a non-Nokia
| competitor dominating this niche.
| anonu wrote:
| I was expecting sort of the opposite, for Nokia to deride the
| whole iPhone thing. But it was quite the opposite, they
| understand what they were facing. Ultimately, the could not meet
| the challenge fast enough.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Blackberry took that approach.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/05/26/blackberr...
|
| > Instead they comforted themselves with reminders that the
| iPhone's keyboard was difficult to use and the battery life,
| terrible. BlackBerry was leading the pack, after all.
| mixdup wrote:
| I would kill to see the presentation from RIM
|
| This is to Nokia's credit. It didn't work out, but they also
| weren't arrogant like RIM or Microsoft
| nickpeterson wrote:
| I think even when companies project arrogance from their
| c-suite, it's more to keep the market happy and calm
| nerves. I'd be shocked if RIM wasn't also sweating bullets
| internally after that iPhone presentation. They weren't
| morons, and saw what happened with iPods.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| I know people who were at RIM at the time, including
| someone who was in the room when they passed around the
| first iPhone they got a hold of. They firmly believed the
| iPhone was dead on arrival both because the product was
| "terrible" (no keyboard, no battery life, etc. etc.) and,
| more importantly, because they were so confident Apple
| would not be able to pull off the networking required and
| people wouldn't be able to use the device at all.
| bombcar wrote:
| People forget just how powerful RIM was in the business
| world, and the keyboard WAS a real stickler (even today,
| you can go to any large conference and ask "who here
| misses the blackberry keyboard" and you'll get a decent
| show of hands).
|
| It was a real issue and a real opportunity - I remember
| for years after the iPhone came out the blackberry die-
| hards were insisting that they'd easily be able to make
| something that was "iPhone like with a blackberry
| keyboard" - but during those years more and more people
| started carrying two phones, an iPhone for home and a
| blackberry for work.
|
| That was the beginning of the end.
| kergonath wrote:
| > I remember for years after the iPhone came out the
| blackberry die-hards were insisting that they'd easily be
| able to make something that was "iPhone like with a
| blackberry keyboard"
|
| Part of the problem is that there were not enough of them
| to sustain a company the size of RIM. The vast majority
| of the market did not care and instead valued the other
| side of the tradeoff, the things you can do with a touch
| screen but not with a physical keyboard.
| scrlk wrote:
| _Losing the Signal: How BlackBerry's bid to one-up the
| iPhone failed_ : https://archive.ph/IgW6s
|
| > In the summer of 2007, however, Lazaridis cracked open
| a phone that gave him pause. "They've put a Mac in this
| thing," he marvelled after peering inside one of the new
| iPhones.
|
| > Lazaridis shared the revelation with his handset
| engineers, who had been pushing to expand BlackBerry's
| Internet reach for years. Before, Lazaridis had waved
| them off. Carriers wouldn't allow RIM to include more
| than a simple browser because it would crash their
| networks. After his iPhone autopsy, however, he realized
| the smartphone race was in danger of shifting. If
| consumers and carriers continued to embrace the iPhone,
| BlackBerry would need more than its efficient e-mail and
| battery to lead the market. "If this thing catches on,
| we're competing with a Mac, not a Nokia," he said. The
| new battleground was mobile computing. Lazaridis figured
| RIM's core corporate market was safe because the iPhone
| couldn't match BlackBerry's reliable keyboard and in-
| house network delivery of secure e-mails. But in the
| consumer market, where the Pearl phone was competing, RIM
| needed a full Web browser. BlackBerry was a sensation
| because it put e-mail in people's pockets. Now, iPhone
| was offering the full Internet. If BlackBerry was to
| prevail, he told RIM's engineers, "We have to fix
| everything that's wrong with the iPhone."
| kergonath wrote:
| Mike Lazaridis is may have his blind spots, but he is a
| great engineer by all accounts.
| sybercecurity wrote:
| Nokia produced several early smartphones. Most ran SymbianOS
| that showed what was possible. The connectivity wasn't there to
| make it really useful and this was the age of "smaller is
| cooler" mobile phones, so they tried to keep the screens small.
|
| I imagine that there were several people in Nokia that
| understood the potential of a phone that could also act like a
| mini-computer.
| cesarb wrote:
| > and this was the age of "smaller is cooler" mobile phones,
| so they tried to keep the screens small.
|
| I, for one, would love a return to "smaller is cooler" with
| small screens and big numeric keypads. I have an elderly
| relative whose only use for a smartphone is calls (it's a
| phone after all) and text messaging (SMS and WhatsApp); these
| don't need a big screen.
| Sharlin wrote:
| The first Nokia phone-mini-computer was the original
| Communicator, with a 640x200 resolution and a full keyboard,
| launched in 1996(!) Of course at that time it was targeted
| purely for business users, but by 2007 they already had a
| well-established high-end consumer smartphone selection (the
| N series - rather more advanced than the first iPhones). They
| just weren't able to pivot to the touchscreen form factor,
| largely due to betting on Symbian - I can see how writing an
| entirely new OS userland from scratch wasn't a terribly
| attractive idea.
|
| In the end they did that too, of course, and the N9 was an
| astonishingly good phone, with a slick zero-button interface
| and silky smooth scrolling and multitouch gestures. _And_ a
| terminal and reasonably-privileged root access if you were so
| inclined. I used a normal ssh /screen/irssi combo to IRC.
| It's such a fucking shame that Maemo/Meego was killed.
| darthrupert wrote:
| Some part understood, and those people started the Maemo
| project. It got a tiny fraction of the available resources.
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| The CTO of Motorola was dismissive of the iPhone in her first
| review and acted like Apple was a little child just learning
| how to take its first baby steps. I remember reading this and
| just shaking my head at her cockiness. She left the company
| before the year was out.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20070114215511/https://blogs.mot...
| sho_hn wrote:
| Not that it hurt her career in any way, looking at her
| Wikipedia article. Failing upwards is a thing.
| AlanYx wrote:
| >they understand what they were facing
|
| Parts of the deck suggest that they didn't fully understand
| what they were facing.
|
| For example, the bullet "scaling the user experience to lower
| HW specs may be challenging. iPhone mini may be closer to iPod
| UI" comment still suggests they were stuck in the mindset of
| the time. They thought it was unlikely that Apple could deliver
| a horizontal platform, rather Apple would be launch a series of
| individual phones at different prices, each with bespoke
| interfaces, just like all the players had been doing, over and
| over.
|
| With that perspective, the choice to keep developing parallel
| product lines (Maemo, Meltemi, Symbian, etc.) rather than
| throwing all their eggs into one basket is more understandable
| I guess, though ultimately completely wrong.
| agos wrote:
| the mention of lack of Java was also very indicative of the
| mindset
| ylee wrote:
| > For example, the bullet "scaling the user experience to
| lower HW specs may be challenging. iPhone mini may be closer
| to iPod UI" comment still suggests they were stuck in the
| mindset of the time. They thought it was unlikely that Apple
| could deliver a horizontal platform, rather Apple would be
| launch a series of individual phones at different prices,
| each with bespoke interfaces, just like all the players had
| been doing, over and over.
|
| Indeed. I referred to it at the time as the 50-model
| strategy.
| alkonaut wrote:
| That Apple succeeded in having people pay $500 and up for a
| phone that was cool but frankly not very useful, was amazing.
|
| We should remember the original iPhone was more a tech
| demonstrator than anything else. It had the revolutionary
| touch screen, yes, but you couldn't really DO that much with
| it. There wasn't even an app store! You still needed to buy a
| digital camera and a garmin GPS and so on. This was a
| _telephone_ in the old sense of the word (For younger
| readers, "telephone" used to mean a thing you made calls
| with).
|
| The fact we pay 2-3 times as much now for premium smartphones
| is no wonder. Now it's a PC power thing with a better camera.
| By the time the iPhone 3G arrived it was a marvel. It had
| ironed out most of the kinks of the early versions, added the
| GPS, App Store etc. But by then, the other dinosaurs were
| already dying. They murdered them with the initial versions
| of the iPhone, which really weren't even that impressive.
|
| The presentation shows they were aware of what was happening.
| But that Nokia didn't just make their portfolio two lines
| (really simple cheap feature phones and really expensive all-
| glass smartphones) on the day after this presentation came
| out, is strange.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes,
|
| I still remember seeing the demo of maps and the user being
| able to pan and zoom and was just floored. I really think
| the screen is what sold it then, even if it didn't have the
| apps, you could still browse the full internet on it which
| was a complete game changer.
|
| IMO the screen + multi touch is what drove sales of the
| first iPhone.
| alkonaut wrote:
| > you could still browse the full internet on it which
| was a complete game changer.
|
| It had the screen and the software do do that but not the
| bandwidth. But I guess people were more patient back
| then.
| happyopossum wrote:
| It had WiFi, which was rare in mobile phones back then
| (carriers wouldn't generally allow it)
| nudgeee wrote:
| Agree on this. As a layman in Australia, i had a friend
| who was coming back from the USA and asked him to buy me
| an iPhone before its release in AU (late-2007 iirc,
| iPhone 3G launched in Australia in 2008) and promptly
| jailbroke it so i could get it on an Australian carrier.
|
| When i whipped it out in public, take a photo at
| concerts, etc. random people would come up to me and ask
| me to play with it -- thats when i knew for sure Apple
| were on to something, a complete game changer that
| captured the attention of the public.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| The thing was all the faults with that iPhone was software.
| You can update software. Lack of copy & paste was a
| software feature that was no doubt in some product backlog
| for a while before getting picked up. And once it got
| picked up and shipped, suddenly every device people bought
| had that feature.
|
| I don't recall any of my older phones having software
| updates that had major new features. Any update would have
| been some esoteric bug fixes or something.
|
| The idea that the phone was just another general purpose
| computer with an operating system that could be updated to
| a significantly changed interface was not a concept that
| existed in the mainstream at the time.
|
| All the players before were hardware manufacturers who were
| deeply in bed with the carriers. Phones were locked with
| whatever software happened to be installed at the time.
| Each phone had very different software that was fixed and
| unchanging. The entire ecosystem was built around that and
| Apple came along and made that model obsolete.
| jandrese wrote:
| > It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, but you
| couldn't really DO that much with it.
|
| You glossed over the one killer feature of the original
| iPhone: It had a fully functional web browser and enough
| compute power to just barely run it. This was the thing
| that made all previous smartphones instantly obsolete. No
| goddamn WAP proxy. No needing 3-4 minutes to get Yahoo to
| render. It didn't completely trash the layout of every
| other page. It was an actually useful web browser.
| alkonaut wrote:
| As I remember it there was a time before and after 3G for
| web browsing. The fidelity of the iPhone Safari early on
| was great, but those early 2 generations didn't really
| have the bandwidth to do much with it. Still, I agree it
| was a leap ahead of the rest.
| jandrese wrote:
| It's not unfair to say the first generation iPhone was a
| bit of an aspirational device. It helped a lot if you
| found some working public WiFi, but even then the speed
| wasn't entirely the fault of the radio, the processor and
| especially RAM on the phone hurt performance.
|
| It's not hard to see why the iPhone 3G was a major
| success. It smoothed over so many of the rough edges from
| the original iPhone.
| 4fterd4rk wrote:
| Oh how we forget... Phones at the time were HORRIBLE. To
| you, today, it looks like the iPhone couldn't do much. Back
| then it was revolutionary that a phone could simply render
| a proper website or connect to your home wifi.
| silvestrov wrote:
| also that most of the deck is about the hardware.
|
| There is almost no understanding of the software needed for
| an iPhone UI.
| anonu wrote:
| However "Develop Touch UI" is point #2 on their action item
| list, after partnering with TMobile.
| sho_hn wrote:
| > Parts of the deck suggest that they didn't fully understand
| what they were facing.
|
| The biggest one to note is the somewhat-hopeful comment that
| the lack of Java support was cutting off the iPhone from a
| "large swath of existing software" ... that barely anyone
| enjoyed using, and didn't amount to much mindshare or
| incumbent advantage.
| gyomu wrote:
| Super prescient analysis, kind of ironically.
|
| Great example that there's a point of organizational no return
| that no amount of awareness and intelligent analysis can fix.
| When the barbarians are at the gate, it's too late.
| willvarfar wrote:
| I remember the normal engineering mood inside Symbian, Motorola
| and Sony Ericsson when the iPhone launched.
|
| We immediately knew we were toast. We used to say that the iphone
| made us irrelevant and android made us redundant.
| criticalfault wrote:
| I think we can see the same thing happening today.
|
| BYD+CATL are the new iphone and other manufacturers are
| Symbian, Motorola and Sony Ericsson
|
| VW, Toyota and friends cannot change fast enough. They should
| have started with big battery investments 10-15y ago and RnDing
| then, not now when Market is flooded.
| repler wrote:
| I wouldn't count Toyota out. Their mega battery plant in
| North Carolina is coming online this year, and the biggest
| drag on their _current_ EV /PHEV lineup is the batteries. New
| EV/PHEV models are on the way, and frankly if they just
| update what they have with better batteries they will be
| absolutely phenomenal because they are _currently_ great to
| drive and run extremely well despite lackluster battery
| range.
| vladslav wrote:
| Not just Toyota; the U.S. will have dozens of battery
| plants because it is strategic, like having our own chips.
| f001 wrote:
| For the PHEVs yes they are battery constrained. They have
| great products and a ton of demand and difficulty keeping
| up manufacturing due to limited batteries.
|
| For their EV, they have yet to make something that is
| competitive. Their EV is slow to charge, slow to
| accelerate, somewhat short in range, and quite expensive
| before they started adding---in some cases five figure---
| incentives to move them. It even had a recall for the
| wheels coming off.
| wegwerfbenutzer wrote:
| BYD+CATL is Android. Tesla is Apple.
| simultsop wrote:
| Bet everyone has a different prespective. And thats what
| makes this world amazing. One is really free to pick any.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Nah.
|
| These companies do not have nearly the same value
| proposition relative their intended market as Apple did.
|
| BYD or Tesla are still just cars. An iPhone completely
| changed what a "phone" was. And did so in a way that
| required the rest of the industry to take time to
| replicate.
|
| BYD is more just Toyota. Which is awesome for BYD. I
| realize that a lot of people would like to be "just" Toyota
| in their market. But it's not the same as being Apple.
|
| Tesla? Yeah, they're nothing like Apple. Maybe if they
| delivered on FSD? But even then, it's not like Apple. Apple
| made something that no one else was working on as more than
| _maybe_ a research project. Tesla FSD development doesn 't
| have the same advantage. _Everyone_ is working on FSD.
| Since we 're American, we're hoping Tesla, (or one of the
| big three), gets it first. But that's more of a hope, not
| necessarily the way things will pan out.
|
| That's the essential difference between Tesla and Apple.
| Apple doesn't talk a big game. In fact, they famously and
| frustratingly say nothing at all. They just deliver. Tesla
| is still talking about FSD.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| > Since we're American, we're hoping Tesla, (or one of
| the big three), gets it first. But that's more of a hope,
| not necessarily the way things will pan out.
|
| And in the FSD space I don't think there is much first
| mover advantage anyway. The iPhone came out of left
| field. The path to FSD has been highly iterative with
| many steps taken by a bunch of different players.
|
| Even if Tesla gets FSD first, it won't be much longer
| before others get it to and they'll all be roughly the
| same interface and feature set.
|
| iPhone was significantly different than what was there
| before and as you or somebody said, nobody else was
| working on anything similar. It was a different business
| model--one that took away substantial power from the cell
| phone carriers and turned the phone into a software
| platform on par with a regular computer. It turned
| carriers into dumb pipes and they _hated_ that!
|
| FSD doesn't really change the fundamental business model
| of any car manufacturers out there. It's just another
| feature for the same familiar players to sell.
|
| What would throw a wrench in the existing crop of
| manufacturers would be street legal FSD cars you could
| order on Amazon for a fraction of the cost or something.
| Ones made by the same crew that make all the other random
| flee market brands sold there. Or maybe if the whole
| market switched to on-demand pay per mile service with a
| completely vertically integrated company--but even then I
| don't think that upsets the apple cart too much.
| realo wrote:
| I respectfully disagree.
|
| Tesla is run by a bigot, far right extremist. I would never
| send money to them, no matter their offerings.
|
| Not so with Apple.
| sho_hn wrote:
| I don't understand where this trust comes from. Just like
| any other large company, Apple will not stand up for your
| civil rights when it seriously threatens the bottom line.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Good grief. Yes, Musk is a raging asshole. But so soon we
| apparently forget that Jobs was also a raging asshole.
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| China
| thefounder wrote:
| I somehow fail to see this as the most I want in a car is
| confort and perhaps space not screen time.
|
| A killer feature for a car would be FSD but that's not an
| "iPhone" thing.
|
| BYD and the other Chinese manage to sell good EVs for great
| prices but I don't see them irreplaceable like the iPhone.
|
| Maybe they are the new Toyota but not the iPhone.
|
| Same goes with Tesla though it's more complicated because
| Tesla keeps promising FSD.
|
| The iPhone didn't promise anything. It just delivered.
| immibis wrote:
| It's all about marketing. You buy the thing that has the
| best marketing, not the best thing. That's how Apple
| replaced all these other smartphone vendors.
| mort96 wrote:
| This is a very narrow and simplistic view on the
| extremely complex topics of market dynamics and consumer
| behaviour.
| bombcar wrote:
| Marketing can get you a leap and a start, but if the
| product isn't at least usable, it'll die out.
|
| Anyone should be able to bring to mind giant marketing
| blitz for products that died horribly.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Also, utterly wrong. The iPhone is very good at being a
| phone + lots more.
| vladslav wrote:
| By borrowing your analogy, the general sentiment with the
| iPhone was excitement and interest when it came out. I just
| don't see it in the folks around me regarding EVs (price is
| high, charging is pain). Yes, it's the future, but a future
| that is way ahead. We aren't even at the point where those
| old "devices" start to show their age. I'd say Symbians and
| Ericssons still have time.
| bombcar wrote:
| People also forget that the iPhone wasn't what we have
| today - it was an iPod that made phone calls, and that
| alone was enough "for most people" - huge swaths of people
| had iPods and a cell phone so even if it had been mediocre
| it would have succeeded.
|
| It _not_ being mediocre is how it ate the world.
| sofixa wrote:
| I disagree. Cars are much more entrenched status symbols than
| phones were back then. A Porsche is a Porsche, a truck to
| show you're manly and outdoorsy is a truck.
|
| People will continue to buy brands they know and whose
| marketing aligns with how they see themselves. Not everyone
| will switch to BEVs for a variety of reasons - cost, lack of
| infrastructure, or hell, even contrarianism.
|
| VW, Renault, Nissan, Stellantis, Toyota can change fast
| enough before BEVs are the only thing on the market. All of
| them already have models in various sizes (e.g. Renault make
| very good and adequate cheap EVs nobody else comes even close
| to in the big EU markets) and varying quality. It's easier
| for VW to improve their EVs than it is for Tesla to launder
| their image.
| immibis wrote:
| Status symbols can be shifted with marketing. BEVs are
| heavy as fuck, and (at least theoretically) torquey as fuck
| at zero speed - both of those seem pretty manly if you put
| the right spin on them.
| jampekka wrote:
| > Status symbols can be shifted with marketing
|
| Or by buying a brand. Happens all the time. BYD already
| bought full control of the luxury brand Denza from the
| Mercedes-Benz joint venture.
| usrusr wrote:
| Also keep in mind that the iPhone was far from starting at
| zero: they did not so much enter the phone market as a
| newcomer as they did pull the phone market into the
| existing and utterly dominated iPod market. Dominated so
| much that I don't even dare calling it the mp3 player
| market.
| jampekka wrote:
| > A Porsche is a Porsche, a truck to show you're manly and
| outdoorsy is a truck.
|
| A Rolls-Royce is a BMW, a Chrysler is a Fiat, an Aston
| Martin is a Ford, a Jaguar is a Tata, a Lamborghini is an
| Audi. And a Porsche is a Volkswagen.
| sofixa wrote:
| If anything, that helps my point. People still buy
| Porsches even if they know it's the same car as a VW or
| Seat, just fancier and with a more prestigious badge.
| mort96 wrote:
| I don't see the comparison. BYD is a decent car for an
| impressive price, but they're ... just cars. The iPhone
| wasn't "just a phone" that was cheaper than its
| contemporaries and a little better in very specific areas, it
| was a complete overhaul of the entire market.
|
| You can look at a BYD and a Nissan and make a decision based
| on minor trade-offs between different aspects of the car. You
| couldn't do the same between iPhone and a Sony Ericsson.
| paganel wrote:
| > BYD+CATL
|
| Unless these two companies change the laws of physics in
| order to exponentially improve the overall performance of
| batteries (exponentially faster charging times, from hours to
| 5-10 minutes, exponentially cheaper batteries that would last
| longer) then, no, they won't be the next Apple. Just ask VW,
| they almost bet it all on EVs and now they're already with
| one foot in the grave because of that.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| They bet the farm on hiding diesel emissions before that.
| travisporter wrote:
| What about Hyundai? They also went big on EVs and now are
| competing even in China
| toast0 wrote:
| > Just ask VW, they almost bet it all on EVs and now
| they're already with one foot in the grave because of that.
|
| Not without some coercion. It was part of the settlement
| from when they cheated on emissions tests by running the
| engines more efficiently if the steering angle was touched
| or the non-drive wheels moved.
| blackoil wrote:
| CATL has 5C batteries and svolt 6C. BYD also is working on
| similar tech. So 10 mins should be possible by year end or
| early next year.
| europeanNyan wrote:
| Are we seeing the same thing, though?
|
| The average consumer replaces their smartphone about every 3
| years (at least in the western world, places like India are
| on an even shorter cycle). Additionally, the global average
| price of a smartphone is about 400 USD. That's a much faster
| moving market than cars and the investment is much lower.
|
| BYD is very impressive, but I wouldn't look at the situation
| as the same.
| edejong wrote:
| No, these are not disruptors. Substantial incremental
| improvements, but part of the larger battle.
| alkonaut wrote:
| In what way is a BYD a completely different/revolutionary
| product compared to, say a KIA or Volvo EV? This comparison
| seems a bit strange tbh.
|
| Sure they are more nimble and have higher margins. But the
| products they make are still just copies of what those other
| dinosaurs are making. And for a car I'm still very reluctant
| to buy a Chinese one. Politics aside, what I'm buying is a
| 5-10 year long service experience where the Volvo dealer is
| 1km away and where the BYD service location is I'm honestly
| not sure. It might be around the corner too, but I don't
| _know_ because it hasn 't been there for 50 years yet. It's a
| much harder market to break into. The easiest way to do it is
| probably the way Geely and SAIC did it - Buy a brand and/or
| service network.
| numpad0 wrote:
| IMO it's shocking that this _did not_ happen in cars, in past
| tense.
|
| Model S launched 12 years ago. Apple replaced Nokia in 4
| years. Model Y was the second best selling car worldwide,
| supposedly, after a Toyota and followed by a Toyota. Tesla
| has market share of about 2.3% globally and stays out of top
| 10.
|
| iPhone became de facto definition of a phone. In less than 5
| years from nothing. Tesla is... not that.
| bodpoq wrote:
| Cellular is to smartphones that charging is to EV's.
|
| Apple launched in a market with comprehensive cellular
| coverage.
|
| The charging stations grid is still being built out, so
| Tesla was in a completely different situation circa 2013.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Bullshit. iPod touch, which was a low end model that
| followed iPhone, wiped out mp3 players, undone viability
| of portable game consoles, and roadkilled Windows CE, all
| without cellular just fine.
|
| Same just didn't happen with Tesla.
| happyopossum wrote:
| The iPod touch didn't outsold the iPhone, and wouldn't
| have done well if it weren't for its big brother paving
| the way.
|
| iPhone got all the press, all the attention, all the
| developers, and made all the money.
| r00fus wrote:
| 1) Cars are vastly more expensive and regulated. 2)
| Consequently the sales cycle is slower (usually people last
| at least 2-3 years for a lease). 3) EVs became politicized
| very quickly as they impacted politically active industries
| (oil).
| lysace wrote:
| Do you think non- _SW engineering_ types in e.g. Nokia and Sony
| Ericsson also immediately knew?
|
| I remember a lot of delusion the first year that then turned
| into bitterness - but I don't have the inside perspective, just
| hints of it from my then position at a software supplier to
| both.
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| As a developer, I remember a few bosses that thought "who
| needs a stupid phone? no one will buy that" except that
| Android could already do most of what Windows was capable of,
| and the bonus was that the SDK was free and Java was an easy
| language.
|
| They were stuck in their post-Windows 95 world, and did not
| understand that multimedia CD-ROMs were clunky and dying.
| simultsop wrote:
| In the very end. It all boils down to who got the developers on
| platform for free. ( From Apple's context, while devs cost a
| lot, they just marketed well and even made them pay something
| to list apps )
| willvarfar wrote:
| Can you elaborate?
|
| My memory is that Apple _charged_ developers to make apps :)
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| They still charge those 99$ a year, don't they?
| simultsop wrote:
| I think so. But I meant no work contracts and lots of
| employees.
| simultsop wrote:
| Imagine Apple even got paid by developers and not pay them
| mitjam wrote:
| To publish something on a feature phone was much more
| costly, including five-figure quality approvals. The App
| Store was a true revolution and probably needed new players
| that were not as entrenched with carriers like Nokia, and
| Siemens.
| bjourne wrote:
| I worked at SE when the iPhone was released and that is not how
| I remember it. :) The mood was more like "lol, it has no
| buttons!", "too expensive!" and "it can't work without a
| stylus!" I think many seriously misjudged how "cool" Apple was
| back then (and consequently how much they'd be willing to spend
| on status symbols) and how good a snappy touch ui could be.
| lysace wrote:
| Did you work with Symbian/UIQ software, feature phone
| software or something else? The feature phone team actually
| showed signs of _getting_ the idea of no-jank and a rich UI
| very early.
| bjourne wrote:
| Lund working on feature phones! My job was writing and
| managing test suites for verifying the J2ME implementation.
| It was a top secret collaboration with Motorola. They took
| QA work extremely seriously and bugs could delay major
| launches. Unfortunately for them, "rock solid J2ME" wasn't
| really what customers were after. :)
| lysace wrote:
| SE's J2ME implementation was top notch. It just worked
| _and_ it was fast.
| kalleboo wrote:
| The fact that they did J2ME multitasking on a feature
| phone better than Symbian S60 did multitasking of native
| apps, and did it before the iPhone got any form of
| multitasking at all always impressed me.
| lysace wrote:
| Not to pile on... but let me pile on: symbian seemed
| eternally bureaucratic, lost in OO abstraction hell _and_
| lacked enough demo scene people who knew that a solid 60
| /72 fps is what mattered.
|
| People from Future Crew (Finland) and Triton (Sweden)
| should have been running these teams. Half ;-).
| lysace wrote:
| (Nokia's also worked but was slow. Everyone else's
| implementations tended to be both broken and slow. A
| particular shoutout to Samsung - they must have had 6+
| separate, broken implementations.)
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| Not related to phone companies, but some software companies
| were in denial about it. I remember purchasing one of the first
| HTC/Android smartphone, and I told my boss at the time that my
| new cheap phone could replace all the applications of the
| company but cheaper, more convenient, in my pocket, and without
| a computer. He made fun of me and laughed. I knew Java pretty
| well and whipped up a few POCs to see by myself if we were
| really doomed, but I didn't told anyone about it. In less than
| 2 weeks I replace the whole company with 2 or 3 applications
| with crappy UIs. I quit in less than a month and the company
| obviously closed soon after that because that was the only
| sensible thing to do.
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| To my mind the key insight from the presentation is this
| sentence:
|
| "The 1% volume share target could translate into 4% value share,
| taking ~ 30% share of the >300 EUR price Band"
|
| That's Apple's superpower in a nutshell - get the majority of the
| profit in the market, while everyone else battles each over over
| market share (and earn low margins in the process).
| alt227 wrote:
| > get the majority of the profit in the market
|
| But they werent able to just do this from the begining. It took
| a lot of building on the success and positive consumer appeal
| of the iPod.
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| The iPod applied the same strategy. When it launched it only
| worked on Macs with a FireWire port, meaning <10% of the
| personal computer market.
| jandrese wrote:
| Also less space than a Nomad.
|
| The killer feature of the iPod was the iTunes music store.
| Everybody was sick of the hoops the companies made you jump
| through to buy songs. Singles were basically out of fashion
| thanks to the domination of the CD, but most bands only
| released one or two good songs on a CD meaning each song
| cost like $5 and you had to rip it yourself and transfer it
| to whatever device you had, which was a lot of work. Apple
| realized people would buy a ton of music if you cut out the
| bullshit and price it reasonably, a strategy that had been
| previously untried in the market and no doubt caused a lot
| of CEO heartburn.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > The killer feature of the iPod was the iTunes music
| store.
|
| That wasn't launched until 2003, two years after the
| iPod, and it took a while for all the big music labels to
| sign on. (Hell, it took until 2010 for the Beatles to
| show up.) The iPod was a success even without the music
| store; while it wasn't the only portable digital music
| player on the market, or even the first, it was the first
| _good_ one.
| jandrese wrote:
| The first couple of generations of the iPod were a
| _modest_ success, and then more as a fashion accessory
| than as a practical device. Lots of cultural cred, but
| the sales figures were pitiful compared to the subsequent
| generations.
| hammock wrote:
| Value share /= profit share
|
| (and 4% /= majority, although I assume you were being poetic)
| neom wrote:
| "User interface has been a big strength for Nokia -- consumer
| research indicates this is in decline." - Funny, they pointed to
| both why the iPhone came out and what to do about it - then went
| on to really focus much more on feature for feature and existing
| players like Sony etc. They really focus on beating apple by
| competing on features vs thinking about it like a shift towards
| portable personal computing rather than competition in the
| telephony market. They seem to have somewhat understood apple
| flipped the script, but then reading through, their work around
| the fact that is true seems a bit... remedial. CEOs take note,
| good lessons in here. :)
| cs702 wrote:
| 2007. The presentation reads like an eerily accurate crystal-ball
| prediction of what actually happened in subsequent years.
|
| Evidently, Nokia executives knew well in advance what the iPhone
| could do to their company.
|
| Evidently, they knew they needed to do "something" to avoid an
| implosion of their mobile-phone business.
|
| Evidently, despite their prescience and best efforts, they were
| unable to avoid disaster.
|
| It's as if they were in the Titanic, and saw the dangerous
| iceberg well in advance, but somehow were unable to turn the
| steering wheel and change course.
| turnsout wrote:
| This is spot-on, and it's a remarkably common pattern when
| dominant players are faced with a seismic shift--even when it
| comes from within.
|
| Kodak essentially invented the modern digital camera, and had a
| phenomenal lead going into the 90s. It was not a little side
| project--they hired IDEO to do vision work, design enclosures
| and create on-camera UIs. They poured money in, and did ship
| products. I'd love to know what happened internally, but
| externally they simply didn't move as quickly and aggressively
| as they needed to.
|
| Very similar story at Polaroid--it's not like they didn't see
| the iceberg.
|
| On the computing side, we have Xerox. Just couldn't figure out
| how to monetize any of the world-changing innovations from
| PARC.
|
| Someone should really interview all these key players while
| they're (mostly) still alive and put together some kind of
| unified field theory of corporate disruption.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| Kodak also bought Ofoto in 2001. So basically they had over a
| decade lead on Instagram. What did they do with it? Try to
| drive people to print more photos, on Kodak paper. I don't
| think they ever really embraced digital, maybe isolated parts
| of the company did, but the film/print cultural inertia was
| just too strong.
| smitty1110 wrote:
| I worked with an ex-Kodak guy, and he related the following
| story to me from the 80's or early 90's.
|
| Xerox was kicking their ass, they were completely owning the
| copier market. But it was a natural fit for Kodak, they knew
| imaging better than everybody, why couldn't they get into
| this market? This guy was on a crack team of engineers a VP
| assembled to create a competing product. 9 months later, they
| demo a fully digital copy machine, working, ready to go, with
| competitive pricing and features.
|
| But the higher ups at Kodak were incensed. They told the
| product needs a redesign, because Kodak was a film company,
| so the product needed to use film for copying. The revised
| product was a complete failure, and was the reason said
| engineer left Kodak shortly thereafter.
|
| My take is devotion to brand identity is death during these
| critical inflection points. YMMV
| turnsout wrote:
| That's fascinating. It really seems that a lot of
| businesses end up hyper-optimized to deliver what they
| already offer, up until the point where anything that isn't
| a current offer is attacked by corporate antibodies. And
| that's when the growth they've optimized for suddenly
| stops.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's way too much worship of Steve Jobs, but one thing
| he had right - either you develop the product that eats
| your cash cow, or someone else is going to do it.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I'll never not talk about how he killed their most
| successful product ever at the time, in 2005-- the iPod
| mini.
|
| In one fell swoop, the small form factor iPod switched
| from a tiny hard disk to flash memory and the former
| model was discontinued, before competitors had even
| really come close to catching up.
| turnsout wrote:
| Not to mention the iPhone, which erased the iPod. He also
| seemed to make that move with zero regret.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| They did continue to sell iPod Classic in parallel to
| iPod touch for a while afterward, and even revamped the
| UI on the nano to look and feel more like iOS. But yeah,
| there was obvious cannibalism there, no question about
| it.
| sgerenser wrote:
| This sounds like an apocryphal story. Kodak did actually
| make copiers in the 80s/90s, I know because my elementary
| school had one (early 90s, in a suburb of Rochester). It
| was one of the very large models that do duplex, stapling,
| ~100 copies per minute, etc. They just presumably weren't
| good enough/cheap enough to get much market share vs. Xerox
| and Canon. I'm not aware of any of their copiers using
| film, not even sure how that would work.
| ndiddy wrote:
| The problem was that Kodak essentially _was_ a film
| chemical production company pretending to be an imaging
| company. The switch to digital meant they could no longer
| get the fat recurring profits from selling film that they
| were used to. Kodak 's value peaked at $31 billion in 1996
| ($58 billion in 2025 dollars) while the total value of the
| digital camera industry today is around $8 billion
| (https://www.researchandmarkets.com/report/digital-camera).
| Even if Kodak had pulled off a masterful pivot to digital
| and captured the entire market, it would have been
| disastrous for the company and led to it shedding most of
| its employees.
| pfdietz wrote:
| If Kodak were to have survived, it should have kept
| Eastman Chemical and morphed into that as imagining
| declined.
| mitjam wrote:
| I think camera is a major smartphone selling point and
| certainly cannibalized the digital camera business. Kodak
| could have upgraded from camera to phone like Apple
| upgraded from mp3 player.
| nradov wrote:
| I doubt that Kodak could have built a complete phone. But
| they certainly could have been a tier-1 supplier of
| camera components and software to Apple and other phone
| manufacturers. It seems like Kodak didn't even really
| try.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Digital was disaster so the plan after 1996 was delay and
| deny. The question is: did it do enough extra business in
| those transitional years to make up for going bankrupt in
| 2012? And was it better ultimately for shareholders?
| gavindean90 wrote:
| Yea, but, like, phones are digital cameras...
| mitjam wrote:
| Large companies struggle to cannibalize their cash cows
| from within. Powerful managers step up and fight against
| change.
|
| I think Microsoft is a notable exception. I was impressed
| how they went all in on Cloud Computing (at the cost of
| installed software business like Windows and classic
| Office) and think it's now doing the same with AI. Maybe
| it's because they almost missed the internet revolution and
| arguably lost in mobile.
| macintux wrote:
| If you aren't already familiar, Clayton Christensen's
| theories on this, on innovation and disruption, are widely
| praised.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Christensen
| turnsout wrote:
| Yeah, this is classic disruption. The amazing part is, I
| can almost guarantee that execs at Kodak read The
| Innovator's Dilemma, but it didn't help. Same goes for
| Nokia. Knowledge of the problem is apparently insufficient.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Sometimes there is no clear path from A to B. There is
| some weird fallacy where people tend to think every
| single company can make every single product if they
| simply hired the right engineers and throw money at it.
|
| I think it comes from underestimating the role of
| process, structure, and competency, which are the DNA and
| codebase of a company.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Sometimes the market says the most efficient outcome is
| for your company to die and a replacement rise from the
| ground elsewhere.
|
| Old, tired companies with lots of sunk costs and old
| employees are at a disadvantage.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Moreover, sometimes the most efficient outcome for
| _owners_ is milk what you can from the business then
| close up shop. The idea of a public market with
| fractional ownership is you dont have to keep all your
| eggs in one basket.
|
| Kodak does not need to become a cellphone company. You
| can take your dividends from Kodak and invest in Apple.
| When Kodak profits go to zero, you sell the the assets
| and move on.
| turnsout wrote:
| I'm definitely not saying any company can make any
| product, but it is striking when a company which is
| making a product refuses to believe the product category
| is going to evolve--even when they themselves are doing
| the original R&D to evolve it.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I was basically agreeing with you earlier post. I do
| think that there is a bias where people tend to conflate
| a failure to believe for legitimate concerns. Both
| happen.
|
| Maybe Kodak was right in the traditional telling of the
| story? What if the best course would have been to ignore
| digital entirely, milk film for all it's worth, and then
| go down with the ship?
|
| https://hbr.org/2016/07/kodaks-downfall-wasnt-about-
| technolo...
| kalleboo wrote:
| One of the problems for Kodak was that selling people digital
| cameras was always going to be just a fraction of the profit
| of selling them film.
|
| Today, in 2025, Fujifilm makes more money from selling film
| (Instax instant photo film) than they do from digital, even
| though they "won" in digital over Kodak to some extent.
| pembrook wrote:
| Classic innovators dilemma.
|
| The entire point of an organization is to systematize,
| standardize, and make reliable something that is working.
|
| When that thing stops working, and the wind changes, that
| organization is now a giant anchor full of the wrong people
| doing the wrong stuff inside the wrong systems on autopilot.
| jebarker wrote:
| My pet theory is that this is the natural lifecycle of almost
| all companies and the reason for that is that they
| underappreciate the luck involved in their first success.
| There are a few exceptions in the form of zombies (typically
| relying on a monopoly or legislative help), but there are
| very few repeatedly innovative companies.
| 3D30497420 wrote:
| There was another thread (I think on HN today) about
| investment strategies, and the ones that earned the most
| over the longest term were basically broad index funds
| rather than picking winners. I'd wager your point has a lot
| to do with why this investment strategy is best.
| pembrook wrote:
| Doesn't need to be a pet theory, that's just an accurate
| assessment of reality.
|
| I'm sure in Finnish business schools they spend a lot of
| time hand wringing over the question of why their domestic
| champion Nokia failed. What they should instead be focused
| on is why the disruptor wasn't also cultivated
| domestically.
| msabalau wrote:
| Quickly and accurately understanding the competitive landscape
| is hard, to their credit, and not sufficient.
|
| Even if they came up with a strong response, it would still
| involve innovation and execution, and probably disruptions to
| their go to market strategy. All things that have large chances
| for failure.
|
| Also, Apple at the top of it's game from the iPhone to the
| iPhone 4. If they were facing a competitor that was strong, but
| not quite so remarkable, they'd have had more room to maneuver.
| alt227 wrote:
| > N-Series and SEMC Walkman probably need to clearly undercut
| iPhone pricing to succeed in the market.
|
| I think this is where they went wrong. They got scared of the
| new cool kid in school and immediately dropped all their
| prices, essentially marketing themselves as budget to Apples
| premium.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| They needed to cut prices because phones could had a fully
| usable browser on mobile broadband with GPS that no one else
| did. There simply wasn't a competitor for at least a few
| years, and it could even be due to the deal Apple made with
| ATT to make sure all iPhones came with unlimited 3G mobile
| broadband.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| It's nice to see that they got it even if they weren't
| ultimately capable of doing anything about it.
|
| I was an intern at BlackBerry (then RIM) Jan-Apr 2008 and it
| was astonishing to me how little anyone seemed to care or be
| taking the threat seriously. Obviously as a student I wasn't in
| any of the high level war room discussions, but from what I
| could see it really did seem like the company was drinking its
| own marketing koolaid as far as the iPhone not being a relevant
| competitor because it was missing, like, cut and paste and
| encrypted email.
| seanc wrote:
| Remember Jim B. scoffing at how you had to plug an iPhone in
| every night? And how much more efficient BlackBerrys were
| with data?
|
| Steve knew that the customers did. not. care. And that the
| carriers would build more cell stations if they had to.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Yup. I remember saying to someone at the time, BlackBerry
| can scream "tools not toys" all they want, but I'm pretty
| sure Apple will have no problem adding encrypted work email
| to the iPhone whenever it becomes a priority... but the
| effort required to reinvent BlackBerry into a friendly,
| approachable device that people actually want to use, on
| the other hand, yeah.
| jampekka wrote:
| They caused their own disaster with the Microsoft marriage.
| Nokia was still huge, market share and coffer wise, and had
| plenty of options, but killed them all for MS.
| dig1 wrote:
| The comparison to the Titanic was quite fitting. I was with
| Nokia then, and there was an overly large administration,
| excessive politics, and far too many managers and meetings for
| anything to be done on time. If I recall correctly, we spent
| 1-2 weeks in meetings just to discuss replacing apache with
| nginx as a web proxy for a less critical service. The actual
| work for that change would take about 10-15 minutes.
|
| Although they attempted to make improvements, they failed to
| recognize what Apple understood: ordinary people wanted to walk
| into a store and purchase a visually appealing phone that was
| easy to set up and use, everything in 20 minutes max. Nokia had
| an overwhelming number of models, catering to everyone from
| older individuals to tech enthusiasts. If you wanted to buy a
| new phone, you had to be prepared to spend weeks searching for
| the right model.
| this_user wrote:
| Well, there are also a lot of assumptions and complaints about
| the iPhone and its impact that were commonly made at the time
| that ultimately didn't matter:
|
| - Has no changeable battery
|
| - Has no physical keyboard
|
| - Is too expensive
|
| - Has no support for Java applications
|
| They clearly thought that these might be potential vectors for
| attacking the newcomer, but none of it worked out. Rather than
| having to play the game that the legacy phone makers like Nokia
| were playing, Apple just changed the entire game, and now Nokia
| et al were suddenly playing at a disadvantage where their
| existing knowledge and experience didn't really matter.
| Terretta wrote:
| - Can't play Flash.
|
| - Forces devs to release their apps as open software, HTML5
| apps that anyone can just install the home screen from
| anywhere*, no marketplace gatekeeper needed, no 70% rev share
| to the telcos.
|
| * This remains true, except if you really _want_ to you can
| pay 30% in year one and 15% thereafter for shelf space,
| mobile apps PaaS, billing /subscription management, and end
| user app payments support. If you don't want to, you can
| still just release HTML5 apps like the Xbox Cloud player from
| Microsoft, downloadable direct from their web site, no App
| Store involved. And the HTML5 locally installable PacMan game
| from 2007 still works.
| jandrese wrote:
| Classic big company problems.
|
| "If we built a product like this it will cannibalize some of
| our existing and profitable divisions, and those existing
| divisions have a lot more clout internally than we do. The CEO
| worked his way up from those divisions. We can't make this."
|
| Then someone else makes that product and eats your lunch
| anyway.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I think the presentation was enough to show they knew they were
| in trouble.
|
| But it also showed they didn't actually understand the
| significance of what was happening.
|
| They thought essentially "all this fancy stuff will redefine
| 'cool', the 'high end'". They imagined a mid-range phone with
| special email features could slow the iPhone - ie, they
| imagined phone makers dribbling out features per dollar. But
| the real lesson of the iPhone was "the 'phone' is going to
| become a general purpose computing device with multiple
| connections to the world and hardware features controlled by
| general purpose software".
| EngineeringStuf wrote:
| I'm surprised that Nokia found out through the keynote
| presentation from Steve Jobs. LG and Prada announced their phone
| a little earlier and it had been shown already at the IF Design
| Awards a few months earlier.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
|
| If Nokia had paid attention to those design awards then they too
| could have moved quickly on a similar device.
|
| Is this a case where Nokia thought they had a moat?
| EngineeringStuf wrote:
| I'm surprised that Nokia found out through the keynote
| presentation from Steve Jobs. LG and Prada announced their phone
| a little earlier and it had been shown already at the IF Design
| Awards a few months earlier.
|
| Google "LG Prada Phone" for the Wikipedia article.
|
| If Nokia had paid attention to those design awards then they too
| could have moved quickly on a similar device.
|
| Is this a case where Nokia thought they had a moat?
| sampo wrote:
| > If Nokia had paid attention to those design awards then they
| too could have moved quickly on a similar device.
|
| Nokia had their Maemo project [1]. A Linux-based OS for mobile
| touchscreen devices. They published their first device already
| in 2005 [2].
|
| But the Maemo department was small, and the old Symbian
| department inside Nokia was big. The large number of managers
| and executives in the Symbian department played corporate
| politics, and kept the size and resources of the Maemo
| department small, as they perceived it an internal competitor
| threatening their position and the dominance of Symbian inside
| Nokia.
|
| Nokia's CEO at the time (Jorma Ollila) had a background in
| investment banking and financial engineering. His previous post
| in Nokia was CFO. He didn't have the kind of passion and
| insight to software and user experience like Apple's Steve Jobs
| had. Today, nobody would expect to get visionary tech
| leadership if recruiting from the corporate's finance
| department.
|
| At its soul, Apple is a software company that also makes their
| own hardware. Nokia was a hardware company that also made their
| own software.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet
| ylee wrote:
| >At its soul, Apple is a software company that also makes
| their own hardware. Nokia was a hardware company that also
| made their own software.
|
| ... and bad software, of course. Worse than that, multiple
| versions of bad software.
|
| Apple is the _only_ company in history to build consistently
| good hardware _and_ good software _and_ UI. Not IBM, not DEC
| or the other Seven Dwarfs. It really does go all the way back
| to the Woz-Jobs duo providing a maniacal focus on UX _and_
| one of the most brilliant engineering minds of the century.
|
| (I'm told that Tesla also qualifies.)
| ttepasse wrote:
| Nokia did had software chops, just on another metric than
| UI: According to a presentation at my university they were
| very deep in testing and verification and had a lot of
| expertise there.
|
| And in all my years of using Nokia phones I can't remember
| a software bug. But of course we wanted more from our
| phones than just stability, we wanted features and better
| UI.
| oyster143 wrote:
| Just to add to the party: Microsoft deck for Nokia acquisition
|
| https://www.slidebook.io/company/microsoft/presentation/f646...
| Thorrez wrote:
| That doesn't look like an internal presentation though.
| joshdavham wrote:
| I'm getting a search error on the page.
| lifefeed wrote:
| I cant find the quote and article now, but I read that before it
| was released no one else believed a computer like that could have
| any reasonable battery life. Then they opened it up and
| discovered the iPhone was really just a battery with a small
| logic board attached to it, and a lot of the heavy computational
| lifting was done when it connected to your computer.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Can you expand on what you mean? What heavy computational
| lifting?
| lifefeed wrote:
| I wish I could find the original article, it was a link from
| a link from the bibliography of Chip War.
|
| I think it was things like how you couldn't initially
| purchase music, and had to sync to iTunes to do that. I think
| there was more.
|
| I did find this article, on iPhone being basically just a
| battery: https://mathiasmikkelsen.com/2011/05/blackberry-
| makers-thoug...
| tmnvdb wrote:
| The first iphone indeed had rather poor battery performance,
| epsecially at that steep price of 500$..
| jervant wrote:
| _" Cingular has allowed Apple to launch a device with WLAN and
| inbuilt services"_
|
| Ugh, that "allowed". It's wild how much Apple shook up the mobile
| phone market and pushed phone companies back to just being dumb
| data carriers.
| bombcar wrote:
| Jobs sticking to his guns here and breaking the shitware
| monopoly on pre-installed phones is probably a bigger part of
| the full story than the phone itself (as likely the black
| rectangle would be developed by someone eventually, phone
| carcinization).
| Lammy wrote:
| > as likely the black rectangle would be developed by someone
| eventually, phone carcinization
|
| Relevant: LG Prada (2006)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
| pjc50 wrote:
| This was so critical - in the US market. The first Apple phone
| was a very interesting market test that proved why this was
| needed, before the iPhone.
| indrora wrote:
| Stuff like this goes back YEARS.
|
| Back in the days of the Bell System, the upper management at
| AT&T believed that it was going to be circuit-switched forever,
| even as Bell Labs was building packet-switched audio networks
| and it was becoming clear that packet-switching was a vastly
| more efficient solution to moving large amounts of mixed data
| around at a time. The development of efficient switching
| networks [0] was fundamentally resulting in continually
| building bigger networks that took up more space -- it was the
| Strowger step-by-step problem all over again. Moving to a
| packet-switched system meant that you could have an infinite
| number of "circuits" so long as you kept track of the paths
| taken.
|
| But even as AT&T Long Lines implemented this, upper AT&T
| management was _firm_ that the fundamental design of the
| network was not to shuffle packets around but instead to
| connect point A and point B with services on either end for the
| subscriber.
|
| Even when they _did_ eventually try to accept the packet-
| switched system, ISDN was too big and bulky, too slow for
| anything practical, and by the time it was useful, Ethernet /IP
| came along and ate its lunch.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonblocking_minimal_spanning_s...
| strangescript wrote:
| These presentations often serve as a comfort blanket rather than
| a plan of action. Oh man something incredibly disruptive is
| happening to us. Lets talk about it. Whew, okay, we understand
| it, lets go back to being complacent.
|
| Years later, "man we tried, we had that meeting and everything,
| we just couldn't compete"
| tmnvdb wrote:
| They actually managed to act on most of the problems identified
| here but missed the move to software-based ecosystem-centric
| market started by the app store launched the next year.
| deskr wrote:
| If you strip this text to the bare-bones meaning, it reads: "Holy
| shit, we're f'cked, but here is the best positive spin we can put
| on it."
|
| They saw the writing on the wall. They didn't want to compete on
| that level, but rather try to kill it. From "summary of actions":
|
| "5. Kill market for such an expensive device by filling mid-range
| with own/Google/Yahoo experiences"
| tmnvdb wrote:
| This is a rather poor reading of the presentation, which seems
| very serious about the threat and the need to adopt similar
| changes, as well as trying to keep the iphone at bay by
| offering similar features at a lower price.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I was there as this played out. Nokia had a lot of good software
| and software engineers but not the management structure to do
| anything good with that.
|
| Nokia was huge as an organization and parts of that organization
| recognized the threat early on. The problem was at the board and
| executive level. These people had a blind spot for software. They
| thought they were still in the electronics business. Lots of
| people with an electronics and radio background. Not a lot of
| people with software competence. And they had bought into the
| notion that Symbian was going to magically fix all their
| problems.
|
| A lot of effort was spent on looking for other solutions. And one
| of the things that was good (Linux) around 2005 was actually
| quite close to displacing Symbian as the key future proof
| replacement for their legacy platforms. Symbian was just rolling
| out for a few years and they had made a big investment in that.
| And management (those same people with a huge blind spot for
| software) backed the wrong horse.
|
| Linux never really died in Nokia but it wasn't allowed to prosper
| either. Devices were cancelled or repurposed for Symbian. This
| happened to the N8, for example. By the time they switched to
| windows phone, they actually had two Linux platforms (Meego and
| Meltemi) and an Android phone in the works as well. Meego had one
| last product phone launch and the team and platform were killed
| in the same week. Any devices for that platform were labeled as
| developer phones. Nokia never marketed them as a consumer phone.
| Meltemi never saw any product launch at all; it was aimed at
| feature phones. Both were good ideas but poorly executed. Nokia
| killed them along with Symbian in order to back windows phone.
| Classic baby and bathwater situation.
|
| And MS ended up killing the one Nokia Android phone that was
| launched shortly before they acquired the whole phone division.
| Kind of a desperate/ballsy move. I suspect Nokia did this as a
| stick to ensure MS followed through with the acquisition. That
| was their "oh we could just switch from windows phone to Android
| unless.. " move. Nokia was at point the only OEM that still
| believed in Windows Phone.
|
| MS killed the whole division shortly after Satya Nadella took
| over and was sorting out the mess left by Steve Ballmer. The
| iphone was solidly in charge by then and the rest of the market
| was Android. Courtesy of lots of Linux contributions by the Meego
| and Maemo team.
| masom wrote:
| Nokia also had a ex-Microsoft exec
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop) that had the goal
| of ensuring Windows Phone would succeed, and tanked Nokia with
| it.
|
| I was on the DVLUP project where Nokia and Microsoft attempted
| to inject energy into windows phone app development. We could
| see the tension between the two companies as we were a 3rd
| party contracted by Nokia to build the platform. The Nokia exec
| we were in contact with was fantastic, and really tried to make
| Windows Phone a success. Unfortunately the Nokia IT teams we
| worked with were not happy and essentially tried to sabotage
| through inactions (we just needed OAuth / SSO to link accounts
| and track app installs, it took over 3 months of email chains
| within Nokia).
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Now I can't find that poem about Elop sinking the Nokia ship
| or something like that.
| alain94040 wrote:
| This one, the burning platform memo?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32698044
| bombcar wrote:
| Was this around the time Microsoft kept switching what
| "windows phone" was? I remember that the one friend who got
| into it loved it, and then they released something completely
| incompatible and he abandoned the platform.
| masom wrote:
| Yes... If I remember we were aiming for the newly released
| "Windows 8"-based Phone OS, and the previous version was
| fully incompatible with it so all apps had to be redone.
| Tiles were the new thing to build for.
| jandrese wrote:
| Microsoft tried to do the same thing on the Desktop side
| too, but on the desktop they were forced to keep the
| backwards compatibility in place so it didn't finish off
| the platform the way it did on the Phone side.
|
| Amusingly Microsoft is still trying to make the walled
| garden happen. Lots of cheap Windows laptops and Desktops
| ship in what is called "Windows S" mode where only
| Microsoft Store apps are allowed to run. But again
| because PC owners don't abide that kind of bullcrap they
| also have to supply a way to tear down the walls (it's
| surprisingly easy, albeit permanent: just download and
| run a free app from the Windows store) if you want to use
| the machine in a normal way.
| jorvi wrote:
| If memory serves, it was a custom kernel and OS, then a
| semi-custom kernel with a few OS components shared with
| Windows 8, and then the Windows 10 'core' kernel (same as
| on the Xbox One?) with many shared OS components.
|
| At each step they left the majority of devices behind.
|
| What was equally worse was the triple (quadruple?) switch
| of app frameworks. If I remember correctly it was a dotnet
| abomination, then ?? then WPF and finally Xamarin.
|
| Good luck convincing your platform 3rd party developers to
| entirely relearn and rebuild their app four times over in
| the span of a few years.
|
| Interestingly enough, Windows Phone itself was far ahead of
| it's time. Buttersmooth UI, flat UI, built-in global and
| app dark modes, all in the early 2010s.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Buttersmooth UI is how I'd describe it too. I loved the
| themes at the time too.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It was incredibly smooth. The Windows Phone 7 browser was
| also very smooth compared to the iPhone/Android browsers
| of the time. Some miracles worked somewhere.
|
| Also the keyboard was incredibly good.
| kernal wrote:
| I had a few Windows phones, and butter isn't a word I'd
| ever use to describe the performance of the UI. Heck, I
| wouldn't even use the word margarine to describe my
| experience with it.
| delusional wrote:
| As I recall it, calling Windows Phone "buttery smooth" is
| quite an overstatement. I remember it looking drab dull
| and cheap at the time.
| rescbr wrote:
| I had two Lumia flagship phones - Lumia 800 with Windows
| Phone 7 and Lumia 930 with Windows Phone 8 (which I later
| upgraded to 10).
|
| Both look and feel awesome, not cheap at all. At the
| time, Microsoft were paying developers to port apps to
| Windows Phone. There were developers who took the effort
| to make their app look native, and I'd say Windows Phone
| 7 had the best UX to this day.
| kernal wrote:
| It's hard to take someone seriously when they
| overexaggerate like that. Windows phone was never butter
| or margarine smooth.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Didn't it end up as UWP? At one point they were trying to
| pitch running the same app on mobile and on desktop, and
| it .. kind of worked, although obviously very sandboxed
| and restricted in APIs.
| int_19h wrote:
| WinCE (which was rebranded as Windows Mobile at one
| point) basically had a cut-down version of Win32 as its
| app framework. There was also .NET complete with a
| WinForms port.
|
| Windows Phone 7 had Silverlight as the app framework,
| which, to remind, was itself basically a rewrite of a
| subset of WPF in native code for perf (although the
| public API remained .NET).
|
| And then after that it was WinRT / UWP, which was
| effectively further evolution of Silverlight in terms of
| how it looked to app devs.
|
| WP7 was a really low point for the series because not
| only the new app dev story was completely and utterly
| incompatible with anything done before, it also had a
| very limited feature set in terms of what you could
| actually do inside the app - much worse than the iOS
| sandbox.
|
| WP7 -> WinRT transition was easier because WinRT was so
| similar to Silverlight in terms of APIs (in some simple
| cases you literally just had to change the using-
| namespace declaration to compile). It also added enough
| functionality for more interesting apps to be viable. But
| by then, the reputation hit from both devs (who were
| being told to again rewrite everything they already
| rewrote for WP7) and users (who were being told again
| that their devices won't get the new OS, and the new apps
| are incompatible with the old OS) was too much for the
| platform, IMO.
|
| And then on top of all that Google actively sabotaged it
| by refusing to make apps for its popular services - such
| as YouTube - and actively pursuing third-party apps that
| tried to fill that gap.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I wouldn't exactly call flat UI a good thing. They are
| one of the horrible flaws of our current UI design
| trends.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I had the original iPhone, then swapped it for a flagship
| android and hated it. I tried Windows Phone out a few years
| later and loved it and had two of them over the years. Some
| apps didn't exist for it and that sucked, but the OS was
| snappy and something different that I really liked. The
| Nokia windows phones were great. I knew it was doomed
| though as when I got them from the carrier, I was
| apparently like the only person despite it having its own
| wall at the brick and mortar store lol. I still miss it.
| cbozeman wrote:
| My cousin says the same thing... 25 year IT veteran.
| Early adopter for almost all new tech. He says his
| 1000-whatever Lumia phone was one of the best phones he
| ever owned. I know it ran Windows Phone OS, and I
| remember playing with it a bit.
| startupsfail wrote:
| I remember having a Windows PDA when I was in college,
| and developing a bit on top of Windows M. It was a
| reasonable platform.
|
| But Microsoft was too greedy with their licensing schemes
| and demanding too much adaptation from the hardware and
| chip manufacturers. You'd think they would adapt their OS
| and drivers, but no, you had to tape out new silicon for
| them. So they've lost the mobile OS market.
|
| It feels like something like this may happen with the AI
| OS now. They are pushing hardware manufacturers to
| conform to their standards while Linux is adapting to
| what is available and working already.
| int_19h wrote:
| Windows Phone had pretty much nothing in common with
| WinCE/WinMo PDAs that preceded it, at least from user and
| app developer perspective.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I think this hurt Windows Phone a lot as a lot of people
| thought it was just the PDA interface on a smart phone.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I had forgotten the name, but yeah, I had a Lumia for my
| first one. Hardly anyone I knew had one, but the ~5 I
| knew were absolutely in love with theirs.
| nextos wrote:
| The Lumia was essentially a N9 ported from Linux to
| Windows. The N9 was the best phone I ever owned. The UI
| was fantastic. In particular, the offline navigation
| application was incredible.
|
| Nokia could have succeeded in the smartphone market. They
| had the 770 since late 2005. But they were a typical
| corporation, conservative and plagued by internal
| politics. Bringing Elop on board, with his Windows
| agenda, didn't help either.
| pmontra wrote:
| A relative of mine had a Windows Phone and kept it
| running at least until the mid 10s. It was fast but he
| could basically only do calls and SMSes with it because
| nobody wrote apps for that OS. Everybody in app
| development (devs and their customers) was keen to see
| Windows Phone die quickly so they could spare time and
| money and develop only for two OSes.
| tartoran wrote:
| Yes, the Windows Nokia Phone was quite an interesting
| alternative. Though I never owned one I played with one
| and was pleasantly surprised, the 'workflow' was very
| good, the UI as was nice, it was snappy. If they were
| around today I'd probably think about owning one.
| asveikau wrote:
| 2009 and earlier: Windows Mobile was based on WinCE. The UI
| was garbage but the innards were pretty functional, and
| there was desktop-like multitasking. Unpopular opinion:
| they should have just done a UI refresh of that thing and
| moved it to an NT kernel. There were a lot of cool third
| party hacks on this platform.
|
| 2010: Windows Phone 7 was still WinCE, but they removed
| full access to WinCE APIs, and got rid of PC style
| multitasking. They had a new UI framework for first party
| apps. Then for third party apps they had a port of
| Silverlight that imitated the new UI style. The latter had
| really terrible performance.
|
| They had to base this release on WinCE because the NT
| kernel port to ARM wasn't ready yet. Blocking access to
| "good" APIs could be seen as a way to ensure app
| compatibility for the next release.
|
| 2012: Windows Phone 8 had the NT kernel. Also, windows 8
| and windows RT shipped. But the silverlight-inspired UI
| framework of Windows 8 was different from the Silverlight
| fork from Phone 7. So you had yet another UI framework
| rewrite to cope with.
| jandrese wrote:
| At the time Steve Jobs was putting his foot down against
| allowing Flash on the iPhone because the performance was
| so pants, Microsoft was going all in on Silverlight which
| had exactly the same problem.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| That's a popular misconception.
|
| The first iPhone had a 400Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM.
| It was so resource constrained that you couldn't put a
| picture on your home screen because it would have taken
| too much memory.
|
| It could barely run Safari. If you scrolled too fast, you
| would see checker boxes while trying to render the
| screen.
|
| When Flash did finally come to mobile on Android, it
| required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM. The first iPhone
| with those specs didn't come out until 2011.
|
| Even then on Android, Flash ran horribly and killed your
| battery. I had a high end Android phone on Sprint back
| then.
| asveikau wrote:
| It's easy to forget how popular flash was in that decade.
| A lot of us found it annoying on desktops too. Not to
| mention Linux, where we'd deal with binary blobs that
| were pretty unstable, not because we liked it but because
| you needed it to interact with the world.
|
| I have not so pleasant memories of having a few different
| versions of their plugin and I'd try to figure out which
| one worked for a given website, symlink the right one and
| restart the browser. And that was the way to watch videos
| online...
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Oh, the flashbacks.. (pun intended). Same here. Every new
| flash release, download, extract, rename to have a
| version number, copy to "folder of last 10-15 released
| flash .so files", symlink, restart browser and hope it
| works.
|
| I think it got to be so common that firefox supported
| reloading the library without restarting the browser if
| you changed the symlink and opened the "about:plugins"
| page.
|
| And then they started releasing both 32-bit and 64-bit
| versions...
| jandrese wrote:
| And yet Microsoft figured they could make Silverlight
| work on devices with even less impressive specs.
| tgma wrote:
| nit:
|
| > It was so resource constrained that you couldn't put a
| picture on your home screen because it would have taken
| too much memory.
|
| Clearly you drank the Apple koolaid that later
| artificially limited wallpapers to 3GS (or 3G?) and above
| when they introduced the feature in later iPhone OS
| updates.
|
| We had wallpapers and great homescreen and dock themes on
| jailbroken iPhones without a significant perf impact.
|
| P.S. Contemporary Windows Mobile phones had Texas
| Instruments OMAP ~200MHz processor IIRC with less RAM and
| iPhone (2G) was comparatively great.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Yes "I drank the Kool aid" when Adobe couldn't get Flash
| to run decently on a 1Ghz/1Gb RAM Android. But it was
| going to run smoothly on a 400Mhz, 128Mb RAM first gen
| iPhone?
|
| Was Safari with Flash going to run well when Safari
| without Flash could barely run?
| pessimizer wrote:
| I didn't read a word about flash in the comment you
| replied to. They commented on the mention of wallpapers
| in _your_ comment about flash, but they didn 't mention
| flash at all. What they said is that you believed things
| that Apple said, that weren't true, about why they
| wouldn't allow wallpapers. They characterized this as a
| nitpick.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| They never said that about wallpaper. They did say that
| about Flash - my original comment.
|
| And he was proven correct
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash
|
| But back to wallpapers - while the jail breaking
| community didn't care, between performance (lot easier to
| redraw a black background), memory and battery life,
| background images would have adverse affects on the
| iPhone. it wasn't that it couldn't be done.
| Tommix11 wrote:
| I couldn't believe my eyes when I read that they had hired
| Elop and was concentrating on Windows phones. I immediately
| knew that was the end. Unbelievably incompetent by the board.
| dev_daftly wrote:
| I think it was actually a good idea. I think they correctly
| predicted the Android market and saw Windows Phone was a
| good way to differentiate their phones from everybody else.
| If you look at the history of Android manufacturers, it was
| a long slog of brands trading off popularity and hardly
| making any profit until Samsung eventually became the only
| mainstream player.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| People blame Stephen Elop. But the person in control of the
| Nokia board was former CEO Jorma Ollila who headed Nokia
| through its glory days and had a lot of power. Nothing
| happened in Nokia without his approval during that period.
|
| The board recruited and invited Stephen Elop. Part of his
| appointment was the board handing over the company on a
| silver platter to the new CEO. Negotiations for the
| acquisition started almost right away in secret. And most
| likely there were high level discussions ongoing with
| Microsoft and Steve Ballmer before Elop's appointment.
|
| Jorma Ollila retired as a CEO around 2006; he wasn't really
| pushed out and Nokia was still performing well. He handed the
| keys to the company to a non technical CEO with a financial
| background (Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, aka, OPK internally). That
| was the first mistake. OPK was a bit hands off throughout the
| Iphone and Android rollout. There was no vision, no
| leadership, just a lot of infighting between heads of various
| units.
|
| The second mistake was selling out to Microsoft and all the
| share value implosion that came with that. Microsoft bought
| several companies over the years. Nokia was one of the
| smaller ones. That's how bad it had gotten. At the peak Nokia
| was worth 150 billion or so. MS bought the phone unit for 5
| billion. The later Linkedin and Github acquisitions were
| worth more.
|
| By the time Stephen Elop was brought in (by the board, headed
| by Ollila) to fix things, it was too late. There were a lot
| of internal battles as well between the big business units. A
| whole string of CTOs with no power whatsoever that were
| appointed and let go. Including Scott McNealy who never
| really made any impact and was there only briefly.
| sampo wrote:
| > Jorma Ollila retired as a CEO around 2006; he wasn't
| really pushed out and Nokia was still performing well. He
| handed the keys to the company to a non technical CEO with
| a financial background
|
| I wouldn't say that Ollila had a technical background
| either. Ollila has 3 MSc degrees, 2 in economics and 1 in
| engineering. But after graduating for the 2nd time, he
| worked first in an investment bank (Citibank), then in the
| finance department in Nokia before rising to the executive
| level. I would say he has a financial background.
| spiralpolitik wrote:
| Nokia was dead company walking before Stephen Elop. Elop saw
| the writing on the wall and made one of the choices
| available. A different CEO would have made a different choice
| but ultimately at that point it would still have been too
| late to save Nokia.
|
| Nokia was a great hardware company that missed the boat when
| the market changed to be based around software. When the
| market changed again to be based around ecosystems, Nokia was
| beyond saving.
| tgma wrote:
| > made a different choice but ultimately at that point it
| would still have been too late to save Nokia.
|
| You think if they made just a single decision different and
| bet on Android instead of Windows, they would be in the
| same spot today? I wouldn't be so sure. Samsung hedged
| their bets across both and succeeded. Both weren't great at
| in-house software and Nokia made better hardware.
| spiralpolitik wrote:
| I don't think Nokia at that point would have gone with
| Android with Google services which what the market
| wanted. They would have gone with Android with their own
| services (Maps etc) and app store.
|
| I don't think that would have succeeded against Samsung
| and the Nexus phones.
|
| But TBH I think going with Android would have a better
| move than what Elop did.
| mxfh wrote:
| Was there with the company as intern and junior during
| Nokia and Microsoft days for Nokia Maps.
|
| In my opinion Microsoft fumbled the app store by bloating
| it with questionable KPIs on number of added apps by anyone
| able to submit templates apps, while not getting key apps
| like WhatsApp on board. S\so it was a hard sell to have
| people's ecosystems. Same syndrome as with Zune, Tablet PC,
| and Microsoft Store on Windows.
|
| Build quality and hardware of the Lumias was second only to
| iPhones and definitly better experience than Android.
|
| The old Nokias had no chance compared to those, and I agree
| with the assessment that Nokia as Android-Vendor would have
| made little sense either.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > In my opinion Microsoft fumbled the app store by
| bloating it with questionable KPIs on number of added
| apps by anyone able to submit templates apps
|
| Worse than that. IIRC, Microsoft ran contests which
| specifically incentivized developers to create as many
| apps as possible, and most of the apps they got as a
| result were garbage (like copies of developer examples
| with some of the text changed).
| rvba wrote:
| Nokia with android vendor would mean Nokia would survive
| until today - just due to the brand (it was big) and
| build quality.
|
| They released an android phone that sold... many years
| too late.
|
| If they released it much earlier (no microsoft) probablh
| Nokia would still be here - competing with Samsung, or in
| worst case the tier3 brand cheaper smartphones.
| jagermo wrote:
| I remember that, too. Nokia even had an "app store" on a lot of
| their business series devices (the E-series), but it was clunky
| to use, had no payment options and was not really friendly for
| 3rd party developers. There was probably a window where, had
| Nokia pushed to compete with apple on that field, they could
| have gotten a leg up and kept Symbian and symbian apps in the
| race for (way) longer. But that invest and speed needed for
| software was probably not doable in the behemoth that was Nokia
| at that time.
| zekica wrote:
| The worst thing with their store was the 3rd party review and
| signing process. For a time you also had to pay (a lot more
| than $99) to receive a developer certificate.
| mindtricks wrote:
| As someone who was there, I recall numerous projects
| instituted to reduce the number of steps it took to even
| install an app on the device. It was mind-numbing to see what
| they were trying to extract themselves from.
| jorvi wrote:
| > The iphone was solidly in charge by then
|
| Nit: the iPhone was only "in charge" for a brief year or two,
| and then Android ate its lunch in terms of marketshare.
|
| What is very interesting is that Apple has displayed twice over
| ( MacBooks and iPhones) that a minority marketshare can capture
| the vast majority of profits in that market. OEMs like HTC and
| LG made a few bucks profit off of any phone, sometimes even
| losing money on the cheaper models. And that's with Google
| footing almost all the cost of developing the OS.
| rdsubhas wrote:
| ~Thrice. Airpods.~
|
| Edit: Airpods also has a majority market share, so probably
| it's not the third in this list.
| afavour wrote:
| I was a day one Android fan (got the Nexus One) but I'd
| actually debate what "in charge" means... to me it doesn't
| necessarily mean dominating market share. I think the iPhone
| defined the touch-based smartphone when it came out and
| continues to do so. These days Android has a much more
| cohesive concept (in the form of Material UI and so on) but
| in the early days it was just a hodgepodge mess of ideas,
| even if it dominated the market.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| it dominated the market because they seized the 'budget'
| smartphone market. Back in they hayday everyone dreaded a
| new android app coming into the shop because of all the
| absolute shit phones (slow cpus, tiny screens) the client
| wanted us to support because there were so many in the
| market (overseas).
|
| iPhone did and still does run the market, everyone else is
| a follower.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > ...in the early days it was just a hodgepodge mess of
| ideas, even if it dominated the market.
|
| and it was _glorious_ ; the intent-system and Notifications
| drawers were Androids calling card. Intents were a blessing
| and a curse: being able to replace apps was great, but the
| variety in design language, not so much.
|
| Being able to reach into apps' storage was insecure, but
| freeing one's data from SQLite files was fantastic.
| naming_the_user wrote:
| This is pretty much just describing the bimodal nature of
| most markets.
|
| Extracting $100 in surplus profit from someone who's not on
| the poverty line is easier than extracting $10 from someone
| who is.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| > the iPhone was only "in charge" for a brief year or two,
| and then Android ate its lunch in terms of marketshare.
|
| This is true worldwide, but there are significant regions
| where iOS quite handily beats Android (such as the US, Japan,
| and even some parts of Europe).
| Terretta wrote:
| > _Nit: the iPhone was only "in charge" for a brief year or
| two, and then Android ate its lunch in terms of marketshare._
|
| Marketshare is less interesting than wallet share for many
| products.
|
| > _a minority marketshare can capture the vast majority of
| profits_
|
| Ah, yes, exactly, there it is.
|
| iPhone offers wallet share, and continues to eat Android's
| lunch in both total spend and ARPU.
|
| There are two cohorts to be in charge of, for two business
| models: selling something, or giving it away to show ads.
|
| This looks like Android dominates until you get to the
| section "iPhone vs Android App Spending" and start doing the
| math that it's winning on total dollars never mind the number
| of devices.
|
| https://backlinko.com/iphone-vs-android-statistics
|
| Even then, advertisers tend to advertise because they want to
| sell something. Advertisers marketing something everyone
| buys, Android audience is best to advertise to. Advertisers
| with something that depends on extra cash in the wallet
| before the buyer considers it, iOS audience makes sense. Ad
| rates reflect this.
|
| Astonishingly, even on the handset makers themselves, there
| were years Apple captured _over_ 100% of the revenue. That
| sounds nuts till you dig and see it 's as simple as Apple
| made money, while so many other handset makers lost so much
| money.
| hilux wrote:
| This is such an important lesson!
| openrisk wrote:
| This is probably the most important bifurcation point in the
| history of European tech. Today's malaise and grasping for
| direction has much to do with the demise of this pioneering
| enterprise. And the fact that it does not appear to have been
| pre-ordained adds poignancy.
| wbl wrote:
| No, the national champions model is the problem. If Apple
| failed the US still has Android and potentially many other
| startups. Europe just doesn't have the risk capital or
| ecosystem.
| openrisk wrote:
| Yes, but now it doesn't even have national champions. The
| last one standing with some pretense at being still with
| the times is probably ASML.
|
| One wonders whether at any point anybody will ask any tough
| questions about where Europe is heading as far as
| technology goes.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Lots of people are. The answer appears to be "down the
| drain".
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I would put Novo Nordisk up there too. Not sure how Eli
| Lilly is doing so much better though, which I presume for
| both is due to advancing GLP-1s, but I thought Novo was
| first to market.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Which is exacly why Finland should have blocked the MS
| deal. Nokia was a _HUGE_ percentage of Finland 's GDP.
| spiralpolitik wrote:
| European tech was doomed in late the 90s when the EU decided
| to throw in with Microsoft et al instead of supporting
| building out a homegrown alternative ecosystem based around
| open source software.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| I worked, briefly, at Symbian.
|
| They were mind-bendingly, staggeringly, bureaucratic - like to
| an extent and in a way you absolutely could not imagine if you
| had not actually seen it with your own eyes.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| I love Finland and the Fins. But there is a certain type in
| that population that is _extremely_ bureaucratic. The only
| country in Europe that has a contingent that comes near is
| Switzerland, also a great place to live.
| holri wrote:
| The Linux based Nokia N900 was the best phone I ever owned.
| With a bit of polish, finish and maturity it could have also
| been the best phone for the masses. RIP.
| badgersnake wrote:
| The follow up N9 was that. It was great. Elop canned it.
|
| I had to import one from Australia. It was totally worth it.
| jayelbe wrote:
| I miss my N9 so badly! Without a doubt the best phone I've
| ever owned.
| zeroc8 wrote:
| I wanted one, but then Elop killed it. I took quite a
| long time for Android to become as good.
| Twirrim wrote:
| I loved my N810, but Maemo had so many little issues all over
| the place, it was reaching "Death by a thousand papercuts"
| territory. iPhone did what Apple used to do so well, which
| was obsess about the user experience.
| afavour wrote:
| I had a Nokia Symbian phone, the 7610. I loved how 'quirky' it
| was:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7610#/media/File:Nokia76...
|
| and I was able to download an NES emulator for it! I remember
| playing Mario 3 on my way to my first post-university job. I
| really felt like I was living in the future compared to the
| phones others had. And then Symbian just... never got better.
|
| I was ambivalent about the MS purchase of Nokia but I was still
| optimistic about a lot of it. Nokia always made top-notch
| hardware but it was obvious from the outside that they just
| didn't have the software talent (the N900 was a wonderful
| device for the tech set but it had no mass market viability). I
| maintain that when it was released Windows Phone was the best
| mobile OS going. But Microsoft fumbled hard by reinventing the
| wheel with Windows Phone 8 and destroying an already emaciated
| App Store. Arguably they fumbled before they even released
| Windows Phone, spending $1bn on the Kin and then almost
| immediately nixing it:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin
|
| Looking back at it all today... iOS is fine. Android is fine.
| But man do I wish we still had a couple of other viable
| competitors in there.
| kawsper wrote:
| The N-series were great too, I loved both my N73 and later a
| N82, both with Gameboy emulators.
|
| I also bought a Garmin license where I could install Garmin
| on my Symbian phone to do car navigation on my phone, this
| was at a time where most people had specific hardware for GPS
| navigation, now we're used to having apps on our phones, but
| it felt quite special back then!
| cbozeman wrote:
| > MS killed the whole division shortly after Satya Nadella took
| over and was sorting out the mess left by Steve Ballmer.
|
| These have always been the real crimes in my mind.
|
| Ballmer wasn't an idea guy, he was a top-tier salesman /
| cheerleader, and he definitely "understood" what actually made
| Microsoft successful (put out a product, then allow third-party
| developers and support to extend it / support / learn it inside
| out and be a VAR).
|
| Ballmer made the same mistake a lot of people in that era made,
| which is that they didn't realize the software was the most
| important component. The era of "killer hardware" never
| actually existed in the smartphone space, because you had a
| limited form factor to begin with. You couldn't cram an NVIDIA
| GeForce 8800 Ultra in your phone, so your software had to be
| useful and on-point.
|
| I think Satya saw the entire Windows Phone debacle as a failed
| experiment and probably looked at Apple / Google and just threw
| his hands up in frustration.
|
| Getting developers onboard for Windows Phone was critical and
| not enough time, money, and attention was spent doing that. I
| think there was a degree of Microsoft arrogance there, along
| the lines of, "We're Microsoft, of course they're going to
| develop for our platform..." Meanwhile, in 2024, the Windows
| App Store is still a barren hellscape compared to even the App
| Store for OS X and you don't even want to talk about Google
| Play Store and iOS App Store vs Windows Store.
|
| The prophecy was fulfilled - software will eat the world.
| jjfoooo4 wrote:
| Wasn't it already too late by the time Ballmer left?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Yes and no. Too late to take on Apple, but Microsoft could
| have persisted as a loss leader and finally at least had
| Enterprise Mobile in its pocket. Just don't actively burn
| third party developers. It would have been too late for
| courting hardware OEMs by then I reckon, though.
| dev_daftly wrote:
| Ballmer, the person who pushed for and created the entire
| Microsoft Enterprise focus, is not an idea guy that
| understood what made Microsoft successful? This idea that
| Ballmer was some goof when he was actually considered a co-
| founder by Bill Gates which is why he received like 17% of
| the company when he joined.
|
| Also, they put plenty of effort into getting developers to
| onboard windows phone. They even created multiple platforms
| that allowed devs to create a single app that worked across
| all windows devices(pc, phone, xbox) but developers decided,
| with some very influential devs being extremely vocal, that
| is was some sort of power grab to force devs to only deliver
| their software through the windows store.
| agumonkey wrote:
| > These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they
| were still in the electronics business
|
| I believe Sony failed to transition for similar reasons. They
| really owned the hardware era with its own kind of ui, pattern
| ... but everything they did in software was lacking.
| ryandrake wrote:
| So many manufacturing companies fail at software. They think
| of software like it's any other component on the BOM. As if
| it's just like a screw or a piece of molded plastic: Build
| the cheapest "software part" that meets the requirements (or
| buy it from a "supplier"), and then bolt it onto the product
| some time during assembly.
|
| They don't think of software as a major component of their
| brand. They don't think of software as the user's interface
| to (and perception of) the product. They don't think of
| software as an ecosystem with updates, a changing security
| landscape, and third party developers and integrators. It's
| just one of 500 things on the BOM that gets sourced and
| assembled.
|
| I've seen companies where each branch in the software repo is
| named with a part number, and they're all somewhat similar,
| copy-pasted around from one another, but with no real concept
| of what's an earlier or later version or updates, no concept
| of where the codebase came from or is going, and no real
| structure other than "This software blob is part 003-2291-54
| for product 003-2291-00. The product is shipped and we will
| never look at the code again."
| pjc50 wrote:
| This is very visible in places like TVs/set-top-boxes,
| which are always chronically awful and slow, and now cars
| are filling up with terrible software. Which they want to
| charge a subscription for.
| drdaeman wrote:
| And the problem is, people buy this. The markets are
| completely broken. And the worst of it - it's unlikely
| this will be addressed, most likely it'll only get worse.
| ryandrake wrote:
| My TV's menus consist of what I would charitably describe
| as clip art. The icons that are supposed to be aligned
| row-wise are sometimes off by 1 pixel. Text is not
| consistently aligned with icons. They can't even get left
| justification right. Some of the UI elements have borders
| around them, but the bottom border is sometimes 3px thick
| and the top border is 2px thick. Interaction with the
| menus generally takes about 500-2500ms from the time I
| push the button on the remote. Yet everything is animated
| (using a CPU that is obviously not powerful enough to
| even keep up with the animation).
|
| As I use my TV, I sometimes think about how many
| engineers, QA test leads, product managers, and
| leadership at the manufacturer signed off on this
| software as acceptable. "Barely functional enough so the
| customer doesn't return it" is apparently the quality
| bar.
| GoToRO wrote:
| This is exactly how a german-car-maker manager put it: just
| an item on a BOM. Their cars have hilarious bad software.
| clippy99 wrote:
| > Symbian was going to magically fix all their problems.
|
| Really? I remember Symbian had the crappiest and most
| shoestring C++ dev stack ever.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| I was there during the end of the Windows Phone era and can
| confirm. There were even efforts for additional Linux based
| OSes post windows phone. Nokia just never had software in their
| DNA.
| asimovfan wrote:
| So Microsoft also killed linux on phones basically. I had a
| n900. Best phone ever.
| burnte wrote:
| I had the N800 and then the N810 which was one of my favorite
| devices ever. Then I got the N900 and what a disappointment
| it was. I wish I could get an N810 with modern internals.
| mindtricks wrote:
| I was also at Nokia during this time and recall OPK (Olli-Pekka
| Kallasvuo), during a visit to the Beijing office, giving a talk
| where he talked about the difficulties of pushing new things
| through the organization.
|
| More specifically, he said that even he would push for
| investment and innovation in one area, but that as the decision
| made its way through the org, it became something else. It was
| an odd moment to see a CEO say something like this, and was a
| clear indicator to me that we didn't have what was necessary to
| really pivot the way we needed.
| teekert wrote:
| I really liked Windows phone. Had a Lumia 800. Nice phone.
|
| I still think they should have kept going with it.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I was working externally for Nokia around 2004~2006. They were
| already competing with Apple at this point. Nokia were scared
| by the iPod and the Rokr. They wanted to secure the mobile and
| online music market. They were trying to beat Apple at iTunes,
| to the point where they gobbled up one of Apple's biggest
| competitors in the music space (OD2-Loudeye).
|
| When the iPhone launched it showed Nokia was woefully behind.
| All their devices instantly felt like they were from a previous
| age.
|
| Delaware State Lost Property says I still have a bunch of Nokia
| shares to collect apparently lol
| dismalaf wrote:
| Ugh, Meego was so good. I still remember watching the
| presentation, then Nokia tanking when it was announced they
| were switching to Windows.
|
| Imagine a world where Meego, a proper Linux, took over instead
| of Android. And I like Android as a product, but the software
| stack is so strange...
| rawgabbit wrote:
| The presentation is evidence itself that Nokia was bureaucratic
| and unlikely to stay competitive.
|
| The PPT was supposedly about the iPhone but the (well put
| together) slides for that don't start until page 14. Credit was
| given to Timo Partanen, along with contributions from Scott
| Cooper, Gordon Murray-Smith and Sanna Puha.
|
| Pages 3 through 11 were market analysis. Boring and irrelevant.
| The only message that should have been given is that iPhone
| will disrupt the market and Nokia desperately needs to create a
| competitive "cool" product. The presentation said several times
| the iPhone was "cool" because of its UI and touch interface
| versus "buttons". But I think they missed the point. The iPhone
| was a new category i.e. it was more of a computer than a phone
| with some computing abilities.
|
| The "recommended" actions slide is on page 12 & 13. I assume
| this was created by Peter Bryer as his name was listed on top
| of the first page. It lists 10 recommendations along with sub
| recommendations. For a large bureaucratic company, good luck
| getting one recommendation executed. Besides, all ten
| recommendations missed the point. This was the automobile
| replacing the horse and buggy. Nokia wanted to tweak their way
| through. They eventually tried to partner with a "software"
| company in Microsoft; but Microsoft at that time was the
| geriatric helping the geriatric. I would argue Nokia would have
| given themselves a better chance of success by creating a
| "skunk works". Assemble their best engineers and designers into
| one team and free from interference from all the internal
| politics. Their goal would be to create a POC that could rival
| the iPhone's "cool factor". And do it in 6 months.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I'm very late to the party here, but as a smartphone product
| manager at Vodafone I had a front-row seat to the entire arc--
| which actually started with many telcos being angry at Nokia
| for their arrogance and near-monopoly, before the iPhone came
| out.
|
| Nokia never really had a chance--the N-series was a mess of
| patched software, they had no real Linux alternative, and their
| supply chain was fragmented six ways from Sunday because they
| churned out dozens of SKUs.
|
| Then everyone went into denial because they couldn't believe
| Apple would be successful by going outside established norms
| (like refusing to customize the homescreen or packaging for
| telcos, etc.).
|
| A few telcos tried to respond by picking their own champion
| smartphone (Verizon did that in the US). I ended up having to
| talk my CMO out of going all out on promoting the Blackberry
| Storm (which was a dud of epic proportions).
|
| I later became the product manager for the iPhone as well, and
| that was an amazing roller coaster I will eventually write
| about (it's been around 17 years, so I think I'll get to it
| sometime soon).
|
| But I would recommend folk interested in the intervening years
| to read Operation Elop: https://asokan.org/operation-elop/
|
| I also had a front row seat to that...
| yabatopia wrote:
| That's how I remember Nokia in the first half of the 2000's:
| peak arrogance. Even if Steve Jobs himself would have given
| them the iPhone for free, they would have rejected it.
| hilux wrote:
| Something clicked for me when I read your comment: the most
| amazing thing about Apple is that despite their corporate
| immensity, they still continue to ship generation after
| generation of cool products that compete and sell on their own
| merits. You don't have to be a fanboy to appreciate that.
|
| Almost no other tech company that I can think of has been able
| to resist bureaucratic ossification. (Perhaps Adobe - to an
| extent?)
| freetonik wrote:
| >The problem was at the board and executive level. These people
| had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in
| the electronics business.
|
| A very common story in European tech and automobile companies.
| b8 wrote:
| Why didn't Nokia go bankrupt afterwards? They have Bell Labs,
| but don't make any interesting products.
| jx0950 wrote:
| I read this after doing a time travel back to 2007. I was using
| Blackberry/Nokia E## at the time. Remember thinking about a phone
| without a full keyboard!
|
| Seems like Nokia had a good grasp of what had happened. Also a
| sense of immediacy to act.
|
| But then - Nokia, Palm, Blackberry....
| ubermonkey wrote:
| That's a great time capsule. I'd love to see a similar document
| from the same period from Microsoft, because I really wonder if
| Ballmer's much-lampooned interview after the iPhone's intro was
| bluster or a real position held by the mobile unit at MSFT.
|
| "<laughs> $500 fully subsidized with a plan? That is the most
| expensive phone in the world, and it doesn't appeal to business
| customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not
| a very good email machine."
|
| It's a take that has aged like milk, but Ballmer wasn't (and
| isn't) an idiot. The rest of the market looked at the iPhone and
| saw the future, and moved accordingly. I mean, the first major
| users I saw of the iPhone were BUSINESS users, in point of fact.
|
| So I've always wondered if that was just bluster, or he really
| was drinking so much Redmond-flavored Kool-aid that he didn't, or
| couldn't, see what was about to happen.
|
| (In re: Kool-aid, in 2009-ish, my company did a joint deal at a
| large client with MSFT; we had complimentary products, so we were
| pitching as a unit. The MSFT guys were genuinely vexed that we
| had iPhones. Like, personally affronted. And this was in Kansas,
| far from the mothership. At the time, WinMo was AWFUL. It _couldn
| 't even do IMAP_ without a 3rd party client -- it was Exchange or
| POP only. None of us had ever really used a WinMo phone for very
| long, because (at that time) a Treo was still a great option, and
| RIM hadn't fully wet the bed, so WinMo was pretty thin on the
| ground unless your paycheck said "Microsoft" on it.)
| bsimpson wrote:
| It's funny to see $500 being expensive for a phone here,
| because I absolutely remember it being so far above the market
| that it was rare to see the first generation in the world (and
| they had a price cut shortly thereafter).
|
| There has been some nasty inflation in these past years, but
| $500 is a budget phone these days!
| tmnvdb wrote:
| Well, $500 in 2007 is $756 in 2025, not exactly a "budget
| phone" price.
| dagw wrote:
| It was $500 with an expensive mandatory 2-year contract. With
| an expensive 2-year contract you can get most budget phones
| for 'free'.
| kristianc wrote:
| "Nokia impact minimal in terms of financials, but may impede US
| penetration or success"
|
| Now there's a gem of a line...
| GoToRO wrote:
| there's another one, users still prefer buttons...
| gatnoodle wrote:
| _Evaluate the partnership with Microsoft (the enemy of your
| enemy...)_
| edejong wrote:
| "Even though Steve Jobs emphasised iPhone superiority to
| "Buttons", it is to be expected that the consumer QWERTY category
| will continue to succeed."
|
| Their key mistake.
| ttepasse wrote:
| I don't know. 17 years on and my fingers still miss hardware
| keyboards a little bit.
|
| My dream smartphone would be a black rectangle, but with a
| landscape hardware keyboard to slide out from underneath. And
| in an ideal world OLED keys for changing the layout and a touch
| sensitivity for moving a text cursor.
|
| What I miss from the 2000s is the big differentiation in phone
| form factors. Granted, a lot of them were weird, but there was
| at least experimentation and optimising for different use
| cases. What if the current standard of a black rectangle is
| just a local maximum and there is something better ahead?
| ylee wrote:
| I helped cover IT hardware companies including Apple at a bulge-
| bracket investment bank. Not just Nokia, but the entire phone
| industry was caught flatfooted by iPhone as willvarfar and anonu
| said, despite rumors going around the industry. (The joke slide
| in Jobs' announcement presentation showing an iPod with phone
| dial was not too far off what we and most people expected.)
|
| Thoughts on the presentation:
|
| * "There is not much coolness left for Motorola" - The day of the
| announcement, I saw a press release from Motorola come across the
| wire, in which the company announced yet another phone with a
| keyboard. I felt pity for the unfortunate souls who had designed
| it, worked on its launch, and wrote the copy for the press
| release, and who now had to see their efforts fly into Hurricane
| iPhone.
|
| * Predictions of lower-priced iPhones - Average iPhone prices of
| course rose, as opposed to falling. As JSR_FDED said, Apple has
| always played upmarket. I heard Apple's CFO say at a Citigroup-
| hosted investor conference that his company could release a $799
| computer "but we don't want to".
|
| (That said, it is quite possible to find deals, at least in the
| US. I got my iPhone 13 by agreeing to pay $200 over 30 months on
| top of my already super-cheap T-Mobile plan. The iPhone before
| that, I bought carrier refurbished for $100 from Sprint.)
|
| And of course, there never was an iPhone mini with a
| fundamentally different UI. Despite the repeated commitment to
| improving on UI, etc., I guess it would have been too much to ask
| a company like Nokia, the king of releasing a new model with new
| UI and new form factor weekly, to imagine that another company
| would just not play the infinite-SKU game. (Conversely, it's not
| hard to imagine that had Apple entered the phone market in the
| 1990s during the years of endless indistinguishable Performa
| models, it might have tried to play along.)
|
| * The MVNO mention is regarding rumors of Apple launching its
| phone in conjunction with an MVNO. We thought this was quite
| possible, but it was based on Apple having the credibility to
| immediately have millions of customers switch to it as their
| carrier, and not because Apple--of all companies--could not get
| whatever it wanted from carriers.
|
| * Third-party app support - Most have forgotten that Apple really
| did expect webapps to be the app experience for iPhone's first
| year. But even that would have been an improvement over what
| things was like before iPhone. I speak as one who purchased my
| share of Palm apps. $20 was the _norm_ for, say, DateBk6 (which,
| by the way, has at least one function that MacOS 's Calendar
| _just_ got with Sequoia).
|
| * "Expect RIM and Palm to suffer" - I never liked using my
| company-issued Blackberries. I didn't leave Palm until 3GS in
| 2009; besides DateBk6, I also liked being able to tether my
| computer to my Palm Treo 700p.
|
| * I'm pretty sure there was no sharing of data revenue or iTunes
| revenue. Apple got what it wanted from Cingular/AT&T regarding
| marketing and in-store push without having to preload bloatware
| or the carrier's brand name all over the device/packaging, and
| the carrier got the exclusive of the decade. Remember, Deutsche
| Telekom deciding to sell T-Mobile in 2011 was directly because it
| didn't have iPhone (so that tells you how the repeated mention in
| the presentation of T-Mobile turned out).
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Oh man... I forgot about the software branding on pre-iPhones.
| Everything had the carriers brand on it from the boot screen to
| all the "special apps" and crap. iPhone had none of that and it
| absolutely pissed off the carriers. Apple turned them all into
| dumb pipes and they _hated that_.
| jl6 wrote:
| One can imagine the feeling of realizing the asteroid will hit in
| 6 months but your anti-asteroid solution will take 3 years to
| build.
| dschuetz wrote:
| Nokia saw the iPhone, fast-forward to 2014, Nokia just gives up
| and sells their dead horse cellphone business to Microsoft.
| Microsoft casts a few necromancy spells and also just gives up 3
| years later, and kills the same dead horse again. The end.
| nsteel wrote:
| ...and then to HMD, and then they gave up. The end (again)?
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| ...and then they made some Android foldables that went nowhere.
| The end?
|
| I expect to see a new Windows Phone in around 2030.
| alt227 wrote:
| > Nokia needs to develop touch UI to fight back. S60 should be
| focus, but Maemo platform can be a critical strength due to
| openness.
|
| If only history went this way, Maemo could be a full OS competing
| with the big boys by now.
| benrutter wrote:
| Like some other commenters, I'm amazed at how well thought out
| Nokia's insight into the iPhone was at the time. They seemed
| pretty aware it was a major threat, and a game changer that
| needed to be responded to.
|
| I'd be curious about an alternative history where Nokia hadn't
| tied itself so strongly to the burning reckage that was Windows
| Phone. Would Nokia have wound up as a solid android phone
| producer somewhere similar to where Samsung are now? I guess
| we'll never know.
| tmnvdb wrote:
| My understanding is that the microsoft partnership was more
| like a late last ditch effort.
|
| The market was changing to one where hardware was produced in
| asia and phones are loaded with ecosystem-centric software from
| Google or Apple (the real game changer, the app store, was
| launched next year).
|
| Nokia did not really have a place in either of those and did
| not manage to adapt to this fundamental change. They did
| actually manage to adapt to the UI revolution of the first
| iphone.
| krastanov wrote:
| It is really saddening for me to see how much N800/N900 and the
| Maemo platform are mentioned here, as an example of Nokia
| actually being first to introduce many of these technologies, but
| then Nokia dropped them a few years later. I still occasionally
| boot my N900, I wish I had a use for it -- it still works great
| as a general purpose computer and a good phone.
| abhayhegde wrote:
| Nokia correctly predicted that iPhone would stand for "coolness"
| factor. It's amazing how Apple carried that brand since its
| inception and precisely what allows it to levy "Apple tax".
|
| The execs even noted that the downside of iPhone would be non-
| removable battery. It is commendable that Apple changed the
| industry standard to something worse without even being in the
| top 10 in 2008.
| kombine wrote:
| I was working as a Qt developer at the time and really rooted for
| Maemo to succeed, because Qt was and still is a truly an amazing
| piece of technology. Unfortunately, Nokia squandered this
| opportunity.
| ongytenes wrote:
| Got a 404 at tiiny.host after following your link.
| sefke wrote:
| I've been reading these Nokia archives for the whole day. It's so
| interesting to see what they did behind the scenes.
| yread wrote:
| > Based on highly speculative iPhone sales of 6.5 million during
| 2007 and 14 million during 2008.
|
| Actual sales: 2007: 1.4M, 2008: 12M. Pretty spot on.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Me too, I was there.
|
| For those who wish to deep dive into the mobile phone industry's
| history from the late 1990s and subsequent decades, I highly
| recommend industry analyst Tomi Ahonen's voluminous (I'm not
| kidding) blog from back then. I'm providing a link here about
| Nokia in particular:
|
| https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/nokia/
|
| and especially his scathing take on the events of the Microsoft-
| Nokia timeframe, wherein as events transpired he frequently
| reframed his belief that Elop was the "Worst CEO In History".
| unwiredben wrote:
| I was at Palm when the iPhone launched, and one note from this
| analysis summed up Apple's new power in the market and how they
| really changed the landscape.
|
| "Cingular has allowed Apple to launch a device with WLAN and
| inbuilt services"
|
| At that time, the carriers controlled so much of the cell phone
| experience. We certainly would have loved to have launched Palm
| Treo phones with WiFi radios, but our carrier partners wanted the
| only way to get data in and out of the devices to be through
| their monetized data plans. They also wanted to control what you
| did with that data so they could charge for their own email or
| messaging systems or web portals. The same applied to app stores.
| Palm OS didn't have a unified app store at that time, just
| sideloading and some third-party methods, and some carriers had
| started making their own stores where you could buy apps billed
| through your cell phone bill. They hated the idea of a platform
| owning that, and I expect that was part of the reason Apple
| originally released it with no app store. They needed the phone
| to be a massive hit in order to gain the power to also bypass
| that wall that the cell companies put up.
|
| Palm did benefit from the iPhone launch -- it had us uplevel our
| efforts away from the post-Palm OS phones that we were in the
| middle of developing that were aimed at the RIM market and
| instead try something radical with webOS, and when the Pre
| launched, it actually had WiFi on board, although the Sprint-
| exclusive Pixi phone lacked WiFi due to carrier request. There
| was some momentum there for a while, but then HP bought us, hit
| its own set of brick walls with carriers, and ditched the
| hardware business shortly after Apple started launching on other
| carriers.
| dboreham wrote:
| Exactly this. Also why I bought Apple stock the day the iPhone
| was announced (I had never seen an iPhone and knew nothing
| about how cool it was, but I took notice that Jobs had been
| able to blast through the carrier moat concerning data
| service).
| jandrese wrote:
| I read that as a failure of Palm's management, notably the ones
| that were negotiating with phone carriers. Jobs isn't the only
| guy who could have negotiated that kind of deal. Apple was a
| second run computer company that had almost no previous phone
| experience. They were not exactly negotiating from a position
| of strength, and the fact that only one carrier took them up on
| the offer shows just how tough it was.
|
| It sounds like they really needed to say "Stop. We are the ones
| building the phone, you are the ones providing the service. We
| don't tell you how to build towers, you don't tell us how to
| build the handset, at least not the user facing part of the
| handset."
| wmf wrote:
| Steve Jobs could say that but as the old saying goes, you are
| not Steve Jobs.
| dmonitor wrote:
| > Jobs isn't the only guy who could have negotiated that kind
| of deal
|
| This is a debatable claim.
|
| > Apple was a second run computer company that had almost no
| previous phone experience. They were not exactly negotiating
| from a position of strength
|
| The iPhone was not a mobile Mac. It was an iPod with an
| inbuilt cellphone. iPod was HUGE. That was their upper hand.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I would expect that being a computer company gave Apple more
| leverage than the handset makers. Apple could afford to have
| none of the providers say yes.
|
| Moreover, Apple had prestige. It wasn't that big but it
| already the high-end computer maker. And Apple had the
| already successful ipod which served as the basis for the
| original iphone. And the handset makers had been
| fundamentally dependent on carriers in determining what
| features made it to the final phones - which would have had
| to made them essentially weaklings.
|
| Which is to say, I think there's reason to think Apple had
| strength in it's negotiation position relative to a random
| handset maker.
| atourgates wrote:
| The Pre was absolutely rad - and to this day the only phone I
| miss from a UI perspective, and the only UX and hardware that I
| thought had a chance of "out Apple'ing Apple".
|
| The hardware was very well done, and I could type faster on my
| Pre than I still can today on any screen. I was never a
| Blackberry person, but I expect it was a simlar experience.
|
| Even at launch, WebOS was a pleasure to use, and the
| architecture of essentially easy-to-make installable web apps
| was revolutionary at the time. It's a damn shame it never made
| it further than it did.
| seanc wrote:
| I was at RIM at that time and saw _exactly_ the same thing.
| When I started in 2008, in addition to WiFi and apps they were
| squabbling with carriers about whether or not the Blackberry
| needed an antenna. Carriers were micromanaging devices to an
| astonishing degree.
|
| The river of money from Macs, iPods and iTunes gave Steve Jobs
| a completely different kind of leverage in those carrier
| negotiations. Device only companies like Palm and RIM couldn't
| have broken that carrier strangle even if they did have the
| technology.
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| Were virtual network operators (?) - VNOs - a thing back
| then, and could a VNO make its own rules? If so, could Apple
| (or Palm or RIM) launch their devices without carrier
| compromise by also owning a virtual network? I guess this
| would have required a lot of money. Maybe Nokia could have
| done it?
| seanc wrote:
| No, the carrier leverage did not come from network policy,
| it came from sales-channel. That is to say, in those days
| one way or another every device passed through a carrier's
| hands before reaching the customer. So carriers controlled
| pricing, and to a large degree, marketing. If they didn't
| like your device they would refuse to sell it and then you
| were stuck.
|
| Unlike RIM or Palm, Apple could realistically choose not to
| sell their device at all, or at least not sell it for a
| while, and so they were able to break the carrier
| oligopsony. It also didn't hurt that Steve Jobs was, well,
| Steve Jobs. A one-of-one business negotiator.
| spiralpolitik wrote:
| The Pre and WebOS were hands down the best non iPhone
| experience at the time. The mistake Palm made was going
| exclusive instead of pushing it everywhere. I don't think the
| Pre ever recovered from that in the USA.
|
| The BlackBerry Z10 was also a great device but by that point
| there was no way BlackBerry to deploy a competing ecosystem to
| iPhone and Android for it to matter.
| grishka wrote:
| > At that time, the carriers controlled so much of the cell
| phone experience.
|
| In English-speaking countries, maybe. But I remember at least
| Windows Mobile PDAs that had both a cellular radio and wifi
| before the iPhone launched. At least Russian carriers never
| cared at all what kind of phone or other device you were using
| on their network. You bought it unlocked for the full price
| from somewhere else anyway. There were various attempts to do
| US-style carrier-locked phones with 2-year commitment with no
| or little upfront payment, but none of that really stuck. The
| only exception to that was SkyLink, Russia's only CDMA carrier.
| They sold their own branded phones but even those, iirc, were
| for the full price upfront.
| tiltowait wrote:
| Though I never used a Pre, I got to use webOS on an HP
| Touchpad. In many ways, I still think it's better than what we
| currently have and wish it had won out instead of the iOS and
| Android.
| jjallen wrote:
| Content doesn't exist for me
| wslh wrote:
| When I loook on this [recent] history, the business and technical
| strategies Apple and Google employed in mobile were truly
| amazing. In my view, Apple and Google managed to reinvent
| themselves (organically or otherwise), while Nokia and Microsoft
| were weighed down by their attachments to the past. Blackberry is
| in the same ship. In hindsight it seems they should have embraced
| Android as early as possible (thinking in the success of the
| Samsung S II (2011)).
| phgn wrote:
| Does anyone have a PDF link that works?
| dagmx wrote:
| The link doesn't work anymore but this one does for me
| https://aalto.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/IO_926740c...
| gurjeet wrote:
| This seems to have been originally posted on Reddit, and the link
| posted there seems to be online, whereas this post's link seems
| to be now dead.
|
| https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/comments/1i2pijr/nokias_...
| codetrotter wrote:
| It seems the other way around for the particular post you are
| linking.
|
| This was posted to HN, then a bit picked it up from RSS and
| cross posted the same link to r/hackernews on Reddit (your
| Reddit link).
|
| Then the repo.aalto.fi site was temporarily hugged by too much
| traffic.
|
| Then someone reuploaded the PDF to this other tiiny site. Then
| the link on HN was changed to that. Then the file on the tiiny
| site disappeared.
|
| Regardless, thanks for the link. The repo.aalto.fi link
| currently works for me. Probably because it's getting much less
| traffic now.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| Sometimes a company can know the problem is real and be unable to
| address it. I was at Palm when HP bought us. HP knew the future
| was mobile and wanted to not be just a low margin OEM for someone
| else's software platform. Buying Palm was a way for them to
| control their own destiny again.
|
| Unfortunately the driver of this dream at HP was fired by the
| board before it got going and his replacement didn't share the
| vision. A year later HP took a massive writedown and turned it
| all off. (Then he was fired by the board as well. The circle of
| life continues).
| maCDzP wrote:
| I doubt todays management would read a PowerPoint that dense.
| hackerstyle wrote:
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mZ_S3R53bmVpvxixavkMPmMorCj...
| EtienneK wrote:
| When things like this pop up, I always think back to Joel
| Spolsky's review of the Nokia E71 and how he compared it to the
| iPhone 3G: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/08/22/a-review-of-
| the-no...
|
| The E71 was arguably Nokia's best phone ever; and it was indeed
| better than the iPhone 3G. But Nokia just couldn't keep up the
| momentum.
| kbouck wrote:
| Worked at Nokia when iPhone was released. No strategy/management
| insight, but I recall the jokes made by my colleagues as I showed
| off my iPhone 1:
|
| "Cool, but can it make phone calls"
|
| On internal message boards, some employees advocated staying
| loyal to Nokia products, and others advocated buying the best
| product (iPhone) to challenge Nokia.
|
| Wish they had navigated this one better...
| pkaye wrote:
| Anyone have a working link?
| toastau wrote:
| Uploaded the PDF here: https://files.catbox.moe/y94qdz.pdf
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| They got so much right and still got swamped.
| sebmellen wrote:
| From the second to last page:
|
| > _Apple is most probably using the first Application Processor
| of nVidia in iPhone._
|
| Was this true?
| markus92 wrote:
| Nope, used a Samsung CPU with PowerVR GPU.
| GoToRO wrote:
| If we go only by this presentation, it seems that they tried to
| understand the forest by looking at every leaf in detail and then
| try to guess if the forest is beautiful or not.
| aanet wrote:
| As others have noted, the original presentation is here:
|
| https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
| haeberli wrote:
| New pdf link broken as well, as far as I can tell
| wodenokoto wrote:
| No one's gonna mention the weird "copyright 2005" on every slide?
| haeberli wrote:
| New pdf link is broken, as far as I can tell.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Huh - the implications of this time period reach much farther
| than I would have expected.
|
| I recall switching from a small, regional cellular carrier to
| Cingular with the launch of the iPhone 3G. It only now occurred
| to me that I'm still there. I stayed with Cingular when it became
| AT&T, and still have service through them. For that matter, the
| service has significantly expanded; I now have tablets, watches,
| and four phones for family members... some of whom weren't even
| alive when I switched carriers. My bill is ~$450 / month.
|
| If I assume an average monthly bill of $300 (it started around
| $100, but has been as high as $550), there have been 196 months
| that I've paid that bill. $58,800 in revenue from me alone, that
| would have gone to someone else had Cingular not allowed Apple to
| launch on their network in 2007.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| A good portion of your monthly bill goes toward paying the debt
| incurred from massively overpaying DirectTV and Time Warner
| shareholders in the 2010s. I don't understand how the entire
| ATT board and leadership were not ejected. I think it was
| something on the order of $100B lost just on those two
| transactions.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| I'm no fan of the company itself, but I've been too pleased
| with the service to really want to switch.
|
| About a year ago I needed a SIM for an (older) Android phone
| for my daughter, who didn't need a capable smartphone or
| anything. They sent me one, but when I activated it over the
| phone the CS rep made a mistake and it ended up blacklisted.
| I told them I was activating it because my daughter was going
| on a trip in a couple of days, and they escalated it. I ended
| up with an AT&T employee driving 1.5 hours to my house to
| hand-deliver a new SIM and make sure the phone was activated
| and working the next day. In addition, they gave me a $500
| bill credit without prompting at all.
|
| So... yeah. It's not ideal, but I honestly feel like I'm
| getting what I'm paying for.
| yreg wrote:
| A bit off the topic, but your bill is bonkers to me. We have
| unlimited data + unlimited calls for 39EUR.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Sure, but those are totally different economies, geography,
| and demographics.
|
| Where I live is quite rural, with my county having a
| population density of ~35 people/mile^2 (or ~13.5
| people/km^2). Median income here is low relative to most of
| the US, but not compared to Europe.
| bdangubic wrote:
| that should all run you sub-$200/month (I have 5 phones, 4
| watches, 1 tablet - $178/month (which I think it is still to
| high and am getting ready to call att to negotiate again or
| switch))
| Ancapistani wrote:
| I really don't think so. I've shopped around several times,
| and while I could cut it a bit, I'm not getting more than a
| ~15% reduction overall.
|
| Note that this is not all cellular service; I typically buy
| contract-subsidized devices. There's really no reason not to,
| as it's the same cost as buying them elsewhere but paid over
| two years. The effect of inflation alone on that deferred
| debt is about the same as what I could save on service by
| changing carriers.
|
| Also, I and my family use our devices _extensively_. It 's
| not uncommon for us to hit 1TB of cellular data in a month.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Through who? I'm paying $450 a month for 5 iphones and 4
| watches.
| bdangubic wrote:
| wow madness!!! at&t! I did spend a bunch of my time
| negotiating over the phone but I think even what I pay is
| too much :)
| catchmeifyoucan wrote:
| I have to share that my career as a software engineer started
| with Windows Phone. They used to give super nice Nokia phones out
| if you made an app. And free backpacks :)
|
| Developing for Windows phone was easy as drag and drop. I
| honestly think no other native platform had that good of a DevEx.
| If you were already an app developer, I can see how it's hard to
| learn something new. But if it was your first time, this was
| prolly the easiest platform to start.
|
| Eventually the platform died, and I found a career with Xamarin
| using a similar stack (C#, XAML) and built for other platforms as
| well.
|
| I miss Windows Phone. Honestly some of the cleanest devices ever
| built with the carl zeiss lens and raised screen.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| One thing that makes me anxious is it looks like right now the
| entire EU has its "Nokia in 2007" moment.
| digitalsurgeonz wrote:
| there are parallels to the Ukraine war in this story. Nokia =
| Ukraine, MSFT = USA. Things played out similarly in both cases.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| Who are Apple, Android, Samsung, etc. in this analogy?
| micheljansen wrote:
| I was doing mobile development on a home healthcare product
| during this period. The product was built around Nokia's line of
| phones with NFC built in, so we had good ties with them and would
| always get prototypes of their next generation of NFC-capable
| device ahead of time to get the software ready ahead of launch.
|
| Shortly after the launch of the iPhone, Nokia canned the
| prototype S60 model we were working on without announcing any
| alternative. I always imagined they scrapped the whole pipeline
| of successors they had planned. The iPhone was at least 2
| generations ahead of the unreleased prototype. Ended up having to
| port the whole thing to a different device from Samsung.
| lxe wrote:
| Wow! Nokia understood exactly what was happening and what needed
| to be done but failed to execute.
| r00fus wrote:
| Thoughts:
|
| 1) References to Java on device and "lack of OTA" and the
| importance of "iTunes" indicated the presenters had little
| understanding of the possibility of the App Store which was a
| seismic shift in the industry that was apparently not foreseen.
|
| 2) They noticed some important missing features (3G, OTA updates,
| etc) but all of them were addressed with the next version (3G).
|
| 3) They were panicking about "iPhone mini" and thought it would
| be a feature reduction (like iPod interface) but in the end Apple
| just cannibalized its own profits and just lower the price on the
| full-featured 3G.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The analysis is fascinating. The iPod had already been a huge
| success for some time, retailing for hundreds of dollars. Of
| course Apple would make a phone. Even if it would have just been
| an iPod with feature phone ... features.
|
| Nokia goes on and on about pricing in the report. How could they
| not get into their thick skulls that there was a good market for
| more expensive, better devices?
|
| Then the tragedy with the Nokia N9, which both in hardware design
| and software UI design looks and feels more modern than Apple and
| Android devices from 2024.
|
| I think Nokia owners and leadership simply gave up when they saw
| the iPhone launch, decided to cash out their money to offshore
| accounts, and hired some shady fellows from Microsoft to cover up
| by staging bad business decisions doomed to fail.
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