

Symbian, a post-mortem - sidcool
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r04yjaQoL1c_vuwQr-CdbDQ8EjGVGOL_1V6BNVWaR1c/preview?sle=true

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babesh
This is just from my limited experience trying to develop mobile software
around 2002 (J2ME and investigating Symbian) and developing for Android and
iOS nowadays.

I developed 3 apps on J2ME at that time and investigated Symbian. The
impression I got of Symbian of that time was that it was painful to develop
against. J2ME was less painful but very, very limited. Think no animation
support, just bitmaps, and I have to write my own game run loop, collision
detection, etc.... This was most probably due to the limited hardware of the
time but nonetheless, it was primitive.

In comparison, iOS and to a lesser extent Android are basically fully featured
OSs with mostly full exposed functionality. iOS gives you core graphics,
opengl es, core text, core animation, grand central dispatch, networking,
etc... Android gives you views, animation, background tasks, activities,
intents, etc...

The distribution model was also broken. If you wanted something distributed,
you had to basically go with a carrier. There were attempts at an app store
but there were not successful.

Contrast this with the App Store, Google Play, and iOS enterprise development
program where you don't have to go begging to a carrier to get your app
distributed.

To summarize, Symbian was coming from a previous era and had no chance. If you
compare RIM's situation to Nokia's, I bet you will see a similar chart.

~~~
deathchill
I am just curious but what changed after the iPhone? It seems like there were
a couple of app stores (e.g. GetJar) before the iPhone, but I don't know if
they differed before the iPhone or if they were basically a less popular
earlier version. Did carriers have to approve apps that went into the store or
did they have to approve the store as a whole?

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cycle
The app stores were not built into the phones. You had to navigate to those
third party app stores via the web and download them to your phone. But that
web navigation was done via your computer rather than your phone itself. The
phones were serving a baby form of HTML that had to be routed via through the
carrier if memory serves.

~~~
rbanffy
Many carriers intercept web traffic and, sometimes, inject headers.

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majormajor
Fascinating read. I always enjoyed my Symbian phones, since the interface was
pretty damn good for the keypad form factor, and I have a big soft spot for
sliders; the behind-the-scenes mess that grew out of the late-90s platform
tech goes a long way to explain more about why quality apps were so few and
far between.

True background multitasking on a phone in 2006 was really fun, though.

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osivertsson
I pre-ordered a Nokia 5630 XpressMusic (S60) in April 2009 and recieved it
late May.

It was awesome! Great camera-recording, WiFi, 3.5mm audio plug, good looking,
slim. Maybe not a competitor to the iPhone 3g but I felt it was on par with
Android devices at the time, and available at only ~260€ without contract.

This feeling lasted for 5 minutes, then it crashed. And it crashed again. And
again. 20-30 times that night as I tried different features, before I just
gave up. I started to regret my purchase.

It got better over the following year with updates but it never fully stopped
to crash. Often it would crash while playing music, which really sucks for a
phone sold to me as THE music smartphone. By June 2010 I had switched to a HTC
Desire (which I'm still happy with, now with a custom ROM).

It is interesting to read in this post-mortem that 'Testability' was really
hard on Symbian, and that problems or bad choices on how e.g. email polling
should work, that must have been caught by engineering, somehow slipped
through the cracks into the hands of customers.

If testability had been easy and quality the highest prio at Nokia, then the
5630 could have been the phone I still use, and I would have recommended it to
friends back then instead of saying 'Stay clear!'. I might even have
considered buying another Nokia phone. Things could have been different.

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jnazario
bear in mind that seeing why something failed (or is failing) is pretty easy
after the fact, ridiculously hard to do before the fact. that said, i think
many people saw the handwriting on the wall before "the fall", even at nokia.
so, why did they continue to slip and become irrelevant in the smartphone
ecosystem?

inertia. plain and simple. not market inertia - although that plays a part -
but internal inertia. and nokia had around a decade of inertia, some of it is
technical debt that gets harder to pay off, some of it comes from big
customers and partners you acquired. but underestimate the weight of that at
your peril.

every business has stakeholders, internal and external. when you recognize a
significant shift must be made, these stakeholders still have to be satisfied.
you have teams of people - customers, partners, business units - invested in
the way things are. to make changes to your core technology and violate the
expectations of those stakeholders is insanely difficult to pull off. RIM is
going through this, as well. one cannot simply "just adopt android (or windows
mobile)" and be done with it. you have to see contracts and expectations (e.g.
core applications and solutions) through with those stakeholders.

clayton christensen did a great job of elaborating on this in "the innovator's
dilemma", everyone should study it. this is a ruthless market with fickle
customers - developers, end users (witness the crash of motorolla in about one
year!), everyone you need to win over - and an insanely fast cycle, much
faster than your platform and hardware development cycle. today's darlings
will be tomorrow's road kill, they always are in this business.

~~~
__Joker
Little tangent <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias>

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ivanb
Great read. I once did a project for S60. Initially I thought to use C++ but
its implementation for this platform required to learn a lot of platform-
specific quirks. I ended up implementing the project in Python. I'm really
happy that I did not waste my time on learning the platform. This rises the
obvious question: how to choose a platform that really deserves the effort to
study it?

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lucian303
That is indeed a very good question. Other than waiting, it's one I have no
answer to. The best technology doesn't always win as we all know. I remember
being extremely excited about Moblin, a little puzzled when it switched to
Meego, and downright disappointed as it slowly fizzled away, one paper cut at
a time by a company with no leadership.

I was in total shock when they killed it. I think most people would be too if
they just saw someone (in this case Nokia) commit suicide right in front of
them.

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zandorg
I was going to make a version of Ted Nelson's Zigzag for the Symbian platform
(circa 2002). It never worked out. I worried recently that I didn't catch the
wave (eg, Symbian), but now I know that the iPhone changed distribution, and
actually the time is ripe for Zigzag to take off on mobile phones.

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troymc
Interesting: when I visit this doc (on Google Docs), there's a line at the top
of the page that says:

"Wow, this file is really popular! Some tools might be unavailable until the
crowd clears. [Try again] [Dismiss]"

This strikes me as a strange choice by the Google Docs team; rather than
fixing the problem, they just tell you it exists. I mean, this is Google;
don't they have lots of bandwidth and server capacity? Why _can't_ they handle
traffic spikes? Can anyone here shed some light on this?

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kkowalczyk
It's good software engineering.

The reasonable case for multi-person editing of a document is several people
at the max editing the document concurrently.

Having thousands of people doing that is not a real-life scenario.

It's better to protect yourself from extremes like that by disabling editing
functionality in that case than try to engineer a system that actually allows
thousands of people editing a document concurrently (because it would be very
expensive in engineering time and especially testing time).

There's literally no business case to be made for supporting thousands of
concurrent edits - no one actually needs that functionality.

~~~
kryptiskt
> It's good software engineering.

> The reasonable case for multi-person editing of a document is several people
> at the max editing the document concurrently.

On the other hand, I suppose it would be good UI design to not show that
warning to everybody who only have read-only access to the document,

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guiomie
For a second a read Sybian, totally different technologies.

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lucian303
Excellent article. The first part reminds me of the fragmentation and stupid
decisions made for the Android ecosystem. More importantly, however, it really
explains a lot about what happened _since_ the death of Symbian with Moblin
and Meego as well as Nokia in general.

Quite a sad story, IMO, but unfortunately one they seem doomed to repeat with
Elop "running" things. On the verge of what could have been the first
GNU/Linux smartphone (N9) to take real market share, he killed both Moblin and
Meego. It's amazing they still released the N9 and yet still switched to
Windows.

Elop absolutely deserves a place next to ex-Sun's ex-CEO Schwartz as two of
the worst CEO's tech or not in history.

tl;dr: Nokia is dying itself, slowly being killed by Elop. In two years or
less, we'll probably get Nokia's postmortem, and it'll be a sad story for all.

