
Nokia’s collapse turned a sleepy town in Finland into an internet wonderland - lnguyen
https://qz.com/1720214/how-nokias-collapse-turned-oulu-into-an-internet-wonderland/
======
PeterStuer
Oulu is my favorite town in Finland. Its post Nokia prosperity is most
certainly due to Finland's generous social security allowing its people the
time and means to recover without having to abandon and emigrate, and also the
significant stimulus the state put forward to new entrepreneurial initiatives
in the region.

There's definitely lessons their for the rest of Europe.

~~~
barney54
The article also notes that Oulu has inexpensive housing. Inexpensive housing
is a lesson many cities could use—from Berlin to London to San Francisco.
Having affordable housing help everyone from people with high-paying tech jobs
to have the time to find new work, to people with lower incomes.

~~~
kmlx
1\. if you want inexpensive housing then you need to find enough voters that
would take a X% haircut on their investment in their own home. good luck with
that. 2\. i don't think you realise just how small oulu actually is. mega-
cities like tokyo, sydney, london or nyc are hugely complex machines.

~~~
RugnirViking
One wonders how many voters in cities own any property, even their own house.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's at least less than half. Possibly
much less, but I'd like to see data if its out there. Obviously the sort that
own property are more likely to vote, but there are many many more people who
rent.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
The homeownership rate in the US as well as in the UK is 65%.

What it means is that 65% of homes are occupied by their owners. It doesn't
mean that 65% of people live in their own homes, but I suspect it is not too
far off the share of people living in their own home or in a home owned by a
family member or partner.

I guess the difference is people renting a room in a house occupied by its
owner. Did I forget anyone?

It may not be the same at all in big cities though. I know that homeownership
rates in London have collapsed far below 50% in recent years.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N)

[https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/home-
ownership-r...](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/home-ownership-
rate)

[https://www.ethnicity-facts-
figures.service.gov.uk/housing/o...](https://www.ethnicity-facts-
figures.service.gov.uk/housing/owning-and-renting/home-ownership/latest)

~~~
RugnirViking
Yeah the cities thing was what I was thinking about mostly - in the
countryside home ownership is higher as prices are less, less apartments and
there are less big property owners.

Theres also the question of what it means to own ones house. A lot of people
have a mortgage for their house, but the relationship between this and
benefitting from the value appreciating is different for different people.

------
kepponen
Current Oulu resident here, working in the IT sector as well. Less than ten
years ago, atmosphere was quite pessimistic when Nokia was laying off lot of
people, which also heavily affected also multiple sub-contractor companies.
However, everything has gone lot better than anyone expected and currently
there are more IT sector employees in Oulu than in the golden ages of Nokia.

~~~
shusson
In general, do you need to speak Finnish to work in Oulu?

~~~
Maxion
Pretty much yes. While you can find tech companies that hire exclusively
English speakers A LOT of companies require fluent Finnish, even when the
internal language is Finnish.

Finland is still in many ways a very conservative society.

~~~
shusson
well there goes a dream, Finnish is also ridiculously hard to learn, coming
from English.

~~~
stevekemp
If you're a developer/coder/sysadmin you can find companies that will hire you
speaking only English. This is very common, though much more so in Helsinki.

In everyday life speaking Finnish will be beneficial, for obvious reasons.
I've been here a few years now, having moved from Scotland. Using English I've
been able to get my brain scanned, buy a couple of flats, deal with daycare (I
became a parent after moving here), and most bureaucracy.

Finnish is indeed hard to learn, but even getting the basics down will make
your life easier and better.

------
m12k
I think this is a great example why we as a society shouldn't coddle
corporations just because they provide jobs. When they fall, others take their
place, and many smaller companies make for a much more healthy and dynamic job
market than a single monolith.

~~~
jenscow
"don't put all your eggs in one basket"

------
danans
The question I have is what if any lessons can be taken from Oulo's experience
and applied to places like Lordestown, OH (losing their GM plant).

On the surface, a big difference seems to be that the current talent pool of
Oulo is R&D heavy, vs the assembly labor heavy Rust Belt cities and towns.

The workers of Oulo, despite their initial misfortune and pessimism, faced a
growing market for their skills - the government just needed to facilitate
their transition to a new set of employers and ventures.

Does such a market exist for Rust Belt assembly workers? Probably not making
the same things they made before - the auto industry is in major turmoil as it
transitions to a structurally different transportation future.

I'd love to see a future where the collection of assembly skills those workers
have are put to use to build the wind turbines and batteries that we
desperately need, but it seems like there are both cultural and political
hurdles in the way of that happening.

------
Sharlin
University of Oulu, incidentally, is where IRC was born in 1988.

~~~
bluedino
All the time I spent on x2ftp.oulu.fi finding DOS and game programming
information...

~~~
jbverschoor
Same here :-)

------
dvfjsdhgfv
Ah the glorious old days of Oulu FTP...

[http://ftp.lanet.lv/ftp/mirror/x2ftp/msdos/programming/forma...](http://ftp.lanet.lv/ftp/mirror/x2ftp/msdos/programming/formats/00index.html)

------
new2628
To be honest, "sleepy Finnish town" sounds much more appealing than "internet
wonderland".

~~~
rebuilder
It does, until you visit one that has lost its jobs...

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
This. There are plenty of rather grim Finnish factory towns that lost their
industry and never found anything to replace it. Kemi, just up the road from
Oulu and fully dependent on a couple of failing pulp mills, is a good example.

------
pergadad
The city succeeded to keep talent because they invested in them.

Somewhat unrelated but this really reminds me of Germany's
Kurzarbeitslosengeld - short working hour unemployment benefits - which was
introduced in the crisis years and is given credit why Germany has high
employment and the economy quickly recovered after 2009. Companies were
allowed to send employees on "part time unemployment" for a certain period of
low work. So eg 300 staff get 60% hours and work 3/5 days per week and get 3/5
of their full time salary and in addition 2/5 of what they would get as
unemployment benefits. This kept workers in employment, unemployment and
benefit payouts low and helped make it easy for companies to keep skilled
staff - and for staff to stay in employment and maybe upskill themselves in
their spare time.

The scheme had some issues but overall a similarly positive impact.

I wish more countries & companies would recognise the benefits of investing in
and catering for staff, rather than to see workers as replaceable widgets.

------
hourislate
I like to take every opportunity to tell people, I had the pleasure of working
with a lot of folks from Nokia. They were the most talented and hardest
working people I have encountered in my 30 years in the IT Industry (and I
have been around).

The Company was overflowing with brilliant people and was a wonderful
employer.

------
pongogogo
The bridge program sounds amazing, not sure I grokked it correctly and the
article only mentions it in passing but it sounds like they let some of the
staff they made redundant take some of the firm's IP with them to help them
strike out on their own? Does anyone have more details on this?

~~~
dry_soup
This is what I could find:

[https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25965140](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25965140)

Not just IP, but also funding for new companies.

------
bitL
So you had a company that dominated the highest growing market in the world,
and now you have a bunch of barely profitable startups and small businesses,
and that's supposed to be a great outcome?

------
swebs
Well it's nice to see Oulu in the international news for a good reason for a
change.

------
Nessa
Wow that's pretty cool.... Apple been taking over the states

------
ossworkerrights
Nokia is a perfect example of corporate arrogance: “we didn’t do anything
wrong, but somehow, we lost” said the CEO at the time. Yet they did everything
wrong.

~~~
Nokinside
Nokia did everything right for a very long time. But when everything is great
success, people behind that success shadow the people who could make success
in the future.

Netflix is great example of how to do big transition right. Netflix was in
renting DVDs by mail business. When the decision to move to streaming was
made, Netflix CEO did not allow managers who responsible for DVD renting
business into meetings where the future was planned.

People responsible for Symbian should have been locked out from all future
planning. They were allowed to participate and of course they sabotaged–both
intentionally and unintentionally–all big changes. Moving from hardware and
embedded software world to full software platform mindset required completely
different people.

~~~
timcederman
They were doing things wrong long before the iPhone was released, e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7600](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7600)

~~~
Aozi
I think that's a sign of Nokia doing the _right_ things.

Nokia made a metric fuckton of different kinds of phones. Some of them, like
your example, were just really goddamn weird and didn't really work out. But
the key thing is that they weren't just sitting on their asses making a better
Nokia 3310 every year.

When Nokia found a winning formula they absolutely used it and created devices
based on that formula. However they were never afraid to try new weird shit.
Doing new things and trying to break the mold of a traditional handset was
exactly what allowed them to find new features and things to add to phones.

Their real problem was that they were too slow to adopt the changes brought
forth by the iPhone, and were too confident in their dominance over the mobile
market so they never saw the possibility of someone overtaking them.

~~~
Nokinside
Nokia had big screen touch-centric smartphone model prototypes long before
Apple even dreamed doing phones. It was not like the idea was not there.

It was classical engineer vs. designer/marketer viewpont.

It's slower to write in touch-screen. From objective engineering perspective
it's backwards in ergonomy. But most people who are not power users like Obama
and his blacberry addiction. They just want to point and drag and big screen
is better for pointing.

Steve Jobs saw the trade-off. Uses are willing to write slower and do more
errors in exchange of bigger screen. Nokia engineers were doing ssh
connections with Nokia Communicator and iPhone UI sucked small planets for
anyone writing a lot. Touch-screens are still slower for writing.

~~~
pilsetnieks
Pre-iPhone Nokias all had resistive touchscreens. Not a pleasant experience
for pointing and dragging. Before 2007 no one was insane enough to put glass
on a phone.

~~~
pjc50
This. It's not the glass specifically (you can still buy cheap androids with
polycarbonate screens), but the capacitative touchscreen, which is more
expensive and requires a much fancier controller to read. But without it,
either you have to use a stylus, which despite Samsung's belief hardly anyone
wants, or press fairly hard. And you can't do multi-touch at all.

Capacitative touchscreen + "real" web browser (not WAP!) was the key
capability of the iPhone. The fact that it subsumed the already successful
iPod was a big benefit too.

~~~
canuckintime
> you have to use a stylus, which despite Samsung's belief hardly anyone wants

That's an odd swipe in an otherwise good post. You don't have to use a stylus
with the Galaxy Note series but the option is quite popular

------
Nessa
Pretty cool I've heard about Finland too.Well Samsung kinda lost too PS Apple
has everywhere wired up....

------
timonoko
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulu_child_sexual_exploitation...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulu_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal)

~~~
welly
Not sure how this relates to the story. Why did you post it?

~~~
timonoko
"Nokia's collapse turned a sleepy town into creepy town"

Except it has always been creepiest place in Finland thanx to Laestadians:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laestadianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laestadianism)

