
Why Nokia failed: 'Wasted 2,000 man years' on UIs that didn't work - macco
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/10/nokia_ui_saga/
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joebananas
Or as JWZ put it 8 years ago, the CADT model of software development.

<http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html>

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tptacek
I nearly spat out my drink when I read the sentence claiming that a team
within Nokia working on a _Linux version of the product_ tried to launch a
UI/UX competitor to QT, even though Nokia had _acquired Trolltech, the QT
company_ , using... wait for it... GTK.

Anyone want to put up odds that there were _other_ UX "initiatives" there
pushing Tcl/Tk? :)

~~~
pavlov
_using... wait for it... GTK._

The real irony here is that this GTK+-based UI modernization attempt was the
only one that actually shipped. The product was called Nokia N900 (still a
fairly popular device in hacker circles).

The Maemo operating system on the N900 worked well and was a good effort by
2009 standards, with a hardware-accelerated GUI and an excellent desktop-
quality browser. Unfortunately Nokia's internal fumbling doomed it to
premature obsolescence: as soon as the device shipped, Nokia effectively
declared it dead by talking up their various internal Qt and Symbian
competitors instead, and then confounding things further with the MeeGo OS
merger madness.

(Their upcoming MeeGo device has already suffered the same fate thanks to the
recent Microsoft deal, of course.)

~~~
wmf
As good as the Maemo 5 redesign was, I think they set their sights too low
(e.g. single-touch), which effectively forced them into another redesign for
Maemo 6. The mistakes of switching to Qt and merging Maemo with Moblin seem to
have been politically motivated, though.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I disagree. Multitouch is cool, and it's great for certain tasks (notably
zooming web pages) but compared to having a great UI, having a fully featured
platform for developing apps, having great apps, integrating well with popular
network services.... I don't think it's that big of a deal.

If I were designing a smartphone, and it came down to whether we supported,
say, multi-touch or video chat... I'd pick video chat. I'd put the developer
hours on making UI fixes first too. Multitouch would be one of the first
features to get punted for 2.0.

And actually, I'd invest in making the single-touch really smooth before I did
multitouch too. It's just really low on my list of priorities. It's 95% whiz-
bang.

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5teev
"For want of a nail the kingdom was lost" overly diminishes the significance
of UI. For users, the experience of using the phone is not a minor detail
added onto a great device, it IS the device.

Perhaps a better quote for Nokia's situation is, "My kingdom for a horse...."

~~~
jacques_chester
They had 3 horses, which were trying to turn and eat each other.

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ffffruit
Back in the 90's, Nokia im my opinion has the best UI's by far compared to the
competitors then. When Motorola phones did not even query the phone book to
get the caller's name, Nokia was innovating with tabbed menus and whatnot. Its
a shame they lagged.

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joe_the_user
I wonder how many man-years Microsoft has spent on failed UIs? (and, yes,
they've had successful ones too).

Nokia had a broken development process. _The answer clearly was to surrender
and turn the company over to ... another company with a long history of broken
processes_.

NOTE: I'm not saying everything in Microsoft is broken by any means. Microsoft
has had processes which produced Windows ME and Windows Vista ... and they
fixed their process and produced some better things. That might be evidence
Nokia _might_ have been able to do something similar.

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wvenable
> With its mature and well-debugged phone stacks, it is better for phone calls
> than any other smartphone: it drops fewer calls, the calls sound better, and
> it uses the antenna better.

I've heard this "fact" presented many times, but is there actually any meat to
it? It seems to me there must be many mature and well-debugged phone stacks
out there.

~~~
enjo
IIRC, the phone stack live completely outside of Symbian itself (I'm not sure
how this looks in something like Android). So each vendor attempting to deploy
a phone would have to provide their own telephony stack... I worked on at
least two memorable projects where they just couldn't make that work.

Now Nokia has put out hundreds of models of S60 phones, each largely sharing
components. I would imagine that their telephony layer was rock solid. I have
no idea if the assertion in the article is true or not, but it wouldn't
surprise me. Nokia has always "gotten" the phone side... it's the UX side of a
smartphone that has always vexed them.

~~~
edderly
The thing that didn't work iirc is that people other than Nokia tried to write
their own Symbian Telephony server (TSY) and failed to get it working.

What makes Android successful, was coming late to the party are QCOM & co
having easier to integrate solutions with their baseband chipsets.

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Estragon
It appears that this Register article is based on the following blog post from
Mark Wilcox. Just in case you want it from the horse's mouth... strange that
they cited this obliquely in the Register article, but didn't link to it...

<http://mobilesoftware.tumblr.com/>

~~~
rayval
The link is all the way at the end of the Register article.

To be fair, the Register article does provide useful context that is missing
from the Wilcox piece.

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smogzer
Also Nokia wanted to flood the market with cheap phones to curtain the people
from seeing other brands. I guess this might have created them a support
nightmare. New kids understand the concept of singularity and just strieve for
perfection, lefting Nokia the land of the lost buttons.

~~~
peterwwillis
That never happened in the US. It was only the past couple years that S60
phones got introduced to AT&T and other US carriers as bundled with contracts.
And nobody's going to pay $400+ for a phone they know nothing about. I always
decried the fact that Nokia's phones were more advanced than the iPhone when
it came out, but nobody gave a crap (they also didn't know it existed).

~~~
5teev
I admired Nokia's "noble" stand against carrier exclusivity deals and
subsidized phones, but in retrospect it cost them a lot of their relevance in
the US market.

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manishm
Its not that it didnt work, People use to love Nokia it worked like charm.
Nokia was the biggest mobile phone manufacturers until it stopped innovating
and iterating their products. It wasn't new for them that Apple and Google are
coming up with their phones and how they would be changing the mobile
industry. Had Nokia took that up and changed their product to be up with the
tech innovations they would have not lost the market share. Right said if you
don't innovate or iterate you are going to Die.

~~~
kennethh
Totally agree. I bought a Symbian phone in 2003 (Nokia 6600) and got a new one
in 2008 and the user interface was almost the same. The only difference was
better looking icons and more options. The applications was the same as
before.

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stevenwei
It's rather unfortunate because Qt Quick is a rather promising framework for
mobile development, it just needed a bit more polish.

The Symbian UI is _really_ bad right now though, it actually defies many
layers of common sense. The flagship Nokia N8, for example, _still_ doesn't
have a full qwerty keyboard in portrait mode. You have to rotate it to
landscape mode in order to type, and the keyboard input takes up the entire
screen.

I'm not really sure how that device managed to get shipped without such basic
functionality in place, not to mention the fact that it is March 2011 and
still not available.

~~~
bergie
By the way, they just launched Qt Quick Components for desktop:
[http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/03/10/qml-components-for-
deskt...](http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/03/10/qml-components-for-desktop/)

Should make app development a lot easier...

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philthy
They were designing for the wrong hardware, Nokia hasn't had a single device
that rivals the iPhone's technical capabilities. With that said Nokia's brick
phones have some of the easiest interfaces to use of any device ever, which is
a huge reason they are so popular in the developing world, that and they
saturated the market.

~~~
viraptor
> Nokia hasn't had a single device that rivals the iPhone's technical
> capabilities

Which iPhone? Version 4? Of course not. 3GS? Have a look at N900. The hardware
is pretty much comparable, with N900 being slightly better in many categories.
More memory, 32GB storage in every model, twice the screen size, additional
flash memory, 2MP more on the camera. Actually the only place where iPhone
wins completely is the multitouch screen.

So out of 4 released iPhones, only the most recent one is definitely better
than N900.

~~~
micampe
_> Actually the only place where iPhone wins completely is the multitouch
screen._

That's no small thing though. I had the N810, which I'm pretty sure used the
same display and sensor as the N900 and the touch screen was just painful to
use.

I think an actually working touch screen sensor has been one of the biggest
things the iPhone introduced (or popularized, mobile phones at the time all
insisted on resistive sensors, probably because of lower costs).

~~~
viraptor
I'm not judging features here as more or less important. I just meant to point
out that N900 can easily be a rival to all but the most recent iPhones from
the technical point of view. I'm not sure about N810 screen - never used it.
I'm ok with the N900 one, although yes, it could be more sensitive. But I'd
honestly take resistive screen over the cap. one for the advantage of using it
in gloves (my hands are easily getting cold ;) )

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bad_user
I would waist another 2000 man years than go with a company that released a
credible competitor on October 21, 2010 ; although they've been doing it since
at least year 2000 (i.e. working on handheld / mobile operating systems).
That's not a good track record if you ask me - whereas both Apple and Google
came out of nowhere and swept the market since the first versions released.

~~~
barranger
While not specifically a phone, the iphone does have ancestry that didn't
exactly "sweep the market"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)>

~~~
protomyth
iOS has about as much to do with the Newton as it has to do with Go.

~~~
recoiledsnake
And Windows Phone 7 has barely anything to do with Windows Mobile. And no one
can court developers like Microsoft(the big problem with Nokia). There are
already close to 10,000 applications compared to close to 5,000 for WebOS
which had a head start.

~~~
jamesgeck0
Windows Phone 7 is based on Windows CE 6 [1]. It has a lot more code in common
with Windows Mobile than iOS has with the Newton.

1\. [http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/04/windows-phone-7-based-
on-...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/04/windows-phone-7-based-on-a-hybrid-
windows-ce-6-compact-7-kerne/)

~~~
recoiledsnake
Windows CE 6 is a complete redesign of Windows CE 5.2(on which Windows Mobile
is based).

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Fargren
How many man hours are there to a man year? Is the unit supossed to concider
how much hours a man works in a year, or is it just 365 * 24 a man hour?

~~~
adolph
Don't forget that the measure is probably in metric too.

~~~
wmf
I guess you're joking, but a European person-year is definitely smaller than
an American person-year (or PY as we call them at the office).

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recoiledsnake
Well atleast they had a bubble inteface!
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSRuY_9ZMsY&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSRuY_9ZMsY&feature=player_embedded)

I was reading a post by a Nokia employee that teams used to work on improving
their own branches of Symbian that were never merged into the main one. This
lead to fiefdoms and waste of duplicate effort.

