
Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones - mlla
https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52c5
======
pavlov
The old Nokia crowd seem to have a tough time admitting that all of Nokia's
old software operations were beyond salvage by 2010. Symbian had turned into a
sprawling pile of crap, and Maemo/MeeGo was painted in a corner by internal
politics that had marginalized its development. Nokia was spending ten times
as much as Apple on R&D, yet had very little to show for it.

Having two competing OS teams was a bad choice made much earlier by Elop's
predecessors, who didn't understand software (the previous Nokia CEO came to
that position from the legal department — a terrible mismatch for a company
about to be overrun by Apple and Google). Elop was fundamentally right in
killing both of Nokia's operating systems. Symbian sales were collapsing in
early 2011 because the devices just couldn't respond to user expectations
anymore, not because of anything Elop did.

I can see why Elop picked Windows Phone over Android: it truly was a more
innovative UI and Microsoft was willing to pay Nokia a billion USD per year
for the partnership. Elop's grave mistake was not having a replacement ready
to go. The Lumias shipped way too late. Playing "armchair CEO", I have no idea
how I would have solved that either.

In any case, Nokia didn't end up too poorly. Microsoft bought the phone
division that was bleeding cash, and that money gave Nokia the opportunity to
buy back its network division that had been a joint venture between Nokia and
Siemens. The outcome was probably better than if Nokia had tried to downscale
itself into a commodity Android vendor.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
I'm pretty confident that the choice of Windows Phone over Android really
didn't have to do with the UI, or even with Elop's past Microsoft connections:
it had to do with services. Nokia wanted to bring their own services to the
platform, especially relating to maps and navigation, _and_ they wanted to
have the new OS vendor be a full branded partner. With Google, that was an
either/or choice: they could have used AOSP and their own services, but they
wouldn't get the Android branding and Google's support. Microsoft was more
willing to play ball.

Personally, I think they should have gone with AOSP and leveraged Qt: by the
end of 2010, they'd already gotten their two operating systems (Symbian and
MeeGo) to a point where it wasn't a lot of work to recompile applications for
one to run on the other. (N.B.: I don't know how much of this work ever
actually made it out of Nokia. I was working there in 2010, when all of this
was going down.) Given that Qt already ran on Android, IIRC, it might not have
been _that_ much work to do the same thing on top of AOSP, producing a Nokia-
specific release that could run Android software _and_ provide a clear path
forward for Symbian users and developers. I was a little shocked that they
didn't release a Qt compatibility layer for Windows Phone, instead choosing to
pretty much leave their existing developer community on that burning platform.

The Lumias _did_ ship too late, but I think the previous commenter who
referred to the "Osborne Effect" has it right; a Nokia that had appeared
firmly committed to Symbian and forging a bridge from the existing to the
forthcoming generation might have fared considerably better. The Nokia N8 and
N9 should have been supported as flagships rather than sort of apologetically
shoved out the door with "DEAD PHONE WALKING" written on the boxes. On a
practical level, this might not have saved them (especially if they'd stuck
with Windows Phone, which it turned out the market really hadn't been waiting
for after all), but it might have given them a fighting chance.

I don't think Nokia would have tried to downscale itself either way, by the
way -- they'd have kept their network equipment division, and might have even
kept their mapping division. They'd balanced that with consumer mobile
hardware for years before that, after all; I don't see why they couldn't have
kept doing that with Android devices.

~~~
cannam
I like your explanation about services.

One thing -

> I was a little shocked that they didn't release a Qt compatibility layer for
> Windows Phone

Windows Phone 7, which was current at the time of the switch, was managed-code
only (i.e. .NET). There was no way to port Qt to it and no way to leverage any
experience that developers for their existing platforms already had. That was
one reason the switch was so dramatic.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
> Windows Phone 7...was managed-code only.

D'oh! I didn't know that. (I was laid off right before the Windows Phone
switch was announced, so never had any reason to look into it.) Welp.

------
glibgil
> Elop combined two different CEOs cardinal blunders: The Osborne and Ratner
> Effects.

> In 1983, the computer manufacturer Osborne announced several new models of
> computers, which they said would be launched in sales after one year. In the
> meanwhile, sales of the old models plummeted because the consumers were
> waiting for the new models. Osborne ended up in bankruptcy. Gerard Ratner,
> on the other hand, was the CEO of the jewelry company Ratners. He gave a
> speech in 1991, where he said that Ratners products were so cheap because
> they were “total crap”. The consumers believed him and stopped buying.

> Elop announced that Nokia is giving up on Symbian before any Windows Phone
> smartphone was ready (Osborne effect) and with his “burning platform”
> speech, expressed that Symbian and MeeGo were trash (Ratner effect).

[https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-
elop-6f2b043f52...](https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-
elop-6f2b043f52c5#2b49)

~~~
oldcynic
I never did figure out what was supposed to be wrong with MeeGo/Maemo. Always
thought it had a lot of potential and some great UX ideas that were nowhere
else.

~~~
edent
Did you ever try using it? It was awkward to use and slow. Even on the
hardware that was specifically designed for.

~~~
cannam
When they announced the move to Windows Phone, I thought it seemed like a good
idea. Meego clearly wasn't ready, Symbian was an antique, and Windows Phone
was promising in so many ways -- even now I believe we will never see another
smartphone OS as well-designed as Windows Phone 7.

Then some months later, for some reason, I ended up owning a phone with the
last release of Symbian on it (Symbian Belle). And I realised that the
original Nokia plan wasn't as stupid as it seemed.

Symbian Belle was a surprisingly smooth and pleasant OS -- much smoother in
many contexts than Android at the time. It had some serious pitfalls, but it
turned out there was quite a lot of productive turd-polishing that could be
done. A lot of the good stuff on Belle was down to Qt Quick, which was the
same framework as they were intending to carry through for Meego developers.
And although I never used Meego, I can believe that it could have worked very
nicely in the end, and a polished Symbian could have seen it through for a
while.

But I was just as surprised to find out how much infrastructure there was
behind it all. Nokia had an app store and billing platform serving a lot of
countries and languages, that could bill you for apps either from credit card
or straight from your carrier balance. They had one of the best mapping
providers, a decent weather service, and a fine music provider. They had
first-class hardware and a lot of public goodwill.

The experience changed my mind completely. Nokia could have done it with
Symbian and Meego.

~~~
nradov
I doubt it. Symbian was held together with duct tape by that point. They
managed to make some things sort of work in the short term through heroic
engineering efforts but it was clearly unsustainable. There were fundamental
limits which couldn't be fixed without seriously breaking backward
compatibility.

------
u801e
I wonder if Nokia would have done better had they focused on markets outside
of the US/North America rather than partnering with Microsoft and abandoning
Symbian and Meego.

------
eitland
Actually looking forward to getting a new Nokia w/Android soon now. :-)

~~~
romwell
I have one now, it's quite pleasant.

I liked the cameras on Lumias better, but overall, I have no complaints about
my Nokia 6 - and it can probably stop a bullet too.

~~~
JTon
Hype train is chugging away for the 7 plus. And I have to admit, it hits many
sweet spots.

~~~
eitland
AndroidOne being possibly the most important for me.

------
coldacid
I want to read this, but the lack of reasonable formatting for the ebook
editions is driving me up the wall. I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up
reformatting it myself and producing my own PDF and EPUBs.

------
yannski
I still love my N9 and I still reminds how fluid is UI was, especially at the
time of slow Android...

------
thriftwy
Upvote if you knew immediately where this "CEO from Microsoft" is headed.

~~~
Nokinside
> On 16 March 2016, Australia's largest telecommunications provider Telstra
> announced, controversially, that Elop would be joining the company in a
> newly created position as Group Executive Technology, Innovation and
> Strategy.[72][73][74] Since joining Telstra, the company's share price has
> dropped by around one third.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#Telstra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#Telstra)

