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.
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.
You hit the nail on the head. That's exactly the same reason why the big German Auto companies can't build a Tesla rival even though they have more resources.
All the old boys managers of ICE tech run the show and don't want electric to be too successful as their decades of experience in a now outdated tech would put the future of their corporate careers in danger.
Had a similar situation at an ex company where a manger would only allow a crummy outdated tool he developed 10 years ago to be used as that guaranteed his job security.
To move forward you have to find the people holding the company back and cut them off, but that's difficult to see from an upper management perspective.
So true. Blackberry is another example of doing it wrong. I was at presentations of there's when the iPhone was coming out and the CEO was still talking about battery life in pagers. They couldn't see apps taking hold and actually actively blocked it. We had a streaming audio/podcast app that legally re-broadcast other people's stations and they wouldn't support it because they were afraid of the RIAA, etc.
While I can understand the reasoning of letting new managers in, it sounds pretty brutal. Imagine you helped the company to make billions and be a market leader and the result is that the CEO starts excluding you from meetings because you represent old success.
Like with age discrimination, a company should be able to judge people by character, not just by CV or age.
For me it sounds more like judging by past success. Just because someone successfully built a DVD business doesn't mean they cannot help to build a streaming business. Excluding people who were successful with "old" technology usually just leads to age discrimination.
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.
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.
Well according to some folclore it wasn't that straight forward.
It also took a long time and a lot of tries from internal teams to Jobs acknowledge they were onto something. Jobs had the same concerns you mentioned, and some more (accordingly).
And one of the deal breakers for the iPhone to be launched was the Keyboard, where they were predicting which was the most probable letter to be typed and increased the area of the letter without displaying it.
Don't take me wrong, Jobs ended up being the one pushing forward with ridiculous deadlines, high ambitious goals, and, when he was on the train, the vision.
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.
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.
> which despite Samsung's belief hardly anyone wants
Which is why nobody is buying ipad pros or surface pros and Wacom is bankrupt /s.
Having a pen in addition to capacitive touch is great. Having only a pen was not. Though the resistive screens in the Nokia N900 or the Nintendo DS for example were not bad.
First usable application of capacitive digitiser on the smartphone was done by HTC. Even before Touch, they tried to make WinMo operable without a stylus.
A big part of Iphone 1 UI was a direct copy of HTC designs.
> It's slower to write in touch-screen. From objective engineering perspective it's backwards in ergonomy.
I've seen this idea a lot on Hacker News and similarly-minded sites ever since the iPhone came out. It's a myth--touchscreen keyboards with good software are faster than physical ones. The Guinness world record for phone typing speed has gone to touchscreen keyboard users for years, and it doesn't even allow autocorrect or predictive text [1]. The average typing speed on touchscreens is only 14wpm less than on full computer keyboards, and some people get up to 85wpm [2]. Software buttons are larger than physical ones and they change activation area based on the predicted next character, among other advantages. Even if screen space weren't an issue, touchscreen keyboards would still be better.
> 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.
You could see it the other way around: for regular users who mostly just wanted to message, which was their core audience since the 3310, the keyboard was best. For power users who wanted to take advantage of the new features that were being ported from the PDAs used by professionals, like Wifi and HTML browsers, it was clearly that the lack of a decent pointing device was a major hindrance.
Nokia 7xxx was fashion and experimental series and not a sign of failure. They were used to test features and target specific consumer segments. In that era it was common to launch large number of different models each year. 3-4 different series and different models in each series. It was how the old hardware-centric model worked. The phone fashion changed from year to year and Nokia was constantly increasing the market share.
When you move to smartphones as software platforms you produce basically the same phone hardware with 2-3 small variations. It was this transition that Nokia missed.
I've heard the idea that all the different products were a cause in Nokia's downfall, since all the different product lines wouldn't be as profitable as one big series and it would prevent the designers and marketers from focusing on one model only, dispersing the efforts of the company.
Wow, was that as brutal as it sounds? Not necessarily wrong, I've seen the result of the "old guard" slowing down and missing the point of radial changes, but what happened to the people involved in the DVD rentals? Were they laid off? Or transitioned back when the major decisions and direction had been set? Just curious really :)
Anssi Vanjoki's 2007 commentary on Taloussanomat is pretty reflective of that. Here's a quick translation of that.
Nokia's Multimedia director Anssi Vanjoki welcomes Apple into the mobile phone race.
– Apple entering the market is a fantastic thing. It will bring forth more growth for the business, Vanjoki tells Taloussanomat.
He thinks that Apple's phone is a sign that Nokia's multimedia direction has been correct since the beginning. Nokia was among the first to add multimedia features on phones.
– This is evidence of us having the right direction since the start.
Vanjoki is not expecting a significant blow to Nokia from Apple's phone. If Apple can hit its sales target of 10 million iPhones in 2008, it will have less than one percent of the mobile phone market.
– Apple's target is not very high.
Vanjoki thinks Apple is competing with the products of his directed Multimedia business.
– Apple's iPhone is competing with our N series products. We just have a much wider array of prices, going from just under 200 euros to a thousand euros, Vanjoki says.
– An interesting product, but it's missing several critical features such as 3G to enable fast data transmission.
That jump, however stupid it was at the time, is the key to Nokia existing at all in its current form.
The Nokia management used the Microsoft money to buy Siemens part of NSN (Nokia Siemens Networks) and managed to turn it around somewhat, in a situation where it looked like Ericsson and Huawei were going to be the only survivors.
I was working for a subcontractor to Nokia during 2010-2016 and we were dumbfounded in the beginning, but as the years went on that turned into a belief that Nokia scammed Microsoft in that sale.
> a belief that Nokia scammed Microsoft in that sale
That's what I've heard too -- They knew they were going down and simply took the opportunity to dump the handset business on Microsoft while securing funding to allow the network business to grow.
No matter who got the better deal, I wouldn't call it a scam if two billion $ companies agree on a price for a business after due diligence. Sometimes both win (because one can use the asset better than the other), sometimes the price is too high or too low. Doesn't mean they got scammed.
I doubt we'll ever get the full story of what happened, and how much Nokia told Microsoft of the state of the business that changed hands. But you are, of course, right; it could just as well have been a really, really bad business deal for Microsoft.
> "...it could just as well have been a really, really bad business deal for Microsoft."
I think that's the more likely explanation. Remember that Steve Ballmer was crazy enough to also try to buy Yahoo, which would have been an even bigger disaster for Microsoft.
While Maemo/MeeGo was cool (Former N900 user here), I doubt it would have succeeded in the long term. It would have been equally difficult to entice developers as it was for the windows phone platform, putting Nokia in the same position as they were with WP.
The latest iteration of that burning platform, Symbian Belle with QT and PIPS was already quite an improvement, Symbian was getting quite good, being open sourced, with everyone slowly moving away from Symbian C++ (uggh) into Qt/PIPs.
Paralel to that N900 was shapping up quite well, also using Qt as part of its SDK.
Being asked to throw away their Symbian Java and Qt for Windows 7 pure .NET SDK was what made the large majority abandon ship.
Naturally Elop was just driving Nokia into the position he could benefit from his compensation clauses given to him by the Nokia board.
If they had the culture of acquiring up and coming start-ups, such as the one making Android, there would have been an excellent result. I fell like most EU based companies lack such culture, and the result is that once great companies face great failures (unless the EU bails them out or taxes their competitors).
I worked there at the time. Senior management is the reason this company went down. They did everything wrong at every strategic moment from the second early rumors about the iphone and android started swirling.
And arguably a lot earlier when they chose Symbian over mobile Linux for the first time in the late nineties. This was when the early trend that Linux was heading for the embedded and mobile space were already bleedingly obvious to industry insiders. It killed Symbian touch screen OS after Apple iphone rumors got quite serious (2005) and then relaunched it in a hurry when it became clear that they were actually launching it. If you trace back Android's roots, you arrive more or less at a period where Symbian was still in the R&D stage and several companies were attempting a mobile linux. Android was one of them and was picked up by Google eventually.
Around the time the iphone rumors got serious (2004-2005) was in the same time frame that Nokia's internal linux mobile OS showed promise. The n770 tablet launched in 2006 and featured Debian linux (complete with apt-get update and oss repos full of oss tools and software), x-windows, and a mozilla based browser. Yet this platform was never allowed anywhere near anything resembling a premium smartphone until 2012. Attempts to create a platform with mobile phone capability were consistently shelved for years.
The reasons for this were entirely political. Maemo and later Meego were perpetually targeted at developer devices because it was considered a threat to Symbian. Projects to target premium phones with Maemo/Meego died over and over again. The N8 (cool metal design with a 13mp camera in 2010) actually started out life as a Meego phone but then turned into a Symbian phone (arguably one of the better ones) because management chickened out. If there ever was a chance for Nokia to make a move against Apple and Google; that would have been it. Never happened because senior management chickened out. The only proper phone that actually made it to market, the n9, was only launched after they decided to kill the whole platform and go for Lumia & MS. For that reason once more never got the benefit of Nokia's marketing and distribution reach.
I can't stress enough the utter stupidity of repeatedly killing (multiple) smart phone platforms with full OSS browsers, awesome developer tooling, and all the multi media stuff you could ever want throughout the development cycles of Android and IOS. When the iphone finally launched they had nothing whatsoever worth shipping.
The N97 mentioned in the article was gobbled together in a hurry and so bad that it allowed Apple and Google to rapidly claim marketshare. Attempts to fix Symbian amounted to too little too late and futile posturing. Throughout this, Meego was considered a threat rather than a solution and attempts to get it to market were frustrated with decisions to continue focus on Symbian over and over again. Meanwhile, Nokia continued to 'differentiate' with under powered devices with cheap CPUs and not enough RAM to shave a few dollars of a device that people did not want. A misguided deal to partner with Intel did not help either. Apple meanwhile correctly identified that margins on smart phones ought to be measured in hundreds of dollars and did not save pennies on materials, hardware, or bother crippling their own software to please the operators. Nokia did all of that. When Nokia got rid of their chip developers, Apple was planning to move CPU development in house. When Apple and Google chose capacitive touch screens, Nokia continued to ship crappy resistive touch screens, because they were cheaper. Technical ineptitude and penny saving is what killed Nokia.
Bot Android and IOS were very limited platforms in their first years. IOS had no SDK in the first version at all and Android devices were a combination of slow and buggy and poorly designed. However, Nokia was a no show and gave them over half a decade to fix this before it eventually folded. Fun fact: a lot of the early Android development was actually done on N800's (Nokia's maego tablet launched in 2007; several years before the ipad): reason Android and Maego shared much of the kernel internals and Nokia was a big kernel contributor and because it was open source, booting another OS was easy and common on these devices. So, Nokia enabled Google massively with their awesome developer oriented devices, tooling, and kernel contributions that they just could not be bothered to target at consumers. Ultimately Google said thank you very much and launched Android and never looked back.
This serial stragic blundering is what killed Nokia.
In 95 or maybe 96 I had access to a variant HP 200LX with an almost full MS DOS running on it which allowed a Nokia phone to be physically slotted into a modified display shell turning it into a computer-phone system. It ran a productivity app with contacts and calendar all integrated. It had almost the functionality of the not yet existing Nokia communicator.
The Nokia partnership with HP fell silent when the Communicator was released. Nokia never got much more productivity software running - Symbian slowed them down and the consumer business distracted them. RIM took over the segment for some time, iPhone was released and the rest is history.
That'll be the HP OmniGo 700LX - I still have mine.
That thing and a Nokia 6110 saw me through college very nicely. Just enough functionality to be useful. The whole HP LX line was really cool and was even more impressive when you factored in that it was an 80186 running MS-DOS.
The phone dock, incidentally, was for a Nokia 2110. There's a Nokia Cellular Data Card in a hidden PCMCIA slot in the LX (lower base section if memory serves), with a cable leading up inside the unit to the dock.
What annoys me is that Creative Labs also had a viable contendor against the iPhone, but killed it right when it seemed like it could have launched and competed. I guess nobody wanted to go up against Google and Android in one corner and Apple and iOS in the other.
Yet, PlaszmaOS could have been a real boon in the industry - especially if they'd licensed it off to all the Asian clone makers. It could've slowed Android, anyway, imho ..
Well, RIM and a lot of other players went under as well.
Android survived (IMHO) because they hyperfocused and took basically only the linux kernel and replaced most of the userspace, especially all the XOrg stuff, focused on the Java API and that was it and then shipped.
Of course Google money helped, but it's not like Google never fumbled a product before.
It's curious, smartphones seem the greatest "disruption" of our time, but they don't fit Christensen's theory... and in fact he classified them as non-disruptive at the time.
given the performance of Nokia's share price in recent years, I find the website of the chairman corroborates your statement: https://www.paranoid-optimist.com/
