Nokia was an amazing company. The corporate culture was first class. They had some of the most intelligent and hard working people I ever met. The Finns are incredibly talented. There were many folks in the Americas that were absolutely amazing.
There's one time, the Nokia C5, a 'feature phone' iirc, the UI was abysmally Bad. 4 nested layers of generic metacategories, until you reach something too cramped to read. Made me feel physically angry.
No. Elop tried to save the handset business, but it was too late. The demise happened during the time when Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was CEO (2006-2010), though I think it actually started already before that, in 2004-2005.
This is a thing I see many people bickering about, but I think they are misguided. Elop tried what he could, and in fact the sale of handset business to Microsoft - which he negotiated - was a very good deal for Nokia, the company (and its shareholders). The price was good. Nokia, the company, is still very much alive and kicking.
The platform for handset business was indeed burning when Elop made the famous speech. His mistake was to signal so strongly to the public the ramp-down of Symbian, which accelerated its demise and loss of sales. But what was laying in the future was clear for anyone to see. The writing was on the wall.
I felt the things were going wrong in about 2005, when Nokia was the market leader, and complacency crept in. Managers and executives forgot about the outside world, and in their comfortable market-leader position the logistics side (always strong in Nokia) was allowed to run things. New phones had under-powered processors, for instance - just to save a few cents a piece, which is huge money when you make millions of devices, but in the end it meant that the user experience suffered and new UX innovations were dumped.
Too much trust in the "we're the gorilla now" position.
It looks a little bit like Apple is now in the same situation. Their cash flow seems unstoppable, but what new are have they recently brought in?
EDIT: FWIW, I was in the infra side (which is still there, although I was made redundant), not in the handset business. I had a lot of friends and former colleagues in the handset side. So I had some visibility and insight to what happened, but no personal axe to grind.
I'm not so sure about that. I think Elop saw the writing on the wall re: Android. If their Windows phones had done well he'd look like a genius. If their Android phones had done well... they'd have scraped a few percentage points of profit off the market at best? It is doubtful they could have given Samsung a run for their money but assuming they did their profits would have been gutted by cheap Chinese competitors.
I'm not sure why anyone signed up to make Android phones. I can only assume it was panic about how far ahead the iPhone was when it was introduced. Microsoft and Intel made all the profits in the PC industry, the manufacturers fought over table scraps. The survivors like Dell quickly moved into enterprise services where they could make actual money.
The cell phone suckers signed up for the same thing in mobile: Let Google and the carriers make all the money while they duke it out gladiator-style to eek out a meager profit. In that situation you're left without the R&D budget to compete with the likes of Apple (who takes most of the profit in cell phones) or Samsung (who has a massive conglomerate including chip fabs, a battery business, and a display business!).
So the tl;dr is that Nokia making Android phones would have been, at best, a shadow of its former self. It was institutionally incapable of making that transition because it wanted to protect its former business. They also believed their carrier relationships would save them (aka the Carrier is the real customer for phones, not the end-user... end-users will take what the carrier offers and like it.) Nokia was also incapable of creating their own platform. The number of surviving companies who have successful done that can be counted with your fingers and all of them are based on the US west coast. It takes a software-is-king culture that neither Nokia nor Blackberry ever had. The only way Blackberry or Nokia survive is to immediately pivot the day the iPhone is announced, open huge software engineering offices in the Bay Area, and start developing their own platforms ASAP. Act as if you're going out of business immediately.
There is also a cautionary tale for startups: By the time you realize your competitor is going to eat your lunch it may be too late to do anything about it. You can't wait until you are losing 20% of your customers to react because it will take you 3-12 months to turn the ship and catch up, then at least as long again to mature features, inform customers, and hit purchasing windows. That can be up to two years you've been focused on catching up while your competitor was free to keep innovating. By the time you get it all sorted out you'll be losing 80-90% of your customers, only now the market is bigger and network effects are even stronger so you'll have to work twice as hard to get back to where you were.
If Windows Phone had done well their profits would have been gutted by cheap Chinese competitors installing Windows Phone, with Microsoft making all the profits in the phone industry like they did in the PC industry. The bold risky strategy with a big payoff was developing their own platform, the safe strategy with a low payoff was Android. Windows Phone was the bold risky strategy without any payoff.
Why are you comparing 'Nokia sells Windows phones' (happened) with 'Nokia sells Android phones' (<-- I don't get this).
Whenever I see someone complain about the new directions, the focus on Windows phones I think of Maemo as the worthy alternative, not Android.
Now, even as a Maemo fan (still wearing the t-shirts to prove it) I still understand that a completely different system might've been .. difficult and/or scary. But for me that system was a differentiating factor, something other than 'another Android'.
MeeGo was not intended to be a differentiating factor in itself. It was an open platform with a Free SW base; only some of Nokia's applications were proprietary. This is not too different from what Android is today.
The problem was that Nokia forgot what their strengths were. Their big problem was the software side, but in pretty much everything else they were way above the competition at the time: industrial design, logistics, marketing, sales channels, etc.
So it was in their best interest to adopt an open platform, because it would have let them focus in what they did best. But it was a mistake to try to do it all by themselves so late in the game.
Nokia had actually been working on a touch-based mobile Linux system for several years (the N770 came out in 2007). If they had bet on that line of work earlier on, things might have been very different.
I always felt that MeeGo/Maemo were _far_ more open and hack-friendly than Android ever was.
Yes, there were closed components again, but as far as I was involved Nokia actually interacted with the community (I was at multiple events, meeting the Nokia guys of that time). If that happens around Android then I'm completely unaware of that.
I agree that Nokia was mostly a hardware shop. But I believe that they might've pulled off with Maemo (or MeeGo) what they did with Symbian.
(I also owned the N800 or N810? Can't quite remember)
They'd been working on Maemo for years and it was still at the level of being a tech demo. A fairly basic Linux distro ported to a mobile platform, but no real unified development framework like iOS, Android and WP. They needed something world class immediately, but just flat out didn't have the relevant resources internally to do it.
Blasted thing was a featurephone with a fancy screen.
If it had been anyone but Apple that tried to pitch it, the press had been laughing loudly.
Nah, thing about Android was that it was a free smartphone OS while Windows PocketPC/Mobile had a pr device license.
And Google also offered the OEMs the ability to modify the look and feel of Android way beyond what Microsoft had allowed (the flip clock that HTC uses to this day on their devices started out as part of their custom launcher on WinMob).
>iPhone, far ahead???
>Blasted thing was a featurephone with a fancy screen.
Which is why they never caught on. All the competitors had to do was put equally fancy screens on their phones as well and the iPhone was toast. Or something.
Ah yes, the brand has still been in that use. But that S40 or Asha phone is not manufactured or sold by Nokia corporation. I think the brand license has now expired, so even if Microsoft would make them or hand over the rights to someone else, those devices are no longer made with Nokia name.
What a shame things worked out the way they did.