alt Hacker NewsI think browsing this gives you a good idea of why Nokia failed. they really thought they had it all figured out and it was now time to lay back and just try out random shit.
they would never have the same kind of focus or philosophy as Apple, nor the willpower to pivot to real smartphones and a proper OS for them
Replies
It all comes down to where top management puts its best resources. Apple's leadership focused theirs on designing a more useful music device, one that could also serve as an internet navigator. Once they had the prototype, they moved to a higher-level vision: a truly personal computer, where music, the internet, and the phone were just apps.
Nokia, the giant at the time, was designing a better phone. And then a better phone. And another phone after that. Their design and engineering were in no way inferior to Apple's, but they were designing phones, not a personal computer.
It is a far more complex story than that.
Nokia had some of the first commercially successful smart phones in the world. The Nokia 9100, 9300 and 9500 were tremendously powerful devices in terms of their capabilities, running full multitasking operating systems.
There were two things that hampered companies like Nokia going further: battery life and data.
The relationship between handset manufacturers and telcos in the 2000s was ... Complex. Telcos had an immense amount of influence over manufacturers and dictated many of the terms, from how handsets could interact with their network, through to branding and "value added services" provided through customised software. Failure to comply would mean a handset could be blacklisted from the network.
So companies like Nokia had to play the game. They couldn't run full desktop-class browsers, for example, because the carriers were worried about their networks crumbling.
Then Apple came along, and reversed the relationship. They dictated the terms and told the carriers they needed to meet their requirements to carry their handset.
Many carriers resisted. Many only agreed to carry it once all their competitors had agreed to carry it.
And the first iPhone ... wasn't great. Carrier networks initially struggled under the load. Pages loaded slowly. Battery life was abhorrent. The first iPhone didn't support apps. In most ways, the iPhone was far less sophisticated than available Nokias, Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices.
But people gravitated towards it because it was stylish. It was fluid. It was responsive. It did less than a Nokia, but it had a better user experience for the average Joe who wasn't a power user.
It sold exceptionally well, and it changed consumer expectations around what a mobile could be. Carriers added capacity in response to ever growing demands for data.
It could have gone very differently.
> they really thought they had it all figured out and it was now time to lay back.
You mean like Apple today ?
The Apple watch is from 2015.
What new product Apple produced since Tim Cook took over ?
The iPhone Duo ? Ironically it has quite a smell of Nokia N95 all over again.
> and it was now time to lay back and just try out random shit
To be fair we hadn't yet decided that phones should be a flat tablet with a screen on one side that ran apps - they were mostly for calling (possibly sending messages) and were being sold to everyone from subsistence farmers to western teenage girls who had vastly different requirements/desires - there were bricks, clamshells, flip-phones, camera phones, phones with changeable coloured covers.
As a consumer I enjoy when companies try out random shit in such a user friendly way.
Apple’s focus and philosophy sure gives them an advantage. At the same time users who like e.g. smaller screens have to suffer or go elsewhere.
Interesting - one of the presentations I found was this one on Design Insights From Apple's iPod (2006).
They highlight:
- core design team
- start with an idea for an unmet customer need
- drive innovation from imagining user’s experience
- define essentials for “insanely great”
- simplify to great lengths to hide complexity
- grow user involvement through evolution
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_7b149a54-2085-4f7d-9b...
They made real smartphones (if you are in the USA you may not have seen them until it was too late).
They did have rather a lack of focus and Symbian was too diverse by that point, but there were some outstanding tail-end S60 devices (the E61 being one of them — it had 3G and a webkit browser before the iPhone).
IMO Nokia failed at least in part because of Stephen Elop's choices.
Well, they also thought it would be great to have a custom OS for every phone model. They had symbian-based S60 in different variations, S40 (or was it S30) in different configurations, some with Java ME support, some maybe not, and so on. Symbian came with different UIs I think, so some other vendor also had symbian phones that were completely different (was it sony?).
Clusterf...
And then Stephen Flop thought it would be cool to go exclusively with Windows Slown instead of the widely popular Android. (or arguably he was probably paid to decide that, coming directly from MSFT)
I can only imagine how defunct the organization Nokia must have been, with this cornucopia of different phones. Impossible to reform, so the only way for them to go was ... to go.
Many people forget that the Apple of today only exists out of sheer luck, by bringing back in house one of their founders.
Apple of today gets idolatrised to a point that it never us in the 1990's, when they did enough random shit that they almost went bankrupt.
Also, Nokia Alumni over here, from 2005 - 2010.
Yeah, I use a Jolla phone today but wish it had the power of a properly resourced company behind it.
I was there for many years, so I can tell you that this is not accurate:
1. Their design process was incredibly focused, especially as it related to concept exploration and use of colors and materials. 2. Apple started in the US, with one expensive SKU, at one carrier. Nokia had 40% of the global market with a mission to put a mobile phone in every person's hand. This required being in multiple price tiers across multiple markets. I guarantee you Apple was not thinking about farmers in India the way Nokia did. 3. It's hard to believe there was a vision of a proper OS versus Nokia's S60/Symbian and Blackberry. Nokia was already invested in Maemo internally, which was more akin to what you think of as a modern OS. 4. Nokia's financial and operational structure was a bit too baked when the iPhone released, which made it difficult to productize Maemo above existing, more profitable product lines. I'd argue this was OPK's (former CEO) lack of decision-making here. 5. Nokia had huge aspirations software-wise, but it had to compete against telco's competing initiatives, while also depending on those telcos for distribution. The way Apple broke that telco model with their brand still amazes me to this day.
Nokia certainly was not perfect, but it didn't lack focus or willpower for the way it understood the market. Apple just did a great job at breaking down telco walled gardens.