This post is probably one of longest ones in my blog. At the same time I would like to say it is the best text in my blog so far. If I would have to delete all but one text from my blog, this would stay. Please take a cup of coffee or tea next to you before you start to read this, it’s worth the time.
Disclaimer: this text is translation from Finnish text that was not written by me. The source is series of articles printed by Finnish magazine Tekniikka ja Talous in late August – early September 2012. T&T interviewed many ex-Nokians and gave us a sneak peek to inside of Nokia between years 2003 and 2012. These are exactly the people who lost their jobs during past years so them, if any, should be able to tell us who to blame for the downfall of Nokia.
Articles are in Finnish. I have combined them together and translated the text to English. But as usual, links to originals are in the end of page, so you can check the validity of the text shall you wish to do so.
All credit for the text goes to Tomi Savolainen from T&T for the hard work.
STRATEGY CHANGE THAT WAS NOT DONE IN TIME
Nokia solved year 1995 logistics crisis so well that the logistics became Nokia’s advantage against competition. Nokia sported huge global portfolio of tens of device models.
Logistics machine kept money flowing and R&D grew larger in order to feed tens of new phone models per year to this machine. Nokia could tailor products aimed to specific target groups and markets. This machine kept making money for the company for next fifteen years but Nokia’s fortune maker could not cope from the biggest disruption of the business since GSM technology.
Nokia became accustomed to be the leader that brings new success stories to the market and gets copied by others. Overconfidence filled the company. [1]
Example of this are the clamshell phones. In Nokia’s perspective folding phone gives no extra value to end-user compared to a monoblock device. In addition, clamshells had hinges that increased the manufacturing costs. Nokia built its financial results on cutting out all extra manufacturing costs so clamshells were seen as a bad business. The smaller size was just not seen as a reason good enough and the company management said clamshells are “out”.
When clamshell design became more popular, Nokia had to change their course but that happened slowly. “It was a hard bite for the organization“, says ex-manager who wishes to remain anonymous. “The stand had been that our stuff is the best.” Nokia ordered first devices from Asian subcontractor. When those were proven popular, company actually started doing them.
Problem was not as if Nokia’s organization couldn’t adapt to the clamshell production – once the decision had been made, models were easy to push into the machinery. Problem was that copying idea of others was seen as unnecessary.
Ironically, clamshells faded as iPhone entered the market. iPhone on the other hand was seen as threat to only minor part of the wide portfolio. Everyone was relieved as clamshells were out and “we were right after all”. [2]
It wa natural for Nokia mangement to think that success in mobile phone business requires huge portfolio and a structure that produces, markets, sells and renews that huge portfolio. Why would they want to risk the pattern that had worked for ten years? Durign the years of success Nokia grew, was reorganized several times but the central mode of operation was “success based on large portfolio of products”. That failed when the competitors extended from devices to apps and ecosystems. [1]
Nokia’s complex portfolio was difficult to redefine in the war of ecosystems. [3]
Nokia was capable of tailoring targeted products for different markets and user groups. The game got changed when users wanted to tailor the device themselves using applications.
Apple made huge success with a single model (iPhone) where majority of user experience focused on application store. The very first iPhone model was far from perfect on radiotechnological terms but people loved it. iPhone was pleasant to use. Nokia had a large portfolio and they assumed that iPhone is a threat to only very small part of that palette. [1]
Nokia failed to build a marketplace that would have lured in users and application developers. But alike touch screens, it was not as if Nokia did not try. They tried multiple times and failed every time.
- In 1996 Nokia launched “Club Nokia” where one could get ringtones and operator logo replacements. Later news awere added and also applications were planned to be included.
- Site named softwaremarket.nokia.com was launched in 2001. It worked only via first Symbian device – 9210 Communicator.
- And remember N-Gage? The gaming phone disappointment from 2003 had games sold on a memory card. Nokia was disappointed to sales of N-Gage, but first tries of selling applications had been taken.
- Later Nokia created (among other things) download.nokia.com site, Widsets for small widget applications and sharing service Mosh.
Unfortunately outsider developers felt Symbian was a difficult platform to develop on and tools were seen as bad. Situation was worsened by the poor support from Forum Nokia, usually limited to documentation.
Nokia first tried to ease the development pain with Python-based tools. In January 2008 Nokia bought Trolltech for 104 million euros and analytics were praising the deal. Qt environment from Trolltech was supposed to make development on Nokia platforms easy. After focusing on Windows Phone Nokia sold Qt to Digia in August 2012. By then the price had gotten down to 4 million euros.
Developers and users fell in love with Apple. That started with music.
Apple changed the way music is being bought with its iPod music player and iTunes music store when store was opened in April 2003. Instead of a pricey CD you could now buy your favorite song for $0.99. By 2008 iTunes had turned into largest music retail in US.
Nokia opened its own music store at spring 2008. Nokia’s problems are well visible in the fact that the store worked only with Internet Explorer, even though Firefox was already very common at the time. At the end of year Nokia launched “Comes with music” phones where entire music collection was available for free but the phone costs more. Possibility to register to Comes with music ended at beginning of 2012.
“Apple had more credible music offering. That is half a meal in music” says Iiro Jantunen. He worked for Nokia but also knows music industry from being 8 years in the board of speaker maker Genelec.
Apple’s App Store got a running start when application store was opened. That happened by iTunes update June 2008. Nokia responded with Ovi Store in May 2009. Ovi was seen as more difficult to use and apps from Ovi Store did not always work in different Symbian devices. Low usability was a common factor between several application store launches of Nokia. Those stores were not able to attract required user base in time. Ovi – later known as Nokia Store – gathered tens of thousands of apps but leading positions were safely at hands of Apple and Google, so even today very few apps reach Nokia or Microsoft store first. [4]
At the end of last decade Nokia did not try to do best possible device, they tried to optimize profits from a certain user segment. This was also said by commenters of these articles:
“Every user segment got broad variety of devices, but none of the segments was made happy. Phone capabilities were put selectively to different models to maximize the revenues” says nickname “Nokipoika”. [1]
It was common practice that R&D needed to find a “customer” for any new feature to make it to production. That means some phone in production needed to include the feature. None of the risky (i.e. worksome and large) changes got to the list as there was nobody to accept them. R&D programs avoided any risks to keep schedules, thus avoiding innovation. [5]
Portfolio grew larger and single idea seems small compared to big picture.
“Single innovation had very small benefit since there were so many products” said long time Nokia executive and current business owner Seppo Laukkanen in Tekniikka&Talous interview. Laukkanen was leading products and portfolios and improving practices for innovation in Nokia. [3]
“Products couldn’t differentiate even between each other. People in product programs were unaware how their product is supposed to be different compared to other product” says nickname “12 years as a consultant”
“Nokia refused to believe that well earning people would pay extra for a product that is seen superior“, nickname Tannenberg said.
But Nokia’s R&D was not held back only by competition between products or feature division between them. Nokia also did its best to keep operators happy and that made it difficult to bring any new services to phones. Apple came to markets with one setup and sold that to operators.
Nickname “Kokemus” (experience) wrote: “Main reason for Nokia’s collapse was ‘blind plus’ where successful company does not see the development of the dynamics of its own business, far less the things done wrong. It is entirely true that Jorma Ollila and his Dream Team built the Nokia that conquered the industry. And it is just as true that whatever was left of that Dream Team was unable to respond to change of its own industry. Eventually old industrialist leaders tried to run a company where control of logistics was no longer the advantage against others: they should have won the race for superior user experience. This was not seen in time, the culture inside company was very arrogant. People thought that they were best so they can handle this so-called crisis too.” [1]
ExNokia executive Seppo Laukkanen wrote:
“It is totally different thing to define the market than be the underdog. Nokia defined the market for ten years. Copying the success of others was humiliating for people who were used to define the market – especially since they did not feel that the competitor product was in any way superior compared to their own.” [2]
Two-three years ago Nokia’s slide was explained by the lack of touch screen devices. How come Nokia did not understand the need of touchscreens? It was bad timing, lack of taking the risk and perhaps some bad luck too. Nokia developed touch screen devices already in early 2000 but abandoned the technology at the wrong moment.
First Touch screen phone was Nokia 7710, launched year 2004. It had usability and stability issues and was not a success. Nokia did reviews that showed people were not excited about touch screens. It is unknown whether the end-users were shown just the technology or the possibilities it could open up. Since product programs were – as said before – avoiding risks at all costs, decision to drop touch screens was easy. According to Helsingin Sanomat (newspaper) the decision was made in 2005 and savings were used to make non-touch products even better. [5]
LOST VALUES
Nokia did not have just problems in execution. The ex-Nokia executives that were interviewed also said that the values inside the company contributed a lot. The values were brought up even though the reporter was not asking about them.
Nokia values were helping Nokia to rise to the top which means they contributed to Nokia’s success in a way most CEOs can only dream of. Values were the base of “Nokia Way” – the way of working in the company. Lots of effort and funding was put to keep the common values alive.
“Stay humble, avoid arrogance”; old values from Jorma Ollila were coming from Finnish – and more closely Northern Ostrobothnian – background. Central value was the respect. The other values in year 2003 were customer satisfaction, achievement and renewal. Values stayed practically unchanged from year 1992.
Values created the Nokia culture. “We had the spirit of fighting and doing together” said ex-Nokia executive interviewed by T&T. People were allowed to take risks and name of the game was that no one gets punished due to their failures. People were trusting and daring. The trusting relations extended all the way to partners subcontractors but then – still during Ollila’s tenure – culture switched from “know-how management” to “execution management”.
Another ex-executive sets Norwegian Hallstein Mørk as a central person causing the change inside Nokia. Mørk came from US PC-manufacturer Hewlett-Packard year 1999 and changed the Nokia person management to be more American. Clear example of this was performance evaluation, where 20 percent were graded exceptional, 70 on target and 10 percent were graded “in need of improvement”. This lowest classification was creating a problem as it became a vague threat. Ratings were given by superiors and criteria was loose. In worst scenarios employees felt they can get the rating just for their looks.
It comes without saying that the fear of being labeled as underachiever decreased people’s will to take risks. This became especially problematic in Research & Design.
“Good employees were walking out” says ex-executive.
The fixed 10% category got so much negative feedback from both the graders as the ones getting the grades that fixed category size was removed. “There was no more need to put specific percentage to underachievers, you could do it more case-by-case and more objectively” said another ex-Nokia executive.
At the same time old practices were removed or they were more unit- or case-based. One example that came up: the practice of having laid off employee’s “exit” interviews were stopped in one unit and continued in another unit. The results of the Listening to you survey that measures employee satisfaction were weakening compared to other big companies. Nokia’s results had been in top ten and that achievement was seen as important. Main pain point in survey was the respect towards individual.
Year 2006 Nokia told in its website that they’ll change the organization to have less hierarchical levels and more networking, agility and flexible decision-making. Unfortunately all that was already disappearing from the organization itself. Subcontractors and partners got to feel the expense control. Co-operation was made more difficult.
“In every strategic meeting extremely ambitious goals were set and at same time people were reminded that they need to avoid arrogance and stay humble. Around mid-2000 those talks became different. And the inevitability of current disaster was sealed in 2008 organization change.” ex-Nokian said in Talouselämä magazine.
The change of values continued when Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo performed a renewal of values with the personnel 2007. Around the world Nokia Café – sessions were kept and values were formed and further adjusted. For finalization people were gathered to Kalastajatorppa. Real-time chat was rolling three days straight and value project nucleus moderated the questions and suggestions coming from around the world.
The values ended up to be achieving together, engaging you, passion for innovation and very human. These word-pairs required explanatory chapters and the previous key value respect was now just part of “very human”.
It may sound like nitpicking but this meant that the common values that supported work towards success were decaying.
“Values were defined but they were not constantly kept alive among personnel like they were when Ollila was still CEO” said ex-executive.
Kallasvuo brought in several new leaders from US. Many of them brought different working cultures and values with them. Kallasvuo was not able to push the new values through.
“Olli-Pekka lacked both charisma and substance to define the course of a big ship. Therefore every unit could define their own direction using their own values” estimated ex-executive. [6]
SYMBIAN – SLOWLY BUILT TO FAIL
Nokia started the year 2004 with a new organisation where mobile phone business was divided to three units: Multimedia for advanced products, Mobile Phones for basic phones and Enterprise Solutions for corporate.
It became apparent that Multimedia was ran over by profit-making Mobile Phones what comes to HW decisions. The chipsets for Multimedia were so weak that the vision of pocket computers were left lacking. This was mentioned by nickname “Senior Manager, Nokia Multimedia” in T&T forum. “You can’t make a Ferrari sports model on top of Lada engine” he sums up.
On the other hand, few years later multimedia unit had so high value that it affected the organisation change.
“Multimedia unit was supposed to help others too. This renewal had a nice thought behind it, but the organisation was so large that the entrepreneur spirit was not enough” says one of the interviewed ex-Nokia executives.
This was refering to the 2008 organization change of Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo which has been blamed to be root cause of many things. In reorganization the decision-making was spread around, made more unclear and therefore the larger context got damaged.
“Stiff project model and over-cautious management stopped any open-minded ideas that could have actually created something new” says nickname “fly in the ceiling”. [3]
Programs inside the company were competing against each others. Best positions in next reorganization were given to managers from the unit that made best success. This is not completely unheard of, many large companies have similar practices, but in Nokia the competition became the goal as itself and company level goals were left behind. Nokia Management did not deliver a clear common goal so in the end e.g. Multimedia had different login to each of its services. [3]
“…strongly politicized middle management slowly creeped in. It focused on internal competition instead of co-operation. — And since the money was still flowing in, middle management had all the time to focus on their own personal interests.”
“Biggest reason [for downfall] was exceedingly stiff project management model and management that vowed for manufacturing process efficiency. It is difficult to create anything new in those conditions, far less something extraordinary.” [3]
“In 90’s Nokia made the most user-friendly UI, bypassing Ericsson and Motorola with it. In 2000’s I was myself having hard time to find features from a Symbian product. — Competitors brought in operating systems that were not difficult to use and at same time were easier to write applications for. Success needs listening to the end-user and modifying products to match that.” wrote nickname MK.
“It is so obvious it makes me shiver. Anyone who was there living the life of Silicon Valley in early 2000 with Steve Jobs knows this full. I was there. Nokia had one man there to follow the trends. A good man, but not a man to notice any trends coming up. I was in deliveries and suffered since reports lacked the essential: technophones and their markets had changed already before 2000. Those reports did not say that work, leisure and interaction are moving towards idea where everything is fun and simple. Even working had to be fun.” said nickname Inssi65. [7]
Nokia wanted to guarantee a continuum for the familiar UI in order to keep old customer base from escaping. In addition to that Nokia had the largest support for different languages, which meant that the UI needed to work well with different letters and glyphs.
“S60 had the leading user experience when it entered the market. Slowly icons became dull and Apple created a wow-effect with their UI made from scratch” says Laukkanen.
Nokia had the organization structure of an electronics company, not that of a software company. In fact Nokia really did not have a chance to learn to be a SW company, as was said before. [3]
The attraction of Nokia’s smartphones faded away when iOS from Apple and Android from Google grew more popular. Compared to competitors, Symbian looks was frozen to a helplessly outdated situation. When Symbian Belle update rolled out, it was praised but it Belle came out way too late.
Ex product development manager from Nokia explained this to T&T:
“It was not that UI design or development would have been asleep. Problems were very well-known and we knew how it [Symbian UI] is broken and how to fix it. But we could not get that through the product development machine. SW development investments were focused on under-the-hood functionalities and Symbian UI was therefore left without needed modernization for a long time.”
Altering Symbian UI was heavy task as changes were also needed to lower layers of the SW. People commenting the articles felt that Nokia forgot the end-users and eventually devices became too difficult to use. Additional slowdown was caused by SW solution which aimed to use as little phone memory as possible. Estimate given to T&T was that any change to Symbian took 2,5 times as long as changes done to competing operating systems.
As an operating system Symbian is way older than iOS or Android. Symbian is based on Epoc32 which was developed by Psion for PDAs in mid-90’s. In year 2001 the name was changed to Symbian and Nokia presented 9210 Communicator – the first Symbian phone.
Symbian had two keyboard-based UI styles, Series 60 and Series 80. Nokia also used touch-screen based UI style (Series 90) but only one product made its way to shops. That was previously mentioned Nokia 7710 which launched 2004. Device was not a success.
According to T&T sources Nokia made conclusion that they do not have the resources to develop touch-based Symbian platform. For next three years touchscreens were only seen in Maemo(Linux)-based internet tablets.
During year 2008 Symbian returned to touchscreens with new phone Nokia 5800, project name “Tube”. Symbian version in use was Series 60 that had touch screen improvements. Similarly Nokia enhanced Series 40 to support touch screen for its Asha-line. First full touch Ashas were shown to public in 2012.
Nokia 5800 could not deliver all the expectations poured to it. 5800 was clearly inferior to iPhone but Symbian was still the Nokia’s choice for smartphones. What was told to T&T is that Lee Williams (responsible of Symbian 2006-2009) repeatedly assured to Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo that next Symbian model will solve the problems. After 5800 problem solver was supposed to be N97. After N97, it was supposed to be N8.
People working for Williams knew that development work was slow. Either Williams had wrong understanding of the doings of his own organization or he held the info back and did not share it to Kallasvuo. Eventually Williams moved to steer Symbian Foundation in 2009. Symbian was unable to catch the competition and Later Williams left Symbian Foundation “due to personal reasons” and strongly criticized Elop for ramping down Symbian in CNet interview in April. [7]
FROM SYMBIAN TO MEEGO – OR THEN NOT
Nokia developed Symbian successor from Linux-based Maemo. In 2010 name was changed to MeeGo as Intel joined to partnership with Nokia. Part of the development resources were tied to N900 – the first Linux phone made by Nokia. At the same time R&D worked on next phone models – of which only N9 made it to shops. Project name “Columbus” did not even get model number whereas N950 was only shared to developers. T&T interviewed manager who said MeeGo development lacked common direction.
“There was no clear focus inside the company and different teams and managers had their own vision of it. The UI was redesigned three times and that alone caused a delay of at least half a year. Pre-installed browser was originally supposed to be Firefox but Nokia later dropped it and decided to make its own browser. Another slow-down was the Intel co-operation which can be credited for another half a year of delay.”
Nokia N9 (the device) was apparently ready almost a year before Meego (the OS) was ready for production. Russian blogger Eldar Murtazin reported that at fall 2010 and our sources confirm this. In the end MeeGo was seen as “the OS that is too slow to develop”.
Some time later Steven Elop made his famous choice between Android, Meego and Windows Phone. [7]
LONG PATH TO RAMPDOWN
Editor note: the following news article is not from the T&T magazine, it is from Salon Seudun Sanomat, 25th of November 2012. I added it as it strongly contributes to the subject.
Salo factory was closed in June 2012 but the fate of it was on the table for long time before that. Ilkka Juva worked in financial leadership of Beijing and Europe factories, Salo included. He said that the calculations for closure of the factory started already in last decade.
“I started making calculations in 2007, but I got ready material from the previous person in the position.”
At the same time City of Salo was building more apartments for Nokia employees. Juva thought Nokia should inform the city about possible closure of factory. He would have done it himself but was not allowed to do so.
“That was inside info and besides the law for layoff negotiations limited possibilities to communicate outside. You could not tell the city to back up with the economic plans as things are about to get ugly, no matter how much you wanted to.”
Juva resigned at summer 2010. Factory was not yet decided to be closed but the knowledge about the pending fate was heavy to carry. However Juva did not break his NDA. The decision to speak up came last Sunday when Juva read Salon Seudun Sanomat and noted interview of Hannu Krogerus. In the interview Krogerus gave hard time to Nokia and the increasing Asian focus of the entire industry.
“Reading Krogerus encouraged me to speak. I am very much in the same lines with him. Nokia made many unpatriotic decisions.“, Juva said. [8]
REFERENCES:
[1] http://www.tekniikkatalous.fi/nokia/nain+nokia+aliarvioi+applen/a832994
[3] http://www.tekniikkatalous.fi/nokia/vanhan+menestyksen+viilaus+tappoi+nokian+innovaatiot/a832137
[5] http://www.tekniikkatalous.fi/nokia/nokia+hylkasi+kosketusnaytot+liian+aikaisin/a831625
[7] http://www.tekniikkatalous.fi/nokia/meego+jai+liian+kauan+symbianin+varjoon/a833013
Dominies Communicate 
@anon —
Feel free to delete this comment after you read it. This is meant as constructive criticism, especially if you intend, as the introduction makes clear, to link back to this article frequently. I think you need to do another pass on this translation, it is far too literal. You are missing tons of determiners (a, the..); and in the few places you do have them I often think you meant to have a possessive pronoun or a clause. Also some of the nouns are being translated too literally to make sense. Your English is naturally strong and fluid, very comfortable to read.
I suspect because of the length you ended up doing a word-for-word translation. You are still thinking of the Finnish original when you wrote and it bled through more than I think you meant it too.
@anon
OK now content. First off I fully agree that Nokia was a consumer electronics company that focused on hardware as a primary and software secondarily. Everyone knows that and even Nokia knew this was a huge problem by the mid 2000s. The interesting question is knowing this why did they keep in place structures which prevented the software guys from taking more control? Why did the hardware people have much say at all over software rather than just passing specs back and fourth? The article talks about arrogance but that’s not really a reason, it is more like name calling.
The author clearly believes there was a values change but what specific values were changing and why isn’t clear. I think he has a vague thesis in mind but what’s in his head is not down on the page.
For example the 20/70/10 management system is common in America. That sounds like a very softcore version of the real thing. I’ve worked for companies where the bottom 30% have mandatory termination every year. Many companies have an an up or out policy, something like you get promoted within 5 years or you are fired. Generally the reason to introduce employee metrics is a belief that worker efficiency is low.
— Was management wrong? Was worker efficiency not low?
— If they were were wrong, why were they wrong?
— Assuming they were right, what was the economics of the efficiency boost due to fear? Obviously these sorts of systems hurt teamwork and morale everyone knows that, the interesting question is whether the harder work and longer hours make up for it.
“It comes without saying that the fear of being labeled as underachiever decreased people’s will to take risks.” I don’t think it goes without saying. It has a lot to do with the advantages of being in the top 20%, which might very well require risk taking. Say for example the bonus for hitting top 20% was 3 year’s salary, you’ll get some risk taking to hit that 20%. Which means the 20/70/10 wasn’t the problem but the incentive structure was.
____
Why was phone OSes being designed to use as little hardware as possible in 2005? Was Nokia’s goal to push prices further down?
The article makes the claim that Symbian was older and thus more difficult to update. EPOC which became Symbian is from the late 1980s.
To take iOS for example
iOS (2007) -> OSX (2001) -> Rhapsody (1997) -> OpenStep (1993) -> NeXTStep(1988) -> BSD/Mach(1985) -> BSD (1977).
Or to take their current phone OS
Windows Phone 8(2012) -> Windows 8 (2012) & Windows Mobile (2003) -> Windows Pocket PC (2000) -> Windows CE (1996) -> Windows 95 (1995) -> MS Windows (1985) -> MS DOS (1980) -> CP/M (1973) -> Intellec-8 (1973)
It wasn’t that the job of upgrading Symbian was impossible, Nokia just didn’t want to do the work to maintain their platform. And that’s the real question why was Nokia unwilling to protect their platform? Absolutely Symbian needed a major overhaul and restructuring, so Nokia hires a big team and does it. They job wasn’t impossible or outside their range they choose not to do it even as it became increasingly obvious it was vital.
The article attributes this problem to Lee Williams blowing sunshine up Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo’s ass. But this should have started long before 2006 and Kallasvuo and people around him should have known there was nowhere near the resources needed for a platform overhaul. I think it is a copout to pretend that a few lies from Williams were the problem.
The article also mentions the complex problem of a legacy interface that older users like and the need for a new interface for people who hadn’t developed Symbian skills. Given that Nokia had a diverse product portfolio why not just release 2 interfaces as an option? Or put them on different phones with different market segments?
______
What I found startling was the comment that “mobile phone business was divided to three units: Multimedia for advanced products, Mobile Phones for basic phones and Enterprise Solutions for corporate.” Huh? They had a Enterprise Solutions as a major unit? We’ve been discussing Nokia’s failure to do anything with enterprise in Europe. What did that division do from 2004 onwards?
____
Anyway I think this article is very shallow and poorly thought through. It is x-employees griping not a careful what went wrong and why analysis. They need to look much more closely at details and stop thinking big picture. The big picture should emerge from seeing the same pattern in the details over and over and over. They haven’t done the detailed work about what went wrong.
BTW it occurred to me that some of the lurkers might not know what the 20/70/10 is supposed to look like. But this scene from Glen Gary Glen Ross is a bit over the top but Alec Baldwin does a great job of describing how it supposed to come in:
@CD-Host
AFAIK, WinPhone8 descents from Windows NT, with WinCE being a separate development. WinNT was designed by the people designing VaxVMS.
Nokia’s Enterprise division sold the Communicators and E-series devices, and did some horizontal software deals, like Office. They weren’t stimulating the vertical markets we discussed earlier, or if they did that, they weren’t very visible, or successful.
Regarding Symbian, at the time it was designed, 1995-ish, it was designed for battery-powered PDA’s that were able to last a week on 2 regular 1.5 volt batteries. This means that it was event-driven from the kernel up to userland. You press a key, processor wakes up, the OS passes the key to the current app, the app does its thing and the processor goes to sleep again, until the next event.
To be as frugal as possible, the designers choose to use a variant of C++ that looked more like Embedded C++ than Standard C++, mainly because all the overhead to unwind the stack after an exception was deemed to expensive on a mobile device with limited memory. At the time that was a good decision, but a big problem was that it influenced the API’s. So, by the time mobile devices became powerful enough, that early decision became one of their bigger problems.
Not a fatal one, as at the time Symbian got proper exception handling, in Symbian OS 9.1, iOS and Android were still in development. But they did nothing to remedy it, so by the time Symbian OS got some serious competition it was to late to upgrade the API.
Symbian had also build an enormous amount of software supporting the development system itself. Nowadays people use open source stuff for that, but at the time they began there wasn’t very much available and the things that were available did not scale.
During the early ’00, Symbian did recreate the entiere kernel, resulting in the already mentioned Symbian 9.x version of the OS. It was now possible to run both the phone software stack and the pda software stack on a single processor. Stuff like that enabled Nokia to have smartphones that could run a couple of days before recharging. But as we found out with iPhone, running one day without recharging is enough.
The system was optimised for being frugal, and that came at a cost, maintainability being one. Another problem was the development mentality, this was indeed not a software company, but a company designing software for it’s own internal use only. Except that Symbian OS was of course very much like a PC OS, and nothing at all like a power plant management system.
I have little doubt that the people talking to the Finnish papers said what they though was happening. It shows how little Nokia did know about designing and maintaining platforms.
But talking to Nokia people at the different events over the years made that completely obvious. They were for instance always talking about developers writing new software for a just-released new S60 device. ???? People, you have a f’ing platform. You do not write that kind of software if you have a platform. And the the next device, rinse, repeat.
Ah yes, Lee Williams. In the interview referenced above, he made the following telling comment:
“When I was at Nokia and we shipped a Symbian product and it was bad, in its worst incarnation we knew that if we just flipped the switch, we could move 2.5 to three million units — overnight, no matter how bad the product,” he tells me. “That was Nokia. That was Nokia’s brand, we knew we could count on that.”
So, the guy who ran the Symbian project was so lacking in self awareness that he can’t see that shipping bad products will mean that the brand will steadily die. In fairness to him, Nokia didn’t help him by making phones lacking in memory and processing power.
I don’t think there was any reason why Symbian couldn’t have evolved over the years, just like any other operating system. By all accounts, right now it is pretty good and user friendly. But it should have been like that in 2010 at the latest, not now.
@CD-Host
I’m not going to delete that, especially since you’re right about that text needing some afterwork. Problem with the text is that it’s not my text. I don’t want to alter it too much. When I wrote open letter, I wrote Finnish version and constantly thought how I’m going to say same in English. In this case I read the Finnish text and tried to keep it as much “as is” as possible. Result is not pretty.
I currently have another post in draft stage and it has fixed deadline on Friday so this will have to wait. Reason I say this post would stay over the others is that this is pile of comments from laid off employees saying the company screwed up in epic scale prior to Feb 2011, which has been the message of my blog to begin with. It’s the intent of this blog in one post. 😉
But I wanted to have this more as a base of conversation than as some corrective list of facts. And I see discussion has already started, I’ll jump in as soon as this evening calms down a bit. Lots of first-hand experience and dreadful examples ready to burst out. 🙂
@Sander
FAIK, WinPhone8 descents from Windows NT, with WinCE being a separate development. WinNT was designed by the people designing VaxVMS.
Yeah I had to follow the mobile part. The train for NT would look pretty similar. The VMS guys (mainly Dave Cutler) designed the NT kernel, not the rest. Anyway that would have been an alternative path that’s arguably even worse for the Symbian was too old:
NT -> OpenVMS -> VAXVMS -> MicroVMS -> Starlet (1975) -> RSX-11 (1972) -> Nova (1969) ->…
Nokia’s Enterprise division sold the Communicators and E-series devices, and did some horizontal software deals, like Office. They weren’t stimulating the vertical markets we discussed earlier, or if they did that, they weren’t very visible, or successful.
Did enterprises buy thousands of Communicators or was it more like an individual business person type phone? Looks like a nice pager type device. When he talks about the divisions was he talking NSeries vs. ESeries vs. CSeries… that is the sales team broke across devices?
Communicators and E-Series seem like they are business targeted. Two way pagers were huge here in the 1990s when the Communicators were being sold. The two-way pager were mainly dominated by Motorola. I’d be curious why Nokia wasn’t pushing these devices which are obviously much more advanced.
Stuff like that enabled Nokia to have smartphones that could run a couple of days before recharging. But as we found out with iPhone, running one day without recharging is enough.
It was worse than that, let’s not forget when the iPhone and Androids came out you were lucky to go a 1/2 day of moderate use without a recharge. But I understand the point until Palm had the same focus on high efficiency. And arguably one of the big advantages iPhone had/has was about 1.5x the battery life of Android, though nowhere near the efficiency of Symbian. It’s a balance.
I have little doubt that the people talking to the Finnish papers said what they though was happening. It shows how little Nokia did know about designing and maintaining platforms.
But talking to Nokia people at the different events over the years made that completely obvious. They were for instance always talking about developers writing new software for a just-released new S60 device. ???? People, you have a f’ing platform. You do not write that kind of software if you have a platform. And the the next device, rinse, repeat.
I think they still have that problem. They focus on devices and not the brand. I’m not sure why, but it is very very harmful. Here in the USA they aren’t building a brand identity deliberately. They are focused on selling individual phones not selling Nokia.
Samsung is changing their ways in this regard, learning from Apple about branding their company. And Samsung is fundamentally still in the parts business.
@anon —
Let me give you an example of what I meant. And if you want to keep it this Finnish, hey it is your translation. I’ll just pick on one sentence, “First iPhone was radiotechnologically far from perfect but people loved it still.”
First, you never use “first” in English without their being a “second” and “third”. You probably would want to use something like “primarily” if original had “first” for emphasis. Second, if you are going to use “first” you need to follow it with a comma. Otherwise “First iPhone” means that “First” is an adjective for iPhone not part of the structure, you would use this in something like “The First King was ….” Third, “radiotechnologically” is not a word in English at all. You can break it to “radio technology” and then you would see the word order is wrong. iPhone is the possessive for “radio”. Finally “loved it still” is likely “loved it anyway”. Fifth, you are missing the determiner, iPhone here is a specific thing.
So the sentence would read something like “Primarily, the iPhone’s radio was technologically far from perfect but people loved it anyway”. But again Primary doesn’t need to be there nor technology. So I’d say, “The iPhone’s radio was far from perfect but people loved it anyway.”
That many changes are a lot to demand of the reader. Again if you are aware of it, and this is intentional. It is your blog I’m just letting you know someone who is not use to reading translated English or not a native speaker might not be able to make it through those sentences at all.
OK, let’s take that sentence in a very long version (what the Finnish version said):
“The first iPhone model (as compared to iPhone3G, 3GS and so forth) was far from perfect if you measure it in radiotechnology criteria. It was loved by people despite that fact.”
Yes, I can tell my text is not clear and I need to work on it. Meanwhile, should we get back to topics at hand?
Wow. Where to start? First seems to be this:
why did they keep in place structures which prevented the software guys from taking more control? Why did the hardware people have much say at all over software rather than just passing specs back and fourth?
It reminds me of the “just don’t let the plant blow up” thinking mentioned here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2011/02/18/why-steve-jobs-couldnt-find-a-job/
I think those T&T articles had right intent there; Nokia had management from the time when phone was piece of hardware. And when you make hardware, you want to keep the solution that works. Nothing you change is allowed to jeopardize the working solution.
Now enter the 2008 where suddenly keyboard needs to be replaced with touch screen. The management knows that all products originate from the same “working solution”. New product needs to be based on the existing UI. Making UI from scratch is too big of a risk. Keep the old but add a touch screen (since touch screen is what was asked for).
If you read SMS with N95 you:
Press menu-key, move highlight with arrows to messages-icon, press options-key, move highlight to “open”, press middle key (or press middle key when messages icon was highlighted) now move highlight to inbox, open it via options or using middle key, move highlight to message, open it (options or middle key).
If you do the same with Nokia 5800, you:
Press menu-key, tap messages icon to highlight it, tap options-text (in place where options button used to be), tap “open”, to highlight it, tap again (or tap again on the messages icon when it was highlighted). Tap Inbox to highlight it, …
I’m sure you get the point. In 2008 Nokia management did not understand that “the thing” in iPhone was not touch screen, it was UI that was built to serve touch as main input. And you cannot change the UI so dramatically without abandoning “the working solution”, which was too high risk to take. N8 (late 2010 after serious delays) was built touch first but even then the UI had those two texts that imitated the missing HW keys in the bottom of the screen. Symbian Belle (late 2011) was first to openly abandon the non-touch heritage. But then it was already “too little, too late”.
Now you ask why did the hardware people have much say at all over software? You got it wrong – software projects were in the end either having manager with more HW-aligned background or then having SW manager who was responding to higher manager with HW background.
Take the BlackBerry style E-series monoblock QWERTY phones: Nokia went after Blackberry, so what was asked from SW development? Support for QWERTY keyboard and landscape display. That was it.
Still in 2009 the product design started with hardware designs and then told SW what is expected from them. As said on the text, if SW design wanted a feature in, they needed to sell it to product manager or it was out.
This is very detailed, but when Nokia tried to add multi-touch support, they did it in the software using a very hard to use method. Developers had to assemble the multi-touch event themselves, instead of the OS doing that basic task. Hence not a lot of developers doing it.
At this level the difference between the iOS and the Symbian API is tiny: one api call that returns a set of touch events for iOS versus one api call that returns a single touch on Symbian.
There are of course lots of differences in calls but the API’s are idempotent. Apart from that single touch call. And with Symbian doing things in a different, and more verbose way.
Sander:
They were for instance always talking about developers writing new software for a just-released new S60 device. ???? People, you have a f’ing platform. You do not write that kind of software if you have a platform. And the the next device, rinse, repeat.
CD-Host:
I think they still have that problem. They focus on devices and not the brand. I’m not sure why, but it is very very harmful. Here in the USA they aren’t building a brand identity deliberately. They are focused on selling individual phones not selling Nokia.
Now to both of you: it goes beyond that. I am in no way innocent, I have been there making the same mistakes as everyone else. But this is something I would by today be completely unaware of if I hadn’t been buying a burglar alarm system in 2008.
I discussed with the sales clerk and he explained that I can enable the system (or selected parts of it) via SMS. The format was something like
#<your PIN number>#<command number>#, e.g. #12345#62#
Now that had been too difficult to use (REALLY?!?) so they made a contract with small SW company that wrote a Symbian app where you choose what you want to turn off/on, press “update” and give your PIN code. App will generate the SMS and send it for you. Simple, elegant.
So this was in 2008 and I was told the app is no longer available since it was made for older Nokia models and does not run in new Nokia models. The company gave too high price tag for new version so they dropped the app as a whole and said to me they had no intention to return to that path.
At that time I was thinking “why on earth do we (Nokia) make end-users lose the working application when they upgrade to next phone?” But I did not think at all what that means in the world of 3rd party SW developer, who in the previous case has made an app later rendered obsolete by Nokia.
Now IIRC this was at worst meaning that “this app works in your current phone but won’t work in the phone you are about to buy. This app here works in the phone you are about to buy but does not work in your previous phone, neither will it work in the phone that is rolling out next month“…
…where all three mentioned models were being sold in same store at same time.
Last year people complained about the fact that Windows Phone 7 devices do not get upgrade to WP8 and that WP8 programs do no run on WP7.
When Nokia launched Symbian^3 in 2010, none of the old devices got upgrade. Symbian^3 programs would not run on old devices. And that was still excellent as unlike in 2008, programs made for old phones were indeed able to run in Symbian^3.
So back to original, people were indeed talking about writing new software for the device in their hand – and there was a chance that SW would not run on any other model the end-user gets to see during his/her lifetime.
I think people making the decisions in Nokia ca. 2008 had no clue what “backwards compatibility” means.
(BTW, I did some cleaning for the text. Anything further needs more time spent and I don’t know when I have that time.)
@anonymousexnokian
“”
I think people making the decisions in Nokia ca. 2008 had no clue what “backwards compatibility” means.
“”
That is quite weird, because backwards compatibility is what made Microsoft the powerhouse it used to be. Nokia was so scared of Microsoft invading the mobile space that they started Symbian in the first place. Surely they realized why Microsoft was that big?
@Sander van der Wal
As the compatibility between Symbian versions was what it was, someone lost the ball pretty high in the chain. It could be just this thing (from your comment):
“Nokia had been pushing hard at apps for a couple of years, and around 2006-2007-ish the apparently decided it wasn’t going to work. By open sourcing Symbian they told the world that there was little value in the smartphone software stack.”
Your comment there reflects to the articles in a sense. There was no “we will make this work” commitment for software store before Apple had one. And even then the existing softwaremarket.nokia.com was replaced with Ovi.
I just wanted to comment on the issue of backwards compatibility and platform compatibility.
Windows 8 is likely the strongest cross platform system ever designed. Microsoft’s approach of ubiquitous computing is designed from the ground up to allow applications to go between devices. Assuming this works the same software will port between mid range smartphones like the Lumia 620 through tablets through notebooks with touch screens through desktops with dual 30″ touch screens through 64 CPU servers delivering screens remotely. And indications are fairly good this is going to work.
Conversely iOS offers compatibility between phones and tablets while OSX offers a laptop / desktop product that in most respects isn’t a good fit for servers. A complete split. They have an entire infrastructure of data sharing, their CoreData approach.
So what we have is:
current iOS/Android: loose standards
Apple’s goal: seamless data portability
Microsoft goal: seamless application portability
________
In terms of backwards compatibility Microsoft has been moving away from it since the .NET platform. Both Sun and DEC were very strong in binary compatibility. Microsoft, while not as good as either of those, probably came in 3rd place. They still obviously have a strong commitment but not as strong as they had been.
Apple was generally quite weak and to this day still is. Applications break frequently between OS versions and Apple pushes out OS versions now annually. In addition in just the last 13 years they’ve had major shifts:
a) Moving from OS9 to OSX though offering Carbon for conversion
b) Dropping Classic so Carbon became mandatory
c) Moving from PPC to Intel so either extensively reworking Carbon was required or conversion to Cocoa.
d) Moving from Intel Carbon to the new App Store sandbox mode which requires newer Cocoa.
That’s in addition to dropping and changing minor libraries like
e) Dropping the Java interface from coequal to Carbon and Cocoa to secondary to not present by default at all.
etc…
Linux aimed for source compatibility with almost no binary compatibility. The distribution system encourages linking between libraries that change annually. Moreover between distributions and over time distributions themselves change their supporting libraries quickly.
Sun / DEC: Excellent binary compatibility
Microsoft: Very good binary compatibility
Apple: Poor binary compatibility.
Linux: Binary compatibility was not even a goal, so-so source compatibility.
_______
In terms of binary compatibility and Symbian, that is backwards compatibility given we are talking:
a) Devices with a 3 year lifespan
b) No large stack of vertical applications
I agree that Nokia should not have made this a focus. However, the reason not to have binary compatibility is to rapidly advance a platform. If one is going to be conservative anyway then there is no reason not to provide excellent binary compatibility. They didn’t do that. Thus they offered neither rapid advancement nor a stable platform for long term applications
In short:
I think the right thing for Symbian would have been poor binary compatibility with rapid advancement.
I think a so-so idea for Symbian would have been good binary compatibility with slow advancement.
I think a terrible idea is poor binary compatibility with slow advancement.
_________
In terms of working the same way across devices it comes down to the size of the software stack and how much advantage the hardware guys are taking of device freedom.
Embedded OSes like Linux variants (MeeGo, Maemo, Android), QNX, Green Hill’s Integrity, Cisco’s IOS (no relation to Apple’s) can be remarkably efficient and effective for a particular device. Conversely they can stabilize and allow a software stack to grow. Generally what they do is provide a stable API which is reimplemented over the tweaked API. Qt is truly excellent at as a stable API over a tweaked API.
The problem for Nokia here was that it appears that different factions within Nokia viewed their stack in conflicting ways.
For example one view you could take is
Qt is the stable API. Symbian and lower levels of MeeGo are variable. But under that circumstance you don’t want direct ports from Symbian up to Qt. You also don’t need Qt to be super efficient since efficiency comes from writing device specific code.
Conversely one could view Symbian’s API as needing to be reasonably stable and then just components like the Symbian internals change. That is heavily tweaked versions of Symbian internals for every device to get the maximum out of them. I suspect this is what Nokia had been doing in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Or one could say that they aren’t going to heavily tweak the embedded OS at all and just let it get a vertical stack. And stop worrying about maximum efficiency.
So:
i) Qt needs to be consistent with Symbian so applications port well, rather than being an entirely new low efficiency but highly portable layer.
ii) Symbian API’s need to be stable to maintain application compatibility.
iii) Symbian internals need to be stable since Symbian comes from Symbian foundation and we aren’t going to spend a fortune on building essentially a semi-custom OS for each device
iv) We want to support a ride range of devices and we don’t want the OS to consume a lot of the resources.
Creates a recipe for a terribly slow moving OS which falls behind. That in itself wouldn’t be terrible, though it would be a problem competitively. But then add
v) We are going to allow devices to perform a wide range of functions which the OS needs to support
And Symbian now has no way to develop an application stack. The OS lags and is inconsistent. (v) nullifies many of the advantages of (i)-(iii).
Okay, T&T is full of surprises. They now have made a new article (paper version should be in my mailbox at home so I’ll read it when I get home. ;-)) Short summary here:
http://www.tekniikkatalous.fi/ict/quotnokia+olisi+havinnyt+vaikka+olisi+valinnut+androidinquot/a877095
T&T gathered three persons to analyze the happenings of Nokia during Elop tenure and the future visions of it. These three were:
Timo Seppälä, researcher from Etlatieto Oy,
Jukka Viitasaari From technology indusrty union, manager on ICT section (if that makes any sense, the title was already half jargon in Finnish)
and… (drums)…
Horace Dediu, internationally well known blogger, ex-Nokian.
The big question was of course whether Nokia made right decision or not.
Timo Seppälä says no. He thinks Nokia should have had plan B and Windows Phone should have been limited to North American market only. He says Nokia lost the game already.
Horace Dediu said that Nokia did not have much choice at the time being. Nokia would have lost even if it had jumped to Android camp. And do not forget that many operators said they want to have third option to smartphones.
No more in web version so I’ll get back to this. Just have to say I find Seppälä’s comment interesting: I hardly count WP success in North America so why should it be limited to there? Go with it all the way or don’t go at all. So far North American market has not shown any better development than the others.
(Also find it interesting that Nokia has “lost the game”. Sure, they have miniature market share ATM but company is not in grave yet. Need to read the full article.)
@CD-Host
I have a few problems with your analysis:
– binary compatibility on iOS is good. It doen’t matter that iOS apps do not run on OS X, or vice versa, as these app markets are not identical. There is overlap, but the difference is significant.
– Symbian had a big horizontal app market. Big at that time was 10.000 apps. Nowadays it is peanuts, but then it was huge. And binary compatibility was generally good, as long as you stayed inside a particular UI. The only significant binary break was with the move from version 8 to 9.
– Symbian had a problem with having multiple incompatible UIs. S60 code did not run on UIQ. That was deliberate, all the early Symbian licensees wanted to differentiate using the UI, while having common middleware- and OS-level code.
– binary compatibility is not essential, you want app compatibility. Symbian uses a app delivery system where it is possible to install different binaries depending on the os version. Add to that an App Store that allows you to download a new release for your new phone for free or a small upgrade fee, and you increase the platform’s stickyness while at the same time enabling faster growth. Nokia could even have done this with MeeGo and Symbian, or with MeeGo and Windows Phone.
@Sandervan
binary compatibility on iOS is good. It doen’t matter that iOS apps do not run on OS X, or vice versa, as these app markets are not identical.
I’d say not having identical platforms between a system released in 2001 and one released in 2007 is bad compatibility. But even if I strictly look at iOS between July 2008 and today most apps have broken on one of the versions of iOS. Quite regularly developers have to update their apps for the new versions of iOS and apps drop off.
Moreover between the tablet (April 2010) and the phone there are tablets apps that don’t run on the phones at all and a few in the other direction.
I’m not sure how much worse binary compatibility could be.
Symbian had a problem with having multiple incompatible UIs. S60 code did not run on UIQ. That was deliberate, all the early Symbian licensees wanted to differentiate using the UI, while having common middleware- and OS-level code.
I understand. And they are doing it to some extent on Android as well. From the standpoint of hardware manufacturers it makes sense. It is however, terrible from an application uniformity sense.
binary compatibility is not essential, you want app compatibility. Symbian uses a app delivery system where it is possible to install different binaries depending on the os version
I understand, I dont think binary compatibility is essential either. I think it is a major sales feature. The system for Symbian requires the developer to create new versions of their app for new versions of Symbian. Which means from a customer’s standpoint some of their apps stop working every time they upgrade. Managing different infrastructures in a company can become quite complex. For both companies and people, every upgrade becomes a complex tradeoff with risk. I might be able to upgrade an application once but I can’t expect to use applications for 3,4,5 upgrade cycles.
I suspect companies that are used to Microsoft’s fairly high levels of binary compatibility on the desktop that are now building out Apple infrastructure for mobility are in for a shock when they discover how little Apple cares about it and how fast Apple transitions their platform.
Timo Seppälä says no. He thinks Nokia should have had plan B and Windows Phone should have been limited to North American market only. He says Nokia lost the game already.
I’m not sure that Microsoft is nearly as interested in Nokia if Nokia is pushing the WP in North America while pushing Symbian / MeeGo in the rest of the world. North America is the easiest market for Microsoft to penetrate by themselves and the market where Nokia has the least pull. Which means I suspect Nokia doesn’t get the cash infusion.
So under this scenario Nokia’s burn rate is higher and their subsidies are lower. Nokia never gets positioned as Microsoft’s flagship phone and say the HTC 8X gets the full support of Microsoft. That seems worse than just going with MeeGo.
Horace Dediu said that Nokia did not have much choice at the time being. Nokia would have lost even if it had jumped to Android camp. And do not forget that many operators said they want to have third option to smartphones.
It is more than just said. Carriers have thrown and are currently throwing huge subsidies at Windows phone. Nokia is supplied constrained because carriers are making Nokia phones cheap (in addition to Microsoft). Nokia is getting the multi billion dollar cash infusions that let iPhone and Android take off. That was the point of being in the American market, to be selling to carriers that can throw around that kind of money. For unexplained reasons Nokia is hampering the effort but the carriers at least are fully backing WP / Nokia.
As I’ve said before I think because of the carrier support Nokia has reached a point where 2013, 2014 look good almost regardless of what Nokia does. The carriers desperately want a real some kind of counter leverage to Apple when the next round of negotiations come up.
Oh dear. People missing a trick here. If carriers are indeed supporting Nokia that way, then the authority on carrier behaviour had to see that coming.
Interestingly Verizon was talking up Blackberry as the fourth ecosystem prior to the launch of the latest blackberries. Are they already hedging their bets on Microsoft as the third ecosystem? Given Nokia’s performance with Lumia?
@CD-Host
Regarding your comments on binary compatibility. Now with Virtual Machine technology as good as it is today, you do not need that much backward compatibility anymore. Stick your old software in a VM and upgrade the host OS at a faster pace.
About the T&T Article:
It was titled “Platform is still burning”.
I could be picky and point out that when they say Nokia smartphone market share has dropped from 40% to 5% while Elop has been CEO, they should say 33% to 3%. But let’s leave that. 😉
Jukka Viitasaari said the biggest mistake was the way Nokia announced new strategy. To his knowledge Nokia comms had instructed Elop to announce the strategy change in a more soft manner but he wanted to make the course clear once and for all. Viitasaari then says it is very predictable what happens when CEO tells that “new better products will come to market some time in the future”.
His expectation is that things will calm down inside Nokia now that biggest chagnes have been done. And actually said that “there’s a new kind of spirit within Nokia”.
Timo Seppälä (in addtion to asking for Plan B) said that Nokia had its chance in 2007. When AT&T made a deal with Apple, Verizon and Sprint asked for similar phone from Nokia. Nokia could not react to that request so those operators turned to Android manufacturers. What comes to present, Seppälä said Nokia has shown they can deliver top class products but it’s Microsoft which is not doing their share of the deal. (There were no details but I assume that refers to WP/ upgradeability, WP8 late schedule/low feature set and/or some other similar things where Nokia could have done better but Microsoft has been the limiting factor.) Seppälä says Nokia should make Navteq to its own stock-listed company, drop the deal with Microsoft and continue with another strategy.
Dediu was most verbal of the three. He reminded that deals with Microsoft have usually been disastrous in the past. LG decided to go primarily on Windows Mobile in 2009 but shifted to Android later. He said LG “lost important years and crashed the profitability”. However he was more optimistic about Nokia’s future now than year before. It seems that Nokia has been able to turn profitable again. Yet he said there are no previous examples in the mobile industry where company would turn loss-making for a long time and then return to top. Compare to SonyEricsson, Alcatel, Motorola,…
What comes to structure of Nokia, Dediu does not believe in changes. NSN is now hepling the handset unit whereas situation was vice versa few years back. He does not expect any big changes into the current “ecosystem-based” setup and also says that it is too late for Nokia to make a tablet. Those are now “bulk merchandise”. He finished by saying that Nokia was the first to add design to phones and first to understand the phone is a lifestyle-product.
Readers gave Elop grade 7- (in scale of 4 to 10).
Reader votes for “what OS Nokia should have chosen in 2011” were:
Windows Phone – 31%
MeeGo – 20%
Android – 11%
Symbian – 1%
“Several of the above ones” – 38%
@Sander —
Oh dear. People missing a trick here. If carriers are indeed supporting Nokia that way, then the authority on carrier behaviour had to see that coming.
It is worse than that for him. Supposedly the problem is that the carriers are boycotting Microsoft and hate them. None of the carriers cares a whit about Nokia, they aren’t really supporting Nokia as much as they are supporting Microsoft. They care about:
a) Having a viable enterprise strategy
b) Stopping Apple
Microsoft having a track record on both fronts.
Interestingly Verizon was talking up Blackberry as the fourth ecosystem prior to the launch of the latest blackberries. Are they already hedging their bets on Microsoft as the third ecosystem? Given Nokia’s performance with Lumia?
I don’t know have inside information. But remember for an America RIM was up until a few years ago the 1st ecosystem. Two give two examples:
a) President Elect Obama’s second order was to have a custom BlackBerry made that met NSA security standards because he was unwilling to give up his BlackBerry smartphone. A $40m phone.
b) In 2008 I used to use the term “BlackBerry data” for 3G, i.e. in a sentence that could sound like “the iPhone also makes use of BlackBerry data”.
That’s the case with most of the industry. BlackBerry is sort of like the X-girlfriend trying to get back together. You’ve been through the breakup and the heartache, there was a lot you really loved about her. You do know the reasons you broke up were good ones, but she changed her ways… Then again as soon as you spend time with her, you can’t hope noticing there is something so comfortable and easy about falling into familiar patterns…
That’s what I suspect is going on with Verizon. Verizon would love love love to have BlackBerry be viable and have them as a major player again in the enterprise space. BlackBerry or Microsoft could both play that role but they have more faith in Microsoft. RIM wants their old job back and everyone knows it. No one else has done nearly as good since RIM got fired…
When I talk to Nokia, I get the impression they really don’t even understand what an enterprise phone means, and don’t want to learn. When I talk to Apple I get the impression they really do understand what an enterprise phone means and are desperately trying to find some way to square the circle to make something that would work as an enterprise phone but not be one. When I talk to Samsung about what an enterprise phone means they seem clueless but greedy, willing to do what it takes to learn. When I talk to BlackBerry I get the impression that they’ve thought about it more than I have and have great ideas.
What I’m not sure about is whether they can execute on their ideas. The trust isn’t there anymore.
“When AT&T made a deal with Apple, Verizon and Sprint asked for similar phone from Nokia. Nokia could not react to that request so those operators turned to Android manufacturers.”
in addition to:
“This sort of casualness and lack of urgency at Nokia is a deep deep character flaw in the company.”
Let’s for fun assume a moment Nokia had said yes. A different shaped variation of Nokia 5800 XPressmusic would have been ready Mid-2008 (assuming they started earlier than they did now). Resistive display + other shortcomings would have made it to be rejected by operators. Variation of N97 would have been a more probable device (mid-2009, probably), but we know how N97 ended up selling.
That means first really “iPhone competitor” phone would have been N8, which we could assume would have come out Q2 2010 in that setup. Three years.
I don’t believe Nokia could have got the UI rewritten before that and they would have needed the “experimental models” – i.e. 5800 & N97 to understand they can’t make it with the old stuff.
Assuming Nokia was asked to deliver iPhone clone, that path would probably have failed unless they were going to make that using another OS.
@anon —
I think it is a good test. Nokia switched over from the announcement of MeeGo to release in a year. One year, once it became clear that MeeGo was a dead end project so the politics stopped. Maemo devices were shipping in 2005. They could have started with those and released immediately. Since this is for the USA market, who cares about Symbian compatibility. So they just enhance Maemo with features.
I don’t think it really is that hard.
___
Even if we do assume they go with Symbian and a complete rewrite, I still don’t think it is that hard. How complex is a rewrite of Symbian really?
Mar 1999 Apple released the first version of OSX, at that time a server only product.
They get the desktop version working Mar 2001
By Mar 2002 they had complete discontinued selling OS9 desktop products at all.
By May 2002 they have the most advanced desktop OS around (OSX 10.2).
I think a reasonable aggressive timeline:
90 days spec published. OS team is hired and trained
1 yr to write the OS.
180 days into the OS project the hardware gets tooled for it. This take 6 mo.
6 mo to get the manufacturing process up and running. During this time OS bugs that are a problem for the hardware are resolved.
So from mid 2006 that’s 21 mo or 2Q2008. Almost 2 years before Android 2.1 (first good version) shipped.
@CD-Host
All this start from assumption of using Maemo (which was – as we know – denied the phone features due to internal politics). That option could have been possible if higher management ( board -1 level) would have given unconditional order to do so.
Symbian rewrite would have been in need of just as high overriding command.
@anon —
Absolutely it would have taken a very high order. Engineering and design are often a series of tradeoffs. Those tradeoffs, particular at the software level have semi-permant effects. Moreover those tradeoffs change the nature of the customer base which changes the nature of the company. It is not at all unreasonable that different middle managers would disagree strongly about these issues. Developing the core of the USA business around an incompatible Maemo means that either Nokia has to change its forward facing direction or it has maintain two entirely different product lines with two different customer bases using two different technologies, essentially two companies. Either way, there would have been huge resistance from more powerful entrenched interests like the Symbian team and like most of the people in hardware unless executive management made the Maemo team more powerful.
In general I believe that one of the things I think is lacking at Nokia is strong executive leadership setting priorities. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo had a history of working with US carriers. If he had personally attended the meetings and personally signed off on the broad direction including explicitly the minuses he was OK with… I think things would have been fine. By mid 2006 Nokia’s margins were in bad and declining. I think most employees would buy off on a high margin strategy if they knew that the minuses had been discussed and were acceptable.
Ooooo-kay, long comment coming:
The values. Central value was respect. When I joined Nokia, there was no space for “I’m not interested in your opinion since I know this better than you do” attitude. But also, there was trust. People were trusted and in return everyone wanted to be worth the trust. So let’s take live example from my career:
When I started in Nokia, we made changes to source code freely and tried things. We were allowed to do that but naturally customer had the final word in it. We were trusted to deliver quality product even if we try out new things – and we did.
So during that era, let’s say some new employee makes a mistake in his code and that is found crashing the SW in testing. What happened?
Error was brought up, examined, directed to proper team (probably initially already), to person in question eventually, and fixed. Then there was a very spontaneous moment of info sharing:
Dev1: “You know Anon, name your pointers ending with ‘Ptr’ so you can at glance tell if you are altering memory address instead of value.”
Dev2: “And it wouldn’t hurt to do a quick desk check with another developer if you do a change that big.”
Dev1: “Actually a good idea, I have a big change coming, could someone check it for me?”
Dev3: “Not me, I’ll be adding some ‘Ptr’s like Anon.”
I don’t know if I could re-create the atmosphere. It was very healthy and supportive environment, people were learning from mistakes so mistakes were OK. Had someone repeatedly done same mistake, he would have gotten to trouble, no doubt.
Okay this was about trust. But let’s also take it into account that it required the respect of others to trust they don’t intentionally f*ck up the code and that they’ll fix it ASAP if something goes wrong. And vice versa management definitely gained some respect for trusting us. 😉
<I was going to jump to 2005 at this point but I can’t do that without trying to track what happened, can I?>
So after a day of thinking, here’s what I ended up saying happened that lost the values: Nokia grew.
Now growth is terrific thing, but in case of Nokia it was too fast and uncontrolled. Around 2000-2003 people were saying (sarcastically) that you’ll get a job at Nokia if you can name at least three programming languages. Not true, but the fact that people were talking like that tells that the criteria had become loose in recruiting. One problem was too high percentage of newcomers, which makes it difficult to get new people grow into “the family”. However, more severe problem was the pace organization structure grew.
When I started, teamleaders were people who were trained and experienced in both people management and technology. (Too HW centric perhaps, but still). In 2011 the head of our site was a man who was one of the team leaders when I started. So team leaders of that time were talented people.
During growth years new teams were constantly formed and new teams needed new team leaders. In many cases programmers were promoted to that position. Now most talented coders try to avoid such positions.
Good thing, since we did not lose the most talented developers.
Bad thing, since people taking the team lead role were in worst case without any skills in people management and at the same time technologically less qualified than their team.
Of course there were successful promotions. But there were bad ones too. And throughout the Nokia history one fact remained. If you were promoted to some level, you were going to be at least on that level until the day you leave the company. (This unwritten practice I’ve heard got discontinued in Elop tenure.)
This – I believe – planted the seed of destruction. Now let’s jump to 2005 and I try to show how this contributes to it:
Well before 2005 – I estimated this to be around 2003 – higher management expressed their concern about code quality. The fast growth caused average competence and knowledge of a developer to be significantly less than 4-5 years earlier, so it was inevitable that people make more mistakes. That would not have mattered in original setup but now the teams were not having the “spontaneous info sharing” I described before. Same mistakes got done; if not twice by same developer, then by multiple developers who were not there to learn from the mistakes of others. And team leaders did not do the people management properly.
Of course the proper thing to do at this point is to take the developers in question (heck, take them all) to some semi-informal session where you show ways how people actually share their mistakes so everybody can learn from them. Couple that with better discipline what comes to team leaders and I think we are good to go back to work.
So what was done in reality? Higher management had too many levels of organization between them and employees. They could not make direct actions to that level so a “Quality Manager” was nominated.
This poor guy had nobody actually below him in management chain so he did not have a way to “manage” the developers. His performance is screened twice a year and he needs to show he had made a progress. And how do you measure the progress? By error counts? Those fluctuate by product development cycle and are really hard to compare in half-year scale unless significant change happen.
Quality Manager made a mandatory check-list that had to be followed before any change to code could be committed to version control, later coupled with (and I’m not kidding you) – mandatory, written inspection minutes from a desk check where another developer has checked your code for any mistakes made.
So in 2005 when I find from code that there is
if(*variable)
but it should be
if(variable &&
*variable )
and add the line I needed to get someone to my desk, make him/her check the code, fill in A4 size inspection document of the change, add it to commit to version control and then I can put in my change.
…or then I just asked a colleague if he thinks my change is small enough, he said “yes” and I copy-pasted old minutes to the tool so I don’t have to actually bother someone with this trivial thing. Which we often did. And that lost any benefit of the inspection process and caused just unnecessary work and huge amount of statistic that was in no way valid.
Did we fight against something as stupid as that? Of course we did. Our team leader made it clear he has gotten orders from his superior and is not going to challenge those. He could tell the practice was stupid but he was not confident enough of himself to challenge it. (high probability the next guy in line would have done the same).
So did we feel we were respected? No.
Did we feel we were trusted? No.
I don’t know if the constant work to keep the values alive would have made a difference there. But at least we can say the newborn management did not follow the values in their actions.
(perhaps another comment on the other values next…)
So other values were customer satisfaction, achievement and renewal.
I say we lost important part of customer satisfaction when error counts went up and doing changes became to troublesome to do tryouts of new things. (Actually, quite a lot of actions were taken to prevent any work that is not coming from direct product requirement.) In the process we lose the innovation, which relates strongly to “achievement”.
When I started in Nokia people were encouraged to attend to trainings in order to keep theis skills up to date.
When cost-savings came into picture, people were instructed not to enlist to any (non-free) trainings unless approved by line manager. I call it quits for renewal.
Once again I don’t say values got lost and caused all this, we can just as well say things got so bad and there was no way to hold the values in that environment.
But I feel the final nail to coffin of Nokia values was the Kallasvuo value update mentioned in the article. If you are said that we hold important values of “respect, customer satisfaction, achievement and renewal”, you have quite good image about what that means.
If you were said you need to align your daily work to values of “achieving together, engaging you, passion for innovation and very human”, you are lost unless you find the intranet page wherre those are explained – and it may be you are lost still.
None of us was able to even remember the word-pairs far less “align our daily work” to those.
I hope I have the energy to reflect the 20/70/10 to this:
I have been giving lots of thought on this. It would be easy to say that in optimal setup where the company has only good employees, you don’t need such. But we know that was not the case.
I’ve never been in “10” so I cannot say for sure how that has been. But I tried to remember the time that method was in use. Few problematic things:
1st: Very few other companies in this area had that practice. If you find the practice uncomfortable and are skilled enough to find job elsewhere, you might just do that.
2nd: The benefit of 20% varied. I remember asking for a raise one year: I was told they have had so many people promoted to team leaders that whole allowed quota is used for those people and anyone who did not apply for a team leader position will have to do with the salary they have.
AFAIK, none of those team leaders were in 20%!
Hence, none of people in the 20% was given raise.
So… What was the benefit?
3rd: The scale. We had group of teams where everybody had been in Nokia for years. Next similar group had significantly less skilled people.
20% of those were given exceptional rating even if they did worse work than the 10% of below target in our group. For a Finn that feels unjust, no matter how much it makes sense to compare your performance to people in the same level.
But the 4th (and this I feel is why the whole thing failed to motivate/increase performance): Remember how the things were getting? Innovation was difficult and troublesome practices were in use. Now let’s remember what I said: any work that was not coming from direct product requirement was automatically seen as “risk” by management and therefore out of things to do. When people have very strictly defined limits of what they are allowed to do and whatnot, there is very little ways to compare your performance. In the end we would have 10 people who have all been doing the same work. Two are supposed to be above target, one is supposed to be below it. There were always chances to get to 20% – you could do more than expected from you. But between those who did all that was expected from them, we frankly could not have known what is the difference between the one “below target” and the others “at target”.
Having more transparency on the criteria would have made sense. Having some better reward for 20% would have made sense. 20/70/10 has its point and I can see it working as a way to make sure people try to do their best and above, but I feel it was not executed properly in Nokia.
(Just my ¢2.)
Say for example the bonus for hitting top 20% was 3 year’s salary
In your dreams. 😉 Even later when there was a new system in place, the maximum multiplier of personal bonus was 250%. So bonus money multiplied by 100% comes to everyone unless you underperform and get (I think it was) 70%. Now if “normal” bonus (the 100% you get for just doing your work) was salary of 1-2 months, you could in ultimate case get bonus of 5 months salary, (i.e. 3 months extra compared to the others) minus extra heavy taxes (as you go over the expected income and progressive taxation makes its job). It is not really pushing you to take risks.
But what was required for 250%?
Basically you would have needed to do something extra which is significantly above your level (150% would mean doing work expected from next level compared to you, so 250% goes to two or more steps higher). Also, you need the “how” part, which means not only WHAT you did but HOW you did it needs to go that well beyond your expectations.
I know one guy who managed to hit 250 on “what”, I don’t know anyone who did 250 on “how”. Needless to say I don’t know a single person hitting 250 on both.
@anon —
As I mentioned 20/70/10 is tough to do in a European country at all and tougher in a country with an egalitarian ethic. It runs contrary to Finnish values about the nature of work. It is stressful for Americans, and they are brought up in a world where winner takes all is common and employees have few rights in the workplace. Almost everyone in America who works for a private company, say 95% are “at will” employees or contractors which means they can be fired at any time for any reason with or without cause. That would be unheard of in Europe.
To put this in perspective my sister works in a company that does that in many department. The spread is something like 30/50/20. The bonus for that top 30% is 250% of salary (which is kind of low) so they get the bonus and say 25% of the time also get promoted. The 50 don’t get anything or a token bonus (say 10% of salary). The bottom 20% are fired. Every year. People after a few years move out of those departments because they can’t handle the stress. But it insures the bank gets great people because they’ve had to survive 5 years of not ever being in the bottom 20%, i.e. only the top 1/3rd who make it through.
Moreover as you mentioned you can’t simultaneously be creating a controlled environment where employees are supposed to just do their job, and using that sort of system. It is like kicking a horse to make them go faster while pulling back on the reins to make them go slower.
In terms of transparent criteria, you are absolutely right. The criteria should be transparent and very simple. The Alec Baldwin video captures how this is supposed to work.
a) Criteria: selling as many of the housing units as possible. Simple count. Selling means getting the signature and the deposit check.
b) Reward for top: Cadillac (probably about 70% of a year’s salary) and remember that is for a good month
c) Punishment for bottom: you are fired
For a programmer you might have 3 teams implement a solution to a problem in 90 days. Team that creates the best solution the fastest mostly all get to be in the 20%. Team that does the worst job are mostly all in the 10%.
____
You also don’t keep this system in place forever. It is too stressful. It sounds like Nokia sort of 1/3rd implemented this system.
____
In terms of being only compared to your level. That’s standard. VPs don’t get compared to managers, manager don’t get compared to new programmers and programmers don’t get compared to cafeteria workers.
_____
In terms of the 20% not being tied to promotion. That’s bad. That shows the company is implementing two distinct criteria which is confusing for employees.
Very few other companies in this area had that practice. If you find the practice uncomfortable and are skilled enough to find job elsewhere, you might just do that.
That happens in America too. If you implement this system you want employees who aren’t highly aggressive to quit. That’s part of the goal. This was, I assume, intended to induce a major cultural shift in Nokia away from cautious practices and towards aggression and risk taking behavior. The problem is they implemented it so badly it produced the opposite result.
So after a day of thinking, here’s what I ended up saying happened that lost the values: Nokia grew.
In reading your comment about respect this is part of what I find frustrating about Nokia. Nokia is not the first company to have a problem of huge market growth requiring a massive scaling up of their developer resources too quickly for them to train new people. Hundreds of companies have gone through this in different industries. They didn’t have to face these issues alone, and since they were coming well after many of them they could have emulated the systems.
IBM as a point of fact sells a product specifically for this problem: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/rational/workbench/systems/capabilities/ . It is a software product specifically designed to allow a huge number of semi-trained low experience workers to work on software in a way that doesn’t corrupt the system. And it works because it establishes a way to manage and coordinate a huge bureaucracy of programmers, QA, technical architects, business analysts…. most of whom don’t have global understanding of the code base or the system. Borland (http://www.borland.com/products/starteam/) sells a similar solution. CA sells a similar suite (though I’ve never personally used it). I’ve implemented these solutions in companies, it works to solve this problem.
The reason people have to be so cautious about checkins is that there isn’t a series of controls between your checkin and what went out to customers. The QA process is absolutely needed but it shouldn’t be torturing developers there should be levels between what development is working on and what customers are using on a day to day basis. Once you create those levels you have people who like being in meetings deciding on goals, people who like managing lists of stuff doing the management, people who like to solve puzzles doing the QA and people who like coding doing the coding. They aren’t getting in each other’s way but rather coordinating nicely. You are getting assistance from QA rather than being stifled by QA. You don’t need to be filling in paperwork because the people who like paperwork did it already.
___
As for not training employees in a company that hopes to be on the technological cutting edge. That’s just plain stupid.
As an aside on “customer satisfaction”. In the mobile business what was meant by that, the customer (i.e. operators) or end users? It strikes me that Nokia was selling to both. How did they handle their natural conflicts of interest?
For example:
RIM in its hayday had terrible customer satisfaction in terms of treating the carriers badly. On the other hand they offered unique services which end users were willing to pay for and often got them to buy network services over and above mobility. So they brought in a lot of money, so they had low customer satisfaction, a very high end user satisfaction and generated huge revenues . Apple has followed a similar path, though even more so, though at the time they were growing AT&T needed the revenue badly. In Apple’s case much more money for the carriers, a genuinely serious threat to their entire business model and at the same time a much broader audience willing to pay more generating huge quantities of profits for the carriers.
Conversely Android is designed to compromise between the big 3: handset manufacturers, carriers and Google. Their goal is a high level of customer satisfaction often at the expense of a low level of end user satisfaction. Microsoft similarly since they moved to enterprise has generally aimed for customer satisfaction in terms of enterprise and manufacturer satisfaction (in terms of keeping their costs down) but at the expense of end user satisfaction.
Nokia doesn’t seem to me to have aimed for customer satisfaction. Many of the stupid arguments they had with their customers like not being willing to put the Verizon or AT&T logo on their phones seem to come from a place of being disinterested in customer satisfaction.
what was meant by that, the customer (i.e. operators) or end users? It strikes me that Nokia was selling to both. How did they handle their natural conflicts of interest?
In SW development customer was either a single product or SW release aiming for several products. So product requirements == customer requirements.
Then we get to “what does customer want”? That comes from conflict of operator and end-user wishes. I’d say there was clear shift from operator satisfaction towards end-user satisfaction when arriving towards 2010. We came to learn (a bit too late, unfortunately) that some of the operator requirements actually would have been very satisfactory to end-users at other side of the globe but seemed just silly if viewed through eyes of Finnish engineer.
As for not training employees in a company that hopes to be on the technological cutting edge. That’s just plain stupid.
Scott Adams never worked for Nokia. Honest.
@anon
Just ran into this quote, which I think is appropriate for our discussion about Nokia’s problems in the USA market:
“In the past, we had a one-size-fits-all mentality that worked well on a global basis but did not help us in this market,” Mr. Louison said. “That has changed now, and there is a recognition within the company that we have had to change our attitude about how we approach this market.” (From 2009)
I’d be curious what were the ideas rejected that would have played well over here?
_____
Anyway I’ve been reading http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/07/obituary-for-opk-wall-street-is-a-cruel-mistress-nokia-searching-for-ceo.html
Wow, are there are lot of inaccuracies in that post. I’m thinking maybe Tomi never really knew much about the industry he just was doing something few others were and some source is better than no source.
I believe you refer to this past article? I noticed this caption:
“An executive at a North American network operator, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly, summed it up: “The attitude at Nokia was basically: ‘Here is a phone. Do you want it?’ Nokia wouldn’t play by the rules here, and they have paid a price.””
Now in Finnish newspaper there was quote from Nokia executive that had been located in US. The article was published late 2010, after Elop had started. Apparently it is not in web so can’t link to it but he said he was basically shoutuing to Keilaniemi (Nokia HQ location) that “Don’t you get it?!? We need operator customization!!!” And answer was “go and sell what we have”. It was not clear whether that had happened prior to article above.
Stop the press! I run to this article fron August 2010 (prior to Elop as CEO):
http://www.digitoday.fi/mobiili/2010/08/09/nokia-etsii-kasvua-operaattorikannykoista/201010923/66
(sorry, it’s in Finnish. Here’s translation in brief:
Nokia seeks growth from operator phones
(Nokia Surge, tailored especially for AT&T)
Nokia executive said to Wall Street Journal that Nokia wants to design a smartphone for operator AT&T. This is part of strategy to gain more foothold in US via closer carrier relations.
Nokia sales & marketing executive Niklas Savander said Nokia is interested in making an AT&T exclusive smartphone when iPhone exclusive contract ends. Nokia did not jump to roll-out of first 4G phones with US operator Verizon as combining unfamiliar CDMA technology and 4G would have been too challenging, says Savander.
Nokia has acquired strong partners in US, including Microsoft, Qualcomm, Intel and Yahoo. Savander says it’s in the best interest of all companies that Nokia makes success in US.
Savander defends Nokia’s strategy to use MeeGo in its smartphones. In his words it would be difficult to differentiate using Android as so many manufacturers are already using it.
—-8<————
Few notes:
The article is not about Nokia Surge. Engadget reviewed it already in 2009 (article above was from 2010). Surge was seen as feature phone in Engadget review.
Apparently the deal here was the Nokia X7 deal, which was cancelled when phone was delayed enough many times for AT&T to lose interest.
Already then the line was that Android does not offer means of differentiation.
And already then they choose AT&T instead of Verizon. (I’ve heard the N9 CDMA variant was in development before Feb 11th, but there was no deal with Verizon to back it up. Apparently they planned to do the “Here is a phone. Do you want it?” strategy again.)
Apparently Google Translate knows better than us when it says “Savander of 4G and foreign CDMA technology combined in the same phone was too technically challenging.” It may just be the case. 😉
@anon —
Thanks for linking to the NYTimes article. I thought I had dropped the link and hadn’t.
That’s a good find on the Android doesn’t offer a means of differentiation. I think the economics of Android just keep getting worse and worse for Nokia. The Amazon / Android phone reports are coming from credible sources like Bloomberg and Citigroup. Amazon might very well go below cost to establish their place in the market. Google has already said their plans for the Nexus are devices roughly at cost going out years, they remain severely supply constrained. And Samsung’s costs, because of their internal pricing on parts are well below Nokia’s costs.
I’m glad they realized the problems even in 2010. It proves Android without a serious partnership from Google was not an option. This wasn’t just Elop it was Nokia, and they were absolutely 100% right not to go there. HTC BTW is
I’ve heard the N9 CDMA variant was in development before Feb 11th, but there was no deal with Verizon to back it up. Apparently they planned to do the “Here is a phone. Do you want it?” strategy again.
I’m not sure what was going on in Nokia. They must know the answer would be more or less “no”. What were they expecting Verizon to say, “Sure we just spent billions in the last 2 1/2 years building up the Android ecosystem for consumer devices so that there would be an alternative to Apple’s iOS and we’ve been remarkably successful. Sounds like a great time to jump ship and bet the business on a manufacturer whose CDMA support and thus commitment to our network is iffy”?
The best they could hope for, “yeah I guess we can carry a MeeGo device. We’ll throw the typical $300 subsidy which means the phone retails for $299 or $100 over the price of the 16g iPhone. We’ll do a little better, say $350 than that on your 64g model so you come in at $399 which ties the 64g iPhone. The only immediate must is you need to program in the Verizon account management app that ships with the phone, we want Verizon on the front, we want…. I’m sure we have a few hundred thousand Europeans on Verizon, plus people who like Nokia. So we can likely do 1/2 million.” And then Nokia turns them down on those few things and if Verizon even agreed to consider it an approved (subsidized phone at all) they would be lucky to get $250 but more likely they push the phone off to Verizon MVNOs and for FCC approval and throw $100 in wholesale subsidy at it at best. If people bring it on their retail network sure….
_____
I do like the quote from Nokia’s Executive Vice President Niklas Savander. I want to reverse the question though: has there ever been a single Nokia employee who works in the United States who believes that Nokia can sell phones they way they want to to in this market? Is there even a dispute? It is articles like that, that makes one realize how much Microsoft is greasing the skids for Nokia in terms of the great pricing they are getting on the Lumia.
Saunalahti (consumer half of operator Elisa) sent a letter to my daughter. Every subscription on their network will have unlimited data (no MB limit) for a fixed price of 2€/month. Mandatory. 2€ version has speed limit of 256 kbit/s. Faster data costs more.
This means that my daughter could now pay fixed price of 2,90€ / month and (assuming that 256 kbit/s is sufficient) use Whatsapp, Skype, Viber, email or whatever to contact us as often as she likes.
Interesting move from operator that is scared to death of those services, eh?
@CD-Host
Regarding rewriting Symbian, Nokia was not able to create Maemo in two years, ready for taking on the competition.
The problem with adding support for multiple touch and a different interaction model in Symbian was also a matter of getting the legacy code to move to the new model. It was a matter of this being a vote of inconfidence for the Maemo team. It was a vote of inconfidence against the Qt people.
All this is about making a choice, but nobody was making choices anymore. The politics got in the way, people kept talking and the opportunity disappeared.
@anon
That working environment sounds horrible. Development is done in teams, and teams only function if people in teams trust each other.
That 20/70/10 system might work in Europe too, in functions where employees are used to compete against each other, in situations such competition is also good for the company. But in situations where inter-employee competition hurts the company, why would anybody in his right mind implement such a system?
@Sander
I’m not sure if I quite follow the comment. As I said above with the Maemo project for North America they could have left legacy support behind. In 2007 Verizon wanted an interface capable of taking on Apple and a user experience like theirs. Apple didn’t even have applications yet.
Part of that was the theory of variable buttons that make an applications specific interface. All legacy Symbian apps are going to assume QWERTY.
Trying to move legacy Symbian over would have been not delivering what the carriers were asking for.
All this is about making a choice, but nobody was making choices anymore. The politics got in the way, people kept talking and the opportunity disappeared.
I agree with you. When I say 2 years I was talking what was possible with executive leadership. That’s what I was changing. Leave Nokia’s directionless leadership in place and you have exactly what did happen. You had people who could not cull the requirements down. The problem Elop was facing where by Feb 2011 he still didn’t have a viable path forward. Nokia was and still is not willing to make tough choices, I hate to quote the competition again, but Steve Jobs is famous for, “Design is not about saying yes, it is about saying no”.
Interesting video insertion at times doesn’t work. It isn’t passing that back out.
First video should start at 4:48
Second video should start at 1:51
Another story I want to share:
Nokia 7610 Supernova had ability to switch color theme by taking a photo with the camera. Use scenario: dress up, capture a photo of your clothes, phone now matches those. (Yes, aimed to women.)
Jolla presented similar feature in Sailfish OS.
Every S40 phone had color themes. What that feature did was:
-add one additional option to themes
-from that option, start camera, wait for photo.
-when photo received, calculate average, choose best matching color scheme and enable that.
No special needs (sans camera).
This should be schoolbook example of innovations that were expected from Nokia (preferably tens of these per year).
I once tried to count the products where this feature was in use. Guess how many I counted?
One.
Yes, since it was key selling point of 7610, other models (at that time) were apparently denied it (to prevent feature overlap of products) and it was not enabled later products either.
A feature of literal zero cost!!!
And I remember a product, cancelled before announcement, that only differed from other product by having “email received” – LED light. The other product (that remained) was not added to have the LED, they just cancelled the LED phone.
So when people said that those working in product programs were incapable of telling how their product differs from another, it is understandable.
@CD-Host
Nokia is not able to deliver a new OS from scratch in 2 years. Just look at their Maemo performance.
But then, I doubt there are many companies that are able to do so. iOS took longer and Apple has tons of experience, in particular things going wrong badly like with Taligent. Microsoft has tons of experience too, and WP 8 took how long?
Sander —
I was assuming executive leadership that leads in my 2 year estimate.
But if you want to use Microsoft and Apple as an example for
November 8, 2010 Windows Phone 7
October 29, 2012 Windows Phone 8
We don’t know the timeline for iOS but
September 7, 2005, Motorola releases ROKR and Steve Jobs thinks it sucks. Up until this point Apple’s strategy was to be a technology vendor to other handset manufacturers. So iPhone does not start any earlier than this.
September 2006 first reference to iOS in any product (iTunes)
January 9, 2007 iPhone prototypes
June 29, 2007 iPhone commercial release
Windows Desktop: a complete redesign of the GUI from scratch as well as massive changes to internals.
July 22, 2009 Windows 7
October 26, 2012 Windows 8
OS9 -> OSX is an even harder project:
March 16, 1999 Apple releases their first server product based on Darwin (this used the Platinum GUI). This is less far along that Nokia started since they already had GTK for Maemo.
March 24, 2001 Apple releases their first desktop version of OSX — it is buggy and slow
September 25, 2001 Apple releases OSX 10.1 much less buggy and slow
March 24, 2002 Apple stops selling OS9 based systems
August 24, 2002 Apple releases OSX 10.2 and is now clearly ahead of the competition
______
Yes, Nokia could have done it.
@CD-Host
Both Apple an Microsoft had lots more experience, including a couple of projects that went seriously wrong. Think 30 years compared to 10 years.
And even now you see in the changes that Apple is making in the API that iOS was very much not fully fledged. They are still changing their minds on all kinds of very important functionality. But they are very good at managing this, so it doesn’t show that much.
While Nokia was absymal on the management front.
No, not in two years. The should have had twenty years of experience, then maybe.
@Sander —
Nokia may not have had much experience in fast OS work, but TrollTech did. This doesn’t apply the Maemo scenerio but if we are talking MeeGo fast. Then they had done: KDE, MotoMagX, Opie, Qt embedded gui, Razor-qt, Unity. TrollTech should have been running the project regardless but yeah they had a lot of experience.
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As a brazilian guy living in Brazil, where iPhones were pretty expensive and rare until 2010, I think the main problem with Nokia was that it was really slow for improving software. But this is only part of the story. Carriers were even slower to bring new versions to their devices, so there were 2 layers of slowness.
N8 could really surpass the iPhone 4 “wow factor” in 2010 if it had more RAM, a slightly bigger screen and improved resolution (800×480 would be fine instead of 640×360). In the software side, a decent Facebook, Twitter and perhaps Flickr apps. That amazing 12MP camera with big 1/1.8″ sensor should be paired with a good sharing solution. This would mean making the Gallery app mainly a photo sharing app.
This is not something that I’m aware just now, these are issues that I was conscious of since I bought my N8 in late 2010, replacing my N95 8GB. After two years having a Galaxy Note, I’m back to Nokia with a Lumia 930. Windows Phone it’s not that much better than Belle, but it is pretty capable in the key points: sharing, screen resolution, good camera, etc. Hardware side, it’s basically a newer iteration of N9.
@Semiografo
If you take a Nokia N8 review from 2010, e.g. GSM Arena, you’ll notice you have nailed it: Low screen resolution, small screen, bad web browser, sharing options, no Twitter app (still in year 2015 there isn’t official Twitter app for Symbian and never has been).
They give all the praise there is for hardware but there are very few kind words for software.
Reading that GSM arena review makes me think N8 (with better screen, CPU and RAM) running on Android could’ve been viewed as a device giving iPhone a beating but as it stood, it was seen as a good phone but not exceptional.