What sealed Nokia's fate?

eh

"Opinion here: that WP7 is really remarkably good already. If it wasn't called Microsoft Windows Phone 7, and had instead originated with a plucky startup more people would be able to appreciate it better."

Opinion in my company where we have several win7 phone users is that it is rubbish. Missing major functions, drops calls, crashes all the time. They all want different phones, I am thankful I held off being one of the first wave to get the new OS.

"And Apple had a bundled data plan, so trying it all out was risk-free."

As long as you consider signing up for a 2 year contract at ~£50 per month which you were tied to even if you didn't like the phone, risk free.

Corrections

"But Nokia took so long bringing Qt to Symbian and Linux that the job was really finished even when Elop announced his revolution last Friday."

Well, Qt already worked on Linux, even embedded Linux, as the Greenphone demonstrated back when Trolltech was independent and trying to get phone vendors to give it a shot, so maybe you mean "Nokia-sponsored Linux". And what does "the job was really finished" mean in the context of the sentence? That they had already completed the work - largely true, as far as I know - or that it was doomed?

"Elop is correct in identifying Android as a mad sharkpool of manufacturers thrashing around in chase of a tiny profit, eating each other in the process. If he had to plump for an OS to license, of the two, WP was the better choice."

Yes, but unless the Android manufacturers do nothing to differentiate themselves at all (and market themselves to punters as "ANDROIDS IN UR FACE" just to wind them up), they'll always have something to offer that's different from the others. Motorola offers their MotoBlur stuff, for example. And doing the work on Android is going to be a lot easier than haggling with Microsoft all the time.

One word

Elop. He is just on a mission for Ballmer to save Microsofts mobile platform. Thats what happened to Nokia.

The REAL Unpopular Opinion

"Elop's problem is that historically you can't really take a large bureaucracy and expect a lean, mean fighting machine to emerge. You usually just get a smaller bureaucracy."

The is that Elop is not alone in his delusion. It is shared by executives in most (if not all) big companies around the world. It is this single delusion that is the reason they fail.

IMHO

IMHO, the point at which it all went irretrievably to the dogs was the point twelve months ago where they effectively killed Maemo and the N900 successor to tit around with Intel on MeeGo which produced exactly nothing. You can't spend a year doing nothing in this business.

If Nokia had kept up the momentum from when the N900 hit the streets 15 months ago with another more polished and faster Maemo device then it would have a chance.

Maemo was a skunkworks that wasn't allowed to reach its full potential. Perhaps it would be interesting to see another skunkworks project working with Android.. after all, all the other major WP7 shops also have Android devices.

It didn't need to end this way...

Agreed that the bureaucracy has been the problem at Nokia. And rather than fixing the bureaucracy, Elop has neutralized what competitive advantage Nokia had and destroyed the company in the space of a week.

Regardless of the technical merits of any of the systems, Symbian (and emerging Qt) had a larger "ecosystem" than WP7, and a good migration story to Meego. Qt developers could develop for Symbian, gaining access to the huge installed base, while being assured that their investment was future-proof thanks to the cross-platform nature of Qt.

Now nobody is going to invest in Qt development - so Symbian is finished. But there's no reason to invest in WP7 either, since there's no installed base. If the platform does take off in a year or two, then you can always hire developers then to port over your apps. In the meantime, the risk is too great.

What kind of an idiot kills off his existing platform while he's still a year away from having a successor?

[Posting anonymously because Nokia is a huge client of my company. They were nice people - sad to see them go.]

Elop will be eaten by sharks regardless

<<Elop is correct in identifying Android as a mad sharkpool of manufacturers thrashing around in chase of a tiny profit, eating each other in the process>>

So what? Elop is incorrect in thinking that's not the future Microsoft plans for WP7. Microsofts business model is to tax every end user, regardless of middlemen. They want a ubiquitous platform and will sell to anyone to achieve that. Either WP7 becomes a niche market or Nokia ends up in a different pool but fighting the same sharks, for the same eroding margins.

Elop recognises that smartphones are fast becoming a commodity item but doesn't want to play. You might get away with that exclusivity if you control your own IP. Nokia just abandoned its IP.

RIP Nokia

After the 6310 no Nokia mob appealed to me, oh sorry the 8800's toughness seemed good, but the price!!! Jewelry.

I've been watching other manufacturers catch up & overtake them, yet all I wanted was phone, text & camera ( 5 - 8 mb ) oh and of course style that appeals to me. My 7610 & 6310 were brilliant.

By by Nokia.

Nokia needed patience

This is a depressingly good analysis. I'm glad that it brings up the point that this was software in huge sales of a consumer product that was done in Europe. I agree that it appears that the bureaucracy of Nokia is what killed them. Jumping onto the sclerotic and buggy arms of Microsoft is not going to help in this case. I just believe that with a little more patience they could have pulled MeeGo off. They had no new device at MWC but a tablet or handset running MeeGo could have been possible and placated investors enough. The scenario that has unfolded is very much because of Elop and the fact that he is a North American who had come from Microsoft.

They had Qt which would have allowed them to take Symbian devs with them to MeeGo. It is all a great shame particularly when you see the tablets that Intel were demonstating at MWC. If Nokia had the patience that Apple had back in 1996 they could have looked back at this period as the start of something great with MeeGo.

the problem is precisely Microsoft not just the name

THE AUTHIR offer another Unpopular Opinion here: that WP7 is really remarkably good already. If it wasn't called Microsoft ,

the problem is precisely that it is Microsoft not just the name

Finnish culture compounded with RoW politics

Basically from working in Nokia I found Fins sometimes struggled to focus on actually getting something out the door. Some smart guy in Nokia named it as corporate attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. They spent so much time planning, replanning, redesigning, replanning again, re-specing, redesigning.. That in the end they never got anything finished. The N900 struggled to get out the door - that it did was a major positive - what did they do ? Instead of smoothing the rough edges and releasing new hardware they seemed to chuck everything in the bin and start again.

Eh?

Is this the Nokia ive suffered for the last decade?

Nokia's phones are shite. Simple. They have zero build quality, the firmware has bugs a 12 year old would by ashamed of and they exhasperate the issue by trying to manage a range of 183 phones while getting properly shafted by one.

The phone in my pocket? A Nokia! Till I upgrade to a BB in a few months. My current BB (email only) has outseen four shiteias easily.

The end

Bureaucracy?

In a large continental European company you say? It can't be. Yes us yanks have bad examples as well like M$ but after working for Infineon and watching the slow and predictable German bureaucracy self hara-kari I understand what the Nokia folks are going through.

Android sharks vs WP7 sharks

"Elop is correct in identifying Android as a mad sharkpool of manufacturers thrashing around in chase of a tiny profit, eating each other in the process. If he had to plump for an OS to license, of the two, WP was the better choice."

I'm not sure I follow you there. Did Nokia get exclusive rights to WP7? I didn't think so. How then (from a manufacturer's perspective) would WP7 be better (or even terribly different) than Android?

They deserve to...

I really love mobile phones and have been interested in them since their inception. To me it was always crazy that the screens were so small with most of the phone taken up by the keypad. Am I the ONLY person who used to wish for a screen that could temporarily show a keypad when needed? If I'm so clever why didn't I patent it, I hear you ask? Because I thought it was so f-in obvious! And lo, in 2005 (2 yrs before the iPhone), Motorola released the A1000 touch screen phone [the only reason I didn't buy it at the time was that it was on 3 and the "internet" was a walled garden affair]. BUT, I thought, WOW, this is what a phone should look like. I expected that 6-months later all the competitors would release a touch screen phone....., TWO YEARS LATER the iPhone arrived, with zero competition..., I thought I'd hold off because no doubt Nokia would unleash a technological marvel to trump the yesterdays tech in the iPhone....., by the 2nd iteration (iPhone 3G) I was tired of waiting,... and bought an iPhone 3G. It was still sometime later before Nokia finally released their resistive/plectrum toting offering (name?). This beggers the question:

WHAT THE HELL WERE NOKIA DOING IN THE INTERVENNG TIME?!

Oh, it's worse than that

Microsoft - a company run by boring middle-aged people with no vision - is now going to pair with Nokia, which is also run by boring middle-aged people with no vision.

Is Microsoft any less bureaucratic than Nokia? No, it isn't. When it comes to innovation, BallmerSoft is trailing along behind the rest of the industry like a rather dim dog chasing after a stick it has no hope of catching.

Let's not forget that WinPho7 is - natch - the 7th iteration of Mobile Windows. And under its achingly edgy UI, it's still a pile of steaming badger kidneys.

So what is to be done?

For Nokia, not much, because it's already too late.

For Nokia's engineers - I'd imagine there might be one or two who might be thinking about start-up funding for interesting new ideas that had no chance of being developed under the old regime.

Someone with venture capital to spare could do worse than hint that anyone with good ideas would be welcome to have a quiet word.

I can see that ten years from now, NokiSoft's carcasse will be rotting away under a pile of old PowerPoint slides - but there's a chance that a hundred start-ups could bloom in its place.

And considering that some of those start-ups could easily have world-class hardware *and* software experience, the predicted demise of the European software industry may be slightly premature.

I think

you're too easy on Nokia.

The writing has been on the wall for Symbian for years.

Nokia were locked into the development snowstorm of hordes of new incompatible handsets.

If one didn't work out, there be another in a few weeks.

They didn't seem to see iphone coming, they didn't seem to recognise the implications when it did, they didn't seem to have a strategy for a long time, then, and here's your point about bureaucracy - took too long to decide what their strategy would be, and ended up with something that tried to be a little bit a this an a little bit a that.

We've all been watching Nokia sink for years and expecting them to come up with something.

While it looked like it was going to be maemo and Qt, it turned out to be a partnership with Microsoft - who will rip out the IP they want and retire the rest..

Was this a shock? Who appointed Elop? Did they ask him where he'd worked before?

I love my Nokias and have never been tempted elsewhere but the reports I've seen about Winphone don't sound encouraging.

Too many models

Nokia's insistence that they make dozens and dozens of not-very-different models, many of them with precisely the same capabilities, is the nightmare avoided by Apple who make one chassis with a couple of variations available under the hood. Nokia's bills for design and tooling must be stratospheric. Why they never concentrated on getting a couple of forms spot on instead of going for the scatter-gun approach and making umpteen designs is a mystery to me and to many others. Fewer, better designers and a small group of the world's finest engineers working collaboratively would have produced better results, cut their overheads, improved their margins...

I still use Nokia, having discarded my 5800 XpressMusic for the POS that it is and reverted to my 6500 Slide, which is still a fine and reliable phone after all these years.

Does anybody else...

...think that Steve Ballmer is the spitting image of Peter Boyle, the actor (the monster in 'Young Frankenstein)?

Nokia's fate? Eh?

"Nokia and Symbian was the last of the European software business, it's gone overnight. That's depressing,"

Nokia != Symbian. Yes, Symbian is gone, and yes it's perhaps sad that as far as OSs is gone, there's no longer anything from Europe.

But Nokia are still around. The fact that they change a technology they use is no different to when Apple or Microsoft or anyone who else do this.

"For me, the most remarkable part of Nokia's decline"

Okay, I stopped reading there. Nokia are still the number one phone and smartphone company. (Even with Android making number one in one quarter, that's split across several companies - Nokia are still number one.)

There has also been no decline - their sales have rocketed. Yes, market share has fallen, but this is playing games with statistics - the market has massively increased, and more companies have entered the market. Would you rather be 60% in a tiny market, or 30% in a massive market?

If company A sells 1 million gadgets, company B sells 1000 gadgets. Then the next year, company A sells 10 million gadgets, company B sells 100000 gadgets, company C sells 100000 gadgets.

Company's A market share has fallen from 99.9% to 98%.

The next year, company A sells 20 million gadgets, companies B and C sell 1 million each. Company's A market share has fallen to 91%. A shocking decline! Yet, company A is not only number one, it is increasing it's sales - with sales increasing higher than B and C.

I'm sure that Apple's market share in tablets will decline, but will we hear doom and gloom about Apple? No, people will realise there it's inevitable as the market grows, and more competitors enter the market.

wrong number

Look at the money.

Company A sells 100 million phones, but only make couple of billion dollars before tax.

Company B sells 2 million phones, but makes 20 billion dollars after tax.

Which company you'd rather be? I know which one I'd choose.

Don't get me wrong, in no way I'd buy anything Apple, or recommend Apple to anyone I know. But even monkey living under rock knows Apple absolutely dominate smartphone + tablet market.

Nokia's fate is sealed because it went WP7 exclusive as its primary smartphone OS.

In the past, Nokia had a very long time to get things right, but amazingly nothing good ever came out. Nokia always has too many "different" phones, each may have a thing or two good, but there has never been a single phone that has all the good.

And everytime they have a half decent phone, they will throw it out of line, start over and release something worse. Just what the fuck they were thinking?

WP7 may be nice...

But as a business we're not going to touch it until it gets SQL Server CE.

WM 5 and 6.x have it, why not WP7?

All our in-house developed business apps require SQL Server CE, and until WP7 gets it we're looking towards Android instead.

Win CE

It's not true that WInCE was bad. It was a quite good "cut down" NT concept with little DOS/Win3.1/Win95 junk. The stupidity was trying to make it have the same Branding and especially GUI as Desktop Windows.

Zune was then the first decent GUI on Win CE for small graphical devices.

After the Communicator N9200 it seemed downhill for Nokia. They should have turned Maemo into Consumer Phone in 9 months. Instead they choked it and then nearly killed it merging with Intel's Moblin to give Meego. The QT debacle also was poor as the article points out. Another good idea strangled. They'd have done better simply outsourcing to Trolltech.

The open sourcing of Symbian was another great idea gone bad.

So the choice for Nokia was continue as is and asphyxiate or adopt the now "nearly good enough" WP7 and hope for W8 x86/ARM for Tablets.

It's probably too late. Unless there is a radical change in the way MS partnerships, maybe Nokia is doomed in 5 years as the Chinese eat the basic & Feature phone market and Android, RIM, HP and Apple eat the Smart phone/Tablet market.

MS too needs major change or the next version of Windows Phone could be the last.

We cheated on users

I worked in a "mobile software development" company from 2003 - 2005. I can tell you all the company did was selling payable SMS subscriptions for users to download wallpapers and ringtones. It was very close to being a scam, users would pay around £10 a month, and 98% of them wouldn't download anything because they didn't even know they were subscribed.

Worst of all - telcos would get immediate 50% cut, for doing practically nothing. We would operate on thin margins, and original content developers would get 10% of the market price. That's 10% only to the ringtone creator, artist or a J2ME developer.

Further, any REAL app or game was impossible because Nokia and other OEM's were not giving anything useful, extremely difficult and fragmented development, so all you needed was remake same old games with slightly different skin, advertise it as something new and lure users into monthly subscription.

Then iPhone came along and I purchased a Guitar Tuner app with cord library for £3, no monthly subscription and the developer got 70%.

Nuff said.

Me and my Nokia

I'm a Nokia user. I have three of 'em. One is a mobile phone. It's black with a kind of gold finish trim that's still under its protective wrapping. It has a small greenish screen on which black text appears. I have no idea what its model number is. Perhaps a 9-something-something. I bought it new as a treat for myself in April 2003. It's been in constant use ever since.

It makes and receives phone calls. If I can be arsed, it sends text messages. It also receives text messages. It runs on standby for up to 10 days. It powers up from flat empty to full steam in 45 minutes. It has never let me down and it has been all over the world.

My other two Nokias are a matched pair. They're Nokia wellington boots. Nokia made boots before it ever made phones. My Nokia boots are green with black trim and the word Nokia emblazoned on them. I bought them in 1983. I wear them in the garden. They are still as good in 2011 as they were in 1983. In December's ice and snow, my Nokias kept me on the move when all about me, people were falling down. They are the best mobiles around.

My Nokia boots will -- in the eys of some -- be technologically flawed because although they are a stable platform, they don't make phone calls. But that doesn't bother me because I have my shiny black and gold wotsit.

So then. Before all the experts on here finish Finnish burying, could they kindly note:

1) A lot of people use phones for phone calls and aren't remotely interested in pockets stuffed full of apples, blackberries, oranges, or whatever the hell else is out there;

2) Nokia's expertise in making wellington boots was and remains far greater than Apple, Microsoft, Sony and Samsung put together. It is perfectly possible for Nokia to return to its core business and make enormous profits.

I hope that's set the record straight.

PS: I have been trying to figure out how much my Nokia boots have saved me in 28 years of wear. Lesser boots fail rapidly, so it must be more than a hundred quid I've saved. I've also tried, though failed, to calculate what I've saved by never needing to buy another mobile phone since 2003. The black-and-gold Nokia cost me £205. Since then there've been almost eight years of mobile communication (talk-speak, message-speak) at an annual contract rate of £00.00. Must be £hundredss? £thousands??

Web OS anyone?

Been following Nokiasoft story for a while. I have a genuine question that I don't know the answer to. Forgive me if I sound thick... why didn't they think about going with hp and web os? Come to think of it, why didn't they buy palm back in the day?

Yup...

"Also, WP7 is remarkably good at not making you poke through fourteen levels of shit to find out what you want."

Very true. Most V1.0 release of MS product are that simple. Then come the patches, upgrades, service packs and bloatware that add features few want, but no one can remove.

That's OK though because WP8 will be more secure, have more user friendly features and be less buggy. At least that has been the MS mantra for the last 25 years. ;-)

The finish of the Finnish?

[I thought that was rather a good title but I am awfully self-centric]

W7 on the Nok may be a short term necessity convenient to both parties.

And who knows?

Maybe W9 for mobile devices might give the Nok exactly what it wants without too heavy R&D costs?

And by then other hardware/software/firmware developments might make for re-energising the Nok with W7 evolutions having to compete?

Breaking Wind

Can anyone explain why it is it that most of Joe and Jo public love Apple - while most media writers are gagging for them to fail...???

Finnish culture compounded with RoW politics

Nokia had a system for end user testing called TRUE whereby you got a phone to use and you entered bugs into a database. It worked on the principle of motivation by gifts - if you got into the top 10 reporters you got free stuff - or at the end you got to keep the phone. You got points based on whether bugs were accepted or already known.. Yada yada. However certain POS employees realised by dumping blocks of errors they would still get a point for each. Hence the databases got stuffed with utterly retarded reports such as 'phone does not make call' - unrepeatable problems. Couple that with the fact that nokias phone home fault system was utterly useless in helping symbian guys find the bugs within that crappy OS you had a receipe for fail.

Most of the last symbian phones (N95 - aalto, N96, N97 - ivalo) where known to be real bug bags when finally released to the market.. But in Nokia people had literially lost all hope of decent phones - so the 'good enough' mentality meant 'just get it out so we can move on with our lives'

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

The thing that puzzles me is that smartphone hardware is largely converging - there's not really much in it between different hardware manufacturers. Generally it's now the software and supporting services that make or break a device. It seems that Nokia has thrown away the ability to control the parts of their product that count.

"Sequences shortened"

To me. an old bloke with longsight an big shaky fingers, this is what gives me iphobia,apart from an 18 month contract with 3 (foreign) or O2 (foreign) at a price which assumes that I want to multitask whilst driving, shopping or sleeping

I regard a mobile phone as an excellent portable device for calling Emergency, Home or a taxi.For OS and UI I have Desktops, Laptops.Netbooks and Media Centres,with achoice of Unix .Linux. Windows, Android, Chrome and what have you.

But, none of this matters any more because Goldman sacks the World.