Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

A lot of people attribute the Windows Phone switch as the end of Nokia but that would only be true if people did not like Windows Phone. On the contrary, Windows phones were loved by their users. And I say this as a person who used Symbian Belle, then Meego (I had the piano white Nokia N9!) and then Windows Phone.

Meego was fantastic, but Windows Phone was fantastic as well. And arguably it had more reach: modern Windows OS was working on mobile phones, tablets, wearables, Xbox and even AR glasses like HoloLens. A developer's dream, you write once and it works on every form factor which has Windows. You could even plug your Windows phone to a docking station and you would have a Windows desktop!

What killed Nokia was being late to the game, and what killed Windows Phone was first the lack of apps (which was getting better but very slowly) and Satya not being happy with low margins and slow progress, compared to Azure.

“This is yet another competitor launching a great product. But we had no doubt that, if it’s successful, we would do the same. We will launch similar products.”

In November 2008, Nokia released the 5800 Xpress Music, a year and a half after Apple had launched its iPhone.

Weird article, between those two paragraphs lies the MOST IMPORTANT period of the whole story. It was Nokia scrambling to adapt to the change in the market.

Their strategic move was to beat the iPhone with a Smartphone OS, expanding their (huge) existing ecosystem to a touch device.

But for that (Project Tube), Nokia had to upgrade their Series60 OS to include Touch-support while preserving backwards compatibility. They had severe troubles on all layers, because touch requires a low-latency feedback-architecture and Series60 was not designed for this.

For quite some time, all their weight was put into that device, they even went ahead and signed a sponsoring deal with WB to have the device featured in Batman The Dark Knight, a movie which finally ended up in cinemas BEFORE the product was even launched.

What a badly written article. How could you leave out the N900 and the development history that came before it? If it wasn't for Elop and Microsoft, Nokia could have dominated and we wouldn't be stuck with mostly proprietary phones.

We're still waiting to solve that problem...

From the article:

"Elop oversaw the 2011 launch of a Linux-based smartphone, the Nokia N9. The N9 ran on a distribution of Linux called MeeGo. Reviewers at the time praised the new smartphone direction the Finnish phone maker had taken. 'Possibly the most beautiful phone ever made,' wrote one reviewer about the N9 for Engadget.

But the N9’s accolades did not ultimately carry the day. Nokia announced its Lumia line of phones the same year—a direct pivot away from MeeGo toward the Windows Phone. It would be the last major strategic turn Nokia would take as a cellphone manufacturer. From this point forward, a succession of C-suite decisions all but sealed the fate of Nokia’s iconic line of phones."

We were so close to having literal plain Linux phones. Sad to me. I wonder where this could have gone without Microsoft.

Nokia had touch screen built into symbianOS from the start. All the API’s were there as was the UI handling. The Psion 5 was based on an earlier version of the same code and it was developed in 1995 or there abouts. In 2002/2003 much worked was done producing a touch based UI (I worked on a few of the apps). We had a customisable Home Screen with drag&drop icons. Multitasking with inter app communication.

Sadly, the hardware wasn’t quite up to it and they were silently dropped instead of working on improving.

The predecessor of the N9, the Nokia N900, with Maemo, is not even mentioned in the article, and it caused a buzz at least in the circles I were back then. And it had one of the best physical keyboards for a smartphone back then.

The N9 was pretty good, usability, design, hardware, but the apps started to weight, and it become a race between Android and iOS.

There was just one smartphone with Maemo (N900) and just one with Meego (N9). More models, letting other vendors to use them, android app compatibility compatibility and not having Elop could had saved Nokia. Now what we have is Sailfish as a descendent of them.

They really didn't have a chance. Technology had moved past them. The capacitive touch screen, multi-touch, fast mobile processors and the move to the web meant that mobile phones were becoming platforms. And Nokia wasn't a platforms business. To paraphrase Bill Gates, a platform requires that the economic value to the other participants exceeds that of the value to the platform. Nokia was never like that. In aggregate the organization had a fragmentation of SDKs, no single device domination, and didn't really value the other participants on their ecosystem.

Apple (or Steve Jobs) understood the value of the web (one of the crucial 3 pieces of the iPhone when it debuted) as a platform - though Apple pivoted over time to have iOS and the App Store itself.

That's just how organizations work. No one inside Nokia could realistically have acquired the power to make the decision in time. The company wasn't shaped to do this. They were doomed as soon as the tech caught up.

My recollection of the mid-2000s is that Nokia simply had no idea how to be a platform provider. They had 2 or 3 main operating systems, but within each of those there were numerous different versions. Most handsets didn't get updated, so you had to download a zillion different SDKs just to do basic testing.

And the bugs... one whopper in particular that I remember was redirect after POST didn't work.

The death knell was Elop announcing that Nokia would be exclusively Windows, at a time when Windows had low single-digit market share and where this exclusivity was a one-way street. Other major manufacturers continued to ship Windows phones, and they did that in parallel to their main Android line.

I never understood what the end game here was. If they had wanted market dominance based on someone else's OS, they could have just used the well-established Android. There was little to gain (their efforts of promoting Windows Phone would have also helped the competition's offerings) and all to lose.

I think the biggest mistake was adopting Windows as their OS. It negated any technical advantages they could have over Android.

And may be a some other context. Steve Jobs initially only wanted 1% of the mobile phone market.

Nokia wasn't at all worried, they still have a few Smartphone 1.0 design ready to deploy. Remember iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. There were plenty of them before hand. Windows Mobile from OEM of HTC , Palm, Sony Ericsson P900s etc. By the time they realise it was a completely different genre and game it was too late.

Incidentally I remember one of the reason during before and after Microsoft acquisition of Nokia was that there are No apps on the platform. People won't buy it.

But I have been thinking for a long time if this is still true. That was a time when new Apps appears and things were changing fast. People even have different Instant messengers. ( To this day I still don't understand why MSN messenger was not on iPhone. ) But now all the Apps are largely settled. There are a few Social Media Apps, Messenger Apps, Banking Apps which I consider essential to every day users and cover 80 - 90% of their usage. Web Technology, 18 years after Steve Jobs announcing HTML 5 for Apps is finally getting close to the original promise.

Is a third major platform for Smartphone really out of the realms of possibilities?

Innovator's Dilemma strikes again.

then add to that an incompetent management. double whammy.

Very nostalgic for the Nokia times, before the "bicycles for our minds" came along.

There is a Korean manhwa/manga called Real Man or A Man's Man. It’s about a guy who worked in the mobile phone company. He goes back in time and starts developing software and hardware phone designs before the companies who originally made them do.

The picture of the guy with his handdrawn "dream phone" is quite charming. Sort of a Homerphone, but it is drawn well.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/man-in-a-village-hol...

"Sir, please, a QWERTY keyboard would be so much -"

"No."

Homerphone reference: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WPc-VEqBPHI

> Elop oversaw the 2011 launch of a Linux-based smartphone, the Nokia N9. [...] But the N9’s accolades did not ultimately carry the day. Nokia announced its Lumia line of phones the same year—a direct pivot away from MeeGo toward the Windows Phone.

This seems a little misleading. From what I remember, and from what Wikipedia says, Elop had already announced the deal with Microsoft long before announcing the N9, so Nokia was in essence already dead when it launched.

They (WP and Lumia) would've been a strong 3rd player if the right investments and care were given since MS acquisition but alas, I think I should've noticed the writing on the wall for all of MS' consumer business (Xbox, being the latest!) from the moment Satya stepped in and Nokia got cut off.

Satya was great for businesses and MS' investors, terrible for consumers.

I was working for a Nokia subsidiary called HERE maps at the time this was happening. All I can say is MeeGo was a great OS and would have competed really well with iOS. They released one phone with it called the N9 in some smaller countries and then discontinued that year in favor of Windows.

The heart of MeeGo continues on in Sailfish OS created by Jolla. They are again releasing a phone in Europe. I wish they released it in the US.

Those were the days. Former Nokia (N9 Meego) employees formed Jolla and it is still alive. They nowadays sell tens of thousands of Linux phones, so not taking over the phone market.

I still remember the Lumia 920 as the best phone I ever used.

Snappy, well done OS, intuitive, great camera.

What Microsoft mobile lacked, despite having a higher market share than iOS at some point was app support.

Developers and companies pretended it did not exist.

Banks, your local transport, whatever.

I think that was what killed windows mobile phone.

Any other just doesn't hold: os and hardware were very, very good.

IMHO they should cosnider re-releasing the 3310. It might sell similar to vinyl. Maybe update the games section to have some more games.

Why do people assume that MeeGo would have been a big success?

> In September 2008, the first Android phone went on sale—the HTC Dream,

Excursion: HTC would later sell the HTC HD2 with WindowsMobile (a predecessor of WindowsPhone), which could be "dual-booted" with Android ROMs from the XDA-developers forum or similar.

The 2009 HTC HD2 was basically the modern glass slab, except for a discrete bottom line of physical buttons, which hadn't yet been eaten by software at the time.