This is quite possibly one of the most beautiful articles you’ll ever read about Nokia’s demise. Five years ago, in 2008, a journalist wrote a letter to Nokia, on his own behalf, as a regular person (so not as a journalist). In it, he detailed how Nokia phones used to be easy to use by everyone. However, the Nokia E51 he was using now was a complete mess, insanely hard to use. He ended the letter with prescient words: “This will cause problems for Nokia”.
The letter made its way to Nokia, and apparently caused waves inside the company, up to the highest levels. Company executives wanted to explain the company’s strategy to him, and eventually, one executive even met up with him on a personal note. After first parroting the usual corporate speak, the executive eventually broke.
“I agree completely with everything that you wrote in your letter and what you have said now.”
I was astounded.
“I completely agree with you and I want to apologise on behalf of Nokia for producing a bad telephone for you.”
Then he started to tell about how a top-secret project had been launched at Nokia, in which a completely new operating system was being designed. It would result in new kinds of telephones. They would be easy to use and they would change everything.
I met the director again a few years later.
Then it turns out that he had been talking about the Meego. However, the project moved forward slowly, and finally the new CEO Stephen Elop shelved it completely.
This same Nokia executive took one of the many original iPhones Nokia bought home right after it was released.
As an experiment, he gave the telephone to his daughter, and she learned to use it immediately.
In the evening as the parents were going to bed, the drowsy four-year-old appeared at their bedroom door with a question: “Can I take that magic telephone and put it under my pillow tonight?”
That was the moment when the Nokia executive understood that his company was in trouble.
Heart-breaking.
So the N9 comes out in limited quantity and is rated BETTER than the iPhone, and there is the N950 with a Qwerty slide-out but limited to developers, and both are killed. They had the existing Ovi app store and the rest including fairly easy development frameworks. These were replaced with .. nothing for several months while the not-upgradable-to-win-8 first Lumias were engineered, which bombed.
Exactly as planned and Elop gets a $25M bonus for the assassination.
Nokia isn’t dead. Let it go man.
No, it isn’t. But it is pretty much gutted. Nokia came to power and prominence through its mobile phones, starting all the way with the luggable NMT-ones, and now that they sold that part of their business to Microsoft there’s very little anything of interest left, there’s little to no charisma or anything to identify them as a company left. It’s disheartening.
The existence of the N9 that was so damnably good doesn’t help the situation at all; it’s just a bitter reminder of what could’ve been.
Nokia has no debt, 10 billion dollars, and own a complete stake in a profitable venture. Nokia is dead by imaginary OSAlert voodoo logic.
I never claimed them to be dead.
I don’t think I said you did, but you did go off on a tangent about how they’re “gutted” (despite being flush with cash, have a 10 year patent license, and an imperviousness to patent counter suits) and something as similarly irrelevant about the N9 as the parent poster.
N9, MeeGo, and Symbian are dead. The board, the CEO, and the company have moved on. Jolla exists because Nokia was generous enough to accelerate it via their Bridge program. They’re happy. Let it go from Nokia’s perspective. I don’t see how else they could’ve handled this to please some of the obsessive types here short of killing themselves on a bad bet.
This ridiculous love affair some of you have would probably be better spent advocating for Jolla which by all accounts is excellent, rather than lamenting a future that never was and never will be.
The N9 reviewed well, got awards, and was a nice piece of kit, but that does not an ecosystem make.
The replacement hasn’t achieved much of an ecosystem as well. Just a bunch of “apps” which are comparable with a random Android fart-app regarding quality and usefulness. And nobody seems to care, not even its creator.
I still look at Android 2.3 phones and sigh in envy. And looking at what Paul Thurrott “leaked” about 8.1, it won’t be getting that much better in a meaningful way.
Can it make phones that are different from Samsung, HTC, LG etc?
Because I thought that Nokia just sold the part of Nokia that makes it Nokia. They already destroyed the software side of Nokia.
And Nokia just bought the other half of NSN. Nokia has never been purely about phones. They’re not HTC. Which is why they fared better than say BBRY, they are not a one trick pony.
Why do I have to hold your hand through basic shit?
As former employee, Nokia is no longer Nokia.
Of course Nokia is no longer the Nokia you worked for at the time you worked for them, but trying to attribute a singular identity to a company that has had many doesn’t make sense, former employee or not.
This equivocation with death or even something remotely negative is disgusting and should be beneath others here.
I shouldn’t really expect more from card carrying members of the always wrong club though.
From the perspective of Nokia as a company, I can understand your point of view. Current events may turn out to be very positive for them. However, most people’s involvement is more complex than this.
For example, MeeGo/Meamo was very promising. A lot of people put a lot of effort into contributing to the community/ecosystem. Even just owning a device involves considerable personal investment (investment which, given Nokia’s stature, looked like a safe bet).
The fact that this is now all gone is negative for many people, even if it’s now very much in the past.
Edit: typo.
Edited 2013-10-10 12:25 UTC
LOL, typical…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2nM55ko_ys
Edited 2013-10-10 16:47 UTC
Sorry if I hurt your feelings. Actually, no I’m not.
Another Nelson p-p-projection combo! LOL
You crack me up.
Someone’s excited they took psychology class in high school.
I can assure you my higschool curriculum did not include psychology classes. Your projection may be leaking again, perhaps?
In any case, just pointing out that horse of yours ain’t that high. It’s more of a pony really…
You’re insight consists of a noun, a verb, and “projection”.
Its a quasi intelligent equivalent of “I know you are but what am I”. Just saying.
And yet, that tiny bit of insight still manages to outdo your Pavlovian MS-Nokia PR claptrap.
Acknowledging that you do in fact only present a tiny bit of insight is probably a positive development for you.
I’m glad you also acknowledged what I said hit home close enough to bring out one of your alt accounts to this fray.
Oh, my what a day of positive developments!
I think you confuse my alt account with your imaginary friend. They both don’t exist.
Yes Nelson, you are correct. In reality, Nokia still exists as a company who manufactured electronic products. Previously, we have been using a Nokia network router provided by our ISP.
What you Nelson failed to realized is that in the context of being a Smartphone manufacturer, Nokia failed, and that is what we are talking about in this thread I believe. I am not talking about Nokia’s profitability, my argument in this post is Nokia no longer exists as a Smartphone manufacturer in the meantime, I don’t know if years ahead they can start developing a Smartphone if they want? But as of today, they failed, and failed miserably.
Software side of Nokia was destroying itself whenever it released smth.
At worst, it’s as dead as Palm is. At best, it’s as alive as Palm is.
It’s time for you to let go.
And you base the palm comparison on what exactly? This reduction to absurdity is beneath you, I’m sure you can think critically.
I think BBRY is more analogous to Palm given who they’re being sold to, the amount of influence they’d carry in their parent company, and the fact that the entire company has been sold, not just one division which didn’t make up a majority of the company any way.
But by all means, please elucidate on how a company which has no parallels to what Palm has done is just as dead or alive as Palm.
Both were shitty phones, that nobody wanted. You make it sound like these would have saved Nokia but were deliberately held back to kill the company… your hatred of microsoft makes you delusional.
Oh, really? Based on… what, exactly? Go ahead, try and google “Nokia N9 review” and you’ll see plenty of praise for it and lots of people wanting it. Even my lil’ sis’ who is definitely not a geek or nerd owns one and she totally loves it.
I’d say there’s someone here who is delusional and it certainly isn’t me or the OP.
Like Meego had the programming infrastructure and future support that Windows Phone 8 has. It’s not even a contest when you look at the future roadmaps and even the current programming models. Now you get the same great Nokia hardware with an OS that has a future.
And none of that has nothing to do with what you said. You claimed the phones were shitty and no one wanted them and even a surface scratch on Google results refutes your claim completely. The lack of future support and the likes was rather obvious, considering that Elop had already announced that there won’t be any more development on MeeGo, and yet the phone still managed to be highly sought-after!
As for your “It’s not even a contest when you look at the future roadmaps and even the current programming models.” — well, of course. MeeGo was discontinued, so obviously there were no future roadmaps or anything! You’re basically saying that WP8 is superior to MeeGo because it wasn’t discontinued — well, no shit Sherlock.
Edited 2013-10-10 03:35 UTC
It was cancelled because it was not good enough. It’s extremely difficult to just start up a new OS with one company an build an ecosystem out of it, especially going up against the iPhone and Android.
I suspect that Elop (correctly) saw this and axed it because no matter how good the product was, he probably figured that Nokia did not have the muscle to single-handedly bring it to market and get people on board. Blackberry tried this approach and where did it get them?
Nokia was way behind at this point and since Elop came from Microsoft, he probably realized that MS had the cash and the clout to get behind Nokia with real resources. Obviously iOS was not available to Nokia, and if Elop chose to go with Android, there would no additional resources and it would not differentiate Nokia’s products enough from the likes of Samsung, which would eat their lunch on a head to head Android battle. Not to mention all of the other Android based phone manufacturers are operating on little or no margins and they are not making money. They are too concerned about keeping things cheap than marketing real value.
It all boils down to business dollars and sense, and strategy. Companies can’t just make shit because nerds think it might be cool. In real terms Microsoft’s involvement realistically saved Nokia’s handset business.
How is Nokia gutted? They still make great hardware.
The N950…flip out hardware keyboards are so ‘2000
Edited 2013-10-10 03:53 UTC
Yeah, sure. Developers loved it, reviewers loved it, users loved it, but nooo, it wasn’t good enough.
There’s nothing original to them anymore and they can’t even make any hardware that Microsoft doesn’t tell them to.
And speaking out loud is so tens of thousands of year ago — and yet it still manages to be plenty useful.
YOU ARE MISSING THE POINT. It may be good but you can’t build a business off of it for external reasons.
You don’t know that. Mostly all of the talent at Nokia is still in place working on the next cycle of phones. Nokia has a 6″ model coming out and I want it! I just bought my 925 a month ago!
If anyone I saw flipped that keyboard out I would be like…damn this guy is a dinosaur. And I myself am old. LOL
Edited 2013-10-10 04:06 UTC
Hm. I’m seeing Jolla doing exactly that.
Microsoft does dictate the hardware specs.
That just shows ignorance on your part, nothing more. Actual hardware keyboards are faster to type on and for many people much more comfortable than on-screen keyboards, plus they don’t require you to stare at the screen to type. Your insistence on the concept of H/W keyboards being inferior because the concept is old is nothing more than elitism.
What is Jolla? Can I buy it from AT&T? LOL
They dictate base hardware specs required for the OS, but the also accommodate the OEMs, and I am sure they are accommodating Nokia designers.
Ignorance? Predictive and Swype-type keyboards SMOKE hardware keyboards. They just raise hardware costs for no advantage. If they were that good then users would be demanding them on more devices. Steve Ballmer used to say that the iPhone would not sell to business users because it did not have a mechanical keyboard…boy was he wrong on that one! Elitism…that’s a good one. I don’t call you names.
Edited 2013-10-10 04:16 UTC
Okay, I’ve had my dose of stupid for the day.
The answer is no. You can preorder it from one country.
You could preorder it from all over the world, but it went so well they sold out. They had to create a new batch just for Finland.
So you can currently only preorder it from one country, and they sold so well (100,000 I believe was your figure, lets be charitable and give them that) that they stopped selling it so well in other countries?
I think its the same expectation management PR game every other country on the planet plays with preorders, yet you don’t call them out on it.
This is a tech startup infused with Nokia money from an accelerator they ran that is on very, very razor thin line.
But Elop is still terrible and killed MeeGo (despite seeding the startup money to get the ball rolling on its spiritual successor).
100,000 sold phone would be plenty into the triple digit % growth…
Haha yeah, according to Nelson, Jolla will see… Uh, infinite growth? From zero to 100000 units – that’s insane! A few more quarters of that kind of growth and they’ll surpass Samsung!
I have yet to encounter any single real person (so not an internet commenter with an agenda) who actually *likes* on-screen keyboards. People just tolerate them.
The world at large prefers them to physical keyboards. They like them enough to spend on them rather than phones with physical keyboards. So sayeth the market forces over the last decade.
I know what Jolla is but…what’s AT&T? And more importantly, I don’t care.
You know…AT&T is the company that is selling all of those Lumia 1020’s!
http://bgr.com/2013/09/05/galaxy-s4-lumia-1020-sales/
Edited 2013-10-10 15:34 UTC
I’m guessing you don’t regularly setup EMail accounts on other people’s phones, entering complex usernames, passwords, server hostnames, etc? With that kind of work, I often end up setting up accounts on my phone first for testing (a Pre3, a vertical slider) and I’m always struck by how much longer it takes to accomplish the same thing on touchscreen-only devices.
Virtual keyboards are OK for quick things like entering URLs or sending short text messages, but they’re vastly inferior for entering large amounts of text. Larger screens don’t help, they just change the nature of the problem – on my Xoom, the virtual keyboard is large enough to touch type on, but that’s not possible without physical keys (at least for me). And if anything, I find extended typing with it produces more hand/wrist strain than on touchscreen phones, because tablets are too big to thumb-type on (beyond 7″ IME), so I have to “hover” over the keys instead of just resting my fingers on the home row.
Even among the people I know who frequently & enthusiastically proclaim mobile devices as “the future” (some to the point of having outright replaced their laptops with iPads), they still all have Bluetooth keyboards for any kind of serious text entry.
The fact that touch-only devices sell well does not, by any means, prove that people buy those devices because they actively prefer virtual keyboards – without specific data indicating such, it’s equally likely that people merely tolerate virtual keyboards, because the other advantages of those devices are compelling enough to offset the disadvantages (and because they’re not doing much text entry with them).
By the same token, the fact that consumers generally aren’t clamoring for phones with physical keyboards doesn’t mean that there’s no merit to or market for such devices. For one, there’s the basic chicken-and-the-egg problem: there aren’t many current phones available with physical keyboards, so most people won’t have used one, and they’ll be less likely to buy something that’s unfamiliar when doing their next phone upgrade… (ad infinitum). In the same way that, before netbooks and ultrabooks, most consumers bought laptops that were big and heavy – not necessarily because they preferred them, but because big & heavy accounted for most of what the major OEMs were selling, so most consumers didn’t realize there were any other options (and those who did, couldn’t justify paying $3k+ for an ultraportable).
I’d also argue that part of the problem is that, of the small number of available phones that DO have physical keyboards, most of them – simply put – aren’t very good. I tried out the new “candybar” blackberry model (the Q10 IIRC) and I much prefer the vertical slider form factor of the Pre phones – because they give the benefits of a physical keyboard, without sacrificing screen size/real estate. And most of the horizontal sliders I’ve used have various other problems: bizarre key layouts (offset spacebar in particular), keys that are too flat/slippery for touch typing, barely any key travel/tactile response, etc. But those are device/implementation-specific issues, not problems that are inherent to physical keyboards.
You may have a point about virtual keypads when entering passwords and server names where exact character entry is required…they might be slower than physical keypads. The real speed comes from natural language texting and email content where swipe and predictive keyboards are way faster. Because the majority of smart phone entry are text communication, the benefits show themselves on these devices. Virtual keyboards obviously keep weight and cost out of hardware designs and I don’t see many new phones on the horizon being introduced with physical keyboards. The keyboard on Windows Phone with prediction is ok, but the Swype keyboard on Android is crazy fast and superb for natural language entry. Microsoft is working on a compact swype-type keyboard also that is in the shape of an arc, which should be interesting.
Edited 2013-10-13 23:06 UTC
You probably like keyboards of Psion 5-series palmtops?
double posting sucks… And so does the lack of stackable quotes…
Edited 2013-10-10 15:02 UTC
What “external reasons”?
I swear there was an article on this very site a while ago that said most of the “talent” jumped ship for Jolla…
Whilst i myself have never agreed with hardware keyboards on phones, there’s a hell of a lot of people who still prefer the haptic feedback you get from a hardware keyboard over a software one. Just saying “Ooooh hardware keyboards are sooooo 1998” just makes you look ignorant.
Edited 2013-10-10 15:01 UTC
First of all the N9 *was* awesome by all accounts.
However after reading about the demise of Blackberry, I think Nokia’s thinking makes a little more sense.
I think Nokia ( Elop) saw the vast delays on Mameo/Meego and realized the amount of money and time it would take to make it successful would exceed the amount of money it and symbian would produce. He found someone that would reduce the software risks and provide the funding/marketing to keep them afloat.
I totally understand the conspiratorial aspect that people think Elop went into the job thinking that he would gut it and sell out to MS. I do think he actually set out to do that as well. But, I also understand how he can sleep at night thinking what he was going to do was best for all parties.
Its really a question of risk. Going alone with Meego would have had a higher Risk/Reward. Going with MS reduced the risk and the reward. Given this, I think its a shoe in that Elop becomes CEO of microsoft. As a large company, they hate risk.
MS’s life story is one of waiting for other companies to prove concepts, then try to follow producing an inferior product that they just continue improving over time.
Not by all accounts – for example, look at conclusions of this review: http://www.mobile-review.com/review/nokia-n9-2-en.shtml
LOL.
Edited 2013-10-10 03:51 UTC
Windows Phone might be well supported and well funded, but that’s still pretty pointless if no-one wants to buy it.
But people are buying it and sales for Nokia/WP8 handsets are going UP, not down…
It also returns this review… http://www.mobile-review.com/review/nokia-n9-2-en.shtml (look at least at conclusions)
Oh Please! Nokia was dead before Elop set foot in the door, he was just brought in to throw a Hail Mary and it failed.
The precious Maemo/Meego? It was being sabotaged on TWO fronts, within by Team Symbian, and without by their “partner” Intel. When you have a culture that has gotten that toxic? give it up. I’ll just leave this here for your education..
http://taskumuro.com/artikkelit/the-story-of-nokia-meego
I’m just glad that the fan boys on OS News don’t run my company!
That is a damn interesting article. Sounds like OS development was a mess and that the product pipeline was dry before Elop.
Another interesting quote from the article:
In addition to tens of their own people they hired consultants from outside of Nokia. As a result a decision was made that the combination of Symbian and MeeGo was not sufficient for a succesful long term strategy.
I believe Elop and the rest of the executive team should be arrested for the obvious scuttling of a company that had an obvious fighting chance in the mobile market. I believe this was a backroom deal from the minute that they announced that they scrapped Meego for WP. The only people that had a gain from this is Microsoft for the patent portfolio and indemnifications, and those few top execs.
Not true. Nokia would face the same uphill battle…developing an ecosystem for a new OS…but they would have to do it alone without injections of cash from Microsoft. I just don’t see why detractors are caught up in this business reality distortion field.
Dano,
There was another company that received cash injections from Microsoft to their doom. Remember SCO? The fact is, no company receives cash injections w/o paying a price in the longrun. That’s business. SCO was a patsy for the patent wars, Nokia is the next chapter in the same, also, there’s that HUGE patent deal in favor of Microsoft. Microsoft needed their patent portfolio in their battle with Google. Microsoft could care less if they sold phones on their OS. I bet they make more money from their shady patent licensing shakedowns than phone OS sales from OEMS.
Could be. Things are different in this example though. SCO was being made obsolete by Linux and other Server products. The only value there was patent trolling. With Nokia, there are patents, but there is also value in the hardware product line and expertise. Windows Phone 8 is a very strategic product from Microsoft at this time and if it extends to tablets, the Nokia staff is the one to design the hardware. Microsoft’s current hardware design before Nokia has been…let’s say…less than Stellar? (i.e. Surface)
…more conjecture that Nokia’s older models and platforms would have saved Nokia’s handset business. Now that Microsoft owns Nokia’s handset business we should rejoice because it isn’t going anywhere. You guys talk like it’s Nokia’s funeral.
Except it isn’t Nokia’s handset business.
It’s Microsoft’s, and it stopped being Nokia’s the moment the burning platform memo came out.
Fair enough if you are responding to some of the comments on this thread – but that article and the small write up about it is nothing more than a little bit of storytelling – one person getting a rare chance to tell a company bigwig whats wrong with their product up close and in person. There is no conjecture in it at all, other than the hopes of one executive 5 years ago.
It isn’t going anywhere now because it already went somewhere… Its gone. Dead. Finished. Nokia as a mobile phone company no longer exists. What most of us considered Nokia is now a select group of Microsoft employees who’s job has become peddling Windows Phone OS…
R.I.P. – you guys made one hell of a phone back when people wanted phones…
Well, Nokia’s newer models didn’t save Nokia’s handset business either. It IS the funeral of Nokias handsets.
They’re Microsoft’s handset business now. That part of Nokia IS dead.
But I am afraid you are right that the old Nokia handset business isn’t going anywhere now that Microsoft bought it. We’ll see if they manage to pump enough funds into it to make it sustainable.
Beautifully written letter.
Being a journalist by profession, he was likely more adept at conveying the mixture emotions about a beloved company apparently on a path to self-destruction than most.
Maybe in a few years, a strangely similar letter written by a Canadian journalist to a BlackBerry executive will surface. And there could also be a follow-up conversation/diner with a hidden vision of doom.
It takes more than one difficult to use/poorly designed product to kill a company. It is however nearly fatal when this occur at the same time another company comes in with a product everyone dreamed of to have and much easier to use than anything existing at that time.
It also takes great leadership to realize this, and not only to correct the situation, but also to sustain the redirection of the necessary resources long enough for success. The quick fix of overly ambitious goals with an aggressive timeline to market fails more often than it succeeds.
There is also the issue that Nokia is over 6 times the size of Blackberry (currently, it was larger in the past), while Canada has over 6 times the population of Finland. Thus the impact of Nokia on the overall Finnish economy is far more significant than Blackberry has on Canada’s, which explains the emotional aspect of the article.
I doubt the Finnish members of Nokia’s board are a very popular bunch in their home country right now.
Edited 2013-10-11 17:46 UTC
If the board is not popular with the Finnish people, it’s mainly because people make up romantic fantasies about the company’s business environment. The market for regular phones is stagnant or dying, and Nokia’s in-house OS development was spread over two platforms with no direction. I think that Elop made the best decision that could be made considering the choices. Nokia did lay people off, but the company is still in Finland, not Redmond. They have a product pipeline and some strong offerings, and are on good financial footing. What else could be done?
Edited 2013-10-12 13:57 UTC
Android didn’t take over because it was easier to use than iPhone. The internet didn’t replace AOL’s proprietary service because it was easier. They won because they were most adaptable.
It is amazing how common this is – why is it that most microwave ovens, washing machines etc are so complicated they make me want to kill the designer in a horribly medieval manner and make the UNIX command-line seem friendly and intuitive?
I might even buy an iMircowave.
Because of guys like ari-free:
Edited 2013-10-10 06:15 UTC