Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

https://nokia-apple-iphone-was-launched-presentation.tiiny.site/

by late • 2 years ago

508 516 2 years ago

nokia-apple-iphone-was-launched-presentation.tiiny.site

lbourdages• 2 years ago

I think the HN hug was too strong for this poor server...

pieix2• 2 years ago

Makes you wonder how many sites out there are just ~10k requests per hour away from being bricked.

alibarber• 2 years ago

To be fair - it's a repository for academic documents at a reasonably-sized-but-still-quite-small university. Their priorities were probably closer to handling few complex requests and being able to manage obscure documents, not dealing with Netflix level traffic.

It'll probably make for a cool story for the sysadmins there, but I doubt there will be a board meeting tomorrow to re-evaluate the web strategy.

albert_e• 2 years ago

Currently erroring out for me:

Error establishing a database connection

How is this already at the top of HN frontpage with just 6 points and zero comments as of my writing

bananaflag• 2 years ago

It's very recent

anilakar• 2 years ago

Don't fret. The IT systems in Finland's top polytechnic grad school have always been shit.

anshumankmr2• 2 years ago

kiss of death for the poor server, might have been the highest traffic it has ever received

astrange• 2 years ago

I get "There was a problem acquiring a content access token from the data service. If this problem persists, please notify your administrator."

Which makes me wonder what a content access token is.

kuschkufan• 2 years ago

Looks like a competent analysis where they recognize the threat of the iPhone to Nokia. Whether the higher ups failed to act on it or whether they could not act on it, even after Microsoft bought them is unfortunately a different topic.

rukshn• 2 years ago

Alternative link to the presentation from a post on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hypponen_the-nokia-design-arc...

anshumankmr2• 2 years ago

Post linked has one slide, the other commenter has shared this: https://nokia-apple-iphone-was-launched-presentation.tiiny.s...

aanet2• 2 years ago

uhh.. looks like the PDF has disappeared?

jandrese10• 2 years ago

That link now 404s.

heinrich5991• 2 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20250115192305/https://repo.aalt...

but doesn't seem to have the actual content. :(

alberto-m• 2 years ago

The page seems online again: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...

UndefinedRef• 2 years ago

I was there at the time and until the end.

That cartoon meme with the dog sitting with a cup of coffee or whatever and telling himself "This is fine", while everything is on fire, is probably the best way to describe how things felt at nokia back then.

llm_trw• 2 years ago

Can you explain why every good phone that Nokia released during the period was killed instantly?

To this day I've not seen a phone that felt more responsive than the Nokia N9, which also looked amazing. Yet it was killed pretty much the second it was released.

jampekka8• 2 years ago

It was born dead, or at least an orphan. Elop had started the Windows Phone strategy before it was launched.

yapyap• 2 years ago

I believe it lol, in the presentation you can see they are still moving forward with the sms focused windowing design while the iphone was introducing the touch screen.

Now of course I’m looking at it retrospectively but still

planb2• 2 years ago

This PDF does not read like "this is fine". I find the initial analysis in here to be on point. Of course it does not print "we are doomed" in bold letters on the front page, but management should have taken the points raised in this presentation very seriously. Do you know if Nokia appointed a "head of UI e.g. not tied to BG or platform" back then?

escapecharacter2• 2 years ago

I'm really curious! In hindsight, we can always point to when a pivot should have happened earlier, but on the other hand, we all know orgs that have pivoted too early or to a trend they shouldn't have, and then suffered.

Do you remember any specifics arguments or conflicts about strategy?

secondcoming2• 2 years ago

Me too. Once the 'Burning Platform' memo was released on the intranet everyone stopped giving a fuck, and were hanging around waiting for redundancy payments.

Soon after Jo Harlow came to give a presentation that was held in The Oval cricket ground. I remember a couple of her statements drew subdued laughter from those attending. I felt a little sorry for her.

muglug• 2 years ago

Direct link to file: https://repo.aalto.fi/download/file/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...

amelius• 2 years ago

(removed)

Edit: because the article did not load my comment was based on someone's alternative link which did not show the entire presentation, so you can ignore my comment.

thechao• 2 years ago

Classically, a CEO is an intern with a bald spot and an ulcer.

jvanderbot• 2 years ago

Not really. Most (all?) of the insights here, probably delivered on short notice, were completely correct over the next 15 years. Don't let the clarity, brevity, and hindsight fool you - that's just how C-suite likes information presented and we have the benefit of looking back to know that all these things were "obviously true".

planb2• 2 years ago

Look at it again without the knowledge of the last 18 years! And from the position of a Nokia employee back then. This is an extremely well made executive summary for that time.

ddalex• 2 years ago

N800 is the future that never was - opem Linux-based mobile computing for the masses. It had developer support, cool form factor, big touchable screen, and no corp to love it.

bityard2• 2 years ago

I had one of those. It was interesting in that it ran Linux and you could (at the time) browse most web sites with it. Otherwise, it was slow, bulky, and had a pretty terrible resistive touch screen. (The stylus was NOT optional.) And you still had to carry your flip phone in another pocket.

In the end I was mainly using mine to listen to podcasts (before they were called that). An iPod Touch eventually replaced it until Android phones got a lot better.

fifilura• 2 years ago

Yes, that platform was set to compete with iOS and Android and with fine timing.

I think they fumbled with the developer relations when first choosing Gtk for the UI and then jumped to QT. That made developers angry. And then of course the Microsoft steamroller killed it.

apricot• 2 years ago

I had one too (and a 770 before it). Great idea, so-so implementation. It was slow (and slowness is a cardinal sin, since you're always reminded that you're using a machine -- in my opinion, the way Apple products react so much faster to user input than competing products is a huge factor in their success, and Apple knows it) and the touch screen was terrible.

broken-kebab2• 2 years ago

And you still had to carry your flip phone in another pocket.

UPDATE: Memory failure! I meant N900, not N800

Why? I had N800 as my only mobile, and was more than happy with it. Stylus was not optional for things like browsing. But most of the time I took it from my pocket, I used it for text input, and physical keyboard made it comfortable to the point no other device has been able to offer me ever since I retired my N800

wiether• 2 years ago

In the end I was mainly using mine to listen to podcasts (before they were called that)

I'm interested in understanding what you meant here?

To my understanding, the N800 was released in 2007 according to Wikipedia[1] and the first craze of podcasts was in the first half of the 00's, with the most notable fact being the official support of podcasts in iTunes in 2004[2]. They then lost their fame before knowing a second wave of popularity starting in the second half of the 10's.

Are you talking about something else?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#History

seba_dos13• 2 years ago

I never had a N800, but I still have a working N900 used as my secondary phone and while it has a stylus holder, I have never pulled it out of there for many many years except to stim. Its resistive touch screen was excellent and I liked it more than today's capacitive screens. The only issue I have with it is that it's ageing and developing problems over years and eventually I may end up out of spare parts.

m4rtink• 2 years ago

Don't forget the N900 as well! :)

flir2• 2 years ago

But with no app store. (As a programmer, I never in a billion years would have invented the app store. Yet it was the most important component of the iphone ecosystem).

Nursie• 2 years ago

Pretty sure there was some sort of App Store.

It didn’t have a hell of a lot in it, but I remember grabbing a cute little game (hex-a-hop) and … maybe an Angry Birds demo on it?

— edit - I’m thinking of the N900

jjmarr2• 2 years ago

The App Store didn't exist for the first iPhone. It launched with the iPhone 3G. The original plan was for everyone to develop web apps; the SDK was added due to external developer demand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(Apple)#History

Not denying how important it was, but the App Store wasn't "invented". It was created because Apple listened to what developers wanted.

kalaksi• 2 years ago

As a Linux user, it just felt like a locked-down package repository to me.

raverbashing2• 2 years ago

If anyone wants to know why Europe has issues with innovation needs to look no further than here

Nokia boomers squandered the opportunity they had with Maemo and kept insisting on the sinking ship (or burning platform) of Symbian

But to be really honest Maemo was also a dud. Because they didn't have the sharp focus of Android and kept a lot of crap from Linux (like X11 sigh)

creaturemachine• 2 years ago

Steve Jobs was a boomer.

yjftsjthsd-h2• 2 years ago

Because they didn't have the sharp focus of Android and kept a lot of crap from Linux (like X11 sigh)

X11 let them use existing apps outright and made porting easy. What else would they have used at that time and what advantage would it give them?

tmnvdb7• 2 years ago

If I see another one of these insane "explainations", I'm gonna have a stroke. Nokia - dominating the mobile phone market for years - is evidence that Europeans are just fundamentally incapable of innovation!

Ok bro.

chengiz• 2 years ago

Their Lumia with the Windows OS was great too. Unfortunately no market => no apps => death. But I loved it when I had it. They made great phones no doubt.

dagw3• 2 years ago

Yea, no one believes me when I tell them that the Lumia with Windows Phone 8.1 or 10 was one of my favourite phones ever. WP 8.1+ was such an underrated OS. Unfortunately it had virtually no support from anybody, even Microsoft quickly stopped caring.

gtk40• 2 years ago

I loved the N800 and was happy to see it make an appearance in that presentation. In fact I still have one in my desk drawer beside me I turn on from time-to-time. Yes it was a bit cumbersome, but I could do more with that device than any other handheld I have ever had and carried it with me for years. I wish the N900 and other smartphones on Maemo had caught on.

audeyisaacs• 2 years ago

That and also the N9 were great, wish they were not abandoned. The design language on the N9 was way ahead of its time too. I still haven't seen a time picker as good as the MeeGo time picker, and now a decade later my Samsung has similar App icons as the N9 had in 2011.

badlibrarian• 2 years ago

My personal moment of "CEO's -- they're just like us!" was walking into a Kinko's in Santa Monica to drop off a package, and seeing a sweaty Stephen Elop frantically photocopying documents the week his part in this debacle came to a head.

sitkack2• 2 years ago

For those not in the know, this is the Ex CIO of Boston Chicken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop

matthewdgreen2• 2 years ago

Clearly in retrospect these were transferable skills.

1123581321• 2 years ago

The bawk stops here.

selimthegrim• 2 years ago

Stephen Elop’s good a$$ barbecue and foot massage

cf100clunk2• 2 years ago

Mobile phone industry analyst Tomi Ahonen's voluminous blog from back then contained an entire section devoted to Elop, who he called the "worst CEO in history", with data and evidence galore:

https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/elop/

Aissen• 2 years ago

- No mention of[…] Java support. Lack of Java would shut out a big mass of existing SW

philipwhiuk• 2 years ago

Which was true, but developers decided it was worth writing new SW for iPhone when the App Store was unveiled (which was significantly later).

Ensorceled2• 2 years ago

Java was a bonus compared to ObjC, but we looked into supporting Blackberry and it was a nightmare to support all the different versions of java, frameworks, and screen types. Much easier to teach someone ObjC and produce one iPhone version.

LiamPowell• 2 years ago

Mirror since the 3 already posted don't actually work: https://archive.org/details/document_20250116

kristjansson• 2 years ago

The host must be 404-ing high-traffic files?

echoangle• 2 years ago

That's probably what happens once the traffic quota is exceeded, I would guess.

pinkfox• 2 years ago

Thanks!

froh• 2 years ago

thanks! FWIW I found it on-site by searching for

"Apple iPhone was launched" on https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html

leading with some clicks to

https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=A0123

which took me to a site that worked.

jaustin• 2 years ago

This is fascinating. A reminder that being (broadly) right in your analysis doesn't necessarily mean you can execute to turn things around.

They note the impact to the high-end, the fact that UI is crucial, they even had a good guess at 2008 sales numbers (estimate 14m, looks like real was 13m).

I was intrigued by this bullet point on how their Maemo platform could help:

* Cellular development of the maemo platform and the politics surrounding it?

Any folks from Nokia in this time care to shed more light on that? I always felt the N9 was a beautiful piece of design and implementation - just late and under-supported.

jampekka8• 2 years ago

Any folks from Nokia in this time care to shed more light on that?

Cellular connection was not allowed for the Linux devices so they don't compete with the Symbian phones. Nokia had deeply dysfunctional internal politics at that point.

Cumpiler69• 2 years ago

Nokia had deeply dysfunctional internal politics at that point.

Tell me a large company other than Apple that wasn't completely dysfunctional.

flir2• 2 years ago

Oh. That brings so much into perspective. They wouldn't cannibalize their own sales, so someone else did. Classic. How deeply Kodak of them.

seventytwo• 2 years ago

If you don’t eat your own lunch, someone else will…

bostik• 2 years ago

That was a big source of contention, but admittedly there was plenty of skunkworks going around internally to experiment with the officially forbidden material.

I was probably one of the first people to ever possess[ß] a Nokia device running Linux. A research unit in US wrote a library to interface with the baseband modem and provided the whole thing as a single, mostly-statically linked binary that could be used for phonecall functionality. A skunkworks team in Finland wrote a bootloader for N95 to use a Linux kernel. And an ex team member helped put together the initial Debian-based userland.

I wrote the wrapper library that under the hood ran the baseband binary, exposing a sane state machine you could then rely on from "regular" userspace. And I wrote the first, really rough contact book to make/receive calls from the prototype UI. The UI was built with a very early version of libflutter, a GL-based widget library. We built our own layer on top of it.

The prototype became known as the "Flower Phone", thanks to its default background screen. A few months after the device having been showed off our team was provided with about a dozen bright orange[0] N95 devices that ran Linux, booted off of a userspace we had built, and came with our prototype UI. We used them for on-device debugging and developing the UI layer further. Making real calls with them was a core piece of functionality.

From what I understand, the phone functionality in N900 became a reality thanks to that little project.

ß: wasn't mine, it firmly remained property of Nokia. But I used it for experimentation and making real calls.

0: the colour was used to signal the devices were prototypes.

escapecharacter2• 2 years ago

A set of individuals being broadly correct in their analysis at an organization doesn't mean that that organization will be able to execute a pivot, even if that organization is pretty competent.

When an entire organization is built around executing on one local maxima hypothesis well, and there's no tangible threat to it that most individuals feel, it is hard for that org to take the temporary hit to change tacks.

finaard• 2 years ago

N9 was very close to launch when Elop came, so that went ahead, but the rest of the development got cancelled immediately to focus on Windows phone: N9 would've otherwise been the first in a series of devices to slowly take over from Symbian.

Until Elop canceled everything Symbian was still selling - declining sales, but still millions of units. So while the situation was bad slowly phasing out Symbian for taking all the money you could make with that, while hoping N9 software stack sticks sounded like a more sensible approach than "cancel everything, go for Windows". Elop did respond to criticism from Developers (including a mail I've sent him with colleagues), but had made up his mind.

This blog post is a byproduct of that discussion, and was referenced by Felipe in internal mailing lists back then:

https://felipec.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/meego-scales-becaus...

I have no idea how successfull it'd have been in the end - the UI was great, parts of the softwarestack were problematic (though we've been doing quite well with parts of that at Jolla later on). The planned hardware for the future models was less than ideal, though.

vachina• 2 years ago

Elop was the trojan horse that killed Nokia. He worked at MSFT prior to this and single handedly destroyed Nokia. The N9 was revolutionary on its own; GPU accelerated UI, sleek looks, Maemo OS, it is a device people would actually want over the limping Symbian that never fully adapted to touch-only, or the useless Windows Phone 7.

No developer dared to touch Maemo because its future was so uncertain due to the switch to WP. My dad was one of the early Lumia adopters and it was so limiting in what it can do.

mempko• 2 years ago

I worked in Nokia at the time and played with the N9. Meego was actually really good. It could have been competitive with the iPhone and Nokia could have stayed at the top and been where Samsung is now.

jampekka8• 2 years ago

There was even the Qt strategy for making the transition smoother (and better hedged) by having apps portable across the different OSs. It was of course killed too because it could have challenged Windows Phone.

jayelbe2• 2 years ago

I bought an N9 in 2011 and it was an incredible phone. The design and UI were gorgeous and it was a joy to use. I still miss the swipe-driven UI - it was clever, intuitive and well thought out. The phone itself had Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Spotify clients, and MS Exchange support for calendaring and email (I believe Nokia developed or ported many of these in-house) and was completely usable day-to-day.

Compared to Nokia's symbian phones and earlier Maemo efforts, it felt revolutionary and I'd agree Nokia had a device which could have paved the way for a post-symbian future. It definitely felt like, with continued investment, it would have been a real iPhone competitor, and in just the nick of time.

Elop's strategy was a disaster.

auggierose• 2 years ago

It is clear that the presentation doesn't really get it. There would be no iPhone mini. This WAS the iPhone mini.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 2 years ago

It's 3.5", 135g :) Those were the days!

jansan• 2 years ago

In hindsight it is funny that Apple used someone with very big hands holding the first iPhone in their 2007 ads to make it look smaller. Nobody at that time could imagine that phones would only get bigger.

matthewdgreen2• 2 years ago

iPhones got bigger in terms of screen size, but Apple remained obsessed with lighter and thinner phones for many years after that. It's hard to remember this, but some of the earlier smartphones like the Palm Trio were giant awful bricks. You can't really convey weight in a picture, but you can convey size.

wodenokoto2• 2 years ago

In all fairness, Apple didn't expect the market to want giant phones, and were very late with big screens.

Releatedly: It's fun to look at old Futurama episodes, where they joke about phones becoming so small you accidentally inhale them while talking.

We all really thought size was going one way and that was down.

whis-kiss2• 2 years ago

Well it is annoying as a 6ft 2 guitar player(I'm saying I have big flexible hands) I still need both hands to do most phone things, like type this.

My Galaxy 5 and 6 were the last the worked well one handed. The "small" phones available are still larger than those most of the time! Guess the demand just isn't there, tho I wish some were still available. Can't imagine how tiny ladies with small hands deal.

reginald78• 2 years ago

Perhaps Apple didn't want to cannibalize iPad or Mac sales? I don't know the timeline on this.

Small phones certainly make sense early on when phones were an additional computer for most people. Fast forward to now and for many people they are their only computer and have a greater need of the versatility that a larger screen can provide.

sundarurfriend• 2 years ago

It is clear that a lot of people commenting about this (here and in other threads) don't really get it. The iPhone mini wasn't (mainly) about the form factor, it was about pricing and market segmentation. They even say:

Analyse what could be Apple’s next release of “iPhone mini” to mass market price points and plan counter-measures for it.

The only thing they got wrong was that it wasn't Apple that released this mass market priced smartphone, it was Android that filled the "iPhone mini" role. But for the purposes of this presentation, that's the same thing: a non-Nokia competitor dominating this niche.

anonu2• 2 years ago

I was expecting sort of the opposite, for Nokia to deride the whole iPhone thing. But it was quite the opposite, they understand what they were facing. Ultimately, the could not meet the challenge fast enough.

ceejayoz• 2 years ago

Blackberry took that approach.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/05/26/blackberr...

Instead they comforted themselves with reminders that the iPhone's keyboard was difficult to use and the battery life, terrible. BlackBerry was leading the pack, after all.

mixdup• 2 years ago

I would kill to see the presentation from RIM

This is to Nokia's credit. It didn't work out, but they also weren't arrogant like RIM or Microsoft

sybercecurity• 2 years ago

Nokia produced several early smartphones. Most ran SymbianOS that showed what was possible. The connectivity wasn't there to make it really useful and this was the age of "smaller is cooler" mobile phones, so they tried to keep the screens small.

I imagine that there were several people in Nokia that understood the potential of a phone that could also act like a mini-computer.

cesarb• 2 years ago

and this was the age of "smaller is cooler" mobile phones, so they tried to keep the screens small.

I, for one, would love a return to "smaller is cooler" with small screens and big numeric keypads. I have an elderly relative whose only use for a smartphone is calls (it's a phone after all) and text messaging (SMS and WhatsApp); these don't need a big screen.

Sharlin• 2 years ago

The first Nokia phone-mini-computer was the original Communicator, with a 640x200 resolution and a full keyboard, launched in 1996(!) Of course at that time it was targeted purely for business users, but by 2007 they already had a well-established high-end consumer smartphone selection (the N series – rather more advanced than the first iPhones). They just weren’t able to pivot to the touchscreen form factor, largely due to betting on Symbian – I can see how writing an entirely new OS userland from scratch wasn’t a terribly attractive idea.

In the end they did that too, of course, and the N9 was an astonishingly good phone, with a slick zero-button interface and silky smooth scrolling and multitouch gestures. And a terminal and reasonably-privileged root access if you were so inclined. I used a normal ssh/screen/irssi combo to IRC. It’s such a fucking shame that Maemo/Meego was killed.

darthrupert• 2 years ago

Some part understood, and those people started the Maemo project. It got a tiny fraction of the available resources.

venusenvy47• 2 years ago

The CTO of Motorola was dismissive of the iPhone in her first review and acted like Apple was a little child just learning how to take its first baby steps. I remember reading this and just shaking my head at her cockiness. She left the company before the year was out.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070114215511/https://blogs.mot...

sho_hn3• 2 years ago

Not that it hurt her career in any way, looking at her Wikipedia article. Failing upwards is a thing.

sgerenser2• 2 years ago

This section: “There is nothing revolutionary or disruptive about any of the technologies. Touch interface, movement sensors, accelerometer, morphing, gesture recognition, 2-megapixel camera, built in MP3 player, WiFi, Bluetooth, are already available in products from leaders in the mobile industry” has to rival “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.” In the early impressions that didn’t age well category.

AlanYx• 2 years ago

they understand what they were facing

Parts of the deck suggest that they didn't fully understand what they were facing.

For example, the bullet "scaling the user experience to lower HW specs may be challenging. iPhone mini may be closer to iPod UI" comment still suggests they were stuck in the mindset of the time. They thought it was unlikely that Apple could deliver a horizontal platform, rather Apple would be launch a series of individual phones at different prices, each with bespoke interfaces, just like all the players had been doing, over and over.

With that perspective, the choice to keep developing parallel product lines (Maemo, Meltemi, Symbian, etc.) rather than throwing all their eggs into one basket is more understandable I guess, though ultimately completely wrong.

agos2• 2 years ago

the mention of lack of Java was also very indicative of the mindset

ylee3• 2 years ago

For example, the bullet "scaling the user experience to lower HW specs may be challenging. iPhone mini may be closer to iPod UI" comment still suggests they were stuck in the mindset of the time. They thought it was unlikely that Apple could deliver a horizontal platform, rather Apple would be launch a series of individual phones at different prices, each with bespoke interfaces, just like all the players had been doing, over and over.

Indeed. I referred to it at the time as the 50-model strategy.

alkonaut4• 2 years ago

That Apple succeeded in having people pay $500 and up for a phone that was cool but frankly not very useful, was amazing.

We should remember the original iPhone was more a tech demonstrator than anything else. It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, but you couldn't really DO that much with it. There wasn't even an app store! You still needed to buy a digital camera and a garmin GPS and so on. This was a telephone in the old sense of the word (For younger readers, "telephone" used to mean a thing you made calls with).

The fact we pay 2-3 times as much now for premium smartphones is no wonder. Now it's a PC power thing with a better camera. By the time the iPhone 3G arrived it was a marvel. It had ironed out most of the kinks of the early versions, added the GPS, App Store etc. But by then, the other dinosaurs were already dying. They murdered them with the initial versions of the iPhone, which really weren't even that impressive.

The presentation shows they were aware of what was happening. But that Nokia didn't just make their portfolio two lines (really simple cheap feature phones and really expensive all-glass smartphones) on the day after this presentation came out, is strange.

silvestrov• 2 years ago

also that most of the deck is about the hardware.

There is almost no understanding of the software needed for an iPhone UI.

sho_hn3• 2 years ago

Parts of the deck suggest that they didn't fully understand what they were facing.

The biggest one to note is the somewhat-hopeful comment that the lack of Java support was cutting off the iPhone from a "large swath of existing software" ... that barely anyone enjoyed using, and didn't amount to much mindshare or incumbent advantage.

gyomu• 2 years ago

Super prescient analysis, kind of ironically.

Great example that there's a point of organizational no return that no amount of awareness and intelligent analysis can fix. When the barbarians are at the gate, it's too late.

willvarfar2• 2 years ago

I remember the normal engineering mood inside Symbian, Motorola and Sony Ericsson when the iPhone launched.

We immediately knew we were toast. We used to say that the iphone made us irrelevant and android made us redundant.

criticalfault• 2 years ago

I think we can see the same thing happening today.

BYD+CATL are the new iphone and other manufacturers are Symbian, Motorola and Sony Ericsson

VW, Toyota and friends cannot change fast enough. They should have started with big battery investments 10-15y ago and RnDing then, not now when Market is flooded.

repler• 2 years ago

I wouldn't count Toyota out. Their mega battery plant in North Carolina is coming online this year, and the biggest drag on their current EV/PHEV lineup is the batteries. New EV/PHEV models are on the way, and frankly if they just update what they have with better batteries they will be absolutely phenomenal because they are currently great to drive and run extremely well despite lackluster battery range.

wegwerfbenutzer• 2 years ago

BYD+CATL is Android. Tesla is Apple.

thefounder• 2 years ago

I somehow fail to see this as the most I want in a car is confort and perhaps space not screen time.

A killer feature for a car would be FSD but that’s not an “iPhone” thing.

BYD and the other Chinese manage to sell good EVs for great prices but I don’t see them irreplaceable like the iPhone.

Maybe they are the new Toyota but not the iPhone.

Same goes with Tesla though it’s more complicated because Tesla keeps promising FSD.

The iPhone didn’t promise anything. It just delivered.

vladslav2• 2 years ago

By borrowing your analogy, the general sentiment with the iPhone was excitement and interest when it came out. I just don't see it in the folks around me regarding EVs (price is high, charging is pain). Yes, it's the future, but a future that is way ahead. We aren't even at the point where those old "devices" start to show their age. I'd say Symbians and Ericssons still have time.

sofixa2• 2 years ago

I disagree. Cars are much more entrenched status symbols than phones were back then. A Porsche is a Porsche, a truck to show you're manly and outdoorsy is a truck.

People will continue to buy brands they know and whose marketing aligns with how they see themselves. Not everyone will switch to BEVs for a variety of reasons - cost, lack of infrastructure, or hell, even contrarianism.

VW, Renault, Nissan, Stellantis, Toyota can change fast enough before BEVs are the only thing on the market. All of them already have models in various sizes (e.g. Renault make very good and adequate cheap EVs nobody else comes even close to in the big EU markets) and varying quality. It's easier for VW to improve their EVs than it is for Tesla to launder their image.

mort963• 2 years ago

I don't see the comparison. BYD is a decent car for an impressive price, but they're ... just cars. The iPhone wasn't "just a phone" that was cheaper than its contemporaries and a little better in very specific areas, it was a complete overhaul of the entire market.

You can look at a BYD and a Nissan and make a decision based on minor trade-offs between different aspects of the car. You couldn't do the same between iPhone and a Sony Ericsson.

paganel• 2 years ago

BYD+CATL

Unless these two companies change the laws of physics in order to exponentially improve the overall performance of batteries (exponentially faster charging times, from hours to 5-10 minutes, exponentially cheaper batteries that would last longer) then, no, they won't be the next Apple. Just ask VW, they almost bet it all on EVs and now they're already with one foot in the grave because of that.

europeanNyan• 2 years ago

Are we seeing the same thing, though?

The average consumer replaces their smartphone about every 3 years (at least in the western world, places like India are on an even shorter cycle). Additionally, the global average price of a smartphone is about 400 USD. That's a much faster moving market than cars and the investment is much lower.

BYD is very impressive, but I wouldn't look at the situation as the same.

edejong2• 2 years ago

No, these are not disruptors. Substantial incremental improvements, but part of the larger battle.

alkonaut4• 2 years ago

In what way is a BYD a completely different/revolutionary product compared to, say a KIA or Volvo EV? This comparison seems a bit strange tbh.

Sure they are more nimble and have higher margins. But the products they make are still just copies of what those other dinosaurs are making. And for a car I'm still very reluctant to buy a Chinese one. Politics aside, what I'm buying is a 5-10 year long service experience where the Volvo dealer is 1km away and where the BYD service location is I'm honestly not sure. It might be around the corner too, but I don't know because it hasn't been there for 50 years yet. It's a much harder market to break into. The easiest way to do it is probably the way Geely and SAIC did it - Buy a brand and/or service network.

numpad02• 2 years ago

IMO it's shocking that this _did not_ happen in cars, in past tense.

Model S launched 12 years ago. Apple replaced Nokia in 4 years. Model Y was the second best selling car worldwide, supposedly, after a Toyota and followed by a Toyota. Tesla has market share of about 2.3% globally and stays out of top 10.

iPhone became de facto definition of a phone. In less than 5 years from nothing. Tesla is... not that.

lysace5• 2 years ago

Do you think non-SW engineering types in e.g. Nokia and Sony Ericsson also immediately knew?

I remember a lot of delusion the first year that then turned into bitterness - but I don't have the inside perspective, just hints of it from my then position at a software supplier to both.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B2• 2 years ago

As a developer, I remember a few bosses that thought "who needs a stupid phone? no one will buy that" except that Android could already do most of what Windows was capable of, and the bonus was that the SDK was free and Java was an easy language.

They were stuck in their post-Windows 95 world, and did not understand that multimedia CD-ROMs were clunky and dying.

simultsop5• 2 years ago

In the very end. It all boils down to who got the developers on platform for free. ( From Apple's context, while devs cost a lot, they just marketed well and even made them pay something to list apps )

willvarfar2• 2 years ago

Can you elaborate?

My memory is that Apple _charged_ developers to make apps :)

bjourne2• 2 years ago

I worked at SE when the iPhone was released and that is not how I remember it. :) The mood was more like "lol, it has no buttons!", "too expensive!" and "it can't work without a stylus!" I think many seriously misjudged how "cool" Apple was back then (and consequently how much they'd be willing to spend on status symbols) and how good a snappy touch ui could be.

lysace5• 2 years ago

Did you work with Symbian/UIQ software, feature phone software or something else? The feature phone team actually showed signs of getting the idea of no-jank and a rich UI very early.

CamperBob2• 2 years ago

A lot of people made the same mistake. They didn't understand -- simply couldn't understand for some reason -- that the imperfect iPhone that was launched in 2007 was the worst one that would ever exist.

You see this attitude a lot today. ("AI? LOL, it can't even count the letters in 'Strawberry.'") People have a mental block when it comes to understanding that the value of something new doesn't matter as much as its time derivative.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B2• 2 years ago

Not related to phone companies, but some software companies were in denial about it. I remember purchasing one of the first HTC/Android smartphone, and I told my boss at the time that my new cheap phone could replace all the applications of the company but cheaper, more convenient, in my pocket, and without a computer. He made fun of me and laughed. I knew Java pretty well and whipped up a few POCs to see by myself if we were really doomed, but I didn't told anyone about it. In less than 2 weeks I replace the whole company with 2 or 3 applications with crappy UIs. I quit in less than a month and the company obviously closed soon after that because that was the only sensible thing to do.

JSR_FDED• 2 years ago

To my mind the key insight from the presentation is this sentence:

“The 1% volume share target could translate into 4% value share, taking ~ 30% share of the >300 € price Band”

That’s Apple’s superpower in a nutshell - get the majority of the profit in the market, while everyone else battles each over over market share (and earn low margins in the process).

alt2273• 2 years ago

get the majority of the profit in the market

But they werent able to just do this from the begining. It took a lot of building on the success and positive consumer appeal of the iPod.

dialup_sounds2• 2 years ago

The iPod applied the same strategy. When it launched it only worked on Macs with a FireWire port, meaning <10% of the personal computer market.

hammock• 2 years ago

Value share /= profit share

(and 4% /= majority, although I assume you were being poetic)

neom• 2 years ago

"User interface has been a big strength for Nokia — consumer research indicates this is in decline." - Funny, they pointed to both why the iPhone came out and what to do about it - then went on to really focus much more on feature for feature and existing players like Sony etc. They really focus on beating apple by competing on features vs thinking about it like a shift towards portable personal computing rather than competition in the telephony market. They seem to have somewhat understood apple flipped the script, but then reading through, their work around the fact that is true seems a bit... remedial. CEOs take note, good lessons in here. :)

cs702• 2 years ago

2007. The presentation reads like an eerily accurate crystal-ball prediction of what actually happened in subsequent years.

Evidently, Nokia executives knew well in advance what the iPhone could do to their company.

Evidently, they knew they needed to do "something" to avoid an implosion of their mobile-phone business.

Evidently, despite their prescience and best efforts, they were unable to avoid disaster.

It's as if they were in the Titanic, and saw the dangerous iceberg well in advance, but somehow were unable to turn the steering wheel and change course.

turnsout5• 2 years ago

This is spot-on, and it's a remarkably common pattern when dominant players are faced with a seismic shift—even when it comes from within.

Kodak essentially invented the modern digital camera, and had a phenomenal lead going into the 90s. It was not a little side project—they hired IDEO to do vision work, design enclosures and create on-camera UIs. They poured money in, and did ship products. I'd love to know what happened internally, but externally they simply didn't move as quickly and aggressively as they needed to.

Very similar story at Polaroid—it's not like they didn't see the iceberg.

On the computing side, we have Xerox. Just couldn't figure out how to monetize any of the world-changing innovations from PARC.

Someone should really interview all these key players while they're (mostly) still alive and put together some kind of unified field theory of corporate disruption.

hyperbovine• 2 years ago

Kodak also bought Ofoto in 2001. So basically they had over a decade lead on Instagram. What did they do with it? Try to drive people to print more photos, on Kodak paper. I don't think they ever really embraced digital, maybe isolated parts of the company did, but the film/print cultural inertia was just too strong.

smitty1110• 2 years ago

I worked with an ex-Kodak guy, and he related the following story to me from the 80’s or early 90’s.

Xerox was kicking their ass, they were completely owning the copier market. But it was a natural fit for Kodak, they knew imaging better than everybody, why couldn’t they get into this market? This guy was on a crack team of engineers a VP assembled to create a competing product. 9 months later, they demo a fully digital copy machine, working, ready to go, with competitive pricing and features.

But the higher ups at Kodak were incensed. They told the product needs a redesign, because Kodak was a film company, so the product needed to use film for copying. The revised product was a complete failure, and was the reason said engineer left Kodak shortly thereafter.

My take is devotion to brand identity is death during these critical inflection points. YMMV

macintux• 2 years ago

If you aren’t already familiar, Clayton Christensen’s theories on this, on innovation and disruption, are widely praised.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Christensen

kalleboo2• 2 years ago

One of the problems for Kodak was that selling people digital cameras was always going to be just a fraction of the profit of selling them film.

Today, in 2025, Fujifilm makes more money from selling film (Instax instant photo film) than they do from digital, even though they "won" in digital over Kodak to some extent.

chatGDPs• 2 years ago

The theory is already out there, it’s called Counter-Positioning. Hamilton Helmer in 7 Powers.

It’s a bit more nuanced as Kodak isn’t such a case due to digital photo being commodity.

pembrook2• 2 years ago

Classic innovators dilemma.

The entire point of an organization is to systematize, standardize, and make reliable something that is working.

When that thing stops working, and the wind changes, that organization is now a giant anchor full of the wrong people doing the wrong stuff inside the wrong systems on autopilot.

jebarker• 2 years ago

My pet theory is that this is the natural lifecycle of almost all companies and the reason for that is that they underappreciate the luck involved in their first success. There are a few exceptions in the form of zombies (typically relying on a monopoly or legislative help), but there are very few repeatedly innovative companies.

msabalau• 2 years ago

Quickly and accurately understanding the competitive landscape is hard, to their credit, and not sufficient.

Even if they came up with a strong response, it would still involve innovation and execution, and probably disruptions to their go to market strategy. All things that have large chances for failure.

Also, Apple at the top of it's game from the iPhone to the iPhone 4. If they were facing a competitor that was strong, but not quite so remarkable, they'd have had more room to maneuver.

alt2273• 2 years ago

N-Series and SEMC Walkman probably need to clearly undercut iPhone pricing to succeed in the market.

I think this is where they went wrong. They got scared of the new cool kid in school and immediately dropped all their prices, essentially marketing themselves as budget to Apples premium.

lotsofpulp4• 2 years ago

They needed to cut prices because phones could had a fully usable browser on mobile broadband with GPS that no one else did. There simply wasn’t a competitor for at least a few years, and it could even be due to the deal Apple made with ATT to make sure all iPhones came with unlimited 3G mobile broadband.

mikepurvis4• 2 years ago

It’s nice to see that they got it even if they weren’t ultimately capable of doing anything about it.

I was an intern at BlackBerry (then RIM) Jan-Apr 2008 and it was astonishing to me how little anyone seemed to care or be taking the threat seriously. Obviously as a student I wasn’t in any of the high level war room discussions, but from what I could see it really did seem like the company was drinking its own marketing koolaid as far as the iPhone not being a relevant competitor because it was missing, like, cut and paste and encrypted email.

seanc3• 2 years ago

Remember Jim B. scoffing at how you had to plug an iPhone in every night? And how much more efficient BlackBerrys were with data?

Steve knew that the customers did. not. care. And that the carriers would build more cell stations if they had to.

jampekka8• 2 years ago

They caused their own disaster with the Microsoft marriage. Nokia was still huge, market share and coffer wise, and had plenty of options, but killed them all for MS.

dig1• 2 years ago

The comparison to the Titanic was quite fitting. I was with Nokia then, and there was an overly large administration, excessive politics, and far too many managers and meetings for anything to be done on time. If I recall correctly, we spent 1-2 weeks in meetings just to discuss replacing apache with nginx as a web proxy for a less critical service. The actual work for that change would take about 10-15 minutes.

Although they attempted to make improvements, they failed to recognize what Apple understood: ordinary people wanted to walk into a store and purchase a visually appealing phone that was easy to set up and use, everything in 20 minutes max. Nokia had an overwhelming number of models, catering to everyone from older individuals to tech enthusiasts. If you wanted to buy a new phone, you had to be prepared to spend weeks searching for the right model.

this_user• 2 years ago

Well, there are also a lot of assumptions and complaints about the iPhone and its impact that were commonly made at the time that ultimately didn't matter:

- Has no changeable battery

- Has no physical keyboard

- Is too expensive

- Has no support for Java applications

They clearly thought that these might be potential vectors for attacking the newcomer, but none of it worked out. Rather than having to play the game that the legacy phone makers like Nokia were playing, Apple just changed the entire game, and now Nokia et al were suddenly playing at a disadvantage where their existing knowledge and experience didn't really matter.

Terretta2• 2 years ago

- Can't play Flash.

- Forces devs to release their apps as open software, HTML5 apps that anyone can just install the home screen from anywhere*, no marketplace gatekeeper needed, no 70% rev share to the telcos.

* This remains true, except if you really want to you can pay 30% in year one and 15% thereafter for shelf space, mobile apps PaaS, billing/subscription management, and end user app payments support. If you don't want to, you can still just release HTML5 apps like the Xbox Cloud player from Microsoft, downloadable direct from their web site, no App Store involved. And the HTML5 locally installable PacMan game from 2007 still works.

panick21_3• 2 years ago

Not supporting Flash and Java was an advantage. Having apps written in an actual performant language made sense.

RIM with their minimal OS and a bunch of Java crap on top of it, just wasn't gone cut it.

Expensive is the only good point. But the issue with expensive is that, if everybody wants it, like 10% of the population will get it, and the other 90% will want it. And then you have product everybody is trying to get.

jandrese10• 2 years ago

Classic big company problems.

"If we built a product like this it will cannibalize some of our existing and profitable divisions, and those existing divisions have a lot more clout internally than we do. The CEO worked his way up from those divisions. We can't make this."

Then someone else makes that product and eats your lunch anyway.

joe_the_user2• 2 years ago

I think the presentation was enough to show they knew they were in trouble.

But it also showed they didn't actually understand the significance of what was happening.

They thought essentially "all this fancy stuff will redefine 'cool', the 'high end'". They imagined a mid-range phone with special email features could slow the iPhone - ie, they imagined phone makers dribbling out features per dollar. But the real lesson of the iPhone was "the 'phone' is going to become a general purpose computing device with multiple connections to the world and hardware features controlled by general purpose software".

lofaszvanitt2• 2 years ago

Same like 3Dfx and many others. Miracles happen too often........

photon_lines• 2 years ago

The whole report shows that it was a company being run by bearcats and middle-managers who focused on sales rather than product. The detailed out exactly what was coming and why it was great and their general response is atrocious. Some of the highlights of the presentation which stood out to me (on page 12):

  1. "Work closely with T-Mobile"

Your competitor just launched a superior product and your response is to 'work closely' with T-Mobile?? Are you kidding me?.

  2. "Prioritize touch UI development, simplifying basic functionality and PC suite development very high."

Response here was spot on and highlighted that they needed to hire a new chief UI-designer and work on prioritizing touch development -- this should have been number 1 without a question and it looks to me like they put it on the back-burner.

  4. "Analyse what could be Apple’s next release of “iPhone mini” to mass market price points and plan counter-measures for it."

Anytime you're focusing on your 'response' to a competitor, you're behind in the game (by miles) and you've lost already -- especially if you're responding with 'counter-measures.' Once again - are you kidding me?

  5. "Kill market for such an expensive device by filling mid-range with own/Google/Yahoo experiences"

Incredibly stupid response -- you're planning to kill something the market may demand massively by...filling your product / experience with 3rd party integrations. Idiocy at its very finest.

  6. "Accelerate Nokia's own free push e-mail project and make it less hidden within the company."

This is a great sign of a company being run by middle-managers - secret projects with no evidence that they will push your product boundary nor satisfy consumer demand and why in the world would you keep anything here 'secret' - sheer idiocy.

  7. "Investigate and play hard in possible IPR infringements"

Another sign of a company being run by idiots.

  8. "Drive key partnerships to highlight Nokia's superior strength in the market, keeping things in perspective."

Wow - use partnerships (i.e. relationships / sales) to counter a superior product. These guys sure are on the ball /sarcasm.

  10. "Highlight potential weaknesses of the iPhone"

Whenever you respond to a threat and one of your highlights is to once again 'talk' your way our of it by highlighting your competitors' weaknesses -- it's usually an indication that your organization is being run by middle-managers or absolute morons.

This whole report shows exactly why Nokia failed.

EngineeringStuf2• 2 years ago

I'm surprised that Nokia found out through the keynote presentation from Steve Jobs. LG and Prada announced their phone a little earlier and it had been shown already at the IF Design Awards a few months earlier.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

If Nokia had paid attention to those design awards then they too could have moved quickly on a similar device.

Is this a case where Nokia thought they had a moat?

EngineeringStuf2• 2 years ago

Google "LG Prada Phone" for the Wikipedia article.

If Nokia had paid attention to those design awards then they too could have moved quickly on a similar device.

Is this a case where Nokia thought they had a moat?

sampo2• 2 years ago

If Nokia had paid attention to those design awards then they too could have moved quickly on a similar device.

Nokia had their Maemo project [1]. A Linux-based OS for mobile touchscreen devices. They published their first device already in 2005 [2].

But the Maemo department was small, and the old Symbian department inside Nokia was big. The large number of managers and executives in the Symbian department played corporate politics, and kept the size and resources of the Maemo department small, as they perceived it an internal competitor threatening their position and the dominance of Symbian inside Nokia.

Nokia's CEO at the time (Jorma Ollila) had a background in investment banking and financial engineering. His previous post in Nokia was CFO. He didn't have the kind of passion and insight to software and user experience like Apple's Steve Jobs had. Today, nobody would expect to get visionary tech leadership if recruiting from the corporate's finance department.

At its soul, Apple is a software company that also makes their own hardware. Nokia was a hardware company that also made their own software.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet

ylee3• 2 years ago

At its soul, Apple is a software company that also makes their own hardware. Nokia was a hardware company that also made their own software.

... and bad software, of course. Worse than that, multiple versions of bad software.

Apple is the only company in history to build consistently good hardware and good software and UI. Not IBM, not DEC or the other Seven Dwarfs. It really does go all the way back to the Woz-Jobs duo providing a maniacal focus on UX and one of the most brilliant engineering minds of the century.

(I'm told that Tesla also qualifies.)

oyster143• 2 years ago

Just to add to the party: Microsoft deck for Nokia acquisition

https://www.slidebook.io/company/microsoft/presentation/f646...

Thorrez• 2 years ago

That doesn't look like an internal presentation though.

joshdavham• 2 years ago

I’m getting a search error on the page.

lifefeed2• 2 years ago

I cant find the quote and article now, but I read that before it was released no one else believed a computer like that could have any reasonable battery life. Then they opened it up and discovered the iPhone was really just a battery with a small logic board attached to it, and a lot of the heavy computational lifting was done when it connected to your computer.

carlosjobim3• 2 years ago

Can you expand on what you mean? What heavy computational lifting?

lifefeed2• 2 years ago

I wish I could find the original article, it was a link from a link from the bibliography of Chip War.

I think it was things like how you couldn't initially purchase music, and had to sync to iTunes to do that. I think there was more.

I did find this article, on iPhone being basically just a battery: https://mathiasmikkelsen.com/2011/05/blackberry-makers-thoug...

tmnvdb7• 2 years ago

The first iphone indeed had rather poor battery performance, epsecially at that steep price of 500$..

jervant• 2 years ago

"Cingular has allowed Apple to launch a device with WLAN and inbuilt services"

Ugh, that "allowed". It's wild how much Apple shook up the mobile phone market and pushed phone companies back to just being dumb data carriers.

bombcar6• 2 years ago

Jobs sticking to his guns here and breaking the shitware monopoly on pre-installed phones is probably a bigger part of the full story than the phone itself (as likely the black rectangle would be developed by someone eventually, phone carcinization).

Lammy2• 2 years ago

as likely the black rectangle would be developed by someone eventually, phone carcinization

Relevant: LG Prada (2006) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

pjc503• 2 years ago

This was so critical - in the US market. The first Apple phone was a very interesting market test that proved why this was needed, before the iPhone.

indrora2• 2 years ago

Stuff like this goes back YEARS.

Back in the days of the Bell System, the upper management at AT&T believed that it was going to be circuit-switched forever, even as Bell Labs was building packet-switched audio networks and it was becoming clear that packet-switching was a vastly more efficient solution to moving large amounts of mixed data around at a time. The development of efficient switching networks [0] was fundamentally resulting in continually building bigger networks that took up more space -- it was the Strowger step-by-step problem all over again. Moving to a packet-switched system meant that you could have an infinite number of "circuits" so long as you kept track of the paths taken.

But even as AT&T Long Lines implemented this, upper AT&T management was firm that the fundamental design of the network was not to shuffle packets around but instead to connect point A and point B with services on either end for the subscriber.

Even when they did eventually try to accept the packet-switched system, ISDN was too big and bulky, too slow for anything practical, and by the time it was useful, Ethernet/IP came along and ate its lunch.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonblocking_minimal_spanning_s...

rasz2• 2 years ago

Wasnt ISDN still circuit switched?

strangescript• 2 years ago

These presentations often serve as a comfort blanket rather than a plan of action. Oh man something incredibly disruptive is happening to us. Lets talk about it. Whew, okay, we understand it, lets go back to being complacent.

Years later, "man we tried, we had that meeting and everything, we just couldn't compete"

tmnvdb7• 2 years ago

They actually managed to act on most of the problems identified here but missed the move to software-based ecosystem-centric market started by the app store launched the next year.

deskr• 2 years ago

If you strip this text to the bare-bones meaning, it reads: "Holy shit, we're f'cked, but here is the best positive spin we can put on it."

They saw the writing on the wall. They didn't want to compete on that level, but rather try to kill it. From "summary of actions":

"5. Kill market for such an expensive device by filling mid-range with own/Google/Yahoo experiences"

tmnvdb7• 2 years ago

This is a rather poor reading of the presentation, which seems very serious about the threat and the need to adopt similar changes, as well as trying to keep the iphone at bay by offering similar features at a lower price.

jillesvangurp2• 2 years ago

I was there as this played out. Nokia had a lot of good software and software engineers but not the management structure to do anything good with that.

Nokia was huge as an organization and parts of that organization recognized the threat early on. The problem was at the board and executive level. These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business. Lots of people with an electronics and radio background. Not a lot of people with software competence. And they had bought into the notion that Symbian was going to magically fix all their problems.

A lot of effort was spent on looking for other solutions. And one of the things that was good (Linux) around 2005 was actually quite close to displacing Symbian as the key future proof replacement for their legacy platforms. Symbian was just rolling out for a few years and they had made a big investment in that. And management (those same people with a huge blind spot for software) backed the wrong horse.

Linux never really died in Nokia but it wasn't allowed to prosper either. Devices were cancelled or repurposed for Symbian. This happened to the N8, for example. By the time they switched to windows phone, they actually had two Linux platforms (Meego and Meltemi) and an Android phone in the works as well. Meego had one last product phone launch and the team and platform were killed in the same week. Any devices for that platform were labeled as developer phones. Nokia never marketed them as a consumer phone. Meltemi never saw any product launch at all; it was aimed at feature phones. Both were good ideas but poorly executed. Nokia killed them along with Symbian in order to back windows phone. Classic baby and bathwater situation.

And MS ended up killing the one Nokia Android phone that was launched shortly before they acquired the whole phone division. Kind of a desperate/ballsy move. I suspect Nokia did this as a stick to ensure MS followed through with the acquisition. That was their "oh we could just switch from windows phone to Android unless.. " move. Nokia was at point the only OEM that still believed in Windows Phone.

MS killed the whole division shortly after Satya Nadella took over and was sorting out the mess left by Steve Ballmer. The iphone was solidly in charge by then and the rest of the market was Android. Courtesy of lots of Linux contributions by the Meego and Maemo team.

masom2• 2 years ago

Nokia also had a ex-Microsoft exec (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop) that had the goal of ensuring Windows Phone would succeed, and tanked Nokia with it.

I was on the DVLUP project where Nokia and Microsoft attempted to inject energy into windows phone app development. We could see the tension between the two companies as we were a 3rd party contracted by Nokia to build the platform. The Nokia exec we were in contact with was fantastic, and really tried to make Windows Phone a success. Unfortunately the Nokia IT teams we worked with were not happy and essentially tried to sabotage through inactions (we just needed OAuth / SSO to link accounts and track app installs, it took over 3 months of email chains within Nokia).

actionfromafar4• 2 years ago

Now I can't find that poem about Elop sinking the Nokia ship or something like that.

bombcar6• 2 years ago

Was this around the time Microsoft kept switching what "windows phone" was? I remember that the one friend who got into it loved it, and then they released something completely incompatible and he abandoned the platform.

Tommix11• 2 years ago

I couldn't believe my eyes when I read that they had hired Elop and was concentrating on Windows phones. I immediately knew that was the end. Unbelievably incompetent by the board.

jillesvangurp2• 2 years ago

People blame Stephen Elop. But the person in control of the Nokia board was former CEO Jorma Ollila who headed Nokia through its glory days and had a lot of power. Nothing happened in Nokia without his approval during that period.

The board recruited and invited Stephen Elop. Part of his appointment was the board handing over the company on a silver platter to the new CEO. Negotiations for the acquisition started almost right away in secret. And most likely there were high level discussions ongoing with Microsoft and Steve Ballmer before Elop's appointment.

Jorma Ollila retired as a CEO around 2006; he wasn't really pushed out and Nokia was still performing well. He handed the keys to the company to a non technical CEO with a financial background (Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, aka, OPK internally). That was the first mistake. OPK was a bit hands off throughout the Iphone and Android rollout. There was no vision, no leadership, just a lot of infighting between heads of various units.

The second mistake was selling out to Microsoft and all the share value implosion that came with that. Microsoft bought several companies over the years. Nokia was one of the smaller ones. That's how bad it had gotten. At the peak Nokia was worth 150 billion or so. MS bought the phone unit for 5 billion. The later Linkedin and Github acquisitions were worth more.

By the time Stephen Elop was brought in (by the board, headed by Ollila) to fix things, it was too late. There were a lot of internal battles as well between the big business units. A whole string of CTOs with no power whatsoever that were appointed and let go. Including Scott McNealy who never really made any impact and was there only briefly.

spiralpolitik4• 2 years ago

Nokia was dead company walking before Stephen Elop. Elop saw the writing on the wall and made one of the choices available. A different CEO would have made a different choice but ultimately at that point it would still have been too late to save Nokia.

Nokia was a great hardware company that missed the boat when the market changed to be based around software. When the market changed again to be based around ecosystems, Nokia was beyond saving.

lofaszvanitt2• 2 years ago

Do not let the saboteurs in...

DanielHB2• 2 years ago

I think the critical failure of the windows phone was that app development was not open. You can't compete with established walled gardens by building your own, you can only compete if you make a huge amazing park free to use just outside the walls of the competitors.

Translating this to windows phones, it would have only succeeded if it either:

1) Made browser applications first-class and pushed phone-specific APIs (gyro, bluetooth, etc) to be open. Then pick a fight with google and apple about supporting PWAs better. This would probably keep windows phones as a "low cost, crappy feeling" systems forever.

2) Made the windows phone native-apps trivial to port to run on browsers with a convenient and easy way to deploy those apps on ios/android (hopefully without feeling too much not-native on those platforms). Would require a lot more engineering resources and time, so much harder to pull off.

jagermo• 2 years ago

I remember that, too. Nokia even had an "app store" on a lot of their business series devices (the E-series), but it was clunky to use, had no payment options and was not really friendly for 3rd party developers. There was probably a window where, had Nokia pushed to compete with apple on that field, they could have gotten a leg up and kept Symbian and symbian apps in the race for (way) longer. But that invest and speed needed for software was probably not doable in the behemoth that was Nokia at that time.

zekica• 2 years ago

The worst thing with their store was the 3rd party review and signing process. For a time you also had to pay (a lot more than $99) to receive a developer certificate.

mindtricks2• 2 years ago

As someone who was there, I recall numerous projects instituted to reduce the number of steps it took to even install an app on the device. It was mind-numbing to see what they were trying to extract themselves from.

jorvi2• 2 years ago

The iphone was solidly in charge by then

Nit: the iPhone was only "in charge" for a brief year or two, and then Android ate its lunch in terms of marketshare.

What is very interesting is that Apple has displayed twice over ( MacBooks and iPhones) that a minority marketshare can capture the vast majority of profits in that market. OEMs like HTC and LG made a few bucks profit off of any phone, sometimes even losing money on the cheaper models. And that's with Google footing almost all the cost of developing the OS.

rdsubhas• 2 years ago

~Thrice. Airpods.~

Edit: Airpods also has a majority market share, so probably it's not the third in this list.

afavour2• 2 years ago

I was a day one Android fan (got the Nexus One) but I'd actually debate what "in charge" means... to me it doesn't necessarily mean dominating market share. I think the iPhone defined the touch-based smartphone when it came out and continues to do so. These days Android has a much more cohesive concept (in the form of Material UI and so on) but in the early days it was just a hodgepodge mess of ideas, even if it dominated the market.

naming_the_user• 2 years ago

This is pretty much just describing the bimodal nature of most markets.

Extracting $100 in surplus profit from someone who's not on the poverty line is easier than extracting $10 from someone who is.

mrtranscendence• 2 years ago

the iPhone was only "in charge" for a brief year or two, and then Android ate its lunch in terms of marketshare.

This is true worldwide, but there are significant regions where iOS quite handily beats Android (such as the US, Japan, and even some parts of Europe).

Terretta2• 2 years ago

Nit: the iPhone was only "in charge" for a brief year or two, and then Android ate its lunch in terms of marketshare.

Marketshare is less interesting than wallet share for many products.

a minority marketshare can capture the vast majority of profits

Ah, yes, exactly, there it is.

iPhone offers wallet share, and continues to eat Android's lunch in both total spend and ARPU.

There are two cohorts to be in charge of, for two business models: selling something, or giving it away to show ads.

This looks like Android dominates until you get to the section "iPhone vs Android App Spending" and start doing the math that it's winning on total dollars never mind the number of devices.

https://backlinko.com/iphone-vs-android-statistics

Even then, advertisers tend to advertise because they want to sell something. Advertisers marketing something everyone buys, Android audience is best to advertise to. Advertisers with something that depends on extra cash in the wallet before the buyer considers it, iOS audience makes sense. Ad rates reflect this.

Astonishingly, even on the handset makers themselves, there were years Apple captured over 100% of the revenue. That sounds nuts till you dig and see it's as simple as Apple made money, while so many other handset makers lost so much money.

hilux3• 2 years ago

This is such an important lesson!

openrisk2• 2 years ago

This is probably the most important bifurcation point in the history of European tech. Today's malaise and grasping for direction has much to do with the demise of this pioneering enterprise. And the fact that it does not appear to have been pre-ordained adds poignancy.

wbl• 2 years ago

No, the national champions model is the problem. If Apple failed the US still has Android and potentially many other startups. Europe just doesn't have the risk capital or ecosystem.

spiralpolitik4• 2 years ago

European tech was doomed in late the 90s when the EU decided to throw in with Microsoft et al instead of supporting building out a homegrown alternative ecosystem based around open source software.

casenmgreen• 2 years ago

I worked, briefly, at Symbian.

They were mind-bendingly, staggeringly, bureaucratic - like to an extent and in a way you absolutely could not imagine if you had not actually seen it with your own eyes.

PeterStuer2• 2 years ago

I love Finland and the Fins. But there is a certain type in that population that is extremely bureaucratic. The only country in Europe that has a contingent that comes near is Switzerland, also a great place to live.

holri• 2 years ago

The Linux based Nokia N900 was the best phone I ever owned. With a bit of polish, finish and maturity it could have also been the best phone for the masses. RIP.

badgersnake2• 2 years ago

The follow up N9 was that. It was great. Elop canned it.

I had to import one from Australia. It was totally worth it.

Twirrim• 2 years ago

I loved my N810, but Maemo had so many little issues all over the place, it was reaching "Death by a thousand papercuts" territory. iPhone did what Apple used to do so well, which was obsess about the user experience.

numerosix• 2 years ago

I second that ! compact, unbreakable screen, real sliding keyboard with backlight, beautiful interface, true debian, a total shame, I regret it everyday. It was almost perfect. Tons of apps, even Waze! Android & iphone are pure shit. Rip n900...

afavour2• 2 years ago

I had a Nokia Symbian phone, the 7610. I loved how 'quirky' it was:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7610#/media/File:Nokia76...

and I was able to download an NES emulator for it! I remember playing Mario 3 on my way to my first post-university job. I really felt like I was living in the future compared to the phones others had. And then Symbian just... never got better.

I was ambivalent about the MS purchase of Nokia but I was still optimistic about a lot of it. Nokia always made top-notch hardware but it was obvious from the outside that they just didn't have the software talent (the N900 was a wonderful device for the tech set but it had no mass market viability). I maintain that when it was released Windows Phone was the best mobile OS going. But Microsoft fumbled hard by reinventing the wheel with Windows Phone 8 and destroying an already emaciated App Store. Arguably they fumbled before they even released Windows Phone, spending $1bn on the Kin and then almost immediately nixing it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin

Looking back at it all today... iOS is fine. Android is fine. But man do I wish we still had a couple of other viable competitors in there.

kawsper• 2 years ago

The N-series were great too, I loved both my N73 and later a N82, both with Gameboy emulators.

I also bought a Garmin license where I could install Garmin on my Symbian phone to do car navigation on my phone, this was at a time where most people had specific hardware for GPS navigation, now we're used to having apps on our phones, but it felt quite special back then!

cbozeman2• 2 years ago

MS killed the whole division shortly after Satya Nadella took over and was sorting out the mess left by Steve Ballmer.

These have always been the real crimes in my mind.

Ballmer wasn't an idea guy, he was a top-tier salesman / cheerleader, and he definitely "understood" what actually made Microsoft successful (put out a product, then allow third-party developers and support to extend it / support / learn it inside out and be a VAR).

Ballmer made the same mistake a lot of people in that era made, which is that they didn't realize the software was the most important component. The era of "killer hardware" never actually existed in the smartphone space, because you had a limited form factor to begin with. You couldn't cram an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra in your phone, so your software had to be useful and on-point.

I think Satya saw the entire Windows Phone debacle as a failed experiment and probably looked at Apple / Google and just threw his hands up in frustration.

Getting developers onboard for Windows Phone was critical and not enough time, money, and attention was spent doing that. I think there was a degree of Microsoft arrogance there, along the lines of, "We're Microsoft, of course they're going to develop for our platform..." Meanwhile, in 2024, the Windows App Store is still a barren hellscape compared to even the App Store for OS X and you don't even want to talk about Google Play Store and iOS App Store vs Windows Store.

The prophecy was fulfilled - software will eat the world.

jjfoooo4• 2 years ago

Wasn’t it already too late by the time Ballmer left?

dev_daftly2• 2 years ago

Ballmer, the person who pushed for and created the entire Microsoft Enterprise focus, is not an idea guy that understood what made Microsoft successful? This idea that Ballmer was some goof when he was actually considered a co-founder by Bill Gates which is why he received like 17% of the company when he joined.

Also, they put plenty of effort into getting developers to onboard windows phone. They even created multiple platforms that allowed devs to create a single app that worked across all windows devices(pc, phone, xbox) but developers decided, with some very influential devs being extremely vocal, that is was some sort of power grab to force devs to only deliver their software through the windows store.

agumonkey• 2 years ago

These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business

I believe Sony failed to transition for similar reasons. They really owned the hardware era with its own kind of ui, pattern ... but everything they did in software was lacking.

ryandrake2• 2 years ago

So many manufacturing companies fail at software. They think of software like it's any other component on the BOM. As if it's just like a screw or a piece of molded plastic: Build the cheapest "software part" that meets the requirements (or buy it from a "supplier"), and then bolt it onto the product some time during assembly.

They don't think of software as a major component of their brand. They don't think of software as the user's interface to (and perception of) the product. They don't think of software as an ecosystem with updates, a changing security landscape, and third party developers and integrators. It's just one of 500 things on the BOM that gets sourced and assembled.

I've seen companies where each branch in the software repo is named with a part number, and they're all somewhat similar, copy-pasted around from one another, but with no real concept of what's an earlier or later version or updates, no concept of where the codebase came from or is going, and no real structure other than "This software blob is part 003-2291-54 for product 003-2291-00. The product is shipped and we will never look at the code again."

clippy99• 2 years ago

Symbian was going to magically fix all their problems.

Really? I remember Symbian had the crappiest and most shoestring C++ dev stack ever.

joshmarinacci2• 2 years ago

I was there during the end of the Windows Phone era and can confirm. There were even efforts for additional Linux based OSes post windows phone. Nokia just never had software in their DNA.

asimovfan• 2 years ago

So Microsoft also killed linux on phones basically. I had a n900. Best phone ever.

burnte• 2 years ago

I had the N800 and then the N810 which was one of my favorite devices ever. Then I got the N900 and what a disappointment it was. I wish I could get an N810 with modern internals.

mindtricks2• 2 years ago

I was also at Nokia during this time and recall OPK (Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo), during a visit to the Beijing office, giving a talk where he talked about the difficulties of pushing new things through the organization.

More specifically, he said that even he would push for investment and innovation in one area, but that as the decision made its way through the org, it became something else. It was an odd moment to see a CEO say something like this, and was a clear indicator to me that we didn't have what was necessary to really pivot the way we needed.

teekert• 2 years ago

I really liked Windows phone. Had a Lumia 800. Nice phone.

I still think they should have kept going with it.

qingcharles• 2 years ago

I was working externally for Nokia around 2004~2006. They were already competing with Apple at this point. Nokia were scared by the iPod and the Rokr. They wanted to secure the mobile and online music market. They were trying to beat Apple at iTunes, to the point where they gobbled up one of Apple's biggest competitors in the music space (OD2-Loudeye).

When the iPhone launched it showed Nokia was woefully behind. All their devices instantly felt like they were from a previous age.

Delaware State Lost Property says I still have a bunch of Nokia shares to collect apparently lol

dismalaf• 2 years ago

Ugh, Meego was so good. I still remember watching the presentation, then Nokia tanking when it was announced they were switching to Windows.

Imagine a world where Meego, a proper Linux, took over instead of Android. And I like Android as a product, but the software stack is so strange...

rawgabbit• 2 years ago

The presentation is evidence itself that Nokia was bureaucratic and unlikely to stay competitive.

The PPT was supposedly about the iPhone but the (well put together) slides for that don't start until page 14. Credit was given to Timo Partanen, along with contributions from Scott Cooper, Gordon Murray-Smith and Sanna Puha.

Pages 3 through 11 were market analysis. Boring and irrelevant. The only message that should have been given is that iPhone will disrupt the market and Nokia desperately needs to create a competitive "cool" product. The presentation said several times the iPhone was "cool" because of its UI and touch interface versus "buttons". But I think they missed the point. The iPhone was a new category i.e. it was more of a computer than a phone with some computing abilities.

The "recommended" actions slide is on page 12 & 13. I assume this was created by Peter Bryer as his name was listed on top of the first page. It lists 10 recommendations along with sub recommendations. For a large bureaucratic company, good luck getting one recommendation executed. Besides, all ten recommendations missed the point. This was the automobile replacing the horse and buggy. Nokia wanted to tweak their way through. They eventually tried to partner with a "software" company in Microsoft; but Microsoft at that time was the geriatric helping the geriatric. I would argue Nokia would have given themselves a better chance of success by creating a "skunk works". Assemble their best engineers and designers into one team and free from interference from all the internal politics. Their goal would be to create a POC that could rival the iPhone's "cool factor". And do it in 6 months.

SSLy2• 2 years ago

BTW, an actual skunk-works project that delivered is the only way that current nokia hasn't collapsed yet again.

rcarmo• 2 years ago

I'm very late to the party here, but as a smartphone product manager at Vodafone I had a front-row seat to the entire arc--which actually started with many telcos being angry at Nokia for their arrogance and near-monopoly, before the iPhone came out.

Nokia never really had a chance--the N-series was a mess of patched software, they had no real Linux alternative, and their supply chain was fragmented six ways from Sunday because they churned out dozens of SKUs.

Then everyone went into denial because they couldn't believe Apple would be successful by going outside established norms (like refusing to customize the homescreen or packaging for telcos, etc.).

A few telcos tried to respond by picking their own champion smartphone (Verizon did that in the US). I ended up having to talk my CMO out of going all out on promoting the Blackberry Storm (which was a dud of epic proportions).

I later became the product manager for the iPhone as well, and that was an amazing roller coaster I will eventually write about (it's been around 17 years, so I think I'll get to it sometime soon).

But I would recommend folk interested in the intervening years to read Operation Elop: https://asokan.org/operation-elop/

I also had a front row seat to that...

yabatopia• 2 years ago

That’s how I remember Nokia in the first half of the 2000’s: peak arrogance. Even if Steve Jobs himself would have given them the iPhone for free, they would have rejected it.

hilux3• 2 years ago

Something clicked for me when I read your comment: the most amazing thing about Apple is that despite their corporate immensity, they still continue to ship generation after generation of cool products that compete and sell on their own merits. You don't have to be a fanboy to appreciate that.

Almost no other tech company that I can think of has been able to resist bureaucratic ossification. (Perhaps Adobe - to an extent?)

yencabulator3• 2 years ago

Really? To me, for example iPhones haven't changed at all in a long time, they get spec bumps but are essentially the same product, and people buy replacements mostly because of batteries going bad / apps bloating / fashion.

Apple's new products are surprisingly often failures, for their background. Vision Pro anyone?

freetonik• 2 years ago

The problem was at the board and executive level. These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business.

A very common story in European tech and automobile companies.

b8• 2 years ago

Why didn't Nokia go bankrupt afterwards? They have Bell Labs, but don't make any interesting products.

stephen_g• 2 years ago

Nokia has a pretty successful business in things like cellular base stations, carrier networking, etc. - for example they brought their joint venture with Siemens (Nokia Siemens Networks) back in-house by buying Siemens' part out, and that does a lot of optical network stuff (DWDM backhaul equipment, etc), already had a cellular base-station business but then also bought competitor Alcatel Lucent, and a lot of provider network stuff came in with that (like FTTH equipment on the provider side). They also got Alcatel's undersea cable laying division.

So they still have a bunch of valuable and successful businesses even though their consumer business went to crap.

pjmlp4• 2 years ago

Same here, I was in Espoo the week after the Burning Memo, and not a single person I met was happy with it.

Especially given how much prevalent the UNIX culture was at Nokia.

jx0950• 2 years ago

I read this after doing a time travel back to 2007. I was using Blackberry/Nokia E## at the time. Remember thinking about a phone without a full keyboard!

Seems like Nokia had a good grasp of what had happened. Also a sense of immediacy to act.

But then - Nokia, Palm, Blackberry....

ubermonkey• 2 years ago

That's a great time capsule. I'd love to see a similar document from the same period from Microsoft, because I really wonder if Ballmer's much-lampooned interview after the iPhone's intro was bluster or a real position held by the mobile unit at MSFT.

"<laughs> $500 fully subsidized with a plan? That is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine."

It's a take that has aged like milk, but Ballmer wasn't (and isn't) an idiot. The rest of the market looked at the iPhone and saw the future, and moved accordingly. I mean, the first major users I saw of the iPhone were BUSINESS users, in point of fact.

So I've always wondered if that was just bluster, or he really was drinking so much Redmond-flavored Kool-aid that he didn't, or couldn't, see what was about to happen.

(In re: Kool-aid, in 2009-ish, my company did a joint deal at a large client with MSFT; we had complimentary products, so we were pitching as a unit. The MSFT guys were genuinely vexed that we had iPhones. Like, personally affronted. And this was in Kansas, far from the mothership. At the time, WinMo was AWFUL. It couldn't even do IMAP without a 3rd party client -- it was Exchange or POP only. None of us had ever really used a WinMo phone for very long, because (at that time) a Treo was still a great option, and RIM hadn't fully wet the bed, so WinMo was pretty thin on the ground unless your paycheck said "Microsoft" on it.)

bsimpson• 2 years ago

It's funny to see $500 being expensive for a phone here, because I absolutely remember it being so far above the market that it was rare to see the first generation in the world (and they had a price cut shortly thereafter).

There has been some nasty inflation in these past years, but $500 is a budget phone these days!

tmnvdb7• 2 years ago

Well, $500 in 2007 is $756 in 2025, not exactly a "budget phone" price.

dagw3• 2 years ago

It was $500 with an expensive mandatory 2-year contract. With an expensive 2-year contract you can get most budget phones for 'free'.

kristianc• 2 years ago

"Nokia impact minimal in terms of financials, but may impede US penetration or success"

Now there's a gem of a line...

GoToRO3• 2 years ago

there's another one, users still prefer buttons...

gatnoodle• 2 years ago

_Evaluate the partnership with Microsoft (the enemy of your enemy...)_

edejong2• 2 years ago

"Even though Steve Jobs emphasised iPhone superiority to "Buttons", it is to be expected that the consumer QWERTY category will continue to succeed."

Their key mistake.

ttepasse3• 2 years ago

I don't know. 17 years on and my fingers still miss hardware keyboards a little bit.

My dream smartphone would be a black rectangle, but with a landscape hardware keyboard to slide out from underneath. And in an ideal world OLED keys for changing the layout and a touch sensitivity for moving a text cursor.

What I miss from the 2000s is the big differentiation in phone form factors. Granted, a lot of them were weird, but there was at least experimentation and optimising for different use cases. What if the current standard of a black rectangle is just a local maximum and there is something better ahead?

nyarlathotep_• 2 years ago

I still think Motorola's Droid (and Droid 2) were the pinnacle of the smartphone form factor.

I distinctly recall the prevailing view among friends at the time was that even with the keyboard-less smartphones becoming the norm that the keyboard approach would become the standard interface, as Blackberry still existed and had majority market share (it seemed; my region had few iPhones at the time).

ylee3• 2 years ago

I helped cover IT hardware companies including Apple at a bulge-bracket investment bank. Not just Nokia, but the entire phone industry was caught flatfooted by iPhone as willvarfar and anonu said, despite rumors going around the industry. (The joke slide in Jobs' announcement presentation showing an iPod with phone dial was not too far off what we and most people expected.)

Thoughts on the presentation:

* "There is not much coolness left for Motorola" - The day of the announcement, I saw a press release from Motorola come across the wire, in which the company announced yet another phone with a keyboard. I felt pity for the unfortunate souls who had designed it, worked on its launch, and wrote the copy for the press release, and who now had to see their efforts fly into Hurricane iPhone.

* Predictions of lower-priced iPhones - Average iPhone prices of course rose, as opposed to falling. As JSR_FDED said, Apple has always played upmarket. I heard Apple's CFO say at a Citigroup-hosted investor conference that his company could release a $799 computer "but we don't want to".

(That said, it is quite possible to find deals, at least in the US. I got my iPhone 13 by agreeing to pay $200 over 30 months on top of my already super-cheap T-Mobile plan. The iPhone before that, I bought carrier refurbished for $100 from Sprint.)

And of course, there never was an iPhone mini with a fundamentally different UI. Despite the repeated commitment to improving on UI, etc., I guess it would have been too much to ask a company like Nokia, the king of releasing a new model with new UI and new form factor weekly, to imagine that another company would just not play the infinite-SKU game. (Conversely, it's not hard to imagine that had Apple entered the phone market in the 1990s during the years of endless indistinguishable Performa models, it might have tried to play along.)

* The MVNO mention is regarding rumors of Apple launching its phone in conjunction with an MVNO. We thought this was quite possible, but it was based on Apple having the credibility to immediately have millions of customers switch to it as their carrier, and not because Apple—of all companies—could not get whatever it wanted from carriers.

* Third-party app support - Most have forgotten that Apple really did expect webapps to be the app experience for iPhone's first year. But even that would have been an improvement over what things was like before iPhone. I speak as one who purchased my share of Palm apps. $20 was the norm for, say, DateBk6 (which, by the way, has at least one function that MacOS's Calendar just got with Sequoia).

* "Expect RIM and Palm to suffer" - I never liked using my company-issued Blackberries. I didn't leave Palm until 3GS in 2009; besides DateBk6, I also liked being able to tether my computer to my Palm Treo 700p.

* I'm pretty sure there was no sharing of data revenue or iTunes revenue. Apple got what it wanted from Cingular/AT&T regarding marketing and in-store push without having to preload bloatware or the carrier's brand name all over the device/packaging, and the carrier got the exclusive of the decade. Remember, Deutsche Telekom deciding to sell T-Mobile in 2011 was directly because it didn't have iPhone (so that tells you how the repeated mention in the presentation of T-Mobile turned out).

cruffle_duffle3• 2 years ago

Oh man… I forgot about the software branding on pre-iPhones. Everything had the carriers brand on it from the boot screen to all the “special apps” and crap. iPhone had none of that and it absolutely pissed off the carriers. Apple turned them all into dumb pipes and they hated that.

jl6• 2 years ago

One can imagine the feeling of realizing the asteroid will hit in 6 months but your anti-asteroid solution will take 3 years to build.

dschuetz• 2 years ago

Nokia saw the iPhone, fast-forward to 2014, Nokia just gives up and sells their dead horse cellphone business to Microsoft. Microsoft casts a few necromancy spells and also just gives up 3 years later, and kills the same dead horse again. The end.

nsteel• 2 years ago

...and then to HMD, and then they gave up. The end (again)?

dialup_sounds2• 2 years ago

...and then they made some Android foldables that went nowhere. The end?

I expect to see a new Windows Phone in around 2030.

alt2273• 2 years ago

Nokia needs to develop touch UI to fight back. S60 should be focus, but Maemo platform can be a critical strength due to openness.

If only history went this way, Maemo could be a full OS competing with the big boys by now.

benrutter• 2 years ago

Like some other commenters, I'm amazed at how well thought out Nokia's insight into the iPhone was at the time. They seemed pretty aware it was a major threat, and a game changer that needed to be responded to.

I'd be curious about an alternative history where Nokia hadn't tied itself so strongly to the burning reckage that was Windows Phone. Would Nokia have wound up as a solid android phone producer somewhere similar to where Samsung are now? I guess we'll never know.

tmnvdb7• 2 years ago

My understanding is that the microsoft partnership was more like a late last ditch effort.

The market was changing to one where hardware was produced in asia and phones are loaded with ecosystem-centric software from Google or Apple (the real game changer, the app store, was launched next year).

Nokia did not really have a place in either of those and did not manage to adapt to this fundamental change. They did actually manage to adapt to the UI revolution of the first iphone.

krastanov• 2 years ago

It is really saddening for me to see how much N800/N900 and the Maemo platform are mentioned here, as an example of Nokia actually being first to introduce many of these technologies, but then Nokia dropped them a few years later. I still occasionally boot my N900, I wish I had a use for it -- it still works great as a general purpose computer and a good phone.

abhayhegde• 2 years ago

Nokia correctly predicted that iPhone would stand for "coolness" factor. It's amazing how Apple carried that brand since its inception and precisely what allows it to levy "Apple tax".

The execs even noted that the downside of iPhone would be non-removable battery. It is commendable that Apple changed the industry standard to something worse without even being in the top 10 in 2008.

kombine• 2 years ago

I was working as a Qt developer at the time and really rooted for Maemo to succeed, because Qt was and still is a truly an amazing piece of technology. Unfortunately, Nokia squandered this opportunity.

ongytenes• 2 years ago

Got a 404 at tiiny.host after following your link.

sefke• 2 years ago

I've been reading these Nokia archives for the whole day. It's so interesting to see what they did behind the scenes.

yread• 2 years ago

Based on highly speculative iPhone sales of 6.5 million during 2007 and 14 million during 2008.

Actual sales: 2007: 1.4M, 2008: 12M. Pretty spot on.

cf100clunk2• 2 years ago

Me too, I was there.

For those who wish to deep dive into the mobile phone industry's history from the late 1990s and subsequent decades, I highly recommend industry analyst Tomi Ahonen's voluminous (I'm not kidding) blog from back then. I'm providing a link here about Nokia in particular:

https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/nokia/

and especially his scathing take on the events of the Microsoft-Nokia timeframe, wherein as events transpired he frequently reframed his belief that Elop was the "Worst CEO In History".

unwiredben• 2 years ago

I was at Palm when the iPhone launched, and one note from this analysis summed up Apple's new power in the market and how they really changed the landscape.

"Cingular has allowed Apple to launch a device with WLAN and inbuilt services"

At that time, the carriers controlled so much of the cell phone experience. We certainly would have loved to have launched Palm Treo phones with WiFi radios, but our carrier partners wanted the only way to get data in and out of the devices to be through their monetized data plans. They also wanted to control what you did with that data so they could charge for their own email or messaging systems or web portals. The same applied to app stores. Palm OS didn't have a unified app store at that time, just sideloading and some third-party methods, and some carriers had started making their own stores where you could buy apps billed through your cell phone bill. They hated the idea of a platform owning that, and I expect that was part of the reason Apple originally released it with no app store. They needed the phone to be a massive hit in order to gain the power to also bypass that wall that the cell companies put up.

Palm did benefit from the iPhone launch -- it had us uplevel our efforts away from the post-Palm OS phones that we were in the middle of developing that were aimed at the RIM market and instead try something radical with webOS, and when the Pre launched, it actually had WiFi on board, although the Sprint-exclusive Pixi phone lacked WiFi due to carrier request. There was some momentum there for a while, but then HP bought us, hit its own set of brick walls with carriers, and ditched the hardware business shortly after Apple started launching on other carriers.

dboreham• 2 years ago

Exactly this. Also why I bought Apple stock the day the iPhone was announced (I had never seen an iPhone and knew nothing about how cool it was, but I took notice that Jobs had been able to blast through the carrier moat concerning data service).

jandrese10• 2 years ago

I read that as a failure of Palm's management, notably the ones that were negotiating with phone carriers. Jobs isn't the only guy who could have negotiated that kind of deal. Apple was a second run computer company that had almost no previous phone experience. They were not exactly negotiating from a position of strength, and the fact that only one carrier took them up on the offer shows just how tough it was.

It sounds like they really needed to say "Stop. We are the ones building the phone, you are the ones providing the service. We don't tell you how to build towers, you don't tell us how to build the handset, at least not the user facing part of the handset."

wmf• 2 years ago

Steve Jobs could say that but as the old saying goes, you are not Steve Jobs.

dmonitor• 2 years ago

Jobs isn't the only guy who could have negotiated that kind of deal

This is a debatable claim.

Apple was a second run computer company that had almost no previous phone experience. They were not exactly negotiating from a position of strength

The iPhone was not a mobile Mac. It was an iPod with an inbuilt cellphone. iPod was HUGE. That was their upper hand.

joe_the_user2• 2 years ago

I would expect that being a computer company gave Apple more leverage than the handset makers. Apple could afford to have none of the providers say yes.

Moreover, Apple had prestige. It wasn't that big but it already the high-end computer maker. And Apple had the already successful ipod which served as the basis for the original iphone. And the handset makers had been fundamentally dependent on carriers in determining what features made it to the final phones - which would have had to made them essentially weaklings.

Which is to say, I think there's reason to think Apple had strength in it's negotiation position relative to a random handset maker.

pavlov2• 2 years ago

Apple in 2006 wasn’t a computer company, they were the iPod company.

It was huge as a consumer product. And that was the only thing that could convince a carrier to take a bet with Apple: they wanted exclusivity on the “next iPod”.

scarface_7415• 2 years ago

By the time that the iPhone was introduced, Apple was riding high on the iPod.

atourgates• 2 years ago

The Pre was absolutely rad - and to this day the only phone I miss from a UI perspective, and the only UX and hardware that I thought had a chance of "out Apple'ing Apple".

The hardware was very well done, and I could type faster on my Pre than I still can today on any screen. I was never a Blackberry person, but I expect it was a simlar experience.

Even at launch, WebOS was a pleasure to use, and the architecture of essentially easy-to-make installable web apps was revolutionary at the time. It's a damn shame it never made it further than it did.

seanc3• 2 years ago

I was at RIM at that time and saw _exactly_ the same thing. When I started in 2008, in addition to WiFi and apps they were squabbling with carriers about whether or not the Blackberry needed an antenna. Carriers were micromanaging devices to an astonishing degree.

The river of money from Macs, iPods and iTunes gave Steve Jobs a completely different kind of leverage in those carrier negotiations. Device only companies like Palm and RIM couldn't have broken that carrier strangle even if they did have the technology.

PlunderBunny• 2 years ago

Were virtual network operators (?) - VNOs - a thing back then, and could a VNO make its own rules? If so, could Apple (or Palm or RIM) launch their devices without carrier compromise by also owning a virtual network? I guess this would have required a lot of money. Maybe Nokia could have done it?

spiralpolitik4• 2 years ago

The Pre and WebOS were hands down the best non iPhone experience at the time. The mistake Palm made was going exclusive instead of pushing it everywhere. I don't think the Pre ever recovered from that in the USA.

The BlackBerry Z10 was also a great device but by that point there was no way BlackBerry to deploy a competing ecosystem to iPhone and Android for it to matter.

grishka• 2 years ago

At that time, the carriers controlled so much of the cell phone experience.

In English-speaking countries, maybe. But I remember at least Windows Mobile PDAs that had both a cellular radio and wifi before the iPhone launched. At least Russian carriers never cared at all what kind of phone or other device you were using on their network. You bought it unlocked for the full price from somewhere else anyway. There were various attempts to do US-style carrier-locked phones with 2-year commitment with no or little upfront payment, but none of that really stuck. The only exception to that was SkyLink, Russia's only CDMA carrier. They sold their own branded phones but even those, iirc, were for the full price upfront.

tiltowait• 2 years ago

Though I never used a Pre, I got to use webOS on an HP Touchpad. In many ways, I still think it’s better than what we currently have and wish it had won out instead of the iOS and Android.

SllX• 2 years ago

Palm OS didn't have a unified app store at that time, just sideloading and some third-party methods, and some carriers had started making their own stores where you could buy apps billed through your cell phone bill. They hated the idea of a platform owning that, and I expect that was part of the reason Apple originally released it with no app store. They needed the phone to be a massive hit in order to gain the power to also bypass that wall that the cell companies put up.

This might actually be a partial explanation why some of Apple’s Executives held back on trying to convince Jobs until after they shipped, but initially, Steve Jobs was truly against the idea of running third-party apps on iPhones and had to be convinced.

I love sharing this trivia with people because really, can you imagine an iPhone without apps? It’s crazy to me to even think about, and back then during that first year and for many subsequent years after until this became public knowledge, I thought the only reason there wasn’t an SDK was because the first iPhone as a minimum-viable product for Apple’s vision of a cell phone and an SDK was always in the cards from before the start. Because why wouldn’t it? They had Cocoa! And a small but enthusiastic base of indie Mac devs that knew how to use it.

orev• 2 years ago

As an outsider very interested in Palm devices, this was always my impression/suspicion. Thanks for confirming what I’ve long thought was going on.

jjallen• 2 years ago

Content doesn't exist for me

wslh• 2 years ago

When I loook on this [recent] history, the business and technical strategies Apple and Google employed in mobile were truly amazing. In my view, Apple and Google managed to reinvent themselves (organically or otherwise), while Nokia and Microsoft were weighed down by their attachments to the past. Blackberry is in the same ship. In hindsight it seems they should have embraced Android as early as possible (thinking in the success of the Samsung S II (2011)).

phgn• 2 years ago

Does anyone have a PDF link that works?

dagmx• 2 years ago

The link doesn’t work anymore but this one does for me https://aalto.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/IO_926740c...

gurjeet• 2 years ago

This seems to have been originally posted on Reddit, and the link posted there seems to be online, whereas this post's link seems to be now dead.

https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...

https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/comments/1i2pijr/nokias_...

codetrotter• 2 years ago

It seems the other way around for the particular post you are linking.

This was posted to HN, then a bit picked it up from RSS and cross posted the same link to r/hackernews on Reddit (your Reddit link).

Then the repo.aalto.fi site was temporarily hugged by too much traffic.

Then someone reuploaded the PDF to this other tiiny site. Then the link on HN was changed to that. Then the file on the tiiny site disappeared.

Regardless, thanks for the link. The repo.aalto.fi link currently works for me. Probably because it’s getting much less traffic now.

joshmarinacci2• 2 years ago

Sometimes a company can know the problem is real and be unable to address it. I was at Palm when HP bought us. HP knew the future was mobile and wanted to not be just a low margin OEM for someone else’s software platform. Buying Palm was a way for them to control their own destiny again.

Unfortunately the driver of this dream at HP was fired by the board before it got going and his replacement didn’t share the vision. A year later HP took a massive writedown and turned it all off. (Then he was fired by the board as well. The circle of life continues).

maCDzP• 2 years ago

I doubt todays management would read a PowerPoint that dense.

hackerstyle• 2 years ago

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mZ_S3R53bmVpvxixavkMPmMorCj...

EtienneK• 2 years ago

When things like this pop up, I always think back to Joel Spolsky's review of the Nokia E71 and how he compared it to the iPhone 3G: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/08/22/a-review-of-the-no...

The E71 was arguably Nokia's best phone ever; and it was indeed better than the iPhone 3G. But Nokia just couldn't keep up the momentum.

kbouck• 2 years ago

Worked at Nokia when iPhone was released. No strategy/management insight, but I recall the jokes made by my colleagues as I showed off my iPhone 1:

"Cool, but can it make phone calls"

On internal message boards, some employees advocated staying loyal to Nokia products, and others advocated buying the best product (iPhone) to challenge Nokia.

Wish they had navigated this one better...

pkaye• 2 years ago

Anyone have a working link?

toastau• 2 years ago

Uploaded the PDF here: https://files.catbox.moe/y94qdz.pdf

TradingPlaces• 2 years ago

They got so much right and still got swamped.

sebmellen• 2 years ago

From the second to last page:

Apple is most probably using the first Application Processor of nVidia in iPhone.

Was this true?

markus92• 2 years ago

Nope, used a Samsung CPU with PowerVR GPU.

GoToRO3• 2 years ago

If we go only by this presentation, it seems that they tried to understand the forest by looking at every leaf in detail and then try to guess if the forest is beautiful or not.

aanet2• 2 years ago

As others have noted, the original presentation is here:

https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...

haeberli2• 2 years ago

New pdf link broken as well, as far as I can tell

wodenokoto2• 2 years ago

haeberli2• 2 years ago

New pdf link is broken, as far as I can tell.

Ancapistani4• 2 years ago

Huh - the implications of this time period reach much farther than I would have expected.

I recall switching from a small, regional cellular carrier to Cingular with the launch of the iPhone 3G. It only now occurred to me that I'm still there. I stayed with Cingular when it became AT&T, and still have service through them. For that matter, the service has significantly expanded; I now have tablets, watches, and four phones for family members... some of whom weren't even alive when I switched carriers. My bill is ~$450 / month.

If I assume an average monthly bill of $300 (it started around $100, but has been as high as $550), there have been 196 months that I've paid that bill. $58,800 in revenue from me alone, that would have gone to someone else had Cingular not allowed Apple to launch on their network in 2007.

lotsofpulp4• 2 years ago

A good portion of your monthly bill goes toward paying the debt incurred from massively overpaying DirectTV and Time Warner shareholders in the 2010s. I don't understand how the entire ATT board and leadership were not ejected. I think it was something on the order of $100B lost just on those two transactions.

Ancapistani4• 2 years ago

I'm no fan of the company itself, but I've been too pleased with the service to really want to switch.

About a year ago I needed a SIM for an (older) Android phone for my daughter, who didn't need a capable smartphone or anything. They sent me one, but when I activated it over the phone the CS rep made a mistake and it ended up blacklisted. I told them I was activating it because my daughter was going on a trip in a couple of days, and they escalated it. I ended up with an AT&T employee driving 1.5 hours to my house to hand-deliver a new SIM and make sure the phone was activated and working the next day. In addition, they gave me a $500 bill credit without prompting at all.

So... yeah. It's not ideal, but I honestly feel like I'm getting what I'm paying for.

yreg• 2 years ago

A bit off the topic, but your bill is bonkers to me. We have unlimited data + unlimited calls for 39€.

Ancapistani4• 2 years ago

Sure, but those are totally different economies, geography, and demographics.

Where I live is quite rural, with my county having a population density of ~35 people/mile^2 (or ~13.5 people/km^2). Median income here is low relative to most of the US, but not compared to Europe.

scarface_7415• 2 years ago

With both T-Mobile and the MVNOs you can get unlimited data and calls for $40-$50.

bdangubic2• 2 years ago

that should all run you sub-$200/month (I have 5 phones, 4 watches, 1 tablet - $178/month (which I think it is still to high and am getting ready to call att to negotiate again or switch))

Ancapistani4• 2 years ago

I really don't think so. I've shopped around several times, and while I could cut it a bit, I'm not getting more than a ~15% reduction overall.

Note that this is not all cellular service; I typically buy contract-subsidized devices. There's really no reason not to, as it's the same cost as buying them elsewhere but paid over two years. The effect of inflation alone on that deferred debt is about the same as what I could save on service by changing carriers.

Also, I and my family use our devices extensively. It's not uncommon for us to hit 1TB of cellular data in a month.

alasdair_• 2 years ago

Through who? I'm paying $450 a month for 5 iphones and 4 watches.

scarface_7415• 2 years ago

I pay $360 a month on T-Mobile. That is for 5 cell phones, 3 iPads, and 2 Watches with unlimited data and 2 phone contracts. Without the 2 phone contracts it would be $300/month

catchmeifyoucan• 2 years ago

I have to share that my career as a software engineer started with Windows Phone. They used to give super nice Nokia phones out if you made an app. And free backpacks :)

Developing for Windows phone was easy as drag and drop. I honestly think no other native platform had that good of a DevEx. If you were already an app developer, I can see how it's hard to learn something new. But if it was your first time, this was prolly the easiest platform to start.

Eventually the platform died, and I found a career with Xamarin using a similar stack (C#, XAML) and built for other platforms as well.

I miss Windows Phone. Honestly some of the cleanest devices ever built with the carl zeiss lens and raised screen.

lifestyleguru• 2 years ago

One thing that makes me anxious is it looks like right now the entire EU has its "Nokia in 2007" moment.

digitalsurgeonz• 2 years ago

there are parallels to the Ukraine war in this story. Nokia = Ukraine, MSFT = USA. Things played out similarly in both cases.

throw_pm23• 2 years ago

Who are Apple, Android, Samsung, etc. in this analogy?

micheljansen• 2 years ago

I was doing mobile development on a home healthcare product during this period. The product was built around Nokia’s line of phones with NFC built in, so we had good ties with them and would always get prototypes of their next generation of NFC-capable device ahead of time to get the software ready ahead of launch.

Shortly after the launch of the iPhone, Nokia canned the prototype S60 model we were working on without announcing any alternative. I always imagined they scrapped the whole pipeline of successors they had planned. The iPhone was at least 2 generations ahead of the unreleased prototype. Ended up having to port the whole thing to a different device from Samsung.

lxe• 2 years ago

Wow! Nokia understood exactly what was happening and what needed to be done but failed to execute.

r00fus2• 2 years ago

Thoughts:

1) References to Java on device and "lack of OTA" and the importance of "iTunes" indicated the presenters had little understanding of the possibility of the App Store which was a seismic shift in the industry that was apparently not foreseen.

2) They noticed some important missing features (3G, OTA updates, etc) but all of them were addressed with the next version (3G).

3) They were panicking about "iPhone mini" and thought it would be a feature reduction (like iPod interface) but in the end Apple just cannibalized its own profits and just lower the price on the full-featured 3G.

carlosjobim3• 2 years ago

The analysis is fascinating. The iPod had already been a huge success for some time, retailing for hundreds of dollars. Of course Apple would make a phone. Even if it would have just been an iPod with feature phone ... features.

Nokia goes on and on about pricing in the report. How could they not get into their thick skulls that there was a good market for more expensive, better devices?

Then the tragedy with the Nokia N9, which both in hardware design and software UI design looks and feels more modern than Apple and Android devices from 2024.

I think Nokia owners and leadership simply gave up when they saw the iPhone launch, decided to cash out their money to offshore accounts, and hired some shady fellows from Microsoft to cover up by staging bad business decisions doomed to fail.

fgblanch• 2 years ago

It is painful to read. To me in retrospective the major mistake in the presentation is that it barely talks about end users and how the iPhone enabled a new world of use cases. It is only about business/corporate, features and specs. When analyzing the iphone on those dimensions all the reactive action items are doomed. They had not a chance to compete with that analysis.

urbandw311er• 2 years ago

Looking back, it’s astonishing how long it actually took the competition to catch up in terms of developing an equally responsive touchscreen that felt anything like as intuitive.

yencabulator3• 2 years ago

My personal theory is where Nokia failed was worrying too much about Osborne effect[1] of their Linux-based phones on their Symbian business, or there being some behind-the-scenes contract clauses that tied them to Symbian too much.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

Background/disclaimer: My business partner made a prototype touchscreen keyboard for Nokia, running on unreleased Linux hardware. Nokia had a significant Linux codebase very early on.

Seanambers• 2 years ago

Site is flagged by basically everything for phishing.

Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

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