Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon
spectrum.ieee.org182 points by jruohonen 4 days ago
182 points by jruohonen 4 days ago
From the article:
"Elop oversaw the 2011 launch of a Linux-based smartphone, the Nokia N9. The N9 ran on a distribution of Linux called MeeGo. Reviewers at the time praised the new smartphone direction the Finnish phone maker had taken. 'Possibly the most beautiful phone ever made,' wrote one reviewer about the N9 for Engadget.
But the N9’s accolades did not ultimately carry the day. Nokia announced its Lumia line of phones the same year—a direct pivot away from MeeGo toward the Windows Phone. It would be the last major strategic turn Nokia would take as a cellphone manufacturer. From this point forward, a succession of C-suite decisions all but sealed the fate of Nokia’s iconic line of phones."
We were so close to having literal plain Linux phones. Sad to me. I wonder where this could have gone without Microsoft.
Discussed in HN many times, but worth restating once more. The N9 was fantastic. A joy to use, and in many ways the best design, both hardware and software, I've ever handled. Everything had been designed with care and some UI elements remain unmatched.
I think I was one of the first developers that got an N770 engineering sample (the first product in the N770-N9 saga) and it was really clear that they were onto something. Sadly, internal politics won over company and consumer interests. It took them extremely long to let this be a phone, not just an "Internet tablet". It was bizarre.
The same team is now behind Jolla/Sailfish. It's pretty remarkable how far they've got, but it's obviously not a perfect product given how small they are compared to the other mobile juggernauts. However, it's usable as a daily driver and, with a critical developer mass, it could get somewhere. There are already quite a few indie apps.
Crucially, I think it's the only platform that has the potential to set you truly free. GrapheneOS is the other alternative I can also endorse and tolerate, but it has a different set of compromises, and it's a bit fragile to Google pulling the plug. But it's great in its own ways.
To add to that: Elop announced the end of N9 weeks before it's release and more then a year before the first Lumina was available. Dead on arrival not even shipped in major markets. Yet the N9 was years ahead any competition of that time.
Exactly, and it sold really well despite that.
It was Kafkaesque, discontinuing a product before release.
Elop knew what his job was. Sell Nokia to Microsoft.
And he effectively killed the last EU platform. Will we ever see another one?
I miss these simpler times when devices were made to serve users, and not the other way round.
The N9 shipped when it did because the teams working on the successor project had been pulled back to support the N9, and Elop arrived to find a company betting its future on a new platform that had almost no existing third party support and which wouldn't have any follow-up hardware for another 2 years. Google has no incentive to work with Nokia rather than the existing vendors who'd staked themselves to Android, the other competing platforms at the time were basically all tied to a single vendor, but Microsoft wanted a recognisable brand name and would throw engineering resources at supporting them. With hindsight it obviously didn't work, but Meego as a competitive platform was already dead even without heading in the Microsoft direction.
It's funny that these conversations always focus on Elop and not all the decisions already made by the time he showed up. Maemo bring rebased on Qt at the insistence of the Series 60 team so there could be a transition story from S60 to Linux delayed software development significantly, and the merge with Moblin was ultimately entirely unnecessary churn.
It's a convenient story to blame Nokia's failure on Elop and Microsoft, but in the timeline where that transition didn't happen we'd still look back at the N9 as the last gasp of a giant that failed to adapt to the changing market fast enough. The N9 came out almost 4 years after the iPhone - the Pre had landed two years earlier and even so had failed to gain sufficient market support to survive, and HP killed WebOS a few months after the N9 shipped. In 2011 momentum was entirely with iOS and Android. If the N9 had shipped in 2009 they might have had a chance. Instead, the N900 was shipped in limited company quantities with woefully uncompetitive hardware.
It's 2011. Faced with an ecosystem that has changed massively in the past 4 years that's destroyed your high end market and is threatening your medium and low end market, and given the choice between an (absolutely beautiful!) in-house platform with no killer apps and two years before you can ship a successor, and the opportunity to tie up with a dominant OS vendor who'll prioritise your brand and provide engineering support and make it possible to churn out several new high end devices in that two year timeframe, which seems like the better choice?
The better choice would have been to double down on N9 and successors. This was my opinion at that time and still is. You may be right about all the internal problems that delayed thing, but the Windows Phone decision was bad and poorly executed.
Nokia Mobile Phones, with all its divisions, was a bloated organization with so much organizational friction that it created enough fire to burn any "platform" and its neighbor too. Proven by Jolla, which with just 50–100 people created so much with a fraction of the headcount that MeeGo had.
Nokia's thinking of the time was to see each phone as a product. The big reset button pressed after release, separating each device from the previous one. Just look at the Maemo & MeeGo story: N770, N800, N900, N9. Basically, top management and did not understand the market early enough and the friction did the rest: it was phones with software, not software for phones. The same misunderstanding some of the media business went through a few years later; people were not buying paper, but news.
There was an internal mandate that MeeGo couldn't release any features before the Symbian side had them too. 100% internal politics.
And as anyone who has worked with Symbian knows, it was a gigantic pile of shit to work with and work on. Everything was massively complex and slow.
So the Linux team had to wait on releases. slowing them down.
It wouldn't necessarily have been better, a major reason the Windows phone stuff failed is it didn't have market share to justify app development. Android barely made it work as a well-funded #2. Palm WebOS, MeeGo, there were various efforts that were better than Android and even iOS in a lot of ways but app availability seems to have been the biggest factor in the lack of platform diversity.
Edit: And consistent with sibling comment Microsoft was even paying companies to build apps for their platform, and it _still_ wasn't enough.
There was also Tizen, FirefoxOS and a whole slew of others. It was a remarkable time.
But it is true that the app-based future, that didn't exist yet, probably came with market dynamics that limits the number of platforms to two or three. It just wasn't clear which those were at the time.
What a vanilla Linux-based platform, and Meego, Maemo, Moblin and Mer were just iterations of the same thing, would have had going for it was that it could have had much better long time support and not just for hardware for software. Linux famously do not break userspace, and can regularly run 30 year old applications. For a phone you would be surprised if a 3 year old app worked.
Microsoft did this so much worse than both Apple or Android, even if they all suffer from it. Every release of the operating system came not just with new design language, never earth-shattering but often interesting, but new GUI toolkits and application packaging. Just a recompile of your application often wasn't enough, you were expected to rewrite your application to fit in with the new. They really shot themselves in the foot with that, and they did it over and over again despite never having leading market share and everbody seeing where things were heading. It was (and perhaps still is) probably the only way they could operate as a company.
The vanilla Linux-based platforms mentioned above had their own problems which should be obvious from the naming scheme alone, which would have compounded had their marketshare grown bigger. It was a forkfest. But that's the issue with corporate open source, there is rightfully an inherent skepticism where a single company dominates what is an open source project. This is also why Linus never took a job with the big Linux providers. It wasn't for a lack of opportunitites, but he knew that had he worked for Red Hat, people would always suspect even technical decisions to be made for the benefit of his employer. The most successful open source projects are vendor neutral. That is not in telecom companies culture, they had a very hard time understanding that and tend to form alliances instead. Not the same thing.
Once native apps became important Microsoft didn't have a chance, the basis for Apple's success was in place back in 2003-2005. Apple had a big head start on what is now the standard phone template (always-on cell data, capacitive touch, etc), and based on the experience and success of the iTunes / iPod platform they found leverage to negotiate a unique deal where they controlled OS updates and the app store (instead of the carriers). They also had a lot of experience with OpenGL composited UI from OS X which translated to a (relatively) good GLES implementation on iPhone even though they didn't originally have any kind of public SDK. Very useful for games. Now I think there are some groups that are hoping LLM-based agents will upset the dominance of the app store model... I'm skeptical but we'll see.
I still fondly remember my Palm Pre. It felt like something with the potential for as much UX gloss and functionality as the iPhone but much easier to make small apps for.
Windows Phone aesthetics was repulsive to most people at that time; we finally got TrueColor 4k screens and all MS could do was to use 10 colors everywhere and start the flat fad that destroyed UX on most systems. What a waste.
I don't think that's quite accurate, the screens of the time were more like 480px wide and I don't think most people had a strong aesthetic opinion. Just look at Android. The major problem is that whatever app you cared about, whether it was your bank, Facebook, sport news, or Uber, or Google Maps, or whatever, it was on iOS and maybe Android. So at least in rich countries the decision tree was: buy iOS if you can afford it, buy Android if you can't. Apple basically got extremely lucky that the native app thing took off instead of their original vision of everything via the browser.
I loved the tiled Windows phone ui, felt years ahead of the already aging android look and the god awful iOS look. I use android and iOS daily, and luckily I have been able to add a tiled launcher, with live tiles in android.
Also, had ms continued production and not burned goodwill at each turn, as well as skipped the crapshow that was windows 8, we could at least had had 3 providers instead of two.
I think they would still fail with MeeGo, same like Blackberry failed even though they had really good OS. I remember was going to their conference in amsterdam and were giving their new Blackberry Tablet for free to attract developers to make any app.
If Nokia and Blackberry team up they maybe would succeed. Nokia Mobile still could be around if instead choosing Windows Phone would release Android phone back then.
The blackberry tablet was amazing at the time, especially if you had a blackberry phone as well. The issue was App development was a pain in a rear if i remember correctly, where it felt like you had to reinvent the wheel for everything you needed to do.
MeeGo was actually just a branding of failed project with Intel's Moblin. What nokia shipped was just "compatible with Meego". One key differences was that MeeGo spec was based on rpm packaging while Nokia used deb's. I dont think this played well either in adoption of new "burning platform" :)
> We were so close to having literal plain Linux phones.
We had that and we still do. Back in 2008 I was wondering whether I should spend my first-earned money on the first Android phone (HTC Dream, aka T1) or a "plain Linux phone" (Neo Freerunner) and I've chosen the latter. Ultimately it was a good choice, as Android quickly turned out to be not what I wanted and only got worse over time, while the other path had me eventually go through Nokia N900 and Librem 5, and both of them worked well as mobile phones and pocket-sized computers. They feel like actual smartphones compared to Android and iOS which feel more like appliances that have largely replaced the so called feature-phones of the past.
That said, Nokia N9 was already strafing away from that path, with its Aegis framework that attempted to lock the device down in hopes to, basically, enforce a form of DRM. It turned out not to be very effective, but it would undoubtedly have kept being improved in later iterations, slowly eroding that unrestricted agency of the user that the N900 was famous for.
> We were so close to having literal plain Linux phones.
IIRC, the dominant position back then was "Android is Linux". Shuttleworth closed his famous #1 bug on Canonical that was their mission in 2013 because now Android/Linux is more popular than Windows and the future is mobile[1]. Also Google still had a lot of good will in the OSS/Linux community back then so most "Mobile Linux" attempts were met with "Just use Android"
[1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/05/mark-shuttleworth-marks-...
Android may be a Linux but it (if we are feeling generous) sure as heck is not the user's. It's someone else's Linux that they let us run some non-Linux apps in in extremely tight sandboxes.
I loved Nokia's Linux phones, and bought several of them. I drove to New York (from Boston) twice to get an N900 as early as possible. But I wonder what they would have had to do to make that line of phones a mass-market success. Users of the N900 had root privilege. Can you imagine a support nightmare that would have been for T-Mobile et al.? To sell Linux phones to the general public, I think they would have had to lock down the OS to the point that it resembled what Android is today.
Most of the Windows CE phones of that era (pre-Windows Phone 7) were also basically "rooted" - i.e. you could install any .CAB and there was nothing stopping you. But Linux is a real operating system and Windows CE is basically on the same level as Windows 95 from an architecture standpoint.
A friend of mine worked at a cell phone repair shop and it was fairly common for someone to bring in their bulky keyboard-slideout HTC PDA that had frozen and typically the only recourse was a "hard reset" - reverting the phone to factory settings and removing all stored data (which was in the MB those days). Of course WinMo on most PDAs of the time was quite capable of keeling over all by itself without the aid of third-party programs, so the user couldn't always be blamed.
Got forbid the user of a device they have bought is in control!
That woul be the end of the world, you could not push downgrades, like Samsung remotely disabling bootloader unlock or Bamboolab forcing all your 3D models through their cloud service.
The horror! They could even remove all your unskippable adds and disable all the spying, gross!
> We were so close to having literal plain Linux phones. Sad to me. I wonder where this could have gone without Microsoft.
Sadly, I strong suspect it would have gone nowhere. Apps became the name of the game and iOS and Android built up strong app libraries quickly. If Microsoft failed to compete I don't think a Nokia Linux phone would have stood a chance at all. Maybe if it added Android compatibility but that would be as much of an admission of failure as anything.
Assuming that a plain Linux phone had succeeded early on, once banks, retailers and media companies refused to provide apps because of security concerns, then either the phone would die in the marketplace or it would have developed security solutions similar to those provided by iOS and Android today and no longer be a 'plain Linux phone'.
Reviewers were nice to it because they knew it was DOA.
It did have some good sides but it was in most ways worse than comparable iPhones and androids.
It was absolutely not. It easily rivaled (and in many ways surpassed) the contemporary iPhones and was so far ahead of Androids it wasn’t even funny. It was such a fascinating combination of ahead-of-its-time touch UI/UX and power user friendliness.
Every time a Linux sprouts out somewhere, Microsoft flamethrower comes over. Consumer market, academic environment, public office. I heard that Bill will cure malaria and covid just anytime now, the day after universal healthcare will be introduced in US.
I think that's over now, Microsoft is focusing on cloud and AI and doesn't particularly care which OS you run as long as they somehow make money. Plenty of reasons left to dislike and distrust them, though (cf. "cloud and AI").
It's over only because average user doesn't have laptop or PC anymore, interestingly there is no Microsoft smartphone OS.
We had Linux phones. I learnt Python+Qt coding on a Nokia N900 (the N9's predecessor). I must emphasise on the "coding on" part. I would ssh into the phone and use it as a regular Linux box.
Something which the article omits is that Nokia changed it CEO to an ex-boardmember of MSFT. Comments in Slashdot that week were "this guy's gonna tank Nokia, kill their Linux research and sell out to MS". They were 100% accurate.
Make no mistake, Nokia didn't make "a mistake" or a simple bad call. Someone was placed at the top to sabotage and destroy it.
Not far. Not even MS had the clout to impose a third alternative in phones, and it was needed.
And WindowsPhone was actually a good design for user interaction, with the exception of some underlying clunkiness of settings.
What a badly written article. How could you leave out the N900 and the development history that came before it? If it wasn't for Elop and Microsoft, Nokia could have dominated and we wouldn't be stuck with mostly proprietary phones.
We're still waiting to solve that problem...
Nokia was already in deep trouble before windows phone. If they did not go windows phone they would have ended up a android OEM (still better for them than what ended up happening) but there was no realistic way for them to "domination" at that point. That would have required them to change strategy years before they first saw the iphone.
> still better for them than what ended up happening
Microsoft paid $7.2 billion for Nokia's loss making phone division in 2013.
There's no way anybody would have paid that much for just another Android OEM.
As much as Nokia fans hated it, the Windows Phone strategy actually extracted the best value out of the rotting assets of Nokia Mobile Phones.
And Nokia the networking company remains a $70B corporation today. The cash from Microsoft enabled the investments that made them a network leader.
> Microsoft paid $7.2 billion for Nokia's loss making phone division in 2013. There's no way anybody would have paid that much for just another Android OEM.
They paid for a fully operating Windows Phone company with competitive devices and an established brand, at a time when Microsoft had a strong hardware-strategy.
It was the perfect move for both Microsoft and Nokia.
Microsoft even tried to bargain that Nokia had no alternative to sell because of their dependency on Windows Phone OS, so Nokia demonstrated that this is not true by announcing the "Nokia X", a device with skinned fork of Android without Google and Nokia's own App-store in Feb'2014, JUST to close the acquisition deal with Microsoft.
> As much as Nokia fans hated it, the Windows Phone strategy actually extracted the best value out of the rotting assets of Nokia Mobile Phones.
Not to forget, Nokia kept almost ALL of their patents AND ownership of the brand in that deal.
But they chose a guy who would leave microsoft, accelerate the rot and set them on the windows phone path before that sale? I don't think it was the best value for those assets. They still were a big phone brand with a ton of consumer attachment prior to that even if on the decline. i wanted to buy their phones.
As an Android OEM they'd have zero chance in the Asian market due to cost/features but they'd likely compete very well in the shut-out-from-most-competition US market and a good chance to be a secondary player in the European markets. Not a leader anymore but a significant player for sure.
Windows Phone was dead on arrival. Throwing yourself behind a losing platform was Nokia's death knell.
> As an Android OEM they'd have zero chance in the Asian market due to cost/features
This is completely wrong.
The Asian Market is far more diverse than that.
The Nokia brand was extremely strong.
The Asian market was and is very capable of supporting high end phones. It’s a smaller percentage of the market than in the west, but the entire market is also a lot bigger, so the absolute size of the Asian high end phone market is not far off from either the U.S. or European high end phone markets.
Funny you assume Nokia would be a high end phone brand and that you assume Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi are not.
Reality of 2026 is that those are by far the best Android brands out there. Oppo Find N6 beats any foldable in screen, build quality, cameras, processor, RAM. Vivo X Fold 6 in battery. Oppo Find X9 Ulta, Xiaomi 17 Ultra and Vivo X300 Ultra beat any Apple or Samsung in cameras and battery etc etc
All I am saying is: the market in Asia is a lot more diverse than the one in Europe and a shit ton more diverse than the US market which is basically a duopoly of Apple and Samsung (with minor market share for everyone else Motorola, Nothing, etc). No Oppo, no Vivo, no Xiaomi, no Honor, no Huawei, soon no Oneplus etc.
Nokia fanboys would never accept anything other than Elop/MS fault.
Even if you shove the sales values in their face and ask to explain why the revenue was dropping for a 3rd year by the time of the Burning Platform memo.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/267819/nokias-net-sales-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph...
And it's always N900 and 'dEvelOpmeNt hIstoRy'.
I'm pretty sure what most of them didn't even read the memo, literally.
Because they didn’t sell Android phones? More specifically, they didn’t have phones that ran an OS for which all the apps were being built, which practically meant Android since Apple wasn’t licensing iOS.
Going to Windows Phone 7 didn’t solve the fundamental problem they needed to solve. The ecosystem, while also eliminating the ability to differentiate or innovate.
No, Android has nothing to do with what Nokia did it to itself.
They were making a supbar products and did them for quite a years and people moved while Nokia itself didn't. I need re-iterate what by the time of the memo it was already too late.
If you want - read my previous thoughts on the topic and don't miss the thing about Ovi in the second link:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32699296
The N900 shipped two years after the iPhone while still having a resistive touchscreen. In the story of Nokia resisting Apple and Android it's basically irrelevant - it's part of the history that led to the N9, but it's not until we get to the N9 that there's a meaningful response to the market shift they represented.
Resistive touchscreens get a lot of criticism but even back then that was partly down to Apple propaganda which caught on because people were used to cheap screens with rubbish resistive sensors. The touchscreen on the N900 was good: high resolution, rigid, fast, accurate, sensitive enough for fingertip use.
Resistive touchscreens get a lot of criticism, and all of it is deserved.
Apple has, correctly, recognized that for a touch-first UI, a resistive touchscreen will always feel worse, wear out worse and perform worse than a glass-integrated capacitive touchscreen. This was a big part of how they got their touch-optimized UI to work and feel this good - which was how they differentiated the first iPhone from the sea of contemporary PDAs.
Nokia sticking with the most half-assed touch UI adaptations, Nokia sticking with resistive tech - all of is symptomatic of Nokia either not understanding what Apple's edge was, or being too slow to react to it.
The N900 was never really intended to be a mass market device, more something to attract enthusiast excitement and serve as a reasonable developer platform - so in that respect it being kind of half assed isn't too much of a surprise. The problem was it taking another two years until the (in theory) mass-market hardware was ready and also there having been another basically pointless upheaval in dev experience (the shift from Maemo to Meego, which included changing packaging formats), and in that respect the experience was incredibly half assed.
Nokia N97 and Nokia 5800 XpressMusic were Nokia's first mass produced, mass market "iPhone killers", and they were half-assed responses at best.
Nokia N8 was their first device that was truly competitive with iPhone, and by then, the image of Nokia as a cutting edge smartphone brand was already in decline.
A lot of iPhone's edge, by then, wasn't just in the touch-native UX, but also in app support (developers! developers! developers!), and they had the mindshare advantage there.
Nokia N9 was even better in a vacuum - but was even more late to market, and had even worse app support.
Did it have multi-touch?
Propaganda or not, I still remember the sense of wonder when first experiencing the smooth zooming and panning with two fingers on the first iPhone. Adding multi-touch to the 2007 MacBook trackpad was one of the reasons why I switched to OSX too.
(I still have that phone and when I try it today, smooth is not what I’d call it.)
The fanfare over multi-touch in phones is something I've never understood. It's flashy but phone use (certainly my phone use) is optimised for one thumb, not two fingers.
If somehow you could have the same phone but with a resistive, single-touch screen and use it just like you use it now, then you would learn what:
a resistive screens do actually need to be pressed instead of just touched, if you never get a literal sore thumb from a touch screen usage - well you don't miss anything but it's quite painful after a while and adds to a carpal tunnel syndrome
a multi-touch sensor greatly helps when you need to discern and filter out the false positives
There's a difference between "optimized for" and "it's the only thing you need".
I could in theory get by with + and - buttons to zoom in and out of a map, but it's way more convenient to use pinch to zoom. But even for the browser, I use pinch to zoom all the time.
You can do things with your hands (fingers) This gives many people an enormously satisfying feeling.
I agree, and add that the N900 shipping 2 years later is another piece of proof that Nokia was doomed long-term. It was way too little, way too late. Nokia was never anywhere near the expertise they needed to be a first-class mobile OS platform developer. Apple and Google started executing on features and platform capabilities 10x faster than Nokia ever did, and they never even really tried to figure out how to fix that.
It hurts reading this after just realizing that I can't unlock my Samsung S24's bootloader anymore (to take control of my phone), because Samsung has decided to erase that feature irreversibly using a remote update.
>Nokia could have dominated and we wouldn't be stuck with mostly proprietary phones.
In an alternative timeline with Nokia winning, linux would still have GPLv2 which has no answer for proprietary drivers and tivoization. Also, the desire to dominate enduser devices by corporations/governments would still be there.
Tivoization should have been strangled in its crib. "Secure boot" as it's used today is the death knell of user freedom.
It’s all tradeoffs. Secure boot sucks for enthusiasts but wow would the phone security / root kit scene be a nightmare without it.
Would it?
A bootkit doesn't give you any more access - only more persistence. At the price of having to tailor a payload to a hardware and software platform very carefully. For most attackers, that's just not worth it.
Now, if what you want to "secure" is your ability to gatekeep what software users can and can't install? What sources they can and can't consume media from? What system-level spyware and adware users can and can't remove? What operators users can and can't connect to? Then, suddenly, "secure boot" makes an awful lot of sense.
Which is exactly how "secure boot" is treated by vendors nowadays. It's there to "secure" something alright. It's there to chain device software to the device vendor securely.
There's a reason why modern "secure boot" originated on gaming consoles and TV boxes.
> There's a reason why modern "secure boot" originated on gaming consoles and TV boxes.
Yes, because hardware is sold at or below cost, and giving away a general purpose computer without reaping the long term upside is a recipe for disaster.
But look at the prevalence of cheating on PC games versus console and tell me secure boot does nothing for actual security.
> cheating
> security
How are these two connected? Are you talking about security of companies from the users?
Yes? And users from each other?
If you’re so far into the “I buy it, nobody can tell me what to do with it” camp that you think it’s unethical for companies to try to stop cheating in multiplayer games… well, we don’t have much in common.
You approach basically makes general-purpose computers/phones impossible in order to save multiplayer games.
If phones didn't have secure boot nowadays inevitably little Johnny would (unknowingly) install a rootkit on his mom's phone for the promise of free vbucks or some see through walls app.
IIRC tivoizing GPLv2 software is illegal in some countries such as Germany. See Steck vs AVM
> Microsoft
They have fight open source and open standards for so long that it is in their DNA.
Open source and standards are the best most efficient solution, but proprietary platforms have the money to buy politicians and create FUD in the development community.
A big part of the current political situation is derived from platforms owning the public discourse and profiting from human attention.
A world of open standards and open software is a better world.
A lot of people attribute the Windows Phone switch as the end of Nokia but that would only be true if people did not like Windows Phone. On the contrary, Windows phones were loved by their users. And I say this as a person who used Symbian Belle, then Meego (I had the piano white Nokia N9!) and then Windows Phone.
Meego was fantastic, but Windows Phone was fantastic as well. And arguably it had more reach: modern Windows OS was working on mobile phones, tablets, wearables, Xbox and even AR glasses like HoloLens. A developer's dream, you write once and it works on every form factor which has Windows. You could even plug your Windows phone to a docking station and you would have a Windows desktop!
What killed Nokia was being late to the game, and what killed Windows Phone was first the lack of apps (which was getting better but very slowly) and Satya not being happy with low margins and slow progress, compared to Azure.
Even if one assumes that Windows Phone was wonderful (and a long WP7 user, I’m sympathetic to this view), it still doesn’t follow that Windows Phone didn’t kill Nokia.
- Windows Phone had no brand value. It didn’t add to the Nokia brand. It detracted from it
- Windows Phone allowed very minimal UI customization. This meant that Nokia could add little to no Nokia specific functionality
- Windows Phone allowed minimal hardware customization. This meant all Nokia phones looked and behaved like cheap Chinese phones for less than half the price
- Windows Phone was closed source, which meant Nokia engineers could not add either hardware or software functionality beyond whar Windows Phone already supported.
- As part of the Windows phone transition, MS required Nokia to kill their own OS development. Switching to Windows Phone was a hard 1 way turn.
The alternative to Nokia at the time wasn’t Windows Phone vs Meego. It was Windows Phone vs Meego vs Android vs Android + Meego.
The obvious, both contemporaneous and in hindsight, choice was to go with Android which and continue Meego dev on the side as a fallback. Android brought Nokia up to speed on the hardware and app ecosystem side, while allowing them to innovate on the hardware side and using their brand + unique designs + hardware quality to be a leading Android developer.
Windows Phone wasn't really good, because it inherited desktop Windows' bad developer experience and constantly broken promises. The write once run everywhere story wasn't as rosy as you remember. Windows Phone wasn't good, wasn't getting better fast enough, and regressed due to some unforced errors later in life.
And I say that as someone with a (blue) N9 and Lumia 900 within a few feet of me in a drawer.
Did Windows Phone solve the problem that Windows Mobile had where libraries like the .net runtime were incomplete? I remember trying to build an app for Windows Mobile 6.0 and not being able to use third party libraries because some of the basic functions of Windows were missing on mobile. I'm not even talking about UI, more like networking and other backend features.
Windows Phone solved it by supporting only Silverlight apps... No Windows APIs.
I also loved the Windows Phone 7 UI. But the app story was always a mess, and the competitive situation with Google meant that 2012's super-important apps like YouTube would never appear on the platform, whatever they did.
Yes, I had really cheap Windows Phone, and prior to Windows 10 Mobile, Windows were super fast and the phone was really fun to use. After Win 10 release, it become unusable - slow, rendering issues, etc.
This was such a short sighted move - with a phone platform and HoloLens they could have built their version of meta glasses and been able to capture all that real world vision for building ai models.
The predecessor of the N9, the Nokia N900, with Maemo, is not even mentioned in the article, and it caused a buzz at least in the circles I were back then. And it had one of the best physical keyboards for a smartphone back then.
The N9 was pretty good, usability, design, hardware, but the apps started to weight, and it become a race between Android and iOS.
There was just one smartphone with Maemo (N900) and just one with Meego (N9). More models, letting other vendors to use them, android app compatibility compatibility and not having Elop could had saved Nokia. Now what we have is Sailfish as a descendent of them.
Don't forget the N950! It was an aluminum body successor to the N900, with a glorious slide-out keyboard. Built like a tank. They were never released for sale to the public, perhaps because Nokia's leadership had already decided to kill its line of Linux phones. But I've got one.
They really didn't have a chance. Technology had moved past them. The capacitive touch screen, multi-touch, fast mobile processors and the move to the web meant that mobile phones were becoming platforms. And Nokia wasn't a platforms business. To paraphrase Bill Gates, a platform requires that the economic value to the other participants exceeds that of the value to the platform. Nokia was never like that. In aggregate the organization had a fragmentation of SDKs, no single device domination, and didn't really value the other participants on their ecosystem.
Apple (or Steve Jobs) understood the value of the web (one of the crucial 3 pieces of the iPhone when it debuted) as a platform - though Apple pivoted over time to have iOS and the App Store itself.
That's just how organizations work. No one inside Nokia could realistically have acquired the power to make the decision in time. The company wasn't shaped to do this. They were doomed as soon as the tech caught up.
Nokia development was limited by its relation with telecom industry (telecoms could limits what Nokias could do, software feautures. The telecoms wanted to profit from software running on Nokias, telecoms didn't wanted to be just dumb Internet providers. Telecoms wanted to be digital service providers - AOLs).
In contrast Apple with iPhone had much stronger position:
"Cingular gave Apple the freedom to develop the iPhone's hardware and software in-house, a rare practice at the time, and paid Apple a fraction of its monthly service revenue (until the iPhone 3G), in exchange for four years of exclusive U.S. sales, until 2011."
We complain (rightly) about the Apple monopoly, but have forgotten that the carriers were a much more annoying monopoly, with even worse policies for trying to charge for things that they'd specifically prevented you from doing.
I think the last remaining example of that is charging for using your phone as a WiFi hotspot.
Yes I can second that.
During that time I was working for a large Telco. I could see how Nokia operated. They did everything the telco asked for, they installed any bloatware just to keep their sales numbers high.
Apple in contrast would say: if you ever touch the user experience on our phone we will go to the other big Telco in your country. Guess who won.
"Mobile" was the little leagues before Apple/iPhone in terms of corporate/product competency.
A few days after iPhone was launched in June 2007 I heard an exec of a technical team defending the by then fairly obvious "ownage" by claiming that Apple had "cheated" by putting 1 GB of RAM into the device (which would be insanely expensive). Of course it was 128 MB. Nokia-adjacent company. He had misunderstood 1 Gbit from some teardown. That was the level of competency.
The software sophistication just really wasn't there at that level. (It was there at an IC/architect level though.) Apple raised the bar quite considerably.
Capacitive screens were out of possibility for them as Apple bought 2 year production in advance, a trick Tim deployed repeatedly in many areas. MeeGo had a chance but US funds didn't want to allow a state where an EU company would rule the fastest growing market of that time and their darling MS slips into irrelevance and its trojan horse killed it off quickly.
My recollection of the mid-2000s is that Nokia simply had no idea how to be a platform provider. They had 2 or 3 main operating systems, but within each of those there were numerous different versions. Most handsets didn't get updated, so you had to download a zillion different SDKs just to do basic testing.
And the bugs... one whopper in particular that I remember was redirect after POST didn't work.
I don't remember the details of Symbian any more, other than it was some ancient fork of C++ and clunky cooperative multitasking.
I was working for a Nokia subsidiary called HERE maps at the time this was happening. All I can say is MeeGo was a great OS and would have competed really well with iOS. They released one phone with it called the N9 in some smaller countries and then discontinued that year in favor of Windows.
The heart of MeeGo continues on in Sailfish OS created by Jolla. They are again releasing a phone in Europe. I wish they released it in the US.
I think the biggest mistake was adopting Windows as their OS. It negated any technical advantages they could have over Android.
I've written lots of comments, but Windows Phone 7.5 and 8 worked pretty well on low end hardware; much better than Android on similar hardware. If Windows Mobile 10 had continued that trend and delivered on the promise of all WP8 phones being upgradable to WM10, things would be different now.
Microsoft also made some big mistakes IMHO; having a terrible browser and a terrible app marketplace doesn't work: mobile IE was garbage, mobile Edge had a better renderer but worse UX, and they prohibited other browsers at least initialy (Firefox wanted to make an internal port, but were told no thanks). The way they managed APIs for apps led to multiple generations of apps and developers noped out at each stage; WinCE -> WP7 -> WP8 -> WM10 all wanted significant reworking, and WP8.1 wanted a minor reworking. A lot of WinCE apis were available in WP7, but Microsoft wouldn't tell you and wouldn't be happy if you did it. You could run WP7 apps in WP8, but to get new features you had to do the rework and distribute two separate apps. Same for WP8.1, but now you had 3 apps. And again for WM10 ... with the bonus that if you had a WP8 app installed when you upgraded to WM10 there was a 50% chance it wouldn't launch after the upgrade. Apple sometimes did some of this, but major OS upgrades usually applied to all phones, and their users upgrade regularly. Android generally puts backports in the jetpack library so you can build for the newer APIs but still work everywhere.
Of course, Microsoft should have understood the importance of backwards compatibility from their decades of experience on PCs... but they were in full forget about everything mode. :P
Not only that, but developing for Windows Phone 8 required using Windows 8 (which was a flop)
That being said I don't know that there was a path to success. I don't think it was as much about the little apps as the big ones: Instagram, YouTube, Pokemon Go... Google in particular got to play the role of anti-competitive
Word on the street was Google didn't want to bother with WP because they worked so hard on WinCE apps and all of that was thrown away. Probably not the whole reason, but they did make an exchange connector available for gmail on wp, so it's not like they didn't support the platform at all..
YouTube in the browser would have been fine if the browser wasn't terrible.
I definitely felt the lack of Pokemon Go ... but given it released in mid 2016, it's pretty clear why it didn't show up on Windows Phone / Windows Mobile... the writing was already on the wall by then and Windows development would have likely trailed anyway. WP8.1 came out in April 2014; it was an improvement, but you really wanted a follow up release. WM10 came out November 2015 and wasn't very good unless you had the flagship phones, which nobody would buy; I did end up running one of the last builds of WM10 and it actually got pretty good (other than Edge still had terrible UX)... too bad it happened so late. Windows Phone's strength was at the bottom of the market --- cheap phones that were usable, but cheap phones didn't run WM10 well, so the huge global market of people who wanted a smart phone but only had $100 to spend was left for Android.
If you look at sales numbers [1], things were going ok until about q3 2015. A dip in Q3 is kind of expected, because WM10 was coming soon, so people are likely to wait ... but then WM10 is crap and people buy an Android or iPhone and there you go.
[1] https://mspoweruser.com/revealed-1-2-million-windows-phones-...
I'm not so sure. There will always be viable alternative histories of course but their existing Symbian OS was already long in the tooth and would have required a lot of work to catch up to the smartphone world and I'm just not convinced they had it in them.
Arguably they should have just gone with Android, and it's easy to say that in hindsight. But Android was a horrible mess in its 2.x era, Windows Phone seemed like a genuinely interesting alternative. Until Microsoft repeatedly messed the whole thing up.
As others have said, they had Maemo/Meego. As the owner of a N900 myself, it was really good, but they decided not to bet on it for some inexplicable reason.
I am sure the reason came from Microsoft. They have mastered outplacement as an offensive weapon.
I think the reason was a lack of thriving app ecosystem. Microsoft seemed like a much better bet in that regard, they just messed it up in incredible ways.
Microsoft was a horrible bet in that regard. Maemo was a natural development platform for many products (just straight out of my head: Mozilla, VMware and Rovio have all chosen it organically), to the point where there was plenty of notable stuff that was first developed on Nokia N900 and ported to Android/iOS afterwards, but only officially released for iOS and Android because Maemo was already abandoned as a consumer platform. Windows Phone had no such gravitational pull at all and its lack of software eventually became an internet meme.
I'm not convinced by that. If Maemo was a natural fit then Microsoft surely was equally so, given they already had Windows Mobile. They also had a large army of developers familiar with Microsoft APIs and the financial backing a large tech company can provide (IIRC MS literally paid people to make apps for Windows Phone). That's the kind of thing you'd need to catch up in an app library race you're already losing.
Yeah, we can look back in retrospect and say it was an obvious failure but that's because of the various insane choices MS made over the years. In the moment I'd argue the decision was nowhere near as clear cut.
They had no developers familiar with these Microsoft APIs as Windows Phone was starting from scratch with new APIs that were incompatible with neither Win32 nor WinCE/Windows Mobile. The only thing that could save them that they were betting on was that these new APIs were also made available on desktops, but were pretty much ignored by developers there as well and ended up largely replaced with an even newer set of technologies.
Compare that with Maemo, where both GTK+ and Qt were first class citizens and which had an army of developers familiar with Unix and X11 before Maemo even existed.