How Nokia's 14 Years of Mobile Supremacy Ended in an Afternoon
Nokia's 14 Years of Mobile-Phone Supremacy Ended in an Afternoon
I explore how Nokia dominated the global market with iconic devices like the 3310 and 1100 before the smartphone era arrived. Despite recognizing the iPhone threat within 24 hours, internal hesitation and a focus on physical buttons delayed their multitouch response. This story reveals how a cultural phenomenon lost its grip on the world, selling its division to Microsoft for pennies.
Today, Apple is reinventing the phone.
- RiverCrochet
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.
- purpleidea
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...
- gmuslera
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.
- ZuLuuuuuu
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.
- arjie
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.
- rjrjrjrj
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.
- mempko
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.
- ksec
And may be a some other context. Steve Jobs initially only wanted 1% of the mobile phone market.
Nokia wasn't at all worried, they still have a few Smartphone 1.0 design ready to deploy. Remember iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. There were plenty of them before hand. Windows Mobile from OEM of HTC , Palm, Sony Ericsson P900s etc. By the time they realise it was a completely different genre and game it was too late.
Incidentally I remember one of the reason during before and after Microsoft acquisition of Nokia was that there are No apps on the platform. People won't buy it.
But I have been thinking for a long time if this is still true. That was a time when new Apps appears and things were changing fast. People even have different Instant messengers. ( To this day I still don't understand why MSN messenger was not on iPhone. ) But now all the Apps are largely settled. There are a few Social Media Apps, Messenger Apps, Banking Apps which I consider essential to every day users and cover 80 - 90% of their usage. Web Technology, 18 years after Steve Jobs announcing HTML 5 for Apps is finally getting close to the original promise.
Is a third major platform for Smartphone really out of the realms of possibilities?