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Comment by phasersout

2 years ago

I covered quite a few Nokia reviews back in the day and Nokia was by far the most arrogant company to deal with.

Every company has it's rules and regulations regarding review devices but with Nokia you had to sign up to three forms just to do your work. Partly with ridiculous rules like a missing charger or cable was up to 50 Euros or so.

And they let you very much know where in the pecking order you were regarding your publication and who would get the devices first and last. This was in Germany.

Everybody at Nokia strived for not just being difficult but outright jerks to deal with... so when Apple came around and the disaster started to unfold it was quite the show to watch...

"ah Nokia would like to invite you to this and that shebang..." ah no thanks I think I'm good.

I'm not the guy who carries a grudge but Nokia really made it personal with their whole behavior.

Apple and Samsung aren't perfect but their marketing people are always nice and super helpful.

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phasersout

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metacritic12  2 years ago

To dogpile into this, in ~2005 I had one of the worst preseed round experiences raising from Nokia.

They clearly had a mandate to make some moves in mobile, so we were in their target sphere. But the investor was just so slow about moving, lackadaisical in personality, and seemed like he was more paid to come into the office versus actually achieve results (regardless of whether they funded us).

I later read Clayton Christianson and immediately knew what he was talking about with old dinosaurs resting on their laurels.

Good riddance. Market forces don't always act in the interest of society, but when it does like this (v Apple, Android) it's refreshing to see.

pjmlp  2 years ago

Nokia has been one of the companies I had most fun working at, you just met the wrong folks.

  • toyg  2 years ago

    The difference is the target audience. When a company reaches a huge size, employees have an incentive to act nice internally, because that's the way to promotion; but they have no incentive to be nice towards external folks. It takes effort from management to ensure people act nicely towards others, and Nokia clearly failed at that.

    I met one of their "evangelist" when they were trying to push Qt. He came to a iOS usergroup, so clearly in "enemy territory", and just used a precooked slide deck that compared Qt to Symbian - nobody gave a shit about Symbian there, but that's how they lived, stuck in their bubble. He was quite off-putting and way too commercial-focused for a tech UG; I already knew Qt and left thinking I could have done a better job of selling the tech.