Comment by AdamCraven
2 years ago
I worked at Nokia as a SWE in Berlin when that email dropped into my inbox. A few days later, it reached the press. We mostly thought ok, fine. What’s next?
Before that, we’d been building an app for Nokia N97 handset users, an ever-decreasing market - all the engineers on the team had iPhones.
We thought after that email that the next step would be to go on Android. Sure, Nokia would contract a little as it lost its platform, but the platform wasn’t that valuable. It was the great handsets - software wasn’t Nokia’s forte - the leadership structure just didn’t have the vision to bring it together.
When the meeting rolled around, we all went to a big conference centre at the heart of Berlin to watch the announcement of the future vision. Stephen Elop appeared on a gigantic screen, talked a bit before laying down the new vision. It was going to be Android, right? It made perfect sense, the ecosystem was growing and aligned to Nokia. But, no - Stephen announced that the future of Nokia was with Microsoft.
I walked out of the conference when I heard that - standing outside of the conference hall. I knew two things at that moment. One, there wasn’t going to be a future for Nokia - there was no way Microsoft under Ballmer’s leadership could produce an ecosystem. Secondly, I realised that Elop was still Microsoft’s man - He didn’t make the logical choice that fit with Nokia’s culture - It was going to be a takeover by Microsoft.
The project I was working on soon got a new boss. We thought this would align with the new vision of the company. He took us into a room and projected a picture on the wall of a mountaintop surrounded by clouds. He said, “I know you must feel a bit like this, unclear about the direction, clouded about what the future holds. Don’t worry… I also feel like that, too”.
The new boss did eventually make a decisive decision - the N97 app that we were building was to be kept, but it was going to be focused on an even smaller niche of the market, N97 users who were pro skiers. I left soon after.
The takeover by Microsoft did eventually happen, and the rest is history.
If anyone wants to know what it was like at the time, for SWEs working anywhere in Nokia's phone division, this post captures it perfectly.
People sometimes think that we can see Android was the right route only with hindsight. No, every engineer at the time knew that Android was the right way to go and that there was huge opportunity for Nokia there. Sure enough, in the following years we all had to read reviews of Nokia's phone that always concluded: "The handset is fantastic, if only it was running Android". I won't bother going into all the reasons that Windows Phone was a disaster. Elop used some nonsense justification that Android would be a 'failure to differentiate'.
Ultimately though, I take a different view about what the real strategy was. The Nokia board had seen their phones business drop in value from around $120b to around a third of that. They wanted to get out, whilst there was still something left to sell. Choosing Windows Phone effectively saddled Microsoft with the risk too (a joint future), and at that point it was obvious they would have buy the unit entirely in time. Elop wasn't a Trojan horse, the Nokia board saw Microsoft flailing in phones and used their riches to get out.
It's sad because Nokia could have been an Android powerhouse. Particularly getting in early, with really interesting hardware innovation. But someone wanted to cash out. They weren't happy to risk having a phone business worth not 40bn but nothing at all.
So they went from 120b$ business to a 7 billion $ sale. Not exactly amazing.
The last company I worked for used the “burning platform” story a few years later after Elop’s memo. It was true, but it didn’t work.
The rank and file have no idea what to do with this information. The new platform looks great, but it isn’t proven, doesn’t replace the margin targets for sales, and the marketing is split telling the new story while trying not to accelerate the fire. Customers don’t know us for the new platform, so large effort is invested trying to get the smallest of wins at new clients. Invariably, the staff don’t really understand the new platform, quality is lower than the burning platform. Client decides this isn’t something you are good at, sales gets burned and says no thanks. Executives say, oh shit, our finances are a catastrophe, focus on the burning platform. We need quick wins!
Layoffs throw a bunch of people off the platform, repeat until the business is 10% of size, and languish for years with mediocre executives (well paid for skills /competency as no one that has a clue will work for them). People that should resign do the work for 8 people until they burnout. The situation messes with people’s minds and they stick around even though they know they must leave.
The analogy makes sense, but thought out, it is apparent why it can’t work. The whole business leaps from a platform, not to another platform, but to a life raft. It has no stability, can’t support the same people, processes, or way of thinking. Eventually it capsizes and sinks, or is collected by someone with a platform who will extract the last of the value as it goes away silently in the night.
Elop gets lots of shit for his role in this but to be fair, he was just the front man. The real power was with the board and in particular the ex-CEO Jorma Ollila. It was the board who hired Elop and it was the board who weighted and eventually made the call to go with Windows Phone instead of Android.
In a proper public company, crucial strategic decisions like these are not CEO-level but board-level. The CEO is called chief executive officer exactly because he executes the strategy set by the shareholders, whom the board represents. And that's exactly how it went down here. You can read it all from the 2014 book "Operation Elop" by Pekka Nykänen and Merina Salminen, Teos Publishing.
It might even have worked out. Just that Microsoft still doesn't know how to run a proper app store besides the XBox Games one until this day.
They flooded this thing with crappy apps anyone could submit for some weird incentives just to get their weird app store metrics up, making the user experience horrible. I wonder what would have happened, if they ran a properly curated platform, where they didn't allow for keyword spamming. At a time Windows Phone had pretty much all the apps you needed back then and a more then decent camera at a competetive price.
I got a ton of free Nokia phones back in the day through these weird incentive programs. I was told at a meetup by one of the employees that each Microsoft division was to get N number of new apps in their local store each quarter, and they’d have developer programs along the line of “publish 5 Windows Phone apps, get a free Lumia phone.”
There were zero requirements other than publish N number of apps, there was zero form of quality control. I was a freshman in college at the time, could barely code my way out of a leetcode at that point and I’d have five calculator-esque apps ready to go whenever my local Microsoft division dropped a Tweet saying a new program was live since there was only a limited amount of phones.
Felt real good for me and my buddies but ironically we were left with phones that had these junk riddled app stores, amazing hardware devices though.
But yeah, Balmer did great developing the B2B side of things, consumer devices wasn’t it.
To be fair, let's not forget that Google had their apps in there and then got them out. At least the YouTube-like app I used had YouTube premium features at no cost, I guess.
1 reply →
Crappy apps might be a problem, but what was a bigger problem was that every major release of the platform came with a new application framework, and developers would have to pick between using the old framework to keep existing customers and live with suboptimal experience on new devices, use the new one and drop support for old devices, or spend even more effort on supporting both (or really all three). Compare to iOS, where most users update to latest OS within months, or desktop Windows where win32 works for everything, or Android where version gated features don't usually require massive changes to enable.
It would have been nice if they didn't copy Apple so hard, leaving out copy and paste and restricting browsers in the store weren't the best decisions for an upstart platform. Mozilla had been excited to port Firefox early on, but Microsoft told them no, so WP users were stuck with Mobile IE and much later in WM10, the amazingly worse Mobile Edge.
Yeah I remember hearing that announcement about incentives and thought it was obvious that crappy apps would come to dominate the store. Two things would’ve made the App Store better:
- First-party apps using the same SDK as third-party apps. This would’ve forced the third-party sdk to be awesome from the beginning, but it also would’ve delayed the launch of WP7 by at least 4-6 months. It wasn’t until a couple years later that some first-party apps switched to the public sdk and improvements were made, but by then it was too late.
- Google allowing us to build official apps for YouTube and maps. We even offered to build and maintain it, but they simply refused to allow those apps to exist on our platform.
I still had a wonderful time working on the product 2008-2012, but it’s really a shame WP never made it as a viable third platform.
> but it was going to be focused on an even smaller niche of the market, N97 users who were pro skiers.
I can’t stop laughing at this.