Comment by r_lee
4 hours ago
I think browsing this gives you a good idea of why Nokia failed. they really thought they had it all figured out and it was now time to lay back and just try out random shit.
they would never have the same kind of focus or philosophy as Apple, nor the willpower to pivot to real smartphones and a proper OS for them
It all comes down to where top management puts its best resources. Apple's leadership focused theirs on designing a more useful music device, one that could also serve as an internet navigator. Once they had the prototype, they moved to a higher-level vision: a truly personal computer, where music, the internet, and the phone were just apps.
Nokia, the giant at the time, was designing a better phone. And then a better phone. And another phone after that. Their design and engineering were in no way inferior to Apple's, but they were designing phones, not a personal computer.
I had a Nokia E61 at the time the iPhone came out.
They didn’t sell it for most networks in the USA (because your uncompetitive oligopoly cellphone market had not been shaken up yet and did not have competition rules governing it).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E61
This thing was in every sense a computer. Good battery life considering its screen, IMAP email, a Webkit web browser with full JS support before Apple released theirs, a music player, fully functional apps and tools to make them, 3G and wifi, office file support, VoIP support, Blackberry support if you wanted it. Great little keyboard.
Excellent device that was vastly more capable for actual work than the first several generations of iPhone (you could select and edit text, copy and paste) and available affordably to consumers in the UK.
Text selection and editing on iOS (and iPadOS!) is still more frustrating than it was on the E61.
The fact that we were already using these sorts of phones for functional work in Europe is a bit of the reason why the early Android phones with their “silly” trackballs that could actually control a text cursor did well compared to the early iPhones, and why interesting niche phones like the Sony Xperia Mini Pro (that I subsequently owned, incredible device) did well here.
It took me to the iPhone 5S to even bother looking at iPhones, even though I had been a Mac user for fifteen years by then. Even then I only got it because the light sensor on my Xperia Mini Pro died; I would have carried on using that for years, it was fabulous.
Communicator devices with Symbian were pretty clear personal computers.
You could even do regular development on device with Python, Apache based servers, and a few other languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_for_S60
I am pretty sure they were designing personal computers too, with Symbian and having witnessed blackberry. Some people may not remember, but people were practically begging Apple to release an ”iPod phone” for what at least felt like years, the market was ready for it and iPod was the key. Nokia was great, their devices too. But Apple won in hearts before it won in pockets. And I was not even a big fan, my first ever iPhone was an Xr, I could still see it.
Nokia N95 had an impressive media menu [1] where you could select music, internet, radio, navigation apps and what-not, it was great for it's time. They even had a gaming figured out at one point, if I am not mistaken even with a store for their n-gage games. So yeah, I don't agree that they avoided building a truly personal computer, but at the same time they still managed to screw up everything.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/FrutigerAero/comments/1k2ao9b/the_m...
N95 was the first Nokia model where OpenGL ES was fully hardware accelerated and not using software rendering, by the way.
It had a quite cool launch demo with Asphalt,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20YMdIswaW8
Remember that this are PS like graphics on a phone.
Nowadays there are plenty of WebGL games that aren't half as good.
The number of buttons on N95 is a hint to why it didn't see as wide adoption as the iPhone. My elderly relatives would be intimidated by that alone, afraid to press the wrong one and break something. A single-button iPhone with a touch screen that showed applications in a simple grid format fit them much better.
Jobs' genius was in understanding that the customer needed a rope that they couldn't accidentally hang themselves with, not a construction crane with a 800-page manual. He spoke about designing devices that his friends and family could use, and you can very clearly see that reflected in the products of that era.
Despite all the Apple copycats nowadays, few copy that focus on the customer.
Well, they also thought it would be great to have a custom OS for every phone model. They had symbian-based S60 in different variations, S40 (or was it S30) in different configurations, some with Java ME support, some maybe not, and so on. Symbian came with different UIs I think, so some other vendor also had symbian phones that were completely different (was it sony?).
Clusterf...
And then Stephen Flop thought it would be cool to go exclusively with Windows Slown instead of the widely popular Android. (or arguably he was probably paid to decide that, coming directly from MSFT)
I can only imagine how defunct the organization Nokia must have been, with this cornucopia of different phones. Impossible to reform, so the only way for them to go was ... to go.
> they really thought they had it all figured out and it was now time to lay back.
You mean like Apple today ?
The Apple watch is from 2015.
What new product Apple produced since Tim Cook took over ?
The iPhone Duo ? Ironically it has quite a smell of Nokia N95 all over again.
Different times. Companies aren't allowed to fail in 2026.
Nokia was also European. We Euroopeans aren't good at not letting our companies fail, also see Philips, Acorn etc.
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no, if they were like Nokia, they'd be desperately trying to make everything and new versions of things
instead they're refining their existing products until they can come up with a hit. although I'm not sure the iPhone Duo is gonna be a hit
there's simply not that much innovation going on these days, there was a lot more low-hanging fruit in the early 2000s
Yeah, Apple today really do look like Nokia did in 2006, particularly their self indulgent tendencies. (If you were in Europe at the time this is far clearer - the north american cellphone market was nothing like as advanced pre-iPhone).
The N95 is a great example because the internals were superb, but the software was just so poorly conceived. S60 started in the wrong place and the more they worked on it the less it seemed like making it remotely usable was a priority.
The noise from Symbian at the time was that Nokia would get a new chip in and then come up with some lunatic scheme that involved using all the new CPU power in the stupidest way possible, causing newer versions to have even worse performance over time.
Their lunacy wasn't confined to S60 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3650 ), they also released madness like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7600 . It's no surprise that during this time SonyEricsson started making serious inroads on them with things like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_K750
from my memory, the OS on Nokias was just fine. it was great. it just wasn't a smartphone OS
which makes sense because they had these half button half touchscreen hybrid phones
the internet browsing features were something akin to like paid phone numbers which you'd avoid using because it was like special stuff
it wasn't first class in any way, it was perpetually stuck in the past. and as you can see, their entire business model was based on iterating on the same thing in a million ways, so there's no way they were gonna do something from the ground up to focus on a first class experience for one form factor which could support 3rd party developers etc.
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It was lunacy business-wise but it sure brought some color to the market and I really liked seeing what they came up with. It wasn't for me, and not for most people, of course. But now we all have a black glass slab. Does make me a bit sad and am always eyeballing new form-factors (ie cyberdeck like). Idk, it's how capitalism works, but perhaps one day technology will find a way to be more flexible and we can bring back some lunacy...
Why? Duo feels pretty nice. Wouldn’t want the first generation (but it is never a good idea to have the first generation of anything)
The N95 was the phone to have.-
It is a far more complex story than that.
Nokia had some of the first commercially successful smart phones in the world. The Nokia 9100, 9300 and 9500 were tremendously powerful devices in terms of their capabilities, running full multitasking operating systems.
There were two things that hampered companies like Nokia going further: battery life and data.
The relationship between handset manufacturers and telcos in the 2000s was ... Complex. Telcos had an immense amount of influence over manufacturers and dictated many of the terms, from how handsets could interact with their network, through to branding and "value added services" provided through customised software. Failure to comply would mean a handset could be blacklisted from the network.
So companies like Nokia had to play the game. They couldn't run full desktop-class browsers, for example, because the carriers were worried about their networks crumbling.
Then Apple came along, and reversed the relationship. They dictated the terms and told the carriers they needed to meet their requirements to carry their handset.
Many carriers resisted. Many only agreed to carry it once all their competitors had agreed to carry it.
And the first iPhone ... wasn't great. Carrier networks initially struggled under the load. Pages loaded slowly. Battery life was abhorrent. The first iPhone didn't support apps. In most ways, the iPhone was far less sophisticated than available Nokias, Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices.
But people gravitated towards it because it was stylish. It was fluid. It was responsive. It did less than a Nokia, but it had a better user experience for the average Joe who wasn't a power user.
It sold exceptionally well, and it changed consumer expectations around what a mobile could be. Carriers added capacity in response to ever growing demands for data.
It could have gone very differently.
They made real smartphones (if you are in the USA you may not have seen them until it was too late).
They did have rather a lack of focus and Symbian was too diverse by that point, but there were some outstanding tail-end S60 devices (the E61 being one of them — it had 3G and a webkit browser before the iPhone).
IMO Nokia failed at least in part because of Stephen Elop's choices.
As a consumer I enjoy when companies try out random shit in such a user friendly way.
Apple’s focus and philosophy sure gives them an advantage. At the same time users who like e.g. smaller screens have to suffer or go elsewhere.
Interesting - one of the presentations I found was this one on Design Insights From Apple's iPod (2006).
They highlight:
- core design team
- start with an idea for an unmet customer need
- drive innovation from imagining user’s experience
- define essentials for “insanely great”
- simplify to great lengths to hide complexity
- grow user involvement through evolution
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_7b149a54-2085-4f7d-9b...
> and it was now time to lay back and just try out random shit
To be fair we hadn't yet decided that phones should be a flat tablet with a screen on one side that ran apps - they were mostly for calling (possibly sending messages) and were being sold to everyone from subsistence farmers to western teenage girls who had vastly different requirements/desires - there were bricks, clamshells, flip-phones, camera phones, phones with changeable coloured covers.
point is they weren't pushing the technology, they were pushing the existing form factor, not thinking ahead.
I could be wrong, but I recall an exec at one of their events on stage doubling down and saying they know better than Apple - that people want buttons (or something like that), which basically means their decline was inevitable due to the culture
Many people forget that the Apple of today only exists out of sheer luck, by bringing back in house one of their founders.
Apple of today gets idolatrised to a point that it never us in the 1990's, when they did enough random shit that they almost went bankrupt.
Also, Nokia Alumni over here, from 2005 - 2010.
Yeah, I use a Jolla phone today but wish it had the power of a properly resourced company behind it.