By whom? The old Nokia was a terrible software company, with so many abject failures at creating platforms (Symbian, N-Gage, Ovi, etc.) that I don't think anyone else in this business can compare.
It's a good thing that they're getting out of software and concentrating on stuff they're actually good at.
As a platform, surely not. The wheels came off by the end of 2008 when S60 5th Edition went touch-only, leaving keyboard devices still shipping with the hopelessly outdated 3rd Edition. Symbian touch devices never gained any platform traction.
Was it a success as a software foundation upon which handset makers could innovate, as had been the original idea behind Symbian? No. Everyone that used Symbian abandoned it for more flexible alternatives. The lack of a unified UI development track didn't lead to the hoped innovation, but merely fragmentation that ultimately doomed Symbian. (It didn't help that the most popular UI layer, Nokia's S60, was so poorly designed and thoroughly mismanaged.)
I actually use a Symbian^3 device, the Nokia N8. It's not bad at all. I love the physical design, and the software works fine for what I do (although the browser is a turd, it's replaceable by the fine Opera).
Still, I can't escape the feeling that this is the OS that Nokia should have had over two years ago. Also, it's a development dead end. Symbian^4 was supposed to be a UI rewrite, but it failed. The promised improvements to S^3 have been slow in coming. (Still no Qt 4.7...!)
How is Symbian a success at this point? What reason would Elop -- or anyone else -- have to believe that the existing software development structure at Nokia could substantially improve this situation?
Comparing market share of Symbian devices to iPhone or Android is like comparing market share of bicycles to market share of cars.
Symbian OS has several version. The version that ships in volume powers devices like Nokia C1-01 http://store.nokia.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/productdeta... or worse. It's not the same product as iPhone or Android or even the old Palm OS shipped on Treo.
The share of Symbian OS devices shipping a version comparable to iPhone or Android is a blip on the radar. A drop in the ocean. And a peasant among Kings.
No, that's a misunderstanding. The C1 and its ilk are not Symbian devices.
Most of Nokia's cheap phones are on the Series 40 platform, which is a closed "non-smart" OS (that has nevertheless grown some fairly smart features recently, like QWERTY keyboards and a HTML browser).
I think integrating would be better, because it seems wrong to judge a products "success" only at some specific instant of time, rather than judging it over a full period of time.
The sign of the first derivative only gives you the present rate of adoption/abandonment of the platform, while integrating gives you a measure of success over the platform's entire existence.
I was just answering his question. Thank you for defining the opposing view quantitatively. I have never used a nokia phone, but certainly I would count myself a success if I had area under the curve like that.
Pretty much since the time it was called EPOC. It failed to grow and support more resources, as phones became more powerful than the desktop computers of the time it was designed in, and it's no longer suited for current smartphones. It still excels on the low end, where neither Android nor WP7 reach.
yes but MS-DOS was followed up by windows 3.1 and then windows 95 both of which were a huge success. What followed up symbian was not. I think this is very sensible for them to focus on hardware while let somebody else do the software. Though I must agree their choice of MSFT is startling. I expected them to fragment Android even further. Glad that didn't happen.
I'm actually not surprised by the choice of wp7, and not simply because the new ceo is ex-MS. Going with Android would make Nokia just another Sony/Samsung/HTC, but throwing all of their eggs in the WP7 basket at least gives them a chance to maintain some relevance as a distinct entity. It's going to be rough on the hardware guys though, making every new phone with a Windows logo on it.
Because there is such a limited range of Winpho7 handsets (and as a matter of personal opinion, I feel they're all token efforts) Nokia can step in and become "the" Windows phone handset. Microsoft needed a hardware partner that was all in with them, not diddling android on the side.
If you put out android phones, you're just another fish in a sea of commodity handsets, no matter how you differentiate your product.
But they're doing it as an afterthought. They're committed to Android, and are supporting wp7 to cover their bases. Nokia's going all in, which would position them at the top of the WP7 hierarchy. If wp7 is a hit, Nokia rides the wave back to relevance, If not, well, they tried.
> would position them at the top of the WP7 hierarchy
This is a mistake many Microsoft partners make. Nobody but Microsoft is at the top of the WP7 hierarchy. If WP7 is a success, Nokia's efforts will be rewarded by lots of competition with more money (because they are already riding the other hit, Android), not relevance.
The only way you could say Symbian was an abject failure is by comparing it to Android or iOS. Before those two systems came out, Symbian was the best mobile OS that was available.
I agree that Nokia is better at hardware than software, but I wouldn't go so far as to call Symbian a complete failure. It served its purpose at its time and did it well.
[My old N70 with S60 from years ago ran a python interpreter on it. Can iOS do that? :) ]
It's biggest issue was probably fragmentation.
There were too many releases - Symbian 3, 1st Edition, Symbian 2, 3rd Edition etc...
That made it difficult to write software that could target more than a handful of the latest models. And with so many models available, the audience you reached was significantly less.
> - CEO quickly decides that the O/S developed in house is not worth maintaining. And that the right O/S is no other than Microsoft's offering
And it's even better when you factor in that in each case there is a viable and much better suited free and open option available. Linux would have made a much better choice as a transitional platform from IRIX.
It's nepotism on the corporate level & just like nepotism will destroy the morale of a department, this kind of nepotism will destroy the morale of an entire company.
> Linux would have made a much better choice as a transitional platform from IRIX.
It would have, but this was 1998, so very few of us knew this at the time. I don't know if you remember the tech zeitgeist in 1998, but Linux was still a pretty hardcore geek alternative at the time, maybe like Vim today. NT had things like journaled filesystems.
You can delve into history to see what the Linux community was talking about at the time:
"Intel and Netscape are now officially investors in Red Hat Software. A year ago such a thing would have been almost unthinkable. But times have changed."
"With this release, the GNOME desktop is reaching a usable state."
"Expect that, with the introduction of pre-installed Linux systems from vendors like Gateway, IBM, Dell or others, the number of people searching out a Linux VAR in order to get a pre-installed Linux system will rapidly dwindle."
"140,000 Mexican school labs to be outfitted with Linux and GNOME." (That was the "Red Escolar" or "Scholar Net" project. Its failure is described in http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2001/08/45737: "RedEscolar, or "Scholar Net," has put computers in 4,500 schools, but fewer than 20 are equipped with GNU/Linux machines. The rest are running Windows 95 or 98.".)
So, from the standpoint of 2011, it's easy to see that committing head-on to Linux could have saved SGI. But, at the time, it was a risky decision.
They did actually start to hitch their wagon to Linux a year later: Scott Bekker "SGI Backs Away from Windows NT - Silicon Graphics - Company Business and Marketing". ENT. FindArticles.com. 11 Feb, 2011. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FOX/is_15_4/ai_55675...
Rick Belluzzo was the CEO who made the NT decision. WP says had been working at HP for the last 23 years, not Microsoft, but he did take a job at Microsoft after being deposed at SGI. WP also says his only degree is a BS in accounting from Golden Gate University, a vocational school, so he's probably not very smart.
Here's what he said about working with Bill Gates: "I was always surprised how much Bill knew. I wonder how you find time in the day to be on top of how many things Bill seemed to be on top of. Bill is so passionate about technology, and he really is in the right role to focus the vast majority of his time."
To me, that sounds like typical non-hacker cluelessness. So maybe it's not that surprising that Rick was blind to the finer points of technical risk, compatibility, portability, and how the free-software community worked. (He was also largely responsible for committing HP to Itanic, effectively killing PA-RISC.)
The the historic state of Linux at the time makes all the difference. I should have been more general and said "Open Platform." Because at the time BSD was a much less risky choice -- it was more mature & didn't have the GPL license stigma being pushed so hard.
The outcome of the SGI WinNT decision is even more interesting when juxtaposed with Apple's decisions during the same time period.
The adoption & use of FreeBSD as the base of OS X's Posix layer shows how SGI could have gained all the benefit of a set of core tools that they needed to stop spending money on maintaining while still retaining control of the best parts of IRIX.
In 1998 both Apple and SGI were on the ropes. Apple embraced and integrated open source, SGI turned to a closed platform. Apple immediately got geeks like me on-board (still have my OS X 10.0.x disk around here somewhere). The difference between the two companies & where they stand now is the ultimate example of how open source can help a corporation succeed.
Apple was pushing very hard at the time to get geeks on. They actually flew their evangelist and lead dev for OS 7 out to my undergrad CompSci program in '99. They really wanted to get a foothold with a dev community & integrating FreeBSD not only allowed them to save on the cost of developing a whole new posix layer, but also was a great way to get a new community of developers interested in the platform.
The Apple story is interesting. I switched from Windows to Mac in 2000 to get on the OS X Public Beta, and it really was all about the BSD underpinnings for me.
But at that point Apple was already on an upward trajectory thanks to the iMac and iBook, with the iPod to come the following year. Granted OS 9 was a dog that has long since seen its day, and the technology in OS X was necessary to create a modern operating system that would enable the kind of UX that Jobs sought. But I question how much of it can really be credited to open source or the geek early adopters per se; certainly it helped, but was it pivotal?
Yeah, I guess it does sound like I'm crediting Open Source and the geeks with singlehandedly saving Apple.
I don't think it was open source itself that saved Apple, but the decision -- as revolutionary as it was at the time -- proved to be an excellent business decision. They added value to their product (hardware sales) by integrating Open Source. And as a bonus, they appealed to a specific audience without having to invest significant resources in selling to that audience.
It was a brilliant business decision because it not only opened a new channel of potential customers, it opened up a whole new set of possibilities for integrating Open Source software; they could leverage the movement. And that's really the significance of the decision in this context.
Apple, Nokia and SGI all focused on their core business -- making hardware -- but only Apple saw the value of leveraging a movement to add value to their hardware/brand. All three were in desperate positions, but only Apple saw the merit of leveraging the Open Source movement for the good of the business.
Where Nokia could have built on the goodwill of their brand by adopting an open and vibrant platform -- one where they could have as much control as they desired -- they have chosen to chain their fortune to a third party that has relatively little vested in their success.
The biggest irony here (other than Apple's role in Nokia's demise) is that choosing Android comes with very little risk compared to the risk that Apple took: there's ongoing development underwritten by a single organization; there's no licensing or quality stigma about the platform; there's a worldwide consortium of companies already using the platform; and there's already a significant and growing market share.
They have missed the opportunity to leverage the movement.
Actually, I think you are confusing things. Rich Belluzzo worked at HP, where he convinced the company to reduce development of PA and HP/UX, favoring Windows and Itanic. He then went to SGI, where he convinced the company to license its IP to Nvidia, support NT on x86 and other stupid ideas. He then went to MSN and it became obvious, at least for me, he was working for Redmond all that time.
I don't disagree with you in general, but IRIX was a dog of an OS. They dominated in hardware, but the OS was always something you just had to live with.
A dog by what metric? In 1994 IRIX was the first 64 bit Unix kernel running on the first 64 bit workstation. In 1997, the same IRIX 6.5 could run on machines from 100Mhz/16MB to 512 cpus monsters. IRIX had really a nice, easy user interface, and many features (real-time IOs, /hw virtual filesystems giving a hint of /proc and /sys long before they came into existence, modular kernel, full 32 bits compatibility on 64 bits machines...) that were long to come on other OS.
It had real time I/O. It had the best user interface at the time, with super fast scalable vector graphics for everything in '94. (Modern desktops have caught up some 13 years later). It had usable 64 bits everything before anyone else - R10000 was generally available in '95.
They were insanely fast compared to the Sun and Digital stations of the time - the only competitor was Digital Alpha, and IRIX beat Ultrix to the ground and mopped the floor with it.
These were the days of multiculture, where my employer insisted on having several Alphas, Suns, SGIs, RS/6000 and more to make sure we're not locked to any specific vendor.
In the press conferences, they stressed that they're going to contribute to WP7 ecosystem (by bringing OVI maps, and their expertise with developing for range hw range, or something along those lines).
2. He says "our platform is burning, we have to do something drastic" which most people interpret as "prepare to come up with a strategy and fight like hell to win".
3. Guess what, he already had something in mind! It was "throw out our current reasonably successful development efforts and become a licensee of Microsoft's failed platform instead". And piss off all our QT-based app developers at the same time.
What could possibly go wrong?
I seriously wonder if this guy might not end up having to leave and not set foot in Finland (or the EU) again for fear of arrest. I have a feeling some Finland business regulators will be going through his emails with a fine-toothed comb.
It's amazing how hyperbolic people are being about this, presumably out of blind Microsoft hatred.
Pretty much everyone agreed that Nokia's Symbian/MeeGo strategy was a failure, that Nokia were quickly losing marketshare and that they needed a new OS.
The only options were Android and Windows Phone 7. WebOS would have been a better fit than either, but that option had already been and gone.
I think there are compelling reasons why Nokia would choose WP7 over Android.
There is a competitive advantage in being the flagship manufacturer of a platform, they won't have to play catchup against much more established competitors, or have to directly compete with cheap Chinese phones from companies like ZTE in the low-end. That's without going into the favourable terms that Microsoft no doubt offered.
I'm not sure everyone here fully appreciates just how bad things are at Nokia. It's been a LONG time coming. Their software development structure, from top-to-bottom, is just awful. You can see it in Symbian (which was developed independently but with much the same issue).
I have to tread lightly here, as I don't want to get anybody in trouble... but I can assure you that the new CEO is doing very much the right thing. Software development is not a core competency (or even a competency) at that company. It's just not. I'm not surprised that about half of tampere left, they are going to be hard hit by this. They should be.. the quality of the work just hasn't cut it.
Their best hope to survive today is to tie themselves to a much healthier eco-system. I would have thought Android to be the very logical choice... but the Microsoft move certainly makes sense.
Software development is not a core competency (or even a competency) at that company. It's just not. I'm not surprised that about half of tampere left, they are going to be hard hit by this. They should be.. the quality of the work just hasn't cut it.
That's the honest truth. When Nokia opened the Symbian code three years ago, it offered a peek into their software development process... And it wasn't a pretty sight.
I used to spend a fair bit of idle time browsing through the Symbian Foundation wikis and forums (all now offline). It seemed that there were basically two kinds of people working on the operating system. The guys in England, who used to work for Symbian Ltd, were pretty smart but arrogant; in old-school programmer style, they were only concerned with managing some extremely narrow ___domain and couldn't take any criticism.
Then there were the Finns at Nokia, who were either completely uninterested and oblivious to the world around them, or just obviously incompetent at the job they'd been given. An example of the latter was the "Direct UI" proposal in 2009. It was supposed to outline a completely new touch UI paradigm to ship in Symbian^4. All there was was a few pages in broken English that essentially said "it should be like iPhone because touching stuff is cool".
Unsurprisingly, Symbian^4 was canned last October after years of development. I'd like to know who had made the decision to put the same people who had mismanaged the previous S60 user interface in charge of creating the replacement... But that's how it went at Nokia. No one ever lost their job for screwing up the software -- until now.
I guess my question is maybe a little different, if Nokia is in that much trouble, then isn't WP7 a gamble? Its not just flying off the shelf where Android on the other hand is. Two losers don't usually make a winner. I don't know, seems like Google is all in with Android, they've got a pipeline, they've established themselves and proven themselves and they are legitimately competing with iPhone.
Now if they think WP7 is the future and it's going to take the market away from iPhone and Android then it makes sense, but I don't know that anyone really thinks that, it might carve out a niche but it's not going to beat the other guys. There are now iPhone, Android, RIM, WebOS and WP7 in the smart phone market, seems like a lot to me.
I think it's actually the other way around, moving to Android would be the bigger gamble. What would differentiate Nokia from any other company that develops phones for Android?
There's certainly some Microsoft anti-love going on here, but it's also not exactly unfounded or irrelevant. After all, they were supposedly competitors in the cell phone OS market before this move and now it appears that Nokia has psychologically completely caved to Microsoft.
This is not going to go over well in Finland's politics is what I was saying. If this move costs thousands of white-collar jobs, this guy may end up being as popular in Finland as Julian Assange is in Washington DC.
People also seem to have forgotten that the bulk of Nokia's sales don't come from smartphones. All they're doing here is replacing the OS of their 'flagship' lineup. Since Nokia smartphones have barely entered into the consciousness of the wealthy Western consumers who have been buying Apple/Android in the last few years, this /has/ to be an improvement.
That depends on how you define a smartphone. Chinese manufacturers as well as Samsung have pushed price of Android phones down to around $150 - unlocked. Samsung's Android phones are not crap. At that price point, it steals the show because the competing Symbian phones were not at all good. Just compare the FB app for Android and that for Nokia. Smartphones will keep getting pushed to lower price-points. Also, they might be offered at cheap rates with 3G data plans. India - one of Nokia's biggest markets just finalized 3G spectrum allocation and there are rumors that operators here will start subsidizing smartphones with fixed data contracts. Nokia denmocratised mobile phones. It won't want to miss out when smartphones become democratised.
Certainly true - but arguably, cheap Windows machines democratized personal computing. I wouldn't discount Nokia's future in the developing world because of Microsoft's involvement.
I am surprised that not many people are excited about this deal. I have only heard good things about WP7 so far and things will definitely improve as the platform matures. I don't understand why people have already labeled it as a failed platform.
People are also saying that the deal is only beneficial to Microsoft. The two real choices Nokia had were Android and WP7. WP7 seems like a more sensible choice to me. Sure they will have to sacrifice things, but they might gain overall. I think Microsoft and Nokia together make a killer combination that is going to help both these companies to bounce back in the mobile arena.
Maybe there were compelling technical reasons and good licensing terms that lead Nokia to choose WP7 over Android.
But if a person is leading a company, they might perhaps consider the psychological impact of their decisions along side with technical and market factors. I mean, his job is to make money - not to make decisions that "would have worked if it hadn't been for those pesky workers" (unless the intent was to gut the company from the get-go - though I doubt that would leave more money in the end either).
Desperate measures were needed. But I don't think I'm alone in feeling depressed that the desperate measures seem involve a move back toward proprietary systems (even if my only involvement with Nokia has been using the excellent QT library).
If, assuming, your aim to get some value out of a company - get some value out of the technical teams that exist in the company, one assumes that one needs to keep the morale of that company at a certain level. And giving the impression that you're gutting everything the company stood-for seems like a not-terribly-effective approach here even if Nokia's internal process was broken.
If you're the underdog, being able to claim you are "fighting for good" is psychologically useful. If Nokia had gone with android, one might be able to believe they'd bring some open source "chops" to the table.
Again, my experience is programmers are willing to work to fix a broken - if they feel like the company if offering them loyalty. Obviously, today's announcement didn't make Nokia's workers feel that was happening.
What I don't understand is how it took over 1000 people to screw up modding Symbian (which has been around forever) into a usable interface. This platform should have been more quickly developed because at the end of the day, Symbian just needed a beautiful skin.
>1. Hire someone from Microsoft to run the company
Except, he was only at Microsoft a year and a half and before that he was with Juniper Networks and before that with Adobe Systems.
What I mean is, he knows more about Microsoft and how their offerings might fit in at Nokia (than say an OS by a company he's not familiar with), but it's a stretch to couch it as if he was an old time Microsoft employee who is going to force Microsoft on Nokia.
An executive switches from company M to competitor N then abruptly throws much of N's development investment in the trash and signs a deal to license all of it from M instead, it smells funny.
I'm not saying anything actually is wrong, I don't know enough about it to care. But what I do see is Nokia being a big employer and part of national pride for Finland. This will likely become an issue in politics there.
They'd be wise not to lay off a single soul due to this deal at this point. Ironically, if Nokia really did need to trim R&D expenses, they may have more trouble doing it now.
Keep in mind the EU is still active in MS antitrust and users are offered the choice of Firefox when they install Windows. I would not want to be the guy who's name was attached to the sinking of Nokia at the advantage of Microsoft.
I am assuming the board talked about something like this happening - even directly with Elop - before hiring him. It's not like it's totally surprising.
I really wouldn't be surprised if the decision to shut down work on their own software platform had already been taken and he was hired and told to decide between Android or WP7 - with the expectation no doubt being that as he was from Microsoft he'd favor the latter.
The germ of this deal probably dates to the early days of WP7 development - seriously, Microsoft would have been negligent if they were not shopping for partners early on. For those deep inside the phone business, it probably has been a well known rumor for some time, which would explain the course taken by Motorola and HTC more plausibly than the corporate spite the article assumes.
But if the board wanted to consider switching to "someone else's platform", why would they hire someone from Microsoft?
Does this suggest that the board wanted to do a deal with Microsoft all along? If so, why would they need to hire him to do it?
Or that they didn't know what they wanted and this guy seized the initiative?
Edit: answering my own question. I think the board probably brought this guy in to take the heat in case this deal goes really bad from a PR and legal perspective.
It certainly surprised the Nokia staff. Wasn't it communicated inside the company? If so, why? I bet the answers to those questions are very interesting.
It's surprising to a degree, yes. But less surprising than if he was to announce, say, that Nokia is pivoting to become an oil company. He came from Microsoft on a rescue mission to a company where software was widely acknowledged to be the biggest problem.
Doesn't that pretty well describe the reasonably successful approach Apple used in moving to Mac OS X? Sure there are differences: Jobs was at Apple before; Apple bought Next; .... There are also similarities in that the MS/Nokia partnership represents a pivot from the current course that has no migration path other than total change.
nokia is a private company and is answerable to only its shareholders...there might be a backlash in Finland but any company that has to take or does take business decisions based on political/nationalistic considerations will find it hard to be competitive in the global economy
No, they're a publicly traded company answerable to their shareholders and the legal systems of Finland, the EU, and the US NYSE and SEC.
Any company that comprises a measurable percentage of a country's GDP and a big share of its exports had better take into account some political considerations.
Europe's anti-trust laws are very different from the USA's. I don't know enough about it to be sure, but simply making anti-competative actions such as partnering can be illegal.
Huh, makes me wonder if the alternate platforms they are supporting (MeeGo, two Symbians) are just distractions to help satisfy the political situation (legal or otherwise).
It depends on local law and where you are applying it. Elop's action can be interpreted as in breach of his duties towards Nokia shareholders. 15% of Nokia's value evaporated this morning.
There are places he could be arrested if there are any hints this value destruction is on purpose.
It's like he took the playbook from ObjectShare (Smalltalk vendor) when the CEO announced, "Hey gang, let's go Java!" then was surprised when the personnel situation started to go pear shaped.
Perhaps, but those employees work for a company that was out of touch with the market. Something has/had to give.
I think the move to WP7 may well be a savvy one (though I too would like to have seen a demo of it running), but can completely understand the employees concern.
Perhaps it would have made more sense to be more specific about what is going to happen with their employees, and done it internally - before rushing to tell the world about their new partnership. The resultant leaks wouldn't have been much bigger than what we already had this week.
So was ObjectShare's move to Java. That's not the issue. The issue is management being so out of touch with the employees. It's like a car with a loose steering linkage. Lots of things can go wrong, but a mechanism by which you'd even feel those things is also compromised.
They know exactly what they are doing. They are "knifing the baby". Some employees will suffer, but it is for the greater good. If the company fails (look at Nortel), then everyone suffers.
Let's say you are reading a historical account of a woman knifing her baby to save something else of value. As you are reading, you come to realize that the mother was panicked and not thinking clearly, because you realize there was another way.
I've read the same script before. The way this move was presented to the employees had bad results. I doubt the bad parts were really necessary.
It's a complicated situation. I doubt there was a binary choice whether or not to knife the baby.
Marsh, these appear to be people walking off the job because Nokia management is insufficiently nurturing to Symbian. How much sympathy can you muster for people protesting on behalf of Symbian?
I don't know enough about Symbian to have an opinion about it in particular. I've never been the least bit interested in playing with it, which suggests to me that it's not a very attractive development platform.
But I have a lot of sympathy for developers who have good reason to think their employer is steering their job into the trashcan, especially if they're in a city where there aren't a lot of other places to work.
Well... Starting from Android you can make as many as you want. And they don't even have to look like Android - My Nook run Android and looks like a Nook.
It was "throw out our current reasonably successful development efforts and become a licensee of Microsoft's failed platform instead".
Reasonably successful? I dare you to name one single Nokia-phone made the last half decade which you would consider relevant.
The truth is that platform-wise and software-wise, the bits you interact with, they've been stagnant since around 2000 and no amount of megapixels or Carl Zeiss optics will be able to compensate for that. They seriously need to throw their old stuff away and start going on something new. Like Microsoft did with Windows Mobile prior to Windows Phone 7.
I'm honestly surprised they didn't do it years ago. Now they've finally gotten a CEO which actually understands this and is willing to act on it. About time! While Microsoft is a risky bet, this move may actually save Nokia from complete annihilation and is certainly better than doing nothing at all.
And so far, Windows Phone 7 looks pretty good. Care to elaborate on how it is a failed platform already? Not disputing it if you have numbers, just that so far I've actually seen more enthusiasm for it than I expected to see.
Check that out. According to that data, in the 2007-2009 time frame they shipped more cell phone operating systems than everyone else combined. That probably translates into a lot of physical Nokia phones, too.
The point that it may be stagnant is well taken, which is why I said "reasonably successful" instead of "stomping everyone else into the ground".
No, stagnant would imply things were stable and they're clearly not. You can make an argument that Symbian OS was successful in the past, but the trend in the GigaOM chart you linked is pretty clear: rapid decline. In 2007, Symbian was around 2/3 of the total smartphone market, and two years later it had fallen below 50%. During the same period, RIM almost tripled its market share and the iPhone and Android numbers were showing even stronger growth.
The point that it may be stagnant is well taken, which is why I said "reasonably successful" instead of "stomping everyone else into the ground". But irrelevant it is not.
Fair enough. But if you look at how quickly Windows Mobile went from being the de-facto Smartphone OS to completely irrelevant and take into account (as Nokia's CEO acknowledged) that they are being taken on and losing market-share at every point which they've usually excelled at, it's clear that while they may not be irrelevant now, the way there is not very long.
The need to do something drastic was IMO very real. If going for Microsoft and Windows Phone 7 as opposed to other options like Android was the best choice can clearly be debated, but something had to be done. Staying with the "reasonable successful" platform they had would not have been a viable long term strategy.
Nokia sells LOTS of phones. You've got to remember than not everyone lives in the Bay Area and has a Twitter account... People living in Sub-saharan Africa and central Asia still need cell phones and the majority can't afford some flashing thing with a touch-screen.
And to quote the CEO:
"Let's not forget about the low-end price range. In 2008, MediaTek supplied complete reference designs for phone chipsets, which enabled manufacturers in the Shenzhen region of China to produce phones at an unbelievable pace. By some accounts, this ecosystem now produces more than one third of the phones sold globally - taking share from us in emerging markets."
Whether it was Android, Microsoft, or slowly dying, people working there would be affected, so I'm not sure the choice of Microsoft changes things too much from that point of view. With Android, perhaps they could have kept more people on board to hack on it and customize it, but still, the axe was going to fall.
Should be interesting to see how this is handled in Finland. Stock is down, layoffs, and some "arrogant foreigner" in charge would be a recipe for even more change in some places.
Yup, I started liking Nokia again because of their Maemo/Meego engagement. I'm an iOS developer but in private I use a Maemo phone (the N900) which fulfills my geek needs.
I hoped for a cool N900 successor with a cap. touch screen and a little more power but ... well ... I guess Nokia will make something half assed.
Meego phones (which run a real linux - not closed bullshit like android) would have been an awesome alternative to iOS and Android. At least for the more geeky consumer. :/
Knowing a little Qt isn't a bad thing, and it's kind of fun to prototype stuff on a desktop and have it run in an embedded environment with a quick recompile.
Android could be built/merged with MeeGo. They have the same kernel and all hardware-specific work would be reused. Both userlands could run side by side.
I don't think you realize how different Android and MeeGo (or atleast Maemo) are. They aren't running the same kernel and their userland is completely different. The fact that both have bits of linux inside doesn't really make them alike. It probably would be easier to port Qt for WP7 than integrate Android on top of MeeGo.
It cannot be that hard. If Linux, MeeGo and Android kernels diverged too much, maybe it's time to unify them in a way they all can share the maximum amount of code and effort.
I agree porting Qt to WP7 shouldn't be much of a problem too, or a much larger one.
But I suspect that Nokia's plan may prove hard to follow because it will be very hard to convince people to use WP7 phones.
That's still missing the point and exactly what _Android_ not did. While MeeGo is quite close to your standard "Linux on the Desktop" (Sorry, was hard to resist), Google suffered from a lot of NIH based design decisions.
On the other hand they probably chose the easier route for themselves (instead of solving their problems in a codebase that's outside of their control) by creating things from scratch although "standard" alternatives were available.
In short: I'd say it probably _is_ hard and I'd even go so far as to say that MeeGo moving into Android would be pointless.
For code and effort sharing maemo/MeeGo was the better stack.
Something tells me Google would have been very happy to help Nokia add the Dalvik VM to MeeGo. Nokia would get Android apps and developers, while still being able to diversify their OS and and UI from the competition. Google would get Dalvik as the dominant development platform in mobile.
If I interpret the page correctly, somewhere between 1000 and 1500 employees at this ___location ALL worked on the Symbian OS.
THAT might have been part of the problem. 1000+ people for a mobile OS? And people wonder why Nokia can't innovate fast enough to keep up with iOS or Android?
It's exactly this sort of tech expertise revolt that happened at the largest Smalltalk company at the time -- when out of touch management announced the company was going to go the direction of Java/JVM.
This is not an indication of mismanagement. This is mismanagement (of employee expectations, culture, and perception) plainly visible in public.
Nokia needs to figure this out right now, or they are going to bleed intellectual and technical assets.
In Finland, where are they going to bleed to? What options do the regular (under 80th percentile) Nokia employees have? If a company of that size were to lay off 100's of technical people here in the Netherlands, that'd be a large supply to absorb for the industry, and especially those with 10-15 years of highly specialized skills (antenna design, phone chipset design etc).
It doesn't matter if the employees leave for startups or other companies, or if they just don't cooperate wholeheartedly. In either case, resources they used to have access to are lost. Management needs to do something, or they'll bleed intellectual captial.
If a company of that size were to lay off 100's of technical people here in the Netherlands, that'd be a large supply to absorb for the industry, and especially those with 10-15 years of highly specialized skills (antenna design, phone chipset design etc).
If their jobs were based in something technical and had significant value, they'll be able to find employment elsewhere. This was also true of former employees of the Smalltalk vendor.
The thing to remember here, is that your most valuable employees are also the ones that can find new jobs fastest.
What I meant was, people may not be running so fast if they have no options.
Re: the last sentence, yes that's exactly their problem and why I said 'under 80th percentile'. The best employees know the fat days are over and are moving out asap, leaving the hanger-ons to run the place. The rest can't get other employment so will just sit there hoping for a miracle.
I guess its a ballsy move, but it was much needed. Going with Android would have killed Nokia anyhow as they would be just another face in the already crap filled Android market ( and before anyone shoots me down, for every decent Android handset out there, there are 3 other really crappy ones)
Think about it though, what do they have to lose. The company was dying rapidly, There are relatively few WP7 products on the market, so they can stand out in the crowd, Microsoft have absolutely 0 to lose and everything to gain as Nokia may just pull this off.
But then again, I actually thought that Paul Thurrot had a good idea when he suggested that Microsoft and Nokia merge. Its not quite a merger but if this move actually works I think a merger is in the future.
If I understand the garbled translation, the Nokia workers took advantage of extremely flexible work time to stage a coordinated, but totally non-rule-breaking walk out. I've never heard of this sort of half-strike method, but it's interesting. Is this something that is common in Europe or Scandinavian countries where a more flexible work schedule is common?
Workers in the United States sometimes stage "sick outs" where everyone calls in sick on the same day, especially if they're in jobs where they are prohibited by law or contract from striking.
Coordinated work slow-downs are another example of a "half-strike"
It has been known to happen in public sector places that work flexitime. If enough people coordinate they can effectively stop business/service for a couple of hours without breaking any hard and fast rules being even bent. There are usually fluffy-wuffy rules regarding reasonableness being broken, but they are so vaguely worded as to be practically unenforceable and anyway no individual can be got by them as they could all make up perfectly plausible reasons to need those particular couple of hours off (as it permitted by their flexitime contract).
While not nearly as effective as a day-long strike or other such, it has the advantage of not being covered by certain laws (so a ballot of the union is not required) meaning it can be implemented quickly to send a very visible message if enough people agree strongly enough with the message.
Think of all the people that like the tech (.Net) or the visuals (Remember the recent "No chrome in the UI" thread). That want this platform to succeed. I guess if you're in this camp the news are great: WP7 gains a very experienced hardware vendor. You can expect a couple of good/decent handsets soonish, pushing WP7 (with a lot of marketing and money) and thereby solving the chicken and egg problem (platform <-> apps) with cash.
2) "I liked Nokias history", "I'm a QT/maemo/MeeGo fan"
In this case the news are bad: Nokia changes direction. How much only time will tell, but the company that over the last couple of years slowly started to adopt open source is now going for a closed platform. QT and MeeGo are more or less declassed in the press release (research..? N770, N800, N810.. They did that in the past, the devices were unusable for non-hackers. I know, I own one). In this case you don't care much about WP7, you basically moan about the loss of plans that YOU had for that company/platform. That's what I see alot around now.
I understand both points, but the latter seems both easier to understand (I've got a bunch of maemo shirts, the N810 hardware etc..) and at the same time completely irrelevant (Seriously.. While mom and dad might have heard about Windows Mobile and that a new version is coming, who around you cared about MeeGo to succeed?). I'm quite sure this is the death sentence for MeeGo handsets. But we haven't even seen one of those yet. How do we know that we lost something of value? Please - no ideology (while I'd probably be with you, that's not something a company of that size should care about in a self-crisis) based answers about being open etc..
You're not the only one. I am stoked for some nice WP7 handsets. I'm currently an Android user but the new WP7 UI looks gorgeous and Microsoft's response to the Chevron exploit was admirable. It appears that they generally understand the importance of a homebrew ecosystem coexisting with their IP.
My career path has me working at or consulting with huge companies who are typically entrenched with Outlook & MS Office and if Microsoft can provide a better integration experience than Android with a piece of hardware that rivals Android handsets I will definitely check them out when it comes time to upgrade. I'm hoping the Nokia alliance works out and starts providing some competitive hardware.
The stock market appears to predict otherwise, believing that this move lowers the net present value of the company. Of course, stock markets aren't necessarily accurate prediction markets, but given suitable efficient-market hypotheses they're an approximation of such a thing.
The stock market isn't predicting anything. It just believes given the current information and Nokia's decision, $NOK's value deserves to be lower now than what it was prior. It's just a current snapshot - no indication of the company's future whatsoever.
Well technically a company's stock value is supposed to represent the discounted present value of all future profits. So you can interpret a reduction in stock price as an indication that the market expects profits to be lower in the future.
PR scandals do that. They also frequently have little bearing on a company's profits, unless it's sufficiently nasty to warrant significant numbers of boycotters for longer than the average consumer memory is.
Stocks are nowhere near that deterministic. When people think others will jump ship, they try to jump first, to lose the least money. When people think others will want buy, they buy first or sell higher, because they can get away with it. There's more games theory than future prediction if you ignore long-term investors, as they make up a microscopic amount of the daily trading and thus the daily prices of stocks.
The stock market just reacted for admitting defeat, Nokia drilled that Symbian is the better option for years and only today acknowledged that is not the case.
Sticking to Symbian and finishing MeeGo were not their only options. AFAIK, the Android stack would run just fine on top of the MeeGo kernel. They could have gone with Android in their high-end while gradually pushing Symbian down towards their dumbphone range.
That depends on you viewpoint. The OS itself is technically good (as in significantly better designed than android and friends).
On the other hand, Symbian has some generally good design assumptions (for example client-server division of almost anything) that are hard for programmers that come from other platforms/just don't care and thus it's architecture is often hacked around, which sadly includes many applications written by Nokia itself.
Well maybe if Symbian wasn't a total piece of shit they wouldn't be shutting it down. Seriously, I owned an N97 for a while and that was the flagship product of Nokia for sometime, the OS is complete shit. Hardware was awesome but the OS was almost as bad as the old Windows Mobile OS.
The Nokia n900 (Maemo) albeit with some flaws, is the greatest phone I will ever own. Allow me to explain.
I live in Canada. We get a lot of snow over here. Last winter, I lost my Nokia phone. I remember it was a night we had a huge snowstorm, and I stayed in drinking hot chocolate by the fireplace only to wake up the next day stressing out because I couldn't find my phone. After an hour of searching, I came to terms that I must have lost it in the mall the day before.
I end up leaving later that day, and find it on my driveway buried in snow. Snow plows came twice and cleaned my driveway and they must have driven over it with the plow part of the truck. Not only that, it was completely submerged in snow for over 12 hours. I picked it up, brushed off as much snow as I could, and tried using it.
It still worked. It didn't even have any scratches (1 minor one). I've owned many phones in my life, and most of them break in the stupidest ways. Nokia is the rambo of phones.
This kind of behavior makes me wish at-will employment was the norm throughout the world. If you aren't happy, quit. Change was clearly needed and change was made. Work hard for your company or find a different place to work that'll make you happier. Everyone thinks they could make better decisions.
This kind of behaviour makes me wish golden parachutes for executives weren't the norm throughout the world. If you can't make money for the company, quit or be fired.
Isn't it amazing how "at will" seems to apply to both employees and management, but somehow management's version of "at will" is considerably lower risk than the employees, even though the manager has considerably more influence over their future.
I don't really know the answer, but are golden parachutes really the norm for many executives? We hear about certain extremely-well-connected CEOs of very big companies, but that's hardly a representative sample of executives.
I'll miss Series 40 phones. A basic, no frills dumb phone OS with a UI that made sense. I'll miss the flexibility of Python for Series 60, even though the Series 60 OS was crud.
I would urge you to read up on the history of labor and unions in the US (or elsewhere). We have a civilized work environment because of strikes. I'm not equating the importance of the Nokia strike with those of the early 20s but, still, they are not "childish".
- Total domination of their own field
- Resting on laurels while others snatch the market from under them
- Panic
- Get a CEO from Microsoft
- CEO quickly decides that the O/S developed in house is not worth maintaining. And that the right O/S is no other than Microsoft's offering
- Company continues dive to irrelevance, albeit at a much faster rate than before
Well, the last one hasn't happened to Nokia. yet.
Goodbye old Nokia. You will be missed.