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By jillesvangurp 2025-01-1614:3123 reply I was there as this played out. Nokia had a lot of good software and software engineers but not the management structure to do anything good with that.
Nokia was huge as an organization and parts of that organization recognized the threat early on. The problem was at the board and executive level. These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business. Lots of people with an electronics and radio background. Not a lot of people with software competence. And they had bought into the notion that Symbian was going to magically fix all their problems.
A lot of effort was spent on looking for other solutions. And one of the things that was good (Linux) around 2005 was actually quite close to displacing Symbian as the key future proof replacement for their legacy platforms. Symbian was just rolling out for a few years and they had made a big investment in that. And management (those same people with a huge blind spot for software) backed the wrong horse.
Linux never really died in Nokia but it wasn't allowed to prosper either. Devices were cancelled or repurposed for Symbian. This happened to the N8, for example. By the time they switched to windows phone, they actually had two Linux platforms (Meego and Meltemi) and an Android phone in the works as well. Meego had one last product phone launch and the team and platform were killed in the same week. Any devices for that platform were labeled as developer phones. Nokia never marketed them as a consumer phone. Meltemi never saw any product launch at all; it was aimed at feature phones. Both were good ideas but poorly executed. Nokia killed them along with Symbian in order to back windows phone. Classic baby and bathwater situation.
And MS ended up killing the one Nokia Android phone that was launched shortly before they acquired the whole phone division. Kind of a desperate/ballsy move. I suspect Nokia did this as a stick to ensure MS followed through with the acquisition. That was their "oh we could just switch from windows phone to Android unless.. " move. Nokia was at point the only OEM that still believed in Windows Phone.
MS killed the whole division shortly after Satya Nadella took over and was sorting out the mess left by Steve Ballmer. The iphone was solidly in charge by then and the rest of the market was Android. Courtesy of lots of Linux contributions by the Meego and Maemo team.
Nokia also had a ex-Microsoft exec (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop) that had the goal of ensuring Windows Phone would succeed, and tanked Nokia with it.
I was on the DVLUP project where Nokia and Microsoft attempted to inject energy into windows phone app development. We could see the tension between the two companies as we were a 3rd party contracted by Nokia to build the platform. The Nokia exec we were in contact with was fantastic, and really tried to make Windows Phone a success. Unfortunately the Nokia IT teams we worked with were not happy and essentially tried to sabotage through inactions (we just needed OAuth / SSO to link accounts and track app installs, it took over 3 months of email chains within Nokia).
By jillesvangurp 2025-01-1616:451 reply People blame Stephen Elop. But the person in control of the Nokia board was former CEO Jorma Ollila who headed Nokia through its glory days and had a lot of power. Nothing happened in Nokia without his approval during that period.
The board recruited and invited Stephen Elop. Part of his appointment was the board handing over the company on a silver platter to the new CEO. Negotiations for the acquisition started almost right away in secret. And most likely there were high level discussions ongoing with Microsoft and Steve Ballmer before Elop's appointment.
Jorma Ollila retired as a CEO around 2006; he wasn't really pushed out and Nokia was still performing well. He handed the keys to the company to a non technical CEO with a financial background (Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, aka, OPK internally). That was the first mistake. OPK was a bit hands off throughout the Iphone and Android rollout. There was no vision, no leadership, just a lot of infighting between heads of various units.
The second mistake was selling out to Microsoft and all the share value implosion that came with that. Microsoft bought several companies over the years. Nokia was one of the smaller ones. That's how bad it had gotten. At the peak Nokia was worth 150 billion or so. MS bought the phone unit for 5 billion. The later Linkedin and Github acquisitions were worth more.
By the time Stephen Elop was brought in (by the board, headed by Ollila) to fix things, it was too late. There were a lot of internal battles as well between the big business units. A whole string of CTOs with no power whatsoever that were appointed and let go. Including Scott McNealy who never really made any impact and was there only briefly.
By sampo 2025-01-1621:27 > Jorma Ollila retired as a CEO around 2006; he wasn't really pushed out and Nokia was still performing well. He handed the keys to the company to a non technical CEO with a financial background
I wouldn't say that Ollila had a technical background either. Ollila has 3 MSc degrees, 2 in economics and 1 in engineering. But after graduating for the 2nd time, he worked first in an investment bank (Citibank), then in the finance department in Nokia before rising to the executive level. I would say he has a financial background.
Was this around the time Microsoft kept switching what "windows phone" was? I remember that the one friend who got into it loved it, and then they released something completely incompatible and he abandoned the platform.
2009 and earlier: Windows Mobile was based on WinCE. The UI was garbage but the innards were pretty functional, and there was desktop-like multitasking. Unpopular opinion: they should have just done a UI refresh of that thing and moved it to an NT kernel. There were a lot of cool third party hacks on this platform.
2010: Windows Phone 7 was still WinCE, but they removed full access to WinCE APIs, and got rid of PC style multitasking. They had a new UI framework for first party apps. Then for third party apps they had a port of Silverlight that imitated the new UI style. The latter had really terrible performance.
They had to base this release on WinCE because the NT kernel port to ARM wasn't ready yet. Blocking access to "good" APIs could be seen as a way to ensure app compatibility for the next release.
2012: Windows Phone 8 had the NT kernel. Also, windows 8 and windows RT shipped. But the silverlight-inspired UI framework of Windows 8 was different from the Silverlight fork from Phone 7. So you had yet another UI framework rewrite to cope with.
At the time Steve Jobs was putting his foot down against allowing Flash on the iPhone because the performance was so pants, Microsoft was going all in on Silverlight which had exactly the same problem.
By scarface_74 2025-01-1617:596 reply That’s a popular misconception.
The first iPhone had a 400Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM. It was so resource constrained that you couldn’t put a picture on your home screen because it would have taken too much memory.
It could barely run Safari. If you scrolled too fast, you would see checker boxes while trying to render the screen.
When Flash did finally come to mobile on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM. The first iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.
Even then on Android, Flash ran horribly and killed your battery. I had a high end Android phone on Sprint back then.
By _wire_ 2025-01-1716:43 Wait, it wasn't about performance, but it was about Performance?
It was that a pseudo-machine/VM approach put the VM IP owner (Adobe, Sun/Oracle) in driver's seat for control of the product's precious HW resources while letting their affiliates define the UI. What could go wrong, knowing that to invite in the vampire of their bloat & risk was to give those IP owners a competitive leg up to override all your design choices and serve their own markets, contrary to everything Jobs had done to rescue Apple from its clone wars.
Oh, and that Flash and Java were the world's most popular malware/APT delivery vehicles at that that continued to wreck PCs for many years after 2007.
But it wasn't about performance!
Or why Jobs choose to not drive a stake into his own heart to defend from vampires.
It would be interesting to see a companion presentation from the POV of Cingular/ATT. They likely also were very surprised and entertained by Jobs' device!
It's easy to forget how popular flash was in that decade. A lot of us found it annoying on desktops too. Not to mention Linux, where we'd deal with binary blobs that were pretty unstable, not because we liked it but because you needed it to interact with the world.
I have not so pleasant memories of having a few different versions of their plugin and I'd try to figure out which one worked for a given website, symlink the right one and restart the browser. And that was the way to watch videos online...
Flash as an animation tool and applet platform was already on the downswing when the iPhone happened, though.
The consumer demand for Flash on mobile seemed to be mostly about video streaming, because at the time Flash was experiencing sort of a second life as the least-bad way to do streaming video on the web. In that context Apple's point of view of "as an industry let's finally fix browser-native video streaming, rather than being stuck with Flash forever" seems pretty reasonable.
By wink 2025-01-1711:34 Yes, I also think around 2008 or so the most widespread use of Flash might already have been newgrounds et al. I don't remember really ever caring for Flash on Linux though.
I do remember writing CMS backends for Flash websites in 2001, but that was the early time I think, before AS3 and really cool stuff.
By hn_acc1 2025-01-1620:55 Oh, the flashbacks.. (pun intended). Same here. Every new flash release, download, extract, rename to have a version number, copy to "folder of last 10-15 released flash .so files", symlink, restart browser and hope it works.
I think it got to be so common that firefox supported reloading the library without restarting the browser if you changed the symlink and opened the "about:plugins" page.
And then they started releasing both 32-bit and 64-bit versions...
By chrisco255 2025-01-1623:252 reply My 90s PC had similar specs and ran Flash websites just fine. It also supported desktop backgrounds and animated screensavers just fine.
By scarface_74 2025-01-1714:06 Your 90s area PC also had disk swapping and wasn’t running on a tiny battery. The Flash of 2007 was much more processor intensive and in the 90s, I doubt you were streaming quality video with Flash.
Suddenly I remember circa ie4 or ie5 that had the "active desktop" feature that made even well spec'd machines grind.
Now we run electron apps which are a pretty similar idea.
By pjmlp 2025-01-1712:28 Mostly because a whole generation lost that part, and finds cool putting Web everywhere, saying this as someone that also does Web projects, I only don't see a value using it as a hammer for all kinds of nails.
Apparently the whole Windows UI mess is also related to Microsoft not able to hire new folks with Windows development experience, probably they only saw Win32 after joining Microsoft, funny how things come around.
By chrisco255 2025-01-1712:19 iirc IE4 was actually good and then it was all down hill from there.
> When Flash did finally come to mobile on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM.
It worked on Maemo years before that though, with 600MHz Cortex-A8 CPU and 256 MB RAM. Nokia N900 had out-of-box support for Flash in its Gecko-based browser.
I believe Symbian had some support before that too, but I don't remember and haven't checked the details.
By M95D 2025-01-178:25 I remember having a Flash app on Nokia E70. I never used it. The phone was lauched in 2006, but I don't know if the app was there from the beginning because I bought it second-hand in 2008.
By scarface_74 2025-01-1714:041 reply That was “Flash light” not full Flash.
By seba_dos1 2025-01-1723:56 The Symbian one, yep. Maemo had the full Flash though.
nit:
> It was so resource constrained that you couldn’t put a picture on your home screen because it would have taken too much memory.
Clearly you drank the Apple koolaid that later artificially limited wallpapers to 3GS (or 3G?) and above when they introduced the feature in later iPhone OS updates.
We had wallpapers and great homescreen and dock themes on jailbroken iPhones without a significant perf impact.
P.S. Contemporary Windows Mobile phones had Texas Instruments OMAP ~200MHz processor IIRC with less RAM and iPhone (2G) was comparatively great.
By outworlder 2025-01-171:27 > We had wallpapers and great homescreen and dock themes on jailbroken iPhones without a significant perf impact.
Untrue. There was a noticeable UI lag when scrolling between app pages. I've tried it in both the iPod touch and previous generations iPhones. It felt like how Android used to feel like back then.
By scarface_74 2025-01-1619:071 reply Yes “I drank the Kool aid” when Adobe couldn’t get Flash to run decently on a 1Ghz/1Gb RAM Android. But it was going to run smoothly on a 400Mhz, 128Mb RAM first gen iPhone?
Was Safari with Flash going to run well when Safari without Flash could barely run?
By pessimizer 2025-01-1620:061 reply I didn't read a word about flash in the comment you replied to. They commented on the mention of wallpapers in your comment about flash, but they didn't mention flash at all. What they said is that you believed things that Apple said, that weren't true, about why they wouldn't allow wallpapers. They characterized this as a nitpick.
By scarface_74 2025-01-1620:101 reply They never said that about wallpaper. They did say that about Flash - my original comment.
And he was proven correct
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash
But back to wallpapers - while the jail breaking community didn’t care, between performance (lot easier to redraw a black background), memory and battery life, background images would have adverse affects on the iPhone. it wasn’t that it couldn’t be done.
> It was so resource constrained that you couldn’t put a picture on your home screen because it would have taken too much memory.
This is the sentence in your original comment I had responded to (and I quoted it in my original comment, not sure where's the misunderstanding here). iPhone was resource-constrained, but not that resource-constrained.
I do agree with your characterization of Flash being slow and clunky at the time for the most part, hence prefacing my comment as "nit," although I do not for one second believe that's the primary reason Jobs killed it. If he wanted a fast Flash, he would have made Adobe dance to his standards.
By jandrese 2025-01-1618:33 And yet Microsoft figured they could make Silverlight work on devices with even less impressive specs.
By 7thaccount 2025-01-1615:224 reply I had the original iPhone, then swapped it for a flagship android and hated it. I tried Windows Phone out a few years later and loved it and had two of them over the years. Some apps didn't exist for it and that sucked, but the OS was snappy and something different that I really liked. The Nokia windows phones were great. I knew it was doomed though as when I got them from the carrier, I was apparently like the only person despite it having its own wall at the brick and mortar store lol. I still miss it.
A relative of mine had a Windows Phone and kept it running at least until the mid 10s. It was fast but he could basically only do calls and SMSes with it because nobody wrote apps for that OS. Everybody in app development (devs and their customers) was keen to see Windows Phone die quickly so they could spare time and money and develop only for two OSes.
By saturn8601 2025-01-1719:19 Thy were really great on supporting a bunch of less popular platforms (feature phones and the like) WhatsApp supported Blackberry for a long time. WhatsApp probably supported a potato for quite a long time.
My cousin says the same thing... 25 year IT veteran. Early adopter for almost all new tech. He says his 1000-whatever Lumia phone was one of the best phones he ever owned. I know it ran Windows Phone OS, and I remember playing with it a bit.
By nextos 2025-01-1622:09 The Lumia was essentially a N9 ported from Linux to Windows. The N9 was the best phone I have ever owned. The UI was fantastic. In particular, the offline navigation application was incredible.
Nokia could have succeeded in the smartphone market. They had the 770 since late 2005. But they were a typical corporation, conservative and plagued by internal politics. Bringing Elop on board, with his Windows agenda, didn't help either.
By startupsfail 2025-01-1616:121 reply I remember having a Windows PDA when I was in college, and developing a bit on top of Windows M. It was a reasonable platform.
But Microsoft was too greedy with their licensing schemes and demanding too much adaptation from the hardware and chip manufacturers. You’d think they would adapt their OS and drivers, but no, you had to tape out new silicon for them. So they’ve lost the mobile OS market.
It feels like something like this may happen with the AI OS now. They are pushing hardware manufacturers to conform to their standards while Linux is adapting to what is available and working already.
Windows Phone had pretty much nothing in common with WinCE/WinMo PDAs that preceded it, at least from user and app developer perspective.
By 7thaccount 2025-01-1619:271 reply I think this hurt Windows Phone a lot as a lot of people thought it was just the PDA interface on a smart phone.
I don't think so. As I recall, the different UI (not just from older MS stuff, but also from iPhone) was really front and center of Microsoft's pitch at the time.
Besides, WinCE PDAs were very much a power user / enthusiast device, with relatively few around. People who used them and thus were familiar with the old UI would be well aware that WP7 was completely different, and people that didn't use them weren't exposed to the old UI in the first place.
By 7thaccount 2025-01-1713:26 I think the issue was some people never even got around to seeing the different UI. They heard Windows + Phone and immediately thought of the older tech and noped out.
By 7thaccount 2025-01-1619:26 I had forgotten the name, but yeah, I had a Lumia for my first one. Hardly anyone I knew had one, but the ~5 I knew were absolutely in love with theirs.
By tartoran 2025-01-1622:42 Yes, the Windows Nokia Phone was quite an interesting alternative. Though I never owned one I played with one and was pleasantly surprised, the 'workflow' was very good, the UI as was nice, it was snappy. If they were around today I'd probably think about owning one.
By muststopmyths 2025-01-173:24 >I still miss it.
There are dozens of us !
I miss so many things besides the UI. seamless integration of Cortana with in-car bluetooth to read incoming SMS, live tiles, fantastic cameras in Nokia devices.
Yes... If I remember we were aiming for the newly released "Windows 8"-based Phone OS, and the previous version was fully incompatible with it so all apps had to be redone. Tiles were the new thing to build for.
Microsoft tried to do the same thing on the Desktop side too, but on the desktop they were forced to keep the backwards compatibility in place so it didn't finish off the platform the way it did on the Phone side.
Amusingly Microsoft is still trying to make the walled garden happen. Lots of cheap Windows laptops and Desktops ship in what is called "Windows S" mode where only Microsoft Store apps are allowed to run. But again because PC owners don't abide that kind of bullcrap they also have to supply a way to tear down the walls (it's surprisingly easy, albeit permanent: just download and run a free app from the Windows store) if you want to use the machine in a normal way.
By inquirerGeneral 2025-01-1618:20 [dead]
If memory serves, it was a custom kernel and OS, then a semi-custom kernel with a few OS components shared with Windows 8, and then the Windows 10 'core' kernel (same as on the Xbox One?) with many shared OS components.
At each step they left the majority of devices behind.
What was equally worse was the triple (quadruple?) switch of app frameworks. If I remember correctly it was a dotnet abomination, then ?? then WPF and finally Xamarin.
Good luck convincing your platform 3rd party developers to entirely relearn and rebuild their app four times over in the span of a few years.
Interestingly enough, Windows Phone itself was far ahead of it's time. Buttersmooth UI, flat UI, built-in global and app dark modes, all in the early 2010s.
WinCE (which was rebranded as Windows Mobile at one point) basically had a cut-down version of Win32 as its app framework. There was also .NET complete with a WinForms port.
Windows Phone 7 had Silverlight as the app framework, which, to remind, was itself basically a rewrite of a subset of WPF in native code for perf (although the public API remained .NET).
And then after that it was WinRT / UWP, which was effectively further evolution of Silverlight in terms of how it looked to app devs.
WP7 was a really low point for the series because not only the new app dev story was completely and utterly incompatible with anything done before, it also had a very limited feature set in terms of what you could actually do inside the app - much worse than the iOS sandbox.
WP7 -> WinRT transition was easier because WinRT was so similar to Silverlight in terms of APIs (in some simple cases you literally just had to change the using-namespace declaration to compile). It also added enough functionality for more interesting apps to be viable. But by then, the reputation hit from both devs (who were being told to again rewrite everything they already rewrote for WP7) and users (who were being told again that their devices won't get the new OS, and the new apps are incompatible with the old OS) was too much for the platform, IMO.
And then on top of all that Google actively sabotaged it by refusing to make apps for its popular services - such as YouTube - and actively pursuing third-party apps that tried to fill that gap.
By pjmlp 2025-01-1712:29 Not only Silverlight, XNA was used for games.
After WinRT transition, Microsoft sabotaged themselves, due to the way WP 8 => WP 8.1 => WP 10 happened to be, with rewrites, promised upgrades that didn't happen, deprecation of C++/CX, and plenty of other missteps.
By bigstrat2003 2025-01-1621:31 I wouldn't exactly call flat UI a good thing. They are one of the horrible flaws of our current UI design trends.
By 7thaccount 2025-01-1615:242 reply Buttersmooth UI is how I'd describe it too. I loved the themes at the time too.
By robertlagrant 2025-01-1618:30 It was incredibly smooth. The Windows Phone 7 browser was also very smooth compared to the iPhone/Android browsers of the time. Some miracles worked somewhere.
Also the keyboard was incredibly good.
I had a few Windows phones, and butter isn't a word I'd ever use to describe the performance of the UI. Heck, I wouldn't even use the word margarine to describe my experience with it.
By 7thaccount 2025-01-1715:36 Out of curiosity...why did you have several? Were they budget models?
By delusional 2025-01-1615:272 reply As I recall it, calling Windows Phone "buttery smooth" is quite an overstatement. I remember it looking drab dull and cheap at the time.
By rescbr 2025-01-1617:29 I had two Lumia flagship phones - Lumia 800 with Windows Phone 7 and Lumia 930 with Windows Phone 8 (which I later upgraded to 10).
Both look and feel awesome, not cheap at all. At the time, Microsoft were paying developers to port apps to Windows Phone. There were developers who took the effort to make their app look native, and I'd say Windows Phone 7 had the best UX to this day.
By kernal 2025-01-1622:10 It's hard to take someone seriously when they overexaggerate like that. Windows phone was never butter or margarine smooth.
By pjc50 2025-01-1616:27 Didn't it end up as UWP? At one point they were trying to pitch running the same app on mobile and on desktop, and it .. kind of worked, although obviously very sandboxed and restricted in APIs.
I couldn't believe my eyes when I read that they had hired Elop and was concentrating on Windows phones. I immediately knew that was the end. Unbelievably incompetent by the board.
By dev_daftly 2025-01-1617:47 I think it was actually a good idea. I think they correctly predicted the Android market and saw Windows Phone was a good way to differentiate their phones from everybody else. If you look at the history of Android manufacturers, it was a long slog of brands trading off popularity and hardly making any profit until Samsung eventually became the only mainstream player.
By spiralpolitik 2025-01-1618:293 reply Nokia was dead company walking before Stephen Elop. Elop saw the writing on the wall and made one of the choices available. A different CEO would have made a different choice but ultimately at that point it would still have been too late to save Nokia.
Nokia was a great hardware company that missed the boat when the market changed to be based around software. When the market changed again to be based around ecosystems, Nokia was beyond saving.
Was there with the company as intern and junior during Nokia and Microsoft days for Nokia Maps.
In my opinion Microsoft fumbled the app store by bloating it with questionable KPIs on number of added apps by anyone able to submit templates apps, while not getting key apps like WhatsApp on board. S\so it was a hard sell to have people's ecosystems. Same syndrome as with Zune, Tablet PC, and Microsoft Store on Windows.
Build quality and hardware of the Lumias was second only to iPhones and definitly better experience than Android.
The old Nokias had no chance compared to those, and I agree with the assessment that Nokia as Android-Vendor would have made little sense either.
By duskwuff 2025-01-1619:33 > In my opinion Microsoft fumbled the app store by bloating it with questionable KPIs on number of added apps by anyone able to submit templates apps
Worse than that. IIRC, Microsoft ran contests which specifically incentivized developers to create as many apps as possible, and most of the apps they got as a result were garbage (like copies of developer examples with some of the text changed).
By rvba 2025-01-1622:40 Nokia with android vendor would mean Nokia would survive until today - just due to the brand (it was big) and build quality.
They released an android phone that sold... many years too late.
If they released it much earlier (no microsoft) probablh Nokia would still be here - competing with Samsung, or in worst case the tier3 brand cheaper smartphones.
> made a different choice but ultimately at that point it would still have been too late to save Nokia.
You think if they made just a single decision different and bet on Android instead of Windows, they would be in the same spot today? I wouldn't be so sure. Samsung hedged their bets across both and succeeded. Both weren't great at in-house software and Nokia made better hardware.
By spiralpolitik 2025-01-1619:27 I don't think Nokia at that point would have gone with Android with Google services which what the market wanted. They would have gone with Android with their own services (Maps etc) and app store.
I don't think that would have succeeded against Samsung and the Nexus phones.
But TBH I think going with Android would have a better move than what Elop did.
By pjmlp 2025-01-1712:35 Nokia is still around, because NSN survived this mess.
As someone on the Networks side, with occasional visits to Finland headquarters, Nokia Mobiles would have done alright, if they kept down the Symbian/Linux path.
The Burning Memo killed the remaining trusth from app developers, in a company and ecosystem that was pretty much anti-Microsoft, just made the transition to have Qt properly integrated in Symbian, with PIPS and nicer Eclipse based IDE than the previous experience.
Only to be told to throw away all that developer experience, adopt Windows and .NET.
I think the critical failure of the windows phone was that app development was not open. You can't compete with established walled gardens by building your own, you can only compete if you make a huge amazing park free to use just outside the walls of the competitors.
Translating this to windows phones, it would have only succeeded if it either:
1) Made browser applications first-class and pushed phone-specific APIs (gyro, bluetooth, etc) to be open. Then pick a fight with google and apple about supporting PWAs better. This would probably keep windows phones as a "low cost, crappy feeling" systems forever.
2) Made the windows phone native-apps trivial to port to run on browsers with a convenient and easy way to deploy those apps on ios/android (hopefully without feeling too much not-native on those platforms). Would require a lot more engineering resources and time, so much harder to pull off.
By shortrounddev2 2025-01-2015:321 reply Well they did do something like that; Windows Phone apps were written in the same .Net UWP SDK as desktop apps, so the idea was that you could target both platforms at once (and Xbox as well). I think MS overestimated how much people cared about native PC apps by that point (basically not at all). Additionally, snapchat was the hot new app at the time, and there was no first party Snapchat app (and if you used the 3rd party one, you risked being banned from snapchat).
The Lumia remains my favorite phone of all time
By DanielHB 2025-01-2015:59 I would argue that windows desktop development using .net is a walled garden in itself as well.
They finally realized what I was saying when they acquired Xamarin in 2016. I never used Xamarin myself, but I hear it is not that great and kinda dying. So like I said the native open platform approach was a lot harder to pull off.
By actionfromafar 2025-01-1614:541 reply Now I can't find that poem about Elop sinking the Nokia ship or something like that.
By alain94040 2025-01-1616:351 reply This one, the burning platform memo? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32698044
By actionfromafar 2025-01-1623:59 No it was more like a song or poem or Ahab kind of thing.
By lofaszvanitt 2025-01-1623:11 Do not let the saboteurs in...
By mindtricks 2025-01-1616:45 I was also at Nokia during this time and recall OPK (Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo), during a visit to the Beijing office, giving a talk where he talked about the difficulties of pushing new things through the organization.
More specifically, he said that even he would push for investment and innovation in one area, but that as the decision made its way through the org, it became something else. It was an odd moment to see a CEO say something like this, and was a clear indicator to me that we didn't have what was necessary to really pivot the way we needed.
> MS killed the whole division shortly after Satya Nadella took over and was sorting out the mess left by Steve Ballmer.
These have always been the real crimes in my mind.
Ballmer wasn't an idea guy, he was a top-tier salesman / cheerleader, and he definitely "understood" what actually made Microsoft successful (put out a product, then allow third-party developers and support to extend it / support / learn it inside out and be a VAR).
Ballmer made the same mistake a lot of people in that era made, which is that they didn't realize the software was the most important component. The era of "killer hardware" never actually existed in the smartphone space, because you had a limited form factor to begin with. You couldn't cram an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra in your phone, so your software had to be useful and on-point.
I think Satya saw the entire Windows Phone debacle as a failed experiment and probably looked at Apple / Google and just threw his hands up in frustration.
Getting developers onboard for Windows Phone was critical and not enough time, money, and attention was spent doing that. I think there was a degree of Microsoft arrogance there, along the lines of, "We're Microsoft, of course they're going to develop for our platform..." Meanwhile, in 2024, the Windows App Store is still a barren hellscape compared to even the App Store for OS X and you don't even want to talk about Google Play Store and iOS App Store vs Windows Store.
The prophecy was fulfilled - software will eat the world.
By dev_daftly 2025-01-1617:59 Ballmer, the person who pushed for and created the entire Microsoft Enterprise focus, is not an idea guy that understood what made Microsoft successful? This idea that Ballmer was some goof when he was actually considered a co-founder by Bill Gates which is why he received like 17% of the company when he joined.
Also, they put plenty of effort into getting developers to onboard windows phone. They even created multiple platforms that allowed devs to create a single app that worked across all windows devices(pc, phone, xbox) but developers decided, with some very influential devs being extremely vocal, that is was some sort of power grab to force devs to only deliver their software through the windows store.
By actionfromafar 2025-01-1616:17 Yes and no. Too late to take on Apple, but Microsoft could have persisted as a loss leader and finally at least had Enterprise Mobile in its pocket. Just don't actively burn third party developers. It would have been too late for courting hardware OEMs by then I reckon, though.
The Linux based Nokia N900 was the best phone I ever owned. With a bit of polish, finish and maturity it could have also been the best phone for the masses. RIP.
By badgersnake 2025-01-1615:471 reply The follow up N9 was that. It was great. Elop canned it.
I had to import one from Australia. It was totally worth it.
By Twirrim 2025-01-1619:12 I loved my N810, but Maemo had so many little issues all over the place, it was reaching "Death by a thousand papercuts" territory. iPhone did what Apple used to do so well, which was obsess about the user experience.
By numerosix 2025-01-198:09 I second that ! compact, unbreakable screen, real sliding keyboard with backlight, beautiful interface, true debian, a total shame, I regret it everyday. It was almost perfect. Tons of apps, even Waze! Android & iphone are pure shit. Rip n900...
I'm very late to the party here, but as a smartphone product manager at Vodafone I had a front-row seat to the entire arc--which actually started with many telcos being angry at Nokia for their arrogance and near-monopoly, before the iPhone came out.
Nokia never really had a chance--the N-series was a mess of patched software, they had no real Linux alternative, and their supply chain was fragmented six ways from Sunday because they churned out dozens of SKUs.
Then everyone went into denial because they couldn't believe Apple would be successful by going outside established norms (like refusing to customize the homescreen or packaging for telcos, etc.).
A few telcos tried to respond by picking their own champion smartphone (Verizon did that in the US). I ended up having to talk my CMO out of going all out on promoting the Blackberry Storm (which was a dud of epic proportions).
I later became the product manager for the iPhone as well, and that was an amazing roller coaster I will eventually write about (it's been around 17 years, so I think I'll get to it sometime soon).
But I would recommend folk interested in the intervening years to read Operation Elop: https://asokan.org/operation-elop/
I also had a front row seat to that...
By yabatopia 2025-01-1620:39 That’s how I remember Nokia in the first half of the 2000’s: peak arrogance. Even if Steve Jobs himself would have given them the iPhone for free, they would have rejected it.
I had a Nokia Symbian phone, the 7610. I loved how 'quirky' it was:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7610#/media/File:Nokia76...
and I was able to download an NES emulator for it! I remember playing Mario 3 on my way to my first post-university job. I really felt like I was living in the future compared to the phones others had. And then Symbian just... never got better.
I was ambivalent about the MS purchase of Nokia but I was still optimistic about a lot of it. Nokia always made top-notch hardware but it was obvious from the outside that they just didn't have the software talent (the N900 was a wonderful device for the tech set but it had no mass market viability). I maintain that when it was released Windows Phone was the best mobile OS going. But Microsoft fumbled hard by reinventing the wheel with Windows Phone 8 and destroying an already emaciated App Store. Arguably they fumbled before they even released Windows Phone, spending $1bn on the Kin and then almost immediately nixing it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin
Looking back at it all today... iOS is fine. Android is fine. But man do I wish we still had a couple of other viable competitors in there.
By kawsper 2025-01-1617:14 The N-series were great too, I loved both my N73 and later a N82, both with Gameboy emulators.
I also bought a Garmin license where I could install Garmin on my Symbian phone to do car navigation on my phone, this was at a time where most people had specific hardware for GPS navigation, now we're used to having apps on our phones, but it felt quite special back then!
By casenmgreen 2025-01-1615:071 reply I worked, briefly, at Symbian.
They were mind-bendingly, staggeringly, bureaucratic - like to an extent and in a way you absolutely could not imagine if you had not actually seen it with your own eyes.
By PeterStuer 2025-01-1618:52 I love Finland and the Fins. But there is a certain type in that population that is extremely bureaucratic. The only country in Europe that has a contingent that comes near is Switzerland, also a great place to live.
> The iphone was solidly in charge by then
Nit: the iPhone was only "in charge" for a brief year or two, and then Android ate its lunch in terms of marketshare.
What is very interesting is that Apple has displayed twice over ( MacBooks and iPhones) that a minority marketshare can capture the vast majority of profits in that market. OEMs like HTC and LG made a few bucks profit off of any phone, sometimes even losing money on the cheaper models. And that's with Google footing almost all the cost of developing the OS.
By naming_the_user 2025-01-1617:49 This is pretty much just describing the bimodal nature of most markets.
Extracting $100 in surplus profit from someone who's not on the poverty line is easier than extracting $10 from someone who is.
By mrtranscendence 2025-01-1618:32 > the iPhone was only "in charge" for a brief year or two, and then Android ate its lunch in terms of marketshare.
This is true worldwide, but there are significant regions where iOS quite handily beats Android (such as the US, Japan, and even some parts of Europe).
By Terretta 2025-01-1618:52 > Nit: the iPhone was only "in charge" for a brief year or two, and then Android ate its lunch in terms of marketshare.
Marketshare is less interesting than wallet share for many products.
> a minority marketshare can capture the vast majority of profits
Ah, yes, exactly, there it is.
iPhone offers wallet share, and continues to eat Android's lunch in both total spend and ARPU.
There are two cohorts to be in charge of, for two business models: selling something, or giving it away to show ads.
This looks like Android dominates until you get to the section "iPhone vs Android App Spending" and start doing the math that it's winning on total dollars never mind the number of devices.
https://backlinko.com/iphone-vs-android-statistics
Even then, advertisers tend to advertise because they want to sell something. Advertisers marketing something everyone buys, Android audience is best to advertise to. Advertisers with something that depends on extra cash in the wallet before the buyer considers it, iOS audience makes sense. Ad rates reflect this.
Astonishingly, even on the handset makers themselves, there were years Apple captured over 100% of the revenue. That sounds nuts till you dig and see it's as simple as Apple made money, while so many other handset makers lost so much money.
By rdsubhas 2025-01-1615:18 ~Thrice. Airpods.~
Edit: Airpods also has a majority market share, so probably it's not the third in this list.
By hilux 2025-01-1621:18 This is such an important lesson!
I was a day one Android fan (got the Nexus One) but I'd actually debate what "in charge" means... to me it doesn't necessarily mean dominating market share. I think the iPhone defined the touch-based smartphone when it came out and continues to do so. These days Android has a much more cohesive concept (in the form of Material UI and so on) but in the early days it was just a hodgepodge mess of ideas, even if it dominated the market.
By sangnoir 2025-01-1617:49 > ...in the early days it was just a hodgepodge mess of ideas, even if it dominated the market.
and it was glorious; the intent-system and Notifications drawers were Androids calling card. Intents were a blessing and a curse: being able to replace apps was great, but the variety in design language, not so much.
Being able to reach into apps' storage was insecure, but freeing one's data from SQLite files was fantastic.
By sleepybrett 2025-01-1616:271 reply it dominated the market because they seized the 'budget' smartphone market. Back in they hayday everyone dreaded a new android app coming into the shop because of all the absolute shit phones (slow cpus, tiny screens) the client wanted us to support because there were so many in the market (overseas).
iPhone did and still does run the market, everyone else is a follower.
By inquirerGeneral 2025-01-1618:32 [dead]
This is probably the most important bifurcation point in the history of European tech. Today's malaise and grasping for direction has much to do with the demise of this pioneering enterprise. And the fact that it does not appear to have been pre-ordained adds poignancy.
By spiralpolitik 2025-01-1618:37 European tech was doomed in late the 90s when the EU decided to throw in with Microsoft et al instead of supporting building out a homegrown alternative ecosystem based around open source software.
No, the national champions model is the problem. If Apple failed the US still has Android and potentially many other startups. Europe just doesn't have the risk capital or ecosystem.
Yes, but now it doesn't even have national champions. The last one standing with some pretense at being still with the times is probably ASML.
One wonders whether at any point anybody will ask any tough questions about where Europe is heading as far as technology goes.
By lotsofpulp 2025-01-1617:51 I would put Novo Nordisk up there too. Not sure how Eli Lilly is doing so much better though, which I presume for both is due to advancing GLP-1s, but I thought Novo was first to market.
By CalRobert 2025-01-1615:37 Lots of people are. The answer appears to be “down the drain”.
By fire_lake 2025-01-171:08 People forget that for a long time ASML was government backed
By PeterStuer 2025-01-1618:56 Which is exacly why Finland should have blocked the MS deal. Nokia was a HUGE percentage of Finland's GDP.
By qingcharles 2025-01-1617:13 I was working externally for Nokia around 2004~2006. They were already competing with Apple at this point. Nokia were scared by the iPod and the Rokr. They wanted to secure the mobile and online music market. They were trying to beat Apple at iTunes, to the point where they gobbled up one of Apple's biggest competitors in the music space (OD2-Loudeye).
When the iPhone launched it showed Nokia was woefully behind. All their devices instantly felt like they were from a previous age.
Delaware State Lost Property says I still have a bunch of Nokia shares to collect apparently lol
I remember that, too. Nokia even had an "app store" on a lot of their business series devices (the E-series), but it was clunky to use, had no payment options and was not really friendly for 3rd party developers. There was probably a window where, had Nokia pushed to compete with apple on that field, they could have gotten a leg up and kept Symbian and symbian apps in the race for (way) longer. But that invest and speed needed for software was probably not doable in the behemoth that was Nokia at that time.
By mindtricks 2025-01-1616:40 As someone who was there, I recall numerous projects instituted to reduce the number of steps it took to even install an app on the device. It was mind-numbing to see what they were trying to extract themselves from.
By zekica 2025-01-1615:41 The worst thing with their store was the 3rd party review and signing process. For a time you also had to pay (a lot more than $99) to receive a developer certificate.
By dismalaf 2025-01-1617:39 Ugh, Meego was so good. I still remember watching the presentation, then Nokia tanking when it was announced they were switching to Windows.
Imagine a world where Meego, a proper Linux, took over instead of Android. And I like Android as a product, but the software stack is so strange...
> These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business
I believe Sony failed to transition for similar reasons. They really owned the hardware era with its own kind of ui, pattern ... but everything they did in software was lacking.
So many manufacturing companies fail at software. They think of software like it's any other component on the BOM. As if it's just like a screw or a piece of molded plastic: Build the cheapest "software part" that meets the requirements (or buy it from a "supplier"), and then bolt it onto the product some time during assembly.
They don't think of software as a major component of their brand. They don't think of software as the user's interface to (and perception of) the product. They don't think of software as an ecosystem with updates, a changing security landscape, and third party developers and integrators. It's just one of 500 things on the BOM that gets sourced and assembled.
I've seen companies where each branch in the software repo is named with a part number, and they're all somewhat similar, copy-pasted around from one another, but with no real concept of what's an earlier or later version or updates, no concept of where the codebase came from or is going, and no real structure other than "This software blob is part 003-2291-54 for product 003-2291-00. The product is shipped and we will never look at the code again."
By GoToRO 2025-01-1617:44 This is exactly how a german-car-maker manager put it: just an item on a BOM. Their cars have hilarious bad software.
This is very visible in places like TVs/set-top-boxes, which are always chronically awful and slow, and now cars are filling up with terrible software. Which they want to charge a subscription for.
By ryandrake 2025-01-1619:06 My TV's menus consist of what I would charitably describe as clip art. The icons that are supposed to be aligned row-wise are sometimes off by 1 pixel. Text is not consistently aligned with icons. They can't even get left justification right. Some of the UI elements have borders around them, but the bottom border is sometimes 3px thick and the top border is 2px thick. Interaction with the menus generally takes about 500-2500ms from the time I push the button on the remote. Yet everything is animated (using a CPU that is obviously not powerful enough to even keep up with the animation).
As I use my TV, I sometimes think about how many engineers, QA test leads, product managers, and leadership at the manufacturer signed off on this software as acceptable. "Barely functional enough so the customer doesn't return it" is apparently the quality bar.
By drdaeman 2025-01-1618:17 And the problem is, people buy this. The markets are completely broken. And the worst of it - it's unlikely this will be addressed, most likely it'll only get worse.
The presentation is evidence itself that Nokia was bureaucratic and unlikely to stay competitive.
The PPT was supposedly about the iPhone but the (well put together) slides for that don't start until page 14. Credit was given to Timo Partanen, along with contributions from Scott Cooper, Gordon Murray-Smith and Sanna Puha.
Pages 3 through 11 were market analysis. Boring and irrelevant. The only message that should have been given is that iPhone will disrupt the market and Nokia desperately needs to create a competitive "cool" product. The presentation said several times the iPhone was "cool" because of its UI and touch interface versus "buttons". But I think they missed the point. The iPhone was a new category i.e. it was more of a computer than a phone with some computing abilities.
The "recommended" actions slide is on page 12 & 13. I assume this was created by Peter Bryer as his name was listed on top of the first page. It lists 10 recommendations along with sub recommendations. For a large bureaucratic company, good luck getting one recommendation executed. Besides, all ten recommendations missed the point. This was the automobile replacing the horse and buggy. Nokia wanted to tweak their way through. They eventually tried to partner with a "software" company in Microsoft; but Microsoft at that time was the geriatric helping the geriatric. I would argue Nokia would have given themselves a better chance of success by creating a "skunk works". Assemble their best engineers and designers into one team and free from interference from all the internal politics. Their goal would be to create a POC that could rival the iPhone's "cool factor". And do it in 6 months.
By freetonik 2025-01-1621:27 >The problem was at the board and executive level. These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business.
A very common story in European tech and automobile companies.
By teekert 2025-01-1616:47 I really liked Windows phone. Had a Lumia 800. Nice phone.
I still think they should have kept going with it.
So Microsoft also killed linux on phones basically. I had a n900. Best phone ever.
By burnte 2025-01-1616:55 I had the N800 and then the N810 which was one of my favorite devices ever. Then I got the N900 and what a disappointment it was. I wish I could get an N810 with modern internals.
By joshmarinacci 2025-01-1616:18 I was there during the end of the Windows Phone era and can confirm. There were even efforts for additional Linux based OSes post windows phone. Nokia just never had software in their DNA.
By pjmlp 2025-01-179:47 Same here, I was in Espoo the week after the Burning Memo, and not a single person I met was happy with it.
Especially given how much prevalent the UNIX culture was at Nokia.
Why didn't Nokia go bankrupt afterwards? They have Bell Labs, but don't make any interesting products.
Nokia has a pretty successful business in things like cellular base stations, carrier networking, etc. - for example they brought their joint venture with Siemens (Nokia Siemens Networks) back in-house by buying Siemens' part out, and that does a lot of optical network stuff (DWDM backhaul equipment, etc), already had a cellular base-station business but then also bought competitor Alcatel Lucent, and a lot of provider network stuff came in with that (like FTTH equipment on the provider side). They also got Alcatel's undersea cable laying division.
So they still have a bunch of valuable and successful businesses even though their consumer business went to crap.
By hnuser123456 2025-01-1717:391 reply So they gained a reputation for reliability/durability and pivoted to infra?
By yencabulator 2025-01-1721:13 Nokia had, for example, excellent RF engineering talent. Personal anecdote: back in the day a Nokia phone would get a call through when other brands didn't, on the same telco.
That talent found great use in cellular base stations. Nokia has been making them for a long time, no real pivot involved, more like a split of a conglomerate into per-vertical businesses. Fun fact: Nokia started as a pulp mill, they made tires and rubber boots, and so on. Think Mitsubishi or such.
By clippy99 2025-01-1615:59 > Symbian was going to magically fix all their problems.
Really? I remember Symbian had the crappiest and most shoestring C++ dev stack ever.
Something clicked for me when I read your comment: the most amazing thing about Apple is that despite their corporate immensity, they still continue to ship generation after generation of cool products that compete and sell on their own merits. You don't have to be a fanboy to appreciate that.
Almost no other tech company that I can think of has been able to resist bureaucratic ossification. (Perhaps Adobe - to an extent?)
By yencabulator 2025-01-1721:161 reply Really? To me, for example iPhones haven't changed at all in a long time, they get spec bumps but are essentially the same product, and people buy replacements mostly because of batteries going bad / apps bloating / fashion.
Apple's new products are surprisingly often failures, for their background. Vision Pro anyone?
By hilux 2025-01-1721:24 Consumers always have the choice to buy a different phone. And in the case of buying an iPhone, they have the choice to buy a much cheaper phone. That so many of us continue to buy iPhones is proof that Apple is doing something very right. And that shows, and this is my main point, that they have impressively avoided being bogged down by megacorp bureaucracy.
By unwiredben 2025-01-1615:449 reply I was at Palm when the iPhone launched, and one note from this analysis summed up Apple's new power in the market and how they really changed the landscape.
"Cingular has allowed Apple to launch a device with WLAN and inbuilt services"
At that time, the carriers controlled so much of the cell phone experience. We certainly would have loved to have launched Palm Treo phones with WiFi radios, but our carrier partners wanted the only way to get data in and out of the devices to be through their monetized data plans. They also wanted to control what you did with that data so they could charge for their own email or messaging systems or web portals. The same applied to app stores. Palm OS didn't have a unified app store at that time, just sideloading and some third-party methods, and some carriers had started making their own stores where you could buy apps billed through your cell phone bill. They hated the idea of a platform owning that, and I expect that was part of the reason Apple originally released it with no app store. They needed the phone to be a massive hit in order to gain the power to also bypass that wall that the cell companies put up.
Palm did benefit from the iPhone launch -- it had us uplevel our efforts away from the post-Palm OS phones that we were in the middle of developing that were aimed at the RIM market and instead try something radical with webOS, and when the Pre launched, it actually had WiFi on board, although the Sprint-exclusive Pixi phone lacked WiFi due to carrier request. There was some momentum there for a while, but then HP bought us, hit its own set of brick walls with carriers, and ditched the hardware business shortly after Apple started launching on other carriers.
I was at RIM at that time and saw _exactly_ the same thing. When I started in 2008, in addition to WiFi and apps they were squabbling with carriers about whether or not the Blackberry needed an antenna. Carriers were micromanaging devices to an astonishing degree.
The river of money from Macs, iPods and iTunes gave Steve Jobs a completely different kind of leverage in those carrier negotiations. Device only companies like Palm and RIM couldn't have broken that carrier strangle even if they did have the technology.
By PlunderBunny 2025-01-1618:421 reply Were virtual network operators (?) - VNOs - a thing back then, and could a VNO make its own rules? If so, could Apple (or Palm or RIM) launch their devices without carrier compromise by also owning a virtual network? I guess this would have required a lot of money. Maybe Nokia could have done it?
No, the carrier leverage did not come from network policy, it came from sales-channel. That is to say, in those days one way or another every device passed through a carrier's hands before reaching the customer. So carriers controlled pricing, and to a large degree, marketing. If they didn't like your device they would refuse to sell it and then you were stuck.
Unlike RIM or Palm, Apple could realistically choose not to sell their device at all, or at least not sell it for a while, and so they were able to break the carrier oligopsony. It also didn't hurt that Steve Jobs was, well, Steve Jobs. A one-of-one business negotiator.
By scarface_74 2025-01-172:20 That’s not exactly true. What Apple did in every market was make deals with the #2 or #3 carrier that was desperate to steal market share from the leader.
Then when the leader started seeing customers lead. Apple could have the same terms with them.
By atourgates 2025-01-1617:48 The Pre was absolutely rad - and to this day the only phone I miss from a UI perspective, and the only UX and hardware that I thought had a chance of "out Apple'ing Apple".
The hardware was very well done, and I could type faster on my Pre than I still can today on any screen. I was never a Blackberry person, but I expect it was a simlar experience.
Even at launch, WebOS was a pleasure to use, and the architecture of essentially easy-to-make installable web apps was revolutionary at the time. It's a damn shame it never made it further than it did.
By dboreham 2025-01-1615:59 Exactly this. Also why I bought Apple stock the day the iPhone was announced (I had never seen an iPhone and knew nothing about how cool it was, but I took notice that Jobs had been able to blast through the carrier moat concerning data service).
I read that as a failure of Palm's management, notably the ones that were negotiating with phone carriers. Jobs isn't the only guy who could have negotiated that kind of deal. Apple was a second run computer company that had almost no previous phone experience. They were not exactly negotiating from a position of strength, and the fact that only one carrier took them up on the offer shows just how tough it was.
It sounds like they really needed to say "Stop. We are the ones building the phone, you are the ones providing the service. We don't tell you how to build towers, you don't tell us how to build the handset, at least not the user facing part of the handset."
By dmonitor 2025-01-1619:07 > Jobs isn't the only guy who could have negotiated that kind of deal
This is a debatable claim.
> Apple was a second run computer company that had almost no previous phone experience. They were not exactly negotiating from a position of strength
The iPhone was not a mobile Mac. It was an iPod with an inbuilt cellphone. iPod was HUGE. That was their upper hand.
Apple in 2006 wasn’t a computer company, they were the iPod company.
It was huge as a consumer product. And that was the only thing that could convince a carrier to take a bet with Apple: they wanted exclusivity on the “next iPod”.
By MichaelZuo 2025-01-1723:361 reply But Cingular/AT&T clearly didn’t sign a lifetime exclusivity contract with Apple?
It didn’t even last 4 years.
What company would sign a lifetime exclusivity contract?
Four years is an eternity in the mobile phone business.
By MichaelZuo 2025-01-1816:56 A company desperate to convince a telecom to allow iphone app store sales…?
By joe_the_user 2025-01-1619:20 I would expect that being a computer company gave Apple more leverage than the handset makers. Apple could afford to have none of the providers say yes.
Moreover, Apple had prestige. It wasn't that big but it already the high-end computer maker. And Apple had the already successful ipod which served as the basis for the original iphone. And the handset makers had been fundamentally dependent on carriers in determining what features made it to the final phones - which would have had to made them essentially weaklings.
Which is to say, I think there's reason to think Apple had strength in it's negotiation position relative to a random handset maker.
By wmf 2025-01-1618:47 Steve Jobs could say that but as the old saying goes, you are not Steve Jobs.
By scarface_74 2025-01-172:221 reply By the time that the iPhone was introduced, Apple was riding high on the iPod.
By ben7799 2025-01-1719:48 The resurgence of the Mac was already well under way at that point as well. Intel Macs had launched before the iPhone. Developer buy in to the Mac was pretty big by then.
But aside from that everyone was carrying around an iPod everywhere along with a dumbphone even if you were a Windows user. We all hated using the dumbphones and loved the iPod.
By SllX 2025-01-171:39 > Palm OS didn't have a unified app store at that time, just sideloading and some third-party methods, and some carriers had started making their own stores where you could buy apps billed through your cell phone bill. They hated the idea of a platform owning that, and I expect that was part of the reason Apple originally released it with no app store. They needed the phone to be a massive hit in order to gain the power to also bypass that wall that the cell companies put up.
This might actually be a partial explanation why some of Apple’s Executives held back on trying to convince Jobs until after they shipped, but initially, Steve Jobs was truly against the idea of running third-party apps on iPhones and had to be convinced.
I love sharing this trivia with people because really, can you imagine an iPhone without apps? It’s crazy to me to even think about, and back then during that first year and for many subsequent years after until this became public knowledge, I thought the only reason there wasn’t an SDK was because the first iPhone as a minimum-viable product for Apple’s vision of a cell phone and an SDK was always in the cards from before the start. Because why wouldn’t it? They had Cocoa! And a small but enthusiastic base of indie Mac devs that knew how to use it.
By grishka 2025-01-1621:26 > At that time, the carriers controlled so much of the cell phone experience.
In English-speaking countries, maybe. But I remember at least Windows Mobile PDAs that had both a cellular radio and wifi before the iPhone launched. At least Russian carriers never cared at all what kind of phone or other device you were using on their network. You bought it unlocked for the full price from somewhere else anyway. There were various attempts to do US-style carrier-locked phones with 2-year commitment with no or little upfront payment, but none of that really stuck. The only exception to that was SkyLink, Russia's only CDMA carrier. They sold their own branded phones but even those, iirc, were for the full price upfront.
By tiltowait 2025-01-1622:09 Though I never used a Pre, I got to use webOS on an HP Touchpad. In many ways, I still think it’s better than what we currently have and wish it had won out instead of the iOS and Android.
By spiralpolitik 2025-01-1618:43 The Pre and WebOS were hands down the best non iPhone experience at the time. The mistake Palm made was going exclusive instead of pushing it everywhere. I don't think the Pre ever recovered from that in the USA.
The BlackBerry Z10 was also a great device but by that point there was no way BlackBerry to deploy a competing ecosystem to iPhone and Android for it to matter.
By orev 2025-01-174:39 As an outsider very interested in Palm devices, this was always my impression/suspicion. Thanks for confirming what I’ve long thought was going on.
By LiamPowell 2025-01-1613:383 reply Mirror since the 3 already posted don't actually work: https://archive.org/details/document_20250116
By froh 2025-01-1620:03 thanks! FWIW I found it on-site by searching for
"Apple iPhone was launched" on https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html
leading with some clicks to
https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=A0123
which took me to a site that worked.
By kristjansson 2025-01-1617:251 reply The host must be 404-ing high-traffic files?
By echoangle 2025-01-1618:25 That's probably what happens once the traffic quota is exceeded, I would guess.
By pinkfox 2025-01-1619:13 Thanks!
