For some reason I still love the Psion logo with the deconstructed letters and the industrial gray-yellow color scheme.
Anyway, it’s sad that there was such a massive opportunity for European corporate players to invent mobile computing, but together they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the form of Symbian (the evolution of Psion’s operating system, co-developed with Nokia and Ericsson).
The other day I was rummaging around papers in the attic, and found a black and white printout of an internal Nokia presentation from 2001 outlining their smartphone and mobile data strategy. It was striking how well they anticipated what users might want in the smartphone, but completely failed to project the technological milestones that might make those dreams realizable. The 2001 outlook was entirely obsessed with the limits of bandwidth and what mobile operators would allow on their network (i.e. how Nokia could enable operators to get a cut on all the content viewed by users).
Post-iPhone, it seems silly that they spent so much energy and engineering effort on shaving off a few kilobytes of 3G data here, squeezing apps into 1 MB RAM there, and so on. Apple was able to project the point where their desktop operating system (itself formerly a late-1980s workstation OS) could fit into mobile, and they also had the design capability to ruthlessly cut features to make that work. Nokia dabbled in all directions: bottom-up with Symbian, top-down with Maemo/Meego, but no commitment and no guiding vision except the managerial focus on cutting costs by putting the same old components a bit more cheaply into a growing range of colorful plastics.
Nokia not only missed what users wanted but also how developers would like to work. Symbian had a strange and easy-to-misuse API, poor manuals, and app deployments were tied to telecom operators as there was no app store. I remember my ramp-up as a developer with the Apple ecosystem after working with Symbian. It wasn't evolution; it was like a leap to the next century. The documentation was excellent, the APIs were clear and logical, the code made sense, and the system was familiar. And then the App Store arrived with all the implications, such as a sudden mass market and less-obvious features like crash reports with stack traces from users. Apple was on an entirely different level than Nokia, and literally not a single developer wanted to touch Symbian anymore. It was effectively dead, even with millions of devices still in use, but it was obvious. Today I see a similar story unfolding, much more slowly, but the same thing is happening with Microsoft Windows.
I was in Espoo HQ, the week after the burning platform memo, which killed most developer love that was worked on during the previous years building up to Qt and PIPS.
Everyone I talked to wasn't that happy with management.
Sorry about that, I was on the Networks unit, still I could follow most of the Mobile stuff from inside.
After the Metrowerks based, tooling, there were two attempts with Eclipse, the first wasn't that great and I no longer remember the name, the second one was Carbide.
Which is when then eventually acquired Qt, introduced PIPS to ease the pain, and started to make Symbian C++ dialect more friendlier, and closer to common programming without those strange two phase constructors, handles, and special suffix names on member functions.
So the community was starting to see the light of transition that was several years in the making, and out of the sudden, that "we are going Windows Phone 7" on a company that was UNIX first for several years.
When I joined, all network software was originally targeting HP-UX, for example.
So there wasn't much Microsoft love on the corridors.
That's not completely fair. Nokia was clearly well aware of the pains of Symbian development, and they bought Qt to improve that. Qt was used both for Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo in the last years. Especially QML for the UI parts was well ahead of the competition, giving declarative and hardware accelerated UIs with great dev convenience.
The problem was that right after the Symbian developer community decided to embrace Qt, the Burning Platform memo came out, telling them to dump C++, learn C# and target Windows Phone 7, with either Silverligh or XNA.
In a community that was largety anti-Microsoft, joking how bad Windows CE and Pocket PC used to be, versus Symbian handsets.
The majority of the Symbian community felt betrayed and went elsewhere, to Apple and Google.
It's always amuses me how people blame Elop, completely ignoring everything what was done before him.
>> No. You should re-read that memo, specifically starting at "In 2008, Apple's market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent." paragraph.
>> In 2010 nobody was interested in Symbian, no one else made phones on Symbian, no one would do apps for Symbian[0] - who would bother with all the Symbian shenanigans when even Nokia itself said what it would move to MeeGo 'soon', along with ~10% of smartphone market? Money was in Apple and Android.
>> Should I remind you what Elop's memo was a month later, in February 2011?
There is a difference from random people around the Internet, and people that were actually Nokia employees at the time.
And yes, the board as well had its own share to blame, including hiring Elop in first place, with a big bonus payment clause if he managed to sell Nokia Mobile business unit, which naturally he ended up doing as well, and created a huge scandal in Finland's press at the time.
> people that were actually Nokia employees at the time.
>> I was on the Networks unit
By the time the board hired Elop Nokia-tanic was already with a giant hull breach.
Sure, you can claim what your personal experience of an unrelated unit in Nokia gives you a proper visibility to the circumstances, but what Nokia actually did before the memo is telling what were happening there way better than your experience.
See, by 2010, we were already focusing on Red-Hat Linux....
You have no idea of what visibility I actually had, how Networks worked with Mobile, which buildings we shared, common lunch talks, nor I am going to disclose most of the NDA stuff.
> ou have no idea of what visibility I actually had
Yes.
But I have a very good idea of what products Nokia shipped before the memo and they were quite shit, compared to the other options on the market.
Just re-read the memo itself and explain with a honest heart how exactly Apple got to 61% in 2010?
Was that the evil Elop doing things?
Or that was Nokia and Nokia employees doing shit for years before 2010?
You are perfectly aware what to lose the market in 2010 you need to make shit products in 2007-2009, because you can't be totally fine all this time and at Dec 31 2010 BAM all the base belong to Apple.
> which buildings we shared, common lunch talks
Puhlease, lunch talks don't push a shitty products to the market. It's the internal bureaucracy, lack of the ability to take the responsibility and overall the bloated and entrenched corporate culture of Nokia what does that.
At managerial level, only half of Nokia was onboard with Qt. The other half wanted to chuck everything and just adopt something developed elsewhere; I reckon most of these folks simply resented the size the company had reached, and wanted to streamline. The latter half won the political battle and brought Elop in to do the dirty work.
...and in the process forced the Maemo team to revamp everything again, delaying the shipping of an OS that didn't carry all of Symbian's terrible legacy, and ensuring that Nokia had nothing that was going to be competitive with the rest of the ecosystem (the follow-up to the N9 was heavily delayed because people got pulled back to get the N9 to ship on schedule, meaning there was going to be at least a two year window for everyone else to make progress while the new Nokia smartphone ecosystem stagnated)
Post-iPhone, it seems silly that they spent so much energy and engineering effort on shaving off a few kilobytes of 3G data here, squeezing apps into 1 MB RAM there, and so on.
From what I learned in Losing the Signal, a great history of RIM/Blackberry, their engineering leadership had the same obsession. They were convinced the iPhone would crash any network it was on. To be fair, Cingular/AT&T had plenty of teething troubles, but the product was so compelling and popular, the market for bandwidth adjusted.
Anyway, it’s sad that there was such a massive opportunity for European corporate players to invent mobile computing, but together they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the form of Symbian (the evolution of Psion’s operating system, co-developed with Nokia and Ericsson).
The other day I was rummaging around papers in the attic, and found a black and white printout of an internal Nokia presentation from 2001 outlining their smartphone and mobile data strategy. It was striking how well they anticipated what users might want in the smartphone, but completely failed to project the technological milestones that might make those dreams realizable. The 2001 outlook was entirely obsessed with the limits of bandwidth and what mobile operators would allow on their network (i.e. how Nokia could enable operators to get a cut on all the content viewed by users).
Post-iPhone, it seems silly that they spent so much energy and engineering effort on shaving off a few kilobytes of 3G data here, squeezing apps into 1 MB RAM there, and so on. Apple was able to project the point where their desktop operating system (itself formerly a late-1980s workstation OS) could fit into mobile, and they also had the design capability to ruthlessly cut features to make that work. Nokia dabbled in all directions: bottom-up with Symbian, top-down with Maemo/Meego, but no commitment and no guiding vision except the managerial focus on cutting costs by putting the same old components a bit more cheaply into a growing range of colorful plastics.