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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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...
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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:
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
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.
> ...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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 if their consumer business has gone to crap.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Legally, you'd struggle to prove any form of infringement happened. Making a copy is fine. Distributing copies is what infringes. You'd need to prove that is happening.
That's why there aren't a lot of court cases from pissed off copyright holders with deep pockets demanding compensation.
Funny, I've done this a few times with good results. I guess it depends on the quote and the amount of context you give it.
This is also a case where something like perplexity might yield better results because it would try to find authoritative sources and then use the LLM to evaluate what it finds instead of relying on the LLM to have perfect recall for the quote. Which of course can fail in the exact same way my own brain is failing me (mangling words, mixing up people, etc.). It's something that works surprisingly well. I pay for Chat GPT and I don't pay for perplexity. But I find myself using that more and more.
> you think we'd be in any different of a situation if junk food were made with cane sugar
That's pretty much the main difference between soft drinks inside the US and outside the US. Soft drinks are a big part of the problem. You see lots of people getting addicted to the sugar rush and drinking that stuff by the bucket load (conveniently supplied in huge containers at your favorite fast food place).
Obesity is a growing problem in many places; but the US is where it all started and where the problem is the largest. The correlation between excessive corn syrup consumption and obesity is not something that needs a lot of arguing.
Correlation is not the same thing as causation of course. But still, if you want to run an experiment where all the corn syrup gets replaced by regular sugar, leave the US and observe people around you. Most things are the same. But you'll have hard time finding anything that contains corn syrup. It's just not a common ingredient anywhere outside the US. There are other differences. But that would be the big elephant in the room.
I wrote a small kotlin framework to help me write documentation that has lots of code samples (https://github.com/jillesvangurp/kotlin4example) that might be of interest to people maintaining kotlin libraries.
My library tries to enable literal programming in Kotlin via a Kotlin DSL that makes it easy to use markdown in multi line string literals. You use the DSL to write your documentation as a Kotlin file that generates markdown that you can save to a file when you run it (from a test typically).
The key feature that enables literal programming is an example lamda function. This makes it easy to embed example kotlin code in the documentation. The library figures out how to extract the code block you pass to this function from the source code and includes it as a markdown source code block in the markdow output. Example blocks are also runnable (optional) and of course have to compile. If you run them, you can optionally capture their output as well and render that in the documentation. Additionally it captures the block return value and allows you to do things with that.
Of course you can also include existing markdown files, create links to files in a (public) github repository or pull in source code examples from existing source files.
Most of this isn't really novel. But I haven't really seen anything like the example lamda function in other tools. And this is something that might also work with other languages (Ruby maybe?). Although it does rely a bit on reflection and classloader magic to figure out the source code that corresponds with the .kt file in which the example blocks are located. At runtime it tries to figure out the beginning and end of those blocks and transforms those in markdown source blocks.
As far as I know, I'm the only user of this library so far. But since I think it is kind of nice, I thought I mention it here.
It's not perfect but I've documented a few of my open source kotlin libraries with this. The most significant one is jillesvangurp/kt-search, which has a lot of documentation at this point.
People complaining about things they had when they were young and no longer have is nothing new. Happens to most generations. The music was better, the food was great, people were friendlier, etc. Or so people believe.
Not exactly true of course. Bad people are a constant, and there was some epically bad stuff happening throughout the last century all over the place. The food was mostly bland and boring (at least my part of the world), and did not have a lot of variation. And while I have some appreciation for music of each of the last six decades. I like that I can have all of that now, which is much better, IMHO. Also modern music seems to borrow from, and often imitate all of that. There's a wider variety of music now. And there is still a lot of bland, cringe worthy pop music that people seem to like as well. Average tastes being a bit shit is a constant too.
Objectively, the internet thirty years ago was kind of shit. It was exciting (I was there) but also pretty bad. Things were slow, lame, ugly, amateurish, hopelessly insecure, etc. Many people didn't really see the point of it all. They think of that as the time where they didn't have to use computers and phones and are feeling nostalgic about that.
But there were some nice people you could get in touch with and do stuff with online. Not a lot. Mostly sending emails and reading each other's rants on nntp, irc, slashdot, online gaming, and what not. Or watching that hit counter on your website not increment much at all. Download some stuff you shouldn't be downloading. Napster, emule, kazaa, and all the rest. Been there done that.
The world changes all the time. Old people don't keep up and feel detached from it and whine about that. People get families and stop doing the crazy shit they were doing when they were young, including talking to each other. That's just life. The thing that's not as good as it used to be is you, not the world.
There are still nice people. And you can still get in connect with them. Just not the way you did thirty years ago. New people, new ways of interacting with them. It's easier than ever actually. There are apps for that!
And you can't blame young people for not being that eager to engage with a bunch of old whiny people using old crappy tools. Mostly they do their own thing that they will be all nostalgic about in twenty years. In exactly the same way we are right here.
>People complaining about things they had when they were young and no longer have is nothing new. Happens to most generations. The music was better, the food was great, people were friendlier, etc. Or so people believe.
Not exactly true of course.
In many cases very much true. The trope that "people always complain for things missing from the past, so they're always wrong" needs to die. They're wrong or not depending on a case by case basis (depending on the thing), and based on the standards they put forward:
If you hate corporate culture and like DIY and individual expession, the 90s internet was 100x better.
If you like the "bazaar" style FOSS communities and FOSS idealism, the late 90s was very much better.
>Objectively, the internet thirty years ago was kind of shit. It was exciting (I was there) but also pretty bad. Things were slow, lame, ugly, amateurish, hopelessly insecure, etc.
I was already loving it, you don't have to sell it to me so hard!
During the first bubble (1998-2000) there were Java stock ticker applets that were better than what we have today. You could already get actually cheap flights via travel sites. There was a short window where you had access to the Sabre booking system directly. Travel sites are expensive and garbage nowadays.
There were flash games that are better than what we have now. In Usenet there was real free speech.
There also was the uninteresting AOL walled garden that was quickly replaced ... by other uninteresting walled gardens. Except that everyone is now a sharecropper in some walled garden, depending on the moderator's grace and feeding AI scrapers.
The only thing that is better now is Rumble/YouTube, which depend on the vastly improved bandwidth. Ironically, YouTube also still allows far greater free speech in the comments that other platforms except for some newspaper comments sections, which also allow a lot.
I don't think it's that binary. We've had a lot of progress over the last 25 years; much of it in the last two. AGI is not a well defined thing that people easily agree on. So, determining whether we have it or not is actually not that simple.
Mostly people either get bogged down into deep philosophical debates or simply start listing things that AI can and cannot do (and why they believe why that is the case). Some of those things are codified in benchmarks. And of course the list of stuff that AIs can't do is getting stuff removed from it on a regular basis at an accelerating rate. That acceleration is the problem. People don't deal well with adapting to exponentially changing trends.
At some arbitrary point when that list has a certain length, we may or may not have AGI. It really depends on your point of view. But of course, most people score poorly on the same benchmarks we use for testing AIs. There are some specific groups of things where they still do better. But also a lot of AI researchers working on those things.
Consider OpenAI's products as an example. GPT-3 (2020) was a massive step up in reasoning ability from GPT-2 (2019). GPT-3.5 (2022) was another massive step up. GPT-4 (2023) was a big step up, but not quite as big. GPT-4o (2024) was marginally better at reasoning, but mostly an improvement with respect to non-core functionality like images and audio. o1 (2024) is apparently somewhat better at reasoning at the cost of being much slower. But when I tried it on some puzzle-type problems I thought would be on the hard side for GPT-4o, it gave me (confidently) wrong answers every time. 'Orion' was supposed to be released as GPT-5, but was reportedly cancelled for not being good enough. o3 (2025?) did really well on one benchmark at the cost of $10k in compute, or even better at the cost of >$1m – not terribly impressive. We'll see how much better it is than o1 in practical scenarios.
To me that looks like progress is decelerating. Admittedly, OpenAI's releases have gotten more frequent and that has made the differences between each release seem less impressive. But things are decelerating even on a time basis. Where is GPT-5?
>Let's say 25 years ago you had the idea to build a product
I resemble that remark ;)
>that can now be solved more generally with LLMs
Nope, sorry, not yet.
>"Nah, don't build that business, it will eventually be solved with some new technology?"
Actually I did listen to people like that to an extent, and started my business with the express intent of continuing to develop new technologies which would be adjacent to AI when it matured. Just better than I could at my employer where it was already in progress. It took a couple years before I was financially stable enough to consider layering in a neural network, but that was 30 years ago now :\
Wasn't possible to benefit with Windows 95 type of hardware, oh well, didn't expect a miracle anyway.
Heck, it's now been a full 45 years since I first dabbled in a bit of the ML with more kilobytes of desktop memory than most people had ever seen. I figured all that memory should be used for something, like memorizing, why not? Seemed logical. Didn't take long to figure out how much megabytes would help, but they didn't exist yet. And it became apparent that you could only go so far without a specialized computer chip of some kind to replace or augment a microprocessor CPU. What kind, I really had no idea :)
I didn't say they resembled 25-year-old ideas that much anyway ;)
>We've had a lot of progress over the last 25 years; much of it in the last two.
I guess it's understandable this has been making my popcorn more enjoyable than ever ;)
I think this is largely right. I look a this space as somebody that plugs together bits and pieces of software components for a living for a few decades. I don't need to deeply understand how each of those things work to be effective. I just need to know how to use them.
From that point of view, AI is more of the same. I've done a few things with the OpenAI apis. Easy work. There's not much to it. Scarily simple actually. With the right tools and frameworks we are talking a few lines of code mostly. The rest is just the usual window dressing you need to turn that into an app or service. And LLMs can generate a lot of that these days.
The worry for VC funded companies in this space is that a lot of stuff is becoming a commodity. For example, the llama and phi models are pretty decent. And you can run them yourself. Claude and OpenAI are a bit better and larger so you can't run them yourself. But increasingly those cheap models that you can run yourself are actually good enough for a lot of things. Model quality is a really hard to defend moat long term. Mostly the advantage is temporary. And most use cases don't actually need a best in class LLM.
So, I'm not a believer in the classic winner takes all approach here where one company turns into this trillion dollar behemoth and the rest of the industry pays the tax to that one company in perpetuity. I don't see that happening. The reality already is that the richest company in this space is selling hardware, not models. Nvidia has a nice (temporary) moat. The point of selling hardware is that you want many customers. Not just a few. And training requires more hardware than inference. So, Nvidia is rich because there are a lot of companies busy training models.
> So, I'm not a believer in the classic winner takes all approach here where one company turns into this trillion dollar behemoth and the rest of the industry pays the tax to that one company in perpetuity.
I agree with this sentiment. There are a lot of frontier model players that are very competent (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon, DeepSeek, xAI) and I'm sure more will come onboard as we find ways to make models smaller and smaller.
The mental framework I try to use is that AI is this weird technology that is an enabler of a lot of downstream technology, with the best economic analogy being electricity. It'll change our society in very radical ways, but it's unclear who's going to make money off of it. In the electricity era Westinghouse and GE emerged as the behemoths because of their ability to manufacture massive turbines (which are the equivalent of today's NVIDIA and perhaps Google).
For me the issue has been that local models seem to be pretty bad (and it’s entirely possible it’s a user error on my end) compared to calling gpt-4o.
And even gpt-4o needs constant attention to ensure it doesn’t analyze input in a haphazard way.
I made a simple AI app for myself where I ran a bunch of recipes I’ve saved over the years through batch analysis. It tagged recipes with “kosher salt” as kosher lol. I had to baby sit the prompt for this simple pet project analysis for like 4 hours until I felt confident enough. And even then I was at maybe 60%.
Now imagine for a business application. This kind of incorrect analysis would be detrimental.
I recently visited Finland (I lived there for 3 years at some point). If you go to Helsinki, there's a shiny new library in the downtown area that is warm, cozy, modern, and has plenty of space for people to work, study, work on art projects, etc. They have books, 3d printers, studios, co-working options, etc.
Anyone is welcome there. Including homeless people, unemployed people. Anyone. You don't see people camping out there (they have other options so they'd be kicked out) but they do provide an environment that welcomes anyone that wants to to come and learn and develop themselves and can behave themselves.
It's a good example of Finnish pragmatism. It might be a bit socialist/idealistic. But it also is a good idea that might actually work. If you find yourself in Helsinki, it's called Oodi and is right next to the train station. Beautiful building. Worth visiting for the architecture alone.
My point here, the Finnish approach is not fighting symptoms but fighting the root causes: mental health, poverty, education, etc. Those things go hand in hand. If you are out of a job, you get poor. If you are not educated, you can't find a job. If you are poor you might develop mental health issues, become homeless, and become even harder to employ, etc. Breaking that cycle is the key. Get people healthy, teach them stuff, house them.
It's a mix of ideology, compassion and pragmatism that drives Finland to do these things. You don't have to buy into the ideology. But most people are not cold sociopaths and are capable of having empathy. Pragmatism is what makes the difference here.
Especially when ideology gets in the way. Which I would say is the main challenge in many harsh, capitalist doctrine dominated societies that are leaving people homless. There's plenty of empathy and charity there but it's mostly limited to giving people access to shelters and soup. People donate but also oppose real solutions. So, things get worse.
Oodi is a pragmatic solution. So is the Finnish way of addressing problems with people being homeless. And realizing that education is part of the problem.
I think there is a bit of nuance to this. The UK also has about 500 or so homeless people per 100000 inabitants. In the US the number of people in prisons is about that number per 100K. On top of their huge homeless problem.
There is the brutal reality that the climate in Finland and being homeless are not a great combination in the winter. And the summers are short. Getting people off the streets saves lives. If it's -20 during the night you can either lock people up or collect their corpses in the morning. Most people will seek shelter by themselves or not reject shelter when it is offered to them. But people with serious psychiatric issues, that are maybe a bit self destructive and under the influence of alcohol or drugs are going to have trouble doing rational things. So, yes, Finland does the pragmatic thing here. I don't have good statistics on this but I bet there are more than few corpses being collected in the US and the UK on a yearly basis.
I've lived in Finland for a few years. It's a friendly place that is mostly safe and nice to be. There's a level of pragmatism and compassion with much of what they do that other countries could learn from. Including the business of incarcerating people. The US and UK are maybe a bit lacking with that. Finland has prisons and psychiatric wards (not the same thing) of course. But people don't stay in those endlessly. Prison sentences are generally short, and rehabilitation is something they put a lot of effort on. Most crime there relates to people doing stupid shit because they are drunk, mentally ill, etc. The solution usually includes addressing those issues after they serve their shortish prison terms. And with some level of success.
I think that's more about keeping them ice free. There's a shopping street in Helsinki where they did that, I think.
Anyway, sleeping rough in Jyväskylä sounds like it would be tough. Although you might have enough material (snow) to try to make an iglo. Some people do that for fun even. Of course technically if you make an iglo your home are you still homeless?
I was told by locals that it was explicitly to keep homeless people from dying. A few streets in the center were heated. Like, not warm in any way, but it was kinda weird to walk into the center and suddenly all the snow was gone. Just warm enough for it all to thaw.
Note, this was 20 years ago, maybe it all changed, either the system or the reasons. I can imagine that if you have a zero homeless strategy, it's weird to say that the street heating is for the homeless.
In my (european) country overly drunk people[1] are locked up for the night in dedicated facilities, and let go the next morning. They also need to pay for it quite a lot of money (detention places are often jokingly called "the most expensive hotel in the city").
I'm not personally a fan of that, but it's quite common in post-soviet countries and very normalized (people are actually surprised when I tell them that not every country does that)
[1] Ultimately for their own good, not as a punitive measure. They are watched by medical personnel and don't risk dying of hypothermia. Still it's not something I'd like to experience.
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.
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