Nokia's 14 Years of Mobile-Phone Supremacy Ended in an Afternoon(spectrum.ieee.org) |
Nokia's 14 Years of Mobile-Phone Supremacy Ended in an Afternoon(spectrum.ieee.org) |
"Elop oversaw the 2011 launch of a Linux-based smartphone, the Nokia N9. The N9 ran on a distribution of Linux called MeeGo. Reviewers at the time praised the new smartphone direction the Finnish phone maker had taken. 'Possibly the most beautiful phone ever made,' wrote one reviewer about the N9 for Engadget.
But the N9’s accolades did not ultimately carry the day. Nokia announced its Lumia line of phones the same year—a direct pivot away from MeeGo toward the Windows Phone. It would be the last major strategic turn Nokia would take as a cellphone manufacturer. From this point forward, a succession of C-suite decisions all but sealed the fate of Nokia’s iconic line of phones."
We were so close to having literal plain Linux phones. Sad to me. I wonder where this could have gone without Microsoft.
I think I was one of the first developers that got an N770 engineering sample (the first product in the N770-N9 saga) and it was really clear that they were onto something. Sadly, internal politics won over company and consumer interests. It took them extremely long to let this be a phone, not just an "Internet tablet". It was bizarre.
The same team is now behind Jolla/Sailfish. It's pretty remarkable how far they've got, but it's obviously not a perfect product given how small they are compared to the other mobile juggernauts. However, it's usable as a daily driver and, with a critical developer mass, it could get somewhere. There are already quite a few indie apps.
Crucially, I think it's the only platform that has the potential to set you truly free. GrapheneOS is the other alternative I can also endorse and tolerate, but it has a different set of compromises, and it's a bit fragile to Google pulling the plug. But it's great in its own ways.
We had that and we still do. Back in 2008 I was wondering whether I should spend my first-earned money on the first Android phone (HTC Dream, aka T1) or a "plain Linux phone" (Neo Freerunner) and I've chosen the latter. Ultimately it was a good choice, as Android quickly turned out to be not what I wanted and only got worse over time, while the other path had me eventually go through Nokia N900 and Librem 5, and both of them worked well as mobile phones and pocket-sized computers. They feel like actual smartphones compared to Android and iOS which feel more like appliances that have largely replaced the so called feature-phones of the past.
That said, Nokia N9 was already strafing away from that path, with its Aegis framework that attempted to lock the device down in hopes to, basically, enforce a form of DRM. It turned out not to be very effective, but it would undoubtedly have kept being improved in later iterations, slowly eroding that unrestricted agency of the user that the N900 was famous for.
Edit: And consistent with sibling comment Microsoft was even paying companies to build apps for their platform, and it _still_ wasn't enough.
If Nokia and Blackberry team up they maybe would succeed. Nokia Mobile still could be around if instead choosing Windows Phone would release Android phone back then.
IIRC, the dominant position back then was "Android is Linux". Shuttleworth closed his famous #1 bug on Canonical that was their mission in 2013 because now Android/Linux is more popular than Windows and the future is mobile[1]. Also Google still had a lot of good will in the OSS/Linux community back then so most "Mobile Linux" attempts were met with "Just use Android"
[1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/05/mark-shuttleworth-marks-...
Sadly, I strong suspect it would have gone nowhere. Apps became the name of the game and iOS and Android built up strong app libraries quickly. If Microsoft failed to compete I don't think a Nokia Linux phone would have stood a chance at all. Maybe if it added Android compatibility but that would be as much of an admission of failure as anything.
And WindowsPhone was actually a good design for user interaction, with the exception of some underlying clunkiness of settings.
The N9 was pretty good, usability, design, hardware, but the apps started to weight, and it become a race between Android and iOS.
There was just one smartphone with Maemo (N900) and just one with Meego (N9). More models, letting other vendors to use them, android app compatibility compatibility and not having Elop could had saved Nokia. Now what we have is Sailfish as a descendent of them.
Apple (or Steve Jobs) understood the value of the web (one of the crucial 3 pieces of the iPhone when it debuted) as a platform - though Apple pivoted over time to have iOS and the App Store itself.
That's just how organizations work. No one inside Nokia could realistically have acquired the power to make the decision in time. The company wasn't shaped to do this. They were doomed as soon as the tech caught up.
In contrast Apple with iPhone had much stronger position:
"Cingular gave Apple the freedom to develop the iPhone's hardware and software in-house, a rare practice at the time, and paid Apple a fraction of its monthly service revenue (until the iPhone 3G), in exchange for four years of exclusive U.S. sales, until 2011."
A few days after iPhone was launched in June 2007 I heard an exec of a technical team defending the by then fairly obvious "ownage" by claiming that Apple had "cheated" by putting 1 GB of RAM into the device (which would be insanely expensive). Of course it was 128 MB. Nokia-adjacent company. He had misunderstood 1 Gbit from some teardown. That was the level of competency.
The software sophistication just really wasn't there at that level. (It was there at an IC/architect level though.) Apple raised the bar quite considerably.
And the bugs... one whopper in particular that I remember was redirect after POST didn't work.
Nokia wasn't at all worried, they still have a few Smartphone 1.0 design ready to deploy. Remember iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. There were plenty of them before hand. Windows Mobile from OEM of HTC , Palm, Sony Ericsson P900s etc. By the time they realise it was a completely different genre and game it was too late.
Incidentally I remember one of the reason during before and after Microsoft acquisition of Nokia was that there are No apps on the platform. People won't buy it.
But I have been thinking for a long time if this is still true. That was a time when new Apps appears and things were changing fast. People even have different Instant messengers. ( To this day I still don't understand why MSN messenger was not on iPhone. ) But now all the Apps are largely settled. There are a few Social Media Apps, Messenger Apps, Banking Apps which I consider essential to every day users and cover 80 - 90% of their usage. Web Technology, 18 years after Steve Jobs announcing HTML 5 for Apps is finally getting close to the original promise.
Is a third major platform for Smartphone really out of the realms of possibilities?
Who will make these apps for the new platform? They have no need to develop for a new platform in hopes it becomes popular, and very few of them have open APIs for the platform to make their own third-party apps.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/man-in-a-village-hol...
"Sir, please, a QWERTY keyboard would be so much -"
"No."
Homerphone reference: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WPc-VEqBPHI
This seems a little misleading. From what I remember, and from what Wikipedia says, Elop had already announced the deal with Microsoft long before announcing the N9, so Nokia was in essence already dead when it launched.
Satya was great for businesses and MS' investors, terrible for consumers.
I would love it even more if we could all go back in time and switch to meego. I used one for a short while and it felt well thought compared to the mess that was android at that time.
The heart of MeeGo continues on in Sailfish OS created by Jolla. They are again releasing a phone in Europe. I wish they released it in the US.
Excursion: HTC would later sell the HTC HD2 with WindowsMobile (a predecessor of WindowsPhone), which could be "dual-booted" with Android ROMs from the XDA-developers forum or similar.
The 2009 HTC HD2 was basically the modern glass slab, except for a discrete bottom line of physical buttons, which hadn't yet been eaten by software at the time.
Microsoft also made some big mistakes IMHO; having a terrible browser and a terrible app marketplace doesn't work: mobile IE was garbage, mobile Edge had a better renderer but worse UX, and they prohibited other browsers at least initialy (Firefox wanted to make an internal port, but were told no thanks). The way they managed APIs for apps led to multiple generations of apps and developers noped out at each stage; WinCE -> WP7 -> WP8 -> WM10 all wanted significant reworking, and WP8.1 wanted a minor reworking. A lot of WinCE apis were available in WP7, but Microsoft wouldn't tell you and wouldn't be happy if you did it. You could run WP7 apps in WP8, but to get new features you had to do the rework and distribute two separate apps. Same for WP8.1, but now you had 3 apps. And again for WM10 ... with the bonus that if you had a WP8 app installed when you upgraded to WM10 there was a 50% chance it wouldn't launch after the upgrade. Apple sometimes did some of this, but major OS upgrades usually applied to all phones, and their users upgrade regularly. Android generally puts backports in the jetpack library so you can build for the newer APIs but still work everywhere.
Of course, Microsoft should have understood the importance of backwards compatibility from their decades of experience on PCs... but they were in full forget about everything mode. :P
Arguably they should have just gone with Android, and it's easy to say that in hindsight. But Android was a horrible mess in its 2.x era, Windows Phone seemed like a genuinely interesting alternative. Until Microsoft repeatedly messed the whole thing up.
Same goes for Nokia's Maemo and Meego. We nerds loved those OSs for being full-blown computer OSs, but the general public doesn't want a full-blown OS, they want a bunch of icons to corporate apps.
It's not obvious Nokia could have realistically competed with the East Asian phone manufacturers for more than a few years. It was/is a very low margin market with very cutthroat competition.
Nokia were a tech slop factory - one new model roughly every two weeks, with no obvious strategy or rationale, many only superficially different.
Every so often they'd produce a classic that was ahead of its time, like the Communicator series, then by the time the surrounding infra had caught up they'd moved on and allowed a competitor to eat that space.
iPhone and Android were both killing them, and they had no idea how to respond.
Elop was the undertaker, and much hated for reasonable reasons. But the brand was already a zombie by that point.
I'm sure some of the gushing praise it got was because it was a last hurrah, but if Nokia had actually supported it, I'm sure it would have sold tens of millions of units. Nokia sold ~100 million smart phones in 2010 and ~ 77 million smart phones in 2011 [1], Apple sold ~ 72 million iPhones in 2011 [2]. While the trend was going the wrong way, tens of millions of mobile users would be hard to ignore.
[1] https://www.nokia.com/system/files/files/request-nokia-in-20... (page 8)
[2] https://gadgetadvisor.com/apple/the-iphone-decades-iphone-sa...
Even given that the Android team actually did understand what they needed to do to achieve that. Nobody else in the industry did. They thought that if you just ported an OS the job was done. That’s barely even the start.
I believe if Nokia continued to invest, MeeGo would have even gotten better and they would have survived (note I worked at Nokia's subsidiary HERE maps at the time and saw early version of MeeGo. Also the hardware of the N9 was beautiful. It would have been a hit and in fact outsold the Lumia in the few countries it was delivered before they axed it).
It was Kafkaesque, discontinuing a product before release.
That was always the problem. But IMO Microsoft were probably the company best placed to compete there, given the existing developer mindshare they had. But they just messed it up, over and over. Incredibly to look back on, really.
Yeah, we can look back in retrospect and say it was an obvious failure but that's because of the various insane choices MS made over the years. In the moment I'd argue the decision was nowhere near as clear cut.
Compare that with Maemo, where both GTK+ and Qt were first class citizens and which had an army of developers familiar with Unix and X11 before Maemo even existed.
