https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/05/microsoft_nokia_anniversary/
When bad management meets bad software, even great hardware is useless
When bad management meets bad software, even great hardware is useless
To be honest, Windows Phone OS was a marvel in terms of user experience and design language. It was a fresh breath on interacting and utilizing the new always online world.
Calling it ‘Bad Software’ is not fair at all.
Too bad MS picked every possible bad decision to cripple it, starting with not putting it’s weight behind the OS at all.
I really, really miss the feeling of being in control of my whole digital existence with just a single glance.
Exacty. The Lumia 925 was so fucking good, and streets ahead of competitors, especially for the price. The camera on that phone made pics that is still better than some phone cameras today, from models that cost double or more!
That phone still has the best image stabilisation I've used. I could take pictures while walking and the pictures it took were never blur.
I was always in the Android camp because it was more FOSS then, more AOSP. Being said that, another competitor was and is desperately needed. When Windows Phones were in the wild, I had hope. But take a look at Windows 11, if Windows Phone had been a success, by now it would be utter shit.
I'd argue that Windows 11 is a result of what Google has been getting away with Android.
Google has shown Microsoft that the users happily pay money for giving up the control of their device. While Android was open 10 years ago, Google has worked hard to lock it down for 99% of the end users. The amount of personal data they get from each device is staggering.
They all find their way to shit when profit, not user satisfaction, is the ultimate goal. In the end, we are talking Microsoft here, we already know them.
Well, at least when you used to buy windows you were the user and the customer.
With Google you're just the product.
It's hard to avoid being their “customer” here. It feels more like the taxpayer experience.
When they compromised on their UI design to make it more like Android and iOS in WP10, it was already over. It was also such a buggy mess compared to WP8.1.
What a shame.
It was a better UI and user experience then Android by the time it launched....but by the time it launched the smartphone market had already exploded and the app developer marketplace had already matured into a profitable sector. There was no incentive to attract enough developers to build out a similar ecosystem on the late to the party Windows Phone
Yeah, I agree.
The main incentive twirled around UWP mentality, “Write one app that works on Windows, WP and Xbox automagically”.
I think it was a fucking-a-star idea that could gather fresh developers to a big potential userbase. And surprisingly, it worked for a time as well.
But MS again cold-feeted the platform themselves in a short span and scared everyone.
I actually witnessed many brilliant developers wrote their very first C# code with UWP, only to spin out to other platforms later as WinPhone’s apparent neglect. PocketCasts and Flipboard are two that went very successful on other platforms.
Not to mention that MS completely changed their development tools and libraries more than once if I remember properly.
I've been running Launcher 10 on Android for a long while now. Replicates the tile interface and app list/drawer. I think it has ads with an IAP to disable them and another IAP for Live Tiles support.
Yeah, visually there are alternatives on Android, but there were a few features built into WP that Android doesn’t fundamentally support that made the whole difference.
Like having your SO’s all accounts merged under a single node, and seeing everything related to her, be it from WhatsApp, Mail, SMS, Photo Shares etc inside a single tile was awesome. Can Android do that in 2024?
HTC had Blinkfeed for a while which was kind of similar to People Hub. It probably wouldn't even be feasible these days as so many services have put their APIs behind paywalls.
I've been enjoying the launcher 10 launcher on my phone for more than two years now. Whenever I change my launcher, I keep going back to it. I find it to be so productive for my use. And the windows 10 live tiles ui is also great.
Not to mention google and apple deliberately C&Ding stuff like the awesome first party youtube apps and stuff like project islandwood. They deliberately tried to stop their apps from working because they knew what would happen if WP succeeded.
That's just nostalgia speaking. It was closed source OS that objectively sucked and had zero app support.
t was over simplified and limited creating massive wasted realestate.
If it wasn’t for the mole they could have gone droid a whole lot earlier and i suspect, flourished as a result.
Such a waste.
Honestly it was a bad call on Nokia to switch to windows. They would have been in a different place of they capitalised on their market share and switched to android.
Nokia should have continued developing the Linux Qt system maemo/meego. I was working with it as subcontractor in Nokia, and it was awesome. The Qt/C++ was really fast to code, and you could basically port KDE apps into it with small effort.
If they would have continued with it, we could have had three major OS in phones.
I was leading architect in internal UI design tools, and the tools had features that android/apple toolsets not even now have. Mainly because you could run the Qt app with PC hardware without any emulation.
Sounds like it wasn't really your area, but good lord the N810/N900 were some of the most beautiful pieces of industrial design I've ever used. Maemo was delightful to use too, don't get me wrong, and I loved tethering it to my featurephone and getting a decent mobile experience, as well as doing my first practical in-car navigation with the GPS and the mapping software that was available, but those things were an overlooked gem of hardware, like something straight out of Star Trek.
Nokia was lead by engineers, which was it's strength, but eventually also caused it's downfall. This is why these things were so good.
Engineers told that the fullscreen displays without keyboard is never as good as physical keyboard.
Engineers told that 1 day battery life is not enough, the system need to be designed so that it can last a week.
They were right.
BUT apple's marketing and slick design convinced the American market that you can give up on those features. Nokia could easily made the same design, but didn't because engineers thought that users need those features. When they turned ship and accepted it, apple had its foot between the door already.
I mean, it got a hit, but what ended it was the Elopian suicide.
Also about slick design ... That's subjective, but even Windows Mobile looked better than Apple stuff.
And Nokia UI design was just perfect.
I always find it amazing when you hear these insights into the downfall of once huge companies. It's incredible how terrible some people's judgement can be and a lot of these successful people are riding on luck rather than intelligence it seems
a lot of these successful people are riding on luck rather than intelligence it seems
All of them, you mean. The people who build quality products are always kicked to the curb by money men who could give a shit.
See: GE, Boeing, Cisco, etc.
This actually happens to a degree defined by a working court system. And to make that smaller takes not a very complex set of laws, but they should be enforced. While IRL people make new laws when the bad thing is covered by existing ones which it's hard to enforce. As if it will be different with a new more specific law.
So I'm hopeful that anti-monopoly institutions get their shit together. This doesn't have to be this way. It isn't this way always . ATnT has been split at some point. Standard Oil and so on.
Wheels of justice grind slowly etc. If they still do grind faster than more injustice emerges - then they work and eventually those who fuck around find out. Otherwise - well, otherwise it'll be some new civilization after the new middle ages, ha-ha.
Nokia only sold off their consumer mobile phone arm. It was the least profitable part of their business. They're still a massive company and doing quite well.
It ended up being a bad call but at the time Android only had 2 years in the market and trusting the leading OS company to manufacture a proper mobile product wasn’t a crazy idea. Microsoft just completely mismanaged the whole phone thing and took down Nokia with it.
If I remember correctly the approach was so anti-google that you couldn’t even watch youtube on Windows Phones.
Google sabotaged Windows Phone to protect Android. They refused to serve even standard Google web apps to the WP browser, instead relegating users to years-old mobile versions that looked and worked terribly. You could literally edit the user string on the Windows browser and get the modern, perfectly functional version. Then there was the constant YouTube fuckery where Google wouldn’t make a YouTube app for them, then wouldn’t let them make their own app either. The entire point was to starve the system to kill it in the cradle and on some level, it probably worked.
Looking at the fact that Google is under intense anticompetitive scrutiny now and has been egregiously destroying evidence every chance they get shows that this isn’t out of character for them.
Very much like how they deliberately fucked up Google search results on Firefox for Android.
100%. They went from understanding the perils of success to exemplifying the worst of it. Don’t be (caught being) evil.
Microsoft also had a decent credibility with mobile device OS’s. They made OS’s for PDA’s like Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Pocket PC… those were all on some very capable devices.
God, I miss my Compaq Ipaq Pocket PC. That thing was a fucking beast.
Sort of. Google and Microsoft really weren’t on good terms back then (relatively speaking). Both were competing for the mobile OS market, and Microsoft ran this whole „Don’t get Scroogled“ campaign to demote Android.
Naturally, Google did not offer any of their apps for Windows phone - i.e. no Google maps or YouTube. Microsoft then made their own YouTube client for windows phone which was an okay app. However Google wasn’t happy with this and had them take down the app and replace it with their own version instead.
The problem is that Google’s YouTube app for windows phone was so embarrassingly bad that after countless 1-star reviews they decided to pull the app from the windows phone store, effectively leaving the platform with no YouTube app at all. There was at least one third party client which was decent, but there was never another official one after that IIRC.
Analysts are all about "product differentiation". Everyone was Android, so the way to differentiate themselves was to go with windows.
And sometimes that's a bad idea, as seen here. Sometimes you do the same thing but do it better, like Apple and the iPod/iPhone.
yea it wasnt all done by microsoft, plenty of idiots high up at the company itself were doing dumb decisions from ngage to microsoft phone
Nokia sealed their fate when they spent $8bn on NavTeq. Switching to Android would have made the purchase valueless, and the people responsible for the acquisition were still in charge.
Or they could've opened up their hardware so enthusiasts could make other stuff work. If Windows doesn't work for them, someone will get Android running, or maybe something like Sailfish.
I'm going to buy a Google Pixel, not because of the software features, but because I can easily flash something else onto it. I'm definitely part of a niche, but people have been modding consoles and whatnot in the mainstream for decades, so I think the community could help a company survive bad software if they open up the hardware enough.
My Lumia 928 is still to this day the best phone i've ever owned.
I absolutely loved everything about it from the OS to the Hardware. The only reason I moved on from it is because I had to for work.
My 1020 was my favourite, had it in lemon yellow. Was the first phone I had with a camera bump, took really nice photos for a phone at the time and even shot in raw. I would love another phone with a polycarbonate body.
It almost feels like if it wasn't for Microsoft Europe could have actually been a tech super power 🙄
Of course it was, Symbian is pretty alive and well, Nokia is still one of the main names, then that guy comes, says it's all burning, closes projects left and right, tanks the company, leaves to work in Microsoft. Oh, and I think he worked in Microsoft before coming to Nokia.
At this point I've seen that your comment answered another one, and not about Elop, but I've already typed that... Yes, it absolutely could. Nokia has done so many cool things.
Imagine if Maemo phones were a thing. Even if Symbian were still a thing. All that Android vs Apple crap would be happening somewhere far away in the tech third world, like shootouts in westerns.
And since Maemo is Linux, MS would also eat shit.
Yeah he worked in Microsoft before that and when he ended in Nokia the path was quite clear what it would be. But I've had the chance to talk with many engineers that were working at Nokia back in the day and the problems didn't start because of Microsoft.
Basically Nokia had the whole management divided between symbian, maemo, and windows mobile, and as they couldn't agree on a future path all the efforts were divided. Symbian was quite a disaster at the end and it wouldn't have gone far most likely, those that wanted to continue with it didn't have a clear view of the changes coming in the mobile world.
Maemo was great, really advanced, based on Linux, and working really well, maybe too advanced even, specially for your common users back then. The whole system was constantly put down and delayed and the first devices sold wouldn't even work as a phone, only the 4th ended up with mobile connection, which didn't help at all to make it useful (wifi was not as big as it is now) and sold.
Finally there was Windows Mobile which was still starting basically then and had far less strength, but with the support of Microsoft behind it it was easier to push it out. I don't understand why it still has such support when it comes to the UI, I personally never liked it and it felt too simplistic and boring, but the more options the better I guess. Of course once Microsoft managed to plant his own guy inside Nokia they managed to favor the balance towards Win mobile and the other two were left behind more and more.
So Microsoft was a key part in what ended happening but they were not the ones that put Nokia in trouble. That was a lack of direction in the management level.
Japan too. The U.S. Congress threatened Japan with a trade war if they didn't shutter their TRON project to create a domestic Unix. Nowadays it's almost entirely Windows, and Japan has stagnated in terms of technology. They might have another chance at it with the world searching for an alternative to Taiwan for semiconductors and the potential legal status of AI training in Japan.
I haven't. The n9 with meego was amazing. The n900 too but I'm still sour thinking how great meego would be now instead of android.
N900 and Maemo were already awesome. There was absolutely no need to rewrite the entire operating system. Damn I am still angry.
Maemo was so much better than any os coming after it... Meego was in my opinion the wrong path to take. I still miss the N900, what an amazing device it was...
I was just waiting for the n900 whining so that I could join in. Damn, I miss my n900. It had flaws but for its time, it was amazing. With a good CPU, I'd buy it today in a heartbeat.
It wasn't really Microsoft that killed Nokia's cell phone division, but gave it the final blow that made the house of cards fall.
Nokia was basically getting super arrogant. "Oh, trust us, we're the #1 phone manufacturer on the planet. We know what's best for the market". They got caught completely pants down when iPhone came out. Despite the fact that they had already made successful smartphones (Nokia Communicator line). Despite the fact that there was this one small Finnish company that had made a touchscreen based phone and Nokia just laughed them off when they offered to help.
Every move Nokia made after iPhone was basically playing catch-up with some really strange decisions.
I believe that Nokia could have salvaged themselves if, instead of going with Windows Phone, they had just announced they'll be Yet Another Android Manufacturer. But Nokia had to be special about it. They had invested in Ovi (app store) and Here (map service) and they just had to be special. (And even more ironic is that HMD Global is doing just fine as a maker of Nokia-branded Android phones these days.)
To be fair I think Nokia was already one foot in the grave before the M$ deal. Largely thanks to Mr. Ollila.
To be fair, Microsoft only bought and killed off the phone division. The rest of Nokia is still around including their R&D department bell labs. You know the same bell labs that's developed some little know inventions like C and C++, solar panels, the transistor, and UNIX...
Nokia bought the parent company of bell labs in 2016. By that point bell labs had already been completely restructured to the point that it has basically nothing to do with the historical bell labs.
I had a Lumia with Win Phone (I forget the exact model & sw version) and thought it was great - it was super fast, lightweight and the battery life was decent but there weren't many apps out there, at least not in comparison to Android
I had such high hopes for Meego. I feel like even if Nokia moved to Android I'd have been thrilled, I like where they're headed in the dumb phone market
Oh no I'm aware, I had the n9, n900, and I regret not getting the n950 more than many things in my life. I like sailfish quite a bit but since I don't live in EU I can't exactly take full advantage of the android app layer
Can't you use VPN? The Android layer works very well, though the lack of fingerprint sensor support gets tiring.
In that photo, does everyone else see the birth control phone in the upper right hand side of the pile? I remember the razr phone and the Nokia brick and the sidekick and all the weird little cell phones we used to have but…I’ve never seen that birth control phone.
Not a Nokia and I can't find that exact model but it seems there were a couple of weird round phones floating around in the early to mid 2000's:
https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com/phone-detail/c800
https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com/phone-detail/xelibri-6
https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com/phone-detail/panasonic-g70
There were some other weird as hell designs around that period, like the ones in this article:
https://medium.com/@samworldpeace/nokia-made-some-of-the-weirdest-phones-ever-a7e3412fa0c0
I recognise all but one of the phones in that link. The time just before smartphones was a weird moment in mobile phone history.
I just watched a video essay about design that talked about this, basically before the iPhone manufacturers were trying all kinds of crazy shit, after the iPhone it was black rectangles all around.
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:2000/format:webp/1*PBXghb0XY5LEXJ-xhTDobQ.png
Oh shit I had this phone! It was cool. For the time. But the left side felt really flimsy when you opened it up.
It was incredible watching it unfold, even more so from the offices of a smartphone competitor.
Yeah and I do not recall knowing people who thought it would end well. It was universally viewed as a bad move as opposed to developing MeeGo or going Android.
It should’ve ended well. Someone at the top made a huge bungle of it all. Windows phone 7 and 8 were some of the best phones I’ve owned.
I waited through meamo, meego, and tizen hoping for it to take off. Went with Firefox OS and Ubuntu touch instead, which had very little to offer. Not too long ago I felt I had to give up and go with android, and dream of a world where nokia would have taken the meamo/meego/tizen path instead.
Eh, doubt that much would change, they would be just another boring post-iphone glass slab seller with a slightly better camera
I read some articles in the past that before was Nokia bought they worked on some new os. Idk if it was based on android, but I think it might have been Linux. I don't remember. Microsoft, after the purchase, of course flushed it.
Maemo and later Meego yes... I had a Nokia N900 and it was an awesome phone. Basically Debian in your pocket, easily accessible terminal with root etc.
Meltemi. It was supposed to be OS for <100 Euro Linux devices.
The second elop, or how he is known by his friends flop, saw it and saw it was good he killed it. Can't have something cheaper and better then what daddy Microsoft has.
It would depend on whether you think elop was a Microsoft mole al along 😉.
By the time of the Microsoft acquisition, focus had already shifted to Windows phones.
The Microsoft Windows Phone probably failed because we forgot to give it a real keyboard.
-Balmer
No he didn't really say that, it's a joke on how he laughed about the iPhone not having a real keyboard.
Windows phone keyboard was leaps and bounds ahead of iOS and Android. I still miss that keyboard. Swiftkey on android just isn't the same.
I was just about to post that there were Android phones with keyboards too, but I looked it up to be sure, and by god they are clumsy and ugly in comparison.
Personally I love the screen keyboard solution, I find it very elegant and handy. But I admit I need a big screen for it, but I also like the bigger screen in general better anyway.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In 2002 Canadian startup Research in Motion launched a proper smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard (its BlackBerry two-way pager had existed since 1999 and already become a hit product) and before long you couldn't attend a meeting without someone wearing one in a naff holster.
When the first telephone call using GSM was officially made in December 1991 by Finland's then-prime minister Harri Holkeri, it was using Nokia kit – even though the Suomi nation hadn't joined the EU yet.
Cheap colorful phones started selling like iced water at a summer rave, and with Nokia providing both the front and back end it was time to make a killing.
In your list of top ten most famous Canadians (in the tech field at least), Stephen Elop must rank highly – if only as the man who decided to destroy Nokia to save it.
To add insult to injury, when Microsoft "upgraded" to Windows Phone 8 it dumped the old WinCE kernel for one based on NT – meaning that apps developed for the earlier operating system needed to be rebuilt.
In 2015 Microsoft declared it was writing off $7.6 billion on the Phone Hardware division as "goodwill and asset impairment charges" – $400 million more than it had originally paid for the Finnish firm.
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Nokia executive's stubbornness to changes is responsible for its downfall. Can't blame Microsoft entirely on this one.
They were on their way killing their phone line for a long time before that. They shouldn't have stuck with Symbian for so long.
MeeGo was quite good! And the latest Symbian wasn't that bad either at the time, though I've heard the source code was all hacky (hence the creation of MeeGo).
