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Comment by glibgil | Hacker News Reader

> Elop combined two different CEOs cardinal blunders: The Osborne and Ratner Effects.

> In 1983, the computer manufacturer Osborne announced several new models of computers, which they said would be launched in sales after one year. In the meanwhile, sales of the old models plummeted because the consumers were waiting for the new models. Osborne ended up in bankruptcy. Gerard Ratner, on the other hand, was the CEO of the jewelry company Ratners. He gave a speech in 1991, where he said that Ratners products were so cheap because they were “total crap”. The consumers believed him and stopped buying.

> Elop announced that Nokia is giving up on Symbian before any Windows Phone smartphone was ready (Osborne effect) and with his “burning platform” speech, expressed that Symbian and MeeGo were trash (Ratner effect).

https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52...

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Elop: "The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don't have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over two years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable."

That was an accurate (and arguably obvious) description of the market in 2011. Nokia had a big problem on their hands and that's true whether they chose to acknowledge it or not.

Should the CEO have stayed silent to his own staff about the perilous fate of the projects they were working on?

I never did figure out what was supposed to be wrong with MeeGo/Maemo. Always thought it had a lot of potential and some great UX ideas that were nowhere else.

The problem was twofold:

- Internal politics and the "old school" symbian developers not buying into this ecosystem

- MeeGo/Maemo was more worried with Free Software "circle self pleasing" and rewriting stuff every couple of months than actually shipping a product

How did Android approach the same problem? Kept the kernel and replaced X and most of userspace with dedicated libraries and binaries. Focused on shipping a product (first Android versions were very poor) and after the iPhone came focused on making it similar.

I think that's a bit unfair. Meego was scheduled to use Wayland instead of X. While I don't remember if it did, Sailfish definitely does. Maemo was also quite of an early adopter of Pulseaudio. Thus, the whole Maemo-Meego-Sailfish saga has been one of the pioneers in changing the stack SysV/X/ALSA -> Systemd/Wayland/Pulseaudio and friends.

The N9 was a really polished product. Offline navigation was incredibly good. I still use it. With a bit of care it could have been a nice product.

Why is it unfair?

If they had focused on shipping and improving the user/developer experience instead of rewriting their product every year or so (and while I didn't see the N9 I did see the N800/N900 and the experience wasn't great - also because of hw issues) we wouldn't be having this conversation

N9 was released in September 2011 that's 5 years after the first iPhone and Android had an ok product by then.

Had them focused on improving what they had on the N800 (released January 2007) instead of what they did they would have owned the market. Instead they let Android surpass them. They had everything to succeed and THEY BLEW IT

> Offline navigation was incredibly good.

It definitely still is. It's unfortunate that map updates are no longer available.

Pretty much this. Lack of interest/willingness to invest aggressively from the CEO, even though Maemo looked quite promising when announced.

Meego was a distraction and pretty much a mistake. I think it was mainly pushed by Intel so they have a reason to sell Atom. People may not remember but before "netbooks" Atom was supposed to go into Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), which were much smaller than netbooks but larger than smartphones.

Netbooks pretty much came out as a "trial and error" device from PC manufacturers, who were failing with MIDs. If I remember right, Microsoft also had to extend selling new XP licenses post-Windows 7 launch, because of the netbook popularity, and because it didn't want Linux to become popular on them.

Did you ever try using it? It was awkward to use and slow. Even on the hardware that was specifically designed for.

When they announced the move to Windows Phone, I thought it seemed like a good idea. Meego clearly wasn't ready, Symbian was an antique, and Windows Phone was promising in so many ways -- even now I believe we will never see another smartphone OS as well-designed as Windows Phone 7.

Then some months later, for some reason, I ended up owning a phone with the last release of Symbian on it (Symbian Belle). And I realised that the original Nokia plan wasn't as stupid as it seemed.

Symbian Belle was a surprisingly smooth and pleasant OS -- much smoother in many contexts than Android at the time. It had some serious pitfalls, but it turned out there was quite a lot of productive turd-polishing that could be done. A lot of the good stuff on Belle was down to Qt Quick, which was the same framework as they were intending to carry through for Meego developers. And although I never used Meego, I can believe that it could have worked very nicely in the end, and a polished Symbian could have seen it through for a while.

But I was just as surprised to find out how much infrastructure there was behind it all. Nokia had an app store and billing platform serving a lot of countries and languages, that could bill you for apps either from credit card or straight from your carrier balance. They had one of the best mapping providers, a decent weather service, and a fine music provider. They had first-class hardware and a lot of public goodwill.

The experience changed my mind completely. Nokia could have done it with Symbian and Meego.

I doubt it. Symbian was held together with duct tape by that point. They managed to make some things sort of work in the short term through heroic engineering efforts but it was clearly unsustainable. There were fundamental limits which couldn't be fixed without seriously breaking backward compatibility.

Yeah, but Symbian Belle was like their third try at "touch OS" by that time. It was too late just like it was for BlackBerry with QNX.

At that point it was all about the ecosystem. It didn't matter anymore even if they did get the OS right.

Didn't own one but a friend had an N900. It seemed like a few things still needed polish, but it didn't seem slow to me - quite the opposite. He hung on to it for a good while too.

My plan was to buy the next one at next contract change - of course that wasn't going to be possible. (I've always had a liking for the Communicator layout, going all the way back to Psion 3s)

I had a Nokia N810 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N810). It was a incredibly good device for the time and left other smart devices of its era in the dust, IMO. The lack of telephony is why I stopped using it but its functionality, perfect keyboard, superb browser, and a proper terminal made it something that I still remember very fondly, next to my Sharp Zaurus SL500.

I don't have experience with Maemo, but Meego was not particularly slow or awkward beyond being a young, immature mobile OS. In fact my N9 was remarkably stable considering the circumstances of its birth. And in fact I know several non-tech people who really liked their N9's, minimal ecosystem notwithstanding, so it had potential beyond a hardcore geek audience.

I had an N9. It was snappier than your average Android phone.

Was it bad enough to abandon all investments made into its development and jump to the less successful competing platform instead of incrementally improving MeeGo/Maemo?

Yes. It suffered from the same problem as all of Nokia's home grown software. The performance was shockingly bad - in an era of jelly scrolling, it was still using janky scroll-bars.

It was clearly made by disparate teams who didn't talk to each other. The design language was all over the place, the radio performance inadequate, and there was no sensible way to develop or release apps for it.

Nokia made brilliant firmware, and amazing hardware. But they simply didn't have the ability to design beautiful, usable software.

Personally, I'd have gone with Android. But you don't hire a Microsoft guy for anything other than getting in bed with MS.

Just to clarify, which device did you have?

I had a N9, and I completely agree with the person above. The funniest thing is that when I got the phone and showed it to a friend who had just received the most recent Nexus at the time, the first thing he did was just scrolling, switching between apps and admiring how smooth everything was. The illusion faded quickly when you tried to open a web page with any javascript.

As far as I know, the code behind the scenes and especially the app store were a mess, but it didn't show to the user. And of course every app could access everything.

I had the n810. See my contemporaneous thoughts at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2009/05/nitdroid-installing-android...

I also had the N8, their last hurrah with Symbian. Three years after the iPhone launch and they were so far behind it was embarrassing.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2010/10/n8-fail-reasons-why-the-nok...

The N8 wasn't their last hurrah with Symbian, far from it. There was a massive difference in usability between that and the later Symbian Belle releases, and they were on a pretty rapid upward trajectory. Those last versions never reached the N8 (not enough memory?) but later Symbian models like my 700 did get them.

Symbian was always likely to be clumsy, but I was surprised how well they made it work by the end. (I should say, my Nokia 700 was my first and only Symbian phone, and I came into it expecting the worst, having heard a lot from other developers.)

I'm sure the N8 lost them a lot of fans though. I had some friends who were positively angry about it.

The choice to go with Microsoft was reasonable; a way to distinguish themselves from all the other (unprofitable) Android manufacturers. But the whole execution of the plan from both Nokia and Microsoft was terrible.

I'm not sure it actually worked that well, but in any event it shipped way too late.

You can even make the case for a brand new effect called the Elop effect whereby you continually throw away the previous OS and development model and replace it with a new non compatible OS and development model.

The lore says so but Osborne didn't actually announce anything because they were not dumb, it was a leak from a meeting of sales and marketing people working for the company where they were being shown the roadmap for the upcoming year.

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