Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

They really didn't have a chance. Technology had moved past them. The capacitive touch screen, multi-touch, fast mobile processors and the move to the web meant that mobile phones were becoming platforms. And Nokia wasn't a platforms business. To paraphrase Bill Gates, a platform requires that the economic value to the other participants exceeds that of the value to the platform. Nokia was never like that. In aggregate the organization had a fragmentation of SDKs, no single device domination, and didn't really value the other participants on their ecosystem.

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.

Nokia development was limited by its relation with telecom industry (telecoms could limits what Nokias could do, software feautures. The telecoms wanted to profit from software running on Nokias, telecoms didn't wanted to be just dumb Internet providers. Telecoms wanted to be digital service providers - AOLs).

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."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone

We complain (rightly) about the Apple monopoly, but have forgotten that the carriers were a much more annoying monopoly, with even worse policies for trying to charge for things that they'd specifically prevented you from doing.

I think the last remaining example of that is charging for using your phone as a WiFi hotspot.

Yes I can second that.

During that time I was working for a large Telco. I could see how Nokia operated. They did everything the telco asked for, they installed any bloatware just to keep their sales numbers high.

Apple in contrast would say: if you ever touch the user experience on our phone we will go to the other big Telco in your country. Guess who won.

"Mobile" was the little leagues before Apple/iPhone in terms of corporate/product competency.

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.

Capacitive screens were out of possibility for them as Apple bought 2 year production in advance, a trick Tim deployed repeatedly in many areas. MeeGo had a chance but US funds didn't want to allow a state where an EU company would rule the fastest growing market of that time and their darling MS slips into irrelevance and its trojan horse killed it off quickly.

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