Nokia in Trouble? How Fast Can a Mobile Device Giant React? | Hacker News Reader

Nokia in Trouble? How Fast Can a Mobile Device Giant React?

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28 pointsblasdel14 comments

TFA's main point is that it takes companies like Nokia a very long time to ship a new product. Fair enough, but the time frame and the value judgements therein are just ridiculous FUD, even if you consider that this type of prediction is always goign to have errors. A few points, off the top of my head:

1) Nokia had a touch screen phone (in addition to the tablets) years before iPhone, and released another in 2008 (5800 XpressMusic) and a third this year (N97, which the article mentions but which somehow seems not to count). TFA says first Nokia touch screen phones "with crude, unusable software" are due in 2011.

2) TFA claims that first devices comparable to the first iPhone would ship in 2014, and makes a snide remark about how competetive such a device would be then. This is, of course, a completely ignorant premise: Nokia's top models are, and always have been, technically ahead of the iPhone. If Nokia gets iPhone's usability in 2014, why would that come at the cost of losing their edge in tech?

As a former Nokia software engineer, I can tell you the difference is that Nokia has a bigger focus on hardware at the expense of software and usability. Basically, Nokia produces software the same way it produces hardware, using an internal methodology that follows a waterfall approach. For example, Agile practices are simply not taken seriously because most managers believe they won't fit in the grand scheme of things.

Also, differently than Apple, Nokia releases a huge number of models every year, worldwide. Apple has the wisdom (and the balls) to focus all its energies on very few products per year.

I also have a 5800, which is a huge improvement over previous Nokia phones. However, it's so far behind the iPhone that I don't even know how to begin describing it.

Nokia knows quite well that its biggest challenge is adapting and reacting quickly. But they're shipping something like million units a day from an organization that probably numbers 100,000 people. That's 10x the volume of iPods rolling off the line, nevermind iPhones. Good luck steering a ship that big! It's a fucking miracle to do this at all, and they do it with a 3.5% dividend on their share price and great margins.

You can see steps they've taken to address most of the problems listed in the article going back over a year, but they've just done a shitty executing them at every step of the way. Unlike some of their competition. It's going to take losing 15-20% of their market share to get back on track, if they're not slain completely by Apple, Rim, Google, SE, LG, etc...

Why is the speed of developing new products inversely related to the number of old product units shipped? I'm not saying it's not related, I just wonder why.

Maybe the answer is that huge numbers of the old product shipping means that any new product promises only a relatively small change in revenue and earnings. And that may be particularly true if the new product is perceived to be a niche product.

It's a network effect, and not the good kind. The new products/existing products relationship doesn't have to be inverse -- but the organization size required for these unit volumes creates staggering complexity and inertia.

So if it ever turns out there's something about the organization itself or its structure (hypothetically speaking, of course) that's impairing your ability to put out new, different or more competitive products, you might have a very, very hard time changing it.

It's like rebuilding a car while you're driving down the road. The faster you're driving, the riskier and/or more expensive the proposition gets.

And if, for example, you build up a corporate culture which is focused around protecting those earnings and margins at all costs (again, completely hypothetical) and put in place financial incentives which reward people for doing so, you're making it even more difficult to enact large-scale change.

I don't think they're sitting on their hands. They bought Trolltech, and if you follow the work they're doing[1], there's lots of emphasis on small device functionality like multi-touch support, optimizing for small devices with embedded graphics processors, and rich declarative UI stuff that smells like CoreAnimation.

[1] http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/

True as all that may be, Nokia has had time to understand and adapt to Linux, resulting in Maemo. If they're only smart enough to realize it, they may be able to make up much of the ground they'll have missed by leveraging what's going on in there, because with or without Nokia's encouragement, or likely even cognizance, my bet is that some of the Maemo folks are learning from the iPhone.

Will it be enough? I don't know. If only for sake of the number of players in the market, I do hope so, though.

Yep Maemo is the way forward for Nokia. Symbian is a OS in the previous decade.

But the problem is I don't think Nokia's top management has understood this at all. They are still favoring Symbian over Maemo and Maemo is only shipped with their internet tablets as of now.

What they need to do is to make Maemo something like Android where any manufacture can contribute and use the OS and then design their smart phones for Maemo. Otherwise they will fail miserably in the smart phone race.

Agreed for the top end, but the market for low-mid range phones is really quite staggering. The UN estimates that over half the world's population now has a mobile phone (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/4933263/Half-of-w...)

Symbian will serve that market quite nicely for a while yet...

If Maemo is the way forward, there's a serious problem.

At my previous company, we developed an 'applet' (one of the little widgets on the desktop) for the Nokia 770 and N800 tablets. I worked closely with the tablet team (all great people, for the record) and yet it was one of the most painful development processes I've ever experienced.

Applets run in the context of the desktop app, so if there's a crash, the entire device reboots, period. The desktop toolchain worked well enough once set up, but it didn't have access to the wireless APIs so we were unable to use it. I eventually wrote an app for the device that loaded and ran our applet inside it, which made debugging with gdb possible, but even with this it was horrid.

I'll be a Nokia fan for life after working with those guys, but I can't help but see Maemo in itself as one step forward, two steps back.

I can't see how Maemo is better than Symbian. Symbian is proven technology, it is running on a lot of successful smart-phones.

Maemo is running just on some smart internet devices from Nokia. A similar Linux offering, Android, has gained a lot of mind-share within OSS enthusiast's circles, but little elsewhere.

Saying that Microsoft and Google can't deliver an 'integrated' product is far from the truth. Apple doesn't have anything on the iPhone that can't be described in a generic sense and then the work of functionality left to drivers. At that point it's up to the hardware manufacturers to do some good industrial design and make sure they don't skimp on hardware features.

You can provide and Apple-like experience on a generic device, so long as it has the requisite hardware functionality. This can be a different story when it comes to things like computers and laptops, but the iPhone 'package' itself doesn't have much but the touchscreen.

Reminds me of http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone

Good article in general but I disagree with the assumption that creating a hardware+software integrated experience is the only way to compete with Apple. That's not how Apple lost the PC wars to Microsoft.

You try to integrate hardware and software to build a better iPhone, you're playing Apple's game.

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