I was there as this played out. Nokia had a lot of good software and software engineers but not the management structure to do anything good with that.
Nokia was huge as an organization and parts of that organization recognized the threat early on. The problem was at the board and executive level. These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business. Lots of people with an electronics and radio background. Not a lot of people with software competence. And they had bought into the notion that Symbian was going to magically fix all their problems.
A lot of effort was spent on looking for other solutions. And one of the things that was good (Linux) around 2005 was actually quite close to displacing Symbian as the key future proof replacement for their legacy platforms. Symbian was just rolling out for a few years and they had made a big investment in that. And management (those same people with a huge blind spot for software) backed the wrong horse.
Linux never really died in Nokia but it wasn't allowed to prosper either. Devices were cancelled or repurposed for Symbian. This happened to the N8, for example. By the time they switched to windows phone, they actually had two Linux platforms (Meego and Meltemi) and an Android phone in the works as well. Meego had one last product phone launch and the team and platform were killed in the same week. Any devices for that platform were labeled as developer phones. Nokia never marketed them as a consumer phone. Meltemi never saw any product launch at all; it was aimed at feature phones. Both were good ideas but poorly executed. Nokia killed them along with Symbian in order to back windows phone. Classic baby and bathwater situation.
And MS ended up killing the one Nokia Android phone that was launched shortly before they acquired the whole phone division. Kind of a desperate/ballsy move. I suspect Nokia did this as a stick to ensure MS followed through with the acquisition. That was their "oh we could just switch from windows phone to Android unless.. " move. Nokia was at point the only OEM that still believed in Windows Phone.
MS killed the whole division shortly after Satya Nadella took over and was sorting out the mess left by Steve Ballmer. The iphone was solidly in charge by then and the rest of the market was Android. Courtesy of lots of Linux contributions by the Meego and Maemo team.
I was at Palm when the iPhone launched, and one note from this analysis summed up Apple's new power in the market and how they really changed the landscape.
"Cingular has allowed Apple to launch a device with WLAN and inbuilt services"
At that time, the carriers controlled so much of the cell phone experience. We certainly would have loved to have launched Palm Treo phones with WiFi radios, but our carrier partners wanted the only way to get data in and out of the devices to be through their monetized data plans. They also wanted to control what you did with that data so they could charge for their own email or messaging systems or web portals. The same applied to app stores. Palm OS didn't have a unified app store at that time, just sideloading and some third-party methods, and some carriers had started making their own stores where you could buy apps billed through your cell phone bill. They hated the idea of a platform owning that, and I expect that was part of the reason Apple originally released it with no app store. They needed the phone to be a massive hit in order to gain the power to also bypass that wall that the cell companies put up.
Palm did benefit from the iPhone launch -- it had us uplevel our efforts away from the post-Palm OS phones that we were in the middle of developing that were aimed at the RIM market and instead try something radical with webOS, and when the Pre launched, it actually had WiFi on board, although the Sprint-exclusive Pixi phone lacked WiFi due to carrier request. There was some momentum there for a while, but then HP bought us, hit its own set of brick walls with carriers, and ditched the hardware business shortly after Apple started launching on other carriers.
2007. The presentation reads like an eerily accurate crystal-ball prediction of what actually happened in subsequent years.
Evidently, Nokia executives knew well in advance what the iPhone could do to their company.
Evidently, they knew they needed to do "something" to avoid an implosion of their mobile-phone business.
Evidently, despite their prescience and best efforts, they were unable to avoid disaster.
It's as if they were in the Titanic, and saw the dangerous iceberg well in advance, but somehow were unable to turn the steering wheel and change course.
To my mind the key insight from the presentation is this sentence:
“The 1% volume share target could translate into 4% value share, taking ~ 30% share of the >300 € price Band”
That’s Apple’s superpower in a nutshell - get the majority of the profit in the market, while everyone else battles each over over market share (and earn low margins in the process).
I was expecting sort of the opposite, for Nokia to deride the whole iPhone thing. But it was quite the opposite, they understand what they were facing. Ultimately, the could not meet the challenge fast enough.
My personal moment of "CEO's -- they're just like us!" was walking into a Kinko's in Santa Monica to drop off a package, and seeing a sweaty Stephen Elop frantically photocopying documents the week his part in this debacle came to a head.
N800 is the future that never was - opem Linux-based mobile computing for the masses. It had developer support, cool form factor, big touchable screen, and no corp to love it.
Great example that there's a point of organizational no return that no amount of awareness and intelligent analysis can fix. When the barbarians are at the gate, it's too late.
These presentations often serve as a comfort blanket rather than a plan of action. Oh man something incredibly disruptive is happening to us. Lets talk about it. Whew, okay, we understand it, lets go back to being complacent.
Years later, "man we tried, we had that meeting and everything, we just couldn't compete"
That cartoon meme with the dog sitting with a cup of coffee or whatever and telling himself "This is fine", while everything is on fire, is probably the best way to describe how things felt at nokia back then.
My personal theory is where Nokia failed was worrying too much about Osborne effect[1] of their Linux-based phones on their Symbian business, or there being some behind-the-scenes contract clauses that tied them to Symbian too much.
Background/disclaimer: My business partner made a prototype touchscreen keyboard for Nokia, running on unreleased Linux hardware. Nokia had a significant Linux codebase very early on.
It is really saddening for me to see how much N800/N900 and the Maemo platform are mentioned here, as an example of Nokia actually being first to introduce many of these technologies, but then Nokia dropped them a few years later. I still occasionally boot my N900, I wish I had a use for it -- it still works great as a general purpose computer and a good phone.
"User interface has been a big strength for Nokia — consumer research indicates this is in decline." - Funny, they pointed to both why the iPhone came out and what to do about it - then went on to really focus much more on feature for feature and existing players like Sony etc. They really focus on beating apple by competing on features vs thinking about it like a shift towards portable personal computing rather than competition in the telephony market. They seem to have somewhat understood apple flipped the script, but then reading through, their work around the fact that is true seems a bit... remedial. CEOs take note, good lessons in here. :)
Huh - the implications of this time period reach much farther than I would have expected.
I recall switching from a small, regional cellular carrier to Cingular with the launch of the iPhone 3G. It only now occurred to me that I'm still there. I stayed with Cingular when it became AT&T, and still have service through them. For that matter, the service has significantly expanded; I now have tablets, watches, and four phones for family members... some of whom weren't even alive when I switched carriers. My bill is ~$450 / month.
If I assume an average monthly bill of $300 (it started around $100, but has been as high as $550), there have been 196 months that I've paid that bill. $58,800 in revenue from me alone, that would have gone to someone else had Cingular not allowed Apple to launch on their network in 2007.
I was working as a Qt developer at the time and really rooted for Maemo to succeed, because Qt was and still is a truly an amazing piece of technology. Unfortunately, Nokia squandered this opportunity.
It is painful to read. To me in retrospective the major mistake in the presentation is that it barely talks about end users and how the iPhone enabled a new world of use cases. It is only about business/corporate, features and specs. When analyzing the iphone on those dimensions all the reactive action items are doomed. They had not a chance to compete with that analysis.
This is fascinating. A reminder that being (broadly) right in your analysis doesn't necessarily mean you can execute to turn things around.
They note the impact to the high-end, the fact that UI is crucial, they even had a good guess at 2008 sales numbers (estimate 14m, looks like real was 13m).
I was intrigued by this bullet point on how their Maemo platform could help:
* Cellular development of the maemo platform and the politics surrounding it?
Any folks from Nokia in this time care to shed more light on that? I always felt the N9 was a beautiful piece of design and implementation - just late and under-supported.
Like some other commenters, I'm amazed at how well thought out Nokia's insight into the iPhone was at the time. They seemed pretty aware it was a major threat, and a game changer that needed to be responded to.
I'd be curious about an alternative history where Nokia hadn't tied itself so strongly to the burning reckage that was Windows Phone. Would Nokia have wound up as a solid android phone producer somewhere similar to where Samsung are now? I guess we'll never know.
I cant find the quote and article now, but I read that before it was released no one else believed a computer like that could have any reasonable battery life. Then they opened it up and discovered the iPhone was really just a battery with a small logic board attached to it, and a lot of the heavy computational lifting was done when it connected to your computer.
I was doing mobile development on a home healthcare product during this period. The product was built around Nokia’s line of phones with NFC built in, so we had good ties with them and would always get prototypes of their next generation of NFC-capable device ahead of time to get the software ready ahead of launch.
Shortly after the launch of the iPhone, Nokia canned the prototype S60 model we were working on without announcing any alternative. I always imagined they scrapped the whole pipeline of successors they had planned. The iPhone was at least 2 generations ahead of the unreleased prototype. Ended up having to port the whole thing to a different device from Samsung.
I have to share that my career as a software engineer started with Windows Phone. They used to give super nice Nokia phones out if you made an app. And free backpacks :)
Developing for Windows phone was easy as drag and drop. I honestly think no other native platform had that good of a DevEx. If you were already an app developer, I can see how it's hard to learn something new. But if it was your first time, this was prolly the easiest platform to start.
Eventually the platform died, and I found a career with Xamarin using a similar stack (C#, XAML) and built for other platforms as well.
I miss Windows Phone. Honestly some of the cleanest devices ever built with the carl zeiss lens and raised screen.
1) References to Java on device and "lack of OTA" and the importance of "iTunes" indicated the presenters had little understanding of the possibility of the App Store which was a seismic shift in the industry that was apparently not foreseen.
2) They noticed some important missing features (3G, OTA updates, etc) but all of them were addressed with the next version (3G).
3) They were panicking about "iPhone mini" and thought it would be a feature reduction (like iPod interface) but in the end Apple just cannibalized its own profits and just lower the price on the full-featured 3G.
Nokia saw the iPhone, fast-forward to 2014, Nokia just gives up and sells their dead horse cellphone business to Microsoft. Microsoft casts a few necromancy spells and also just gives up 3 years later, and kills the same dead horse again. The end.
For those who wish to deep dive into the mobile phone industry's history from the late 1990s and subsequent decades, I highly recommend industry analyst Tomi Ahonen's voluminous (I'm not kidding) blog from back then. I'm providing a link here about Nokia in particular:
and especially his scathing take on the events of the Microsoft-Nokia timeframe, wherein as events transpired he frequently reframed his belief that Elop was the "Worst CEO In History".
Sometimes a company can know the problem is real and be unable to address it. I was at Palm when HP bought us. HP knew the future was mobile and wanted to not be just a low margin OEM for someone else’s software platform. Buying Palm was a way for them to control their own destiny again.
Unfortunately the driver of this dream at HP was fired by the board before it got going and his replacement didn’t share the vision. A year later HP took a massive writedown and turned it all off. (Then he was fired by the board as well. The circle of life continues).
I'm surprised that Nokia found out through the keynote presentation from Steve Jobs. LG and Prada announced their phone a little earlier and it had been shown already at the IF Design Awards a few months earlier.
Worked at Nokia when iPhone was released. No strategy/management insight, but I recall the jokes made by my colleagues as I showed off my iPhone 1:
"Cool, but can it make phone calls"
On internal message boards, some employees advocated staying loyal to Nokia products, and others advocated buying the best product (iPhone) to challenge Nokia.
I'm surprised that Nokia found out through the keynote presentation from Steve Jobs. LG and Prada announced their phone a little earlier and it had been shown already at the IF Design Awards a few months earlier.
Google "LG Prada Phone" for the Wikipedia article.
If Nokia had paid attention to those design awards then they too could have moved quickly on a similar device.
Is this a case where Nokia thought they had a moat?
Looking back, it’s astonishing how long it actually took the competition to catch up in terms of developing an equally responsive touchscreen that felt anything like as intuitive.
I read this after doing a time travel back to 2007. I was using Blackberry/Nokia E## at the time. Remember thinking about a phone without a full keyboard!
Seems like Nokia had a good grasp of what had happened. Also a sense of immediacy to act.
If we go only by this presentation, it seems that they tried to understand the forest by looking at every leaf in detail and then try to guess if the forest is beautiful or not.
That's a great time capsule. I'd love to see a similar document from the same period from Microsoft, because I really wonder if Ballmer's much-lampooned interview after the iPhone's intro was bluster or a real position held by the mobile unit at MSFT.
"<laughs> $500 fully subsidized with a plan? That is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine."
It's a take that has aged like milk, but Ballmer wasn't (and isn't) an idiot. The rest of the market looked at the iPhone and saw the future, and moved accordingly. I mean, the first major users I saw of the iPhone were BUSINESS users, in point of fact.
So I've always wondered if that was just bluster, or he really was drinking so much Redmond-flavored Kool-aid that he didn't, or couldn't, see what was about to happen.
(In re: Kool-aid, in 2009-ish, my company did a joint deal at a large client with MSFT; we had complimentary products, so we were pitching as a unit. The MSFT guys were genuinely vexed that we had iPhones. Like, personally affronted. And this was in Kansas, far from the mothership. At the time, WinMo was AWFUL. It couldn't even do IMAP without a 3rd party client -- it was Exchange or POP only. None of us had ever really used a WinMo phone for very long, because (at that time) a Treo was still a great option, and RIM hadn't fully wet the bed, so WinMo was pretty thin on the ground unless your paycheck said "Microsoft" on it.)
I helped cover IT hardware companies including Apple at a bulge-bracket investment bank. Not just Nokia, but the entire phone industry was caught flatfooted by iPhone as willvarfar and anonu said, despite rumors going around the industry. (The joke slide in Jobs' announcement presentation showing an iPod with phone dial was not too far off what we and most people expected.)
Thoughts on the presentation:
* "There is not much coolness left for Motorola" - The day of the announcement, I saw a press release from Motorola come across the wire, in which the company announced yet another phone with a keyboard. I felt pity for the unfortunate souls who had designed it, worked on its launch, and wrote the copy for the press release, and who now had to see their efforts fly into Hurricane iPhone.
* Predictions of lower-priced iPhones - Average iPhone prices of course rose, as opposed to falling. As JSR_FDED said, Apple has always played upmarket. I heard Apple's CFO say at a Citigroup-hosted investor conference that his company could release a $799 computer "but we don't want to".
(That said, it is quite possible to find deals, at least in the US. I got my iPhone 13 by agreeing to pay $200 over 30 months on top of my already super-cheap T-Mobile plan. The iPhone before that, I bought carrier refurbished for $100 from Sprint.)
And of course, there never was an iPhone mini with a fundamentally different UI. Despite the repeated commitment to improving on UI, etc., I guess it would have been too much to ask a company like Nokia, the king of releasing a new model with new UI and new form factor weekly, to imagine that another company would just not play the infinite-SKU game. (Conversely, it's not hard to imagine that had Apple entered the phone market in the 1990s during the years of endless indistinguishable Performa models, it might have tried to play along.)
* The MVNO mention is regarding rumors of Apple launching its phone in conjunction with an MVNO. We thought this was quite possible, but it was based on Apple having the credibility to immediately have millions of customers switch to it as their carrier, and not because Apple—of all companies—could not get whatever it wanted from carriers.
* Third-party app support - Most have forgotten that Apple really did expect webapps to be the app experience for iPhone's first year. But even that would have been an improvement over what things was like before iPhone. I speak as one who purchased my share of Palm apps. $20 was the norm for, say, DateBk6 (which, by the way, has at least one function that MacOS's Calendar just got with Sequoia).
* "Expect RIM and Palm to suffer" - I never liked using my company-issued Blackberries. I didn't leave Palm until 3GS in 2009; besides DateBk6, I also liked being able to tether my computer to my Palm Treo 700p.
* I'm pretty sure there was no sharing of data revenue or iTunes revenue. Apple got what it wanted from Cingular/AT&T regarding marketing and in-store push without having to preload bloatware or the carrier's brand name all over the device/packaging, and the carrier got the exclusive of the decade. Remember, Deutsche Telekom deciding to sell T-Mobile in 2011 was directly because it didn't have iPhone (so that tells you how the repeated mention in the presentation of T-Mobile turned out).
Looks like a competent analysis where they recognize the threat of the iPhone to Nokia. Whether the higher ups failed to act on it or whether they could not act on it, even after Microsoft bought them is unfortunately a different topic.
The analysis is fascinating. The iPod had already been a huge success for some time, retailing for hundreds of dollars. Of course Apple would make a phone. Even if it would have just been an iPod with feature phone ... features.
Nokia goes on and on about pricing in the report. How could they not get into their thick skulls that there was a good market for more expensive, better devices?
Then the tragedy with the Nokia N9, which both in hardware design and software UI design looks and feels more modern than Apple and Android devices from 2024.
I think Nokia owners and leadership simply gave up when they saw the iPhone launch, decided to cash out their money to offshore accounts, and hired some shady fellows from Microsoft to cover up by staging bad business decisions doomed to fail.
When I loook on this [recent] history, the business and technical strategies Apple and Google employed in mobile were truly amazing. In my view, Apple and Google managed to reinvent themselves (organically or otherwise), while Nokia and Microsoft were weighed down by their attachments to the past. Blackberry is in the same ship. In hindsight it seems they should have embraced Android as early as possible (thinking in the success of the Samsung S II (2011)).
Edit: because the article did not load my comment was based on someone's alternative link which did not show the entire presentation, so you can ignore my comment.
Nokia correctly predicted that iPhone would stand for "coolness" factor. It's amazing how Apple carried that brand since its inception and precisely what allows it to levy "Apple tax".
The execs even noted that the downside of iPhone would be non-removable battery. It is commendable that Apple changed the industry standard to something worse without even being in the top 10 in 2008.
Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
(nokia-apple-iphone-was-launched-presentation.tiiny.site)486 points by late 16 January 2025 | 504 comments
Comments
Nokia was huge as an organization and parts of that organization recognized the threat early on. The problem was at the board and executive level. These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business. Lots of people with an electronics and radio background. Not a lot of people with software competence. And they had bought into the notion that Symbian was going to magically fix all their problems.
A lot of effort was spent on looking for other solutions. And one of the things that was good (Linux) around 2005 was actually quite close to displacing Symbian as the key future proof replacement for their legacy platforms. Symbian was just rolling out for a few years and they had made a big investment in that. And management (those same people with a huge blind spot for software) backed the wrong horse.
Linux never really died in Nokia but it wasn't allowed to prosper either. Devices were cancelled or repurposed for Symbian. This happened to the N8, for example. By the time they switched to windows phone, they actually had two Linux platforms (Meego and Meltemi) and an Android phone in the works as well. Meego had one last product phone launch and the team and platform were killed in the same week. Any devices for that platform were labeled as developer phones. Nokia never marketed them as a consumer phone. Meltemi never saw any product launch at all; it was aimed at feature phones. Both were good ideas but poorly executed. Nokia killed them along with Symbian in order to back windows phone. Classic baby and bathwater situation.
And MS ended up killing the one Nokia Android phone that was launched shortly before they acquired the whole phone division. Kind of a desperate/ballsy move. I suspect Nokia did this as a stick to ensure MS followed through with the acquisition. That was their "oh we could just switch from windows phone to Android unless.. " move. Nokia was at point the only OEM that still believed in Windows Phone.
MS killed the whole division shortly after Satya Nadella took over and was sorting out the mess left by Steve Ballmer. The iphone was solidly in charge by then and the rest of the market was Android. Courtesy of lots of Linux contributions by the Meego and Maemo team.
"Cingular has allowed Apple to launch a device with WLAN and inbuilt services"
At that time, the carriers controlled so much of the cell phone experience. We certainly would have loved to have launched Palm Treo phones with WiFi radios, but our carrier partners wanted the only way to get data in and out of the devices to be through their monetized data plans. They also wanted to control what you did with that data so they could charge for their own email or messaging systems or web portals. The same applied to app stores. Palm OS didn't have a unified app store at that time, just sideloading and some third-party methods, and some carriers had started making their own stores where you could buy apps billed through your cell phone bill. They hated the idea of a platform owning that, and I expect that was part of the reason Apple originally released it with no app store. They needed the phone to be a massive hit in order to gain the power to also bypass that wall that the cell companies put up.
Palm did benefit from the iPhone launch -- it had us uplevel our efforts away from the post-Palm OS phones that we were in the middle of developing that were aimed at the RIM market and instead try something radical with webOS, and when the Pre launched, it actually had WiFi on board, although the Sprint-exclusive Pixi phone lacked WiFi due to carrier request. There was some momentum there for a while, but then HP bought us, hit its own set of brick walls with carriers, and ditched the hardware business shortly after Apple started launching on other carriers.
Evidently, Nokia executives knew well in advance what the iPhone could do to their company.
Evidently, they knew they needed to do "something" to avoid an implosion of their mobile-phone business.
Evidently, despite their prescience and best efforts, they were unable to avoid disaster.
It's as if they were in the Titanic, and saw the dangerous iceberg well in advance, but somehow were unable to turn the steering wheel and change course.
“The 1% volume share target could translate into 4% value share, taking ~ 30% share of the >300 € price Band”
That’s Apple’s superpower in a nutshell - get the majority of the profit in the market, while everyone else battles each over over market share (and earn low margins in the process).
We immediately knew we were toast. We used to say that the iphone made us irrelevant and android made us redundant.
Ugh, that "allowed". It's wild how much Apple shook up the mobile phone market and pushed phone companies back to just being dumb data carriers.
Great example that there's a point of organizational no return that no amount of awareness and intelligent analysis can fix. When the barbarians are at the gate, it's too late.
Years later, "man we tried, we had that meeting and everything, we just couldn't compete"
That cartoon meme with the dog sitting with a cup of coffee or whatever and telling himself "This is fine", while everything is on fire, is probably the best way to describe how things felt at nokia back then.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
Background/disclaimer: My business partner made a prototype touchscreen keyboard for Nokia, running on unreleased Linux hardware. Nokia had a significant Linux codebase very early on.
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/comments/1i2pijr/nokias_...
https://www.slidebook.io/company/microsoft/presentation/f646...
They saw the writing on the wall. They didn't want to compete on that level, but rather try to kill it. From "summary of actions":
"5. Kill market for such an expensive device by filling mid-range with own/Google/Yahoo experiences"
I recall switching from a small, regional cellular carrier to Cingular with the launch of the iPhone 3G. It only now occurred to me that I'm still there. I stayed with Cingular when it became AT&T, and still have service through them. For that matter, the service has significantly expanded; I now have tablets, watches, and four phones for family members... some of whom weren't even alive when I switched carriers. My bill is ~$450 / month.
If I assume an average monthly bill of $300 (it started around $100, but has been as high as $550), there have been 196 months that I've paid that bill. $58,800 in revenue from me alone, that would have gone to someone else had Cingular not allowed Apple to launch on their network in 2007.
Their key mistake.
If only history went this way, Maemo could be a full OS competing with the big boys by now.
The E71 was arguably Nokia's best phone ever; and it was indeed better than the iPhone 3G. But Nokia just couldn't keep up the momentum.
They note the impact to the high-end, the fact that UI is crucial, they even had a good guess at 2008 sales numbers (estimate 14m, looks like real was 13m).
I was intrigued by this bullet point on how their Maemo platform could help:
* Cellular development of the maemo platform and the politics surrounding it?
Any folks from Nokia in this time care to shed more light on that? I always felt the N9 was a beautiful piece of design and implementation - just late and under-supported.
I'd be curious about an alternative history where Nokia hadn't tied itself so strongly to the burning reckage that was Windows Phone. Would Nokia have wound up as a solid android phone producer somewhere similar to where Samsung are now? I guess we'll never know.
Actual sales: 2007: 1.4M, 2008: 12M. Pretty spot on.
but doesn't seem to have the actual content. :(
Now there's a gem of a line...
Shortly after the launch of the iPhone, Nokia canned the prototype S60 model we were working on without announcing any alternative. I always imagined they scrapped the whole pipeline of successors they had planned. The iPhone was at least 2 generations ahead of the unreleased prototype. Ended up having to port the whole thing to a different device from Samsung.
Developing for Windows phone was easy as drag and drop. I honestly think no other native platform had that good of a DevEx. If you were already an app developer, I can see how it's hard to learn something new. But if it was your first time, this was prolly the easiest platform to start.
Eventually the platform died, and I found a career with Xamarin using a similar stack (C#, XAML) and built for other platforms as well.
I miss Windows Phone. Honestly some of the cleanest devices ever built with the carl zeiss lens and raised screen.
1) References to Java on device and "lack of OTA" and the importance of "iTunes" indicated the presenters had little understanding of the possibility of the App Store which was a seismic shift in the industry that was apparently not foreseen.
2) They noticed some important missing features (3G, OTA updates, etc) but all of them were addressed with the next version (3G).
3) They were panicking about "iPhone mini" and thought it would be a feature reduction (like iPod interface) but in the end Apple just cannibalized its own profits and just lower the price on the full-featured 3G.
For those who wish to deep dive into the mobile phone industry's history from the late 1990s and subsequent decades, I highly recommend industry analyst Tomi Ahonen's voluminous (I'm not kidding) blog from back then. I'm providing a link here about Nokia in particular:
https://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/nokia/
and especially his scathing take on the events of the Microsoft-Nokia timeframe, wherein as events transpired he frequently reframed his belief that Elop was the "Worst CEO In History".
Unfortunately the driver of this dream at HP was fired by the board before it got going and his replacement didn’t share the vision. A year later HP took a massive writedown and turned it all off. (Then he was fired by the board as well. The circle of life continues).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
If Nokia had paid attention to those design awards then they too could have moved quickly on a similar device.
Is this a case where Nokia thought they had a moat?
"Cool, but can it make phone calls"
On internal message boards, some employees advocated staying loyal to Nokia products, and others advocated buying the best product (iPhone) to challenge Nokia.
Wish they had navigated this one better...
Google "LG Prada Phone" for the Wikipedia article.
If Nokia had paid attention to those design awards then they too could have moved quickly on a similar device.
Is this a case where Nokia thought they had a moat?
> Error establishing a database connection
How is this already at the top of HN frontpage with just 6 points and zero comments as of my writing
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
Seems like Nokia had a good grasp of what had happened. Also a sense of immediacy to act.
But then - Nokia, Palm, Blackberry....
"<laughs> $500 fully subsidized with a plan? That is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine."
It's a take that has aged like milk, but Ballmer wasn't (and isn't) an idiot. The rest of the market looked at the iPhone and saw the future, and moved accordingly. I mean, the first major users I saw of the iPhone were BUSINESS users, in point of fact.
So I've always wondered if that was just bluster, or he really was drinking so much Redmond-flavored Kool-aid that he didn't, or couldn't, see what was about to happen.
(In re: Kool-aid, in 2009-ish, my company did a joint deal at a large client with MSFT; we had complimentary products, so we were pitching as a unit. The MSFT guys were genuinely vexed that we had iPhones. Like, personally affronted. And this was in Kansas, far from the mothership. At the time, WinMo was AWFUL. It couldn't even do IMAP without a 3rd party client -- it was Exchange or POP only. None of us had ever really used a WinMo phone for very long, because (at that time) a Treo was still a great option, and RIM hadn't fully wet the bed, so WinMo was pretty thin on the ground unless your paycheck said "Microsoft" on it.)
> Apple is most probably using the first Application Processor of nVidia in iPhone.
Was this true?
Thoughts on the presentation:
* "There is not much coolness left for Motorola" - The day of the announcement, I saw a press release from Motorola come across the wire, in which the company announced yet another phone with a keyboard. I felt pity for the unfortunate souls who had designed it, worked on its launch, and wrote the copy for the press release, and who now had to see their efforts fly into Hurricane iPhone.
* Predictions of lower-priced iPhones - Average iPhone prices of course rose, as opposed to falling. As JSR_FDED said, Apple has always played upmarket. I heard Apple's CFO say at a Citigroup-hosted investor conference that his company could release a $799 computer "but we don't want to".
(That said, it is quite possible to find deals, at least in the US. I got my iPhone 13 by agreeing to pay $200 over 30 months on top of my already super-cheap T-Mobile plan. The iPhone before that, I bought carrier refurbished for $100 from Sprint.)
And of course, there never was an iPhone mini with a fundamentally different UI. Despite the repeated commitment to improving on UI, etc., I guess it would have been too much to ask a company like Nokia, the king of releasing a new model with new UI and new form factor weekly, to imagine that another company would just not play the infinite-SKU game. (Conversely, it's not hard to imagine that had Apple entered the phone market in the 1990s during the years of endless indistinguishable Performa models, it might have tried to play along.)
* The MVNO mention is regarding rumors of Apple launching its phone in conjunction with an MVNO. We thought this was quite possible, but it was based on Apple having the credibility to immediately have millions of customers switch to it as their carrier, and not because Apple—of all companies—could not get whatever it wanted from carriers.
* Third-party app support - Most have forgotten that Apple really did expect webapps to be the app experience for iPhone's first year. But even that would have been an improvement over what things was like before iPhone. I speak as one who purchased my share of Palm apps. $20 was the norm for, say, DateBk6 (which, by the way, has at least one function that MacOS's Calendar just got with Sequoia).
* "Expect RIM and Palm to suffer" - I never liked using my company-issued Blackberries. I didn't leave Palm until 3GS in 2009; besides DateBk6, I also liked being able to tether my computer to my Palm Treo 700p.
* I'm pretty sure there was no sharing of data revenue or iTunes revenue. Apple got what it wanted from Cingular/AT&T regarding marketing and in-store push without having to preload bloatware or the carrier's brand name all over the device/packaging, and the carrier got the exclusive of the decade. Remember, Deutsche Telekom deciding to sell T-Mobile in 2011 was directly because it didn't have iPhone (so that tells you how the repeated mention in the presentation of T-Mobile turned out).
Nokia goes on and on about pricing in the report. How could they not get into their thick skulls that there was a good market for more expensive, better devices?
Then the tragedy with the Nokia N9, which both in hardware design and software UI design looks and feels more modern than Apple and Android devices from 2024.
I think Nokia owners and leadership simply gave up when they saw the iPhone launch, decided to cash out their money to offshore accounts, and hired some shady fellows from Microsoft to cover up by staging bad business decisions doomed to fail.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hypponen_the-nokia-design-arc...
Edit: because the article did not load my comment was based on someone's alternative link which did not show the entire presentation, so you can ignore my comment.
The execs even noted that the downside of iPhone would be non-removable battery. It is commendable that Apple changed the industry standard to something worse without even being in the top 10 in 2008.