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That time when Microsoft bought and killed Nokia phone unit
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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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
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.
Yeah true, can't argue there
Couldn't give a shit, surely
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.