Ahonen is a smart cookie in a lot of respects, but he can't let go of the idea that Symbian and MeeGo were the future for Nokia. While I think in retrospect Elop made a few bad calls, when he got there MeeGo was not in production-quality shape. Nokia's own assessment was that they would have one MeeGo unit ready for shipping in 2011, and that particular unit--what eventually came out quietly as the N9--was an intriguing but crashably unusable demo unit even in late 2010. This isn't speculation on my part, either: I was at Nokia in 2010 and used one of them briefly. Or tried to. There was a lot of stuff that just didn't work. In November 2010. On the only device that was far enough along to have hardware that could be shown to other groups.
And Symbian? Jesus. To implement a "search as you go" feature for Symbian^3, something that would narrow down search results both on the phone and off as you typed (like iOS and Android devices do, so this was just achieving parity), we had to write our own keyboard because the Symbian keyboard took over the whole screen. You selected a text field and got the keyboard, then hit the keyboard dismiss button to see the screen again. But look on the bright side: in addition to the "Universal Search" team in San Francisco working on that, there were four other groups around Nokia, both employees and contractors, working on what was, essentially, the exact. Same. Product.
And this was de rigueur for Nokia. This was the problem that Elop had to fix beyond anything technical: massive duplicated effort on what, at any other company, were already solved problems, because Nokia had become a bunch of fiefdoms all fiercely protecting their own turf. I'm pretty sure this is why Symbian stuck around in essentially the same form for so long. I'm sure Tomi Ahonen loved it as a user, but the number of engineers working on Symbian who liked working on it that I talked to was, to the best of my recollection, zero. (Just getting the developer toolchain running on my machine made me feel like I'd time traveled back to the days of SLS Linux.)
If I ran the zoo, I'd have probably gone with Android rather than Windows Phone; Elop went the other way not because of his past connections with Microsoft, but because he wanted to keep using lucrative Nokia services (rather than Google counterparts, most notably Maps) and be allowed to use the Android branding, and Google said no. I wouldn't have cared about the Android branding--instead I'd have cared about porting Qt to Android and not burning bridges with Nokia's existing development community. They'd just spent a lot of time, money and effort convincing everyone that Qt was the Way Of The Future: instead of writing to Symbian or MeeGo APIs, you'd write to Qt APIs, and then porting would be simple. Losing that was a bad call.
But I'd say the most serious mistake Elop made had nothing to do with technology. Love Apple or hate them, one of the things they're really good at is not talking about products before they're ready. The rumor mill may be in high gear for months, sure, but when Apple makes their official announcement, it is nearly always in the form of "Here is our new Superlative Magical Thing. Here is a video of Jony Ive talking earnestly about it. It will be available for this price (two weeks from now|tomorrow|as soon as the band stops playing)." If Elop had been running Apple during the PowerPC-Intel CPU switch, he'd have leaked an internal memo describing the PowerPC in some colorful apocalypse-invoking metaphor, then three months later announce the switch, then six months after that introduce one laptop with an Intel chip that wasn't the most current generation and say they'd have more coming next year.
The lesson to draw from Nokia under Elop isn't that they should have stuck with MeeGo; it's that they should have kept their mouth shut, kept shipping Symbian phones through 2011, and started 2012 with their new devices ready to ship when they announced them. I wouldn't be surprised if Ahonen gets his wish within a year and Elop is canned by Nokia's board -- but I'd be very surprised if doing so improves their situation.
I agree with all your points except for the one about Meego. All reviews I've read of the N9 when it was released half a year after your experience with it were positive. All praised the innovative design and the fluidity of the device while it was running on dated hardware.
Would Nokia have been saved by choosing Meego over WP7? We'll never know and I think that's a shame.
Well, as I said to another commenter, my observation wasn't "MeeGo was poop," it was "MeeGo wasn't ready."
I'll admit that when the Windows Phone rumors started -- which was right after I'd been laid off from Nokia, as the product I was working on was being transformed into something that no longer needed the server-side components I was developing -- I dismissed them out of hand. (And got some level of unintended fame by calling them "loony" on my blog, and having that picked up by BGR. I'm surprised Nokia didn't hire me back at that point just so they could fire me again.) While I think MeeGo was fairly unusable at that point, it seemed to me that in 6-8 months with serious work it could have been awesome. And, apparently, in the shipping N9 it was.
The specific "what if" question I've thought of that parallels yours is whether they could have gotten, say, two MeeGo devices out in 2011, and three more in 2012, which would have put them in roughly the same place they're in with Windows Phone, but with an OS that was entirely theirs and with what might well have been a larger ecosystem. The MeeGo team had only predicted being able to get three devices out by the end of 2012; maybe if they'd been convincingly optimistic things might have gone differently.
This is exactly The Thing; N9 with MeeGo(more strictly Maemo) has been idolized by everyone, everywhere. Yet, Nokia tried to kill it and in fact still tries to, because it does not sit well with their earlier strategy(Symbian) nor with the current one(Windows Phone).
Nokia was brought down by the internal issues between divisions, Symbian people fought against Maemo/MeeGo people and executives threw plans and requirements around at such pace that whatever got nearly finished had to be scrapped and the whole process began again. Add in other strategy decisions, issues with hardware(LTE not available, no-go for North American market) and fierce competition and it's not really surprising they've gone down at the pace they had.
Well, luckily there are people who still believe on what MeeGo and N9 were built upon...
> N9 with MeeGo(more strictly Maemo) has been idolized by everyone, everywhere.
Idolized? Yes. Is it enough to make people purchase the phone? Not at all.
If a fancy UI and eye-candy animations were enough to be successful, webOS would be the leader of tablets, and I'd be using BeOS to write this.
What Elop realized was that Nokia was, indeed, sitting on a "burning platform". And MeeGo wasn't the lifeboat they needed.
MeeGo was fancy, but too incipient as a platform to compete against iOS/Android. No developers, no industry support, no technical expertise within the company to develop it (plus the political fights with Symbian). It'd be a long, slow, expensive and bumpy road ahead. It'd cost him 3-4 years of development time, and the the board and investors would crush him well before he could deliver on the plan.
Symbian was completely f-ed up, broken to its core, so this was never an option (and it's laughable to read "Symbian was winning" as put by the OP). A much better review was also posted on HN today - "Symbian, a post-mortem" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4648843.
So the only real options were between Microsoft or Google. Android offered no differentiation against Samsung/HTC -- and no insurance against patent lawsuits. And I guess Microsoft offering a pile of cash probably helped to sweeten the deal.
Will Elop be fired? Well, it wouldn't surprise me. The odds are against him, as they were since the day he joined. But I highly doubt it'll make things any better for Nokia.
Well, you seem to forget that Meego and the N9 were built on Qt. And you cannot say about Qt that " No developers, no industry support, no technical expertise within the company to develop it".
To continue your idea, n9 was stable at launch and with v1.3 it is pretty solid for a platform that was effectively abandoned.
If Nokia had continued to invest in performance optimizations, bug fixes and new hardware it would fight shoulder to shoulder with the Android and iOS of today.
The OS would be ready to fight on features, but not on audience- that's the problem. Anyone launching a new platform in today's mobile landscape needs to have significant aces up their sleeve. Though there's no guarantee of success, Microsoft pairing up their desktop and mobile offerings is one such way to increase your chances of breaking the market.
Nokia had no such benefits. It's very uncertain how they would manage to persuade people to make apps for their devices, and for customers to buy the phones.
I always wondered how the write ups from this individual jived with the rest of what I had heard about Nokia. Like you said, he's clearly a smart guy. However, he glosses over Nokia's ridiculous management strategy and practices like subcontracting hardware design. Not to mention the clearly dying Symbian OS, which was abundantly clear to anyone who had used it and a modern smartphone at the same time.
Elop has a significant share of the blame to take, but I wouldn't chastise him for killing Symbian and MeeGo. Symbian was an old-world mobile hellhole akin to PalmOS, and MeeGo wasn't even close to ready in 2011.
It jives extremely well with a lot of traditional business management especially in hardware and telecoms oriented companies. It's a top down approach which satisfies the needs of the business development people first.
Nokia grew up in a world where the network operator was king and put complex and intrusive demands on the handset vendors, you still see this effect today.
If you look back further in his blog you'll see how he was perplexed that the original iPhone appeared so lacking in the bullet point features vs S60/Symbian.
Nokia employed a whole horde of business guys and product managers to slap these features on to OS so they could sell the platform, but simultaneously neglected the intrinsics that make an OS 'good'.
If you look at the history of Symbian, especially articles on The Register you'll see that this problem was actually well understood inside engineering. There were several points throughout the years where things could have been different. Elop rolled the dice, but cannibalized his own company at the same time. Steve Jobs 2.0 obviously didn't.
FYI, to both you and shinratdr, the word is jibe. It jibes extremely well with a lot of traditional business management. Jive is a dance and a manner of speaking.
Interesting, maybe it's because I'm English, it felt like the right expression.
"The British Oxford English Dictionary flags jibe in the sense of “to agree with” as “chiefly U.S.” Unlike Merriam-Webster, however, the OED includes this definition under the word jive:
b. intr. To make sense; to fit in. U.S. Cf JIBE v."
I loved it(now I use an Iphone), it is rock solid and what it does does it great.
Meego would had been at least a Bada (Samsumg OS) equivalent, and it would had been very important if it had not been murdered by Elop.
There was an internal war in the company with Meego and Elop made sure it was killed, doing things like using underperforming hardware, getting rid of this people as well.
In fact if it were for Elop, there would had never been a Meego phone.
Well, keep in mind my point wasn't "MeeGo was poop," but rather that MeeGo wasn't -- at least according to Nokia's own internal estimates -- ready to go with products beyond the N9 in a reasonable timeframe.
I don't think I'd blame Elop for the N9's hardware, though; Nokia tended to go with pretty low-juice designs as a matter of course, from what I saw. There were some good reasons for that in terms of overall cost and battery life, but the first iPhone came out in 2007 and the first Android phone came out in... also 2007, I think, and it wasn't until 2010 that Nokia had anything resembling a credible competitor in the N8. And frankly, the N8 was a credible competitor to the iPhone and Android phones of 2008. This is a venerable Nokia tradition that Elop perhaps can be blamed for not doing enough to change.
But I'm pretty sure that MeeGo was doomed at Nokia from about five minutes after Elop was handed the same test unit that I saw in late 2010 -- and that unit, both hardware and software, was designed before Elop had been hired. The idea that there was an internal war that crippled it seems completely plausible to me, but it would have been a war between Symbian and MeeGo partisans.
I agree with most of what you said, except that Nokia taking the Windows Phone strategy and keeping it mouth shut would've killed Windows Phone before they could even ship a phone.
Which makes the decision to go Windows Phone (and kill the company in the process) even more intriguing.
That's quite possible, and that's part of why I would have probably gone with Android instead. Windows Phone is a really interesting OS, but Android -- even if you couldn't use the official Google branding -- gives you access to a much bigger ecosystem than WP's and a more vibrant one than Symbian/MeeGo's, while porting Qt would have let them keep the existing development community from feeling torched while also likely letting them bring along their new MeeGo UI, which was actually pretty cool.
I think Elop placed a very high -- possibly too high -- value on having a "partner" in whoever made their new OS. Microsoft was willing to be a partner on Nokia's terms because Microsoft was desperate; Google wasn't.
And Symbian? Jesus. To implement a "search as you go" feature for Symbian^3, something that would narrow down search results both on the phone and off as you typed (like iOS and Android devices do, so this was just achieving parity), we had to write our own keyboard because the Symbian keyboard took over the whole screen. You selected a text field and got the keyboard, then hit the keyboard dismiss button to see the screen again. But look on the bright side: in addition to the "Universal Search" team in San Francisco working on that, there were four other groups around Nokia, both employees and contractors, working on what was, essentially, the exact. Same. Product.
And this was de rigueur for Nokia. This was the problem that Elop had to fix beyond anything technical: massive duplicated effort on what, at any other company, were already solved problems, because Nokia had become a bunch of fiefdoms all fiercely protecting their own turf. I'm pretty sure this is why Symbian stuck around in essentially the same form for so long. I'm sure Tomi Ahonen loved it as a user, but the number of engineers working on Symbian who liked working on it that I talked to was, to the best of my recollection, zero. (Just getting the developer toolchain running on my machine made me feel like I'd time traveled back to the days of SLS Linux.)
If I ran the zoo, I'd have probably gone with Android rather than Windows Phone; Elop went the other way not because of his past connections with Microsoft, but because he wanted to keep using lucrative Nokia services (rather than Google counterparts, most notably Maps) and be allowed to use the Android branding, and Google said no. I wouldn't have cared about the Android branding--instead I'd have cared about porting Qt to Android and not burning bridges with Nokia's existing development community. They'd just spent a lot of time, money and effort convincing everyone that Qt was the Way Of The Future: instead of writing to Symbian or MeeGo APIs, you'd write to Qt APIs, and then porting would be simple. Losing that was a bad call.
But I'd say the most serious mistake Elop made had nothing to do with technology. Love Apple or hate them, one of the things they're really good at is not talking about products before they're ready. The rumor mill may be in high gear for months, sure, but when Apple makes their official announcement, it is nearly always in the form of "Here is our new Superlative Magical Thing. Here is a video of Jony Ive talking earnestly about it. It will be available for this price (two weeks from now|tomorrow|as soon as the band stops playing)." If Elop had been running Apple during the PowerPC-Intel CPU switch, he'd have leaked an internal memo describing the PowerPC in some colorful apocalypse-invoking metaphor, then three months later announce the switch, then six months after that introduce one laptop with an Intel chip that wasn't the most current generation and say they'd have more coming next year.
The lesson to draw from Nokia under Elop isn't that they should have stuck with MeeGo; it's that they should have kept their mouth shut, kept shipping Symbian phones through 2011, and started 2012 with their new devices ready to ship when they announced them. I wouldn't be surprised if Ahonen gets his wish within a year and Elop is canned by Nokia's board -- but I'd be very surprised if doing so improves their situation.