My paranoid brain often thought that Microsoft not only acquired their stake in Nokia for Windows phones but also to control some aspects of Qt as it was quickly unloaded from Nokia after Microsoft entered the picture. A sort of power play which we all saw later on with Xamarin without the feel-good outcome that Xamarin eventually had. Qt Creator is a joy to work with for open source software in my opinion for even just non-Qt projects. Back then I was using it on my BSD desktop before switching to XCode for vanilla C++ projects. Anyhow, it was extremely portable I could code with MinGW on Windows and then move the same project to BSD and then move it into XCode with minor changes. I would imagine Nokia at that time would seem extremely unique to Microsoft for just Qt alone. Just some food for thought...I still have Qt built ANGLE libs in my GH repo I think. Yeah, it was also an OpenGL ES 2 emulator that ran on DirectX which you could optionally run Qt Creator on top of and I remember Nokia's name was all over it. It was possible to do cross-platform Windows and Android code this way with just a JNI wrapper. It was a hot mess and I loved it! Here are a couple links that back up this strange tale:
Even in 2017, with several uses across Symbian, Blackberry, Ubuntu and Jolla SDKs, Qt is lacking in regards to mobile OS API support.
Unless one is doing GUI apps required without integration with OS APIs or their native UIs, replicating everything in QML (C++ widgets are not supported) and writting JNI and Objective-C++ wrappers isn't that much fun.
Xamarin gets more love from app developers, because even before Microsoft's acquisition they had a whole set of teams dedicated to doing nothing else other than achieving parity with iOS and Android native APIs.
> I would imagine in a large enough acquisition like that Qt was probably at the bottom and wasn't even noticed much.
Qt was the UI toolkit for the _Meego_ OS, which Nokia was developing at a time where there was still very much room for a third mobile OS. wolfspider's paranoia has some truth behind it. When MS invested in Nokia and a "former" MS exec became CEO, his first action was to completely kill Meego and announce that Nokia would exclusively make Windows phones, even though Meego was gathering steam. Much of the company walked out of the address that he announced it at.
Sometimes when I'm in the mood for a little self-congratulation, I look back on a blog piece I wrote shortly after the Burning Platform memo and subsequent move towards Windows Phone:
I was pretty ignorant of the rest of Nokia's business outside of mobile devices, and there are some particulars that differed a bit, but I think I called basic trajectory they traced in the mobile market from that point pretty well: premier hardware maker loses lead in market shift, turns to Microsoft for software partnership, finds itself still struggling in a competitive market, now working with another failing software platform whose destiny it can't control on top of its other problems, eventually is "married" by Microsoft.
Now divorced, and looking to make a new life, it would seem.
Can't help thinking that selling the phones to Microsoft was the plan-B all along and one of the reasons why they brought in Elop and decided to go with Windows.
Selling to Microsoft when things went bad was a pretty big thing. If they had not been able to sell the mobile phone business for decent price, it might have taken down the whole company. Considering what happened, the outcome for Nokia was (IMHO) pretty spectacular.
I have the feeling it was plan-A for Microsoft all the time. Shuttling someone loyal to your company to the top job of a struggling acquisition target is a genius move.
Nokia was struggling to differentiate itself by making their own OS, which is, in retrospect, a huge mistake. Had they gone with Android, they'd leverage all their knowledge of the Linux kernel on their own hardware. Getting Android to run on the N9 would probably have been trivial and they would have a compelling product in no time.
The whole model of the handset market changed - instead of courting telcos, they needed to court end-users and they totally blew that up.
The N9 was probably the most successful unmarketed and unavailable (not in any primary markets that could afford it) phone in history. It's big brother was only available as a dev device.
There's plenty of evidence that there was demand. I'd love to see them relaunch a similar device with updated specs today. I'd certainly get one.
Every time the fall of Nokia is mentioned I always retell the feelings I had sitting in Ruholahti, Helsinki on February 2011- the Friday of my first week at the company; and hearing the news that R&D was shutting down in favour of Windows Phone.
Many considered it an inferior product, many had just lost the work of their lives. Most just went to the bar across the street.
I feel the heart and soul of Nokia, just like those engineers, is off of the main building somewhere. Getting drunk and telling stories of how great things were and could have been.
...telling stories of how great things were and could have been.
They're deluding themselves. Things were not great at Nokia before February 2011. The product pipeline of mostly Symbian-based smartphones was an unfolding disaster.
I've talked to a lot of passionate ex-Nokia people, here in Helsinki.
I recently waited for a couple of months to try and buy one of the new Nokia 6 android phones. It took so long that I ended up with a MotoG instead. It's been years since I actually owned a Nokia phone, but I have fond memories, and the technical staff always seemed very competent, passionate, and thorough.
What did they mess up? I have one and all I noticed is that the iPhone app got an update that imparts a cleaner UI design, reminiscent of Nokia's golden age (i.e. Marko-Ahtisaari-esque).
I've found the app cleaner, but more difficult to use. I have several complaints about this new app:
- Heart rate used to show on a chart that would show normal range and your history. Now it's a single number. I have to swipe to see my history.
- I can no longer swipe pinch to customize the date range.
- They removed one of my features, a running average of my weight over time. If you zoom out to three-month view, you can still see an average. However, I liked seeing it always.
I think they could have updated the fonts and made the background colors shades of white and gray. This would have made it felt clean without removing a ton of functionality. Perhaps mocking up a redesign will be a weekend project for me.
I stepped on my scales this morning and loaded up my Withing's app to check my charts only to see Nokia branding everywhere. I'm guessing I missed a communication on this, but it still felt a little violating to suddenly transfer my health data to "those phone guys".
Yep... it's amazing they could screw that up. Can anyone recommend a replacement for the Withings scale? All I want it to do is record my weight every time I step on it, send it up to the Internet, and let me view it in my browser and iPhone.
I've built a such a scale using a raspberry Pi 3 and a Wii balance board. Step on the scale and it sends to my phone where an app records it in Samsung health.
It's still a work in progress but it's functional.
As someone who doesn't have familiarity with Withings products but is considering buying one of the Nokia scales - how did they screw it up? What would you want a "smart" scale to do that the Nokia doesn't?
Just use a Google Sheets or other online doc and a normal scale. It's so much faster in my experience to use a normal scale, read the number, then pop open the sheet (it can be a direct link on your homescreen) and type in the weight on a new line vs. fumbling with bluetooth connections, horrible apps, etc. Your data is never locked in to a service and you can graph, chart, analyze, etc. as much as you want too.
I can't understand how it could possibly be faster to stand on a scale, remember a number, go to your phone, open a spreadsheet and input it... than to just stand on the scale.
I mean the manual approach starts with the only step of the automatic approach.
You don't have to fumble with bluetooth or apps. It takes the measurement and uploads it to the internet with no help over WiFi after you have configured it once in its lifetime. It tells me my weight and my trend on the screen, so I don't need to open the app.
Once a month or so I look online or on the app and get the effect of the spreadsheet.
"The only step" presumes that the automatic approach Just Works™ at a price you're willing to pay (including having someone else own your data).
A $20 scale in the bathroom with a 3x5 card and a pen nearby has worked out pretty well for me over the last 3 years. There's two whole steps, but they're entirely transparent and quick, the equipment involved is affordable, I haven't had to spend time on setup or troubleshooting beyond occasionally retrieving a new 3x5 card or pen from my office supply box. The privacy is pretty good too.
Once every week or two I look at the 3x5 cards and can see what the trend looks like.
> End of the day, your weight doesn't fluctuate that much...
It does if that's a focus of your health efforts.
> ...that level of precision doesn't add much value and can make weight loss harder.
In fact, that daily feedback is immensely helpful. Very quickly, you begin to understand the connection between your actions of the last day or two and your weight.
> Very quickly, you begin to understand the connection between your actions of the last day or two and your weight.
Really? According to e.g. the Mayo Clinic, a healthy weight loss programme is aiming for no more than 2 lbs lost per week. That's 4.5 oz per day.
Edit: If you go any faster, you're mainly just dehydrating yourself and you'll bounce right back up (maybe even higher).
Meanwhile, your body weight fluctuates by up to 64 oz in 24 hours as you eat, drink and go to the toilet. There's a whole forest of confounding variables, and what you're doing is looking at twigs and going "Significant!"
E.g. eating salty food the night before will easily retain an extra 20 oz of water in your body the next morning. That's got nothing to do with weight loss. But salty food often has a lot of fat, so you go "Correlation! Causation!"
Really, if you're looking at weight changes on time scales less than two weeks, you're only chasing patterns in randomness and fooling yourself.
This is my neo-Luddite response to a lot of "there should be an app for that" kind of comments: "Have you tried using a pencil?"
There's lot of reasons to use computers, but there's also a large problem space where it's really hard to beat pencil and paper. They even usually come pre-installed in most offices and homes.
You'd think, but the setup and configuration on these things can take forever. And nevermind the things that can and occasionally do go wrong and need fixing.
Yes I don't think connected devices are always the best, but the person I was replying to was doing the classic informercial black-and-white video impression of someone pretending something is more difficult than it actually is.
No, that's not what I did at all. The GP of my comment was looking for an alternative recommendation. Spending >$100 for a fancy pants scale as a convenient alternative is incredibly wasteful and encourages activity (daily or mulime times daily) that is counter productive.
A high quality regular scale (of similar build quality, design, and construction) to a Withings scale is $40-60
The Withings is $100. So it’s up to the consumer of the simplicity, ease of use, lack of friction in monitoring, and saving of time is worth $40-60 extra.
If I save 30-45 mins of my time over the life of the scale: yes it is. Just from time alone (not taking other benefits into account yet) That’s not wasteful - that’s economical long term.
Not at all. I live a digital life where I automate a ridiculous amount of activity.
This is just an exercise in false progress. The average scale has an error range of 10-20 oz for a 200lb load. Automating something of little value (i.e. Daily or more frequent body measurements) doesn't make it more valuable.
Nokia is now primarily doing networks, something they were doing before doing mobile. A long while ago Nokia was a conglomerate and one of key reasons it was raising to the top spot in mobile phones and networks was a relentless focus over a decade where all non-core businesses were sold off or shut down and the money plowed back to the core. This focus part of the Nokia Group strategy was not sustainable. The networks part of Nokia peaked with the 3G networks where their base station was a real hot seller due to superior performance.
The network side of Nokia is heavily dependent on big buyers. It used to be that telecom service providers were national and fragmented. That allowed many companies with localized services to serve them. Of course there are efficiencies to be gained by running networks across borders and buying in bulk. The consolidation on the service provider side prompted a consolidation on the network equipment provider side.
Nokia's networks part merged with Siemens Networks part in a "merger of equals" imho. not the most effective manner to do these things. Then Alcatel-Lucent was folded in as well. It is worth contrasting Nokia's strategy with it's Nordic arch rival Ericsson who went through a consolidation and rejuvenation a few years earlier and pursued a more organic growth path.
This article confused me on the reality of today's 'Nokia' phones. The recently released and 'back to basics' phones are not legitimate Nokia in my estimation, they are some generic OEM phones with a Nokia label slapped on them.
I am not sure why this badge engineering bugs me, to make me think they are not real Nokia. More generally, why is it that badge engineering sometimes is seen as okay and sometimes not?
To take an automotive analogy, in the VW group there are various high end brands, e.g. Bentley and Bugatti. Both these marques are seen as having heritage even if the engines are 'glorified Golf engines' to a certain extent, even if built in heritage locations (e.g. Crewe, UK) rather than straight out of Wolfsburg. Same with the BMW brands - the Mini and Rolls Royce cars aren't seen as badly styled BMWs, but with heritage intact.
Perhaps the reason that these auto brands are okay is that there really has been innovation, the product line has evolved and the reputation survives. Getting back to the Nokia 'phones', there is no innovation in bringing out a ten-year-old product, OEM made by some randoms. This product makes 'Nokia' one of those fake brands in my estimation and obfuscates the real Nokia that is innovating with the backend hardware.
Imagine if IBM, when they sold their PC hardware, decided to let Lenovo use not just 'ThinkPad' but 'IBM' on the products. You would have no idea as a casual observer that 'IBM were still going'. Nokia just had numbers for their product line, no household name for that, as per 'ThinkPad'.
I am most amazed that Microsoft could not make this work and I think it was the death of the evil Microsoft that cowards used to love and the rest of us used to hate. The once fearsome Microsoft were humbled by it. Even today there is definite scope for being able to carry your office PC around in mini-form in a phone in some seamless way, as hinted at with 'Continuum' and so forth. But whatever happens on the Microsoft Phone platform is negated by things like 'not being able to play YouTube' on it.
The new Nokia phones are engineered and designed by a company called HMD. HMD was founded for the specific purpose of making "Nokia" phones under the license after Microsoft sold it off. HMD is based in Espoo, with their office right across the street from Nokia HQ, and the company consists mostly of ex-Nokia phone engineers and other employees.
So basically the phones are designed by the same engineers, and the office where they are designed is right next-door to Nokia. The reason it's a separate company is just that Nokia is not that interested in making phones right now.
That seems like a very limited view: a lot of that “unimportant stuff “ has been massive improvements in safety, durability, fuel economy and emissions, ride quality and comfort, etc.
The other thing to remember is that you're comparing technologies at different parts of their life-cycle: automotive technology matured half a century earlier so it's unsurprising that there's less room for dramatic change, just as the computing market has had periodic plateaus where the annual changes were far less significant to users – how many normal people even know what CPU/GPU they're using?
(and, of course, for awhile they've been moving together as we're seeing manufacturers shipping cars which have things like the ability to stop when a kid jumps in front of the vehicle. That's not just a car thing or just a computer thing but it'll save tens of thousands of lives, which seems a lot more significant than most of what's in an app store)
Some of the most talented people I have ever met in my 30 years in IT worked at Nokia (USA and Finland).
There was something about the culture there that just made it an incredible place to work for everyone. An environment where people were treated with dignity and respect and rewarded with generosity.
The Fins are incredibly hard working and talented along with their US counterparts. I imagine any company that hired an ex Nokia employee was rewarded well.
The company has greatness in it, would not surprise me at all if it rose like a phoenix from the ashes.
Nokia bought Alcatel-Lucent who previously bought Timetra which was a silicon valley start up that at one time was meant to compete with Cisco, a pretty bold move for sure. They had some pretty amazing stuff (IMHO) but I think one acquisition after another ruined them, sad I think.
The acquisition of Timetra is the most successful one in Alcatel's history; it has grown into one of top 4 carrier routing vendors from a startup;
and they still have very amazing stuff:
they recently launched FP4, a 2.4Tbs network processor with full routing features:
https://networks.nokia.com/solutions/fp4-network-processor
What makes you think they are now ruined? Is FP4 not what you were expecting, does it not still compete with Cisco? It's a big reason why Nokia bought ALU.
Funny just yesterday I was discussing Nokia history. As a simple westerner I only new Nokia telco, early GSM glory and recent demise. But Nokia was founded in the 19th century, dealing with wood and rubber. Later they moved into military equipment and telco.
They also did consumer electronics (VHS, TV) and PCs (desktop and laptops) using sub brands though.
I currently work at Nokia/Alcatel-Lucent/Bell Labs/foo and there's a lot of restructuring going on. Lots of layoffs and org changes which is making everyone's head spin and adding a lot of uncertainty into the workplace.
A big part of the Alcatel acquisition was acquiring their customers - in a recent All Hands meeting, Nokia stated they were planning to move away from "nuts and bolts engineering". In America at least.
Nokia fits in a bigger picture of large European tech firms which stumbled over the last 20 year, sold off and shut down divisions before radically restructuring and reemerging as a smaller but more nimble companies. What is very worrying however that unlike in the US, which had similar scenarios with HP and IBM, hardly anything close to new giants of the likes of Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon appeared during that timeframe in the EU
We haven't done software right in Europe. Really, we only have SAP and computer games companies as massive software companies. We have been terrible at software. It's very worrying for the remaining industries that software will soon eat: automobiles and trucks. We're way behind there. Deja vu all over again, maybe?
> We haven't done software right in Europe. Really, we only have SAP and computer games companies as massive software companies. We have been terrible at software. It's very worrying for the remaining industries that software will soon eat: automobiles and trucks. We're way behind there. Deja vu all over again, maybe?
As a German I say: I would not say we can't do software or we are bad at it. "Getting really big" is not the typical German culture - so instead we have software companies from mittelstand that are quite successful in their niche, but if you don't work in the specific industry, you surely have never heard of.
What we are really bad at is internet-based (cloud-based) services. On one hand in Germany there are strong data protection laws which make some kind of monetization harder - but only people from Germany and neighboring countries seem to care about what is done with their data. On the other hand there existed German companies that tried to provide similar services to GMail, Dropbox etc., but they simply did not have the large financial backing that is necessary to provide such a service with large capacities for free in the hope that some time in the future they will make money on it. So they had to do monetization attempts much earlier on which did not work out well.
I never said we can't do it. We educate good enough people - just look at some of the key technical people at the american giants - Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, Urs Hölzle at Google, Johnny Ive at Apple.
There are technical reasons - lack of deep VC capital markets and data protection laws as you point out. There are also cultural reasons - we sell out at 100m and then go enjoy life instead of building a global giant.
I don't think data protection is our problem. For one thing, if our government really meant it (which they don't), we could build businesses that attract customers from all over the world who need strong data protection laws they can't find anywhere else.
For another thing, there probably is a huge, unexplored market for all kinds of software which would be in line with the current law.
However, there are many roadblocks that hinder people from experimenting, like too much bureaucracy and financial dangers (UBI might come in handy here)
And then there are "the little things". Take that law which urges you to fully disclose your address on your website. If I had build twitter, without knowing how it is going to turn out, I would not want my boss to be able to find out what I do in my spare time. In other words, I wouldn't have put it online.
> we sell out at 100m and then go enjoy life instead of building a global giant.
This is what happened to Booking.com, sold to Priceline back in 2005 for about $150M due to lack of growth capital, currently Booking.com accounts for 70% of Priceline's revenue, which, with some handwaving, would amount to a virtual market cap of 50+ Billion $ if hypothetically they had continued on their own.
UK has a few large ones - though we are trying hard to get out of Europe at the moment...
Sage and Sophos are pretty well known.
Generally though I agree and it's something Europe should/could be good at since they are high paying jobs that require a good thorough educational system.
They are aiming at 5G network markets. Everything else is secondary.
You can see all their consumer products just as a way to ensure that there are products that push 5G to the max in terms of low consumption/latency/bandwidth in the next 5-10 years. Milking and maintaining the strong consumer brand is extra.
Successors of Ozo camera will the bandwidth hog in 5G.
Withings products are the platform they will use to push factor 10 reduction in energy consumption and “sleep modes” for always on network devices that are part of 5G.
Their new deal with HMD Global / Foxconn means that others take the risk and Nokia brand stays relevant in smartphone market. They still own the brand but they don't but significant money into it.
The Nokia of today is first and foremost a business-to-business network supplier: even its name is back to Nokia Networks. All the consumer investments on the side are only side bets that may or may not take off.
Their brand name everywhere is Nokia, not Nokia Networks. Networks is a division (and subsidiary) of Nokia. They have networks, health, virtual reality and phones.
They went back to a market that is not that cool but where the bar of entry is very high because real engineering is required: network equipment. On this market you deal with other companies, the prices of everything are very high, projects take a long time to implement and everything is more predictable. Sure there is some competition but nobody can hack something in a garage and compete with them.
> As part of the euro zone, Finland was also unable to devalue its currency to stimulate spending.
I see this a lot with respect to poorer eurozone countries like Greece. I wonder if it's part of the reason why some U.S. states like West Virginia are (apparently permanently) poor. Would the U.S. economy be more dynamic and productive if each state had its own dollar?
Quite possibly. The idea is that there is an Optimum Currency Area, i.e. a region over which a single currency makes sense.
Larger countries (including the UK) are not necessarily Optimum Currency Areas but can mask the effects by using fiscal transfers between richer areas (or states) and poorer areas (or states).
Some smaller countries do better sharing a currency even without the fiscal transfers, (such as Switzerland and Luxembourg I believe).
The Euro is a classic example of far too large an area, encompassing widely disparate economies, and without sufficient balancing fiscal transfers - hence the considered opinion of many people that the Euro as it is currently constituted is not viable over a longer time period. To survive, the Euro requires one of:
(a) Strong Political Union and Fiscal Transfers
(b) The Departure of Weaker Economies (such as Greece)
(c) Breakup, into for example a "Northern" Euro and a "Southern" Euro
It could be. The part of economics which deals with this stuff is the Optimum Currency Area Theory. Basically, if different regions respond differently to shocks, they might prefer to have different currencies. And apparently someone posted a link on Wikipedia to an article from the Chicago Fed that suggests that there are different response areas in the United States.
I haven't figured out the actual arrangement behind HDM Global, but can't helping thinking this is just some temporary arrangement and Nokia will acquire it if the phones turn out to be a success. I would say they are definitely planning a real comeback to consumer market.
They have been an absolute star of my portfolio since shortly before they sold a whole load of stuff to Microsoft. Doubled in price, fantastic dividends. Whatever they're doing, I hope they keep doing it.
Source: I went to school with a Son of a Nokia employee who informed me the origin of the name wasn't anything exotic, but a specific town in Finland. Thus, I gather it's still there.
The Bloomberg article said that Nokia was founded near the city of Tampere. In fact, it was founded in a smaller town near Tampere, called... Nokia. Originally it would have been called something to "the Nokia wood pulp company" or whatever, but they kept the name Nokia when they expanded and moved.
Nokia's headquarters have been in the city of Espoo for a long time (near Helsinki). The area in Espoo where they have their office, Otaniemi, is home to many Helsinki-area tech companies, Aalto University, and many science and engineering institutions.
I can't help but thinking that Nokia is horribly managed. The amount of inferior products they sold to their loyal audience over and over again, until we were all so fed up with it: different proprietary cables on same-years' devices, stagnant software development and replacing durable with cheap plastics and materials.
Much of the nostalgia connected with this brand is from its early phone days, it's been an utter mess since.
To that extend, there are very little highlights since then.
It depends on what you mean the early days. Nokia cheap phones were targetting a specific market, that did not want something more expensive. Bashing them for those phones makes no sense, since there were targetting markets that couldn't afford something else.
However, top of the line Nokia phones were had great hardware and construction quality. Look up Nokia E51 or Nokia N9.
What hobbled them was Symbian. Nokia N9 was close to "escape velocity" since the OS was really cool. But by then Nokia pivoted to Microsoft and...
> Much of the nostalgia connected with this brand is from its early phone days, it's been an utter mess since.
In the early times there were great phones by Nokia, but also among the later ones there were great ones. Just mention "Nokia N900" on HN and get detailed explanations... ;-)
I'm afraid I cannot let a mention of the N900 pass by without babbling about it. I still use my N900, from 2009, every day. It's a full pocket Linux workstation. I can't believe any company actually made such a thing; it'll never happen again.
Am using mine ATM. It may lack "elegant design" and 4g but it makes up for it with usability, physical keyboard, swappable battery & expandable storage. It also can be reassembled and used after most falls up to 20 feet onto solid surfaces(my Nexus 4 failed after dropping from my pants pocket onto carpet). It is the only smart smartphone I have encountered since 2007.
https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_5_on_Windows_ANGLE_and_OpenGL
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)