Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

People blame Stephen Elop. But the person in control of the Nokia board was former CEO Jorma Ollila who headed Nokia through its glory days and had a lot of power. Nothing happened in Nokia without his approval during that period.

The board recruited and invited Stephen Elop. Part of his appointment was the board handing over the company on a silver platter; the new CEO. Negotiations for the acquisition started almost right away in secret. And most likely there were high level discussions ongoing with Microsoft and Steve Ballmer before Elop's appointment.

Jorma Ollila retired as a CEO around 2006; he wasn't really pushed out and Nokia was still performing well. He handed the keys to the company to a non technical CEO with a financial background (Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, aka, OPK internally). That was the first mistake. OPK was a bit hands off throughout the Iphone and Android rollout. There was no vision, no leadership, just a lot of infighting between heads of various units.

The second mistake was selling out to Microsoft and all the share value implosion that came with that. Microsoft bought several companies over the years. Nokia was one of the smaller ones. That's how bad it had gotten. At the peak Nokia was worth 150 billion or so. MS bought the phone unit for 5 billion. The later Linkedin and Github acquisitions were worth more.

By the time Stephen Elop was brought in (by the board, headed by Ollila) to fix things, it was too late. There were a lot of internal battles as well between the big business units. A whole string of CTOs with no power whatsoever that were appointed and let go. Including Scott McNealy who never really made any impact and was there only briefly.

Was this around the time Microsoft kept switching what "windows phone" was? I remember that the one friend who got into it loved it, and then they released something completely incompatible and he abandoned the platform.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I read that they had hired Elop and was concentrating on Windows phones. I immediately knew that was the end. Unbelievably incompetent by the board.

Now I can't find that poem about Elop sinking the Nokia ship or something like that.

The follow up N9 was that. It was great. Elop canned it.

I had to import one from Australia. It was totally worth it.

No, the national champions model is the problem. If Apple failed the US still has Android and potentially many other startups. Europe just doesn't have the risk capital or ecosystem.

~Thrice. Airpods.~

Edit: Airpods also has a majority market share, so probably it's not the third in this list.

I was a day one Android fan (got the Nexus One) but I'd actually debate what "in charge" means... to me it doesn't necessarily mean dominating market share. I think the iPhone defined the touch-based smartphone when it came out and continues to do so. These days Android has a much more cohesive concept (in the form of Material UI and so on) but in the early days it was just a hodgepodge mess of ideas, even if it dominated the market.

My pet theory is that this is the natural lifecycle of almost all companies and the reason for that is that they underappreciate the luck involved in their first success. There are a few exceptions in the form of zombies (typically relying on a monopoly or legislative help), but there are very few repeatedly innovative companies.

I worked with an ex-Kodak guy, and he related the following story to me from the 80’s or early 90’s.

Xerox was kicking their ass, they were completely owning the copier market. But it was a natural fit for Kodak, they knew imaging better than everybody, why couldn’t they get into this market? This guy was on a crack team of engineers a VP assembled to create a competing product. 9 months later, they demo a fully digital copy machine, working, ready to go, with competitive pricing and features.

But the higher ups at Kodak were incensed. They told the product needs a redesign, because Kodak was a film company, so the product needed to use film for copying. The revised product was a complete failure, and was the reason said engineer left Kodak shortly thereafter.

My take is devotion to brand identity is death during these critical inflection points. YMMV

Kodak also bought Ofoto in 2001. So basically they had over a decade lead on Instagram. What did they do with it? Try to drive people to print more photos, on Kodak paper. I don't think they ever really embraced digital, maybe isolated parts of the company did, but the film/print cultural inertia was just too strong.

If you aren’t already familiar, Clayton Christensen’s theories on this, on innovation and disruption, are widely praised.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Christensen

One of the problems for Kodak was that selling people digital cameras was always going to be just a fraction of the profit of selling them film.

Today, in 2025, Fujifilm makes more money from selling film (Instax instant photo film) than they do from digital, even though they "won" in digital over Kodak to some extent.

The iPod applied the same strategy. When it launched it only worked on Macs with a FireWire port, meaning <10% of the personal computer market.

In what way is a BYD a completely different/revolutionary product compared to, say a KIA or Volvo EV? This comparison seems a bit strange tbh.

Sure they are more nimble and have higher margins. But the products they make are still just copies of what those other dinosaurs are making. And for a car I'm still very reluctant to buy a Chinese one. Politics aside, what I'm buying is a 5-10 year long service experience where the Volvo dealer is 1km away and where the BYD service location is I'm honestly not sure. It might be around the corner too, but I don't know because it hasn't been there for 50 years yet. It's a much harder market to break into. The easiest way to do it is probably the way Geely and SAIC did it - Buy a brand and/or service network.

I don't see the comparison. BYD is a decent car for an impressive price, but they're ... just cars. The iPhone wasn't "just a phone" that was cheaper than its contemporaries and a little better in very specific areas, it was a complete overhaul of the entire market.

You can look at a BYD and a Nissan and make a decision based on minor trade-offs between different aspects of the car. You couldn't do the same between iPhone and a Sony Ericsson.

I somehow fail to see this as the most I want in a car is confort and perhaps space not screen time.

A killer feature for a car would be FSD but that’s not an “iPhone” thing.

BYD and the other Chinese manage to sell good EVs for great prices but I don’t see them irreplaceable like the iPhone.

Maybe they are the new Toyota but not the iPhone.

Same goes with Tesla though it’s more complicated because Tesla keeps promising FSD.

The iPhone didn’t promise anything. It just delivered.

By borrowing your analogy, the general sentiment with the iPhone was excitement and interest when it came out. I just don't see it in the folks around me regarding EVs (price is high, charging is pain). Yes, it's the future, but a future that is way ahead. We aren't even at the point where those old "devices" start to show their age. I'd say Symbians and Ericssons still have time.

IMO it's shocking that this _did not_ happen in cars, in past tense.

Model S launched 12 years ago. Apple replaced Nokia in 4 years. Model Y was the second best selling car worldwide, supposedly, after a Toyota and followed by a Toyota. Tesla has market share of about 2.3% globally and stays out of top 10.

iPhone became de facto definition of a phone. In less than 5 years from nothing. Tesla is... not that.

BYD+CATL is Android. Tesla is Apple.

Are we seeing the same thing, though?

The average consumer replaces their smartphone about every 3 years (at least in the western world, places like India are on an even shorter cycle). Additionally, the global average price of a smartphone is about 400 USD. That's a much faster moving market than cars and the investment is much lower.

BYD is very impressive, but I wouldn't look at the situation as the same.

I wouldn't count Toyota out. Their mega battery plant in North Carolina is coming online this year, and the biggest drag on their current EV/PHEV lineup is the batteries. New EV/PHEV models are on the way, and frankly if they just update what they have with better batteries they will be absolutely phenomenal because they are currently great to drive and run extremely well despite lackluster battery range.

Did you work with Symbian/UIQ software, feature phone software or something else? The feature phone team actually showed signs of getting the idea of no-jank and a rich UI very early.

Can you elaborate?

My memory is that Apple _charged_ developers to make apps :)

> For example, the bullet "scaling the user experience to lower HW specs may be challenging. iPhone mini may be closer to iPod UI" comment still suggests they were stuck in the mindset of the time. They thought it was unlikely that Apple could deliver a horizontal platform, rather Apple would be launch a series of individual phones at different prices, each with bespoke interfaces, just like all the players had been doing, over and over.

Indeed. I referred to it at the time as the 50-model strategy.

That Apple succeeded in having people pay $500 and up for a phone that was cool but frankly not very useful, was amazing.

We should remember the original iPhone was more a tech demonstrator than anything else. It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, but you couldn't really DO that much with it. There wasn't even an app store! You still needed to buy a digital camera and a garmin GPS and so on. This was a telephone in the old sense of the word (For younger readers, "telephone" used to mean a thing you made calls with).

The fact we pay 2-3 times as much now for premium smartphones is no wonder. Now it's a PC power thing with a better camera. By the time the iPhone 3G arrived it was a marvel. It had ironed out most of the kinks of the early versions, added the GPS, App Store etc. But by then, the other dinosaurs were already dying. They murdered them with the initial versions of the iPhone, which really weren't even that impressive.

The presentation shows they were aware of what was happening. But that Nokia didn't just make their portfolio two lines (really simple cheap feature phones and really expensive all-glass smartphones) on the day after this presentation came out, is strange.

the mention of lack of Java was also very indicative of the mindset

The first Nokia phone-mini-computer was the original Communicator, with a 640x200 resolution and a full keyboard, launched in 1996(!) Of course at that time it was targeted purely for business users, but by 2007 they already had a well-established high-end consumer smartphone selection (the N series – rather more advanced than the first iPhones). They just weren’t able to pivot to the touchscreen form factor, largely due to betting on Symbian – I can see how writing an entirely new OS userland from scratch wasn’t a terribly attractive idea.

In the end they did that too, of course, and the N9 was an astonishingly good phone, with a slick zero-button interface and silky smooth scrolling and multitouch gestures. And a terminal and reasonably-privileged root access if you were so inclined. I used a normal ssh/screen/irssi combo to IRC. It’s such a fucking shame that Maemo/Meego was killed.

> and this was the age of "smaller is cooler" mobile phones, so they tried to keep the screens small.

I, for one, would love a return to "smaller is cooler" with small screens and big numeric keypads. I have an elderly relative whose only use for a smartphone is calls (it's a phone after all) and text messaging (SMS and WhatsApp); these don't need a big screen.

I would kill to see the presentation from RIM

This is to Nokia's credit. It didn't work out, but they also weren't arrogant like RIM or Microsoft

The bawk stops here.

Clearly in retrospect these were transferable skills.

Stephen Elop’s good a$$ barbecue and foot massage