Not entirely convinced that Apple would own the mobile space without Android. There were lot of mobile handset incumbents when IPhone came out. It was the one-two punch of IPhone AND Android that destroyed the handset dominance of the likes of Nokia and Blackberry.
Had there not been an Android, I'm pretty sure one of those incumbents would have come up with something.
Nokia, for example, had lots of nice Linux handheld devices before IPhone. They were encumbered by a degraded engineering culture and Symbian.
People don't remember but, what actually killed Nokia handsets in one stroke was one memo by their then CEO Stehphen Elop where he basically stated their platform as it is was dead in the water. Until then they had had a fairly good portion of the market, but that single statement just killed it. People who did not like IPhone moved from Nokia phones to Android after that.
Now, without Android, there might have not been such an obvious migration path, and Nokia might have kept some of it's customers. Nokia managed to get some great handsets out after that, but they had already lost market momentum.
Nokia was never a big competitor in the US market mainly because they refused to play the game by the operators rules, hence the operators did not really endorse them.
Without Android, once again, I think there might have been openings for Nokia to get into the handset market state side.
Or Blackberry or Ericsson might have come up with something.
The thing that commoditized handset market was not actually Android, but the availability of cheap radio circuits from Asia. Until then the radio technology had been the secret sauce of the encumbents, not software. When the radio stack became commoditized, the playing field changed fairly rapidly.
I'm pretty sure there would have been competing Linux enabled smart devices in one way or another without Android. Android just got there first.
None of the handset makers back then were in a position to come up with a workstation class OS, with desktop class application development frameworks and highly tuned power management and commercial level software development tool chains. They just didn’t have software groups anywhere close to able to deliver something like that. Their software was at best based on embedded variants of Linux with very bare bones dev environments and frameworks. They just didn’t have anything close to the required level and breadth of dev experience and capability.
Furthermore when the iPhone came out almost nobody in either the phone or the Tech industry in general appreciated what Apple had done and why it mattered. I must have read a handful of posts a month like yours back then trivialising the issue as just having to ‘come up with something’. Desktop OS systems like OSX and Windows at the time aren’t something you can just come up with. It’s this sort of thinking that doomed desktop Linux to the margins for decades, and without the Google Android team’s immediately realising what had happened and what they needed to do about it, handset Linux could very easily have ended up a footnote like desktop Linux. Nobody else in the industry seems to have had that insight back then.
What I think would have happened is Microsoft would have eventually got their act together and brought out a credible Windows Mobile and licensed it to the handset makers. Other than Google they are the only software company with the resources in talent and technical depth capable of it. Without Android to light a second fire under them it might have taken longer than it actually did, but they did do this in the actual timeline and without Android to compete with their strategy would have worked.
> with desktop class application development frameworks
It was for this very reason Nokia bought Qt. They very much had a desktop class dev story going, and also some pretty solid mobile device cred. People seem to forget the Greenphone, which was sold as a development platform but you could actually buy it and it was a proper phone with the full dev stack, more than a year before the iPhone was shown publicly. Nokia absolutely had what was required to stay relevant. Without the hostile takeover, things might have turned out different.
Nokia had a problem long before that. They were trying to play on too many playgrounds. They had S60 and Symbian as their workhorse OSs and then were dabbling in various custom Linux stacks (I had an N800 back than, GTK+ based - could skin it like a tricorder - fun times). Then they acquired Qt (Trolltech) and instead of building a UI on the Widgets tech stack they wanted to re-invent the wheel with QML - which is how the Qt framework became this weird two GUI frameworks in one that don't really mesh to this day.
Granted, Google was also just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what stuck, but at least they are a tech company with multiple revenue streams - while Nokia wasn't either of those - so without a laser focus they were doomed from the get go. And they did not have it.
The irony was that there were already versions of Windows Mobile kicking around. Compaq iPAQ, for example. It ran Windows CE and required a stylus. To me, it seems that Apple managed to do to the phone what they'd already done to MP3 players. They weren't the first, and they didn't win the price/features war, but they had uniquely better UX on the device. The key differentiating features seem to me to have been:
- toughened glass screen
- stylus-free interaction due to use of capacitative screen
- multitouch
- real web browser (not WAP)
- (US) escaping the control of carriers; nobody remembers the "iTunes phone" the ROKR. Also indirectly killing carrier's attempts to do nickel-and-dime billing and therefore turning internet into a bulk commodity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/300-page_iPhone_bill
- the marketing achievement of being a fashion device not a tech device (Tesla are explicitly copying this, to their advantage)
(again, I'm not claiming that they were the first to do any of these, but they did all of them well together)
The things that really mattered, apart from really well thought out and implemented multi-touch were: A true pre-emptive multitasking OS; Full 32bit application process memory model; multiprocessor support; OS level support for power management profiles for apps, based on experience from laptops and enabled by all the above; server class security, again enabled by the kernel features above. A full featured network stack and background services, again enabled by the first handful of features.
Bear in mind the Windows CE kernel, used until Windows mobile version 8 in 2012, was a single tasking OS with severe fundamental architectural deficiencies. That’s why Microsoft never allowed ‘ordinary’ developers access to write in C++. That was restricted to selected partners, because it gave full naked access to the platform and required specialist knowledge and skill.
Meanwhile Apple could let anyone develop on their platform in C, C++, Objective C, it’s all fine and just upload it to the App Store because it had workstation class process isolation.
Where did you get this idea the normal devs couldn't program Windows CE with C++. There are tons of open source C++ Windows CE apps from as far back as the 90s written in C++.
The Phone 7 App Store only allowed Silverlight, XNA and .NET applications, C++ apps were only allowed by close partners. Thats because CE didn't have a robust security framework or process isolation. This is fine on non-networked devices like the ones in the 90s you referred to because the worst that can happen is crashing the device, but once you have constant network access you need to be a lot more careful about allowing direct access at the system level. A badly behaved app could play havoc with the network, especially since the network stack on CE was pretty primitive with few safety features.
Also early CE devices were aimed at technical users that knew how to side-load apps and were much more tolerant of technical issues, but the later phones were aimed at ordinary consumers and so needed to be as reliable as possible. Hence the restriction to managed framework dev environments for general developers releasing to the App Stores on version 7 and below.
This is why Apple could open up their App Store to any developer with basic review, because the system was heavily locked down with robust system security, process isolation and networking models. Windows Phone didn't have that until version 8 in 2012, based on the NT kernel, and that's when the MS App Store started accepting apps developed in low level languages. That wan't a co-incidence or a capricious decision by Microsoft, but based on pragmatic considerations.
> stylus-free interaction due to use of capacitative screen
> multitouch
IMHO these two were the key standout killer features that made the iPhone a qualitatively different and better experience than every handset that had come before.
It went further; not only was the touchscreen better, and multitouch, but the UI was designed for fingers through and through. When I saw it I remember thinking, wow, finally a design team that cares about users at large, instead of showing off how they got X-windows to run on a phone.
It was comical how previous designs slapped a desktop UI on a phone and expected you to emulate a mouse with a tiny, easy-to-lose stylus.
I'm still expecting someone to well-actually us and point out an obscure device that did both first, but to me these were the spectacular features. Resistive touchscreen + stylus was and is awful (qv the other thread about how you hold a pen, like a ballpoint a stylus on resistive requires pressure and can be hard on the grip. It's also extremely loseable)
> I'm still expecting someone to well-actually us and point out an obscure device that did both first
There were devices before the iPhone with multi-touch, but that doesn’t matter. Being first isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be if you can’t market it to the world.
The first palm pilot was around 10 years before the iPhone, but despite the similarities we had flip phones, screen+keyboards, flipout keyboards, etc. It really took the iPhone nailing it to bring us the generation we have now of rectangle you can touch.
The use of glass as opposed to plastic was also critical in my opinion
> In other famous cases, Jobs’ exacting demands won out, to the eventual benefit of the final product. The screen of the phone was originally supposed to be composed of the same plastic that iPod screens were made of. But after a day in Jobs’ pocket, the prototype unit suffered from deep and permanent scratches thanks to his car keys. On a dime, Jobs switched the screen from plastic to Gorilla glass, even talking Corning into converting an entire factory in Harrisburg, Kentucky to produce the quantities Apple needed. This actually complicated things for the hardware team, since the multitouch sensors now had to be embedded in glass, and glass was an entirely different proposition from embedding in plastic.
I remember seeing the original iPhone for the first time. I was an ardent Apple hater and asked to play with it for a few minutes so I could uncover all of the dumb things Apple had done.
10 minutes later I needed to own one. My N95 immediately seemed completely awful in comparison.
I would add to this that in addition to differentiating features that would surface on a PRD, the quality of these features is critical.
Having capacitative multitouch is one thing, but having a quality touch screen is another. It is easy to lose sight of how much black-magic goes into making a usable capacitative muti-touch screen.
" yours back then trivialising the issue as just having to ‘come up with something’."
Sorry, I was not trying to trivialize the complexity of the issue. Rather, I was trying to slyly refer to the other competetive handsets already on the market back then.
The question was if Android had not happened, would Apple rule the mobile ecosystem completely. I don't think so. Rather, capital chose Android as the most viable alternative.
There were viable alternatives back then such as Meego which had the combined expertise of Nokia and Intel behind it.
It was the market and business that sealed Apple/Android duopoly, not the lack of viable alternative tech stacks.
Be mindful about windows phone too, it is very revisionist to call it failed; it had all the hallmarks of a successful product except it didn't have developer attention so it died.
It failed in perception, no one developed for it and why would they when MS could break their app compatibility any second with just a single update. It was already even less cool to use than Blackberry, to much enterprise and too little user focus. At the time geeks were unhappy about how the things were going with Windows on PCs. Partnering with MS and taking Elop as their CEO was the final nail in the Nokia coffin. They really should had partnered with one of the asian companies like HTC, they were fierce competitors at the time and guess who bought their mobile division and continues to make pixel phones there. It's easy to say that after the fact, but they could have stayed a niche player, instead Elop chose to completely devalue their brand.
By the time Elop took over at Nokia they were already doomed. The best they could have done was simply become another Android OEM.
The final iteration of Windows Mobile was excellent, what killed it wasn't marketing but ecosystem. MS wasn't competing with just Apple or Google. If they were they could have stood a chance, they're just as big, just as technically adept, had just as good a platform (in the end) and just as well capitalised. They could go toe to toe with any company in the world.
They weren't just competing with Apple and Google though, they were competing with them, plus all the existing handset manufacturers that had invested in Android, plus all the developers that were developing or had already released apps on Android or IOs, plus all the companies providing services for those platforms. The ecosystem provides ~10x or more market power than the platform owner on their own. That is what you're actually competing with when you go up against a market incumbent platform owner. It's the crucial difference between a platform and a product.
Sinfosky was responsible for tanking Windows Phone.
Windows Phone 7 could have evolved from Silverlight/XNA models, while evolving the support, maybe adding C++ support in the mix (On WP 7 C++ was only available to selected partners).
Instead WinDev just killed it (similar to how they torpedoed Longhorn), came up with WinRT using an incompatible variant from .NET, that not only dumped Silverlight/XNA, it required multiple reboots (WinRT, UAP and then UWP) always asking us to rewrite the applications between each reboot.
MSIX, WinUI (desktop UWP), .NET 5, C++/WinRT are just the long roadmap of fixing those issues, while trying to make everyone happy again.
Windows Phone 7 was still based on the old Windows CE kernel which couldn't support multiple cores, didn't have true multitasking or support background services, had a limited network stack, the list goes on. Windows Phone 8 finally came out with a true multitasking NT kernel based OS that could compete with the iPhone, 5 years after the iPhone launched.
This is why developer access to the system was so limited, it simply didn't have the sort of process isolation capabilities and the system services this enables that you need in a modern app platform. There's no way they could just open up low level programming to anybody to develop for it and everything would be fine, the skills and knowledge needed to develop for it efficiently and safely were highly specialised.
It’s not true that CE could not support multitasking. Originally CE up to 5.0 had a limitation in the number of processes it supported (32), in order to support more performant task switching (no TLB flushes for one) - though it did not have such a tight limitation on number of threads.
However the version of CE (6, released way back in 2006) that was released on Windows Phone did not have this restriction and version 7 released in 2011 also supported SMP.
Windows CE was really not an entirely incapable OS (and I personally despised it). Its real annoyance was having a completely non-standard bastardized/limited Win32 API which made it both an odd ball embedded RTOS and only vaguely similar to the API of Windows NT. Despite this it had considerable adoption in industrial computing — never a huge market though.
It’s hard to say this was a real problem though as no one considered OS X to be a phone OS before 2007 either. The bigger issue is that clearly MS wanted out from under CE before the phone was even released.
The limitations in Phone 7 were higher level, not due to the underlying kernel.
Sure. They could have pivoted and partnered with automotive industry, Maemo legacy isn't even completely gone yet and it sparked a whole new generation of open source developers. Also as far as I remember Qt were still used in cars.
> By the time Elop took over at Nokia they were already doomed.
They had a lot of money and a lot of market share. They could have culled a large part of the organisation, especially due to the insane policy of self-competition resulting in a lineup of almost-but-not-quite-identical handsets, either put more into Maemo/Meego or jumped ship to Android.
Instead they had an MS plant installed at the top who seemed determined to devalue the company then sell off everything to MS, who then just ran the brand into the ground while failing to get Win Phone to launch in any meaningful way.
> By the time Elop took over at Nokia they were already doomed.
Yeah, someone in Nokia engineering had made some company destroying miss calculations.
It's not like the didn't know what they were up against - it was race between engineering teams. And it's not like Nokia the company couldn't fund that race - they were a gorilla in the ring when it came to resources. They even saw the train coming at them, knew what it would do to them, did some awesome things like buy QT in preparation but it was nowhere near enough.
Blind freddy could see the pace of development happening on MeeGo and is predecessor (I forget what it was called) was nowhere near fast enough. Given the resources I expected Nokia to be throwing at it, either the team behind it was tiny, or they were tied up in some titanic tide of red tape go-slow goo.
It's not like it was an impossible ask. That was back in the days of Android Honeycomb and Gingerbread which were clearly something Google has slapped together in a rush. They were IMO barely usable. iPhone was barely more than a phone + ipod back then, granted with the best UI on the planet interface but even then the gulf between what Android would allow you to do what would be possible in Apple's walled garden was apparent, so there was space in the market for a different mix.
> The final iteration of Windows Mobile was excellent, what killed it wasn't marketing but ecosystem.
Well in that case it was obvious what happened. I've lost count of how many "throw it away and start again" iterations Microsoft went through. I do recall using one of their earlier attempts when they had very little competition. It was a Win95 interface crammed into tiny resistive touch screen, complete with start button. It was unusable without the stylus they provided. It had an uptime measured in hours - literally far worse than Win95, which was an amazing "achievement".
They threw major bits of it away and started again, and again, and again, each time with something that was 100% binary incompatible with the previous version so they never built up a customer and app base. Eventually they ended up on the NT kernel with an amazing GUI toolkit that as you quite rightly say was the best in class by any number of engineering metrics, but by that time the network effects of their competitors building up an enormous customer and applications by keeping compatibility completely annihilated them. Numbskulls.
Regarding Windows Phone, on one hand I was pleased to see what should have been .NET in first place, managed runtime built on top of COM, but the way it was rolled out initially incompatible across mobile, tablet and desktop (first WinRT iteration), it was just a mess.
Not only were Windows Phone 7 devs being asked to throw out their beloved Silverlight/XNA tooling, they were being told to rewrite the app three times with #ifdef, and in XNA's case to also move into C++ bare bones DirectX (here is when DirectXTK was born as XNA-like for C++).
How so? It never achieved much market share AFAICT, despite being marketed heavily everywhere from slashdot to the tv.
It had to be relaunched each revision as the platforms were incompatible, it was always way behind on features and playing catch-up... and eventually MS ditched it entirely.
Sure, absent android it could have had a shot. But I wouldn't call the platform a success.
We're talking about a hypothetical situation where android doesn't exist.
Microsoft phone OS 7 (the one that was adapted to the Nokia phones originally designed for MeeGo) was very polished and quite pleasant to use. I think it would have succeeded.
I say this through a clenched jaw though because I had just started working at Nokia during the time of the acquisition and was quite enthusiastic about MeeGo.
Microsoft phone 7 that couldn't use an arbitrary mp3 as a ringtone? Microsoft phone 7 that was pretty much ditched with an incompatible update in next to no time?
I don't think it's revisionist to call it a failure here in this universe where android does exist, like I say, if android didn't exist then maybe it would have taken off. Or maybe another linux variant would have had time to come to market. We shall never know.
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I found the marketing campaigns for Win Phone 7 and Win Phone 8 to be quite offensive. It started months before general availability of even an SDK, with posters on popular tech sites like /. asserting that it was the best platform ever for developers, and trying to get that accepted as some sort of consensus before anyone could even try it.
Then Win phone 7 got unceremoniously ditched (screw you developers) seemingly only a few months later and the exact same people started singing the exact same praises about WP8...
It just smacked of trying too hard, and being underhanded.
> Microsoft phone 7 that couldn't use an arbitrary mp3 as a ringtone?
And iOS which couldn't at the time either.
> Microsoft phone 7 that was pretty much ditched with an incompatible update in next to no time?
Due to no market-share. (Silverlight et al. was an abject failure)
I think it's fine to talk about it as if it's failed in the context of android existing; but the context here is iOS dominance in abstentia of Android itself, and I think there would have been other players (Windows Phone included) which would have contested it given the absence of android.
Windows phone was a contender and it just feels like it wasn't because Android not only won (and thus; you think of Android now vs Windows phone then) but won wildly.
Other phones could, and that seemed to be the expectation of two not-especially-technical friends/colleagues of mine at the time, and the answer being "No, you have to go to this special tool and cut out the first minute, then export in this format" led to both saying "what a pile of crap then, I should have got something else"
How did it not fail? Failing is something that you can only look on after it happened.
I think "failing to capture developer attention" and provide the benefits of that to your users counts as failing. Its just unfortunate that the vendor (MS) doesn't get as much control over that.
Remember we are discussing a parallel universe where Android did not happen. There was a brief time when Microsoft was a not-obviously dead in the water participant in the market. Without Android who knows how that market position had developed.
> Remember we are discussing a parallel universe where Android did not happen.
I think when someone says it's revisionist to call WinPhone a failure, we're talking about this universe. There isn't really a history to revise in an imaginary parallel universe...
Its revisionist to say that it was "never a contender", it was for a short time and lost monumentally. Had Android not existed it would not have lost so monumentally.
Windows phone sits in the minds of many as this "absolute failure that could never have worked" but the reality is that it could have worked had it not floundered so phenomenally in the wake of Android.
I guess that depends on what your threshold is for being "a contender".
All of this is a bit subjective, but if I asked 10 friends and 10 relatives whether they thought Windows Phone was a failure, I'd expect close to 10 friends to say "yes", most of the relatives to say "What is Windows Phone?", and the rest of the relatives (if there were any left) to likely say "yes".
Personally, I'd call that a failure.
Yeah, I know I haven't actually asked the questions (and probably won't), but I think I know my friends and relatives well enough to guess what they would say (mostly based on prior technical discussions).
Again, you're talking about the current state of things and not about the original cited discussion: "what if android didn't exist? would iOS dominate completely?" to-wit I responded that Microsoft might have very well stepped up to the plate, but in the reality we currently live in all OEM's were going Android; Additionally Microsoft crumbles and "pivots" under failure causing them to fail even harder in most cases.
Sorry, been busy last couple of days, and just got back to this.
Yeah, I quoted your "contender" line in my previous response, but I was seeing that as basically equivalent to what you said earlier: "is very revisionist to call it failed" -- which I interpreted to mean that it was a dishonest assessment of what actually happened.
I'm not sure how you can call something "revisionist" if you aren't actually talking about what really happened in history, so maybe that's the source of disconnnect here.
I saw your comment as not being tied to the imaginary universe, but as an aside reflecting your opinion of the value of the Windows Phone in reality.
I suspect that if Android hadn't happened, it is likely that some other entity would have produced a phone that had an equal chance of stomping out Windows Phone. Not that it really matters, because like I said, my opinion is, that in reality Windows Phone was a failure, and I was just responding thinking you were saying that wasn't a fair assessment.
I actually think Windows Phone died only because of the Windows brand. It was otherwise a better product than early Android.
For years (and this may still be the case) the average smartphone user only downloads chat, social media, and games to their phone anyway (if anything at all).
Windows Phone died because Google played dirty. They basically prevented Windows Phone from having decent Google apps such as youtube/google maps. They also did user agent blocks to ensure those web applications didn't work on the phone.
Google did the same thing with Amazon Fire devices. I am frankly surprised they haven't been rung over for anti-trust lawsuit for how they seem to abuse play services.
For a platform the two requirements for determining success are developer attention and money earned by the platform. You can't really have one without the other, but you can have differences between the two metrics and use those differences to plan for the future.
I dont know why people kept calling it revisionist history. Me and everyone I know except for a handful of people really hated how Windows Mobile works. Maybe its great in some way, buts its definitely not great in mainstream user perspective. And its not just because lack of apps. That was a time when I could forgive lack of apps if its meant better smartphone.
WebOS was interesting and pretty clever, they certainly had the UI down pretty well, but I think Mobile Windows would have killed them in the end. I just don't think they were ever going to get the resources, not just in money but also in the depth and breadth of developer talent and additional platform services, to compete at the Apple/Microsoft/Google level. Only those firms had those resources, and no amount of money can replicate that fast enough for it to matter.
If the company lives long enough, the hardware can always be improved. So can the software.
Palm proved that people wanted computers that would fit in their hands and pockets comfortably; that instantaneous readiness to work trumped other aspects of speed; that battery life is really important, but being able to drop a new battery set in is the fastest recharge method available.
Yeah, i seems like half their interface guys went to apple or google respectively and what was left of webos got morphed into a smart tv ui, that frankly isn't bad, although all the apps suck, so I don't use it.
I still get to see the webOS logo occasionally when my television reboots. A bit of nostalgia every few months.
Too bad LG had to ruin the user experience with the stupid magic wand remote control. If you think voice control of TVs is bad, imagine a remote that you can't leave next to you on the couch because every time you move, a giant pink cursor pops up on the screen and a menu overlay slides in from the side over what you're watching.
And as xorcist said https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22287837 it seems likely that Nokia really had finally figured it out with Meego (though I've never touched the thing myself). It was fairly inevitable that a decent #2 smartphone OS would be along sooner or later as soon as iOS had provided the competitive impetus and the blindingly obvious model to crib from.
OTOH it's also quite clear why Google would not have wanted to gamble on waiting around for somone else to get their act together, especially since it already happened to own the guts of an okay smartphone platform. Not only would a viable #2 have taken an uncertain amount of time to emerge, it could have turned out to be someone quite unfriendly to Google: it would very likely have been MS, after all. And after all (viz. __ka https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22287118 ) what other platform owner was ever going to be friendlier to Google search than Google itself?
And let's be frank, by the mid-2000s it wasn't really that bloody hard, from a purely technical point of view, to ship a decent mobile OS running on an adequate hardware platform. It seems pretty clear that in almost all cases, what was most sorely missing was someone with both the power and the taste to make an overall assessment of UX and say "no, this is shit, come back with something acceptable"; maybe to even make a few hirings or acquisitions if necessary to get someone competent on the problem. But this is one facet of one of the most remarkable and slightly strange things in the history of tech. Even by not too long into the '90s it was easy, for anyone with eyes to see, to look at a Macintosh on one side and a VCR blinking 00:00 on the other and see what the future of device UI was. But companies with massive resources and their very future at stake, including firms of impressive competence like Sony and Nokia, couldn't get there. Up to the early iPhone age it seems that the list of companies which could do good work in software-heavy/"smart" UI was roughly:
1) Apple
2) Microsoft, but only when Apple first provided them a detailed model to crib from. Not something to sneer at too much, because others couldn't do it even then
3) Some Mac/PC ISVs who could do good work, but purely in software and only inside the lines of the existing Windows/Mac platforms. (OFC by this time MS itself was effectively a Mac ISV with notions.)
See also the iPod, Apple's Digital Hub strategy (Jobs' hope that consumers would buy Macs in order to make their consumer-electronics devices usable), Sony's catastrophic missed opportunity to turn PlayStation into an app and Web-browser platform https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288538 , and the fear other companies felt towards MS even after Apple had been first to a hit smartphone.
It seems pretty clear that in almost all cases, what was most sorely missing was someone with both the power and the taste to make an overall assessment of UX and say "no, this is shit, come back with something acceptable"; maybe to even make a few hirings or acquisitions if necessary to get someone competent on the problem.
By all accounts I've read, that someone was Steve Jobs. After Rubin saw what iPhone was, he apparently completely pivoted Android to go the same way. Before aiming for the full-handset touchscreen paradigm, Android was supposed to be able to handle all types of handsets, including foldables, keyboard slideouts, Blackberry paradigms, etc, all depending on what manufacturers wanted to make. Seeing the iPhone changed the game, so much that Steve Jobs had his "going thermonuclear" rant about Android stealing his stuff. Ironic for a guy who once claimed that Apple was shameless about stealing other people's stuff because great artists steal.
Android could and did handle all kinds of handsets. It wasn't Android that took the industry in the iPhone form factor, it was the OEMs. People tend to think Android had way more power over the mobile industry than it actually did back then. Android got all kinds of dumb stuff put in it because a major carrier or OEM i.e. customer wanted it there.
That also constrained Android's innovation significantly. Some people say Android copied iOS, which is only partly true, and of course iOS has also copied Android over time. But when I was at Google I did encounter quite a few stories of cases where the Android team came up with something really clever and it was shot down by carriers and OEMs who said "we want what the iPhone does". They had no vision at all.
In fairness to carriers though, T-Mobile's QA effort on the G1/G2 were pretty intense. At the time Android's QA was near non-existent and the carrier testing procedure found tons of bugs.
Google also had early access to the iPhone because it was one of the few (the only?) non Apple companies to release Ana app on the iPhone on day 1 (Maps was powered by and created by Google initially if I remember correctly).
The first iteration of the Google Maps app was actually written by Apple engineers, and just used Google APIs to access their mapping data. Google took over development later when the iPhone dev kits became available to third parties.
> Google took over development later when the iPhone dev kits became available to third parties.
Google didn’t take over the stock Maps until after 2010/2011 when Google and Apple had a big falling out. Apple wanted to keep pushing the app experience further, but Google wanted to own the app (and associated data collection) and so wouldn’t license more to Apple. This was exactly the reason Apple did their own maps and was forced to release too early. Apple couldn’t renegotiate the contract and their hand was forced.
Same thing applied for the built in stocks and weather apps. Yahoo provided the APIs, but Apple entirely owned the app experience and wrote all the code.
That sounds off. I had Google Maps on my Samsung flip-phone somewhere around 2007 - can't remember if it was before or after the iPhone's release though.
Those are just other clients to the Google Maps service, and some of those clients might have predated the iPhone. It just happens that the client on early iPhones was written by Apple, but clients on other platforms may have been developed by Google.
The impressive thing about the client on iPhone wasn't the maps themselves as such, other phones had maps, it was the ease and fluidity of navigation using multi-touch gestures, and the simple integration with system services such as location services. Bear in mind phones back then didn't have pre-emptive multitasking.
Nokia n770 "an internet tablet", had maemo mapper which used the Google Map data. It worked well, the main problem is that n770 had no WAN chip. You could preload map tiles though.
This was before the iphone, and years before google maps would work offline.
> None of the handset makers back then were in a position to come up with a workstation class OS, with desktop class application development frameworks and highly tuned power management and commercial level software development tool chains.
Did you ever use early Android? It was impressively bad.
Yes and you're right, it took the Android team years to catch up, but they started a massive course correction effort basically the day the iPhone was announced. Google realised how much of a threat the iPhone was and threw everything they had at getting Android up to speed. My point is the incumbent phone handset companies didn't have those sorts of resources in skilled development teams with system level experience and support services available to throw at anything.
Microsoft left it for years, believing they could still compete using their single tasking Windows CE kernel based platform. That's why Windows 8 with a true pre-emptive multitasking NT based kernel, able to run background services and run on multiple cores wasn't ready until 2012. By then Android had already had it's act together for a few years and it was too late for MS.
>I must have read a handful of posts a month like yours back then trivialising the issue as just having to ‘come up with something’.<
I remember ESR going on and on about how Apple was doomed any day now. He lost site of how the direction the world was going, wishing instead it went where he wanted it to end up.
NOKIA had N9, the only phone that was well-received by US reviewers, quite few calling it better than iPhone, yet Elop killed it off by not allowing it to sell in major markets (e.g. Germans had to buy it in Switzerland).
NOKIA was used by Microsoft's investors as a way to get MS back into mobile game, unsuccessfully. It was an internal coup. With the revenue and world-wide market share they had, they could have survived for a few years, finally going full speed ahead with MeeGo, at the cost of never making it in the US, but continuing their dominance in the rest of the world.
There seems to be some foul play involved in ruining NOKIA as Elop had a bonus for the sale of a company in his initial contract and the chairman of the board publicly distrusted his own engineers as unable to compete with Silicon Valley.
Finnish economy is still in shambles from NOKIA's downfall and only Google/US profited from taking over the fastest growing market segment at that time from NOKIA. EU lost its only competitive tech company.
The N9 was so good. Meego was great, the all-swipe, no-buttons interface was way ahead of iOS and Android at the time. The hardware with its subtley curved screen was perfectly designed around it. The phone was the right size.
I might still be using mine if it didn't have an unfortunate bug, which always came back eventually, where SMS messages would show up under the wrong person. Nokia said they'd support it until 2015 but that didn't happen, I think the last update was in 2012. The community made some fixes for other bugs, but not for that one.
The Meego interface is better than what I have in my Android 10 phone... Those gestures are so awkward and bolted on. I haven't used an iPhone with gesture navigation but I imagine their navigation is only marginally better, also being bolted on later.
it is better. N9/Meego was designed with those gestures as the main navigation of the OS. So it somehow feel intuitive and natural to use it. In comparison the Android gesture is nice, buts its just a nice extra imo.
I would probably still use N9 as my 2nd phone if its not broken.
Not really. It uses a completely different paradigm. 3 screens next to each other. One is notifications, one is a list of installed programs, and the third is a scrollable list of open apps (somewhat similar to tabs in FF for Android). It was later used (and greatly refined) on the failed Blackberry QNX-based devices.
SwipeUI winds up very usable on a phone, but basically unusable everywhere else. This is in stark contrast to the webOS paradigm which is much closer to a macOS desktop (dock at the bottom, menu always at the top left, settings always at top right, and modified/improved deck of cards "expose"). Because of this, scaling webOS to tablets or even desktops isn't difficult.
If Steve Jobs had seen the webOS UI, the iPhone would definitely be using it today.
If there was foul play involved, you'd have to pull back a few more curtains to find it. Information that transpired after it was all over was that the Nokia board hired Elop with the assignment to sell to Microsoft.
The N9 is a really sad story. I had one, it was great. It did get some "better than iPhone" reviews. It was in development for too long, and when it was released and it was great, Nokia was too cowardly to bet on it.
You can't really call it foul play, it was deliberate corporate takeover.
They had an unplanned stockholders meeting where the then-CEO was voted out and Elop was ushered in. He did a lot of good stuff like clean up five layers of middle management, got rid of build-it-five-times mentality as well as bring Nokia up-to-date with a bunch of modern practices.
But then he made a PUBLIC speech about Symbian being dead and that they would have an amazing Windows phone at the end of the year. This caused the Osborne effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect) to just eat up Nokia.
Nokia was ahead of the game in a lot of things, like platform security -- let's not forget the first iOS ran everything as root and had no App store, while Nokia was making secure boot and encrypted applications happen.
Nokia was five or ten years ahead of everyone else in technology (you can look at iOS history and tick off boxes when they catch up to Nokia), but they had massive problems in their company culture. Nokia could not have bet on the N9 because they just didn't have that sort of mentality.
Nokia decided to never adopt Android ever and that decision started the whole collapse, I think.
They chose to maximize diversity of investment, while opposing widespread use of free beer software, that is Android as perhaps they perceived. That combined with Microsoft’s chronic inability to launch and stabilize new platform led to burnt ash of Microsoft Mobile.
Had Nokia adopted Android and had Google allowed them to maintain MeeGo, a MeeGo/Android/S60/Series40 train of platforms could have worked at least for a while.
> Had Nokia adopted Android and had Google allowed them to maintain MeeGo
IIRC that wasn't a possible option, thanks to Google's monopolistic practices that prevented other companies from shipping phones with Google's proprietary apps and at the same time shipping phones with alternative mobile OSs.
That was a mayor reason why technical people rooted against Android open-but-not-so-much and for any other available truly-free-software platform.
That’s not true. Samsung shipped GAPPs Android devices along with phones running their own proprietary mobile OS. HTC, Samsung, LG etc shipped GAPPs Android phones at the same time shipped windows mobile phones
That's right, my memory failed me. Google's anti-competition behavior was limited to preventing companies from distributing both devices with and without their proprietary Play Services at the same time, thus making it almost impossible for hardware manufacturers to support non-Google's AOSP full open-source distributions of Android; which is bad enough as it is.
In NOKIA's case, they couldn't ship e.g. NOKIA Maps (now HERE) as default navigation, but instead use Google Maps; that would make their navigation investment pointless.
No they could have shipped Nokia maps as default just as long as Google Maps was included as part of the GAPPs suite. Samsung still ships many of their proprietary apps as default (Samsung Pay, their own messaging and mail app etc)
I am not convinced board hired Elop to sell the company to Microsoft. Anecdotally Jorma Ollila, the Nokia Chairman when Elop was hired[0], was extremely agravated to learn the sale of handsets had taken place [1].
I am wondering if the surveillance capitalism we have now would have been impeded if NOKIA was still around in full force. I miss time when my phone didn't track everything I did. The only alternative I own now is running on SailfishOS, from MeeGo team members.
It’s the apps that spy on you, largely not the OS.
If you lock down your app permissions and install the bare minimum of apps that you need or aren’t practical as web versions, you can absolutely limit your blast radius.
Changing your OS to sailfish isn’t helping you on its own. Sailfish can run Android apps, so if you installed an Android app and gave it those permissions, you’d have the same problem.
It's not just your phone that spies on you, it's mostly the apps on it that do. With no Android to push it so hard and fast, perhaps surveillance capitalism would be a bit less developed by now, but I doubt the difference would be all that big. The allure of corrupt money is just too high, and the pressure is industry-wide.
Not true, Symbian was highly locked down. You needed permission for pretty much anything, and some of them required you to ask Nokia for permission. It's probably part of the reason why it didn't take off in the US.
The N9 did have a chance, I think. If you live in the US, you have no idea how big Nokia was. Problem was that the decision to sell to Microsoft was made before the N9 release. It would have taken a lot of courage to change course. People making that decision could have ended up looking like idiots. The N9's success was possible but not a sure thing.
"Never presume an action is caused by ill will if it can be explained by ineptitude".
Reading materials related to Nokia at that time period it was pretty dysfunctional as it was. The only mistake I can accrue for Elop was his "Burning platform" memo - which is basically paraphrazing crisis management 101. So he was clearly out of his depth when running Nokia.
I think the sale of Nokia handsets to Microsoft was quite the coup. At that time the value of that IP was close to zero and Microsoft paid billions for it.
If there was foul play intended then the players surely lost. The fall of Nokia was the best thing to happen to Finland. It was far too big an enterprise for a small country. It basically stifled innovation and entrepreurship accross the board.
Not sure, if you look at how Elop (mis)managed the company piece-by-piece, first by sidelining MeeGo, then one by one closing Indian factories that made NOKIA independent (ask Indians how fun that was), then splitting off Qt to prevent any kind of internal competition to MS' platform, including the sell-off bonus Elop had in the contract, the Hanlon's razor applicability is pretty low. If you want to believe there wasn't some background deal between top management, rendering all NOKIA employees sacrificial lambs for MS, OK.
Hanlon's razor becomes more credible once you understand how mismanaged Nokia already was at the point Elop took in the reins. He may have been in the boat when it sunk, but it already had lot of holes in it.
Both Jorma Ollila (the Chair) and Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the CEO preceding Elop, were financial experts, not tech visionaries. The organization that had created the rise of Nokia was split to pieces before Elop took control with no understanding that you can't run an technology corporation like an investment bank.
"rendering all NOKIA employees sacrificial lambs for MS"
'Sacrificial lamb' is quite hyperbolic. The laid of people enjoyed quite good benefits. You don't become an instant destitute in Finland just because you are temporarily out of a job.
The way the handset business was going, Microsoft basically paid 8 billion for the privilege of a dead-in-the water platform and the nicety of laying off the staff .
If there ever was an evil plot to steal value from Nokia's shareholders then it was thoroughly botched.
>The way the handset business was going, Microsoft basically paid 8 billion for the privilege of a dead-in-the water platform and the nicety of laying off the staff .
It was having issues when Elop came in but still had potential for rebound and good market share.
Elop just stomped any potential for that in the ground making it dead in the water.
I was horrified when they signed that deal with the devil. Nokia shares suffered 20% drop.
By that time everyone already knew what were going to happen eventually.
> Reading materials related to Nokia at that time period it was pretty dysfunctional as it was. The only mistake I can accrue for Elop was his "Burning platform" memo - which is basically paraphrazing crisis management 101. So he was clearly out of his depth when running Nokia.
I just did some very superficial reading on the "Burning Platform" memo (the first time I had heard of it).
I'm intrigued by the idea that the memo shows Elop was "out of his depth". Is there something I can read to explain why this was such a terrible management move? What would have been a better response?
The Symbian eco-system had just started to finally move into Qt as main development platform, Qt on Symbian got PIPS (POSIX compatibility layer), there was the third reboot of the Eclipse based IDE (Carbide), Symbian Java was getting JavaSE extensions, Python and Web Runtime were made available, Symbian Open Source project had just been made available.
So everyone was putting the effort to move away from Symbian C++, J2ME into a more pleasant environment, and then comes Elop with that memo saying to everyone that all their efforts were gone to the trashcan and it was time to embrace Silverlight and XNA instead.
Also from internal point of view, this memo was very bad, because until then Nokia had an heavy anti-Windows culture, and now everyone had to suck it up, leave HP-UX, Linux, Symbian behind and embrace Windows.
The burning platform memo basically triggered the Osborne effect [0] on the whole range of Nokia's smartphone offerings.
If you read crisis management literature this "burning platform" metaphor is literally in the "For dummies" section (at least what I recall). It implies he was desperately trying to find something to drive a message trhough the organization and he grabbed the most obvious and stereotypical thing he could find.
I was in Nokia at the time. As soon as it was released onto the intranet news feed, a couple of thousand employees immediately stopped caring and were more focused on hanging around for their redundancy payment.
The Nokia London office had an emergency Town Hall session in The Oval cricket ground building where execs tried to convince us that Symbian was safe. Those claims were met with actual laughter from the crowd.
Ah, you mean all device and radio patents were left with Nokia? Sorry, can't seem to remember the details on a moments notice - but I think you are correct. Hence MS underwrote all of Nokia acquisitions as a complete loss eventually.
Maybe I'm mixing my timelines but when was this? I thought the N9 was released a couple of years after the first iphone? Around the time there was iphone4?
None of them has revenue comparable to NOKIA before Elop. Look at the unemployment level in Finland right after NOKIA went belly up. They were some of the worst in EU in that period. Now instead of one huge company you have hundreds small ones that combined can't even reach 10% of NOKIA's revenue. That must be felt in taxes.
I wanted to add to this list but as it turns out, all of the EU's top companies (the top x list starts at around $22B revenue) aren't tech companies; oil and gas, automotive, utilities and financial services are the main ones. Mind you the list is from 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_compa...
It's true, but perhaps it's also worth mentioning that Europe has a large number of small and medium sized companies in general and high tech companies in particular.
For instance, the Obama administration blocked the takeover of Aixtron by a Chinese company because Aixtron was so key to national security.
The US Attorney General recommended a few days ago that the US take a share in Ericsson and Nokia, because they are the main 5G equipment suppliers besides Huawei.
A recent takeover of Kuka, an industrial robot maker, has caused a lot of concern as well. Germany has a lot of small to medium sized high tech equipment makers that are mostly privatly owned.
Robert Bosch, the largest car parts manufacturer in the world, is not a publicly listed company and not usually classed as a tech company, but it does make some of the most high tech parts that go in to cars. It's certainly no less of a tech company than, say, Facebook.
Then of course there are companies like ARM, SAP, Siemens, ASML, Amadeus Group, Infineon, Vestas or Airbus. No, they are not the size of Apple and ARM is now owned by SoftBank.
You see the pattern? Europe doesn't have consumer tech. It does have a lot of high tech equipment makers and parts suppliers.
Europe is really bad at selling to consumers (apart from France's and Italy's luxury goods makers and traditionally auto makers that are now suffering as cars become software platforms), and that's exactly where network effects have created those giant tech companies that now dominate US stock indices.
So yes, I think Europe is in a pretty bad place right now when it comes to tech, but it's not quite as bad as what you might think if you're just looking at the biggest components of stock indices.
Given NOKIA hosted Qt that was the only reasonable alternative to Java in Mobile, and the only threatening tech, it indeed was the only relevant European tech company. I met Haavard Nord at Googleplex just before he sold Qt to NOKIA and Google was in the play as well. Had Google acquired Qt, Android could have been Qt-based instead.
Nokia never was a 'tech' company in the sense we attribute the term nowadays. Their core expertise was in the areas that are now handled by an integrated Asian logistics and manufacturing network available to all.
The mobile handset is only one part of the multiplicity that creates the mighty FAANG product and service portfolio and Nokia never had strong offerings in most of them.
> Nokia never was a 'tech' company in the sense we attribute the term nowadays.
In what sense? By the size alone, off course you can't compare it to the american and asian mega companies. The ambition to be a european mobile tech leader was still around in the mid 2000s. At least in Europe Nokia arguably had one of the most dedicated customer crowds in the handheld devices category. To piss all that away in one move left a big stain...
It was 10 years ago so I know people might not remember this, but I do and I think it’s relevant. RIM had 10 year development cycles for devices. They had blackberries designed 10 years out and had nothing on the horizon that looked like an iPhone.
> Do not understate how ridiculous the iPhone was when it launched. You had to side load apps on your phone to use them. Remember getjar.com?
It looked ridiculous for for your average grandma but for young tech enthusiasts that was half the fun. That turned out to be detrimental for your average grandma but not the amount of cash that apple got at the bank. Did it matter that you could put SD card into your iphone , obviously not because you still can't.
I was at Nokia during Elop's short reign, and while he gets a lot of blame for what happened to them -- some of it fairly -- the thing is, that memo was basically right.
Remember, by this point it was 2010. The iPhone had already taken off like a rocket, Android had pivoted to be "iPhone-like" and other companies were riding its rocketship -- and Meego, Nokia's ostensible Symbian successor, was way, way behind schedule. The Nokia Communicator was a great "computer in your pocket" device for a certain kind of ubergeek, but it wasn't ever going to be a mainstream smartphone. I know there are people who still fiercely defend the hardware keyboard -- I was a Sidekick user and used to be one of them! -- but it was obvious by 2009 that "giant touch screen with virtual keyboard" was the runaway winner, and it was also obvious by 2009 that most of the incumbents had dealt themselves death blows by refusing to read the writing on the wall.
Elop's memo came about after he looked at the N9, what was supposed to be their response to the iPhone and Android, and it was clearly not just too little, too late, but at the time he saw it, it literally just did not work. You were lucky if you could get through a few hours without a fatal crash.
Anyway -- I don't think Apple would own the mobile space without Android, either, but I think there's a good chance they'd have a larger marketshare than they do just because nobody else would gotten a credible response to the market before 2011. Maybe it would have opened up space for Windows Phone and WebOS to keep existing, which would have been nice. (Although if we're playing "what if," it's possible that if Windows Phone had succeeded, Microsoft wouldn't have gotten desperate enough to go through its executive shakeup and, ironically, would have been in a worse place today!)
What's nifty about Google's business rationale here is how tight and elegant it is.
The strategic case needs to clear a very low "knowability" threshold in order to justify their conclusion. Great example of contingency-based strategy.
Google didn't need to waste a ton of cycles on the counterfactuals (would RIM/Nokia/others be a threat? Would Apple really box us out if they win? etc.).
Android was simply a way to de-risk a potentially catastrophic scenario and give them some optionality.
Palm's WebOS was already competing and was better than Android at that point. Android being out there with Google behind it sucked the air out of the room, and WebOS was only deployed on hardware that was 6-8 months behind the competition... and so it died.
Perhaps things would have turned out differently without Android in the picture. I really liked WebOS
If wikipedia is correct, the google acquisition of Android was two years before Palm launched WebOS?
Palm (and RIM) has a kind of first-mover disadvantage; they'd build a fantastic niche, and people loved their devices, but that inherently prevented them from building something completely different like the iPhone which could take the mass market and be "imitated" by Android.
Sure, 2 years before, but in that 2 years period Android looked nothing like iOS. As others have pointed out it was an entirely different kind of UX until Apple announced the iPhone.
WebOS was the first to come along after the iPhone and make something competitive. Android took some time to catch up. I don't think your statement is correct about Palm -- they weren't like RIM, stuck with an old OS for eons unable to switch because legacy; WebOS and Palm Pre were launched pretty soon after the iPhone.
They just didn't do well in the market, because they couldn't keep up on hardware manufacture, and Android took the not-Apple ecosystem over despite being an inferior experience for many years.
I think Blackberry killed themselves... they should have spun off and created business email apps for iOS and Android and focused on the software licensing... interacting with MS Exchange was painful around that time, and BB had a lock in on the corporate culture... they could have expanded into that space well before google docs and o365 took hold.
I think Nokia might have eventually caught up, and I think the Windows Phones that came later could have been even more compelling. I thought Metro UX was really nice, but just missing crucial apps compared to iOS and Android... if MS had pushed about 2 years earlier with that OS, they'd be in a different position in the space.
These days, who knows. It's easy to speculate with some hindsight.
I think it's less about "Apple would own the mobile space", but "some other company than us would own the mobile space and would be a threat to our advertising business".
Just like Microsoft owned the browser market in the late 90's and 2000's, and it was a problem for Google. That's why they poured resources first into Firefox, then into Google Chrome.
Microsoft/Windows would have won, not Apple. Apple is doomed† by the fact that they're a vertically integrated provider with a limited range of products. That makes them a big player in every market they are, but rarely the biggest. People crave simplicity but the real world is very messy and needs are super varied so they have to settle for complexity that solves their issues.
At a much larger scale and with the US as a much bigger hold out, it's happening again now, very, very slowly. Before it was PC/Windows vs Mac now it's Android vs iOS.
† "Doomed" is hyberbole, they'll just never be the biggest player on a long term scale. But they'll make zounds of money along the way :-)
Vertical integration is how you win the upper edges of the market, Apple’s goal was never to have 90% market share, it was simply to make the best product and have (affluent) customers buy it. They know that the bottom 50% of the market is low-profit and low-CSAT products so they don’t touch it. To go a step further, Microsoft only really found any success in Windows Phone when they vertically integrated their involvement with WP. I agree that if you are chasing market share you should be licensing software, but if you want profits you should be chasing product. When compared, the Microsoft Model ends up being exemplified by the underperforming licensees. It makes holes for companies like Apple or Palm to make their own product that owns the story of the market. We are in a little different of a world than the 90s now. Android’s on most phones out there...but those manufacturers are looking at everything Apple does and following suit.
True, but as a vertically integrated company you only need to slip once badly and the piranhas eat you up. Everyone else, collectively, can make way more mistakes and still come out on top, long term. Apple has learned from past mistakes, though.
> what actually killed Nokia handsets in one stroke was one memo by their then CEO Stehphen Elop where he basically stated their platform as it is was dead in the water.
Gotta disagree with you there - when the burning platform memo came out the battle was already decided, even if it wasn't over.
I owned a series of Nokia high-end smartphones through this era, and I have to disagree with this:
> what actually killed Nokia handsets in one stroke was one memo by their then CEO Stehphen Elop where he basically stated their platform as it is was dead in the water
IMO, Nokia was infact dead in the water compared to Apple and Android, and Elop was just the one to recognize it in a culture of stagnated development coasting on past glories, and call it out loud enough that it might possibly change in time.
The key falling behind point, as I see it, is that Nokia just never got on board with making app development and distribution easy. Symbian phones in theory supported loading apps. In the many years that I owned one, I think I was able to install 1 or 2 total, which were mostly never used. IIRC, there was an app store with virtually nothing on it, and useful apps were usually downloaded from random websites directly. I don't recall the process exactly, and I never tried to look into building and distributing one myself, but it sure wasn't as easy as open the official store -> find an app that's useful -> tap "install" -> done, use the app.
The bigger issue, also IMO, is that their engineering culture just never got into the rapid cadence that the new-gen phone OSes brought - they were stuck in the appliance mentality. The first iPhone and Android were a little lame compared to the best Nokias. Nokia's development pace was always slow though. iOS and Android rapidly eclipsed them, while they essentially stood still.
I did also own one of the Meego devices. It was basically junk compared to Android. Nokia never had a chance. Elop might have been a MS stooge, but it was still arguably the best move they had at the time.
> People don't remember but, what actually killed Nokia handsets in one stroke was one memo by their then CEO Stehphen Elop where he basically stated their platform as it is was dead in the water. Until then they had had a fairly good portion of the market, but that single statement just killed it. People who did not like IPhone moved from Nokia phones to Android after that.
The way I saw that was that Elop was pretty much hired by the board to sell the company to Microsoft. Maybe he had some last ditch efforts in mind to save the company, but the fallback plan seems to have always been to lean on his connections to sell the place to a former employer. As a random example, he was allowed to keep his shares in MSFT, a direct competitor and eventual buyer, while working as the CEO of Nokia. This conflict of interest would likely have been blessed by the board of directors.
Android certainly make Nokia's life harder, but like, if Nokia couldn't negotiate subsidies from operators, they were going to be sold for parts regardless.
> People don't remember but, what actually killed Nokia handsets in one stroke was one memo by their then CEO Stehphen Elop where he basically stated their platform as it is was dead in the water.
That's like saying that declaring the patient has pneumonia killed the patient.
Nokia was treading water, and everyone knew it. Their Symbian phones were plasticky slow devices with a stillborn ecosystem. Their Linux devices were plasticky hacky devices that only geeks loved. They were hooked on the feature-phone pipeline and couldn't decide how to face the smartphone revolution. They had dozens of competing models that splintered their development efforts and made them compete, ineffectually, with each other.
Elop told them the truth, didn't find a way to flip the behemoth around in 6 months, and sold the company. There absolutely is valid debate about selling the company, but people underestimate the difficulty of radically changing such a large company to effectively compete with the new existential threat.
At the time I worked for STMicro, in the division developing the Nomadik line of SoCs for Nokia's smartphones. We were all carefully watching Nokia's numbers and very nervous about their continued assertions that they'd pull it together.
I quit ST in January 2011, knowing (like all my colleagues) that the Titanic was heading for its iceberg. The "Burning Platform" memo came out in February.
"Nokia, for example, had lots of nice Linux handheld devices before IPhone."
True, and their partnership with Microsoft killed them all. When the 770 came out I bought it almost immediately; it was more like an expensive toy (1), but years before the first iPhone was being introduced it showed how Nokia had the technology ready.
(1) there was a way to navigate Google Maps (or how was called back then) from this mobile device before any Android and iPhone devices were produced. A small utility (forgot the name, sorry) allowed the download of Google maps as tiles, georeference and rearrange them in a bigger map on storage memory, so that thanks to an external GPS receiver paired to the 770 via Bluetooth I could have my Tomtom-like screen perfectly useable with maps of the entire city.
Microsoft killed Meego and Nokia, taking part of Finland with it. What I don't understand is why the board of Nokia went for it. Granted, I've been in the open-source world for a long time so my opinions might not be those of the average non-tech user, but Meego did feel like it could have kept some people happy ("critical mass") while giving Nokia a chance to rebuild itself. Instead, the board sold out, and destroyed what could have been a worthwhile competitor to the more closed platforms of Android and iOS. Jolla is still alive with Sailfish OS, but they are a very small fish in the sea.
Remember, the board is responsible for stockholders. When Nokia's handset business was sold to MS, the value of the handset business to Nokia was close to zero. It would have been very difficult for the board not to accept a deal at the given pricepoint.
Had Blackberry created an email and messaging client for iPhone I am 100% positive they'd still be around. It took Apple almost a decade on the email front to get to where Blackberry + BES was in the early 2000s. Blackberry messenger was THE THING back then too, and a reason I had friends who weren't even in the business world buying Blackberry phones.
Sad part is Nokia started the Nokia 770. Linux kernel, c based, nice 800x480 screen, (big enough for web pages of the day), app store, icon based GUI launcher, and a map app MUCH nicer than anything else in that space (maemo mapper).
Sadly it took too many years for Nokia to add a WAN chip to it, tragic. They had a good lead over Apple, but had no WAN chip, quite ironic for Nokia.
"those incumbents would have come up with something."
I am convinced about the exact opposite. Apple interrupted so many different industries, all were sooner on the market with more resources and very good financial situation. Steve Jobs was extremely tough on staff do deliver what he wanted. He also had an extremely good 6th sense what people wanted. Combining all of these, you get Apple, lacking any of these you get the rest.
But Android was exactly created by others than Apple.
So while Apple surely performed admirably, I'm not sure how you can follow historical evidence to the conclusion that "without Android no one would have competed with Apple".
Android was also not made by those incumbents. I don't necessarily agree but it seems like the point wasn't that it was impossible so much as the old guard was not capable or willing.
Had there not been an Android, I'm pretty sure one of those incumbents would have come up with something.
Nokia, for example, had lots of nice Linux handheld devices before IPhone. They were encumbered by a degraded engineering culture and Symbian.
People don't remember but, what actually killed Nokia handsets in one stroke was one memo by their then CEO Stehphen Elop where he basically stated their platform as it is was dead in the water. Until then they had had a fairly good portion of the market, but that single statement just killed it. People who did not like IPhone moved from Nokia phones to Android after that.
Now, without Android, there might have not been such an obvious migration path, and Nokia might have kept some of it's customers. Nokia managed to get some great handsets out after that, but they had already lost market momentum.
Nokia was never a big competitor in the US market mainly because they refused to play the game by the operators rules, hence the operators did not really endorse them.
Without Android, once again, I think there might have been openings for Nokia to get into the handset market state side.
Or Blackberry or Ericsson might have come up with something.
The thing that commoditized handset market was not actually Android, but the availability of cheap radio circuits from Asia. Until then the radio technology had been the secret sauce of the encumbents, not software. When the radio stack became commoditized, the playing field changed fairly rapidly.
I'm pretty sure there would have been competing Linux enabled smart devices in one way or another without Android. Android just got there first.