[Interest] Semi-OT: What could / should Elop / Nokia have done differently?

[Atlant Schmidt]

K. Frank:

> But what about my first question?  Suppose you had been
> brought in instead of Elop to lead Nokia back then.  If I
> understand you correctly, you're saying that Nokia was
> already in a deep hole.  What path would you have taken
> that you think could have worked?  (Or do you think Nokia
> was already beyond salvation even at that point?)

  Ahh, sorry, I got so wrapped-up in what I wrote that
  I forgot to answer that part of your question. ;-)

  I was very fond of the strategy that I *THOUGHT* was
  emerging within Nokia: Use Symbian to "hold the fort"
  until Maemo/MeeGo was "ready for prime time".

  The problem Nokia ran into was that 1) iPhone and Android
  created a much larger, much faster disruption in the
  marketplace than the Nokia leadership had originally
  assumed and 2) the attempt to switch Symbian (really,
  the S60 User Interface) from a D-Pad metaphor to a
  touchscreen metaphor was bombing badly, creating
  products like the N97 ("Ivalo") that quite frankly
  sucked when initially released.

  So, what I would have done was:

  1. Kicked the asses of all of those Symbian-family developers
     who thought 7,000+ warning messages was "OK".

     I tracked down some of those warnings and at least a few
     dozen of them were real, non-nonsense warnings such as
     "variable accessed before being set". At least several
     of those particular warnings explained bugs that were
     in my own group's bug-tracking data base. That is, for
     at least a few of our bugs, we didn't need to have spent
     months trying to reproduce and diagnose an obscure bug,
     we need only have *FIXED THE DAMNED WARNINGS* that the
     compiler was already being nice enough to give us. But
     there was no time and no priority to do that. :-(

     I would have fixed that.

     I also would have introduced Lint and static code analysis.

     Maybe with those changes, S60 wouldn't have been so unreliable.


  2. I would have introduced a few "tyrants with taste".

     I've claimed all along that one difference between Apple
     and Nokia was that Steve Jobs was "tyrant with taste".
     Sure, he may have been tough to work for, but he could
     tell good stuff from junk. And he never let junk ship.
     At Nokia, there was no one playing the Jobs role, no one
     willing to say "This product sucks in the following
     twelve ways and it won't ship until it doesn't suck".
     The N97 is the best example of that. It was long delayed
     as a result of development difficulties and eventually,
     management set a date at which it would ship, ready or
     not. It wasn't ready, but it shipped anyway. And it
     sucked.

     I'd have introduced gatekeepers. Not to slow things
     down, but to protect our reputation in the marketplace
     from exactly the sort of damage that the N97 caused.

     I'd also have expected my tyrants with taste to be
     involved early, so even at the concept reviews we'd
     know which concepts were headed the right way and which
     were not.


  3. I'd have killed off most of the individual phone programs.

     Nokia didn't develop grand, sweeping phone programs.
     Instead, every new "terminal" (phone model) was a branch
     from the Symbian code base and the software was highly
     customized by that phone's own development team. This was
     even true among the variants of a single model that were
     sold to different carriers.

     The end result was that the code base was hopelessly
     forked into hundreds of branches, and fixes discovered
     in one branch couldn't be easily ported to all the other
     branches.

     Instead, I'd have developed major platforms, say, "the
     D-Pad platform" and "the touchscreen platform" and all
     of the individual terminals would have been forced to use
     the common build of the software with as much variation
     being done at runtime as possible, at compile time if
     that was impractical, and only as an absolute last
     resort would I have allowed the code itself to be
     variated.

     This would also have helped create a truly-common
     user experience among the many phone models.


  4. I'd have gone "all-in" on Maemo/MeeGo. Not as a skunk
     works project but as a real, full-scale program. I'd
     have made it clear that those phones were the *NEAR*
     future of the company in the high-end smartphone business.
     I would have shipped and promoted Maemo/MeeGo phones
     to technically-challenging markets such as North America
     so we'd have accumulated real-world competitive experience
     against iOS and Android. And every six months, I'd have
     wanted the next, incrementally-improved model released.


  5. Also, as a hedge against all this, I'd have run an Android
     skunk works project. Not to ever ship a phone (except in the
     extreme emergency) but mostly for what we could learn
     about working with FOSS, with nimble development methods,
     etc.

  6. And finally, I'd have dismissed any member of the Group
     Executive Board who said "but we're the world's largest
     manufacturer of mobile phones; we don't need to do that!"
     (whatever "that" was that day).


                                 Atlant


-----Original Message-----
From: interest-bounces+aschmidt=dekaresearch.com at qt-project.org [mailto:interest-bounces+aschmidt=dekaresearch.com at qt-project.org] On Behalf Of K. Frank
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2012 8:50 AM
To: Qt-interest
Subject: Re: [Interest] Semi-OT: What could / should Elop / Nokia have done differently?

Hi Atlant!

Thank you for some of the history and your insightful
comments.

On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 7:41 AM, Atlant Schmidt
<aschmidt at dekaresearch.com> wrote:
> Dear all:
>
>  In my opinion (informed by some time spent actually
>  working for Nokia), Nokia's biggest problem was that
>  their early, stunning success in mobile phones led them
>  to develop a culture which was risk-averse. They were
>  the largest manufacturer of mobile phones in the world
>  so they would routinely conclude that what they were
>  doing must be maximally right and any other approach
>  would be less right.
>
>  There were literally *THOUSANDS* of middle-level managers
>  at Nokia who all had the authority to say "NO!" to new
>  things and almost no one who was willing to say "Yes!".
>  E.g.,
> ...
>  "Look, we're the largest mobile phone manufacturer in
>  the world so we know what we're doing. If you don't
>  like it, you can always go elsewhere."
>
>  So eventually, I did. So did many other talented folks.
>  So, eventually, did the customers.

Not that I know anything about the internals
of Nokia, but this all sounds very plausible.

There have been plenty of big, successful companies
that have run into trouble in the way you described.

>  Nokia became unable to make revolutionary changes or even
>  fast evolutionary changes. This was true even when the
>  iPhone meteor hit the Nokia planet and the dinosaurs
>  started having trouble breathing. In an interview I
>  watched, Executive VP Mary McDowell characterized the
>  iPhone as "a toy". Not only could the leadership not
>  react to the iPhone, they couldn't even see the magnitude
>  of the impact. Then the Android comet came by as well...
> ...
>  I believe Elop was brought in with the deliberate purpose
>  of blowing up that culture of being entirely risk-averse
>  and unwilling to change.**
> ...

I'll buy that.

I always surmised that Elop was brought in to be a dramatic
remedy to a significant problem.  Presumably Nokia leadership,
or the board, or whatever recognized real problems and was
attempting to address them.

> ...
>  Now we've all speculated on whether Elop was just inept
>  or a deliberate Trojan Horse, planted by Microsoft. Up
>  until the cancellation of Meltemi (the Maemo/MeeGo child
>  that was going to replace S40 in featurephones), I was
>  willing to entertain the idea that Elop was just totally
>  inept. But the cancellation of Meltemi, the last known
>  internal competitor in the "could be a smartphone" space
>  has driven me to accept that Elop's motives are not pure.
>
>  What happens now?
>
>  Well, Microsoft just Osborned Nokia again with their
>  WinPhone8 announcement of non-support for everything Nokia
>  has recently sold and everything they'll attempt to sell
>  for the next few months. So at this point, I'd guess that
>  Nokia burns through their cash and fails as a free-standing
>  business. I don't think there's *ANYTHING* they can do to
>  stop that now. No Android "Hail Mary!" phone, no waiting
>  for Win8, nothing.

Well, it sounds like you've answered my second question:
What would you do if you were brought in now to replace
Elop?  Not to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like
you are saying you wouldn't take the job, or you'd take it
and go play golf, or something, or you'd take it and try to
sell the patent portfolio.  But you view it as too late to save
Nokia, so there's no point in trying.

That's fair.  (Maybe right, maybe wrong, but fair.)

But what about my first question?  Suppose you had been
brought in instead of Elop to lead Nokia back then.  If I
understand you correctly, you're saying that Nokia was
already in a deep hole.  What path would you have taken
that you think could have worked?  (Or do you think Nokia
was already beyond salvation even at that point?)

> ...
>  I think Apple should buy them for Nokia's IP portfolio.
>  Apple won't do that, of course, because Apple would have
>  a hard time getting regulatory approval. But they should.
>
>  Instead, as Nokia's stock becomes worthless, I think they
>  will simply fall into Microsoft's hands, almost by default.
>  And the world will be a much poorer place for that; Nokia
>  was a fine, moral corporation that made a good product for
>  a while. If they'd let me run the place instead of Elop,
>  they'd probably still be doing so.

So what would you have done, and what would be Nokia's
current recipe for success / relevancy?

>                             Atlant
>
>
> *  Never mind that Symbian still built with (no exaggeration!)
>   more than 7,000 warning messages from the compiler. Those
>   warnings couldn't mean anything, right?

(Ouch!)

Thanks for your thoughts and your contribution to this little
parlor game.

Best.


K. Frank
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