The Downfall of Nokia - Symbianize

First of all i don't write these. It is posted here http://www.symbianize.com/showthread.php?t=808673 .. Credits and Thanks to NRX10 of Symbianize

( image credits to Symbianize Forum: www.symbianize.com )

Why and how did Nokia fall and who should be held responsible for it?

Nokia made a free fall from it’s position of being the largest mobile phone manufacturer to a company on the verge of bankruptcy. Nokia was a huge company that built some of the best phones in history. A company that introduced smartphones to the world. Nokia was well known as the best mobile phone manufacturer before 2007 to be strict. What happened since then? What lead Nokia into this situation they are currently in? What factors have caused such a massive mass destruction of Nokia? Why was MeeGo axed? Why Windows Phones? Why was Symbian ditched? What happened to the Meltemi project? Who is to blame? We got a lot of questions. To find the answers we will need to look back to early 2010. Well, the post is long so you better grab a cup of coffee. I tried my best to keep this post the least technical and wrote it more like an understandable story. A story of downfall of a massive giant. A story of bad execution of plans and bad administration and maybe bad luck too. Here it goes.

Nokia’s initial strategy before February 2011:

1. Keep updating Symbian and continue making it more and more competitive until MeeGo and Qt are matured enough to be public. 

2. Invest and develop Qt – A Cross Platform ecosystem and try to shift developers from Symbian native code to using Qt for building their apps.

3. Develop the Linux based MeeGo as a full featured OS for Nokia’s future high-end phones eventually to replace Symbian (powered by Qt) 

4. Shift Symbian to mid range phones powered by the Qt ecosystem.

5. Replace S40 with another new advanced Linux based OS – Meltemi (Basically stripped down MeeGo).

Qt sounded like a good plan to attract the developers. Developers could built applications for both MeeGo and Symbian simultaneously. For example: The Qt apps built for Symbian could be easily deployed on MeeGo with minor code changes.

What forced Nokia to change the path? What happened to the Symbian ecosystem suddenly?

Don’t blame Stephen Elop yet, all this started even before he arrived. In 2010, Nokia’s shares fell from 39% to 28% . The release of iPhone in 2007 created a drastic change to how people look at “Smartphone” and which Nokia obviously wasn’t ready for. Symbian touch screen devices that were eventually introduced to compete with the iPhone (Like the 5800 in 2008) failed to deliver the user experience. No doubt the 5800 had good sales but the user experience that Symbian S60v5 delivered was simply not good on a touch screen. The UI wasn’t optimized at all for a touch screen and the resistive screens made it frustrating for people to operate those devices. People gradually started shifting to eiher iPhones or Android Phones (Android – Another open sourced Linux based OS made popular by Google). The N8 introduced in 2010 was a stunning product from this Finnish giant packing an awesome 12MP Carl Zeiss sensor and a really good designed body built with anodized aluminium. The phone was the first device to introduce Symbian^3 to the world (The next iteration of Symbian after S60v5). Symbian^3 came in with a massive list of new features, new hardware support and well a capacitive screen after all. But, there was a catch. Though it was much faster and smoother compared to S60v5, it shared the same UI which ruined the experience to the core. The N8 yet sold very widely because the ridiculously good camera in it and a whole bunch of features like USB-OTG, HDMI, FM Transmitter etc. The mobile phone succeeded but the ecosystem failed. Most people now started looking at Symbian as an old OS with a ridiculous UI (when compared to Android and iOS) and some well known Symbian flaws like random freezes and reboots made it worse. Developers were another key aspect. Most of the developers shifted to iOS and Android from Symbian. The Nokia Store (Ovi Store to start with) wasn’t delivering when compared to other app stores and lesser apps were forcing current Symbian customers to shift to Android or iOS. Nokia also played a major role in making Symbian handsets more measurable buy shipping these phones with very low hardware specs. In 2010, when Android phones were shipping with a good powerful 1 to1.2 Ghz processors, Nokia shipped the N8/E7/X7 etc with a mere 680Mhz CPU. I agree, Symbian isn’t a resource hog like Android but third party apps does require a good CPU! Particularly games. Games couldn’t run properly at all even with not-so-impressive graphics on the Symbian^3 devices. All these things all together made Symbian devices look really ugly to the masses, sales kept going down, Nokia kept loosing market share.

Next Stop? Arrival of Stephen Elop

( image credits: http://symbian-developers.net/ )

Stephen Elop was appointed the CEO and a new strategy was laid out in February 2011 and it was a complete shocker to most people including me. Nokia suddenly decided to jump on to the Windows Phone ecosystem and erased all it’s previous to-do lists. The new strategy was:

1. Complete Focus in Windows Phones. 

2. Until Windows Phones gain traction, keep selling Symbian phones and continue keeping them attractive. 

3. Try to make a smooth transition of the existing Symbian users from Symbian to Windows Phones when Windows Phones are ready.

4. Meltemi? (Still on the list) 

5. MeeGo was still being developed. Scheduled to release sometime by the end of 2010.

The rest information are available here http://www.symbianize.com/showthread.php?t=808673