Why Nokia failed: 'Wasted 2,000 man years' on UIs that didn't work
Or as JWZ put it 8 years ago, the CADT model of software development.
I nearly spat out my drink when I read the sentence claiming that a team within Nokia working on a Linux version of the product tried to launch a UI/UX competitor to QT, even though Nokia had acquired Trolltech, the QT company, using... wait for it... GTK.
Anyone want to put up odds that there were other UX "initiatives" there pushing Tcl/Tk? :)
"For want of a nail the kingdom was lost" overly diminishes the significance of UI. For users, the experience of using the phone is not a minor detail added onto a great device, it IS the device.
Perhaps a better quote for Nokia's situation is, "My kingdom for a horse...."
Back in the 90's, Nokia im my opinion has the best UI's by far compared to the competitors then. When Motorola phones did not even query the phone book to get the caller's name, Nokia was innovating with tabbed menus and whatnot. Its a shame they lagged.
I wonder how many man-years Microsoft has spent on failed UIs? (and, yes, they've had successful ones too).
Nokia had a broken development process. The answer clearly was to surrender and turn the company over to ... another company with a long history of broken processes.
NOTE: I'm not saying everything in Microsoft is broken by any means. Microsoft has had processes which produced Windows ME and Windows Vista ... and they fixed their process and produced some better things. That might be evidence Nokia might have been able to do something similar.
> With its mature and well-debugged phone stacks, it is better for phone calls than any other smartphone: it drops fewer calls, the calls sound better, and it uses the antenna better.
I've heard this "fact" presented many times, but is there actually any meat to it? It seems to me there must be many mature and well-debugged phone stacks out there.
It appears that this Register article is based on the following blog post from Mark Wilcox. Just in case you want it from the horse's mouth... strange that they cited this obliquely in the Register article, but didn't link to it...
Also Nokia wanted to flood the market with cheap phones to curtain the people from seeing other brands. I guess this might have created them a support nightmare. New kids understand the concept of singularity and just strieve for perfection, lefting Nokia the land of the lost buttons.
Its not that it didnt work, People use to love Nokia it worked like charm. Nokia was the biggest mobile phone manufacturers until it stopped innovating and iterating their products. It wasn't new for them that Apple and Google are coming up with their phones and how they would be changing the mobile industry. Had Nokia took that up and changed their product to be up with the tech innovations they would have not lost the market share. Right said if you don't innovate or iterate you are going to Die.
It's rather unfortunate because Qt Quick is a rather promising framework for mobile development, it just needed a bit more polish.
The Symbian UI is really bad right now though, it actually defies many layers of common sense. The flagship Nokia N8, for example, still doesn't have a full qwerty keyboard in portrait mode. You have to rotate it to landscape mode in order to type, and the keyboard input takes up the entire screen.
I'm not really sure how that device managed to get shipped without such basic functionality in place, not to mention the fact that it is March 2011 and still not available.
They were designing for the wrong hardware, Nokia hasn't had a single device that rivals the iPhone's technical capabilities. With that said Nokia's brick phones have some of the easiest interfaces to use of any device ever, which is a huge reason they are so popular in the developing world, that and they saturated the market.
I would waist another 2000 man years than go with a company that released a credible competitor on October 21, 2010 ; although they've been doing it since at least year 2000 (i.e. working on handheld / mobile operating systems). That's not a good track record if you ask me - whereas both Apple and Google came out of nowhere and swept the market since the first versions released.
How many man hours are there to a man year? Is the unit supossed to concider how much hours a man works in a year, or is it just 365 * 24 a man hour?
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Well atleast they had a bubble inteface! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSRuY_9ZMsY&feature=playe...
I was reading a post by a Nokia employee that teams used to work on improving their own branches of Symbian that were never merged into the main one. This lead to fiefdoms and waste of duplicate effort.
Back in the 90's, Nokia im my opinion has the best UI's by far compared to the competitors then. When Motorola phones did not even query the phone book to get the caller's name, Nokia was innovating with tabbed menus and whatnot. Its a shame they lagged.