Something that nobody has ever written about Nokia, Elop and the burning platform.
Taking up this post, the author is fully aware of. And the fact that "crammed". And that "only the lazy did not throw a stone." And about the fact that "enough already, got." However, having read enough homegrown and not-so-great analysts, the author decided to express his own opinion, which differs from the generally accepted one, which with some masochistic languor was reprinted here and here by various authors, interpreters and translators. Probably someone will be interested to read it.
Traditionally, for those who do not like a lot of beeches, brief (more or less) theses:
All this is in the details - under the cut. I warn you that there are no cool pictures there. Sheer graphomania and ornichie.
First of all, I will try to answer the question that has long interested me:
For me, the answer is obvious. The crisis and perestroika in Nokia are close to the Russian heart, because the Soviet Union literally recently collapsed in you, then it was rebuilt under the guidance of a drunk Yeltsin with a cane, and so on. When the “process started” with the USSR, everybody at every corner was saying the truth, remember? True, it flowed from television screens, newspaper and magazine pages, bards, rockers, KVNs sang their songs, books were written with volumes and so on. Everyone spoke on the topic, God, how we lived, how it would be if there was no revolution and what should have been done next. After everyone paused, listened, listened to the speakers, chewed and everyone answered for himself the eternal question - who is to blame and what to do, the society plunged into the routine of daily affairs. Those who did so did learn, except to state the obvious, continue yelling and writing about the bloody gebna, the lawlessness of those who hold them, great-power rudeness, about the fact that “we are smerds for them” and “the authorities have sniveled, covet and create what they want.” Well, God bless them.
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The situation with the cutting of the truth-uterus about Nokia is tracing from the collapse of the USSR. At the same time, the majority of opinions and components of the cut-off truth of the uterus are some such cocktail from the interpretation of open financial statements, usually made by superimposing the final figures on some infinite scales or axes, personal insults of some offended and not very mobile analysts issued for an objective point. of view, and of course personal experience - from the series “here I dropped my Nokia 3111 into the toilet, this was the phone ...”.
My opinion outlined below is based solely on my own experience and knowledge of this office, so I don’t pretend to an absolutely finite and objective point of view, but I hope that my reading will entertain you.
Let's start very far away. About the fact that Nokia, as a manufacturer of mobile phones, has a rich history associated with rubber galoshes, tractors, televisions, etc. I will not remind. I'll talk about this topic. The country of Finland and the Finnish society basically has some very interesting features that can explain Nokia’s strange behavior in certain situations. Finns for the most part work very diligently, diligently, not November on trifles and despite the difficulties. Of course, over the past 10 years, everything has changed a bit, the number of tolerasts and all oppressed has increased, but on the whole, everything looks exactly like that. In this, the Finns are a bit like the Japanese, who tend to polish the individual elements of their work to absolute art.
Finnish engineers are mostly introverts. By the way, do you know how Finnish introverts differ from extroverts? The fact that Finnish extroverts, when they talk to you, look at your shoes, not theirs. Introverts who can work carefully and neatly can move mountains. If you give the Finnish engineer a rail and a file, put him in a house with a sauna by the lake and feed him with sausages, then after five years he will cut out an exact copy of the iPhone, no doubt. The ability to do something methodically for a long time, overcoming difficulties and striving for a distant, sometimes unrealistic goal, is called the Finnish word "sisu". In general, there is no unambiguous translation of this word into Russian, and this can only be fully understood if you were born in Finland.
The reasons for all this are mostly historical. Finland has long been under the yoke of Sweden, then was part of the Russian Empire, then survived the winter war with the USSR, then for a long time the USSR paid reparations for participating in the Great Patriotic War on the side of Germany. All this, such a feeling of constant press, rallied the Finnish people and developed such elements of psychology as “sisu”. Why am I doing all this? This is necessary to understand some moments of the logic of Nokia in the development of the company.
The background for such a cold-resistant and bullet-proof Finnish engineer is an environment that requires quick response and quick decisions. In non-standard dynamic situations, Finnish meticulous engineers are often lost. The reason is that in order to get to work they need to carefully plan and verify everything, read the documentation, discuss all the details. In dynamic situations, it is often necessary to act without clarifying all the details, seeing only a small part of the overall picture, and there is no time left for something fundamental. This moment must also be taken into account.
Well, with such introductory and let's imagine Nokia, the sample say in 2001. By this year, Finnish engineers, through hard work on the NMT and simple, but reliable GSM phones, gained credibility and the company began to really drown in money. As a result, the company began to actively expand, nevertheless focusing specifically on mobile phones. For several years, Nokia sold all of its units, with tractors and televisions that did not directly relate to the core business. But we are wondering what was happening inside.
And that's what happened. A good engineer, say, by the antennae, whose name is, say, Pekka, became a senior engineer, then a specialist, then a senior specialist, and then everything. His career growth along the engineering line stopped, and Nokia did not foresee more positions for his growth. It was only later realized that not everyone needs to be managers. And at that time, Pekka, for example, has five children, a house with a sauna on credit and everyone wants to eat. In 2003, Nokia’s policy meant continuous career growth upward only through the managerial level. That is, at some stage, Pekke had to become a manager in order to receive more money. It’s not a lie that for this purpose, positions are often specially organized within an already existing team, and this transformation took place depending on the years worked in one place - who is older then the manager.
According to this scheme, Nokia, among many people working there, due to the relative stability, has acquired the tacit status of almost a state organization with hierarchical elements for years of service. That is, 3 years of work - a senior engineer, another 3 - a specialist and so on. Promotions within the same organization usually occurred in accordance with the amount of time worked and all those who had not yet risen to the manager waited patiently for their turn.
Well, now let's look at our Pekka. He's a great antenna engineer, yes, but a darn manager. He knows how to work alone, but he feels uncomfortable managing the work of others. Moreover, as soon as Pekka becomes a manager, he is automatically invited to 20 different meetings during the week, where his opinion on certain issues is needed, plus working meetings, planning, reporting, etc.
In a short time, Pekka understands that he only has enough time for his work in the new role to attend meetings and send the information received to them to various authorities, in a sluggishly compiled form. The general rule is this: the higher the instance, the fewer words and slides in PowerPoint. The lower the instance, the more tricky questions asking for detailed answers. At the same time, among peers, Pekka feels great. He still remembers something about his antennas and can screw in a word or other, for example, in the discussion of technical roadmap for the next year.
Since everything looks beautiful on paper, the plans are approved and his opinion is appreciated, after some time Pekka begins to break away from reality. Roadmaps, plans, and other talking rooms look beautiful and easy only in his head, and reality begins to lag behind because of his flight, because someone needs to work with his hands, and if it's a Finn, then also think thoroughly about everything and think it over. And after some time we get a typicalmiscarriage of a representative of the managerial stratum of Nokia in the mid-2000s - a talker-theorist manager who cannot live by the old, but does not know how the new.
Having rejected the crookedness, I will note this: Pekka every year participates in the creation and approval of a strategy and development plans, say antennas. He represents the interests of his engineers, determines what they can do and what is not for the required period of time. In addition, without his participation, no decision can be taken. And here comes a couple more paradoxes.
First, after several such one-year iterations, Pekka understands that every year he asserts essentially the same thing and every year this is given to him more and more smoothly, because he repeats the same arguments - verified, accurate, brief , smart, word polished to a shine. At some point, Pekka wonders - why? That is, why, say, a super antenna, planned in the roadmap for 2004, is present in the plans of 2005 and 2006, and so on? Mark it as “concern number 1” and move on.
Secondly, at some point, Pekka understands that the number of committees and groups to which he belongs as a manager is already beginning to exceed his abilities. Each decision in a particular group requires him to delve into the details of real proposals. But Pekka physically does not have time to delve into all these details, plus as an antenna specialist, he is already beginning to lose qualifications, plus, more precisely, minus, no one without his consent can make a decision and start working, therefore decisions need to be made, and preferably quickly. Mark this as “concern number 2”.
Third, seeing that the implementation of the plans does not keep up with boltology and drawing in PowerPoint, Pekka goes to refresher courses and learns about such a concept as risks. The concept of "risks" specifically for Pekka is good because you can add an infinite number of them to the analysis of any problem. Therefore, if a task is simply “not rushing”, then it can always be surrounded by a high level of risk.
Let's return to the “concern number 1” and recall the super antenna. It is approved from year to year because everyone works well. Paradox? Nothing like this. Just after the plans, strategies and roadmaps were approved, say for the year 2003, the majority of managers responsible for this will be promoted next year and begin to deal with other, more important issues. And Pekka spends one more year to explain everything to the new generation of managers, too. Then another year, etc. and so on until he himself moves to a higher position and does not push this problem to his successor.
Although no one can reproach Pekk for not pushing the super antenna. But the problem is, to promote it and start working on it, you need a product that agrees to take it. And there their managers with their own vision of risks, who really do not want to take a new, not run-in, chip into their product. And in the details that can convince them, they also have no time to delve into, they need everything briefly, smoothly and understandably, because they suffer from the same illness as Pekka. And here, on the one hand, Pekka himself does not have time to delve into everything to make a decision, but on the other hand he is not understood for the same reason.
In order to resolve the current situation in this environment, anti-patterns are beginning to be applied:
Everything. As a result, we get the skeleton of the very managerial layer, which over time will reign in Nokia. A lot of people speak intelligently and find countless reasons to “talk about it later” and “in more detail”, but not making real decisions, but waiting for instructions from above, or accepting them “with a squeak” on the basis of ugly compromises in order not to create conflicts interests, or generally discourage decision-making at the root, based on a strange system of risks, and in fact waiting for these problems to be solved by someone else over time.
Such an assessment of the managerial layer is an extreme degree of the grotesque; it cannot be said that all the managers in Nokia in the mid-2000s were without exception. But to understand the picture, I use exactly the grotesque.
The main idea of ​​this part of the opus is to make it clear that the system of decision-making, the introduction of new technologies, etc. in Nokia, it was hopelessly corrupted by a multi-level hierarchy of bureaucracy and the struggle of managers with themselves. Some time ago in a single news publication, some mobile analysts admired that Nokia was in no hurry to introduce new technologies, justifying this with the maturity of the company, its talents to carefully analyze the market situation, etc. I hasten to disappoint, most of these “mature” decisions were made solely because of the slowness of the company, and in some cases forced, that is, only when the situation was brought to a critical state and demanded an immediate escalation.
From Pecky, let's go to Mary. Maria is a senior UX designer for the S60. It develops the UI, or rather the menu for, say, the browser. If someone remembers the menu in smarts on the S60, with an investment level of up to 4x and a total number of all items about a hundred, then I’ll understand what I’m talking about. Personally, I had such an opinion that most of the people working in Nokia, who were simply tired of life, became either UI designers or UI testers, because in this area, traditionally, universities had not been taught before and, accordingly, they did not ask for a diploma, it was impossible to find a man, only dismissal. And as you know, in Finland it’s just very easy to dismiss someone very and very difficult, it’s cheaper to keep it in the workplace, but more on that later.
So that's about Mary. She basically doesn't care about the browser menu. It develops it according to existing patterns, which means to create a submenu item for each of them. She does not care about the other 20 menus in the phone and that they can duplicate each other. She can discuss two months what to call a new submenu item - “Clear browsing history” or “Clear history”, and finally call it “Clear data”, because in short, localization in Turkmen does not go beyond the bounds of one line and generally average The user of “history” knows only that in 1918 Finland gained independence from Russia.
All her work, Maria diligently does in Adobe Acrobat, where she has prepared special templates, producing PDF files as output. Developers swear by cutting out bitmap images from Adobe Reader for layouts and end up redrawing everything on their own, but everyone is afraid to offend Maria with a bad word, also because she is such a sweet and good person. For the same reason, the main dude who collects all the menus on the phone in one pile, once again sighs and squeezes the seventy-ninth menu item into the big picture, redrawing everything from Acrobat to the right place. He would certainly have done everything right, but he doesn’t have time to explain this to Maria for a long and tedious time, because otherwise, if he does everything himself without her notification, he will create a bad situation and ignore the opinions of others.
To understand why this is happening, you need to go back to the Finnish roots and see, say, upbringing. As the Finns themselves say, Finland is a country of average people. And in principle this was justified during a war or something else, where it is necessary to withstand the use of a “sis” and not to bend. According to this logic, it is better to have a hundred strong middling than ten stars. Since childhood, attention in Finland has been paid only to those who are incapable and lagging behind. If you are smart, cool and talented, it is believed that you will live and so. No one will encourage you and be equal to you, and if you are at the same time immodest or upstart, you will also be scolded. But those who do not have time, to whom everything is given is difficult - they are always in the center of attention, each his / her little step is considered an achievement and is exalted. Therefore, I will give advice if you are actively praised in a Finnish company, this is an occasion to reflect on your own success or behavior.
All this, coupled with the tendency to make compromise decisions in the absence of time, for a long time gave the results of a similar example to the menu in S60. Everyone understood that there was a problem, but when its elimination went down to the personal level of Masha or Pekka, it was rare for anyone to take the responsibility to say - “Maria, you are doing a damn job”. Moreover, rarely did anyone try to get Maria to be more creative in her work, rather than drawing a hundred menu items using the same template. Working on something, okay.
Bonuses in the company Nokia is a separate issue. For simplicity, let's say that there was no difference how an employee worked during the year - bad, normal or excellent. It had no effect on the basic salary - the salary only increased over time, never decreased. This only affected the annual bonus, which, due to various intricate schemes for calculating it, was never the first significant for staff with an average salary. In addition, secondly, the final difference between those who worked poorly and those who performed the double rate was a hundred or two euros per year. Also, the performance evaluation system was quite doubtful. In some cases, the priorities placed at the beginning of the half year became irrelevant by the end of it. New priorities appeared and, as a result, managers, throwing up their hands, suggested setting the average rating - “normal”.
The wage increase system was also very vague. If the employee worked with increased efficiency for a year, then he was supposed to receive some increase. The irony was that even the gains earned by the trade unions, as compensation for inflation, were several times higher than if a person fulfilled a double rate for several years.
As a result, this led to the emergence of a huge number of “gonzo workers”, who, realizing that wages did not wait at one place, began to jump at different positions in the organization, usually with an increase in wages, without producing anything significant. Think about the aforementioned Pekku, and you will understand how and why it was more profitable to postpone the adoption of important decisions and not bring the work begun to the end. Yes, yes, precisely because in a large organization it was easier to change jobs than to try to pierce the walls with your head.
The greatest heights and successes in terms of salary increases were achieved by people who moved from Nokia to another organization and back. If inside Nokia still existed some kind of salary increase policy when transferring to another internal position, and certain internal categories and tariffs were taken into account, then after leaving the organization and returning to it, no limits were applied.That is, you could be a senior developer, work a year in the office doing subcontracting of the same Nokia as a project manager and return back as a senior manager with a double salary difference. And all this in two years instead of several years of hard and responsible work in one place ...
At some point, when the number of managerial layer began to gradually increase, many managers at once came to the conclusion that it is more profitable to order some projects from third-party organizations. It happened like this. For example, let's say Yucca, in his 35 years, has already outgrown his position as a senior developer and wants to be a manager. Yucca is engaged in writing the editor SMS. Well, let's make it a manager and let it manage the creation of the editor at the conceptual level. Since architectural astronauts still promise us a global general editor of everything on the phone in the long run, we will not hire developers for him, but order the whole thing to another office, and we will make him responsible for those. job, and their training. The profit is obvious - it’s not necessary to hire permanent workers and pay taxes for them,Expenditure amounts are clear, projected, plus liability and regulated quality / acceptance criteria. And when it comes time to close the shop, then there will be no problems.
Speaking in simple and understandable human language, at some point Nokia began to compensate for the crisis and problems of internal career growth by hired workers, under the guise of a subcontract. At some point in Finland, an incredible number of companies that mainly existed at the expense of Nokia subcontracts, and which also changed their names in the course of the play - TietoEnator (aka Tieto), Sesca (aka NeuSoft), Flander (aka Symbio ), Almare (aka Plenware, aka Cybercom), Digia, Accenture, Ixonos, and so on. This was later extrapolated to outsourcing based on class differences and slavery, such as hiring 10 programmers in India, instead of one in Finland. Simply put, these same companies began to open units in India and take contracts there.
The main and cruel problem of the subcontract is that the competence and know-how due to this subcontract erodes somewhere between the two companies, eventually nullifying all previous developments. Simply put, not all knowledge is transferable, and outsourcing directly kills the internal competence of the company. I will give an example.
In 2008, Nokia closed the phone factory in Germany. Well, it closed and closed, but at the same time it also closed and the department that was engaged in the development of means of local communication in phones. This department, which by the way was one of the most advanced in terms of technical competence, was bought up by Sasken. After the closure of the factory, Nokia entered into a subcontract agreement with the same Sasken, and the same department in the heavily depleted structure continued to do the same work for Nokia. A year later, Sasken disbanded this department under the pretext of transferring business to India. If you imagine how the contents of the brains of German engineers, accumulated over several years, to be sent to Bangalore, and train even ten times more Indian programmers at the appropriate level, then go ahead and patent the method.The story of the German factory is only one in a series of similar ones. The ending of the story is that at some stage Nokia gave the go-ahead to the Indian programmers to rewrite this code from scratch, because no one remembered and understood little in it, and this code simply did not touch for years. When it became necessary to conduct a global refactoring, it seemed that it was easier to write it again. The laugh is that it just seemed easier. As a result, deadlines, repeated attacks on the same rake and the invention of bicycle curves.When it became necessary to conduct a global refactoring, it seemed that it was easier to write it again. The laugh is that it just seemed easier. As a result, deadlines, repeated attacks on the same rake and the invention of bicycle curves.When it became necessary to conduct a global refactoring, it seemed that it was easier to write it again. The laugh is that it just seemed easier. As a result, deadlines, repeated attacks on the same rake and the invention of bicycle curves.
Again, this is only one of the many stories. During its “heyday”, Nokia shuffled and overtook a huge amount of its competencies through Finnish, Chinese, Indian and Romanian subcontracts, where this knowledge was, if not lost, then suffered badly, including being misinterpreted by inexperienced engineers.
If we take and see, let's say on Microsoft, with Ballmer's obsessive-compulsive declamations - “Developers! Developers! Developers! ”, Then we will notice a very interesting trend. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that Microsoft is outsourcing ALL but the core business. That is, the main value is the code that is written within the organization by programmers who belong to the organization. Psychologists, graphic designers, logistics, lawyers, bookkeeping, localization and translation, etc. can be outsourced. but it is impossible to outsource the technological competence that represents the core business. Unfortunately, the model of outsourcing in Nokia was exactly the opposite - the code and the introduction of technology were done in dozens of other organizations by subcontracting.
The logical result of this? As a result, Nokia finds itself in a situation where the managerial layer in some areas is already the final link in the hierarchy. In fact, it turns out a crowd of smart and a lot of talking former professionals who now put technical tasks to third-party organizations. That is, at the moment their main talents, which they were once valuable, are not fully utilized. And in the trade and shifting of papers from the left edge of the table to the right, former engineers often lack talent. After all, what is work with outsourcing is a dynamic struggle between two managers for deadlines and prices. In such work, the content of the contract itself is often not analyzed deep enough. And it is far from a secret that in the process of subcontracting some key requirements that passed through the hands of several chain managers simply fell out of the delivered product.Now add the above description of typical Finnish introvert engineers to the word “dynamic” and you will probably understand the essence of the problem.
Well, we have discussed all this. Now imagine an organization in which the main business represents one big subcontract. Submitted? This is Nokia until 2008.
When Nokia released the 9110 Communicator in 1998, it became clear at some point that it would be difficult to work in this direction without a full-fledged multi-tasking OS. Quite another question is whether multitasking OSes were required for regular phones, even smart, because the output of the first iPhone and such a thing as Windows Phone 7 after 10 years clearly showed that you can put together the necessary applications into a quite tasty and revered phone without " full-fledged "OS. However, at that time, and specifically for communicators, multitasking was needed. Nokia had no single resources for writing this. But since Nokia was already an adult company with ambitions, then at least she wanted to do the look or the UI herself.
As a result, Nokia had to choose between two offers - Windows CE and EPOC. Yes, an alliance with Microsoft could take place as early as 1998, but for some reason Microsoft did not agree to separate the UI directly from Windows CE and therefore, as well as for a number of other reasons, Nokia began working with Psion.
For those who do not know, in 1998, an office was created under the name Symbian Ltd., which included as founders - Psion, Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola, from which this unique model of a chimerical mobile platform with elements of insanity began. Symbian Ltd. did three versions of the mobile platform - for Nokia called S60, for Motorola and Erickson called UIQ and for a specific Japanese market called MOAP. All of them had different UI and different priorities for features. That is, for example, the kernel feature that was adopted for the UIQ could linger for a year for S60 or vice versa, etc.
Here it is necessary to say one more thing. EPOC and Symbian as a platform were written directly in C ++, but at the time when there was no uniform standard for C ++. Therefore, Symbian is known for its mildly “strange” features of C ++ programming, which are very obscenely revered by software developers. The development of the entire platform, including the kernel, immediately in C ++ led to one more feature. None of the existing open source on it could not be applied without porting to C ++, which made it difficult even without difficult development.
Features C ++, the inability to use open source packages on pure C, and other identity of the operating system were complemented by a completely idiotic SDK model and developer documentation. A bunch of disparate API packages and a poor consistency of their use led to an interesting situation. In order to set up a development environment and write the “Hello World!” Application, an average developer with knowledge of ordinary C ++ took up to a week. You can compare it with XCode for iOS or with the Android SDK. It is not surprising that in the two years of the existence of the same iPhone applications it was written almost more than all the time for Symbian. And do not care about the fact that more than half of these applications just grafomanskaya garbage. The bottom line is that development under Symbian was quite a difficult task for novice independent programmers.And with the widespread development of Symbian and its introduction into smartphones, there is a need for education and training of a separate type of specialists - a developer for Symbian. In the end, after the massive cuts in Nokia, some of them were quite difficult to find work for obvious reasons of lack of demand.
The problem with the development for Symbian was basically solved by creating more distinct APIs and putting in order the documentation, examples, writing elementary RADs under the same Eclipse / Carbide. This eventually began to happen at Symbian sunset - partly through Qt, partly by screwing plain C libraries, but time was lost and independent mobile developers saw the alternative in other axes quickly dumped there.
Was this an operating system problem as such? My opinion is that no. It was possible to finish Symbian to a competitive state. As some can see on the example of the latest Symbian devices, as a result, they licked it thoroughly enough, so much so that some mobile analysts immediately rushed to write another treatise on the subject of the fact that Nokia refused to give it up, etc. But this entire article was written in order to show that Nokia’s problems were not in the operating system and not in technical solutions, but in a cumbersome organization that stupidly could not keep up with competitors who had no similar organizational problems.
And the reality was this - there was an operating system, the core of which was developed by subcontracting trading between Nokia and Symbian managers, the middleware and UI of which was written by Nokia itself, like the S60 platform, there were specific phone programs that wrote the necessary features not yet implemented on the platform or in S60 ... Plus, Symbian himself, who wrote the operating system, was engaged not only in Nokia, but also made two branches for other participants of this enterprise. For the sake of laughter, I can add that the S60, with all the original Nokia decorations, was also offered as a separate platform for licensees - Samsung and LG.
As a result, the situation was ridiculous. For example, a programmer from S60 and a programmer from Symbian could, as a result of joint work on a project, pre-empt an additional feature ahead of time, which all the same had to be done once, test it and put it into a build. Then, this working and implemented feature was successively discarded, first from the next version of S60, and then from Symbian due to the fact that managers were not able to approve it in the current requirements for any known calculations of risks and priorities. As a result, both programmers had to edit their tested code in order to isolate this feature from what was stated in the version.
There were such cases as, for example, one of the main components in the library of communication Symbian was written by a student undergoing summer practice. And then no improvement requirements for this component were accepted for a long time by any product, because no one knew this code, its refactoring did not meet the time requirements and the risk of touching it was always calculated as significant. This eventually led to the fact that a separate component could not be moved at all for reasons of risk for several years, even if there was a real need to improve it. He did not want to take Pekk on risks for a couple of years, and then handed him over to Yukka, who braked him a couple of years due to reasons of low priority requirements.
As a result, over the years the existence of such a model, the number of bureaucracy and buffer layer between the two organizations has increased, and the quality of products has decreased, because for each specific program for the production of a specific smartphone model there was always a terrible hemorrhoids - from which to build the final software? Toli wait until it writes Symbian, or S60, or write by yourself, or order subcontractors. And all this happened against the background of a dynamic, exhausting fuss with the priorities of technical requirements and a constant conflict of interests between the managers of different fragmented groups.
In Nokia, in addition to the natural ideological discrepancies between Symbian and S60 for a long time there was another level of fragmentation called the business direction of smartphones. It did not appear immediately, but gradually. Actively, he began to escalate one day, when a moaning and witty dude named Anssi Vanjoki appeared on the horizon, who, through active, not at all typical Finnish behavior and pressure, proved the need to create a whole direction called Multimedia.
There have been other attempts before that to make specialized directions, such as the S90 or NGage. If you are not aware, then the S90 was Nokia’s attempt to make Touch UI phones long before Android and iPhone, that’s what most of the current smartphone users are working with now, poking their fingers at the screen. S90 really didn’t assume a finger, but used a traditional wand - a stylus, but nonetheless. Years of work, hundreds of people, failed 7700 and 7710 phones, a bunch of prototypes including touchscreen tablets that never saw the light, and millions of dollars spent almost nowhere.
Ask about NGage? It was supposed to be a mobile gaming console. Actually, two devices came out - NGage and NGage QD, after which the initiative was transferred to a service plane similar to the Microsoft Xbox, where it finally died, because users couldn’t understand why they needed to run some kind of NGage, to put. As is well known, the application distribution policy for Symbian has been absolutely insane for a long time - called “Form Eight” (whichwe ’ll give up, we wear). In the end, too, millions of dollars spent.
So, about the witty guy Anssi. In contrast to the S90 and NGage, he somehow pushed through his line and Nokia at some time actually produced three lines of smartphones - regular, multimedia (which were persistently called mobile computers) and business. At the same time, with the exception of the additional letter N at the beginning of the index, no one could clearly tell how Multimedia Moblie Computers differ from ordinary smartphones and how they both differ from business solutions. For example, there was a Nokia 3250 phone, which was even stronger than some N-Series, and included all the chips with music and video. In my time, no one could clearly explain to me why he was not multimedia. There was such a proverb, marked by one mobile onolitek - if a dude uses the phrase “Mobile Computer” speaking of the phone, then this is an employee of Nokia Multimedia. This is the true truth.
With all this magnificence, the presence of fragmentation physically resulted in the duplication of different teams. Here, for example, was the usual team that had its X millionth annual budget and developed, say, software for the camera for the main line of the S60. And in the neighboring town sat another similar team, with an even greater budget, which made software for the camera for the so-called. "Mobile computers", that is, the same smartphones with the prefix N. Two teams, double costs, two code branches that naturally did not overlap. And at the same time, another team was sitting in Symbian that made software for the camera, say for UIQ. Again wasting money.
There were a lot of such teams that arose because of fragmentation. I was a little overlooked by E-Series - business smartphones, usually with a QWERTY keyboard and integration into corporate services. There, too, there was a fragmentation, since the priorities of the business teams did not coincide with the priorities of multimedia, and together they rose across the throat of the plans of simple boys from S60. If for the first ones it was vital to synchronize contacts with the Exchange Server, for the second it was important to synchronize the music with Windows Media Player and both teams looked at the software for the built-in camera differently - face detection is important, and the second is bar codes and business cards.
In short, due to the fragmentation of business, a lot of money was wasted wasted on double (and sometimes triple) work. It is difficult to say how many of them were spent, in numbers, but if once these amounts are announced, I think that a couple of Arab sheikhs will suffocate with envy. It’s no secret that when the fall of Nokia began, she provided herself a couple of years of life stupidly by reducing such unnecessary expenses and streamlining the business. Unfortunately, a lot of “re-optimisations” were made in that very period, which pushed the organization back. As a rule, this was done by new boys with a two-year freshness MBA diplomas in their pockets, which stupidly translated everything that could be subcontracted to Romania and India, with corresponding consequences. Well, about the author has already written enough ...
If we are talking about spending, it is impossible not to mention among others about the morning plane Helsinki-Oulu. The usual such aircraft, such as the MD-11 for 200 passengers, it flies even now. In the morning, flies, flies 600 km, back in the evening. In the old days, 90% of the passengers were employees of Nokia, they joked that the remaining 10% of the passengers are industrial spies. Then on arrival each paid another 30 euros for a taxi at one end, then back. And there were other "semi-regular" aircraft, to London - Symbian was there, to Germany, to Canada, etc. The middle manager at Nokia was “flying around” for the year on Finair's silver card, which corresponds to OneWorld Ruby, which is 40,000 points. This despite the fact that the flight within Europe will bring you about 3000 one way, and to the States about 5000. If you are a manager in a virtual team, which is spread between Finland, Canada and China, then you have a permanent - gold and business box with blackjack and whores.
They flew a lot, flew often, on occasion and without reason, to all corners of the world. Sometimes it was really easier to fly for a couple of days from Finland to Germany, hold an hour-long meeting there and fly back to solve the problem quickly. When they began to cut costs, the first thing they did was to install the Tandberg video conference system at a cost of $ 20,000 each to reduce flights. As a result, no one used them, because the Finns are naturally shy and do not like to show themselves on TV, and the conference systems have gone somewhere, replacing them with ordinary webcams, which, incidentally, are rarely used either.
Why all this? It is not clear why creating virtual teams with a bunch of developers living in different time zones, etc. if their coordination ultimately leaves just an unreasonable amount of money and time? At a certain period in Nokia, it was a tradition to have in the team representatives from all countries and continents, respectively working in the community. If the purpose of creating such teams was to give the Finnish engineers from a small country a look at the world, then this goal was achieved. If the goal was to ensure effective work, then I strongly disagree with such methods.
Another item of insane expenses was the purchase of companies. I will give one example. In 2005, Nokia spent $ 430 million to buy Intellisync. At the end of time, no one so clearly could not say what exactly was purchased. I stand applauding to Intellisync business owners who were ableto sell a piece of shit to sell their business so successfully. At the time of the purchase of this company, they did not even have a normal SyncML solution for data synchronization. All that they had was vague services for MSN and an engine for synchronization between Outlook and Palm / Windows Mobile, written another xs in what year for DOS 16 and since then containing this code. One of the few really useful acquisitions of Nokia - Trolltech, which wrote Qt, cost the company 150 million, almost three times less. And what is strange is that no one was killed for embezzling such money, fired, or opened a criminal case. Spend xs on that and all right, God bless him.
This is not an isolated example, but in my opinion - the most extreme in the history of the company. A complete list of purchases can be found here: www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/investors/acquisitions-and-divestments/acquisitions-and-divestments . To my deep regret, he does not give real numbers in dollars or euros, and also does not give a final assessment of the usefulness of the purchased company. I dare to note that a sufficient number of companies bought in this way dissolved in Nokia with almost no trace.
There were also applicants with the purchase of professional services instead of companies. For example, Nokia from 2002 to 2008 regularly paid one out of five English offices at $ 1.8 million per year for the program synchronizing with Microsoft Outlook under Windows. At the same time, the company did not own the source code until, at the end of 2008, it was sold to it for a fee. The office later went out of the software altogether and opened a real estate business in London. Kayf?
The main problem in such unreasonable and irresponsible expenses is the lack of responsibility. Yes, this is exactly the case, for the reasons described above, in Nokia, decision-making is rarely the one who was responsible. Initially, a collective decision is taken, the worst possible one, due to the fact that it is formed on the basis of a compromise, so as not to offend anyone, absorbing all the shortcomings. Then the responsibility for making this decision is smeared. In style - bought a thousand sets of Tandberg for 20 million, and put it to hell with it. Then a clever uncle will come and say that they are not needed - we will decide that they are not needed. Well, in that spirit. Reminds voting for the symbol of the 2014 Olympics in Sochi - Leopard, White Bear and Bunny, then Putin will say who exactly.
In the 2000s, the Nokia company for a long time spat on the opinion of users. Yes, this is a fact that was repeatedly covered in the press by mobile and not-so-big analysts. There was not even a little bit clear feedback form. There was no analytics, no web, no crash, no usage, no other statistics. Few people in the company represented what exactly real people want.
Mobile phones were invented on the basis of magical calculations for some strange coordinate system, where the X axis extended from housewives and farmers from Peru on donkeys to vice-presidents of high-tech companies, and along the Y axis, young enthusiasts, Internet surfers, gamers, music lovers and pragmatic business leaders. As a result, smart diagrams were created, with clusters that supposedly showed potential niches for new phone models. How this all could be created without real and regular feedback from the users - I still don’t know.
As it is known, the result of Nokia’s activity during the year was the release of a certain number of new phones. With the exception of design innovations, it was sometimes difficult to tell how one phone was different from another, in terms of the same software. The answer to the question - “WHY the company sprayed on several models during the year?” Is in the very table of potential users ranking along the X, Y axes and one more letter from the Russian alphabet.
If you look honestly at that situation, then out of ten phones produced a year, the number of normal ones rarely exceeded 2-3. As a rule, even if the software was 99% the same, the whole thing rested on the main product manager. If the manager was good, then the product was relatively bug-free. That is why many people remembered the 6300 or N95 or E71, and few remembered, say 7500, N96 or E72. And phones like 7610 or N97, to be honest in Nokia itself, were recalled with a sense of shame.
Yes, it was all about the manager. If he had a personal desire and the task of releasing a quality phone, he tested it himself day and night, kicked everyone, forced him to work, delayed the release, when necessary, etc. But these were very few. Unfortunately, the characteristics of the main management staff, I have already cited above. Coupled with the lack of responsibility it gave such results as everyone saw. They released a buggy phone and don't care - there are still five more in the row, we'll finish it. We released the product on time, received bonuses, and that’s it - we are moving to another project, to other ideas, perpetual growth, striving forward.
At the same time, sometimes, in principle, there was no understanding of the fact that people do not buy phones 3 times a year, and that in 2005 people also used models produced in 2000m. Employees of Nokia lived with those prototypes that will only see the light next year, or even later. Therefore, any adequate claims on the quality of existing phones are often swept aside under the pretext - “God, this is old stuff!”. Such is the separation from reality. Updates of the firmware were made only in the service center, and only bugs were fixed in them, no new features or platforms. The fact that now the fashionable word is called customer retention was absent in principle, and gross production was present, driven by tired out managers who were chronically short of time and for any reason a lot of “risks” were stored in their pockets. Explaining to the manager that it is necessary to spend a month of work on elementary refactoring in order to improve the stability and extensibility of the component, it was almost impossible to platformize ten vertically written features. This time wasted. Why refactor that, and so worked in the previous model? Wrote - do not touch, etc.
Against this background, sometimes articles appeared in the press and the Internet, which contained criticism, suggestions for improvement, certain sound thoughts and hints. It is foolish to say that within the company did not see any problems. These articles were quoted, sent from department to department, but due to the lack of clear responsibility, specific measures were rarely taken on them, only on the most blatant facts such as a mass marriage. Including measures were not taken due to the fact that, as already mentioned, there was simply no conceptual feedback mechanism in Nokia. There was a PR department, which was mainly engaged in voicing the official position of the company, and the possibilities for organizing feedback, and especially bringing it to the desired level, and the teams within the organization were minimal.
Here we must make a digression and again recall the Finnish mentality. Intelligent and modest Finns do not like to swear and sort things out. Any hitting, criticism or scandal put them in a dead end, make them blush and silently quickly walk away from the source of spiritual discomfort. This is essentially what happened on a more global scale, when mobile analysts publicly wrote multi-page opus with frank claims and visits. It was easier to ignore them and not to descend to the level of areal battle, but this created a precedent as if Nokia behaved too arrogant, since it allegedly "does not want to be responsible for the quality of the product," etc., well, you probably remember.
Against this background, some mobile truth-bearers who cut the truth-womb to the left and right, among others, received their loyal audience inside Nokia, that is, among those workers who sincerely wanted to resolve problems within the company, tried to point out the mobile analysts with their existing shortcomings. Here are some of these fans of the printed word, too, drove their nails into the coffin of the previous organization.
Usually it happened this way. People with access to prototypes "by big secret" gave them on the subject to play well-known mobile experts. They promised to give them their private feedback, as well as test the phone and, in general, express an authoritative expert opinion that would supposedly help to improve the product. In reality, all that most of these experts want is just to get an exclusive. Here I deliberately make a distinction between real experts and “such” experts.
The fact is that Nokia, like other companies, hire certain organizations to test and research products, organize focus groups for presales testing, etc. At the same time, an official nondisclosure document is drawn up, which provides for liability for information leakage. This is how real experts and analysts work.
All the rest,who did not get a place at the trough , are engaged in anything at all, from self-praise to truth-seeking, and at times their desperate desire to be some value and even find questionable, but the recognition can sometimes go beyond the limits of decency.
I think that many people are aware of the events when one of these analysts published a review of the prototype of the N8 phone before its official presentation. Management Nokia in this connection was forced to postpone the date of the official announcement of the model on the day after the publication of the review. I don’t know whether to say that such an analyst simply substituted his informants. There is no need to talk about the real consequences of these leaks for the people who allowed them. I will only express my personal regret that the countermeasures against this analyst were not brought to the end, using all the power of the disinterested law-enforcement system of Russia, and specifically the press hut in the SIZO for a long weekend, as some Russian-speaking workers of Nokia suggested. Therefore, this type of otbrehavshis continues to actively draw in public, making a good face on a bad game and presenting your personal emotions as objective information. Well, God bless him. From this story should make this.
The person who gives the prototypes or other results of their interim work into the hands of a third party without an official document of non-disclosure, roughly shits himself in a compote or sawing the branch onwhich which it sits. Dates of product announcements and release dates are very accurately calculated. I can say that nothing is so carefully calculated by the manufacturers of mobile phones and in general of household iron, as the dates of the announcement, release and characteristics of the products. History shows that sometimes you can even give a damn about quality, but release a product within a calculated time frame. Why is this happening?Because of the competition, as well as because of the characteristics of the production of mobile phones.
The fact is that the characteristics of iron are planned in advance and very carefully. The process of production of the iron platform itself is a thing very far from software characteristics, because you can theoretically tighten software on iron and after release if the model allows, for example, by issuing a hotfix or update - not sugar but not fatal. But if you lose with iron, then competitors will eat you. In this case, the iron must be chosen not anyhow, but a quality one and so that the final price would give a profit and not go off scale. It is also necessary to ensure that after the announcement before the appearance of the product in the stores, the response of competitors is reduced to a minimum, etc.
As a result, the timing of the announcement and release of the product - this is very carefully verified dates when everything should come together, and subsequently bring a profit. People who do not understand this and violate the secrecy of disclosing the characteristics of prototypes are just idiots. As a result, falling profits hit their own pocket, or even deprive them of their work, as some Protestants from Simbian, who had spent six months on the manual, clearly felt. But of course in the end it is up to the particular person to decide what is more important to him.
Until a certain time, the secrecy mode in Nokia was so formal that all roadmaps, names and characteristics of the prototypes were available on the net to almost everyone. Prototypes were stolen in factories, forgotten in taxis, and even stolen from DHL hubs when they were sent from one team to another. Entire presentations, mostly for mobile operators, flowed into the network. Mobile and not-so-analysts very confidently and openly discussed on the pages of their publications the characteristics of one unreleased prototype against the other, also unreleased. Compare this and suppose how much such information you will find about Apple products, and you will get another problem the company received by Elop.
The apofigeem of the company's development was, of course, an attempt to reorient it to services. At that time, the company had neither competences, nor infrastructure, nor methodology, in short, nothing to do with quality services. Nevertheless, one day, the company’s management presented a detailed plan, which directly stated that Nokia’s direct competitors are Apple and Google, which already have service infrastructures, and who are joining the smartphone market with them. It's funny, but let's say Samsung in this announcement was not directly recognized as a competitor, but was viewed as a hardware company that could not stand the competition with service offices. Therefore, it was proposed to create a competitive services infrastructure from scratch and call it Ovi (translated from Finnish - Door).
The first step to introducing chaos was the official and widespread implementation of Agile practices in all areas of development. The number of scram-masters and product-ounerov simply went too far, the benefit is that the courses take only 2 days. Throughout the organization, a bunch of preachers were running with one or another agile bible, sometimes offering such an extreme approach to creating everything in general, which sometimes gave the impression that flexible methodologies and anarchy are one and the same. With all this orgy, few people imagined exactly how flexible methodologies should be adapted specifically to his field. Previously, the software development process in Nokia flowed smoothly out of the iron development environment and embedded software such as controllers, where almost nothing sensible can be applied except the waterfall methodology, because it is difficult to deal with flexible methodologies when assembling iron.For this reason, the software released for phones for a long time was tied to the specific requirements of the final product (the phone, not the OS for it) with a formal description in UML and RUP-like development techniques. It came to the fact that the developer was obliged to provide a functional and design specification even before he wrote at least one line of code. It was certainly very annoying, and as usual there were crowds of admirers of flexible methodologies who did not tire of yelling about it at every corner. Having received the desired in full measure, as it were, by kick-ass, the same adherents being in the composition of specific teams simply fell into a stupor, eventually turning the same Scrum into a completely idiotic mechanism, when the developer was obliged to register every step in tulze, such as Trac, JIRA or bugzilla,enter there the time spent up to minutes and engage in another idiotic metric activity, instead of quietly writing code. The question with the scaling of teams and the organization of structures that are larger than the Scrum of Scrams, in general, was almost unsolvable and was settled by the good old waterfall. In short, a new venture began with an organizational mess.
The second not entirely clear step was to get an answer to the natural question - what kind of services do we want? And for what to take first, and for what then? There were a huge number of proposals, which, however, eventually quietly suffocated. Nothing better than repeating a sacred bunch - maps, contacts, mail, files, music, video, pictures at first was not found. And if it was relatively easy to explain the necessity of creating and the fundamental difference between Nokia and Neokia’s Nokia services, it was very difficult for the end user. Considering the fact that such services from Google and Apple were already working, to make such services competitive in a short time, and even more, getting the user to switch to them was a very difficult task.The main bet was made on the fact that Nokia has a huge resource in the form of existing phone users, and through the phone it will be possible to “plant” them on similar Ovi services. It was supposed to start the sitting from the service - an app store, which, if not strange, was a success in the end, just like the card service.
The third step, which brought confusion to the ranks of service programmers, which for some reason few people understood in detail, was the question - on which technologies will Nokia build the infrastructure for services? In some cases, the answer was trivial, we take open source then open source, we attach this database to this backend, we do everything in the JavaScript and RESTfull API, and “everything is in our hands”, and what’s missing is purchased (see about Intellisync). There were those who shook SOA volumes, and talked about WS-I, SOAP, and other WebServices architecture. There were no principal disputes, but in the end different services were built on different ideologies. For experienced specialists, the longevity of such optimism caused great doubts, but the general enthusiasm and the amount of money invested in the end won.
As a result, when Agile teams from Vancouver to Bangalore were engaged in business, with lack of experience both in building mass services and in organizing their intercommunication models (single sign-on, user-centric data, etc.), the business began to move with a lot by work
It should be recognized that a lot of things done during the time of universal “doorbellization”, went to Nokia for good. The introduction of Agile methodologies, the introduction of NPS and in general the organization of analytics channels and user feedback, a focus on customer retention, a partial departure from Symbian, the release of maps and navigation programs, etc.
However, as a result, Ovi quietly bent, some of the services that remained, such as mail, were transferred to Yahoo. One can argue for a long time about whether Ovi was bent before the change in the company's strategy or whether the change in strategy turned it. In any case, about how many attendants were hammered into this initiative, the history, as usual, is silent.
But there is one more positive element in this whole story.
We forgot a little about the managerial layer. In the meantime, this ballast has not gone away. According to the law of conservation of mass, they flow to where there is money, where you can talk about anything and where, against the background of a mass illusion of progress, you can also depict a vigorous activity. So it happened with Ovi. All bawlers and theoretical managers have eventually surfaced there. I will give one example.
Nokia regularly and often produced various types of phones for one clear customer segment, which did not want to squeeze into these segments, but instead asked for smaller, but better and with backward compatibility ... Since there were many products, there were formal business processes, which allowed these products to be produced, from start to finish. One of these processes was called the Product Creation Process, which actually described what needs to be done in order to justify, design, and so on, a mobile phone. So, one of the most recent ideologues of Ovi presented to the public a completely official document called the Service Creation Process, which in essence was tracing paper from a PCP made by the same person who simply received a new post in a new organization. Same slidesonly some words are replaced from “product” in the sense of “mobile phone” to “product” in the sense of “service”. The moron is exceptional, but it reflects the mental state of the managerial stratum. As you can see, some of them apparently seriously believed that Nokia will launch 10 new services per year ...
The positive thing about this is that Ovi slightly pulled the manager's ballast from the phones, which made it possible to calmly and effectively begin to finish Symbian and seriously take on Maemo on Linux in order to create a decent platform for war with competitors. And something even succeeded, the first thing to do was eliminate the eternal model of perpetual outsourcing, by purchasing Symbian, the developers were offered Qt and made a more or less sane package that is relatively easy to install. They introduced a fairly clear system of versions, gradually began to remove most of the fragmentation, all these E-Series, N-Series, etc. After Qt was screwed to Symbian, we started porting it to S40 and Maemo. Qt as the main library, a single toolkit and a framework has greatly facilitated and improved the development process.It happened that Qt managed to dampen and level even the terrible Hindu code, the share of which by the way inexorably reduced. Moreover, Symbian was turned into something similar to the open source community called Symbian Foundation and they opened most of the code under EPL.
However, after the purchase of Symbian, a number of requirements managers appeared, who in the past mostly flew to London and back and ended up without work. Some of them leaked into Ovi, but a fair amount continued to poison the organization. And suddenly, against this background, Ovi actually died. Quietly, without a pump, but the managerial layer from there began to slowly drain away, what do you think where?
Yes, at this point, Nokia began to pour funds into the development of the MeeGo platform, the successor to Maemo, and prepare for the release of the N950, N9 and some other phones. Together with the funds, though without former chic, the managerial stratum began to flow into the platform, migrating from the already irrelevant Ovi. Exactly from that moment the office was already doomed.
A sufficient number of people point out that the final result of MeeGo was not so bad. Honestly, it could have turned out even better. The original UI design, "honest Linux", Qt, and all that. The entire direction simply buried the infection of the talkers, in the form of decision-making committees, management groups and the rest of the ballast, with which MeeGo turned into a hulking monster from the old days.
Well, imagine - you have such a company, which is like a leader, but all indicators of its dynamics are zero, if not negative, while competitors are actively gaining momentum.
Everything, even tactical roadmaps are planned for years, collective responsibility everywhere, more precisely, its absence, detailed strategic planning is carried out with a stick and traditionally none of these are implemented on time, a lot of money is spent and spent. FIG knows what, every step you take bogged down in a swamp, around the dime a dozen of philosophizing specialists who really haven't done anything for a long time, as well as an endless collection of human processes. Most of the core business is at the mercy of subcontractors, without which it is no longer possible to breathe.
And in this situation, you can not quickly release, say a phone with a resolution of 1280x720, even if there is iron, because Symbian for this case is not yet sharpened, and sharpening will end in time only when it becomes irrelevant. And you cannot release an LTE phone, although technologists have invested in the standard since its inception, but what the hell, it would take a year and a half to implement it on MeeGo by the most optimistic estimates. And there are already Korean models with LTE on the market, though traditionally curves.
So what would you do? This is what Elop did:
Separately it is necessary to say about MeeGo. It was, there was a real hope that it will emerge, especially since the very same Windows Phone as a platform was not much better at that time. But after watching MeeGo for some time and analyzing how its operational components work, the conclusion was disappointing - Nokia's internal machinery is not able to produce software products with the required quality in the required time. One of the reasons is the very ballast that permeated the organization from top to bottom, including MeeGo. I will not disclose an open secret, but I hint that after the liquidation of MeeGo, further attempts were made to compete with Android using its Linux platform and MeeGo practices. But they were also buried, for the same reasons - the internal software development processes were too slow, and there was no time to learn.
With all this, one must also look at the inexorably diminishing money that was spent on Ovi, on the purchase of Intellisync, on tickets to Bangalore and to London, and on payment of insane subcontracts.
I will not specifically consider other aspects of Elop’s activities, such as the early promises of products on WP, the closure of factories, etc. This has been sucked many times without me, and I will not say anything new here. However, in conclusion, I repeat once again - Elop had no choice but to completely restructure the company by withdrawing the main software development to another company. Unfortunately, the internal processes in Nokia have brought their own development processes to a cruel deadlock, and even Android would not save the company because of the widespread bureaucracy and the constant practice of making collective decisions based on compromises.
Separately, I apologize for not quite the Russian language and clogging in English terms. Unfortunately, the author is not entirely Russian and does not know how correctly some terms are now called in modern language.
UPD:I beg you to draw attention to the fact that the information in this post reflects the situation in the company that has taken shape in 2010, before its restructuring and change of strategy. As I have repeatedly mentioned, the current Nokia is a new company, which, in its reorganization, took into account the above shortcomings and fought directly with them. Unfortunately, even within the company, many still do not understand what the true reasons were behind the change of strategy, platform and working methods, so this post is not so much an insider, as an attempt to explain what Nokia has done in one decisive step, including itself her employees. How the situation is now in the updated company with a new strategy, the author does not know yet, but sincerely believes that all the measures taken will ultimately lead Nokiy to success. Many thanks for the comments,I did not expect that there will be so many positive reviews.
Author.
Traditionally, for those who do not like a lot of beeches, brief (more or less) theses:
- Being a long time market leader, Nokia has greatly relaxed and shattered its internal infrastructure with bureaucracy, excessive outsourcing and a huge amount of useless “managerial stratum”.
- Being a leader for a long time, Nokia has
lost alot of money on unnecessary operating expenses, take-overs to unnecessary companies and on the irresponsible model of outsourcing. - Fully detached from reality with the departure of Jorma Ollilla, Nokia, managed by the
brilliant lawyer of theCEO Olli-Pekka Kalasvuo, spent a lot of money and effort on creating a useless and uncompetitive Ovi service infrastructure. As a result, in addition to money, Nokia lost a lot of useful time, which could and should have been spent on the development of the main business - phones, software, etc. - The bureaucracy and the unsinkable managerial stratum in Nokia successively migrated from one advanced project to another, in the same groups of people, self-replicating as a heap of formal
moron processes of thecommittees and management groups, a little shuffledaccordingto the specifics. As a result, it was this bureaucracy that killed both Symbian, and Ovi, and MeeGo and the rest of the attempts to catch up with the outgoing train on their own. - The fight against bureaucracy and the interlayer in Nokia has come to a complete dead end.
- The
great CEOElop simply had no choice but to beat the old, sluggish and rotten organization by creating an alliance with Microsoft and switching to Windows Phone. Thus, all the old processes, competencies, technologies and, most importantly, people have sharply become, as they say, “not in the subject.” And therefore, it was possible, under the specious excuse, to nail this herd of managers, endlessly painting fantasy roadmap with unicorns and shifting papers from the left edge of the table to the right. - New Nokia, after 2011 and the old Nokia until 2011 - these are two different organizations. They are united only by the common name and S40 OS for Asha phones.
- Burning platform, this is not Symbian or MeeGo. Burning platform, this is the state in which Nokia has driven years of relaxed leadership and stupid ambitions of the previous CEO - Olli-Pekki Kalasvuo with a clique of hitting vice-presidents.
- With the bureaucracy and business processes available for 2010, Nokia would not save either Android or half of the Bangalore population writing Qt under MeeGo. Even if Apple gave Nokia iOS and all services free of charge, they would have degenerated with the hands of all Requirement Managers into typical Nokii design chimeras and eventually bent over time.
- What the
great CEOElop did was the only reasonable decision that could give at least some chance of survival. The question “how did he do it?” Remains open, as does the question “will this help Nokia?” In the end. We should not forget that the current Nokia is a completely new organization, so it’s foolish to assume that it will regain its leadership at once. Like all new organizations, it will have to fight for this leadership for a long time. - Without mistakes and victories, Nokia would never have had an Android or an iPhone. Both Google and Apple carefully analyzed the merits and demerits of older competitors before taking a step forward.
All this is in the details - under the cut. I warn you that there are no cool pictures there. Sheer graphomania and ornichie.
First of all, I will try to answer the question that has long interested me:
Why themes about Nokia cause so much flames and excitement?
For me, the answer is obvious. The crisis and perestroika in Nokia are close to the Russian heart, because the Soviet Union literally recently collapsed in you, then it was rebuilt under the guidance of a drunk Yeltsin with a cane, and so on. When the “process started” with the USSR, everybody at every corner was saying the truth, remember? True, it flowed from television screens, newspaper and magazine pages, bards, rockers, KVNs sang their songs, books were written with volumes and so on. Everyone spoke on the topic, God, how we lived, how it would be if there was no revolution and what should have been done next. After everyone paused, listened, listened to the speakers, chewed and everyone answered for himself the eternal question - who is to blame and what to do, the society plunged into the routine of daily affairs. Those who did so did learn, except to state the obvious, continue yelling and writing about the bloody gebna, the lawlessness of those who hold them, great-power rudeness, about the fact that “we are smerds for them” and “the authorities have sniveled, covet and create what they want.” Well, God bless them.
')
The situation with the cutting of the truth-uterus about Nokia is tracing from the collapse of the USSR. At the same time, the majority of opinions and components of the cut-off truth of the uterus are some such cocktail from the interpretation of open financial statements, usually made by superimposing the final figures on some infinite scales or axes, personal insults of some offended and not very mobile analysts issued for an objective point. of view, and of course personal experience - from the series “here I dropped my Nokia 3111 into the toilet, this was the phone ...”.
My opinion outlined below is based solely on my own experience and knowledge of this office, so I don’t pretend to an absolutely finite and objective point of view, but I hope that my reading will entertain you.
Suomalainen Yritys or the role of Sisu in the Finnish company strategy
Let's start very far away. About the fact that Nokia, as a manufacturer of mobile phones, has a rich history associated with rubber galoshes, tractors, televisions, etc. I will not remind. I'll talk about this topic. The country of Finland and the Finnish society basically has some very interesting features that can explain Nokia’s strange behavior in certain situations. Finns for the most part work very diligently, diligently, not November on trifles and despite the difficulties. Of course, over the past 10 years, everything has changed a bit, the number of tolerasts and all oppressed has increased, but on the whole, everything looks exactly like that. In this, the Finns are a bit like the Japanese, who tend to polish the individual elements of their work to absolute art.
Finnish engineers are mostly introverts. By the way, do you know how Finnish introverts differ from extroverts? The fact that Finnish extroverts, when they talk to you, look at your shoes, not theirs. Introverts who can work carefully and neatly can move mountains. If you give the Finnish engineer a rail and a file, put him in a house with a sauna by the lake and feed him with sausages, then after five years he will cut out an exact copy of the iPhone, no doubt. The ability to do something methodically for a long time, overcoming difficulties and striving for a distant, sometimes unrealistic goal, is called the Finnish word "sisu". In general, there is no unambiguous translation of this word into Russian, and this can only be fully understood if you were born in Finland.
The reasons for all this are mostly historical. Finland has long been under the yoke of Sweden, then was part of the Russian Empire, then survived the winter war with the USSR, then for a long time the USSR paid reparations for participating in the Great Patriotic War on the side of Germany. All this, such a feeling of constant press, rallied the Finnish people and developed such elements of psychology as “sisu”. Why am I doing all this? This is necessary to understand some moments of the logic of Nokia in the development of the company.
The background for such a cold-resistant and bullet-proof Finnish engineer is an environment that requires quick response and quick decisions. In non-standard dynamic situations, Finnish meticulous engineers are often lost. The reason is that in order to get to work they need to carefully plan and verify everything, read the documentation, discuss all the details. In dynamic situations, it is often necessary to act without clarifying all the details, seeing only a small part of the overall picture, and there is no time left for something fundamental. This moment must also be taken into account.
Well, with such introductory and let's imagine Nokia, the sample say in 2001. By this year, Finnish engineers, through hard work on the NMT and simple, but reliable GSM phones, gained credibility and the company began to really drown in money. As a result, the company began to actively expand, nevertheless focusing specifically on mobile phones. For several years, Nokia sold all of its units, with tractors and televisions that did not directly relate to the core business. But we are wondering what was happening inside.
How Pekka became a manager ...
And that's what happened. A good engineer, say, by the antennae, whose name is, say, Pekka, became a senior engineer, then a specialist, then a senior specialist, and then everything. His career growth along the engineering line stopped, and Nokia did not foresee more positions for his growth. It was only later realized that not everyone needs to be managers. And at that time, Pekka, for example, has five children, a house with a sauna on credit and everyone wants to eat. In 2003, Nokia’s policy meant continuous career growth upward only through the managerial level. That is, at some stage, Pekke had to become a manager in order to receive more money. It’s not a lie that for this purpose, positions are often specially organized within an already existing team, and this transformation took place depending on the years worked in one place - who is older then the manager.
According to this scheme, Nokia, among many people working there, due to the relative stability, has acquired the tacit status of almost a state organization with hierarchical elements for years of service. That is, 3 years of work - a senior engineer, another 3 - a specialist and so on. Promotions within the same organization usually occurred in accordance with the amount of time worked and all those who had not yet risen to the manager waited patiently for their turn.
Well, now let's look at our Pekka. He's a great antenna engineer, yes, but a darn manager. He knows how to work alone, but he feels uncomfortable managing the work of others. Moreover, as soon as Pekka becomes a manager, he is automatically invited to 20 different meetings during the week, where his opinion on certain issues is needed, plus working meetings, planning, reporting, etc.
In a short time, Pekka understands that he only has enough time for his work in the new role to attend meetings and send the information received to them to various authorities, in a sluggishly compiled form. The general rule is this: the higher the instance, the fewer words and slides in PowerPoint. The lower the instance, the more tricky questions asking for detailed answers. At the same time, among peers, Pekka feels great. He still remembers something about his antennas and can screw in a word or other, for example, in the discussion of technical roadmap for the next year.
Since everything looks beautiful on paper, the plans are approved and his opinion is appreciated, after some time Pekka begins to break away from reality. Roadmaps, plans, and other talking rooms look beautiful and easy only in his head, and reality begins to lag behind because of his flight, because someone needs to work with his hands, and if it's a Finn, then also think thoroughly about everything and think it over. And after some time we get a typical
Having rejected the crookedness, I will note this: Pekka every year participates in the creation and approval of a strategy and development plans, say antennas. He represents the interests of his engineers, determines what they can do and what is not for the required period of time. In addition, without his participation, no decision can be taken. And here comes a couple more paradoxes.
First, after several such one-year iterations, Pekka understands that every year he asserts essentially the same thing and every year this is given to him more and more smoothly, because he repeats the same arguments - verified, accurate, brief , smart, word polished to a shine. At some point, Pekka wonders - why? That is, why, say, a super antenna, planned in the roadmap for 2004, is present in the plans of 2005 and 2006, and so on? Mark it as “concern number 1” and move on.
Secondly, at some point, Pekka understands that the number of committees and groups to which he belongs as a manager is already beginning to exceed his abilities. Each decision in a particular group requires him to delve into the details of real proposals. But Pekka physically does not have time to delve into all these details, plus as an antenna specialist, he is already beginning to lose qualifications, plus, more precisely, minus, no one without his consent can make a decision and start working, therefore decisions need to be made, and preferably quickly. Mark this as “concern number 2”.
Third, seeing that the implementation of the plans does not keep up with boltology and drawing in PowerPoint, Pekka goes to refresher courses and learns about such a concept as risks. The concept of "risks" specifically for Pekka is good because you can add an infinite number of them to the analysis of any problem. Therefore, if a task is simply “not rushing”, then it can always be surrounded by a high level of risk.
How anxious managers worked ...
Let's return to the “concern number 1” and recall the super antenna. It is approved from year to year because everyone works well. Paradox? Nothing like this. Just after the plans, strategies and roadmaps were approved, say for the year 2003, the majority of managers responsible for this will be promoted next year and begin to deal with other, more important issues. And Pekka spends one more year to explain everything to the new generation of managers, too. Then another year, etc. and so on until he himself moves to a higher position and does not push this problem to his successor.
Although no one can reproach Pekk for not pushing the super antenna. But the problem is, to promote it and start working on it, you need a product that agrees to take it. And there their managers with their own vision of risks, who really do not want to take a new, not run-in, chip into their product. And in the details that can convince them, they also have no time to delve into, they need everything briefly, smoothly and understandably, because they suffer from the same illness as Pekka. And here, on the one hand, Pekka himself does not have time to delve into everything to make a decision, but on the other hand he is not understood for the same reason.
In order to resolve the current situation in this environment, anti-patterns are beginning to be applied:
- Postponement of decision-making by restructuring the formulation of the problem, splitting it into several components, or reformulating it, and then issuing it for a new problem.
- Making decisions by compromise and sharing responsibility for several people, such as “I agree, if everyone agrees”
- Postponing decision making, using risk as a key argument to hide uncertainty or unwillingness to take responsibility
Everything. As a result, we get the skeleton of the very managerial layer, which over time will reign in Nokia. A lot of people speak intelligently and find countless reasons to “talk about it later” and “in more detail”, but not making real decisions, but waiting for instructions from above, or accepting them “with a squeak” on the basis of ugly compromises in order not to create conflicts interests, or generally discourage decision-making at the root, based on a strange system of risks, and in fact waiting for these problems to be solved by someone else over time.
Such an assessment of the managerial layer is an extreme degree of the grotesque; it cannot be said that all the managers in Nokia in the mid-2000s were without exception. But to understand the picture, I use exactly the grotesque.
The main idea of ​​this part of the opus is to make it clear that the system of decision-making, the introduction of new technologies, etc. in Nokia, it was hopelessly corrupted by a multi-level hierarchy of bureaucracy and the struggle of managers with themselves. Some time ago in a single news publication, some mobile analysts admired that Nokia was in no hurry to introduce new technologies, justifying this with the maturity of the company, its talents to carefully analyze the market situation, etc. I hasten to disappoint, most of these “mature” decisions were made solely because of the slowness of the company, and in some cases forced, that is, only when the situation was brought to a critical state and demanded an immediate escalation.
Strange design solutions
From Pecky, let's go to Mary. Maria is a senior UX designer for the S60. It develops the UI, or rather the menu for, say, the browser. If someone remembers the menu in smarts on the S60, with an investment level of up to 4x and a total number of all items about a hundred, then I’ll understand what I’m talking about. Personally, I had such an opinion that most of the people working in Nokia, who were simply tired of life, became either UI designers or UI testers, because in this area, traditionally, universities had not been taught before and, accordingly, they did not ask for a diploma, it was impossible to find a man, only dismissal. And as you know, in Finland it’s just very easy to dismiss someone very and very difficult, it’s cheaper to keep it in the workplace, but more on that later.
So that's about Mary. She basically doesn't care about the browser menu. It develops it according to existing patterns, which means to create a submenu item for each of them. She does not care about the other 20 menus in the phone and that they can duplicate each other. She can discuss two months what to call a new submenu item - “Clear browsing history” or “Clear history”, and finally call it “Clear data”, because in short, localization in Turkmen does not go beyond the bounds of one line and generally average The user of “history” knows only that in 1918 Finland gained independence from Russia.
All her work, Maria diligently does in Adobe Acrobat, where she has prepared special templates, producing PDF files as output. Developers swear by cutting out bitmap images from Adobe Reader for layouts and end up redrawing everything on their own, but everyone is afraid to offend Maria with a bad word, also because she is such a sweet and good person. For the same reason, the main dude who collects all the menus on the phone in one pile, once again sighs and squeezes the seventy-ninth menu item into the big picture, redrawing everything from Acrobat to the right place. He would certainly have done everything right, but he doesn’t have time to explain this to Maria for a long and tedious time, because otherwise, if he does everything himself without her notification, he will create a bad situation and ignore the opinions of others.
To understand why this is happening, you need to go back to the Finnish roots and see, say, upbringing. As the Finns themselves say, Finland is a country of average people. And in principle this was justified during a war or something else, where it is necessary to withstand the use of a “sis” and not to bend. According to this logic, it is better to have a hundred strong middling than ten stars. Since childhood, attention in Finland has been paid only to those who are incapable and lagging behind. If you are smart, cool and talented, it is believed that you will live and so. No one will encourage you and be equal to you, and if you are at the same time immodest or upstart, you will also be scolded. But those who do not have time, to whom everything is given is difficult - they are always in the center of attention, each his / her little step is considered an achievement and is exalted. Therefore, I will give advice if you are actively praised in a Finnish company, this is an occasion to reflect on your own success or behavior.
All this, coupled with the tendency to make compromise decisions in the absence of time, for a long time gave the results of a similar example to the menu in S60. Everyone understood that there was a problem, but when its elimination went down to the personal level of Masha or Pekka, it was rare for anyone to take the responsibility to say - “Maria, you are doing a damn job”. Moreover, rarely did anyone try to get Maria to be more creative in her work, rather than drawing a hundred menu items using the same template. Working on something, okay.
Bonus and motivation system
Bonuses in the company Nokia is a separate issue. For simplicity, let's say that there was no difference how an employee worked during the year - bad, normal or excellent. It had no effect on the basic salary - the salary only increased over time, never decreased. This only affected the annual bonus, which, due to various intricate schemes for calculating it, was never the first significant for staff with an average salary. In addition, secondly, the final difference between those who worked poorly and those who performed the double rate was a hundred or two euros per year. Also, the performance evaluation system was quite doubtful. In some cases, the priorities placed at the beginning of the half year became irrelevant by the end of it. New priorities appeared and, as a result, managers, throwing up their hands, suggested setting the average rating - “normal”.
The wage increase system was also very vague. If the employee worked with increased efficiency for a year, then he was supposed to receive some increase. The irony was that even the gains earned by the trade unions, as compensation for inflation, were several times higher than if a person fulfilled a double rate for several years.
As a result, this led to the emergence of a huge number of “gonzo workers”, who, realizing that wages did not wait at one place, began to jump at different positions in the organization, usually with an increase in wages, without producing anything significant. Think about the aforementioned Pekku, and you will understand how and why it was more profitable to postpone the adoption of important decisions and not bring the work begun to the end. Yes, yes, precisely because in a large organization it was easier to change jobs than to try to pierce the walls with your head.
The greatest heights and successes in terms of salary increases were achieved by people who moved from Nokia to another organization and back. If inside Nokia still existed some kind of salary increase policy when transferring to another internal position, and certain internal categories and tariffs were taken into account, then after leaving the organization and returning to it, no limits were applied.That is, you could be a senior developer, work a year in the office doing subcontracting of the same Nokia as a project manager and return back as a senior manager with a double salary difference. And all this in two years instead of several years of hard and responsible work in one place ...
Insane Subcontracting
At some point, when the number of managerial layer began to gradually increase, many managers at once came to the conclusion that it is more profitable to order some projects from third-party organizations. It happened like this. For example, let's say Yucca, in his 35 years, has already outgrown his position as a senior developer and wants to be a manager. Yucca is engaged in writing the editor SMS. Well, let's make it a manager and let it manage the creation of the editor at the conceptual level. Since architectural astronauts still promise us a global general editor of everything on the phone in the long run, we will not hire developers for him, but order the whole thing to another office, and we will make him responsible for those. job, and their training. The profit is obvious - it’s not necessary to hire permanent workers and pay taxes for them,Expenditure amounts are clear, projected, plus liability and regulated quality / acceptance criteria. And when it comes time to close the shop, then there will be no problems.
Speaking in simple and understandable human language, at some point Nokia began to compensate for the crisis and problems of internal career growth by hired workers, under the guise of a subcontract. At some point in Finland, an incredible number of companies that mainly existed at the expense of Nokia subcontracts, and which also changed their names in the course of the play - TietoEnator (aka Tieto), Sesca (aka NeuSoft), Flander (aka Symbio ), Almare (aka Plenware, aka Cybercom), Digia, Accenture, Ixonos, and so on. This was later extrapolated to outsourcing based on class differences and slavery, such as hiring 10 programmers in India, instead of one in Finland. Simply put, these same companies began to open units in India and take contracts there.
The main and cruel problem of the subcontract is that the competence and know-how due to this subcontract erodes somewhere between the two companies, eventually nullifying all previous developments. Simply put, not all knowledge is transferable, and outsourcing directly kills the internal competence of the company. I will give an example.
In 2008, Nokia closed the phone factory in Germany. Well, it closed and closed, but at the same time it also closed and the department that was engaged in the development of means of local communication in phones. This department, which by the way was one of the most advanced in terms of technical competence, was bought up by Sasken. After the closure of the factory, Nokia entered into a subcontract agreement with the same Sasken, and the same department in the heavily depleted structure continued to do the same work for Nokia. A year later, Sasken disbanded this department under the pretext of transferring business to India. If you imagine how the contents of the brains of German engineers, accumulated over several years, to be sent to Bangalore, and train even ten times more Indian programmers at the appropriate level, then go ahead and patent the method.The story of the German factory is only one in a series of similar ones. The ending of the story is that at some stage Nokia gave the go-ahead to the Indian programmers to rewrite this code from scratch, because no one remembered and understood little in it, and this code simply did not touch for years. When it became necessary to conduct a global refactoring, it seemed that it was easier to write it again. The laugh is that it just seemed easier. As a result, deadlines, repeated attacks on the same rake and the invention of bicycle curves.When it became necessary to conduct a global refactoring, it seemed that it was easier to write it again. The laugh is that it just seemed easier. As a result, deadlines, repeated attacks on the same rake and the invention of bicycle curves.When it became necessary to conduct a global refactoring, it seemed that it was easier to write it again. The laugh is that it just seemed easier. As a result, deadlines, repeated attacks on the same rake and the invention of bicycle curves.
Again, this is only one of the many stories. During its “heyday”, Nokia shuffled and overtook a huge amount of its competencies through Finnish, Chinese, Indian and Romanian subcontracts, where this knowledge was, if not lost, then suffered badly, including being misinterpreted by inexperienced engineers.
If we take and see, let's say on Microsoft, with Ballmer's obsessive-compulsive declamations - “Developers! Developers! Developers! ”, Then we will notice a very interesting trend. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that Microsoft is outsourcing ALL but the core business. That is, the main value is the code that is written within the organization by programmers who belong to the organization. Psychologists, graphic designers, logistics, lawyers, bookkeeping, localization and translation, etc. can be outsourced. but it is impossible to outsource the technological competence that represents the core business. Unfortunately, the model of outsourcing in Nokia was exactly the opposite - the code and the introduction of technology were done in dozens of other organizations by subcontracting.
The logical result of this? As a result, Nokia finds itself in a situation where the managerial layer in some areas is already the final link in the hierarchy. In fact, it turns out a crowd of smart and a lot of talking former professionals who now put technical tasks to third-party organizations. That is, at the moment their main talents, which they were once valuable, are not fully utilized. And in the trade and shifting of papers from the left edge of the table to the right, former engineers often lack talent. After all, what is work with outsourcing is a dynamic struggle between two managers for deadlines and prices. In such work, the content of the contract itself is often not analyzed deep enough. And it is far from a secret that in the process of subcontracting some key requirements that passed through the hands of several chain managers simply fell out of the delivered product.Now add the above description of typical Finnish introvert engineers to the word “dynamic” and you will probably understand the essence of the problem.
Well, we have discussed all this. Now imagine an organization in which the main business represents one big subcontract. Submitted? This is Nokia until 2008.
Symbian
When Nokia released the 9110 Communicator in 1998, it became clear at some point that it would be difficult to work in this direction without a full-fledged multi-tasking OS. Quite another question is whether multitasking OSes were required for regular phones, even smart, because the output of the first iPhone and such a thing as Windows Phone 7 after 10 years clearly showed that you can put together the necessary applications into a quite tasty and revered phone without " full-fledged "OS. However, at that time, and specifically for communicators, multitasking was needed. Nokia had no single resources for writing this. But since Nokia was already an adult company with ambitions, then at least she wanted to do the look or the UI herself.
As a result, Nokia had to choose between two offers - Windows CE and EPOC. Yes, an alliance with Microsoft could take place as early as 1998, but for some reason Microsoft did not agree to separate the UI directly from Windows CE and therefore, as well as for a number of other reasons, Nokia began working with Psion.
For those who do not know, in 1998, an office was created under the name Symbian Ltd., which included as founders - Psion, Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola, from which this unique model of a chimerical mobile platform with elements of insanity began. Symbian Ltd. did three versions of the mobile platform - for Nokia called S60, for Motorola and Erickson called UIQ and for a specific Japanese market called MOAP. All of them had different UI and different priorities for features. That is, for example, the kernel feature that was adopted for the UIQ could linger for a year for S60 or vice versa, etc.
Here it is necessary to say one more thing. EPOC and Symbian as a platform were written directly in C ++, but at the time when there was no uniform standard for C ++. Therefore, Symbian is known for its mildly “strange” features of C ++ programming, which are very obscenely revered by software developers. The development of the entire platform, including the kernel, immediately in C ++ led to one more feature. None of the existing open source on it could not be applied without porting to C ++, which made it difficult even without difficult development.
Features C ++, the inability to use open source packages on pure C, and other identity of the operating system were complemented by a completely idiotic SDK model and developer documentation. A bunch of disparate API packages and a poor consistency of their use led to an interesting situation. In order to set up a development environment and write the “Hello World!” Application, an average developer with knowledge of ordinary C ++ took up to a week. You can compare it with XCode for iOS or with the Android SDK. It is not surprising that in the two years of the existence of the same iPhone applications it was written almost more than all the time for Symbian. And do not care about the fact that more than half of these applications just grafomanskaya garbage. The bottom line is that development under Symbian was quite a difficult task for novice independent programmers.And with the widespread development of Symbian and its introduction into smartphones, there is a need for education and training of a separate type of specialists - a developer for Symbian. In the end, after the massive cuts in Nokia, some of them were quite difficult to find work for obvious reasons of lack of demand.
The problem with the development for Symbian was basically solved by creating more distinct APIs and putting in order the documentation, examples, writing elementary RADs under the same Eclipse / Carbide. This eventually began to happen at Symbian sunset - partly through Qt, partly by screwing plain C libraries, but time was lost and independent mobile developers saw the alternative in other axes quickly dumped there.
Was this an operating system problem as such? My opinion is that no. It was possible to finish Symbian to a competitive state. As some can see on the example of the latest Symbian devices, as a result, they licked it thoroughly enough, so much so that some mobile analysts immediately rushed to write another treatise on the subject of the fact that Nokia refused to give it up, etc. But this entire article was written in order to show that Nokia’s problems were not in the operating system and not in technical solutions, but in a cumbersome organization that stupidly could not keep up with competitors who had no similar organizational problems.
And the reality was this - there was an operating system, the core of which was developed by subcontracting trading between Nokia and Symbian managers, the middleware and UI of which was written by Nokia itself, like the S60 platform, there were specific phone programs that wrote the necessary features not yet implemented on the platform or in S60 ... Plus, Symbian himself, who wrote the operating system, was engaged not only in Nokia, but also made two branches for other participants of this enterprise. For the sake of laughter, I can add that the S60, with all the original Nokia decorations, was also offered as a separate platform for licensees - Samsung and LG.
As a result, the situation was ridiculous. For example, a programmer from S60 and a programmer from Symbian could, as a result of joint work on a project, pre-empt an additional feature ahead of time, which all the same had to be done once, test it and put it into a build. Then, this working and implemented feature was successively discarded, first from the next version of S60, and then from Symbian due to the fact that managers were not able to approve it in the current requirements for any known calculations of risks and priorities. As a result, both programmers had to edit their tested code in order to isolate this feature from what was stated in the version.
There were such cases as, for example, one of the main components in the library of communication Symbian was written by a student undergoing summer practice. And then no improvement requirements for this component were accepted for a long time by any product, because no one knew this code, its refactoring did not meet the time requirements and the risk of touching it was always calculated as significant. This eventually led to the fact that a separate component could not be moved at all for reasons of risk for several years, even if there was a real need to improve it. He did not want to take Pekk on risks for a couple of years, and then handed him over to Yukka, who braked him a couple of years due to reasons of low priority requirements.
As a result, over the years the existence of such a model, the number of bureaucracy and buffer layer between the two organizations has increased, and the quality of products has decreased, because for each specific program for the production of a specific smartphone model there was always a terrible hemorrhoids - from which to build the final software? Toli wait until it writes Symbian, or S60, or write by yourself, or order subcontractors. And all this happened against the background of a dynamic, exhausting fuss with the priorities of technical requirements and a constant conflict of interests between the managers of different fragmented groups.
What is fragmentation?
In Nokia, in addition to the natural ideological discrepancies between Symbian and S60 for a long time there was another level of fragmentation called the business direction of smartphones. It did not appear immediately, but gradually. Actively, he began to escalate one day, when a moaning and witty dude named Anssi Vanjoki appeared on the horizon, who, through active, not at all typical Finnish behavior and pressure, proved the need to create a whole direction called Multimedia.
There have been other attempts before that to make specialized directions, such as the S90 or NGage. If you are not aware, then the S90 was Nokia’s attempt to make Touch UI phones long before Android and iPhone, that’s what most of the current smartphone users are working with now, poking their fingers at the screen. S90 really didn’t assume a finger, but used a traditional wand - a stylus, but nonetheless. Years of work, hundreds of people, failed 7700 and 7710 phones, a bunch of prototypes including touchscreen tablets that never saw the light, and millions of dollars spent almost nowhere.
Ask about NGage? It was supposed to be a mobile gaming console. Actually, two devices came out - NGage and NGage QD, after which the initiative was transferred to a service plane similar to the Microsoft Xbox, where it finally died, because users couldn’t understand why they needed to run some kind of NGage, to put. As is well known, the application distribution policy for Symbian has been absolutely insane for a long time - called “Form Eight” (which
So, about the witty guy Anssi. In contrast to the S90 and NGage, he somehow pushed through his line and Nokia at some time actually produced three lines of smartphones - regular, multimedia (which were persistently called mobile computers) and business. At the same time, with the exception of the additional letter N at the beginning of the index, no one could clearly tell how Multimedia Moblie Computers differ from ordinary smartphones and how they both differ from business solutions. For example, there was a Nokia 3250 phone, which was even stronger than some N-Series, and included all the chips with music and video. In my time, no one could clearly explain to me why he was not multimedia. There was such a proverb, marked by one mobile onolitek - if a dude uses the phrase “Mobile Computer” speaking of the phone, then this is an employee of Nokia Multimedia. This is the true truth.
With all this magnificence, the presence of fragmentation physically resulted in the duplication of different teams. Here, for example, was the usual team that had its X millionth annual budget and developed, say, software for the camera for the main line of the S60. And in the neighboring town sat another similar team, with an even greater budget, which made software for the camera for the so-called. "Mobile computers", that is, the same smartphones with the prefix N. Two teams, double costs, two code branches that naturally did not overlap. And at the same time, another team was sitting in Symbian that made software for the camera, say for UIQ. Again wasting money.
There were a lot of such teams that arose because of fragmentation. I was a little overlooked by E-Series - business smartphones, usually with a QWERTY keyboard and integration into corporate services. There, too, there was a fragmentation, since the priorities of the business teams did not coincide with the priorities of multimedia, and together they rose across the throat of the plans of simple boys from S60. If for the first ones it was vital to synchronize contacts with the Exchange Server, for the second it was important to synchronize the music with Windows Media Player and both teams looked at the software for the built-in camera differently - face detection is important, and the second is bar codes and business cards.
In short, due to the fragmentation of business, a lot of money was wasted wasted on double (and sometimes triple) work. It is difficult to say how many of them were spent, in numbers, but if once these amounts are announced, I think that a couple of Arab sheikhs will suffocate with envy. It’s no secret that when the fall of Nokia began, she provided herself a couple of years of life stupidly by reducing such unnecessary expenses and streamlining the business. Unfortunately, a lot of “re-optimisations” were made in that very period, which pushed the organization back. As a rule, this was done by new boys with a two-year freshness MBA diplomas in their pockets, which stupidly translated everything that could be subcontracted to Romania and India, with corresponding consequences. Well, about the author has already written enough ...
About insane expenses
If we are talking about spending, it is impossible not to mention among others about the morning plane Helsinki-Oulu. The usual such aircraft, such as the MD-11 for 200 passengers, it flies even now. In the morning, flies, flies 600 km, back in the evening. In the old days, 90% of the passengers were employees of Nokia, they joked that the remaining 10% of the passengers are industrial spies. Then on arrival each paid another 30 euros for a taxi at one end, then back. And there were other "semi-regular" aircraft, to London - Symbian was there, to Germany, to Canada, etc. The middle manager at Nokia was “flying around” for the year on Finair's silver card, which corresponds to OneWorld Ruby, which is 40,000 points. This despite the fact that the flight within Europe will bring you about 3000 one way, and to the States about 5000. If you are a manager in a virtual team, which is spread between Finland, Canada and China, then you have a permanent - gold and business box with blackjack and whores.
They flew a lot, flew often, on occasion and without reason, to all corners of the world. Sometimes it was really easier to fly for a couple of days from Finland to Germany, hold an hour-long meeting there and fly back to solve the problem quickly. When they began to cut costs, the first thing they did was to install the Tandberg video conference system at a cost of $ 20,000 each to reduce flights. As a result, no one used them, because the Finns are naturally shy and do not like to show themselves on TV, and the conference systems have gone somewhere, replacing them with ordinary webcams, which, incidentally, are rarely used either.
Why all this? It is not clear why creating virtual teams with a bunch of developers living in different time zones, etc. if their coordination ultimately leaves just an unreasonable amount of money and time? At a certain period in Nokia, it was a tradition to have in the team representatives from all countries and continents, respectively working in the community. If the purpose of creating such teams was to give the Finnish engineers from a small country a look at the world, then this goal was achieved. If the goal was to ensure effective work, then I strongly disagree with such methods.
Another item of insane expenses was the purchase of companies. I will give one example. In 2005, Nokia spent $ 430 million to buy Intellisync. At the end of time, no one so clearly could not say what exactly was purchased. I stand applauding to Intellisync business owners who were able
This is not an isolated example, but in my opinion - the most extreme in the history of the company. A complete list of purchases can be found here: www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/investors/acquisitions-and-divestments/acquisitions-and-divestments . To my deep regret, he does not give real numbers in dollars or euros, and also does not give a final assessment of the usefulness of the purchased company. I dare to note that a sufficient number of companies bought in this way dissolved in Nokia with almost no trace.
There were also applicants with the purchase of professional services instead of companies. For example, Nokia from 2002 to 2008 regularly paid one out of five English offices at $ 1.8 million per year for the program synchronizing with Microsoft Outlook under Windows. At the same time, the company did not own the source code until, at the end of 2008, it was sold to it for a fee. The office later went out of the software altogether and opened a real estate business in London. Kayf?
The main problem in such unreasonable and irresponsible expenses is the lack of responsibility. Yes, this is exactly the case, for the reasons described above, in Nokia, decision-making is rarely the one who was responsible. Initially, a collective decision is taken, the worst possible one, due to the fact that it is formed on the basis of a compromise, so as not to offend anyone, absorbing all the shortcomings. Then the responsibility for making this decision is smeared. In style - bought a thousand sets of Tandberg for 20 million, and put it to hell with it. Then a clever uncle will come and say that they are not needed - we will decide that they are not needed. Well, in that spirit. Reminds voting for the symbol of the 2014 Olympics in Sochi - Leopard, White Bear and Bunny, then Putin will say who exactly.
About secrets and about mobile analysts
In the 2000s, the Nokia company for a long time spat on the opinion of users. Yes, this is a fact that was repeatedly covered in the press by mobile and not-so-big analysts. There was not even a little bit clear feedback form. There was no analytics, no web, no crash, no usage, no other statistics. Few people in the company represented what exactly real people want.
Mobile phones were invented on the basis of magical calculations for some strange coordinate system, where the X axis extended from housewives and farmers from Peru on donkeys to vice-presidents of high-tech companies, and along the Y axis, young enthusiasts, Internet surfers, gamers, music lovers and pragmatic business leaders. As a result, smart diagrams were created, with clusters that supposedly showed potential niches for new phone models. How this all could be created without real and regular feedback from the users - I still don’t know.
As it is known, the result of Nokia’s activity during the year was the release of a certain number of new phones. With the exception of design innovations, it was sometimes difficult to tell how one phone was different from another, in terms of the same software. The answer to the question - “WHY the company sprayed on several models during the year?” Is in the very table of potential users ranking along the X, Y axes and one more letter from the Russian alphabet.
If you look honestly at that situation, then out of ten phones produced a year, the number of normal ones rarely exceeded 2-3. As a rule, even if the software was 99% the same, the whole thing rested on the main product manager. If the manager was good, then the product was relatively bug-free. That is why many people remembered the 6300 or N95 or E71, and few remembered, say 7500, N96 or E72. And phones like 7610 or N97, to be honest in Nokia itself, were recalled with a sense of shame.
Yes, it was all about the manager. If he had a personal desire and the task of releasing a quality phone, he tested it himself day and night, kicked everyone, forced him to work, delayed the release, when necessary, etc. But these were very few. Unfortunately, the characteristics of the main management staff, I have already cited above. Coupled with the lack of responsibility it gave such results as everyone saw. They released a buggy phone and don't care - there are still five more in the row, we'll finish it. We released the product on time, received bonuses, and that’s it - we are moving to another project, to other ideas, perpetual growth, striving forward.
At the same time, sometimes, in principle, there was no understanding of the fact that people do not buy phones 3 times a year, and that in 2005 people also used models produced in 2000m. Employees of Nokia lived with those prototypes that will only see the light next year, or even later. Therefore, any adequate claims on the quality of existing phones are often swept aside under the pretext - “God, this is old stuff!”. Such is the separation from reality. Updates of the firmware were made only in the service center, and only bugs were fixed in them, no new features or platforms. The fact that now the fashionable word is called customer retention was absent in principle, and gross production was present, driven by tired out managers who were chronically short of time and for any reason a lot of “risks” were stored in their pockets. Explaining to the manager that it is necessary to spend a month of work on elementary refactoring in order to improve the stability and extensibility of the component, it was almost impossible to platformize ten vertically written features. This time wasted. Why refactor that, and so worked in the previous model? Wrote - do not touch, etc.
Against this background, sometimes articles appeared in the press and the Internet, which contained criticism, suggestions for improvement, certain sound thoughts and hints. It is foolish to say that within the company did not see any problems. These articles were quoted, sent from department to department, but due to the lack of clear responsibility, specific measures were rarely taken on them, only on the most blatant facts such as a mass marriage. Including measures were not taken due to the fact that, as already mentioned, there was simply no conceptual feedback mechanism in Nokia. There was a PR department, which was mainly engaged in voicing the official position of the company, and the possibilities for organizing feedback, and especially bringing it to the desired level, and the teams within the organization were minimal.
Here we must make a digression and again recall the Finnish mentality. Intelligent and modest Finns do not like to swear and sort things out. Any hitting, criticism or scandal put them in a dead end, make them blush and silently quickly walk away from the source of spiritual discomfort. This is essentially what happened on a more global scale, when mobile analysts publicly wrote multi-page opus with frank claims and visits. It was easier to ignore them and not to descend to the level of areal battle, but this created a precedent as if Nokia behaved too arrogant, since it allegedly "does not want to be responsible for the quality of the product," etc., well, you probably remember.
Against this background, some mobile truth-bearers who cut the truth-womb to the left and right, among others, received their loyal audience inside Nokia, that is, among those workers who sincerely wanted to resolve problems within the company, tried to point out the mobile analysts with their existing shortcomings. Here are some of these fans of the printed word, too, drove their nails into the coffin of the previous organization.
Usually it happened this way. People with access to prototypes "by big secret" gave them on the subject to play well-known mobile experts. They promised to give them their private feedback, as well as test the phone and, in general, express an authoritative expert opinion that would supposedly help to improve the product. In reality, all that most of these experts want is just to get an exclusive. Here I deliberately make a distinction between real experts and “such” experts.
The fact is that Nokia, like other companies, hire certain organizations to test and research products, organize focus groups for presales testing, etc. At the same time, an official nondisclosure document is drawn up, which provides for liability for information leakage. This is how real experts and analysts work.
All the rest,
I think that many people are aware of the events when one of these analysts published a review of the prototype of the N8 phone before its official presentation. Management Nokia in this connection was forced to postpone the date of the official announcement of the model on the day after the publication of the review. I don’t know whether to say that such an analyst simply substituted his informants. There is no need to talk about the real consequences of these leaks for the people who allowed them. I will only express my personal regret that the countermeasures against this analyst were not brought to the end, using all the power of the disinterested law-enforcement system of Russia, and specifically the press hut in the SIZO for a long weekend, as some Russian-speaking workers of Nokia suggested. Therefore, this type of otbrehavshis continues to actively draw in public, making a good face on a bad game and presenting your personal emotions as objective information. Well, God bless him. From this story should make this.
The person who gives the prototypes or other results of their interim work into the hands of a third party without an official document of non-disclosure, roughly shits himself in a compote or sawing the branch on
The fact is that the characteristics of iron are planned in advance and very carefully. The process of production of the iron platform itself is a thing very far from software characteristics, because you can theoretically tighten software on iron and after release if the model allows, for example, by issuing a hotfix or update - not sugar but not fatal. But if you lose with iron, then competitors will eat you. In this case, the iron must be chosen not anyhow, but a quality one and so that the final price would give a profit and not go off scale. It is also necessary to ensure that after the announcement before the appearance of the product in the stores, the response of competitors is reduced to a minimum, etc.
As a result, the timing of the announcement and release of the product - this is very carefully verified dates when everything should come together, and subsequently bring a profit. People who do not understand this and violate the secrecy of disclosing the characteristics of prototypes are just idiots. As a result, falling profits hit their own pocket, or even deprive them of their work, as some Protestants from Simbian, who had spent six months on the manual, clearly felt. But of course in the end it is up to the particular person to decide what is more important to him.
Until a certain time, the secrecy mode in Nokia was so formal that all roadmaps, names and characteristics of the prototypes were available on the net to almost everyone. Prototypes were stolen in factories, forgotten in taxis, and even stolen from DHL hubs when they were sent from one team to another. Entire presentations, mostly for mobile operators, flowed into the network. Mobile and not-so-analysts very confidently and openly discussed on the pages of their publications the characteristics of one unreleased prototype against the other, also unreleased. Compare this and suppose how much such information you will find about Apple products, and you will get another problem the company received by Elop.
About Ovi in ​​the summer
The apofigeem of the company's development was, of course, an attempt to reorient it to services. At that time, the company had neither competences, nor infrastructure, nor methodology, in short, nothing to do with quality services. Nevertheless, one day, the company’s management presented a detailed plan, which directly stated that Nokia’s direct competitors are Apple and Google, which already have service infrastructures, and who are joining the smartphone market with them. It's funny, but let's say Samsung in this announcement was not directly recognized as a competitor, but was viewed as a hardware company that could not stand the competition with service offices. Therefore, it was proposed to create a competitive services infrastructure from scratch and call it Ovi (translated from Finnish - Door).
The first step to introducing chaos was the official and widespread implementation of Agile practices in all areas of development. The number of scram-masters and product-ounerov simply went too far, the benefit is that the courses take only 2 days. Throughout the organization, a bunch of preachers were running with one or another agile bible, sometimes offering such an extreme approach to creating everything in general, which sometimes gave the impression that flexible methodologies and anarchy are one and the same. With all this orgy, few people imagined exactly how flexible methodologies should be adapted specifically to his field. Previously, the software development process in Nokia flowed smoothly out of the iron development environment and embedded software such as controllers, where almost nothing sensible can be applied except the waterfall methodology, because it is difficult to deal with flexible methodologies when assembling iron.For this reason, the software released for phones for a long time was tied to the specific requirements of the final product (the phone, not the OS for it) with a formal description in UML and RUP-like development techniques. It came to the fact that the developer was obliged to provide a functional and design specification even before he wrote at least one line of code. It was certainly very annoying, and as usual there were crowds of admirers of flexible methodologies who did not tire of yelling about it at every corner. Having received the desired in full measure, as it were, by kick-ass, the same adherents being in the composition of specific teams simply fell into a stupor, eventually turning the same Scrum into a completely idiotic mechanism, when the developer was obliged to register every step in tulze, such as Trac, JIRA or bugzilla,enter there the time spent up to minutes and engage in another idiotic metric activity, instead of quietly writing code. The question with the scaling of teams and the organization of structures that are larger than the Scrum of Scrams, in general, was almost unsolvable and was settled by the good old waterfall. In short, a new venture began with an organizational mess.
The second not entirely clear step was to get an answer to the natural question - what kind of services do we want? And for what to take first, and for what then? There were a huge number of proposals, which, however, eventually quietly suffocated. Nothing better than repeating a sacred bunch - maps, contacts, mail, files, music, video, pictures at first was not found. And if it was relatively easy to explain the necessity of creating and the fundamental difference between Nokia and Neokia’s Nokia services, it was very difficult for the end user. Considering the fact that such services from Google and Apple were already working, to make such services competitive in a short time, and even more, getting the user to switch to them was a very difficult task.The main bet was made on the fact that Nokia has a huge resource in the form of existing phone users, and through the phone it will be possible to “plant” them on similar Ovi services. It was supposed to start the sitting from the service - an app store, which, if not strange, was a success in the end, just like the card service.
The third step, which brought confusion to the ranks of service programmers, which for some reason few people understood in detail, was the question - on which technologies will Nokia build the infrastructure for services? In some cases, the answer was trivial, we take open source then open source, we attach this database to this backend, we do everything in the JavaScript and RESTfull API, and “everything is in our hands”, and what’s missing is purchased (see about Intellisync). There were those who shook SOA volumes, and talked about WS-I, SOAP, and other WebServices architecture. There were no principal disputes, but in the end different services were built on different ideologies. For experienced specialists, the longevity of such optimism caused great doubts, but the general enthusiasm and the amount of money invested in the end won.
As a result, when Agile teams from Vancouver to Bangalore were engaged in business, with lack of experience both in building mass services and in organizing their intercommunication models (single sign-on, user-centric data, etc.), the business began to move with a lot by work
It should be recognized that a lot of things done during the time of universal “doorbellization”, went to Nokia for good. The introduction of Agile methodologies, the introduction of NPS and in general the organization of analytics channels and user feedback, a focus on customer retention, a partial departure from Symbian, the release of maps and navigation programs, etc.
However, as a result, Ovi quietly bent, some of the services that remained, such as mail, were transferred to Yahoo. One can argue for a long time about whether Ovi was bent before the change in the company's strategy or whether the change in strategy turned it. In any case, about how many attendants were hammered into this initiative, the history, as usual, is silent.
But there is one more positive element in this whole story.
Another positive element
We forgot a little about the managerial layer. In the meantime, this ballast has not gone away. According to the law of conservation of mass, they flow to where there is money, where you can talk about anything and where, against the background of a mass illusion of progress, you can also depict a vigorous activity. So it happened with Ovi. All bawlers and theoretical managers have eventually surfaced there. I will give one example.
Nokia regularly and often produced various types of phones for one clear customer segment, which did not want to squeeze into these segments, but instead asked for smaller, but better and with backward compatibility ... Since there were many products, there were formal business processes, which allowed these products to be produced, from start to finish. One of these processes was called the Product Creation Process, which actually described what needs to be done in order to justify, design, and so on, a mobile phone. So, one of the most recent ideologues of Ovi presented to the public a completely official document called the Service Creation Process, which in essence was tracing paper from a PCP made by the same person who simply received a new post in a new organization. Same slidesonly some words are replaced from “product” in the sense of “mobile phone” to “product” in the sense of “service”. The moron is exceptional, but it reflects the mental state of the managerial stratum. As you can see, some of them apparently seriously believed that Nokia will launch 10 new services per year ...
The positive thing about this is that Ovi slightly pulled the manager's ballast from the phones, which made it possible to calmly and effectively begin to finish Symbian and seriously take on Maemo on Linux in order to create a decent platform for war with competitors. And something even succeeded, the first thing to do was eliminate the eternal model of perpetual outsourcing, by purchasing Symbian, the developers were offered Qt and made a more or less sane package that is relatively easy to install. They introduced a fairly clear system of versions, gradually began to remove most of the fragmentation, all these E-Series, N-Series, etc. After Qt was screwed to Symbian, we started porting it to S40 and Maemo. Qt as the main library, a single toolkit and a framework has greatly facilitated and improved the development process.It happened that Qt managed to dampen and level even the terrible Hindu code, the share of which by the way inexorably reduced. Moreover, Symbian was turned into something similar to the open source community called Symbian Foundation and they opened most of the code under EPL.
However, after the purchase of Symbian, a number of requirements managers appeared, who in the past mostly flew to London and back and ended up without work. Some of them leaked into Ovi, but a fair amount continued to poison the organization. And suddenly, against this background, Ovi actually died. Quietly, without a pump, but the managerial layer from there began to slowly drain away, what do you think where?
Yes, at this point, Nokia began to pour funds into the development of the MeeGo platform, the successor to Maemo, and prepare for the release of the N950, N9 and some other phones. Together with the funds, though without former chic, the managerial stratum began to flow into the platform, migrating from the already irrelevant Ovi. Exactly from that moment the office was already doomed.
A sufficient number of people point out that the final result of MeeGo was not so bad. Honestly, it could have turned out even better. The original UI design, "honest Linux", Qt, and all that. The entire direction simply buried the infection of the talkers, in the form of decision-making committees, management groups and the rest of the ballast, with which MeeGo turned into a hulking monster from the old days.
So what did Elop do?
Well, imagine - you have such a company, which is like a leader, but all indicators of its dynamics are zero, if not negative, while competitors are actively gaining momentum.
Everything, even tactical roadmaps are planned for years, collective responsibility everywhere, more precisely, its absence, detailed strategic planning is carried out with a stick and traditionally none of these are implemented on time, a lot of money is spent and spent. FIG knows what, every step you take bogged down in a swamp, around the dime a dozen of philosophizing specialists who really haven't done anything for a long time, as well as an endless collection of human processes. Most of the core business is at the mercy of subcontractors, without which it is no longer possible to breathe.
And in this situation, you can not quickly release, say a phone with a resolution of 1280x720, even if there is iron, because Symbian for this case is not yet sharpened, and sharpening will end in time only when it becomes irrelevant. And you cannot release an LTE phone, although technologists have invested in the standard since its inception, but what the hell, it would take a year and a half to implement it on MeeGo by the most optimistic estimates. And there are already Korean models with LTE on the market, though traditionally curves.
So what would you do? This is what Elop did:
- Neutralized the influential component of managerial ballast. Abolished all committees, decision boards, management groups, etc.
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Separately it is necessary to say about MeeGo. It was, there was a real hope that it will emerge, especially since the very same Windows Phone as a platform was not much better at that time. But after watching MeeGo for some time and analyzing how its operational components work, the conclusion was disappointing - Nokia's internal machinery is not able to produce software products with the required quality in the required time. One of the reasons is the very ballast that permeated the organization from top to bottom, including MeeGo. I will not disclose an open secret, but I hint that after the liquidation of MeeGo, further attempts were made to compete with Android using its Linux platform and MeeGo practices. But they were also buried, for the same reasons - the internal software development processes were too slow, and there was no time to learn.
With all this, one must also look at the inexorably diminishing money that was spent on Ovi, on the purchase of Intellisync, on tickets to Bangalore and to London, and on payment of insane subcontracts.
I will not specifically consider other aspects of Elop’s activities, such as the early promises of products on WP, the closure of factories, etc. This has been sucked many times without me, and I will not say anything new here. However, in conclusion, I repeat once again - Elop had no choice but to completely restructure the company by withdrawing the main software development to another company. Unfortunately, the internal processes in Nokia have brought their own development processes to a cruel deadlock, and even Android would not save the company because of the widespread bureaucracy and the constant practice of making collective decisions based on compromises.
Separately, I apologize for not quite the Russian language and clogging in English terms. Unfortunately, the author is not entirely Russian and does not know how correctly some terms are now called in modern language.
UPD:I beg you to draw attention to the fact that the information in this post reflects the situation in the company that has taken shape in 2010, before its restructuring and change of strategy. As I have repeatedly mentioned, the current Nokia is a new company, which, in its reorganization, took into account the above shortcomings and fought directly with them. Unfortunately, even within the company, many still do not understand what the true reasons were behind the change of strategy, platform and working methods, so this post is not so much an insider, as an attempt to explain what Nokia has done in one decisive step, including itself her employees. How the situation is now in the updated company with a new strategy, the author does not know yet, but sincerely believes that all the measures taken will ultimately lead Nokiy to success. Many thanks for the comments,I did not expect that there will be so many positive reviews.
Author.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/171325/
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