Then I bought a 3DFx Voodoo card and started using Glide and it was night and day. I had something up the first day and every day thereafter it seemed to get more and more capable. That was a lot of fun.
In my opinion, Direct X was what killed it most. OpenGL was well supported on the Voodoo cards and Microsoft was determined to kill anyone using OpenGL (which they didn't control) to program games if they could. After about 5 years (Direct X 7 or 8) it had reached feature parity but long before that the "co marketing" dollars Microsoft used to enforce their monopoly had done most of the work.
Sigh.
I was acutely aware of the various 3D API issues during this time and this rings very true.
> By 1999 it was clear that Microsoft had no intention of delivering Low Level; although officially working on it, almost no resources were dedicated to actually producing code.
No kidding...
Also the CEO of SGI in the late 90s was an ex-Microsoft and bet heavily on weird technical choices (remember the SGI 320 / 540? I do) that played no small role in sinking the boat. Extremely similar to the infamous Nokia suicide in the 2010s under another Microsoft alumni. I think the similarity isn't due to chance.
Nokia would had killed itself either way, with Elop it still tried to flop.
Every Nokia fanboy cries about EEE, but blissfully forgets what a turd was 5800 Xpress Music, which came half a year later than iPhone 3G.
Yes it had huge systemic issues. Structural problems, too many departments pumping out too many phones with overlapping feature sets, and an incoherent platform strategy.
But Elop flat-out murdered it with his burning platforms memo and then flogged the scraps to the mothership. It came across as a stitch-up from the word go.
You know why it was 'Xpress Music'? Because Nokia was years late for a 'music phone'. Even Moto had E398 and SE had both music and photo. By 2009 Nokia had a cheap line-up for the brand zealots (eaten up by Moto C-series and everyone else), a couple of fetishist's phones (remember those with floral pattern and 8800?) and.. overpriced 'commucators' with subpar internals (hell, late PDAs on Xscale had more RAM and CPU power) and incompatible with anything, including themselves, mess of Symbian.
Elop not only allowed MS to try the waters with mobiles, but actually saved many, many workplaces for years. Alternative for that would had been a bankrupcy around 2013.
> Alternative for that would had been a bankrupcy around 2013.
The alternative would have been some restructuring by someone with a better idea than crashing the company and selling the name to his real bosses at MS.
The company was in trouble but salvageable. Elop flat-out murdered it, and it looked a lot like he did it to try to get a name brand for MS to use for its windows phones, which were failing badly (and continued to do so).
No. You should re-read that memo, specifically starting at "In 2008, Apple's market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent." paragraph.
In 2010 nobody was interested in Symbian, no one else made phones on Symbian, no one would do apps for Symbian[0] - who would bother with all the Symbian shenanigans when even Nokia itself said what it would move to MeeGo 'soon', along with ~10% of smartphone market? Money was in Apple and Android.
To be salvageable you need something in demand on the market and Nokia only had a brand. You can't salvage an 18-wheeler running off the cliff.
Personally, I had a displeasure of trying to do something on colleague's N8 somewhere in 2011-2012. Not only it was slow as molasses but most of the apps which relied on Ovi were nonfunctional.
Insightful tidbit from N8 wiki page:
> At the time of its launch in November 2010 the Nokia N8 came with the "Comes With Music" service (also branded "Ovi Music Unlimited") in selected markets. In January 2011, Nokia stopped offering the Ovi Music Unlimited service in 27 of the 33 countries where it was offered.
So popular and salvageable what they discontinued the service 3 months after the launch? Should I remind you what Elop's memo was a month later, in February 2011?
[0] Yep, this is what really killed WP too - lack of the momentum on the start, inability to persuade Instagram to bake the app for WP, falling integrations (whey worked at the start! Then Facebook decided it doesn't want to be integrated anywhere because everyone should use their app) => declining market share => lack of interest from developers => declining market share => lack of...
But there were all sorts of options to restructure a company that big that had only just been surpassed by android at the time of the memo. Tanking what was left of the company and selling out to MS was probably the worst of them.
It's quite funny, the guardian article on the memo, that reproduces it in full, is here - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2011/feb/09/noki...
First comment below the line "If Nokia go with MS rather than Android they are in even bigger trouble."
Everyone could see it, apart from Stephen Elop, who was determined to deliver the whole thing to MS regardless of how stupid a decision it was.