zlacker

In the minds of most Finns, Nokia ceased to exist a long time ago.

Not saying that this was not personally significant for sirkneeland, and it's a nicely written piece. For myself, for the past few years, Nokia has ceased to exist a little bit more every day. This is just one more of those days.

Somehow, I feel this is appropriate here:

  The computer center is empty,
  Silent except for the whine of the cooling fans.
  I walk the rows of CPUs,
  My skin prickling with magnetic flux.
  I open a door, cold and hard,
  And watch the lights dancing on the panels.
  A machine without soul, men call it,
  But its soul is the sweat of my comrades,
  Within it lie the years of our lives,
  Disappointment, friendship, sadness, joy,
  The algorithmic exultations,
  The long nights filled with thankless toil,
  I hear the echoes of sighs and laughter,
  And in the darkened offices
  The terminals shine like stars.

– Geoffrey James, The Zen of Programming (1988)

>>metafu+(OP)
Thank you for the kind words. Yes, my Finnish friends (and thanks to Nokia I have many) have expressed similar sentiments about when Nokia "died" to them. But for me it hit me today, when as I walked out the doors of the office I realized that while I would walk out of the same doors ~24 hours later, I would never walk out the doors of Nokia ever again.

>>sirkne+H
What really struck me, was that for the first time, even though I've read it a thousand times before, was the fact that Nokia had one of those impossible goals.

Connecting people, is somewhat like the Microsoft vision of giving everyone a personal computer. And while there are people in certain parts of the 3rd world that doesn't have mobile phones, I would say Nokia did an amazing job to get a mobile phone into everyone's hands.

My dad worked for Ericsson, so I've never owned a Nokia phone, you were the "evil rivals" after all, but I bow my head to Nokia for what they did, for how many people they connected with mobile phones.

Nokia might not have been the company that profited from SmartPhones, but they were the company that created the market for SmartPhones.

>>nyrina+W1
I work for Ericsson - we are now allowed other phones after the partnership with Sony dissolved.. That said, the patent lawsuits related to Samsung have previously interfered with the selection.

>>savv+A5
I do not know much of how it is now. My dad went to Aastra Technologies 5+ years ago. I did enjoy being one of the first boys in school to get a phone, even though everyone followed up with getting a Nokia 3310 and I was left with the "unpopular" phone.

>>metafu+(OP)
My favorite poem for endings:

  Sometimes I think
  we could have gone on.
  All of us. Trying. Forever.

  But they didn't fill
  the desert with pyramids.
  They just built some. Some.

  They're not still out there,
  building them now. Everyone,
  everywhere, gets up, and goes home.

  Yet we must not
  diabolize time. Right?
  We must not curse the passage of time.

(Jennifer Michael Hecht, "On the Strength of All Conviction and the Stamina of Love")

>>sirkne+H
"There is always a last time for everything."

- Arthur C. Clarke in "The Nine Billion Names of God"

>>savv+A5
What an excellent way to ignore valuable input.

If your employees would rather have your competitors product then you need to get to work rather than to forbid them to use it you need to make it so they would prefer to use their own.

>>nyrina+W1
Nokia was one of the smartphone pioneers with their 770 Internet Tablets. It's hard to understand why they embraced Microsoft when the last product from this line, the N9, was so widely acclaimed and IMHO doomed to succeed.

>>jacque+rc
Back then, Ericsson (And later, Sony Ericsson) was working really hard to make great phones, as well, and they certainly did. I never felt like I was lacking with my Ericsson phones even if it wasn't the same as everyone else's Nokia 3310.

Just like it's hard to make the new Facebook, it was hard to beat Nokia. Remember, back then, everyone was using Nokia 3310. It didn't just take a better product to become the thing everyone wanted to have, because everyone didn't want a mobile phone. They wanted a Nokia mobile phone.

>>saalwe+09
Hey, that's a very nice piece. Thanks for sharing. This is by the author of several very interesting books of historical criticism, as well.