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Former Nokia Engineers Fueling Finnish Startups

Posted by Unknown on from the funeral-pyre dept.

pbahra writes with an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. From the article: "A few weeks ago Microsoft's European chairman told TechEurope that the average amount of venture capital per head across Europe was just $7. ... Finnish blog ArcticStartup has extrapolated figures showing the total average VC investment per capita for the country was $46 in 2010... The question of why this country on the edge of the Arctic Circle should have such active entrepreneurs came up again in a conversation with Wilhelm Taht, the marketing director of Flowd... 'With Nokia changing gear there is a lot of technical know-how all of a sudden which wasn't available even two years ago,' said Mr.Taht, diplomatically, about the savage job cuts at the struggling mobile phone giant. 'There's a culture of technically savvy engineers. Finns are not necessarily very talkative people, but when it comes to what they know about computers and programming it's pretty staggering.'"

11 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. Good by GameboyRMH · · Score: 2

    Maybe one of these companies can start selling MeeGo phones for those of us who want pocket computers.

    --
    "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
    1. Re:Good by GameboyRMH · · Score: 2

      Either way, they both have their ups and downs. Keep in mind that Maemo is designed for a separate rootfs which makes porting Debian packages straight in even less likely to work. Presumably MeeGo will do away with this system on newer hardware, in which case I would have preferred if they stuck to Debian packages, even though RPMs are technically more robust - in practice I've had way more trouble with RPM than DEB package management.

      Also MeeGo is actually Debian-based with RPM package management shoehorned in. Weird, I know.

      --
      "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
    2. Re:Good by Microlith · · Score: 2

      Maemo isn't designed for it so much as that's how it happened due to the flash layout on the N900.

      Also MeeGo is actually Debian-based with RPM package management shoehorned in. Weird, I know.

      No, it isn't. MeeGo is purely RPM based. The N9 runs Harmattan, which is effectively Maemo 6 and still a DEB based system.

    3. Re:Good by diegocg · · Score: 2

      Or even better: Make possible to disable the android userspace and install the Maemo userspace on android phones.

  2. As a former Nokia/Symbian engineer... by bre_dnd · · Score: 4, Insightful
    ... this confirms my bitter suspicions that it wasn't the engineers running Nokia against the iceberg, but the captains.

    Innovation could have happened, if only they didn't try to "manage" all the fun out of the job. Oh well.

    1. Re:As a former Nokia/Symbian engineer... by pavon · · Score: 2

      To me it appears that what killed Nokia was lack of focus.

      Mameo was very promising, and instead of focusing on polishing it, they decided to make a huge side-step with MeeGo. From my outsider perspective, that sounds like exactly the sort of thing that an engineer would do - decide to refactor code rather than focus on user-facing features. The same thing happened between Gnome 1-2, and KDE 3-4 (projects run by engineers), breaking all sorts of things for the sake of cleaning up the codebase. Such things might be a good decision in the long term, but it was a horrible decision considering the need to get something to market at a crucial time.

      Deciding to consolidate on QT to unify Symbian and MeeGo development was also a good decision for the long term, but had horrible business timing, and again has the smell of engineers in charge.

      Finally, continuing to invest so much into Symbian without making hardly any user-noticeable progress and under-investing Mameo, sounds like people that were too attached to their "baby" to recognize that it was becoming irrelevant in the market. I could see both engineers and management having that failing.

    2. Re:As a former Nokia/Symbian engineer... by gbjbaanb · · Score: 2

      but it appears that they lose focus once they were the biggest - sure, they had Maemo as a strategic plan, but they didn't keep it small and tight. Meanwhile the rest of the company went on a spree of managers and bloat while the times were good, thinking they could never end.

      That's probably what killed them, taking their eye off the ball. If they had released Maemo (or MeeGo even) then I think they would still be the number 1 phone manufacturer and we'd possibly be talking about the 3-way split of phone OSes, or even potentially 2-way, with Android being a niche, "geek" toy.

  3. Re:Where is the cash? by LizardKing · · Score: 3, Informative

    Citations please. I studied Finnish history as part of my degree (three years Finnish language, one year history), and this doesn't sound likely to me. In Finlands case, they had to be bloody careful not to annoy the Soviets - hence the geo-political term "Finlandisation". So I can't see how they could have been doing such research at the behest of the US government.

  4. Re:Where is the cash? by quenda · · Score: 2

    US gov't spent billions per year in Scandinavian investments

    I call b-sh-t.

    Finland was (and still is) not even a part of NATO.

    And more, it is not even part of Scandinavia. They speak a totally different language.

  5. Re:Where is the cash? by ladoga · · Score: 2

    this article is interesting (I'm not able to check the validity).

    So where does it say anything about listening posts and surveillance tech imports to Finland? I'm Finnish and knowing our history I find it very unlikely.

    Even if what you say is true, (Which I very much doubt) why didn't US use that advanced tech and it took Nokia to commercialize it? Here everyone and his mom had a small mobile phone while in the US they were priviledge of rich juppies (and even they had big luggable ones...strech to call them mobile).

    Nokia (and Swedish Ericsson to some extent) had a good head start in mobile phone business during the 90s. Rest of the world catched and finally passed Finland in the mobile tech only during few recent years. Now Microsoft practically owns Nokia so we can say goodbye to any new innovation in mobile tech. It was fun while it lasted. :)

    A Wikipedia article claims that "the U.S. promised to provide military force in aid of Sweden in case of Soviet aggression. Knowledge of this guarantee was by the Swedish governments kept from the Swedish public until 1994, when a Swedish research commission found evidence for it" - unfortunately without source.

    And to our horror USSR promised Finns the same thing, which Finland politely rejected. NATO's plans (which Finnish military was aware of) were to obiliterate Finlands transportation network and airbases with tactical nukes in case Soviet forces crossed the border. During Soviet force movements and military excercises near the Finnish border bombers on the British airbases were fueled up and on standby.

  6. Re:Where is the cash? by Luckyo · · Score: 2

    It may be worth noting that export status (for sensitive hardware and such) in Soviet Union had a classification category of "Warsaw Pact states and Finland".

    For all bits and purposes Finland was regarded neutral enough to actually view it as a reasonably trustworthy diplomatically by both parties during peace time, resulting in many high-level negotiations, especially ones that needed to be done out of media sight between East and West being done there. Installing listening posts form EITHER party would have destroyed this unique status overnight - something leadership would not do under any circumstances. This balancing act between two giants hell bent on destroying each other was the only thing that allowed Finland to retain independence during Cold War.

    Notably it was the same thing that allowed it to retain independence during WW2 in spite of being part of Axis, and being located in what Stalin called "strategic Leningrad defence zone". Why? Because finns successfully pulled off a very difficult balancing act between being part of Axis, staging a bloody enough defence to make Stalin think twice of the cost it would take to pacify the country vs letting it stay independent with land successions deciding in favor of latter (and we all know how high Stalin regarded human life cost).

    Of course, the other side of the coin was that both East and West regarded the country as expendable in event of an actual war, and had plans to simply level the country with nukes to deny other the use of it. So from local point of view there were no "good guys" in Cold War - there were just two brutal murderous empires ready to wipe out about 5 million nation with tactical and strategic nuclear weapons just to deny other side use of its infrastructure. As a result, NATO isn't exactly loved by anyone other then right wing folks, and old school Russia haters drawing their hate from what happened during Winter War and WW2 who see NATO as the "enemy of my enemy".