Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from half
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer here
Speaker 1: at hell Stuff Works and I love all things tech.
Speaker 1: And in the last episode, I chronicled the year journey
Speaker 1: of Nakia from a paper mill to a company that
Speaker 1: was just starting to develop electronics. And before I get
Speaker 1: into this, like I said in the last episode, I'm
Speaker 1: pronouncing it Nakia. But of course people have said Nokia
Speaker 1: or Nokia. There are a lot of different pronunciations for it.
Speaker 1: I'm going with Nakia, and if it's wrong, it's wrong.
Speaker 1: But I'm gonna try and be consistent. Today we'll pick
Speaker 1: up with Nakia in the nineteen sixties and quickly make
Speaker 1: our way up to how it helped define the cellular
Speaker 1: phone age in the nineteen nineties, and then what happened
Speaker 1: after that, because it was a pretty precipitous fall, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't like it was just a steady climb either.
Speaker 1: Up on the formation of the Nakia Corporation, businessmen named
Speaker 1: Bjorn George Wilhelm Westerland became the first president and CEO
Speaker 1: of Nakia. Now he began to look for ways to
Speaker 1: expand into new fields like electronics in telecommunications. He also
Speaker 1: encouraged the research and development departments in Nakia to work
Speaker 1: on their own projects, something that Google would copy decades later,
Speaker 1: sort of like that of your weekly time can be
Speaker 1: dedicated to personal projects. It was similar in that way,
Speaker 1: except not necessarily laid out specifically as twenty percent of
Speaker 1: your time. But the whole idea was get smart people together,
Speaker 1: let them work on things that they think are interesting,
Speaker 1: and you might be able to benefit from that. Nakia
Speaker 1: would diversify and begin investing in new businesses, nearly all
Speaker 1: of which would cater to the Soviet Union's need for
Speaker 1: electronics and robotics, including computers. Nakia also created manufacturing facilities
Speaker 1: for scientific equipment, again for the Soviet Union. While the
Speaker 1: U s s R. Was doing business with Finland, the
Speaker 1: US was becoming increasingly agitated by the whole thing, because
Speaker 1: this was during the Cold War between the United States
Speaker 1: and the U. S s R. And America began to
Speaker 1: let Nakia know that it was being watched carefully. Nakia
Speaker 1: was importing components from the United States and then incorporating
Speaker 1: them in products that there was ultimately selling in the
Speaker 1: U S s R, which wasn't really helping things with
Speaker 1: the U. S relations because the United States sort of
Speaker 1: had this policy of let's not help the Soviets out
Speaker 1: if we can possibly avoid it, and this created a
Speaker 1: very high tense situation throughout the entire world, and Finland
Speaker 1: in general and Nachia in particular, we're kind of straddling
Speaker 1: the line a little bit. According to the newspaper Madras Courier,
Speaker 1: Nakia was building computers for the Soviet Union by nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy one. Now, I say according to the newspaper, because
Speaker 1: it's actually pretty hard to find a lot of definitive
Speaker 1: information in regarding Nakias products during this era. The website
Speaker 1: itself is pretty generic when it comes to covering this.
Speaker 1: It kind of talks about the founding of the company
Speaker 1: as a paper mill and then jumps ahead into the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, skipping a whole lot of stuff in the middle.
Speaker 1: Jorn Westerland would retire as CEO in nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 1: and he was replaced by Kari and Tero Oswald Kairamo.
Speaker 1: Kiamo had started at Nakia as an engineer in wood
Speaker 1: processing back when the company was still heavily involved in
Speaker 1: forestry industries. Like his predecessor, Karaimo wanted to grow Nakia
Speaker 1: and acquire new businesses. He aggressively pursued new opportunities, sometimes
Speaker 1: to the consternation of analysts. Some industry experts were worried
Speaker 1: that Nakia was over extending itself, particularly with regards to
Speaker 1: consumer electronics, which was already a crowded space with fierce
Speaker 1: competition from the United States and Japanese companies. But that
Speaker 1: did not stop Kairamo from pursuing them, and in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine, Knakia entered into a partnership with a Finish
Speaker 1: television and electronics company called Solaura. Their joint venture was
Speaker 1: called Mobira Oi, a radio telecommunications network and electronics brand.
Speaker 1: Early radio phones were pretty limited, operating in the v
Speaker 1: h F frequency range, the very high frequency range, and
Speaker 1: requiring large antennas and hefty batteries, but this marked Knakia's
Speaker 1: first steps into what would become cellular phone technology. In fact,
Speaker 1: now is a good time to talk about cellular phone
Speaker 1: technology in general. Prior to cellular phones, radio telephones were
Speaker 1: pretty limited. This has to do with the physics of
Speaker 1: radio signal transmissions as well as limitations on technology. Now,
Speaker 1: maybe you've played with radios and wondered what elements determined
Speaker 1: how far the radios can communicate with each other, like
Speaker 1: if you've had walkie talkies, for example, And as it
Speaker 1: turns out, there are several factors that determine how far
Speaker 1: a radio can transmit signals. So let's start with some
Speaker 1: basic facts about radio waves. The radio frequency spectrum is
Speaker 1: a significant chunk of the overall electromagnetic spectrum. It ranges
Speaker 1: on the low end with very low frequency signals, which
Speaker 1: have a wavelength that can be as long as a
Speaker 1: hundred kilometers or sixty two miles for one wave at
Speaker 1: that wavelength. The radio signals frequency, as in the number
Speaker 1: of cycles of waves that go past an arbitrary point
Speaker 1: in space within a second, is three thousand cycles a second,
Speaker 1: or three kilo hurts. That means three thousand of those
Speaker 1: waves would pass through a point in space every second
Speaker 1: as the signals passed through the area. On the high end,
Speaker 1: you have extremely high frequency radio waves which measure point
Speaker 1: zero zero one meters or point zero four inches in
Speaker 1: wavelength and have a frequency of three hundred thousand mega hurts.
Speaker 1: That means three hundred billion waves will pass through a
Speaker 1: given point in one set n as the signal passes through.
Speaker 1: Radio wavelength is one factor that determines how far a
Speaker 1: radio signal will travel on Earth. A m radio signals,
Speaker 1: which in the United States range from five killer hurts
Speaker 1: to one point six oh five Mega hurts, have a
Speaker 1: long enough wavelength to follow the curvature of the Earth
Speaker 1: and bounce off the atmosphere, meaning they can travel a
Speaker 1: really long distance. They can travel beyond the horizon. Shorter wavelengths,
Speaker 1: such as the ones that the US reserves for radio
Speaker 1: communication for things like wireless radios and walkie talkies, cellular phones,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. They travel in the line of
Speaker 1: sight between a transmitter and a receiver. Now that does
Speaker 1: not necessarily mean that you have to be able to
Speaker 1: physically see the receiver from the transmitter. For one thing,
Speaker 1: radio waves can penetrate some substances just fine, although other
Speaker 1: substances can reflect radio waves and cause them to bounce back,
Speaker 1: which I guess is being redundant, but you get what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. And because the Earth is curvature, that limits
Speaker 1: how far a transmitter can send a signal to a
Speaker 1: receiver because the Earth physically curves away from the line
Speaker 1: of transmission. If you send out a radio signal straight
Speaker 1: out from your position. Let's say you're standing up and
Speaker 1: you send out a radio signal, that radio signal is
Speaker 1: going to continue in a straight line even as the
Speaker 1: Earth curves away from it. So eventually the Earth curves
Speaker 1: away enough where no one's going to be able to
Speaker 1: receive that signal, even if it were strong enough to
Speaker 1: keep on going and be strong enough to be picked
Speaker 1: up by an antenna. So the radio signals will just
Speaker 1: keep on going out into space rather than curving along
Speaker 1: the Earth. This, by the way, is one of the
Speaker 1: many pieces of evidence that proves the Earth is in
Speaker 1: fact round, as if we didn't have enough already. But
Speaker 1: you know there are flat earthers out there. If in
Speaker 1: fact the Earth was flat, you would not have this
Speaker 1: problem with radio transmissions. So that's a pretty strong evidence
Speaker 1: that the Earth is round. Another limiting factor is transmission power.
Speaker 1: The power behind the signal helps determine how far it
Speaker 1: can travel. Technically, it's not how far it can travel,
Speaker 1: but how strong the signal is once it gets beyond
Speaker 1: a certain point from its transmission Now imagine a radio
Speaker 1: transmission signal going out in all directions from a transmission antenna.
Speaker 1: Let's just say it's a regular antenna. It's not a
Speaker 1: directional antenna. You're sending a broadcast signal to this antenna.
Speaker 1: It's sending it out in essentially a sphere that extends
Speaker 1: out from that antenna. Now, as the transmission moves further
Speaker 1: from the antenna, the signal is spread over a wider area. Right,
Speaker 1: it's getting it's it's thinning out, it's getting spread across
Speaker 1: more and more space. The law of conservation of energy
Speaker 1: tells us that the further out you are from a transmitter,
Speaker 1: the weaker the signal will be because it's spread over
Speaker 1: a greater area, and eventually you'll be too far from
Speaker 1: the source of transmission to pick up any useful signal.
Speaker 1: It'll be too weak for you to do anything with it,
Speaker 1: to be able to hear anything. Early mobile phones were
Speaker 1: big and bulky, largely because they needed a powerful transmitter
Speaker 1: to get a signal to a nearby radio tower, which
Speaker 1: would then patch the call into a more traditional telecommunications infrastructure,
Speaker 1: in other words, into the regular phone system. This is
Speaker 1: part of the reason why early consumer mobile phones were
Speaker 1: mostly car phones because they could pull energy from the
Speaker 1: car's battery, or they could be big, bulky things that
Speaker 1: you didn't carry around. They'd be too heavy to carry around,
Speaker 1: but you could drive them around in your car, and
Speaker 1: they would rely on a battery that was strong enough
Speaker 1: to power a transmitter that could send a signal to
Speaker 1: a radio tower nearby. And typically cities would have a
Speaker 1: single radio tower, maybe a couple of radio towers, and
Speaker 1: each radio tower was only able to handle maybe a
Speaker 1: couple of dozen channels of communications simultaneously, which really limited
Speaker 1: the number of people who could communicate via radio phones
Speaker 1: at a single time, because once that channel is activated,
Speaker 1: no one will can use it. So if you've got
Speaker 1: a radio tower and it can only handle maybe twenty
Speaker 1: four twenty six channels, one of those channels is going
Speaker 1: to be used for the signal you're sending out. The
Speaker 1: communication signal you're sending out, one of them would be
Speaker 1: used for the signal you're getting back. So each person
Speaker 1: is essentially taking up two channels, and that's because you
Speaker 1: would want to be able to speak and here at
Speaker 1: the same time. If you're using a single channel for
Speaker 1: a communication back and forth, only one person can speak
Speaker 1: at a given time. You may have experienced this if
Speaker 1: you've used CB radio or walkie talkies or anything like that.
Speaker 1: Cellular technology helped change this by creating a new means
Speaker 1: of sending signals across the network. Rather than putting a
Speaker 1: few large radio antennas and strategic locations in major cities,
Speaker 1: the cellular tower approach took a totally different approach. More
Speaker 1: on that in just a second, but first let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break to thank our sponsor. Now, before I
Speaker 1: went into the break, I mentioned that a primitive walkie
Speaker 1: talkie can only handle one channel of communication. It's called
Speaker 1: a half duplex radio. That means that all parties are
Speaker 1: communicating over that same frequency, and thus only one person
Speaker 1: can talk on that frequency at any given time. And
Speaker 1: that's why we ended up developing a way of explaining
Speaker 1: to people when we were done talking. You know, you
Speaker 1: say over at the end of a sentence, meaning you
Speaker 1: are done with that thought, and that allows other parties
Speaker 1: to have a chance to chat and add in things,
Speaker 1: and they would say over when they were done, and
Speaker 1: that's how you would be able to manage communication traffic
Speaker 1: across this single channel. A cell phone is a full
Speaker 1: duplex device which uses one frequency for sending communications and
Speaker 1: one for receiving communicating signals, which means multiple people can
Speaker 1: talk over each other. And cell phones have the ability
Speaker 1: to communicate over more than a fifteen hundred channels and
Speaker 1: they don't need to send signals for a far because
Speaker 1: of cell towers. Now, the cell and cell phone refers
Speaker 1: to regions of coverage, and these regions of coverage are
Speaker 1: actually pretty small. Each cell region has an allocation of
Speaker 1: channels that represents a fraction of all available signals for
Speaker 1: cell phones. So let's say you're looking at a map
Speaker 1: of a region. Let's say it's a city, and imagine
Speaker 1: that the the map has an overlay on top of
Speaker 1: it to show the cell tower allocation, and it would
Speaker 1: look kind of like a hexagonal overlay. So if you've
Speaker 1: ever seen hexagonal maps that are often used in gaming,
Speaker 1: just imagine one of those overlaid on top of a
Speaker 1: city map. Each hexagon represents a cell, the center of
Speaker 1: which you would argue is the cell tower, and uh,
Speaker 1: each cell would have one seventh of all the channels
Speaker 1: available for communication in that city. No two adjacent cells
Speaker 1: would have the same range of signals, So this is
Speaker 1: just for simplicity's sake. Well, I'm just going to use
Speaker 1: this as an example. This is not the way it
Speaker 1: actually shakes out. But let's imagine hypothetically that you have
Speaker 1: seven hundred channels to work with the center hexagon. When
Speaker 1: you start off, Let's say that you're at your location
Speaker 1: and you're looking at a map. The hexagon you are
Speaker 1: in is using channels one through one hundred. The cell
Speaker 1: directly to your north can use signals on one through
Speaker 1: two hundred, and then you move clockwise around your center hexagon.
Speaker 1: You look at each hexagon that's adjacent to yours. Each
Speaker 1: one would have the next range of signals, so two
Speaker 1: hundred one to three hundred, the next one three one
Speaker 1: to four hundred, and so on. Now, because cell phones
Speaker 1: transmit at a low power signal, just at a few watts,
Speaker 1: the transmissions do not go very far. The signal attenuates
Speaker 1: enough it it loses enough energy that it's not going
Speaker 1: to be picked up the on the next cell tower hexagon.
Speaker 1: You don't have to worry about interfering with the immediate neighbors.
Speaker 1: That means you can actually reuse the channels again once
Speaker 1: you have a different cell in between them, so an
Speaker 1: entire city could use just seven channels this way, repeating
Speaker 1: channels once there's enough space between two cell towers that
Speaker 1: use that same range, so your center hexagon and a
Speaker 1: hexagon on the other side of one of your neighbors
Speaker 1: could use the exact same set of frequencies because you're
Speaker 1: not going to interfere with your transmissions. The big advantage
Speaker 1: of cell phones is obviously that their mobile, and as
Speaker 1: you move towards the edge of a cell, your cells tower,
Speaker 1: the one that's in the hexagon you are currently in,
Speaker 1: it starts to detect that your signal is diminishing in strength. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the neighboring cell tower is picking up that your signal
Speaker 1: is starting to get stronger. Now, every cell tower is
Speaker 1: monitoring the entire a range of channels, not just the
Speaker 1: channels that are specific to that cell, so they can
Speaker 1: they can monitor all of the channels of communication. They're
Speaker 1: only really concerned with the block of channels that are
Speaker 1: assigned to that particular cell. However, now when you get
Speaker 1: close enough to the new cell, your old cell tower,
Speaker 1: the one that was where you used to be, will
Speaker 1: hand off the signal to its neighbor, to whatever neighboring
Speaker 1: tower you're heading toward, and that will send instructions to
Speaker 1: your phone that will switch channel frequencies. This all happens seamlessly.
Speaker 1: It can happen in the middle of a conversation, and
Speaker 1: it happens so quickly that we humans don't even notice
Speaker 1: that it happens. Assuming that everything is working properly, and
Speaker 1: you can have a call on a speaker phone and
Speaker 1: pass through half a dozen cells through a single call
Speaker 1: as you're driving across town, and you wouldn't have a problem,
Speaker 1: assuming everything's working the way it's supposed to. Now, this
Speaker 1: concept of cell towers dates back to about nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 1: when A T and T referred to splitting phone service
Speaker 1: in cities into areas called cells. The first mobile phone
Speaker 1: call happened in nineteen seventy three when Dr Martin Cooper
Speaker 1: of Motorola made the first cell phone call to Dr
Speaker 1: Joel s Ingle, who was the head of Bell Labs. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, Dr Cooper called up his biggest competitor
Speaker 1: for the first cell phone call, which I think is
Speaker 1: pretty awesome. And it took about a decade in the
Speaker 1: United States for companies to build out this technology. And
Speaker 1: the protocols and the infrastructure to make cell phones a
Speaker 1: viable commercial product that was already taking place in Europe,
Speaker 1: but we were a little bit behind here in the US. Now,
Speaker 1: that's a basic overview of how cellular towers work, and
Speaker 1: there's a lot more detail than what I just mentioned,
Speaker 1: including the differences between analog and digital cellular service, but
Speaker 1: it's good enough for our discussions about Nokia. So let's
Speaker 1: get back to that company. While the VHF phone service
Speaker 1: the Nokia launched in the late seventies wasn't cellular necessarily,
Speaker 1: not not in the same way that we would call
Speaker 1: it today, the company soon focused on developing cell phones
Speaker 1: due to the construction of the Nordic Mobile Telephone Network
Speaker 1: or in MT. This network provided coverage across Finland, Sweden, Denmark,
Speaker 1: and Norway and then later Iceland, making it the first
Speaker 1: international cellular network. The networks launched in Sweden and Norway
Speaker 1: in one and then in Finland and Denmark the following year,
Speaker 1: and that gave companies like Nokia the opportunity to develop
Speaker 1: handsets for consumers. During this you are using the service
Speaker 1: as its backbone. Ino Nokia released the Mobira Senator this
Speaker 1: was a car phone and had a hefty battery to
Speaker 1: provide for the transmission strength needed to send signals from
Speaker 1: the phone to a radio tower, and the Senator weighed
Speaker 1: twenty two pounds or ten krams. Pretty heavy phone. You
Speaker 1: can see why. It was a car phone, not a
Speaker 1: cell phone that you would carry around with you. While
Speaker 1: the Senator saw a limited success, it became the first
Speaker 1: step towards Nokia asserting itself in a growing industry, and
Speaker 1: the company would release a slightly lighter transportable phone that
Speaker 1: was what they called it, called the Mobira Talkman, which
Speaker 1: weighed in at eleven pounds or five kilograms, so half
Speaker 1: the weight of the Senator, but still pretty darn heavy.
Speaker 1: In seven, the company, still producing phones under the Mobira name,
Speaker 1: introduced the first handheld mobile phone and they called it
Speaker 1: the Mobira Cityman nine hundred. It weighed about one point
Speaker 1: six eight pounds or seven sixty grams. That's according to
Speaker 1: one source. I saw everything from seven hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: grams up to eight hundred grams, so one point six
Speaker 1: eight to like one point seven six pounds somewhere in
Speaker 1: that range. It also cost a pretty penny. The price
Speaker 1: tag for the handset which was in a brick style
Speaker 1: with a big antenna, and this was a big mobile phone.
Speaker 1: It cost twenty four thousand finish marks back in nineteen
Speaker 1: eight seven. That would be about five thousand, four hundred
Speaker 1: fifty dollars in US money at the time, So we
Speaker 1: adjust that for inflation, that would be worth about eleven thousand,
Speaker 1: eight hundred forty three dollars today. So imagine spending nearly
Speaker 1: twelve thousand dollars for a mobile phone. It got the
Speaker 1: nickname Gorba in Finland. Why because during a press conference
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty seven, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was photographed
Speaker 1: using one he called uh Moscow. I believe during the
Speaker 1: press conference using such a phone in night a highly
Speaker 1: competitive electronics market meant that Nakia saw a big drop
Speaker 1: in profits. Times were getting tight for Nakia. CEO Kairamo,
Speaker 1: who had also served as chairman between nineteen eighty six
Speaker 1: and nineteen eighty eight, tragically ended his own life in
Speaker 1: December Night, a fact that Nokia at first tried to
Speaker 1: keep Wyatt. While there has been speculation over what moved
Speaker 1: Karramo to commit suicide, I found no definitive reason. Though
Speaker 1: there's no doubt he was under tremendous stress at the time,
Speaker 1: though whether or not that directly contributed, I can't say.
Speaker 1: Simo Virlato assumed control of the company, at which at
Speaker 1: the time was still several businesses in very different industries,
Speaker 1: all kind of gloamed on together. This new CEO called
Speaker 1: for a complete restructuring of the company, and the company
Speaker 1: began to divest itself of various businesses, including the Finished
Speaker 1: Rubber Works, which was the first major company to create Nokia.
Speaker 1: I mean, you remember, there was the paper mill that
Speaker 1: came before it that was technically called Nokia. But it
Speaker 1: was the founder of the Finnish rubber Works who really
Speaker 1: put all these companies together in the first place. He
Speaker 1: also divested the company of Nokia's computer division. Finland at
Speaker 1: the time was entering a severe economic recession. It was
Speaker 1: essentially a depression that was greater in magnitude than the
Speaker 1: one in the nineteen thirties for Finland, and then the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union collapsed, and the Soviets had been Nokia's chief customers.
Speaker 1: So things were looking pretty grim for the company. But
Speaker 1: the story doesn't end here. I'll tell you how the
Speaker 1: story does end. In just a second, but first, let's
Speaker 1: take another quick break to thank our sponsor. During this
Speaker 1: dire economic situation, Nakia released the Nakia ten eleven phone.
Speaker 1: It was one of the earliest phones to have the
Speaker 1: Knackia name, not a Mobira brand, although it was also
Speaker 1: called the Mobira Cityman two thousand in some publications. It
Speaker 1: had a battery that allowed for ninety whole minutes of
Speaker 1: talk time before needing a recharge, and it could hold
Speaker 1: up to contact numbers. It worked on the Global System
Speaker 1: for Mobile Communications standard, better known as g s M.
Speaker 1: This eventually became the dominant standard for mobile phones worldwide,
Speaker 1: with Code division Multiple Access or c d m A
Speaker 1: being a distant second place. GSM would end up being
Speaker 1: pretty used pretty much everywhere, whereas c d M A
Speaker 1: became a standard found mainly in the United States and Russia,
Speaker 1: and in fact even in the US. It was a
Speaker 1: bit confusing because you had some telephone networks working on
Speaker 1: GSM and others working on c d M A. In
Speaker 1: nineteen nine two, Yerma Allila became the new CEO of Nakia. Alilah,
Speaker 1: who had been the head of Nakia's mobile device division,
Speaker 1: decided the future of the company was in telecommunications, and
Speaker 1: so he continued the trend of divesting Nakia of all
Speaker 1: other businesses in order to focus exclusively on telecommunications. Shedding
Speaker 1: those businesses turned out to be the right move, as
Speaker 1: Nakia was able to refocus and grow and return to profitability.
Speaker 1: In n Nakia introduced the twenty one line of phones.
Speaker 1: This was the first phone to have the famous Knakia ringtone,
Speaker 1: which goes like this, do do do do Do Do do
Speaker 1: do do do do do do I'm sure you've heard
Speaker 1: it a billion times. That's when it dated from. Two
Speaker 1: years later, in ninety six, the company released a sort
Speaker 1: of proto smartphone called the Nakia nine thousand Communicator. This
Speaker 1: thick handset flipped open to reveal a monochromatic screen and
Speaker 1: a full quarty keyboard, along with a direction pad and
Speaker 1: function keys. You could make calls, you could browse the
Speaker 1: web such as it was back in and even send
Speaker 1: a facts using this phone. The device wasn't a commercial success,
Speaker 1: but found its fair share of devoted fans. Nonetheless, Nakia
Speaker 1: also released a phone called the Knackia eight one ten.
Speaker 1: It featured a cover that would slide down to reveal
Speaker 1: the number pad on the phone, inspiring some people to
Speaker 1: call this the Banana phone. It is featured in a
Speaker 1: little film that came out in nineteen You might have
Speaker 1: heard of it. It's called The Matrix. If you remember
Speaker 1: the scene where Neo's in his office and he gets
Speaker 1: a delivery and he opens up the package and there's
Speaker 1: a phone inside it. Immediately he gets a phone call.
Speaker 1: That's the phone. It's a Nakia one. So watch that
Speaker 1: scene and you'll see this famous phone highlighted on screen
Speaker 1: by n Nakia had become the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer.
Speaker 1: Not bad considering that they had just made the decision
Speaker 1: to focus exclusively on telecommunications just a few years earlier.
Speaker 1: This was a company that was doing a lot of everything,
Speaker 1: and then when they really focused on this one industry,
Speaker 1: they dominated it. They wrestled the title away from Motorola,
Speaker 1: and Nakia remained the top mobile phone company in the
Speaker 1: world for more than a decade. In fact, I think
Speaker 1: it was fourteen years that they held the top spot.
Speaker 1: One of the big selling features for their phones was
Speaker 1: that you could play this little nifty game called Snake
Speaker 1: on them. Look, times were tough, and we took entertainment
Speaker 1: where we could find it. Guys in and two thousand
Speaker 1: Nakia launched the thirty two ten and the thirty three
Speaker 1: tin hand sets, which both would sell like hotcakes. They'd
Speaker 1: be dwarfed in sales a few years later, however, when
Speaker 1: the eleven hundred series launched, Nakia would sell more than
Speaker 1: two hundred fifty million eleven hundred hand sets, making it
Speaker 1: not just the best selling mobile handset of all time,
Speaker 1: but also the best selling consumer electronics product at that point.
Speaker 1: In two thousand two, Nakia entered into a joint venture
Speaker 1: with Psion and a couple of hand set manufacturing competitors,
Speaker 1: that being Ericsson and Motorola. The three of them joined
Speaker 1: together with the purpose of creating an operating system for
Speaker 1: mobile devices. The handset manufacturers wanted to build out the
Speaker 1: features on phones and increase their capabilities and create various
Speaker 1: little things that we would call apps today, and they
Speaker 1: wanted it to go well beyond sending and receiving calls
Speaker 1: and text messages and doing some rudimentary web browsing. The
Speaker 1: joint venture became Symbian Limited, and the operating system is
Speaker 1: of course known as Symbian. Symbian serves as the foundation
Speaker 1: for software platforms and different handset manufacturers have different overlays
Speaker 1: on top of the basic operating system. You can think
Speaker 1: of them as different flavors of Symbion, So for Nakia
Speaker 1: as well as for Samsung and LG that platform was
Speaker 1: called S sixty, also known as Series sixty User Interface.
Speaker 1: The first Nakia phone to launch with this operating system
Speaker 1: was the Nakia seventy six fifty in two thousand two.
Speaker 1: This was the first of Nakias phones to have a
Speaker 1: built in camera and a color display. It's largely referred
Speaker 1: to as one of the first smartphones, though it was
Speaker 1: still on two G networks at the time. The first
Speaker 1: three G phone from Nakia was the sixty six fifty,
Speaker 1: which came out a little bit late eater. By the way,
Speaker 1: this numbering standard, I don't understand where it comes from.
Speaker 1: Seven's eight six is tens twos. They don't seem to
Speaker 1: be sequential, so I don't really get it. But the
Speaker 1: Knackia thirty six fifty would be the first Symbian Series
Speaker 1: sixty phone available in the United States, and it had
Speaker 1: a video recorders, so we were starting to see these
Speaker 1: more advanced features get incorporated Knockia phones. Now I could
Speaker 1: list all the phones Knockia launched in the two thousand's,
Speaker 1: but that would get super old super fast. Suffice it
Speaker 1: to say that the company was churning out new models
Speaker 1: covering a spectrum of features and budgets. In those years.
Speaker 1: Year after year, Nakia was topping the list of mobile
Speaker 1: handset manufacturers. It's brand was known throughout the world, and
Speaker 1: the company was the in the best financial shape in
Speaker 1: its entire history. Now, that didn't mean that they didn't
Speaker 1: stumble a couple of times along the way. In two
Speaker 1: thousand three, for example, Knackia launched a device that became
Speaker 1: the punchline for a mini tech article. It was a
Speaker 1: mobile gaming device called the Engage. It was part phone,
Speaker 1: part handheld gaming console. Not a bad idea necessarily, but
Speaker 1: the form factor left a lot of people laughing or
Speaker 1: scratching their heads. The shape of the device inspired people
Speaker 1: to call it a taco because it was kind of
Speaker 1: taco shaped, and the placement of the speakers and microphone
Speaker 1: meant you had to hold the top edge, the flat
Speaker 1: side of the edge, not the surface, but the edge
Speaker 1: of the taco against your ear, so it would stick
Speaker 1: out from the side of your face quite a bit.
Speaker 1: It seemed weird to have it like that instead of
Speaker 1: using the flat side of the device, so it looked
Speaker 1: pretty ridiculous and start. Contrast with the two million plus
Speaker 1: handsets that Nakia had sold, they managed to only sell
Speaker 1: around three million Engage units and they did not get
Speaker 1: good reviews. That just didn't take off. Yerma Alila retired
Speaker 1: in two thousand six as ce OH and would become
Speaker 1: the chairman of the company. The new CEO was a
Speaker 1: La Peca kalaz Va. In two thousand seven, Apple introduced
Speaker 1: the iPhone, which, as you may recall, caused quite the
Speaker 1: stir in the mobile device world. Nakia, for its part,
Speaker 1: launched a service called O v O v I that
Speaker 1: encompassed internet services for Nakia's own line of feature phones.
Speaker 1: Also in two thousand seven, Knakia had a big problem
Speaker 1: when the company had to recall forty six million cell
Speaker 1: phone batteries across nearly all of its devices. Nakia promised
Speaker 1: that it was going to come out with a flagship
Speaker 1: phone called the N eight that would be a big
Speaker 1: competitor in the smartphone space, but it took longer to
Speaker 1: develop than the company had anticipated. There were a lot
Speaker 1: of delays that frustrated customers, and things were not looking
Speaker 1: good for the company. Smartphones like the iPhone and various
Speaker 1: Android handsets were starting to take a serious chunk out
Speaker 1: of Nakia's dominant position. It was clear Nakia had not
Speaker 1: reacted fast enough to this changing landscape and allowed Apple, Android,
Speaker 1: and even BlackBerry to dominate, although BlackBerry wouldn't be a
Speaker 1: problem for very much longer. By twenty ten, the company
Speaker 1: directors felt there was a need for change, and they
Speaker 1: fired Kalizva and hired the first non finish CEO for Nakia,
Speaker 1: Stephen elop Eli had previously worked for Microsoft in two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven. He likened Nakia's market position to that of
Speaker 1: a man standing on a burning platform. Things were looking
Speaker 1: pretty tough. By this time. Nakia was the only handset
Speaker 1: manufacturer still using Symbion. Nakia had a new operating system
Speaker 1: in development called Mego Lennox in a partnership with Intel,
Speaker 1: and launched a phone that used it, but ultimately the
Speaker 1: company decided to scrap that plan in favor of concentrating
Speaker 1: on Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system. Interesting, since elap had
Speaker 1: become the new president and CEO of the company in
Speaker 1: November two thousand eleven, the company introduced the Loom eight
Speaker 1: hundred Windows Phone. The Windows Phone platform underperformed in the market,
Speaker 1: which is an understatement. Nakia began to incur huge losses
Speaker 1: and Elap announced that Nakia would eliminate ten thousand jobs,
Speaker 1: shutting down a manufacturing processing plan as well. In Nakia
Speaker 1: announced it was selling its mobile division, which accounted for
Speaker 1: most of the company's success in the two thousand era,
Speaker 1: and then they were selling it to by the BA
Speaker 1: BA Microsoft. The sale was complete in two thousand fourteen
Speaker 1: and the division was renamed Microsoft Mobile. Elap headed back
Speaker 1: over to Microsoft. I'm sure this raised several eyebrows. Nakia
Speaker 1: changed its focus once again, now concentrating on network equipment
Speaker 1: and services. Nakia is now in the business of running
Speaker 1: infrastructure for devices like mobile phones, rather than making mobile phones.
Speaker 1: It's also become a player in the Internet of Things space,
Speaker 1: and it still makes consumer electronic products under the Nakia
Speaker 1: technolog G's division. And it's still in the phone business
Speaker 1: because it actually owns a phone company, although it leases
Speaker 1: it to a Chinese company called tc L. It's licensed
Speaker 1: the technology to tc L, so they don't make them themselves.
Speaker 1: They licensed the name to another company. So Nakia still exists,
Speaker 1: though its dominance in the mobile device market is no more.
Speaker 1: Really interesting to see how a company went from being
Speaker 1: the top brand in an industry and just in a
Speaker 1: couple of years falling so hard. But then when you
Speaker 1: look at the full history of Nakia, you really realize
Speaker 1: that the cell phone part of its history is one
Speaker 1: of the shortest span of years in the entire company's history.
Speaker 1: I mean, it went for more than a century before
Speaker 1: it started looking into consumer electronics seriously. So in the
Speaker 1: grand scheme of things, it was a blip on the radar.
Speaker 1: But for many of us who are not familiar with
Speaker 1: the name of the company, and by us I specifically,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about myself, it seems pretty shocking. I want
Speaker 1: to be totally clear here. I think that a lot
Speaker 1: of the decisions that were made by the company executives
Speaker 1: throughout the history of Nakia we're probably pretty solid decisions
Speaker 1: at the time they were being made. It's just that
Speaker 1: the circumstances that surrounded them, much of which were beyond
Speaker 1: their control, ended up hurting the company. Uh. The only
Speaker 1: thing I think was a real detriment for them was
Speaker 1: their lack of initiative once the smartphone revolution really took off.
Speaker 1: And that wraps up our story on Nakia. Maybe in
Speaker 1: the future I'll do a follow up if there are
Speaker 1: any other interesting things to talk about. There were some
Speaker 1: stories that I didn't cover. Uh. There were some troubling
Speaker 1: stories about Nakia and the way its technology was handled
Speaker 1: in Iran. There were accusations that Nakia allowed the Iranian
Speaker 1: government enough power to be able to limit the technology
Speaker 1: when Iranian citizen's we're trying to use it to communicate
Speaker 1: with one another and protest the government. But I felt
Speaker 1: like that was beyond the scope of this episode. It
Speaker 1: might be that it better serve to have a full
Speaker 1: episode about technology and its use on different sides of
Speaker 1: political disagreements, political turmoil. I think that could be a
Speaker 1: really interesting episode that I might do in the future.
Speaker 1: If you have a suggestion for a future episode, please
Speaker 1: let me know what you would like me to talk about.
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Speaker 1: a person. Maybe there's someone you want me to interview
Speaker 1: or have on as a guest host. You can send
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