The Rise and Fall of Nokia (2018) - full transcript
How small, idealistic, Finnish company, Nokia, became the global leader in cell phone technology only to become drunk with success, lose its visionary style of leadership and completely fail to predict the rise of its death knell, iPhone.
(dark atmospheric music)
- [Man] The one thing you
need to understand is that
working in Nokia at
that time was unlike
anything I've
experienced anywhere.
- [Man] I feel super privileged
to have been welcomed
and to have been included and
to have been given all these
opportunities to do
stuff at the scale
that Nokia operated at.
- For the past few
years, it's almost been,
people have talked in a way
that they're almost embarrassed
to have been at Nokia
or people have joy at,
"ah, you Nokia people,
look what happened to you."
- [Man] For Nokia's glory, I
must say it still kinda looks,
(chuckles) looks like a phone.
(moody electronic music)
- The underlying reasons
here at Mobira is to operate
in the field of radio telephony
in such a way that the short
and long-term interests
of our customers and other
interested groups are fulfilled
in best possible manner.
- [Reporter] The China is a
market area of vast potential,
and here, Nokia has
made remarkable inroads,
even in the face of
extremely fierce competition.
- Especially I think we
are able to offer far-east
telecommunication equipment,
we are also able to offer
far-east turn key engineering
products like this cable
machinery line that we
have sold here to China.
(dark atmospheric music)
- [Whispering Woman]
The future is now.
Nokia.
Technophone.
- And I found my father and
I said, "Where's Finland?"
And he said, "I think
it's near Luxembourg."
Which shows how
much my father knew.
So anyway, so I finish
work, five o'clock.
Just like Olli is, get on
a plane, fly to Helsinki,
get a bus to Salo.
Why are they all puttin'
hats and coats and scarfs,
and I'm fine, I got outside,
I thought, oh, now I know.
And there was a bank, on
the top it had a clock,
and the temperature was -29.
(moody electronic music)
(tense orchestral music)
(phone rings)
- [Woman] Scotty, I've
just gone into labor!
What should I do?
- Push!
- [Man] Nokia,
connecting people.
(moody atmospheric music)
(upbeat string music)
- [Man] Nokia, and you
never miss an opportunity.
- Hello?
(dramatic orchestral music)
(peaceful string music)
(phone rings and vibrates)
- And when we actually
heard, during the winter '98,
that there is a possibility
to download a ringtone
over the air to
this mobile phone,
and change the
ringtone that you had,
it was really exciting.
So we started work on that
and by December that year,
we were ready to launch
the service, and it was
really amazing because when
we started the service,
during the first day, without
any advertising, we had more
downloads than we were
predicting for the whole month.
And after one week, we had
already, the same amount of
downloads that we were
forecasting for the whole year.
- It's difficult.
No offense.
So I lived in Oulu for
most of last 26, 27 years,
though I like in Helsinki
now, and I think many people
don't realize the significance
that Oulu played in
some of the success that
Nokia had, I mean, you know,
everyone takes credit,
everyone thinks that they
were the ones who made it.
The state technical
laboratory, so VTT,
was very strong on software
development at the time,
and we did a lot of work
with VTT in some quite
fundamental things that were
used in billions of phones.
(water hisses)
- Before I came to Finland,
we were given this kind of a
cultural training and that
was given by a Finnish guy
and the first thing he told
was, "Finnish people are very
"comfortable getting naked
in front of other people."
And me and my friends were
like, "What did he say, naked?"
And then we learned
about sauna, and yeah,
the sauna experience
was, in the beginning,
a bit shocking to me, but then
I also kind of liked sauna,
also take sauna quite often now.
(peaceful atmospheric music)
- [Reporter] Mr.
Gates, Mr. Gates.
Do Microsoft have any
plan to buy Nokia,
or some other Finnish companies?
(ominous chord)
(smooth jazz music)
- You were in the sexiest,
you were in the most
science-fiction technically
forward-looking,
everybody wanted a phone,
you were doing it, you know?
You were the dream son-in-law,
the dream daughter-in-law.
"Ah, your husband works for
Nokia, wife works for Nokia."
People talked like
that, it was weird.
- So, one of the focus areas
for me has really been to build
the Nokia brand such that
we're now virtually number one
in terms of brand popularity,
and we're certainly number one
in terms of the number of
handsets we sell in Asia.
- Now we have had a very
successful Nokia Superbowl
in the beginning of January
that has really helped our brand
building and name recognition
in the United States.
- [Reporter] In
the United States,
Nokia is the market leader.
- Went to a place
called Chongqing,
which is now probably the
biggest city in China.
It was big then, but
it's even bigger now.
It's right on the Yangtze River.
And the driver said,
"Do you want to go to
the Nokia factory?"
And I said, "There's
no factory here.
"There's an office
here, that's it."
And he said, "No, no,
no, it's a factory."
So, "Okay."
Massive, big Nokia factory.
I thought, oh, this
is interesting.
So, no one knew and this
is not in the bible,
it's not on John Talbot's
spreadsheet, so this is bad.
It's huge, it's an
absolutely massive factory,
and sure enough, there's
a big Nokia sign.
I thought, we're
in the right place.
So, I goes in,
there's a great big,
you know, manufacturing
on this big shiny floor,
when the machines are all put
on, anti-static or something,
there was a big floor and
it was like an ice rink.
There was nothing on it.
I went to walk and all the
cleaners came, the Chinese.
"Don't walk on that."
"Okay, sorry."
So, big Finnish guy comes out,
I said, "Hi, how are you?"
He said, "Very good."
"We haven't seen anyone
from Nokia here for years."
I said, "Really, how
long have you been here?"
He said, "About two
and a half years."
I said, "Do you feel abandoned?"
He said, "Yeah."
I said, "Where do you
get your orders from?"
"Nowhere."
And he was just there.
It turned out that a
salesman of Nokia Networks,
because the amount of money
in networks was so big,
he had agreed to build
a $20-million factory
so they could
employ local people.
He even paid $5-million
to finish it early,
so it could be doing
nothing for longer.
But they wanted a factory,
so he gave them the factory.
And that was it,
and it was there.
And this went right
up to the top.
"How come we've got
a fucking factory,
"and what do we do with it?"
(smooth jazz music)
(dark atmospheric music)
- In certain countries in
Africa, they were killing rare
gorillas in those areas in
order to get tantalum from the
mines and then sell the tantalum
to electronics industry.
The question was how will
we know that what kind of
materials are used in mobile
phones because in electronics,
it was very difficult
at that time.
- Auto-correct this.
- I think looking back,
that was the time when,
when things changed.
It went from being a
highly technical group
to just being a large
group of people.
And I don't think that that
was just an Oulu issue.
In fact, I can
tell you it wasn't.
Myself, I had teams
all over the world.
California, Texas,
Boston, the UK, Denmark,
Germany, all over Finland,
India, China, Tokyo, I had
teams all over the place.
And they all grew.
Some of them, much
quicker than others.
- We'd go to work every
morning hoping that we'll
have some impact and
wanting to see that impact
and I think in a company
that size, it's very hard.
- It almost seemed like,
instead of competing with
people outside of the company,
that there was more
competition inside the company.
Page 37.
(sighs)
- There was a lot of excitement,
but I think there was also
that hubris had crept in.
So every product we were
gonna make was always gonna be
massive, never
gonna be a problem.
No one was ever gonna be
able to beat us at that.
And, um, other companies
were trying, you know?
- Tonight, we're gonna honor
one of your country's greatest
products, the Nokia cellphone,
its world-famous ringtone.
(phone rings)
(audience laughs)
Finland, this is for you.
- One, two!
(audience cheers and applauds)
- [Actor] Today, today Apple
is going to reinvent the phone.
And here it is.
(audience applauds)
(ominous chord)
- [Actor] Well, what we're
gonna do is get rid of all
these buttons and just
make a giant screen.
- I remember looking
at that and going, oh,
oh yeah, that's, yeah, that's
how it's supposed to be done.
- Apple's made some pretty
interesting trade-offs,
one of them is battery
life and one of them is
the durability of the product.
Now, 10 years later, we all
kind of accept that our phones
last for a day and
then we charge them,
and we have chargers
next to the bed,
which is the new normal.
And we all accept that if we're
stupid and we drop our phone
then the screen will smash,
we know that that will happen.
10 years ago, that
was not acceptable.
- [Actor] And boy
have we patented it.
- [Actor] Who wants a stylus?
You have to get 'em and put
'em away and you lose 'em.
Nobody wants a stylus, so
let's not use a stylus.
We're gonna use the best
pointing device in the world.
We're gonna use a pointing
device we're all born with.
We're born with 10 of them,
we're gonna use our fingers.
- Yeah, so this is the N9
in its original packaging,
and there it is.
(black metal music)
- [Reporter] This was
supposed to be nothing short
of a fairytale.
At first the company had
planned to create more than
10,000 jobs, but right now only
1,600 Romanians are employed
and many of these are on
very precarious contracts.
Management has refused
to comment on this.
- [Reviewer] So, it's not
gonna be the end of the line
for this particular style,
though at the moment,
MeeGo's future
isn't looking great.
- I can't even remember,
I'm assuming it was winter,
but I remember driving into
the parking lot in Nokia house
and you had to go up a couple
of ramps and then you drove
and you found the space and
it was super nice and little
green lights to show you
where there was spaces and I
remember pulling in and
shutting off the engine and
not wanting to get
out of the car.
Just, I thought, okay, I'll
just sit here for a bit,
'cause I don't wanna go in
there and I could see, like,
Nokia house is built in
a way that it has these
three big lumps of building
and then there's these glass
bridges in between and you can
see people walking backwards
and forwards and
doing their thing.
But I didn't wanna go in,
like, I think physically
just couldn't get out of
the car, so just sat there,
and looked and it was probably,
I don't know, 20, 25 minutes
something like that and
then I thought, right, okay,
I'll pull myself
together and go in and so
I got out the car and shut
the door and locked the car,
and I looked around
and (chuckles) there
was probably like
five other people doing
the exact same thing.
Just sitting in their cars,
just sitting there, and I walked
slowly to see whether maybe
they just arrived, but no,
they were doing the exact same
thing that I'd been doing.
And that was a
really scary moment.
That was like, this
is hurting people.
And I think what was keeping
them there was just this
complete powerlessness,
like driftwood,
and we could go in there,
we could work our arses off
for 12 hours and we did,
like 12, 16 hours a day,
just cranking it out, and
it would have no impact,
no effect whatsoever.
That company was going down,
no matter how much me and
those five other people worked.
- [Reporter] After a
rollercoaster decade,
Nokia will no longer be
making mobile phones.
The Finnish company is
selling its mobile device unit
to Microsoft in an all-cash
deal worth 5.44 billion Euros.
By abandoning phones,
it will refocus on
infrastructure and services.
- This is win-win for employees,
win-win for shareholders,
and win-win for customers
of both companies.
- Conspiracy?
It's business.
Publicly-traded company.
Foreign people will
buy your shares.
When they have enough, they
will make your decisions.
It's not a conspiracy.
Business.
(moody atmospheric music)
- All of us, all of the
shareholders, we have children
in school and we know that
the digitalization is coming
and there are basically no
means, no processes, no tools
for teachers and students
to actually implement the
digitalization and we all
have a very long background
in device management, so we
know this area in and out.
- Who knows, maybe one
these startup one day become
as big as Nokia
again for Finland.
- If you aim for 99%
quality, it's a failure.
You have to have 100%.
'Cause if you think if
the airlines run at 99%,
you're gonna lose two or
3,000 planes every day,
and that's not gonna
work very well.
(peaceful electronic music)
- [Man] The one thing you
need to understand is that
working in Nokia at
that time was unlike
anything I've
experienced anywhere.
- [Man] I feel super privileged
to have been welcomed
and to have been included and
to have been given all these
opportunities to do
stuff at the scale
that Nokia operated at.
- For the past few
years, it's almost been,
people have talked in a way
that they're almost embarrassed
to have been at Nokia
or people have joy at,
"ah, you Nokia people,
look what happened to you."
- [Man] For Nokia's glory, I
must say it still kinda looks,
(chuckles) looks like a phone.
(moody electronic music)
- The underlying reasons
here at Mobira is to operate
in the field of radio telephony
in such a way that the short
and long-term interests
of our customers and other
interested groups are fulfilled
in best possible manner.
- [Reporter] The China is a
market area of vast potential,
and here, Nokia has
made remarkable inroads,
even in the face of
extremely fierce competition.
- Especially I think we
are able to offer far-east
telecommunication equipment,
we are also able to offer
far-east turn key engineering
products like this cable
machinery line that we
have sold here to China.
(dark atmospheric music)
- [Whispering Woman]
The future is now.
Nokia.
Technophone.
- And I found my father and
I said, "Where's Finland?"
And he said, "I think
it's near Luxembourg."
Which shows how
much my father knew.
So anyway, so I finish
work, five o'clock.
Just like Olli is, get on
a plane, fly to Helsinki,
get a bus to Salo.
Why are they all puttin'
hats and coats and scarfs,
and I'm fine, I got outside,
I thought, oh, now I know.
And there was a bank, on
the top it had a clock,
and the temperature was -29.
(moody electronic music)
(tense orchestral music)
(phone rings)
- [Woman] Scotty, I've
just gone into labor!
What should I do?
- Push!
- [Man] Nokia,
connecting people.
(moody atmospheric music)
(upbeat string music)
- [Man] Nokia, and you
never miss an opportunity.
- Hello?
(dramatic orchestral music)
(peaceful string music)
(phone rings and vibrates)
- And when we actually
heard, during the winter '98,
that there is a possibility
to download a ringtone
over the air to
this mobile phone,
and change the
ringtone that you had,
it was really exciting.
So we started work on that
and by December that year,
we were ready to launch
the service, and it was
really amazing because when
we started the service,
during the first day, without
any advertising, we had more
downloads than we were
predicting for the whole month.
And after one week, we had
already, the same amount of
downloads that we were
forecasting for the whole year.
- It's difficult.
No offense.
So I lived in Oulu for
most of last 26, 27 years,
though I like in Helsinki
now, and I think many people
don't realize the significance
that Oulu played in
some of the success that
Nokia had, I mean, you know,
everyone takes credit,
everyone thinks that they
were the ones who made it.
The state technical
laboratory, so VTT,
was very strong on software
development at the time,
and we did a lot of work
with VTT in some quite
fundamental things that were
used in billions of phones.
(water hisses)
- Before I came to Finland,
we were given this kind of a
cultural training and that
was given by a Finnish guy
and the first thing he told
was, "Finnish people are very
"comfortable getting naked
in front of other people."
And me and my friends were
like, "What did he say, naked?"
And then we learned
about sauna, and yeah,
the sauna experience
was, in the beginning,
a bit shocking to me, but then
I also kind of liked sauna,
also take sauna quite often now.
(peaceful atmospheric music)
- [Reporter] Mr.
Gates, Mr. Gates.
Do Microsoft have any
plan to buy Nokia,
or some other Finnish companies?
(ominous chord)
(smooth jazz music)
- You were in the sexiest,
you were in the most
science-fiction technically
forward-looking,
everybody wanted a phone,
you were doing it, you know?
You were the dream son-in-law,
the dream daughter-in-law.
"Ah, your husband works for
Nokia, wife works for Nokia."
People talked like
that, it was weird.
- So, one of the focus areas
for me has really been to build
the Nokia brand such that
we're now virtually number one
in terms of brand popularity,
and we're certainly number one
in terms of the number of
handsets we sell in Asia.
- Now we have had a very
successful Nokia Superbowl
in the beginning of January
that has really helped our brand
building and name recognition
in the United States.
- [Reporter] In
the United States,
Nokia is the market leader.
- Went to a place
called Chongqing,
which is now probably the
biggest city in China.
It was big then, but
it's even bigger now.
It's right on the Yangtze River.
And the driver said,
"Do you want to go to
the Nokia factory?"
And I said, "There's
no factory here.
"There's an office
here, that's it."
And he said, "No, no,
no, it's a factory."
So, "Okay."
Massive, big Nokia factory.
I thought, oh, this
is interesting.
So, no one knew and this
is not in the bible,
it's not on John Talbot's
spreadsheet, so this is bad.
It's huge, it's an
absolutely massive factory,
and sure enough, there's
a big Nokia sign.
I thought, we're
in the right place.
So, I goes in,
there's a great big,
you know, manufacturing
on this big shiny floor,
when the machines are all put
on, anti-static or something,
there was a big floor and
it was like an ice rink.
There was nothing on it.
I went to walk and all the
cleaners came, the Chinese.
"Don't walk on that."
"Okay, sorry."
So, big Finnish guy comes out,
I said, "Hi, how are you?"
He said, "Very good."
"We haven't seen anyone
from Nokia here for years."
I said, "Really, how
long have you been here?"
He said, "About two
and a half years."
I said, "Do you feel abandoned?"
He said, "Yeah."
I said, "Where do you
get your orders from?"
"Nowhere."
And he was just there.
It turned out that a
salesman of Nokia Networks,
because the amount of money
in networks was so big,
he had agreed to build
a $20-million factory
so they could
employ local people.
He even paid $5-million
to finish it early,
so it could be doing
nothing for longer.
But they wanted a factory,
so he gave them the factory.
And that was it,
and it was there.
And this went right
up to the top.
"How come we've got
a fucking factory,
"and what do we do with it?"
(smooth jazz music)
(dark atmospheric music)
- In certain countries in
Africa, they were killing rare
gorillas in those areas in
order to get tantalum from the
mines and then sell the tantalum
to electronics industry.
The question was how will
we know that what kind of
materials are used in mobile
phones because in electronics,
it was very difficult
at that time.
- Auto-correct this.
- I think looking back,
that was the time when,
when things changed.
It went from being a
highly technical group
to just being a large
group of people.
And I don't think that that
was just an Oulu issue.
In fact, I can
tell you it wasn't.
Myself, I had teams
all over the world.
California, Texas,
Boston, the UK, Denmark,
Germany, all over Finland,
India, China, Tokyo, I had
teams all over the place.
And they all grew.
Some of them, much
quicker than others.
- We'd go to work every
morning hoping that we'll
have some impact and
wanting to see that impact
and I think in a company
that size, it's very hard.
- It almost seemed like,
instead of competing with
people outside of the company,
that there was more
competition inside the company.
Page 37.
(sighs)
- There was a lot of excitement,
but I think there was also
that hubris had crept in.
So every product we were
gonna make was always gonna be
massive, never
gonna be a problem.
No one was ever gonna be
able to beat us at that.
And, um, other companies
were trying, you know?
- Tonight, we're gonna honor
one of your country's greatest
products, the Nokia cellphone,
its world-famous ringtone.
(phone rings)
(audience laughs)
Finland, this is for you.
- One, two!
(audience cheers and applauds)
- [Actor] Today, today Apple
is going to reinvent the phone.
And here it is.
(audience applauds)
(ominous chord)
- [Actor] Well, what we're
gonna do is get rid of all
these buttons and just
make a giant screen.
- I remember looking
at that and going, oh,
oh yeah, that's, yeah, that's
how it's supposed to be done.
- Apple's made some pretty
interesting trade-offs,
one of them is battery
life and one of them is
the durability of the product.
Now, 10 years later, we all
kind of accept that our phones
last for a day and
then we charge them,
and we have chargers
next to the bed,
which is the new normal.
And we all accept that if we're
stupid and we drop our phone
then the screen will smash,
we know that that will happen.
10 years ago, that
was not acceptable.
- [Actor] And boy
have we patented it.
- [Actor] Who wants a stylus?
You have to get 'em and put
'em away and you lose 'em.
Nobody wants a stylus, so
let's not use a stylus.
We're gonna use the best
pointing device in the world.
We're gonna use a pointing
device we're all born with.
We're born with 10 of them,
we're gonna use our fingers.
- Yeah, so this is the N9
in its original packaging,
and there it is.
(black metal music)
- [Reporter] This was
supposed to be nothing short
of a fairytale.
At first the company had
planned to create more than
10,000 jobs, but right now only
1,600 Romanians are employed
and many of these are on
very precarious contracts.
Management has refused
to comment on this.
- [Reviewer] So, it's not
gonna be the end of the line
for this particular style,
though at the moment,
MeeGo's future
isn't looking great.
- I can't even remember,
I'm assuming it was winter,
but I remember driving into
the parking lot in Nokia house
and you had to go up a couple
of ramps and then you drove
and you found the space and
it was super nice and little
green lights to show you
where there was spaces and I
remember pulling in and
shutting off the engine and
not wanting to get
out of the car.
Just, I thought, okay, I'll
just sit here for a bit,
'cause I don't wanna go in
there and I could see, like,
Nokia house is built in
a way that it has these
three big lumps of building
and then there's these glass
bridges in between and you can
see people walking backwards
and forwards and
doing their thing.
But I didn't wanna go in,
like, I think physically
just couldn't get out of
the car, so just sat there,
and looked and it was probably,
I don't know, 20, 25 minutes
something like that and
then I thought, right, okay,
I'll pull myself
together and go in and so
I got out the car and shut
the door and locked the car,
and I looked around
and (chuckles) there
was probably like
five other people doing
the exact same thing.
Just sitting in their cars,
just sitting there, and I walked
slowly to see whether maybe
they just arrived, but no,
they were doing the exact same
thing that I'd been doing.
And that was a
really scary moment.
That was like, this
is hurting people.
And I think what was keeping
them there was just this
complete powerlessness,
like driftwood,
and we could go in there,
we could work our arses off
for 12 hours and we did,
like 12, 16 hours a day,
just cranking it out, and
it would have no impact,
no effect whatsoever.
That company was going down,
no matter how much me and
those five other people worked.
- [Reporter] After a
rollercoaster decade,
Nokia will no longer be
making mobile phones.
The Finnish company is
selling its mobile device unit
to Microsoft in an all-cash
deal worth 5.44 billion Euros.
By abandoning phones,
it will refocus on
infrastructure and services.
- This is win-win for employees,
win-win for shareholders,
and win-win for customers
of both companies.
- Conspiracy?
It's business.
Publicly-traded company.
Foreign people will
buy your shares.
When they have enough, they
will make your decisions.
It's not a conspiracy.
Business.
(moody atmospheric music)
- All of us, all of the
shareholders, we have children
in school and we know that
the digitalization is coming
and there are basically no
means, no processes, no tools
for teachers and students
to actually implement the
digitalization and we all
have a very long background
in device management, so we
know this area in and out.
- Who knows, maybe one
these startup one day become
as big as Nokia
again for Finland.
- If you aim for 99%
quality, it's a failure.
You have to have 100%.
'Cause if you think if
the airlines run at 99%,
you're gonna lose two or
3,000 planes every day,
and that's not gonna
work very well.
(peaceful electronic music)