Nils Torvalds, Vater des Linux-Erfinders Linus, ist schwedisch-finnischer Journalist und sitzt seit 2008 für die Partei der schwedischen Minderheit im Stadtrat von Helsinki. Für das Linux-Magazin kommentiert er den neuen Kurs des Unternehmens Nokia. Wir veröffentlichen die ungekürzte Originalfassung in englischer Sprache.
Looking back historically Finland is situated at the edge of the so called civilized world. That goes with a complicated history. The Bible – as cultural scaffolding and, in a way, an open source – was printed in Finnish 1548. In comparison with the German translation (Frühhochdeutsch) in 1466 we were almost a century behind.
That wasn’t the only problem.
Up to 1808 the country was part of Sweden, after that up to 1917 part of Russia, which meant that the main “volksprache” Finnish started to be a modern language in mid 19th century – under heavy influence from Johann Gottfried Herder.
Countries on the fringe are easily dreaming of shortcuts to progress. And in a strange way Finland did succeed. As part of the Russian Empire Finland – and Poland – were the technological frontrunners and therefore able to improve their position. The Nokia paper works stared up 1880 and a little later the rubber booth factory – which made the Nokia-brand famous in the pre-electronic age – begun production.
The Nokia rubber booth was iconic and became synonymous with getting kicked out. In the US you would say that you got the pink slip. In Finland you said you got the Nokia stamp. Therefore the Nokia-agllomerate, which in my youth produced boots, cables and sanitary papers, dis-invested itself from the less than glorious past when it became a world brand.
Why the success?
There are a lot of explanations for how Nokia sky-rocketed to national and international glory. Some of it has to do with good leadership. A lot is explained by the Nordic mobile phone standard NMT. Most is probably explained by shear coincidence.
From a history-of-culture point of view Finland had during two centuries acquired an interesting blend of advantages and dis-advantages. Number one of the advantages is the educational system as a basis for radical upward social mobility. On the dis-advantages you had a very sparsely inhabited country with few possibilities for face-to-face communication and interaction.
We are – to put it gently – not a very communicative culture. And Bert Brecht’s experience from Helsinki railway station is illuminating: Die Finnen schweigen zweisprachig.
A window of opportunities
This culture run head on into the early stages of the IT-revolution. We don’t know for sure how it happened, but all of a sudden the sky opened up and the holy Grail of programming was given to uncommunicative boys not given to make any unnecessary distinctions between playing and learning.
They didn’t either make any unnecessary distinctions between proprietary codes and intuitive findings. It was the IT-realm of freedom, from which Nokia benefited enormously.
Then the windows started to shut down.
In hindsight from 2050 one of the most stupid sequences of decisions from the late 20th and early 21st centuries will be the greedy extension of copyrights. The decisions had almost nothing to do with inventions or care for the cultural processes behind innovations. In the US case the main concern was honestly given in the Senate report for the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1995:
”The purpose of the bill is to ensure adequate copyright protection for American works in foreign nations and the continued economic benefits of a healthy surplus balance of trade in the exploitation of copyrighted works.” (My italics.)
The subsequent narrowing of the free flow of information created islands of program platforms in a digital ocean. Logically these islands would get more vulnerable the fewer they were and the less freedom of the high (digital) seas there would be.
All of a sudden this archipelago is reduced to four islands: the Symbian, the Android, the Windows Mobile and Apple’s IOS.
Nokia has, probably for good reasons, been accused of being av company for and of engineers. They gave created a programs and technical solutions, which from an engineer’s point of view are impeccable. But the rumors in Helsinki tell that the engineers didn’t reed the cultural writing on the wall. They had the touch-screen very early, but they didn’t think it worthwhile to spoil their own market by exploiting it too early.
Thereby they created a tsunami sweeping over the intellectual property of their Symbian-island.
Consequences for Finland
During the nice part of the Nokia-era you had a rich flowering av programming companies. All the nerds from the late 80’s up til today were able to implement their creative abilities and Nokia used it. The exact amount of people directly and indirectly employed by this network is hard to calculate, but Nokia’s share of Finland’s total r&d is about 20 %.
It seems highly improbably that the three remaining islands – of which the Android and Open Handset Alliance is now in a way excluded from the Finnish horizon – will be able to save this level.
