Such a shame trojan horse Elop tanked the company by partnering with Microsoft, I'd have loved to see more of their Linux based phones, I've still got a Nokia N9 which has to be my favourite handset so far.
I hope Ubuntu for phones can gain at least some traction.
I have heard this statement so many times and I feel it doesn't justify the truth. Here are some counter points. Nokia came back into my view when they started launching the Lumia phones. It was slick, fast and solid phones with amazing camera. Any mention of Nokia here on HN and Reddit before that was met with DOA as the top comment. When they started releasing the Lumia phones, the tune started to switch to "if they made an android phone, I would totally buy!". Remember the whole silly fiasco with even Siri calling Lumia 900 the best phone in the market? [1]
I think Microsoft gave it a premiere spot with Windows Mobile which would have otherwise gone unnoticeable in the Android market. Despite me jumping ship from Windows Phone, I still believe Windows Mobile was one of the best (*subjective) of all mobile OSes. Its extremely fast, less resource hog and well designed (flatness before it got trendy). Given the stereotypes about Windows OS, the mobile OS seemed nothing like it. Heck, I bought a $15 Lumia phone from Best buy and it seems like a $200 buttery smooth phone.
Lumia also had good set of apps, which created an amazing group of loyal buyers.
Offline GPS - You could download the maps for the entire world on your phone.
Offline Radio - Download the entire mix radio to you phone and use it where you went.
Camera Apps - Nokia cinematography, Live Images, Selfie, Panorama.
However, I do believe that Microsoft's Nokia buyout was a stupid idea. Nokia was amazing at advertising, viral marketing and creating a brand loyalty. Microsoft however sucks at both advertisements and marketing but they seem to be very good at pissing off even their loyal followers.
There is an interesting story by the New Yorker: "It wasn’t just that Nokia failed to recognize the increasing importance of software, though. It also underestimated how important the transition to smartphones would be. And this was, in retrospect, a classic case of a company being enthralled (and, in a way, imprisoned) by its past success. Nokia was, after all, earning more than fifty per cent of all the profits in the mobile-phone industry in 2007, and most of those profits were not coming from smartphones. Diverting a lot of resources into a high-end, low-volume business (which is what the touch-screen smartphone business was in 2007) would have looked risky. In that sense, Nokia’s failure resulted at least in part from an institutional reluctance to transition into a new era."
> Diverting a lot of resources into a high-end, low-volume business (which is what the touch-screen smartphone business was in 2007) would have looked risky. In that sense, Nokia’s failure resulted at least in part from an institutional reluctance to transition into a new era.
It's a bit of a nitpick, but Nokia had put considerable resources into Series 60, Symbian, and subsequently Maemo. Nokia's management, before Elop, was in no way reluctant about a smartphone future beyond high-volume S40 devices. The S60 features of integrated PIM apps are foundational to smartphones, and Maemo/Meego was a credible smartphone OS. As I recall, Tomi Ahonen had good reason to think the N9 was outselling Windows Phone when Meego was killed.
I guess I wasn't clear. I dint claim Microsoft made them, just that it came exclusively with the Lumia phones. If I recall correctly, back then if you searched for it in the store using a non-lumia phone, you wouldn't even find it listed.
I wonder if you're from the US, because I heard that Nokia as a brand never really quite took off in the way it did Europe. Over here before smartphones came along you were pretty much mad to buy anything except a Nokia. So why didn't it work with windows mobile? It did to start with, people bought them because of the Nokia name, but the lack of apps for the platform killed that good will pretty quickly.
Combine their superb industrial design with android and it would have been significantly more potent.
>> Such a shame trojan horse Elop tanked the company by partnering with Microsoft
> I have heard this statement so many times and I feel it doesn't justify the truth
To me when people talk about the Windows Phone being great they are talking about the hardware. Which is something Nokia used to excel at. I have a Lumia on my desk and it is a really nice phone, its the lack of the latest Apps that lets it down.
Elop failed to leverage the software developers at Nokia, you had great Qt/C/C++ developers and suddenly the company is Silverlight/C#?
The biggest mistake I attribute to his management was his announcement that the phones they were just launching would not upgrade to Windows Phone 8. As a buyer you are just going to wait 6 months, that killed the sales channel and App developers decided to hold off.
I don't think Elop was a trojan, I think he was out of his depth or the wrong man. The board should never have appointed him. But he did tank the company through a string of bad decisions.
To echo nivla's point: One of my favorite phones was the Lumia 950. Its fatal flaw was the lack of app support, but everything else was fantastic. The OS was fast and easy to use, the apps that were there were well done, the build was fantastic, etc.
Instead of being "just another" high-end android, Nokia got to be the flagship phone for an entire OS. Today it seems like a crazy call, but it's easy to understand why they would pick WP over Android.
Tl;dr: A Microsoft "trojan horse" bet Nokia's future on Windows Phone. Then he cut the lifeboats off the davits by killing Nokia's internal smartphone OS and phone projects, and an Android-based phone, and wantonly destroyed Nokia's chances to back off a fatal decision. One of the worst, most malign CEOs in history.
Nokia was dead no matter what. The only way to make a significant profit selling Android phones is massive vertical integration like Samsung. Otherwise, you're talking about a low-margin high-volume business that Nokia could never have sustained in comparison to Chinese and Taiwanese competitors like HTC and Lenovo.
Like what's the point of this new Nokia phone? It'll be commodity Qualcomm hardware running a commodity Android OS. There is no reason to pay any premium for it, especially when you can get a cheap Nexus phone.
They did make beautiful hardware though - at a time where everything that wasn't an iPhone was plastic garbage (with the exception of HTC which for some reason was largely ignored in comparison to Samsung).
As someone who had a Nexus One, S and Galaxy Nexus I really wanted an android phone with really nice hardware (Nokia N9 plus android would have been amazing), but after the Microsoft partnership and the iPhone 5 having turn by turn navigation I bailed.
Even today there aren't a lot of nice hardware options on the android side of things.
The only "nice" Android hardware I see now is coming from Sony.
Understated black slabs, no lazy bulging camera lens protruding from the back, no half-arsed slapped-on fingerprint sensor mucking up the chin and no strange amorphous blob-like body shapes.
Those phones do look nice - unfortunately for me google dropped the ball so hard with ignoring google voice for years and pushing a broken hangouts SMS integration that iMessage came and ate their cake.
Not willing to leave now mostly because of iMessage (though iOS scrolling is nice too - probably lack of JVM?).
Shame too because google was ahead of the game on a lot of this stuff, products just weren't focused.
Thats always been the case with Google, they never follow through properly on any of their products.
The Pixel C is beyond irritating, the hardware is solid enough, but the tablet experience on Android is so anaemic (Even Google's own first party software is barely tablet optimised, in some cases there has been a serious regression since previous versions of their apps)
In that respect the market is probably more in their favor now than a few years ago. Since hardware and software have become mature this is the time to differentiate with design, integrations (iot, payments, brand) and accessories. Essentially what Google tries to do, but usually fails at because it doesn't really make a difference for them and what xiaomi does fairly successfully, in some ways even better than Apple.
Nokia tanked well before Elop came around. Basically the refusal to accept the fact that Symbian was going nowhere killed them. If they did the switch sooner (while they still had some market share) to pretty much anything else I think they would have had a chance.
That's a common myth, actually at the time Elop got in, Nokia's sales were still growing, though not at the speed of Android. That would have given them a nice cushion for a few years as many people loved the brand and were loyal (EU + India). In the US they weren't basically present as they didn't want to play the ball with cellular carriers.
After Elop issued his burning platform memo, Nokia fell off-the-cliff as channels/carriers realized there is no future in selling Symbian phones and stopped ordering/subsidizing them. Mind you, Nokia dwarfed Samsung in market share at the time having way more resources - if they decided to go with Android, they could have been the leader Samsung became. Probably even going with MeeGo would have been way better than with MS.
Sales were growing via the Asha low cost brand, Nokia was in deep trouble and heading in the wrong direction way before Elop.
Nokia didn't fail because of the choise of an OS, it failed because they did not embraced the new business model, they were still selling and designing phones when everyone was already selling platforms.
No, just no. Nokia did fail because they chose an OS that failed. They bet everything on Windows Mobile and lost.
You can't say with a straight face that if they choose Android instead that they would be in the same situation. Nokia could've had pro quality cameras that happen to be phones out long before any of the other Android phone makers.
They blew it. Partnering with Microsoft was a huge mistake.
While this is probably true, it benefits immensely from hindsight.
Even when Nokia decided not to move forward with MeeGo (which was an extremely defensible decision given how behind schedule both the OS and the products to run it on had become), they considered their services--particularly mapping--a major "crown jewel." They went with Windows Phone (n.b.: not Windows Mobile, which was the earlier OS) because Microsoft would partner with them and promote the Nokia products as "premium" Windows Phone devices while letting Nokia use their own services. That deal wouldn't have been possible with Google. While Android is open source, the Android branding is not, and to be able to market their device as Android--and get any support from Google--they would have had abandon their own services and use Google's.
If I'd been in charge of things, would I have done that? No. I think Nokia should have gone with AOSP and put not only their own services but their own UX on it, along with Qt. I was at Nokia at 2010 and we were in the process of unifying Symbian and Meego on Qt, with the notion that you'd (mostly) just be able to recompile a Qt-based app to move between OSes; they could have kept that strategy while moving to Android. Then they'd be able to run Android apps natively and have a solid platform to move ahead on, while not leaving Nokia's existing community feeling like they'd been shut out. And, as others have pointed out, Nokia had some fantastic industrial design; the N8/N9, whose design language carried over into the Lumia line, was really the only phone design I've liked as much as the iPhone 4/4s design.
But, Nokia's choice wasn't entirely bananas at the time. We all knew Windows Phone was late to the game, but initially it still got a lot of positive attention, a lot of love for its UX design, and it was Microsoft. I was arguably a skeptic, and even I wildly underestimated how hard the platform ended up cratering.
If they have went with Android they would've been just another OEM, nothing guarantees that they would have outlived their fate and could be competitive with Samsung or LG today.
I wonder; leaving the market surely gave Samsung a huge air gap to breath, but Samsung was seen a new strong player while Nokia, even not choosing MS would have got the "old giant" image. I believe they could have kept a very large chunk of said market, even with Samsung and Apple securing the top two positions.
Samsung only recently have gotten really strong, early Android days HTC was the king with Motorola being a close second.
I'm not sure, while Microsoft didn't sell that well (or well not at all), they did ship quite a few of pretty high end devices, Nokia has probably shipped more high end devices than Samsung prior to the S6/7.
Yes, they were pretty asleep, yet MeeGo was quite nice, even Engadget, traditionally hostile to Symbian, was impressed with N9, and Elop did everything he could to kill it (couldn't be sold in the US/UK/Germany etc.), and it still managed to outsold first Lumias.
It was atrocious to developers. I looked at it just a bit myself, decided not to go there at all; I knew many Symbian developers and they said they'd generally prefer contracting syphilis to contracting Symbian.
Symbian was and probably still is the best phone platform, and the usability of most important phone functions (just making phone calls, and also things like what the phone does with alarm clock during call / when phone is switched off, or what it does when you get a text message during a call, etc) was very well designed.
But Nokia leadership just wanted to keep doing what was selling so well (keyboard phones) so touchscreen development was ignored. The horrible complexity of Symbian app development was the other big issue.
As someone who owned multiple Symbian phones, it was great as a user - developing for it was a different matter entirely with the bastardized C++ variant you had available (no exceptions or a lot of other common features that were left out because the original devices running Symbian had nowhere near enough CPU power to handle them, but once the S60 3rd Edition devices like my N75 started rolling around they should have been pushing hard on modernizing the toolchain - they didn't).
It wasn't that Symbian wasn't going anywhere it was that Nokia failed to embrace the development community properly they continued to work with only corporate developers and didn't give 2 cents about what made the iOS ecosystem shine.
When the iPhone came out iPhone didn't had native apps but it did had good support for developers and an easy way to publish.
Device per device Nokia devices weren't outdated, even the latest Symbian ones were still ok on the hardware and even software fronts.
The overall experience wasn't that different than early iOS (n97 type devices).
But still no support no good store no easy publishing.
Their solution was to bank hard into nerdland with multiple Linux based projects, and while I still love my n900 it is not a consumer device by any means.
> How can you even think to compare it to an iphone 3G?
Indeed it's a silly comparison, the iPhone 3G had a far inferior screen and camera. And it couldn't even record video!
Seriously though the N97 was very popular in the UK amongst business and technical types. My nerdy ISP at the time gave detailed VPN and VOIP instructions for the N-series but had no support for the iPhones because they couldn't perform those functions over cell networks.
If Nokia had managed to keep the momentum up following the N97 they perhaps could have maintained the corporate-market dominance they had with the E- and N-series Communicators. But they stumbled and Blackberry struck, plus Apple started picking-off juicy C-level targets who then demanded that their tech staff support the iPhone. At that point the division between 'fun' consumer and 'serious' corporate phones began to crumble.
I had both of them they had advantages over the iPhone as far as the device capability goes.
Even some apps were better, the problem is that Nokia continued to work on feature phones rather than their platform.
If Nokia had a decent store and opened Symbian development to the masses properly it would not have been at a disadvantage, vanilla iOS was pretty horrible.
I wasn't aware that the N95/N97 had a capacitive touchscreen, multitouch, fluid scrolling, desktop class web browser and all of the animations, visual design and flourishes that Apple has been renowned for.
Many of the early iPhone users were Mac users i.e. very particular about the subtleties of good user experience. The idea that the N95/N97 would have been similar for those users is pretty laughable in its misguidedness.
The N97 had a touchscreen with a higher resolution than the iPhone 3g, the camera was considerably better, it had more storage and an SD card, could record and play video, could be easily connected to a TV, had a better browser (w/ flash support which was important 7-8 years ago), heck many of the early apps like Facebook worked considerably better on the N97...
The N97 also had things like notifications, widgets and many other things before they came to the iPhone.
Hilarious, the N97 YouTube page was awful to navigate because handling the flash content was so sluggish and the video crapped out after a few seconds anyway. Meanwhile the 3GS came with a swishy native YouTube app, not shown. I wonder how many people are still using an N97 though. My daughter was still using my old 3GS every day, it even still worked with the App Store, up until 2 weeks ago when she upgraded to a hand-me-down iPhone 4.
Edit: hang on, the N97 was contemporary with the 3GS, which could record video.
It didn't have a capacitive touchscreen, multitouch, animations and fluid scrolling. All of the hallmarks of modern day smartphones. The multitouch in particular is what made the browser so different from previous mobile devices.
And SD cards and TV connectivity were as irrelevant back then as it is today. They aren't major differentiators.
You're comparing specs on a page without understanding that the experience is what made the iPhone so unique.
The browser of the N97 is a joke.
Sorry but that's why it failed. the iphone was more simple and intuitive than this crap n97.
flash was something nobody needed even back than.
people wanted a smartphone a SMART phone not a dumb phone which the n97 looks like.
Are there any articles in english about this ? Why would the Nokia board throw this huge empire in the ground ? They won more by selling the mobile phone div. than by trying to compete ?
"Elop was entitled to immediate share price performance bonus in case of a “change of control” situation… such as selling of Nokia’s handset division. "
While the Nokia management did do wrong choices, they were clearly not stupid people. Nokia did after all do quite well for many years under their command. When the mobile phone business had gone south, they must have thought about different scenarios and how to save the rest of the company in case mobile phones don't recover.
At that time, it would have been quite reasonable to come to the conclusion that if Nokia jumped fully to the Microsoft bandwagon, they might be eventually buy the business for strategic reasons even if did not do so well. And if this was then plan, then recruiting a Microsoft man and person with good relationship to Microsoft CEO was a reasonable choice.
They definitely had not given up hope on the mobile phone business when they chose Windows Phone. At the time they were still one of the largest phone manufacturers and would have probably stayed relevant to this day if they had chosen Android.
Microsoft told them all sorts of bulls*hit about how Windows Phone was as good as Android or at least was going to be by the next version. They thought it was plausible that together with MS they could break the Apple-Google duopoly, and since MS gave a massively sweeter OEM deal than Google, WP it was. Note that the board fully supported Elops actions at this point, it was not a backroom deal.
Once Nokia engineers got to actually working with WP they found out it was technically in far worse shape than MS had led them believe, but at that point it was too late to backpedal to Android.
It took almost half a decade and four huge upgrades (WP 7.5, WP 8, WP 8.1 and W10) before WP became somewhat competitive to Android, but that was much longer than what Nokia could reason financially, so the best option left was to ditch the sunken phone business to the highest bidder. Microsoft was luckily still believing they could break the duopoly so Nokia again got a pretty sweet deal from them.
I hope Ubuntu for phones can gain at least some traction.