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StripeNoGood

A trojan horse from the MS did it...

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Five year anniversary of the burning platform memo just passed, the world is a different place now.

http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/02/09/full-text-nokia-...

Nokia was in big trouble / dying years before that.

Nokia was in trouble indeed, but the damage caused by that memo was irreversible.

I remember the day it came out, it was the day everyone who I knew at Nokia realised that they'd soon need new jobs.

So true, from the 'Burning Platform Memo':

"The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable."

This is a very extended assumption which is quite wrong.

When Nokia opted for MS all paths were already downhill. Going with Android would have meant and injection of money from Google, but clearly Nokia was not prepared to land in the highly dense Android ecosystem, fighting for a tiny piece of the cake with giants like Samsung. There was no way that Nokia would have a success in Android that would put out the fire.

MS in turned meant to have most of the Windows Phone market for itself and a BIG partner behind. As terrible as WP was at the beginning, it bought Nokia a LOT of time. Nokia reorganized its business in the meantime, separated the location business (what is now HERE), the NSN side and consolidated its patent portfolio and research divisions.

This way, they managed in the end to sell Devices to Microsoft, which was a huge burden. And then sell HERE (which wasn't really profitable) to the automotive consortium. With this two moves they kept the company afloat, along with many great assets that actually make and will make money (the research division and NSN ), and the brand.

Had Nokia opted for Android back then, it would have ended much worse (Blackberry maker comes to mind). I think from the point of view of share-holders, Nokia escaped dodged a terrible future. Basically they took their things and left the platform in the rescue boat, while the rescuers (MS) burn with it.

I always despise such theories of what would have happened had Nokia selected Android instead of Windows. You have absolutely no idea what would have happened. What we do know is that selecting a single OS from a company that had ulterior motives was a key to their demise. It's clear the Microsoft decision was a failure and anything else is just rampant speculation. It was nice, though, to see Nokia get the last laugh by selling their device division to MS for 7+ Billion dollars.

As for Nokia, well, we'll see how they do when they re-enter the smartphone market in late 2016 free of Microsoft.

The management got too rosy picture of what Windows Phone 7 was (a quick hackish MVP, nothing more, like the first iPhone few years earlier) and they were really surprised when upgrade path to Windows Phone 8 was really hard.

I firmly believe that the messy transition from WP7.5 to 8, Microsoft focusing on the internals of the OS versus much-requested user-facing features is what doomed the OS.

I recognize that the transition was necessary, but between the lackluster functionality (notification center, for example, was the #1 requested feature for years), lack of updates (8.0 to 8.1 took 20 months), and, of course, lack of developer support, I'm wondering if Windows Phone had a chance at all.

I will never stop being upset over the death of Zune HD and WP7 era Metro UI, though.

And basically developers needed to remake (more or less) the apps from WP7.* to WP8. Nowadays they need to port apps from WP or from Desktop Windows to Windows Universal Apps, so what's the point if nobody's using those apps? :D

Eh, he was not the only guy in nokia.

No. He was just the guy giving orders to everyone.

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