Nokia D1C: The Comeback

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.

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Device per device Nokia devices weren't outdated, even the latest Symbian ones were still ok on the hardware and even software fronts.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.

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 guess you(and several others, including the parent poster) have no clue how boards of companies work.

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.

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.

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 ?

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.

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.

> Offline GPS - You could download the maps for the entire world on your phone.

The maps and related software (Nokia/Ovi Maps/HERE) came from Nokia, not Microsoft.

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."

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/where-nokia-went-...

>> 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.

I'll be very glad if Nokia ends up making very good Android phones.

Lumias were quite good, too, from the hardware perspective.

What is the saddest part is the loss of their mobile OS effort; it had a number of good UI ideas.

BTW I wonder when some reasonably large player will try to offer an entirely (or at least significantly) different UX on top of Android's open-source core.

No, they're likely just putting their name on some other OEM's Android phones.

Thanks for the update. That's interesting news.

They could at least try and make it look like a Nokia phone on the outside.

Nokia was known for the quality of its phones trough 90's up to mid 2000's.

Where did you get the two decades? Before IPhone came 10 years ago and changed the game from hardware to software plus ecosystem Nokia's phones were in the top category - no, sorry, they were in all of the categories since there were so many of them.

Even after IPhone Nokia had years of great market position.

Technology wise mediocre? Thats.. not really the general perception.

Perhaps the fact that Nokia tanked as fast as it did creates a shadow over the history before this.

Except he wanted something smaller. The Nexus 4, 5, and 5x are all much bigger than an iPhone 4.

Android doesn't have an update problem, Android OEM's do.

> Think about this fact , many of high end phone from last year or year before that (which customer spent ~700$ -which is quite money-) has not fixed stagefright vulnerability and don't have any plan to update to new version

And that would be exactly which ones? Samsung did update their high end phones, so did Sony, HTC and LG.

I think they just don't have the tech. Really. Android is a battery hog compared to iOS and the chips aren't as efficient either, so an Android phone the size of a 5SE would have unacceptably short battery life or would have to use an old CPU with a lower power draw but that just wouldn't be competitive. I just don't think the engineering works out well for them, otherwise somebody would be doing it.