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Comment by thepangolino | Hacker News Reader

I’ll never forget how they jumped from a burning platform to a sinking ship.

That jump, however stupid it was at the time, is the key to Nokia existing at all in its current form.

The Nokia management used the Microsoft money to buy Siemens part of NSN (Nokia Siemens Networks) and managed to turn it around somewhat, in a situation where it looked like Ericsson and Huawei were going to be the only survivors.

I was working for a subcontractor to Nokia during 2010-2016 and we were dumbfounded in the beginning, but as the years went on that turned into a belief that Nokia scammed Microsoft in that sale.

> a belief that Nokia scammed Microsoft in that sale

That's what I've heard too -- They knew they were going down and simply took the opportunity to dump the handset business on Microsoft while securing funding to allow the network business to grow.

No matter who got the better deal, I wouldn't call it a scam if two billion $ companies agree on a price for a business after due diligence. Sometimes both win (because one can use the asset better than the other), sometimes the price is too high or too low. Doesn't mean they got scammed.

I doubt we'll ever get the full story of what happened, and how much Nokia told Microsoft of the state of the business that changed hands. But you are, of course, right; it could just as well have been a really, really bad business deal for Microsoft.

> "...it could just as well have been a really, really bad business deal for Microsoft."

I think that's the more likely explanation. Remember that Steve Ballmer was crazy enough to also try to buy Yahoo, which would have been an even bigger disaster for Microsoft.

To be more accurate they jumped from a burning platform (Symbian) to a sinking ship (Windows Phone) while throwing away the lifebuoy (MeeGo).

Because the "old timers" though this linux thing was a toy and a fad and stuck to Symbian

Depends on what you mean by Nokia. Nokia which is still around, cut off an arm to give it to Microsoft. The arm itself didn't fare very well...

While Maemo/MeeGo was cool (Former N900 user here), I doubt it would have succeeded in the long term. It would have been equally difficult to entice developers as it was for the windows phone platform, putting Nokia in the same position as they were with WP.

The latest iteration of that burning platform, Symbian Belle with QT and PIPS was already quite an improvement, Symbian was getting quite good, being open sourced, with everyone slowly moving away from Symbian C++ (uggh) into Qt/PIPs.

Paralel to that N900 was shapping up quite well, also using Qt as part of its SDK.

Being asked to throw away their Symbian Java and Qt for Windows 7 pure .NET SDK was what made the large majority abandon ship.

Naturally Elop was just driving Nokia into the position he could benefit from his compensation clauses given to him by the Nokia board.

If they had the culture of acquiring up and coming start-ups, such as the one making Android, there would have been an excellent result. I fell like most EU based companies lack such culture, and the result is that once great companies face great failures (unless the EU bails them out or taxes their competitors).

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