Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
"Elop oversaw the 2011 launch of a Linux-based smartphone, the Nokia N9. The N9 ran on a distribution of Linux called MeeGo. Reviewers at the time praised the new smartphone direction the Finnish phone maker had taken. 'Possibly the most beautiful phone ever made,' wrote one reviewer about the N9 for Engadget.
But the N9’s accolades did not ultimately carry the day. Nokia announced its Lumia line of phones the same year—a direct pivot away from MeeGo toward the Windows Phone. It would be the last major strategic turn Nokia would take as a cellphone manufacturer. From this point forward, a succession of C-suite decisions all but sealed the fate of Nokia’s iconic line of phones."
We were so close to having literal plain Linux phones. Sad to me. I wonder where this could have gone without Microsoft.
And WindowsPhone was actually a good design for user interaction, with the exception of some underlying clunkiness of settings.
Edit: And consistent with sibling comment Microsoft was even paying companies to build apps for their platform, and it _still_ wasn't enough.
Also, had ms continued production and not burned goodwill at each turn, as well as skipped the crapshow that was windows 8, we could at least had had 3 providers instead of two.
But it is true that the app-based future, that didn't exist yet, probably came with market dynamics that limits the number of platforms to two or three. It just wasn't clear which those were at the time.
What a vanilla Linux-based platform, and Meego, Maemo, Moblin and Mer were just iterations of the same thing, would have had going for it was that it could have had much better long time support and not just for hardware for software. Linux famously do not break userspace, and can regularly run 30 year old applications. For a phone you would be surprised if a 3 year old app worked.
Microsoft did this so much worse than both Apple or Android, even if they all suffer from it. Every release of the operating system came not just with new design language, never earth-shattering but often interesting, but new GUI toolkits and application packaging. Just a recompile of your application often wasn't enough, you were expected to rewrite your application to fit in with the new. They really shot themselves in the foot with that, and they did it over and over again despite never having leading market share and everbody seeing where things were heading. It was (and perhaps still is) probably the only way they could operate as a company.
The vanilla Linux-based platforms mentioned above had their own problems which should be obvious from the naming scheme alone, which would have compounded had their marketshare grown bigger. It was a forkfest. But that's the issue with corporate open source, there is rightfully an inherent skepticism where a single company dominates what is an open source project. This is also why Linus never took a job with the big Linux providers. It wasn't for a lack of opportunitites, but he knew that had he worked for Red Hat, people would always suspect even technical decisions to be made for the benefit of his employer. The most successful open source projects are vendor neutral. That is not in telecom companies culture, they had a very hard time understanding that and tend to form alliances instead. Not the same thing.
I think I was one of the first developers that got an N770 engineering sample (the first product in the N770-N9 saga) and it was really clear that they were onto something. Sadly, internal politics won over company and consumer interests. It took them extremely long to let this be a phone, not just an "Internet tablet". It was bizarre.
The same team is now behind Jolla/Sailfish. It's pretty remarkable how far they've got, but it's obviously not a perfect product given how small they are compared to the other mobile juggernauts. However, it's usable as a daily driver and, with a critical developer mass, it could get somewhere. There are already quite a few indie apps.
Crucially, I think it's the only platform that has the potential to set you truly free. GrapheneOS is the other alternative I can also endorse and tolerate, but it has a different set of compromises, and it's a bit fragile to Google pulling the plug. But it's great in its own ways.
It was Kafkaesque, discontinuing a product before release.
I miss these simpler times when devices were made to serve users, and not the other way round.
If Nokia and Blackberry team up they maybe would succeed. Nokia Mobile still could be around if instead choosing Windows Phone would release Android phone back then.
Sadly, I strong suspect it would have gone nowhere. Apps became the name of the game and iOS and Android built up strong app libraries quickly. If Microsoft failed to compete I don't think a Nokia Linux phone would have stood a chance at all. Maybe if it added Android compatibility but that would be as much of an admission of failure as anything.
IIRC, the dominant position back then was "Android is Linux". Shuttleworth closed his famous #1 bug on Canonical that was their mission in 2013 because now Android/Linux is more popular than Windows and the future is mobile[1]. Also Google still had a lot of good will in the OSS/Linux community back then so most "Mobile Linux" attempts were met with "Just use Android"
[1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/05/mark-shuttleworth-marks-...
A friend of mine worked at a cell phone repair shop and it was fairly common for someone to bring in their bulky keyboard-slideout HTC PDA that had frozen and typically the only recourse was a "hard reset" - reverting the phone to factory settings and removing all stored data (which was in the MB those days). Of course WinMo on most PDAs of the time was quite capable of keeling over all by itself without the aid of third-party programs, so the user couldn't always be blamed.
That woul be the end of the world, you could not push downgrades, like Samsung remotely disabling bootloader unlock or Bamboolab forcing all your 3D models through their cloud service.
The horror! They could even remove all your unskippable adds and disable all the spying, gross!
We had that and we still do. Back in 2008 I was wondering whether I should spend my first-earned money on the first Android phone (HTC Dream, aka T1) or a "plain Linux phone" (Neo Freerunner) and I've chosen the latter. Ultimately it was a good choice, as Android quickly turned out to be not what I wanted and only got worse over time, while the other path had me eventually go through Nokia N900 and Librem 5, and both of them worked well as mobile phones and pocket-sized computers. They feel like actual smartphones compared to Android and iOS which feel more like appliances that have largely replaced the so called feature-phones of the past.
That said, Nokia N9 was already strafing away from that path, with its Aegis framework that attempted to lock the device down in hopes to, basically, enforce a form of DRM. It turned out not to be very effective, but it would undoubtedly have kept being improved in later iterations, slowly eroding that unrestricted agency of the user that the N900 was famous for.
It did have some good sides but it was in most ways worse than comparable iPhones and androids.
It's funny that these conversations always focus on Elop and not all the decisions already made by the time he showed up. Maemo bring rebased on Qt at the insistence of the Series 60 team so there could be a transition story from S60 to Linux delayed software development significantly, and the merge with Moblin was ultimately entirely unnecessary churn.
It's a convenient story to blame Nokia's failure on Elop and Microsoft, but in the timeline where that transition didn't happen we'd still look back at the N9 as the last gasp of a giant that failed to adapt to the changing market fast enough. The N9 came out almost 4 years after the iPhone - the Pre had landed two years earlier and even so had failed to gain sufficient market support to survive, and HP killed WebOS a few months after the N9 shipped. In 2011 momentum was entirely with iOS and Android. If the N9 had shipped in 2009 they might have had a chance. Instead, the N900 was shipped in limited company quantities with woefully uncompetitive hardware.
It's 2011. Faced with an ecosystem that has changed massively in the past 4 years that's destroyed your high end market and is threatening your medium and low end market, and given the choice between an (absolutely beautiful!) in-house platform with no killer apps and two years before you can ship a successor, and the opportunity to tie up with a dominant OS vendor who'll prioritise your brand and provide engineering support and make it possible to churn out several new high end devices in that two year timeframe, which seems like the better choice?
Nokia's thinking of the time was to see each phone as a product. The big reset button pressed after release, separating each device from the previous one. Just look at the Maemo & MeeGo story: N770, N800, N900, N9. Basically, top management and did not understand the market early enough and the friction did the rest: it was phones with software, not software for phones. The same misunderstanding some of the media business went through a few years later; people were not buying paper, but news.
And as anyone who has worked with Symbian knows, it was a gigantic pile of shit to work with and work on. Everything was massively complex and slow.
So the Linux team had to wait on releases. slowing them down.
Something which the article omits is that Nokia changed it CEO to an ex-boardmember of MSFT. Comments in Slashdot that week were "this guy's gonna tank Nokia, kill their Linux research and sell out to MS". They were 100% accurate.
Make no mistake, Nokia didn't make "a mistake" or a simple bad call. Someone was placed at the top to sabotage and destroy it.
We're still waiting to solve that problem...
In an alternative timeline with Nokia winning, linux would still have GPLv2 which has no answer for proprietary drivers and tivoization. Also, the desire to dominate enduser devices by corporations/governments would still be there.
A bootkit doesn't give you any more access - only more persistence. At the price of having to tailor a payload to a hardware and software platform very carefully. For most attackers, that's just not worth it.
Now, if what you want to "secure" is your ability to gatekeep what software users can and can't install? What sources they can and can't consume media from? What system-level spyware and adware users can and can't remove? What operators users can and can't connect to? Then, suddenly, "secure boot" makes an awful lot of sense.
Which is exactly how "secure boot" is treated by vendors nowadays. It's there to "secure" something alright. It's there to chain device software to the device vendor securely.
There's a reason why modern "secure boot" originated on gaming consoles and TV boxes.
Yes, because hardware is sold at or below cost, and giving away a general purpose computer without reaping the long term upside is a recipe for disaster.
But look at the prevalence of cheating on PC games versus console and tell me secure boot does nothing for actual security.
> security
How are these two connected? Are you talking about security of companies from the users?
If you’re so far into the “I buy it, nobody can tell me what to do with it” camp that you think it’s unethical for companies to try to stop cheating in multiplayer games… well, we don’t have much in common.
They have fight open source and open standards for so long that it is in their DNA.
Open source and standards are the best most efficient solution, but proprietary platforms have the money to buy politicians and create FUD in the development community.
A big part of the current political situation is derived from platforms owning the public discourse and profiting from human attention.
A world of open standards and open software is a better world.
Apple has, correctly, recognized that for a touch-first UI, a resistive touchscreen will always feel worse, wear out worse and perform worse than a glass-integrated capacitive touchscreen. This was a big part of how they got their touch-optimized UI to work and feel this good - which was how they differentiated the first iPhone from the sea of contemporary PDAs.
Nokia sticking with the most half-assed touch UI adaptations, Nokia sticking with resistive tech - all of is symptomatic of Nokia either not understanding what Apple's edge was, or being too slow to react to it.
Nokia N8 was their first device that was truly competitive with iPhone, and by then, the image of Nokia as a cutting edge smartphone brand was already in decline.
A lot of iPhone's edge, by then, wasn't just in the touch-native UX, but also in app support (developers! developers! developers!), and they had the mindshare advantage there.
Nokia N9 was even better in a vacuum - but was even more late to market, and had even worse app support.
Propaganda or not, I still remember the sense of wonder when first experiencing the smooth zooming and panning with two fingers on the first iPhone. Adding multi-touch to the 2007 MacBook trackpad was one of the reasons why I switched to OSX too.
(I still have that phone and when I try it today, smooth is not what I’d call it.)
I could in theory get by with + and - buttons to zoom in and out of a map, but it's way more convenient to use pinch to zoom. But even for the browser, I use pinch to zoom all the time.
a resistive screens do actually need to be pressed instead of just touched, if you never get a literal sore thumb from a touch screen usage - well you don't miss anything but it's quite painful after a while and adds to a carpal tunnel syndrome
a multi-touch sensor greatly helps when you need to discern and filter out the false positives
Even if you shove the sales values in their face and ask to explain why the revenue was dropping for a 3rd year by the time of the Burning Platform memo.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/267819/nokias-net-sales-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph...
And it's always N900 and 'dEvelOpmeNt hIstoRy'.
I'm pretty sure what most of them didn't even read the memo, literally.
Going to Windows Phone 7 didn’t solve the fundamental problem they needed to solve. The ecosystem, while also eliminating the ability to differentiate or innovate.
They were making a supbar products and did them for quite a years and people moved while Nokia itself didn't. I need re-iterate what by the time of the memo it was already too late.
If you want - read my previous thoughts on the topic and don't miss the thing about Ovi in the second link:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32699296
Windows Phone was dead on arrival. Throwing yourself behind a losing platform was Nokia's death knell.
This is completely wrong.
The Asian Market is far more diverse than that.
The Nokia brand was extremely strong.
The Asian market was and is very capable of supporting high end phones. It’s a smaller percentage of the market than in the west, but the entire market is also a lot bigger, so the absolute size of the Asian high end phone market is not far off from either the U.S. or European high end phone markets.
Reality of 2026 is that those are by far the best Android brands out there. Oppo Find N6 beats any foldable in screen, build quality, cameras, processor, RAM. Vivo X Fold 6 in battery. Oppo Find X9 Ulta, Xiaomi 17 Ultra and Vivo X300 Ultra beat any Apple or Samsung in cameras and battery etc etc
All I am saying is: the market in Asia is a lot more diverse than the one in Europe and a shit ton more diverse than the US market which is basically a duopoly of Apple and Samsung (with minor market share for everyone else Motorola, Nothing, etc). No Oppo, no Vivo, no Xiaomi, no Honor, no Huawei, soon no Oneplus etc.
Microsoft paid $7.2 billion for Nokia's loss making phone division in 2013.
There's no way anybody would have paid that much for just another Android OEM.
As much as Nokia fans hated it, the Windows Phone strategy actually extracted the best value out of the rotting assets of Nokia Mobile Phones.
And Nokia the networking company remains a $70B corporation today. The cash from Microsoft enabled the investments that made them a network leader.
They paid for a fully operating Windows Phone company with competitive devices and an established brand, at a time when Microsoft had a strong hardware-strategy.
It was the perfect move for both Microsoft and Nokia.
Microsoft even tried to bargain that Nokia had no alternative to sell because of their dependency on Windows Phone OS, so Nokia demonstrated that this is not true by announcing the "Nokia X", a device with skinned fork of Android without Google and Nokia's own App-store in Feb'2014, JUST to close the acquisition deal with Microsoft.
> As much as Nokia fans hated it, the Windows Phone strategy actually extracted the best value out of the rotting assets of Nokia Mobile Phones.
Not to forget, Nokia kept almost ALL of their patents AND ownership of the brand in that deal.
The N9 was pretty good, usability, design, hardware, but the apps started to weight, and it become a race between Android and iOS.
There was just one smartphone with Maemo (N900) and just one with Meego (N9). More models, letting other vendors to use them, android app compatibility compatibility and not having Elop could had saved Nokia. Now what we have is Sailfish as a descendent of them.
Meego was fantastic, but Windows Phone was fantastic as well. And arguably it had more reach: modern Windows OS was working on mobile phones, tablets, wearables, Xbox and even AR glasses like HoloLens. A developer's dream, you write once and it works on every form factor which has Windows. You could even plug your Windows phone to a docking station and you would have a Windows desktop!
What killed Nokia was being late to the game, and what killed Windows Phone was first the lack of apps (which was getting better but very slowly) and Satya not being happy with low margins and slow progress, compared to Azure.
I also loved the Windows Phone 7 UI. But the app story was always a mess, and the competitive situation with Google meant that 2012's super-important apps like YouTube would never appear on the platform, whatever they did.
And I say that as someone with a (blue) N9 and Lumia 900 within a few feet of me in a drawer.
- Windows Phone had no brand value. It didn’t add to the Nokia brand. It detracted from it
- Windows Phone allowed very minimal UI customization. This meant that Nokia could add little to no Nokia specific functionality
- Windows Phone allowed minimal hardware customization. This meant all Nokia phones looked and behaved like cheap Chinese phones for less than half the price
- Windows Phone was closed source, which meant Nokia engineers could not add either hardware or software functionality beyond whar Windows Phone already supported.
- As part of the Windows phone transition, MS required Nokia to kill their own OS development. Switching to Windows Phone was a hard 1 way turn.
The alternative to Nokia at the time wasn’t Windows Phone vs Meego. It was Windows Phone vs Meego vs Android vs Android + Meego.
The obvious, both contemporaneous and in hindsight, choice was to go with Android which and continue Meego dev on the side as a fallback. Android brought Nokia up to speed on the hardware and app ecosystem side, while allowing them to innovate on the hardware side and using their brand + unique designs + hardware quality to be a leading Android developer.
Apple (or Steve Jobs) understood the value of the web (one of the crucial 3 pieces of the iPhone when it debuted) as a platform - though Apple pivoted over time to have iOS and the App Store itself.
That's just how organizations work. No one inside Nokia could realistically have acquired the power to make the decision in time. The company wasn't shaped to do this. They were doomed as soon as the tech caught up.
In contrast Apple with iPhone had much stronger position:
"Cingular gave Apple the freedom to develop the iPhone's hardware and software in-house, a rare practice at the time, and paid Apple a fraction of its monthly service revenue (until the iPhone 3G), in exchange for four years of exclusive U.S. sales, until 2011."
I think the last remaining example of that is charging for using your phone as a WiFi hotspot.
During that time I was working for a large Telco. I could see how Nokia operated. They did everything the telco asked for, they installed any bloatware just to keep their sales numbers high.
Apple in contrast would say: if you ever touch the user experience on our phone we will go to the other big Telco in your country. Guess who won.
A few days after iPhone was launched in June 2007 I heard an exec of a technical team defending the by then fairly obvious "ownage" by claiming that Apple had "cheated" by putting 1 GB of RAM into the device (which would be insanely expensive). Of course it was 128 MB. Nokia-adjacent company. He had misunderstood 1 Gbit from some teardown. That was the level of competency.
The software sophistication just really wasn't there at that level. (It was there at an IC/architect level though.) Apple raised the bar quite considerably.
And the bugs... one whopper in particular that I remember was redirect after POST didn't work.
The heart of MeeGo continues on in Sailfish OS created by Jolla. They are again releasing a phone in Europe. I wish they released it in the US.
Nokia wasn't at all worried, they still have a few Smartphone 1.0 design ready to deploy. Remember iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. There were plenty of them before hand. Windows Mobile from OEM of HTC , Palm, Sony Ericsson P900s etc. By the time they realise it was a completely different genre and game it was too late.
Incidentally I remember one of the reason during before and after Microsoft acquisition of Nokia was that there are No apps on the platform. People won't buy it.
But I have been thinking for a long time if this is still true. That was a time when new Apps appears and things were changing fast. People even have different Instant messengers. ( To this day I still don't understand why MSN messenger was not on iPhone. ) But now all the Apps are largely settled. There are a few Social Media Apps, Messenger Apps, Banking Apps which I consider essential to every day users and cover 80 - 90% of their usage. Web Technology, 18 years after Steve Jobs announcing HTML 5 for Apps is finally getting close to the original promise.
Is a third major platform for Smartphone really out of the realms of possibilities?
Who will make these apps for the new platform? They have no need to develop for a new platform in hopes it becomes popular, and very few of them have open APIs for the platform to make their own third-party apps.
Arguably they should have just gone with Android, and it's easy to say that in hindsight. But Android was a horrible mess in its 2.x era, Windows Phone seemed like a genuinely interesting alternative. Until Microsoft repeatedly messed the whole thing up.
Same goes for Nokia's Maemo and Meego. We nerds loved those OSs for being full-blown computer OSs, but the general public doesn't want a full-blown OS, they want a bunch of icons to corporate apps.
That was always the problem. But IMO Microsoft were probably the company best placed to compete there, given the existing developer mindshare they had. But they just messed it up, over and over. Incredibly to look back on, really.
It's not obvious Nokia could have realistically competed with the East Asian phone manufacturers for more than a few years. It was/is a very low margin market with very cutthroat competition.
Yeah, we can look back in retrospect and say it was an obvious failure but that's because of the various insane choices MS made over the years. In the moment I'd argue the decision was nowhere near as clear cut.
Compare that with Maemo, where both GTK+ and Qt were first class citizens and which had an army of developers familiar with Unix and X11 before Maemo even existed.
Nokia were a tech slop factory - one new model roughly every two weeks, with no obvious strategy or rationale, many only superficially different.
Every so often they'd produce a classic that was ahead of its time, like the Communicator series, then by the time the surrounding infra had caught up they'd moved on and allowed a competitor to eat that space.
iPhone and Android were both killing them, and they had no idea how to respond.
Elop was the undertaker, and much hated for reasonable reasons. But the brand was already a zombie by that point.
Microsoft also made some big mistakes IMHO; having a terrible browser and a terrible app marketplace doesn't work: mobile IE was garbage, mobile Edge had a better renderer but worse UX, and they prohibited other browsers at least initialy (Firefox wanted to make an internal port, but were told no thanks). The way they managed APIs for apps led to multiple generations of apps and developers noped out at each stage; WinCE -> WP7 -> WP8 -> WM10 all wanted significant reworking, and WP8.1 wanted a minor reworking. A lot of WinCE apis were available in WP7, but Microsoft wouldn't tell you and wouldn't be happy if you did it. You could run WP7 apps in WP8, but to get new features you had to do the rework and distribute two separate apps. Same for WP8.1, but now you had 3 apps. And again for WM10 ... with the bonus that if you had a WP8 app installed when you upgraded to WM10 there was a 50% chance it wouldn't launch after the upgrade. Apple sometimes did some of this, but major OS upgrades usually applied to all phones, and their users upgrade regularly. Android generally puts backports in the jetpack library so you can build for the newer APIs but still work everywhere.
Of course, Microsoft should have understood the importance of backwards compatibility from their decades of experience on PCs... but they were in full forget about everything mode. :P
That being said I don't know that there was a path to success. I don't think it was as much about the little apps as the big ones: Instagram, YouTube, Pokemon Go... Google in particular got to play the role of anti-competitive
YouTube in the browser would have been fine if the browser wasn't terrible.
I definitely felt the lack of Pokemon Go ... but given it released in mid 2016, it's pretty clear why it didn't show up on Windows Phone / Windows Mobile... the writing was already on the wall by then and Windows development would have likely trailed anyway. WP8.1 came out in April 2014; it was an improvement, but you really wanted a follow up release. WM10 came out November 2015 and wasn't very good unless you had the flagship phones, which nobody would buy; I did end up running one of the last builds of WM10 and it actually got pretty good (other than Edge still had terrible UX)... too bad it happened so late. Windows Phone's strength was at the bottom of the market --- cheap phones that were usable, but cheap phones didn't run WM10 well, so the huge global market of people who wanted a smart phone but only had $100 to spend was left for Android.
If you look at sales numbers [1], things were going ok until about q3 2015. A dip in Q3 is kind of expected, because WM10 was coming soon, so people are likely to wait ... but then WM10 is crap and people buy an Android or iPhone and there you go.
[1] https://mspoweruser.com/revealed-1-2-million-windows-phones-...
I never understood what the end game here was. If they had wanted market dominance based on someone else's OS, they could have just used the well-established Android. There was little to gain (their efforts of promoting Windows Phone would have also helped the competition's offerings) and all to lose.
Which is a perfectly reasonable reaction, the first iPhone was an iPod with a sub-par Browser and a bad mobile phone, in a device which barely managed to last one day on a charge.
Others also had sub-par browsers, comparable/more versatile Media Players and MUCH better phones, running a week or longer on a single charge.
The way Apple destroyed the competition was by creating so much hype around their product that they could demand concessions from carriers, most of all revenue-share (and a scheme where the ~1000USD device-price included marketing budget the carrier could then "consume" from Apple), two moves which decoupled Apple from Market-pressure and created an incredible influx of money into their R&D.
In the end, it also wasn't the carriers who rectified that situation either. After Apple was technically ready to support more carriers, they moved away from their "one carrier per country" exclusivity-model, so they also had to concede on revenue-share compensation.
But by that time Apple already had the search-deal with Google, so revenue-share continued to from the search-traffic generated in Safari.
All of those were genius moves, disrupting the economy of an industry which separated the product from provided services, ultimately gaining total control over the user and all services provided, degrading the carrier to a mere ISP (who was even happy about it because the average revenue per user was higher).
Nonetheless, it destroyed the entire mobile phone ecosystem (especially outside of US, where market-forces were less in control of the carriers)
To justify what?
What exactly are you defending in such an emotional way...?
Quite the opposite, the demand was so high that Apple could set requirements to carriers that were impossible before AND after...
No, hype and demand are not exclusive to each other. You can create hype around good or bad products. The key aspect is that hype is not entirely grounded on quantifiable practical values of a product but a demand which is amplified by an emotional desire.
Which is exactly what Apple did, and this move allowed them to make demands towards carriers no other company could.
I think it would have. The N9 was killed before it came to market. It was never sold in any of the major markets, the platform was declared dead as the switch to Windows Phone was already announced. But the N9 was technically a very good phone and I do not think it came too late. At that time Nokia was still strong with Symbian and the iPhone was not strong in Europe. The move to Windows Phone (even if you think it would be a good platform) delayed things further. Declaring all your existing products a dead end before having an alternative on the market was a really bad idea.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/man-in-a-village-hol...
"Sir, please, a QWERTY keyboard would be so much -"
"No."
Homerphone reference: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WPc-VEqBPHI
Sadly, the hardware wasn’t quite up to it and they were silently dropped instead of working on improving.
This seems a little misleading. From what I remember, and from what Wikipedia says, Elop had already announced the deal with Microsoft long before announcing the N9, so Nokia was in essence already dead when it launched.
In November 2008, Nokia released the 5800 Xpress Music, a year and a half after Apple had launched its iPhone.
--
Weird article, between those two paragraphs lies the MOST IMPORTANT period of the whole story. It was Nokia scrambling to adapt to the change in the market.
Their strategic move was to beat the iPhone with a Smartphone OS (the iPhone wasn't a Smartphone yet), expanding their (huge) existing ecosystem to a touch device.
But for that (Project Tube), Nokia had to upgrade their Series60 OS to include Touch-support while preserving backwards compatibility. They had severe troubles on all layers, because touch requires a low-latency feedback-architecture and Series60 was not designed for this.
For quite some time, all their weight was put into that device, they even went ahead and signed a sponsoring deal with WB to have the device featured in Batman The Dark Knight, a movie which finally ended up in cinemas BEFORE the product was even launched.
Excursion: HTC would later sell the HTC HD2 with WindowsMobile (a predecessor of WindowsPhone), which could be "dual-booted" with Android ROMs from the XDA-developers forum or similar.
The 2009 HTC HD2 was basically the modern glass slab, except for a discrete bottom line of physical buttons, which hadn't yet been eaten by software at the time.
Satya was great for businesses and MS' investors, terrible for consumers.
I would love it even more if we could all go back in time and switch to meego. I used one for a short while and it felt well thought compared to the mess that was android at that time.
Snappy, well done OS, intuitive, great camera.
What Microsoft mobile lacked, despite having a higher market share than iOS at some point was app support.
Developers and companies pretended it did not exist.
Banks, your local transport, whatever.
I think that was what killed windows mobile phone.
Any other just doesn't hold: os and hardware were very, very good.
then add to that an incompetent management. double whammy.
I'm sure some of the gushing praise it got was because it was a last hurrah, but if Nokia had actually supported it, I'm sure it would have sold tens of millions of units. Nokia sold ~100 million smart phones in 2010 and ~ 77 million smart phones in 2011 [1], Apple sold ~ 72 million iPhones in 2011 [2]. While the trend was going the wrong way, tens of millions of mobile users would be hard to ignore.
[1] https://www.nokia.com/system/files/files/request-nokia-in-20... (page 8)
[2] https://gadgetadvisor.com/apple/the-iphone-decades-iphone-sa...
WhatsApp was on Windows Phone though.
Instagram was not on Windows Phone, which hurt it, but there is no indication it would have come to MeeGo either.
Even given that the Android team actually did understand what they needed to do to achieve that. Nobody else in the industry did. They thought that if you just ported an OS the job was done. That’s barely even the start.
I believe if Nokia continued to invest, MeeGo would have even gotten better and they would have survived (note I worked at Nokia's subsidiary HERE maps at the time and saw early version of MeeGo. Also the hardware of the N9 was beautiful. It would have been a hit and in fact outsold the Lumia in the few countries it was delivered before they axed it).