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.
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.
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