Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

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It could "hardly be argued" that it'd be a difficult task to compete with Samsung? No, that could definitely be argued.

I'm not exactly a gigantic Elop fan but Nokia was in trouble long before he came on board. Consider this headline from his hiring in 2010: "Nokia Hires Microsoft's Elop as CEO to Reverse Losses to Apple". A top Nokia shareholder said, "Earlier management grossly underestimated the challenges related to moving from a hardware-driven business model to software." And Elop: "My job is to take the organization through a period of disruption..." [1]

That's what's at the core of this, a kind of denial about Nokia's condition pre-Elop. Fans want to pretend everything was hunky-dorey and make the hatchet man the scapegoat.

But really, Nokia fumbled their chance to build a smartphone platform several years ago. And one could definitely argue that Elop's bet on Microsoft's platform was a better shot at a profitable strategy than competing with Samsung in the Android space. (Have you considered that's why the board brought him on in the first place?) Didn't work out so well but probably neither would have becoming yet another Android player.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-10/nokia-hires-microso...

I didn't say that, I said it could hardly be argued that they couldn't have easily entered the Android ecosystem. We are talking about smartphones, they were (and are) competing with Samsung anyway, Windows or Android. So, what you say doesn't make much sense to me.

I acknowledge Nokia's situation in 2010, but I think you are taking the other extreme of considering Nokia already doomed by that time. By the time Elop entered Nokia it still was the largest mobile phone maker in unit sales and Samsung had just entered the smartphone sector a year before. And though a promising entrant, Samsung wasn't that big of a threat until much later.

Look at the article you linked, or Elop's memo, they don't even mention Samsung or Galaxy phones (just Android in general terms). At that time Android was low-hanging fruit to be put on their phones and leverage their market leadership. The first Galaxy phones weren't exactly a paramount of excellence. I don't think it's very unrealistic to think that they could have competed with Samsung in more or less equal terms for Android dominance.

And I'm telling this without being exactly an Android fan, but at that time it was the most sensible course of action (IMHO). They could have even tried both Android and Windows Phone (something Samsung did) and see what sticked.

Instead, they chose to stop Symbian and Meego and took the strange decision of betting the future of the company on the all new Windows Phone 7, something which can only be described as an enormous gamble. Those first phones couldn't even be upgraded to Windows Phone 8 when it came out afterwards, and I'm not even mentioning the incompatibilities between those two. Talk about a burning platform.

You claimed more than that. You said it would be easy to enter "and differentiate themselves like Samsung has" (emphasis mine). That most certainly is not easy. There are multiple big players that have tried that exact strategy and failed or been reduced to marginless commodities.

Just found this money quote from Elop:

For Elop, it was all about standing out from the crowd, and he admitted that Nokia couldn't do that with Android. "The single most important word is 'differentiation,' " he said. "Entering the [Android] environment late, we knew we would have a hard time differentiating."

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57559620-94/nokia-on-the-ed...

Of course, I'm sure it could never be an automatic winning strategy, but I think it could have given them a fair chance at market dominance.

Instead of the popular and proven OS with many apps they chose the unpopular and unknown one with just a few. And in the end, what's the advantage of the Windows-only strategy when Microsoft gives licenses to Samsung and HTC to produce phones with the exact same OS? They haven't differentiate themselves at all from the competition, just cornered themselves.

So you're saying they shouldn't have gone with an OS that is licensed to Samsung and HTC because they can't "differentiate themselves at all from the competition," and instead they should go with an OS that is licensed to Samsung and HTC because "it could hardly be argued that it was difficult to differentiate themselves."

I sense a possible flaw in that logic.

Well, it was Nokia the ones who said that they wanted to differentiate themselves, which they clearly didn't since they chose an OS used by other manufacturers as well. What he's saying is that Nokia could have at least chosen the more popular OS, which would have offered them a higher market share.

> which would have offered them a higher market share

That's huge leap of logic. Android has a larger market share. Android vendors don't automatically get more market share. They still have to outcompete the other vendors.

Given how commodified the Android space is, it's not surprising they saw the Windows hail mary as a relatively more differentiated approach. Obviously not as differentiated as a proprietary approach, but given they couldn't pull that one together in time, they didn't exactly have a plethora of awesome options. Become yet another commodity Android vendor, or try to be the "Samsung of the 3rd platform" so to speak.

Too bad that 3rd platform didn't work out. It was a risky bet, but probably the only shot at a sustainable business. Really their fate was sealed a long time ago when they missed the shift towards sophisticated software platforms.

You severely underestimate how dominant Nokia was at that time. Nokia was 'the' premium brand, at least in Europe and Asia. Symbian was dead, Meego held promise, but Android...God, they could have so easily produced a nice Android phone! We're talking here of people who designed the N9, it doesn't take much imagination to think how they could have customized the UI and sold it on their beautiful, sturdy hardware.

The market's big enough for another android player, especially if it can provide the kind of hardware that Nokia provides.

I will argue they've already proven themselves wrong. Nokia has differentiated itself through hardware quite well - the 1020 takes better pictures than any smartphone on the market.

There's a reason why all the Lumia commercials have focused on hardware rather than software. The technical merits of Windows Phone 8 aside, it doesn't seem to have much consumer appeal compared to iOS or Android.

The Win 7 and Win 8 rollouts were the biggest problem. Elop ANNOUNCED shutting down Nokia's OS units with their Flagship N9 in the wings to be sold. Strike one for slashing YOUR OWN SALES. Then they announced the shift to Win 7, which they had to WAIT on Microsoft to make ready... Strike Two, what the hell were they supposed to SELL for almost 18 months. Finally they had to wait again for Win 8 that was incompatible with their "bet the company" Win 7 hardware... Strike three... Screw the few customers trying to save you.

Finally Strike Four is that they bet the company on Microsoft delivering products in a timely fashion and maybe letting them be first. Except what is MICROSOFT's incentive to DELIVER a compelling product when they really want your price to fall so you are cheap to buy.

Look at Microsoft's history in mobile: Orange? Danger Sidekick? Kin? and several others... Microsoft kills its partners. Was the Nokia board so foolish to think it wouldn't happen to them. This is as entertaining as Taylor Swift dating John Mayer and watching everybody cry from"broken hearts" when the cheating starts... It's not like you knew who you were getting in bed with.

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