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Comment by Shamanmuni | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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