The end of Nokia

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

I’m baffled, trying to figure out what line of reasoning lead Nokia into such a clearly bad decision.

Microsoft has a long history of botching their mobile devices. The only Windows phone I’ve ever owned was sent to me by accident, and I played with it (and one of its brothers in a store) long enough to conclude that they still don’t get it. Maybe if Ballmer started using an iPhone for a while, they’d eventually get it.

If Microsoft had outright bought Nokia, made this announcement and changed course accordingly, it would have been one thing. To see effectively the same happen without any risk to MS, and with immediate consequences for Nokia (Android on Nokia is now pretty much a thing that you can safely label ‘impossible’), is a bad development. Microsoft execs must be laughing themselves silly how they got this deal to happen without buying Nokia outright (at least, as far as I’m aware that did not happen). And Finland must be mourning for what was, not all that long ago, a source of immense national pride.

Look at SGI to see how partnering with Microsoft as a non-exclusive hardware vendor works out. When SGI started shipping their NT workstations, the writing was on the wall: SGI was all but dead. Now Nokia is still a good bit larger and more solid than SGI was at the time, but most of Nokia’s brand loyalty is because of the indestructible and unbelievably reliable phones they made in the 90′s. The phone I rely on is a direct descendant of those. Since then they’ve been steadily dropping on that front. If Nokia had kept its independence from MS, and instead had put its might behind the Android ecosystem, something positive might have come out of it. I believe Nokia cleaning up Android, making it rock-solid would be the best thing that could happen.