Comment by spiralpolitik

Comment by spiralpolitik 2 days ago

Nokia was dead company walking before Stephen Elop. Elop saw the writing on the wall and made one of the choices available. A different CEO would have made a different choice but ultimately at that point it would still have been too late to save Nokia.

Nokia was a great hardware company that missed the boat when the market changed to be based around software. When the market changed again to be based around ecosystems, Nokia was beyond saving.

mxfh 2 days ago

Was there with the company as intern and junior during Nokia and Microsoft days for Nokia Maps.

In my opinion Microsoft fumbled the app store by bloating it with questionable KPIs on number of added apps by anyone able to submit templates apps, while not getting key apps like WhatsApp on board. S\so it was a hard sell to have people's ecosystems. Same syndrome as with Zune, Tablet PC, and Microsoft Store on Windows.

Build quality and hardware of the Lumias was second only to iPhones and definitly better experience than Android.

The old Nokias had no chance compared to those, and I agree with the assessment that Nokia as Android-Vendor would have made little sense either.

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duskwuff 2 days ago

> In my opinion Microsoft fumbled the app store by bloating it with questionable KPIs on number of added apps by anyone able to submit templates apps
Worse than that. IIRC, Microsoft ran contests which specifically incentivized developers to create as many apps as possible, and most of the apps they got as a result were garbage (like copies of developer examples with some of the text changed).

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rvba a day ago

Nokia with android vendor would mean Nokia would survive until today - just due to the brand (it was big) and build quality.
They released an android phone that sold... many years too late.
If they released it much earlier (no microsoft) probablh Nokia would still be here - competing with Samsung, or in worst case the tier3 brand cheaper smartphones.

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pjmlp 21 hours ago

Nokia is still around, because NSN survived this mess.

As someone on the Networks side, with occasional visits to Finland headquarters, Nokia Mobiles would have done alright, if they kept down the Symbian/Linux path.

The Burning Memo killed the remaining trusth from app developers, in a company and ecosystem that was pretty much anti-Microsoft, just made the transition to have Qt properly integrated in Symbian, with PIPS and nicer Eclipse based IDE than the previous experience.

Only to be told to throw away all that developer experience, adopt Windows and .NET.

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tgma 2 days ago

> made a different choice but ultimately at that point it would still have been too late to save Nokia.

You think if they made just a single decision different and bet on Android instead of Windows, they would be in the same spot today? I wouldn't be so sure. Samsung hedged their bets across both and succeeded. Both weren't great at in-house software and Nokia made better hardware.

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spiralpolitik 2 days ago

I don't think Nokia at that point would have gone with Android with Google services which what the market wanted. They would have gone with Android with their own services (Maps etc) and app store.
I don't think that would have succeeded against Samsung and the Nexus phones.
But TBH I think going with Android would have a better move than what Elop did.

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