OSNews covered the downfall of Nokia extensively back when it was happening, but I must admit that seeing this whole story in “retrospectives” now makes me feel so incredibly old. This story played out roughly between 2007 and 2016 – in the grand scheme of things, the end of Nokia’s phone business wasn’t that long ago! Zeit, bitte bleib stehen.
Anyway, here’s another retrospective, but this one I definitely like a bit more than the countless others we’ve seen, because it ends on the part of the story often left out: Nokia not only survived, it’s actually thriving.
The company itself ultimately survived, even if the transition wasn’t painless. Nokia’s revenues, which peaked in 2007, fell sharply through the mid-2010s before the company refocused on a decades-old business line—telecom infrastructure—that many had forgotten Nokia was even in. Nokia now ranks among the world’s top three suppliers of 5G network equipment, serving carriers across more than 125 countries, alongside Ericsson and Huawei. Although the company could never quite crack the smartphone, it now plays a key role in providing the network backbone those smartphones run on.
↫ Chris Chinchilla at IEEE Spectrum
From a business perspective, I honestly doubt Nokia’s phone business could’ve survived to this day, even if they had responded to the arrival of the iPhone sooner, and even if they didn’t do the stupid thing of focusing on Windows Phone first and had just embraced Android right away. Obviously, a Nokia with its own touch-era smartphone operating system would never have survived – none of them did – and even if they went with Android from the onset, I think the eventual onslaught of Samsung, which has killed many a popular smartphone brand, would’ve trampled Nokia too.
In a better version of our world, Nokia would’ve survived with its own smartphone operating system, based on Symbian or not, and it would’ve been Europe’s strong, consistent answer to the Americans’ iOS and Android. While Nokia would’ve still been a business and would’ve undoubtedly tried the same anti-user shenanigans as Apple and Google, they’d at least be easier to reign in regulatory-wise. You’d hope.
The EU should’ve never allowed Nokia’s smartphone business to be sold to Microsoft.
You never know. When Android was just starting, Nokia was still a well known brand. Had they embraced Android early they could have become the defacto Android handset maker…
Maybe, but what would that have changed? I feel like Thom kind of addressed that by saying the same already