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
quinn,
Windows Phone was okay. And I don’t think it was the fundamental reason Nokia failed.
Nokia just stopped making great phones. At least in the smartphone era.
(Yes, I had that ill fated N810 (Symbian then Meomo), I even had Lumia 900 (not exactly sure about the model I had. It was the flagship Windows).
They frankly were not as good as what HTC, Motorola or even LG offered.
Their phones always had weaker CPUs. You had to buy a new phone for a major OS update. The settings menu was a mess. I agree, they would probably have ended up as part of Samsung, if Microsoft hadn’t killed them.
I love my latest Nokia E61i though. It still boots.
Windows Phone failed because Windows Phone 6 was incompatible with Windows Phone 7 that was incompatible with Windows Phone 8. Users got fed up, developers got fed up…
Sony tried that, to no avail. Show me established phone brands that have survived Android.
Jolla / sailfish remains. The continuation of maemo/meego, nokia n9
And its still just as weird as ever. Its got the same problems that Windows Phone had just on a smaller scale: it isnt used by many people so app developers never migrated which also fed back into the no one using it. While they do allow running of Android apps theyre going to miss oit on a fair few of the critical ones people need due to Play integrity. To offset these downsides theyve not done anything particilarly interesting, their phone is less repairable than a Fairphone and less secure than a Pixel or iPhone. The niche they seem to be running on is “European developed”, which is great but not enough when youve got to get people out of their existing ecosystem and into yours
And yet no one produces a production/work mobile device rather than a content consumption machine. I was very disappointed by my Cosmo Communicator and still daily drive a Jornada 720 because anything else is just so bad at data input that, ugh. I miss my 9210i.
We are stuck with a bunch of equally mediocre options and no manufacturer tries anything different. I miss how Nokia would really experiment with different form factors and there were options for every need.
Honestly I’d have loved to have seen them partner in some way with Blackberry.
Blackberry had an OS and an Android compatibility layer. But the hardware just didn’t match. Nokia had the hardware, and as much as I loved my windows phone, it was obvious Microsofts heart wasn’t in it..
Nokia had s solid strategy: Symbian in the middle/low end and Linux in the midfle/high end wit Qt as a common sdk but they had a serious management problem. After they began to develop a successor for the N900 they thew almost all of they work to the garbage when the reached an agreement with Intel to develop Meego and, instead of using Maemo as basis of the system they chose Intel’s Moblin that nobody used. Then they decided to rewrite most of it from scratch. Then the collaboration with Intel was so slow that they decided to develop some things in private.
A monumental waste of time. They could have released a Linux smartphone at least 1.5 years before.
They
I think, so many things went wrong. In 2005 and the few years after, I was in the loop for Maemo developer devices since I did a ilve CD for testing Maemo developments. Nokia always considered a full fledged touch screen OS as an accompagnying device for the phone. They were extremely late at understanding that everything (camera, PDA, internet tablet, music player) would converge into the smartphone. And not: phone for phone calls, SMS, internet access and the old devices (yet connected to the phone) for the other stuff.
If they had caught the vibes at the right time, they’d have done Maemo on phones at the right time and moved S60 to the lower end.
The problem was their stone-age management, full of infatuated ego.
In 2005 Nokia showed the internet tablet 770 at the linux messe germany. The team was a small group inside Nokia. They had a platform, hardware, package managment (.deb) but no real support from the management. When they bought trolltech in 2008 they would had a framework to support multiple platforms. It was for me always a mismanagment and not a developer problem.
This is not the story of Nokia, this is the story of Europe’s technological downfall.
Europe should push banks/companies operating in Europe to support Sailfish OS as a push for digital sovereignty.