Goodbye Nokia! Mission accomplished Elop, you have destroyed Nokia and return back to Microsoft (fastest collapse of a industry market leader in the history of mankind)

[Mnementh]

I'm a bit puzzled about this thread. To get some things clear here: Nokia was together with Blackberry an important player in smartphone market - in the era before the iPhone. Both had their own OS: Blackberry had their Blackberry OS, Nokia had Symbian. It worked well enough for both of them. But back then smartphones were mostly built for managers. Then came Apple and started to sell smartphones to the general public. OK, well, the part of the general public with at least average wealth, not the poorer part. That market was a lot bigger (if you want a blue ocean) and therefore Apple was highly successful.

That brought problem upon Nokia. They were dominant in the market with featurephones. But it was visible, that the smartphones started to cut more and more into this market. They were a big player for smartphones for managers - but even managers now thought the iPhone was cooler. So while Nokia wasn't in direct trouble, they looked at shrinking market shares. And they started to panic and made one dumb decision after the other.

They decided that Symbian wasn't good enough to compete with iOS and later Android, so they bought Trolltech and the Qt-toolkit (a big one for me, I was programming earlier with Qt - as it was only version 1.0). They used Qt to build the UI of an OS named Maemo that was based on Linux. That in itself was not bad, bad was they already talked about Maemo - and people started to go away from Symbian because it looked more and more as it was about to being abandoned by Nokia. But development of Maemo took time. They should have focussed in this time to push Symbian more. As Maemo reached completion they made the next stupid decision,. Instead on focusing to complete the system they decided to merge it with Intels Moblin. While it sounds clever to merge strengths, it was technically stupid. While both systems were Linux-based, Moblin was built around Fedora and Maemo around Debian - two distribution with very distinct philosophies and many in detail differences in the systems. So instead on focusing on a system that was nearly ready, they abandoned it to get into another years-long dev-cycle.

Then came Elop. While Nokia was already in hurt, Elop wasn't basically much of a help. He abandoned all the work that was done so far and switched to Windows Phone. Surely that deal was sweetened by Microsoft. It helped MS a lot more than Nokia. What was so wrong on this decision? They stopped all their own systems to switch to an OS they had no control of. No other company did that. Yes, Samsung makes a lot of money with android, but all the time they kept their own Phone-OS Bada and developed for it. Ironically they have picked up the abandoned Meego to merge it with Bada to Tizen. Sony at least diversify, they have phones with systems of different manufacturers. Similar with others. I know of no company that throw away their own system to make phones exclusively for the OS of another company - and even one of the few Phone-OS that wasn't at least Open-Source-based.

I don't believe in long-term-plans of MS to take over Nokia. But I think Nokia could have done a lot better. They could have kept developing on Symbian actively to keep it as a system for low-end smartphones. They should have stick with Maemo as it was nearly ready. And they should also released phones for Android and Windows phone. Diversify the option. The point is: all the time Nokia had great hardware - the stupid software decision were ruining it.

Also the last deal, selling to MS. While it brought a lot money, MS paid probably the most for the patents. If they had sold the production-facilities seperately and would have auctioned the patents, they could have made a lot more money - patent-auctions were going incredibly well in the past few years. Especially if the patents are relevant for the smartphone-market. Apple, Google and Samsung (and to a lesser degree Sony, HTC and LG) would have had a lot of interest into the patents, but they all already have production facilities.