It is sad, but I don't think it was the Microsoft deal that did Nokia in.
Nokia had already been left behind when they finally realized that Symbian wasn't going to cut it against iOS and Android. I think they made a calculated decision: they could try and create an Android device to compete against the likes of Samsung, HTC, Motorola, and LG with basically no differentiation -OR- they could take Microsoft's money and put their hopes on Windows Phone.
If they had gone the Android route, it doesn't seem like they would have gotten a better result. Samsung can make its own displays and chips and that advantage has ground a lot of the competition to dust. LG makes its own displays. Facing this, HTC (who had a nice Android business) has really struggled. Motorola struggled and then got bounced around and still doesn't really make money. Nokia would likely have struggled as well.
Let's look at the Lumia 800 flagship launched in November 2011. The Galaxy S2 was launched in May 2011 with a dual-core processor (as opposed to the single-core Lumia), 1GB of RAM (rather than 512MB), a 4.3" display (rather than 3.7" - and people want larger screens), a 3-colors-per-pixel AMOLED Plus display (rather than the 2-color-per-pixel PenTile on the Lumia), a microSD card slot (while the Lumia had no expandable storage), a front camera the Lumia lacked entirely, and a larger battery. A Lumia 800 Android phone wouldn't have sold well. It was way worse (hardware wise) than a Samsung phone introduced 6 months prior.
Not to go on too much of a tangent, but in a way it was like the Palm Pre. Palm introduced it, but it had a smaller display than the iPhone, underclocked processor, half the storage, 40% thicker, creaky build quality, and the same price tag. Sure, it had the niche feature of the keyboard, but in most ways the hardware was simply inferior. It was easy to write off the Palm Pre as a device that could have been great if not for an OS that wasn't popular enough. If it had run iOS, it would have tanked against an iPhone that was simply superior.
It's very easy to critically acclaim something when one sees one specific flaw that's a dealbreaker. In that case, all other flaws tend to go unnoticed or just get attributed to the dealbreaker. If the Lumia 800 ran Android, it would have been crappy compared to Android phones of the day.
Nokia did a couple cool things like the 41MP Lumia 1020 (or PureView 808). But a camera just isn't enough, especially when wedded to a bulky, underpowered phone with a crappy display. Nokia's hardware was simply poorly matched against what you could get from competitors.
It's always sad to see a brand that once meant so much end up the way it did. But it wasn't Microsoft that did Nokia in. Like many others, they failed to notice how important the iPhone was going to be. Even those that saw the iPhone for what it was (like HTC) weren't spared. Nokia wouldn't have done much better if they'd released their devices as Android phones. They would have been underpowered and overpriced. Sure, some would have bought it for the Nokia name, but not enough. The market was flooded with better hardware. Nokia would have introduced Android phones that would have been mediocre with a premium price. A lot of us remember Nokia fondly and would have rooted for Nokia to introduce something without the dealbreaker of Windows Phone, but we would have been disappointed when we compared a Nokia Android against other options in the market. Maybe it's best that we can just write off Nokia's failure as due to Windows Phone rather than noting that most of their smartphone devices also just weren't great hardware.
Disagree. It's likely that Nokia, like many manufacturers, used the minimum specs possible to get a certain experience level. It could be that WP7 required lower specs to get the same smoothness that Android could achieve. That wouldn't be hard to believe, as Android wasn't even focusing on feeling "smooth" until long after the Galaxy S2 had come out. Nokia isn't somehow incapable of sourcing competitive parts aside from Samsung's AMOLED.
I dislike the "Windows Phone or become a commodity Android OEM" argument because it holds no substance. First of all, if Nokia is successful at executing WP, then other manufacturers will license WP and Microsoft sure as hell won't let an OEM customize WP, so how does your argument hold weight? Nokia would only be able to compete in build quality, which it can do regardless of OS, so why not jump in with the popular, entrenched option?
As for differentiating as an Android OEM, if they had gone that route, that common argument always seems to ignore the fact that every single manufacturer has had no issue making their own skin. In fact, one popular OEM's schtick is that they provide a near-stock experience. Shit, if Nokia had done that coupled with their reputation for good build quality (something that aforementioned popular OEM lacks), then they would be doing better than most of the guys on the market now. At the very least, they'd be doing better than how they actually did.
I LOVED Nokia at the time, so I followed news of their phones closely. No one will ever be able to convince me that it was a good idea to pick a dead end OS (it was obvious even at that time) over a popular juggernaut, publicly destroying their current OSes before even implementing their dead OS properly, destroying the N9 which had pretty much only great reviews, and then undoing all of that in the span of a few years. I hated it when it happened and I hate it now.
I loved Nokia too. I think it was a bad idea to pick Windows Phone. I still think that by November 2011, Nokia wasn't going to become a great smartphone company regardless of their OS choice.
Nokia wouldn't have been able to competitively source parts. Apple and Samsung were putting down huge component orders (and Samsung makes a lot of its own parts like processors, RAM, storage, and displays). As Nokia's first Android phone, they would have made smaller orders at higher cost.
If you're going to argue that they only needed certain specs to get the same experience, it undercuts your argument that they're able to competitively source given the price of the Lumia 800 against the competition. If you're going to say that Android needed the more power, than if the Lumia 800 were an Android phone, it would have been terrible - or they would have had to spend up on parts.
Nokia was great, but they ignored smartphones for too long. I don't think the Microsoft deal did them in - they were done-in before that. They spent too much time pursuing Maemo and Symbian alternatives to Android. When they came out with the Lumia 800, it wasn't amazing. It was another slab phone with mediocre specs.
By November 2011, you had to do something really impressive and Nokia wasn't doing something impressive. That's my argument. The market had already decided that it didn't give a crap about brands from the dumbphone era. It might have given a crap about Nokia. I mean, Nokia was great. The fact still remains that even if they went with an Android device, they needed a better phone. People were already quite happy with Samsung Android devices, while HTC, Motorola, SonyEricsson, and LG were all competing in that space with established brands.
Even if we ignore the single-core CPU and 512MB of RAM, the Lumia 800's display simply wasn't competitive against other offerings.
Frankly, Motorola and HTC have both come out with really nice, compelling Android devices and both of them haven't been able to keep up. They both got on board the Android train a lot earlier than November 2011.
Yes, I liked Nokia's brand better. Yes, Nokia made some great build-quality devices. I even have a Lumia sitting on my dresser as I type this. I still think that a Nokia Android phone released in November 2011 would have been below-par compared to other available Android devices. It certainly would have sold some, but HTC, Motorola, LG, Sony sell some. But even if it had 1GB of RAM and a dual-core processor, the Lumia 800 had a small display compared to Android phones, a comparatively low-res display, it was a good deal thicker (40% thicker than a Galaxy SII) and heavier (22% heavier than a Galaxy SII), with a smaller battery.
That's the thing one can't account for. Maybe the RAM and CPU were spec'd by Microsoft. Maybe the RAM and CPU were competitive in terms of experience against Android phones. The fact is that Nokia couldn't manufacture something that was physically competitive in terms of weight, size, and battery capacity. A Lumia 800 Android phone with 1GB of RAM and a dual-core processor would have been thicker, heavier, and had less battery life with a smaller display. Customers wanted the larger display. Customers want more battery life. Even if Nokia had made it run Android, customers would have looked at it next to a Galaxy SII and most of them would have decided on the larger display, better display, better battery, while being thinner and lighter.
That's ultimately the issue. Regardless of RAM and CPU, the Lumia 800 just wasn't a superb phone. It was bulky and heavy. Nokia put a smaller display on it than consumers wanted.
I miss Nokia too. I wish they were still around. I just don't think that Windows Phone was the determining factor. I did like the build quality of the Lumias, but I don't think that would be enough to get most people to choose them over a competitor that was better in all other respects - especially as competitors ramped up their build quality a lot in 2012. Nokia had squandered their chance in the smartphone race regardless of OS. They were late to the game and the Lumia 800 just wasn't a flagship device. I miss Nokia, but blaming it on Windows Phone given that Nokia was late to smartphones generally and that the Lumia 800 was a poor offering with respect to what consumers wanted seems like shifting the blame because it's easier to hate on Microsoft for destroying the brand we loved than recognizing that Nokia just didn't make the transition to smartphones more generally.
I had a N9 and I loved it. The user experience of MeeGo was just awesome and very innovative! Choosing Windows phone over MeeGo was definitely a mistake.
In my opinion Windows phone doesn't have a chance against Android and iOS as it doesn't offer something that makes people think "omg that's so cool, I gotta have that". I guess quite a few people would have thought that if the N9 hadn't been dropped so fast and if they'd had a chance to play with the N9.
Fun fact. When Samsung adopted Android, Nokia still had twice the market share in phones that Samsung did. Adopting Android early would've absolutely helped.
Instead they wasted time first with Maemo, which the executive team never took seriously enough to expand across the product lines, then with "touch Symbian", which they should've known it would have never worked, and then with Windows Phone, when it was already too late and it was clear to many at the time that there wouldn't be a "third" large ecosystem for smartphones, because there was no reason for one.
Maybe Android would've helped, maybe it wouldn't have, because it was already a little late for such adoption, but Nokia still have relatively strong brand at the time. And there were much fewer chances it would've worked with the "different" Windows Phone, because people were looking for ecosystem, not difference.
> Adopting Android early would've absolutely helped.
Yes, if they had adopted Android when Samsung or HTC did, it certainly would have helped. But they didn't. I'm not arguing that Nokia shouldn't have come out with Android phones in 2009. I'm saying that by 2011, the market was different and they were offering an inferior experience then against a well-established market.
Nokia, like RIM, didn't take smartphones serious for too long. Both thought that there was some non-full-smartphone thing like classic BlackBerry or Symbian devices that would be competitive in a post-iPhone, post-Android world.
It's true that Nokia had a strong brand, but that doesn't seem to have mattered in the move to smartphones. Motorola had a strong non-smartphone brand that didn't translate to smartphones. HTC had no non-smartphone brand and became one of the larger players there before Samsung started just out-producing them. SonyEricsson had a strong non-smartphone brand that just didn't make it through to smartphones.
It's true that Nokia's brand was stronger than SonyEricsson or Motorola, but I think it's more likely that the Nokia brand wouldn't be as meaningful as what Samsung was bringing to the party.
In 4Q2006, Nokia had 36% of the market compared to 22% for Motorola, 11.3% for Samsung, 9% for SonyEricsson, and 6% for LG. Samsung seems to be the only one to have stuck on the leaderboard through 2Q2016 at 22%, Apple at 12%, Huawei at 9%, OPPO at 7%, and vivo at 5%.
And Motorola got into the Android game early. I always preferred Nokia, but it's not like Motorola wasn't a strong brand pre-iPhone.
I think it's easy to say that Windows Phone was the only reason. I think you're spot on that if Nokia had adopted Android when Samsung had, it's a completely different story. But in November 2011, the market had already been shaped against them. It was already a little late for adoption :-(.
Damn that hurts my brain to read, and in hindsight, I have to agree. The n900's open platform built on debian, functional resistive touch and a hardware keyboard should have gained traction. Of course, without the monetized ecosystems of app stores and specialized accessories it is no wonder the policymakers didn't want it.
If you think back to 2009, it was a different era. People were still paying carriers for _ring tones_, and they were loathe to give up that level of profitable device control. For the first year of iPhone's life, there was no app store to speak of.
And the n900 did have an App store. It was shitty, and suffered from the typical platform bootstrapping problem. And if I recall, there were some security holes that let people download apps for free.
n900's problems were:
a) resistive touch sucks
b) tiny, tiny hardware keyboard keys
c) a pathetic, zero subsidy US launch
d) incredibly late to market -- iphone had a 2 year head start
e) zero developer credibility
f) no support for MMS
g) surprisingly flaky USB charging port
Valid points, but while I agree resistive sucks in every other instance I have experienced, the n800 and n900 were extremely well implemented iterations. Precision was spot on using fingers, fingernails or the included stylus.
As for the small keys: thumbnail precision. I had rare typos and multi factors more wpm than this on-screen capacitive nuisance I have no choice but to edit every 3rd word with now.
edit: additionally, 2009 was already too late. Android's release from Tmo exclusivity and iPhones release from AT&T exclusivity had opened the gates to mass consumption with ectremely effective marketing & fanfare. The writing was on the wall, RIM & Nokia didn't or couldn't see it in time, nor adapt.
edit 2: maemo app store was free as in speech & free as in beer, like any other linux distro's repository.
I really like my Lumia 925 and the lack of apps was not of problem for me. The apps that mattered were all there. What bothered me was that vendors didn't bother updating those apps or giving it feature parity.
When I dropped it for nth time and the display went dead, I bought a Moto G and have been happy with it (gave the G3 away and bought a G4 recently).
I miss Windows Phone, it was a really nice and fast OS and it looked great to me... but I guess it went the Betamax way maybe.
Android popularity is due to it's multi vendor nature. You don't like the latest Sony? Then buy HTC or moto or Xiaomi or whatever. You will even keep your apps and settings. Your problem with Windows was really due to lack of this.
That's not entirely true. The problems I encountered on the Note 4 were no different from those encountered by my flatmate who was using the Nexus 6.
For example if we did a clean install. What's App or LINE would both open the camera in ~1-2 seconds.
With only installing a few apps (facebook, twitter, whats app, line...) after 1 month, both the note 4 and nexus would degrade in performance that What's App or LINE would take ~8 seconds to open the camera...
After using an iPhone 6s+ for over a year, the camera opens instantly, every time...
I thought it was my Note 4 and got it replaced twice... my flatmate couldn't replace the nexus since he bought it in Hong Kong and Google Singapore wont help.
Everyone I know who has Android says iPhone sucks, but constantly complain their (android) phones are slow and laggy.
Again, I don't understand why people like Android.
well ok. Guess i have to take this. Personally i never experience such issues at all with clean android flavors (Nexus or AOKP). I use a different camera app since ages tho, maybe thats why i never experienced that issue. Overall i remember especially Samsungs flavors slowing down a lot after just a few months.
> Samsung can make its own displays and chips and that advantage has ground a lot of the competition to dust. LG makes its own displays. Facing this, HTC (who had a nice Android business) has really struggled.
That actually wasn't the main contributing factor since MSRP was pretty similar at the time. Samsung instead spent millions on marketing. Supposedly they were going to Verizon salespeople and offering ~$20 per Galaxy sold. Guess which one they pushed at the stores?
They could not have competed with neither Samsung nor LG because of the reasons you mentioned, but then again neither can Apple, and they seem to be doing rather good.
Nokia had a great supply chain and talented product designers, they could have done very well as a premium Android manufacturer (which is where Google wants Pixel to be). I think the mismanagement story, which many ex-Nokians share variations of, makes sense.
Apple is different because it has scale and margin.
Apple releases very few models and sells a lot of them. That means that they have buying power that component sellers can't ignore. They aren't ordering 100k or 500k of a display size. Apple also has the cash to pre-pay for components. Most companies don't have those advantages. Nokia likely wouldn't have been sure enough of a new product to put in a large enough order to be a price-setter. It's also important to note that a lot of Nokia's market-share was on the low-end in the world (emerging markets that don't command premium prices).
Nokia certainly had some great people and great products. I liked them a lot. But I think Nokia would have needed a lot more variation in models like Samsung has, but without its own chip foundry or display-making capabilities.
Motorola also had a strong pre-smartphone brand (commanding 22% of the market compared to Nokia's 36%). Motorola also got involved with Android way before November 2011. It didn't save them.
One of the things to realize is that the market was stacked against ALL of the former mobile makers (regardless of brand, designers, or supply chains). The Motorola Droid came out in October 2009 - more than two years before the Lumias. The Motorola Droid was a good phone with a higher resolution display and camera than the iPhone at the time. It was really nice. It didn't save Motorola.
I'm not saying that Nokia is bad or anything like that. I'm saying that companies that had great brands like Motorola or SonyEricsson jumped on the smartphone bandwagon before Nokia and failed. And I think Nokia's products were historically better than Motorola or SonyEricsson, but by the time Nokia joined the smartphone fray, Samsung was firing on all cylinders. Even companies that joined early like Motorola got swept aside by Samsung.
Why would an Android Nokia have done better? The Lumia phones were fine, but they weren't something that made a Samsung look bad. If anything, phones from Android manufacturers seemed better.
There was certainly mismanagement. However, that's not saying it's just the Android decision. Motorola went to Android very early and put out some great phones, but it didn't leave them in a strong position in the smartphone era. Nokia releasing a below-average-spec'd Android phone in November 2011 just doesn't seem like it would have changed the story. HTC, LG, Motorola, SonyEricsson, and others all released really great phones and they've all been relegated to also-rans. Nokia certainly has/had a strong brand and talent, but brand and prior mobile creation talent didn't seem to save any of the others from getting swept aside by Samsung and Apple.
Yes, if Nokia had made an Android phone and kept making all of the right bets, they could have become a successful smartphone company. But plenty of companies went Android much quicker and made a lot of the right bets and still didn't end up as successful smartphone companies. If you want to rewrite Nokia's management to being "way better than LG, Motorola, and HTC combined", then yea. But saying that just going to Android in November 2011 would have done the trick seems unlikely given that so many companies made better bets than that and failed.
I believe both you and your parent poster are correct. IMO Nokia could've done it right -- even much better than everybody else in the Android land -- but they took way too long to understand when was the right moment to step in. At that point they lost a lot of talented personnel and it was simply too late.
The Lumia 800's hardware requirements were largely shaped by rigid requirements that Microsoft set for Windows Phone that were an attempt to avoid the fragmentation issues that have come to define Android hardware development. So the fact that Lumia 800 hardware was underpowered compared to Galaxy hardware of the time is much more Microsoft's fault than Nokia's fault (except for that PenTile display).
Nokia fell because in the beginning,
a) Symbian accrued massive technical debt that Nokia management refused to pay down because they could keep cranking out dumbphones for the foreseeable future and so paying down technical debt didn't seem like a good investment decision to management. Why should you have an OS architecture that allows dual-core processors in a cell phone? Nobody will ever need more than a single core processor in their cell phone, any more processing power will obviously use up way too much battery. This leads to:
b) The rise of the first smartphones - Palm and Blackberry. Nokia management paid down a minimum of technical debt to get out some Symbian smartphones to compete and stayed ahead of the market because early smartphones were targeted to heavy business users and not consumers. Nokia's continued advantageous market positioning leads to:
c) The rise of consumer smartphones - iOS and Android. Nokia management starts to try to adapt and go to engineering and tell them they need a decent competitor yesterday. Nokia engineers tell them the technical debt makes that impossible within any reasonable time frame. They are buoyed by hierarchy figures who predict that Symbian will carve out a niche alongside all the other players and that the sky isn't falling because the sky is never falling. Cell phones are a totally different product from music players, don't you know, and Apple products don't always run away with the market, look how few computers Apple sells! And Android is this unproven, insecure, ugly, rudderless mess with no real enterprise support and too many players pulling it in too many directions. Still, revenue is falling and so Nokia management starts to freak out. This leads to:
d) Hiring Stephen Elop from Microsoft, who calls up his old contacts at Microsoft and gets Nokia management the deal of a lifetime: huge amounts of aid to hold off the wolves until they get a flagship out for the immortal IT company throwing everything it has into catching up on mobile with unbeatable integration with products like Office that everyone uses and is deeply dependent on. And the rest is history.
Two things killed Nokia: they rested on their laurels when the going was good, and when the going got tough they hitched their cart to a horse which abandoned them along the way.
If Symbian was inevitably going to go the way of the dodo, Nokia management should've swallowed their pride and pursued an acquisition by Microsoft. But Nokia was a Finnish national symbol that accounted for far too much of Finnish GDP to ever allow the company to be acquired outright, upper management would've been signing their social death warrants. So in truth, Nokia's death was inevitable.
Nokia had already been left behind when they finally realized that Symbian wasn't going to cut it against iOS and Android. I think they made a calculated decision: they could try and create an Android device to compete against the likes of Samsung, HTC, Motorola, and LG with basically no differentiation -OR- they could take Microsoft's money and put their hopes on Windows Phone.
If they had gone the Android route, it doesn't seem like they would have gotten a better result. Samsung can make its own displays and chips and that advantage has ground a lot of the competition to dust. LG makes its own displays. Facing this, HTC (who had a nice Android business) has really struggled. Motorola struggled and then got bounced around and still doesn't really make money. Nokia would likely have struggled as well.
Let's look at the Lumia 800 flagship launched in November 2011. The Galaxy S2 was launched in May 2011 with a dual-core processor (as opposed to the single-core Lumia), 1GB of RAM (rather than 512MB), a 4.3" display (rather than 3.7" - and people want larger screens), a 3-colors-per-pixel AMOLED Plus display (rather than the 2-color-per-pixel PenTile on the Lumia), a microSD card slot (while the Lumia had no expandable storage), a front camera the Lumia lacked entirely, and a larger battery. A Lumia 800 Android phone wouldn't have sold well. It was way worse (hardware wise) than a Samsung phone introduced 6 months prior.
Not to go on too much of a tangent, but in a way it was like the Palm Pre. Palm introduced it, but it had a smaller display than the iPhone, underclocked processor, half the storage, 40% thicker, creaky build quality, and the same price tag. Sure, it had the niche feature of the keyboard, but in most ways the hardware was simply inferior. It was easy to write off the Palm Pre as a device that could have been great if not for an OS that wasn't popular enough. If it had run iOS, it would have tanked against an iPhone that was simply superior.
It's very easy to critically acclaim something when one sees one specific flaw that's a dealbreaker. In that case, all other flaws tend to go unnoticed or just get attributed to the dealbreaker. If the Lumia 800 ran Android, it would have been crappy compared to Android phones of the day.
Nokia did a couple cool things like the 41MP Lumia 1020 (or PureView 808). But a camera just isn't enough, especially when wedded to a bulky, underpowered phone with a crappy display. Nokia's hardware was simply poorly matched against what you could get from competitors.
It's always sad to see a brand that once meant so much end up the way it did. But it wasn't Microsoft that did Nokia in. Like many others, they failed to notice how important the iPhone was going to be. Even those that saw the iPhone for what it was (like HTC) weren't spared. Nokia wouldn't have done much better if they'd released their devices as Android phones. They would have been underpowered and overpriced. Sure, some would have bought it for the Nokia name, but not enough. The market was flooded with better hardware. Nokia would have introduced Android phones that would have been mediocre with a premium price. A lot of us remember Nokia fondly and would have rooted for Nokia to introduce something without the dealbreaker of Windows Phone, but we would have been disappointed when we compared a Nokia Android against other options in the market. Maybe it's best that we can just write off Nokia's failure as due to Windows Phone rather than noting that most of their smartphone devices also just weren't great hardware.