This whole deal, from the moment Elop went to Nokia, was a disaster in slow motion. That the current Lumias are so good, yet sell at unsustainable levels, shows just how fundamentally flawed Microsoft's strategy has been, and continues to be.
They've been solidly outplayed at their old embrace, extend, extinguish game, and unless they can get back into that mode mobile will just be dead to them.
And I say this as someone that would welcome a strong third player, because the App Store/Play Store duopoly is stagnating fast.
Stagnating how? Less fancy whiz-bang shiny maybe-novelty features to entertain the tech blogs and mainstream media?
Since the iPhone arrived in 2007, phones in general have made incredible advances in mobile performance, networking/cell, form factor and screen technology. This continues today, with things like crazy-high ppi screens and 8-core processors in Android phones, to things like Touch ID and the Ax SOCs in Apple's phones.
That's a pretty narrow view of things IMHO. Smartphones are much more usable than they were 2-3 years ago and lightyears beyond what they were 7-8 years ago. Phone web browsers are just as fast as real computers, and fast LTE connections keep things moving quickly. I remember the early days of the first iPhone era smartphones and would never want to go back to them. The web browsers sucked and overall the phones were too slow to do anything beyond check a simple web page. Now a big smartphone or phablet could easily replace a laptop for most people's needs.
> Phone web browsers are just as fast as real computers, and fast LTE connections keep things moving quickly. I remember the early days of the first iPhone era smartphones and would never want to go back to them. The web browsers sucked and overall the phones were too slow to do anything beyond check a simple web page.
This is a result of chip improvement. If you don't do a single thing to improve mobile phones other than use the current generation of chips, you get that. I have seen no other improvements or innovation, and the chips were directly referred to in the comment to which you were replying.
> This whole deal, from the moment Elop went to Nokia, was a disaster in slow motion
No, the problem started before. Nokia had their platform, it was called Maemo, but their developers were too busy rewriting everything multiple times "just because" and the Symbian team treated it as a toy.
Elop was just the Titanic hitting the iceberg, but the course was set.
If you want history, Nokia was dead from the bodge of the series 60 rollout, which basically made Symbian a bit player in a market it really should have utterly dominated.
The irony is that Symbian + Series60 did utterly dominate in many important markets [1]. This gave Nokia a false hubris and made them blind to the deep flaws of their UI framework and their software design process in general.
[1] In 2007, Symbian had 80%+ marketshare in smartphones in all markets other than USA, China and Japan.
The mistake there was to assume smartphone is a separate category of cellphone, when really it's not. (This is the same trick used to suggest Windows Mobile was ever remotely successful, by pretending it was a category of one). By that measure Symbian only succeeded in Japan where it was free of Series 60 and had whole different UIs stuck on it.
What Nokia achieved with S60 was a UI no one wanted, and unnecessary fragementation and antagonism with the other Symbian licensees (and with Symbian itself). UIQ predictably never went anywhere (too complicated), but had Symbian produced a UI closer to S40 in spirit then we'd be looking at a very different situation today. To this day iOS is closer to S40 than S60 for end users, and this is no coincidence.
It's a real shame because Psion, the company who designed the original version of Symbian OS (EPOC32), had a knack for sensible, simple UIs on their pocket organizers -- or whatever those '90s PDA-like things were called.
If that original Psion spirit had been carried to a smartphone design ten years ago, it could have been a great foundation for Symbian. Instead Symbian got a menagerie of confused UIs developed by the phone vendors whose primary aim was to tick more boxes in feature sheets every year.
Nokia was already in the disaster zone before Elop got there. While I agree that the current strategy hasn't been a winning one, I don't actually see that they had a ton of other options. Become another me-too Android manufacturer?
Nokia had better quality HW, logistics and sales infrastructure than any of the Android manufacturers back then, by far. Nokia's strong points were precisely what was needed to win with a commodity OS.
But going WP7 certainly didn't help. It slowed Nokia's sales to a crawl.
Nokia could've been the Samsung of Android, today, especially when you consider its advantage in smartphone and camera engineering. All it had to do is adopt Android early "enough" (even a year after Samsung did would've been okay).
>But going WP7 certainly didn't help. It slowed Nokia's sales to a crawl.
I think it's more accurate to say that it was the fault of that stupid (unless it was intentionally meant to lower the value of Nokia mobile, of course) Elop speech, where he obsoleted Symbian and Maemo, at a time when Nokia hadn't released a Windows phone, and didn't even have a plan to serve the low-end smartphone market that Symbian had locked up.
Those numbers have some noise within. If you read this literally they did the right thing. Why would you be releasing on a competing OS if yours have a bigger market share? By the time when they decided to ditch symbian it was already late and they needed to differentiate themselves.
this is actually understandable, Nokia is a well respected brand in Europe. Price/Performance was/is very good ( most of the phones were actually build in EU, which made them somewhat cheaper ).
Almost every one in Eurupe owned at some time a Nokia phone, and will tell good things about it.
They've been solidly outplayed at their old embrace, extend, extinguish game, and unless they can get back into that mode mobile will just be dead to them.
And I say this as someone that would welcome a strong third player, because the App Store/Play Store duopoly is stagnating fast.