But to be honest we also had our share of alienating developers, it wasn't only MS fault.

First the Symbian development was a mess with the Metrowerk tools and that Symbian C++ dialect, then came PIPS, followed by Carbide (Eclipse based).

Followed by the whole mess of open sourcing Symbian and closing it again.

Or the Symbian model moving from Symbian C++ / PIPS to Qt, also in the middle this process.

Maemo was GTK, but then everyone should move to Qt. Better not lets also move the OS into Meego.

I remember asking why the Nokia 770 didn't had a GSM modem and the team saying to me that wasn't the market they wanted to target. When they did the usual roadshow of upcoming devices.

Nokia was already quite bad in terms of relationship with app developers before Elop came into the party, due to the internal politics.

Of course, the famous burning platform memo was just the last way to alienate developers that were slowly accepting the new Qt based model for Symbian, after all the previous pain points.

Even years after the iPhone came out, Nokia outsold Apple, had a bigger R&D budget and a bigger foothold in practically every market except North America.

Smartphones outsold feature (dumb) phones only in 2013, five years after the iPhone came out. When did Nokia slip to 3rd place by number of sold devices? Q1 2015.

There was time, just no will.

I can't agree more. Few people remember the Nokia 770 was released almost 2 years ahead of the iPhone. With a bit of polish it could have grown into a fantastic product line. In fact, the N9 was pretty much a masterpiece.

For some reason that I don't understand, they continued to push Symbian, and those phones were not good. I remember thinking, either push further on the MeeGo stuff or drop it and move to Android. They did neither and suffered for it.

Of course, as a platform for Web browsing, and particularly for app development, Symbian was not good.

But I still miss the phone functionality of my E71, or the Symbian devices I had before it.

Talking is one of my least-used functions on my Android phone. I use it far, far more for texting, apps, internet, navigation, games, photos, and even visual voicemail than I do for talking. I might have a handful of calls a week on it. A phone that's great for talking and sucks for all the other things would be mostly useless to me.

So in other words - they were great phones, but terrible smartphones? I fully agree.

Android or iPhone could do the same technically, but my employer can no longer use it. The company would give all data about meetings to Google or Apple. It's an absolute no-no.

Thus I sometimes forget my meetings, as the phone no longer reminds me.

Also, the alarm clock of Symbian was great, and i could depend on it. Even if you turned the phone off, it would wake you up. I'm nervous about trusting any Android device to wake me up in the morning if I have to catch a plane or a train (and I understand it's the same with iPhone).

I owned one of these. It was an ugly, slow, expensive brick. I'd much rather use a Treo from that period. The iPhone was a wonderfully svelte device compared to either. I don't think you're appreciating how badly Apple beat up the Palm and Nokia competition back then. It was absolutely no contest and a disruption that was badly needed. Holding up the 770 as some under-appreciated jewel is fairly ridiculous. It was comically out of touch with consumers.

Yes but who had higher profits? That's the real factor. Outselling by itself is meaningless if your margins are poor.

Apple has 94% of the profits in mobile: http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/15/11/16/apple-inc-n...

We will never know for sure by Nokia shareholders might have gotten an amazing deal out of going Windows Mobile and getting acquired by Microsoft. As for the employees, this would have happened either way with how badly the company was prepared for smartphones.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/27/11523616/samsung-earnings-...

Updates. Updates, updates, updates.

I've come to trust Apple. Why? Because my iPad 2 still gets OS and security updates. Because my iPhone 5s still gets OS and security updates.

Apple has demonstrated that they support their tablets and phones at least 4 or 5 years. That's why I'll buy another Apple tablet. That's why I'll buy another Apple phone.

Why would I buy an Android phone or tablet that's unsupported and abandoned after less than two years in many cases? Where security updates (think Stagefright) take months and months to get patched, if they ever get patched at all on your device? Android devices simply aren't safe.

Even the Nexus devices can't compete with Apple on longevity of support.

Android manufacturers could convince me to try their products if they'd simply patch them in a reasonable time and update them for a reasonable amount of time. I would define reasonable as at least 4 full years after purchase. For that, I'd pay Apple like premiums.

Until that time comes, my only viable option is Apple.

OTOH, nobody can copy an iphone because nobody but apple can put ios on a phone.

The other difference is quality. I have no faith Huawei can make a phone at Samsung's quality level. Where are they going to get the screen from anyway? Or the camera? Those components aren't easy to copy; those things are state-of-the-art.

Finally, even Apple can't copy Samsung. They still have crappy screens, though the next iPhone is finally supposed to be getting a superAMOLED screen. WTF took them so long? Simple: Apple isn't a hardware manufacturer, they have to contract stuff out, whereas Samsung is a hardware maker, and makes state-of-the-art screens themselves.

But yeah, I got myself a transfer inside Nokia after harmattan program was finished (still working on Linux stuff). Was away for few years and went back few months before Microsoft bought us, laid us off and our dept. spun off. During those times I didn't see any change on how things where handled from old Nokia days. So anyone who says that they didn't see this final layoff round coming is blind AF.

Then they brought in the son of the former Finnish president (Ahtisaari) and the guy stood in front of the entire program telling us how awesome he was and he was going to reshape the way people use mobile phones.

Good times.

They were an independent company under control of a trusted general of Steve Ballmer. Nokia had a lot of goodwill in some regions, e.g. in Europe they were known for their excellent reliable and serviceable hardware. At the time the fear was that a switch to Android would reduce their margins, but I guess they'd still be around and pretty successful if they had switched to Android timely.

If you had such a bonus on your contract what would you do?

>Microsoft really loves to own and eventually destroy Nordic companies. (skype, minecraft, nokia)

Minecraft went from being neglected to even mismanaged to something that's alive again. Skype was originally Estonian, nor Nordic, and runs better than ever considering it doesn't rely on the charity of "supernodes" anymore. I can't remember the last time I had a dropped call or random quality drops.

I do agree MS shouldn't have picked up Nokia. It was a walking corpse and didn't help either entity in the end, but this is just business as usual. Playing up this "wild linux hackers vs The Man(TM)" is pretty out there. If you want a paycheck, the entity that pays you needs to make money. If MS didn't fire you, Nokia would have. MS is profitable. Nokia isn't.

I think Sweden counts as Nordic.

1) go all-in with their own Symbian/Qt/MeeGo strategy

2) go all-in with Google Android

3) go all-in with a Nokia fork of Google Android (a nonstarter today, but back in 2011, with Nokia's considerable heft and before Google started rolling so much of Android into non-open Google Play Services, things could have played out differently)

In terms of Nokia's performance as a phone company, it is more or less impossible for any of these options to have done any worse than Nokia did with Windows Phone.

HOWEVER, for Nokia as a company, Windows Phone "worked out" in the sense that they had a willing buyer for an asset that was long-term uncompetitive against Asian players in a commodity market. (then again that too has a counter-argument that the phone division would have been worth more than $7 billion had it not dedicated itself to the losing proposition of Windows Phone)

Shame - personally I think people would have bought a Nokia Android phone. They were renowned for their hardware.

Overnight Nokia turned into a cesspool of backstabbers who didn't add any real value, but managed to steal the credit from everyone else.

Steal credit for what? What has come out of Microsoft's phone business since the Nokia purchase that anyone would want to take credit for?

As an example, Lumia 1020 had a lot of people working hard on it... but a very select few went out and took all the credit.

http://jacquesmattheij.com/microsoft-just-bought-nokia-for-0

And I very much wished I was wrong. They'll have to pry my impossible to destroy Nokia from my hands when I'm dead. Thanks!