There's no way that Microsoft bought Nokia to concentrate on making that tiny hardware subdivision profitable (MSFT's market cap is $700B+ and they bought Nokia for $7.6B). They wanted a hardware platform to promote Windows Phone. For Microsoft, the dying entity in need of a Hail Mary was Windows Phone, not Nokia.
Windows Phone was native and extremely performant on even low end hardware. Microsoft dumped millions into development and couldn’t get traction. No way Maemo was going to displace Android.
Manufacturers literally do not care about anything except selling devices and are uninterested in performance except as it relates to bigger numbers that they can advertise with. Users consistently chose Android over Windows Phone demonstrating that their priorities did not align with picking the phone that would still be snappy in two years.
Nokia’s phone business was doomed. Even if they’d pivoted to Android devices they’d probably have still failed because that’s such a tough market with so much competition willing to sell phones with no margin.
Disclosure: Microsoft employee
Furthermore, Nokia wouldn't have shared a successful OS with others like Google did if they had one. That meant all other manufacturers were going to stay with Android, and I greatly doubt that they would've succeeded in building the whole ecosystem alone like Apple did.
But that was exactly the plan. When they cooperated with Intel to build Meego, the resulting OS was available to all other handset manufacturers and there were test suites in the work for vendors to be able to claim Meego compat, just as with Android.
The Meego OS was actually quite solid and very nice to develop for. Its major problem was the unwillingness of most app developers to support additional platforms besides Android and the Iphones. Just as with Windows Phone.
As for the adoption among developers, it never had a wide enough release to even start with that. N9 was available in limited countries only, and after Nokia's WP announcement.
Yes there were a few dark years, but I think most IM was struggling years ago.
Now skype is pretty good.
Finally Nokia managers were full of hubris, and believed Nokias was still the center of mobile, and so important it to change the course of industry by Adopting Windows Phone.
This is a well regurgitated lie that I see posted often. If you would like the truth about what really happened I suggest you read Operation Elop.
According to a source present, Google seemed to really want Nokia to join the Android world. The company assured that Android can be customized more than Nokia understood, especially compared with Windows Phone. Even if Google was criticized continuously for having Samsung, HTC and Sony Android phones differ from each other too much, Nokia would be given leeway to create its own user experience. Google saw that Nokia differentiated from these competitors in that it had a global area of operation. Nokia would be able to create better local services and user experiences for network providers and customers, one person present remembers being discussed. The Nokians also noticed that they had been living partially with misinformation. Nokia could continue with Android with its own maps side-by-side with Google’s maps. The same applied with the app store. Nokia’s music service as well as ovi.com could continue, as long as the phone had Google Play.
The discussions continued at a fast pace after the first visit. Google seemed to really want Nokia.
Some constraints were set by the Open Handset Alliance behind Android, OHA. Unlike Windows Phone, Android is not controlled by one company, rather by an alliance of 84 companies which is led by Google, where the members are able to use Android in an equal manner. Google was in a difficult position. By giving Nokia special privileges, it risked its relationship with other manufacturers. The reactions would be difficult to predict. Creativity was needed.
As the negotiations proceeded, a solution was found. Google offered Nokia, among other things, plenty of say in choosing the direction of Android development. By directing Android development to align with its own competitive goals, Nokia would gain some advantage, even if the changes would be available for everyone at the same time. Now Nokia was interested. Android and Nokia had an area where their interests converged in a brilliant way: Developing countries. If Android could be made to work on cheap hardware, Nokia would be best at getting in through in developing markets. The arrangement was enticing. Google would secure the position it was dreaming of in smartphones, and Nokia would become part of virgin Android markets. The precise details remained hidden, but Nokia was able to learn that Google worked Android into clearly cheaper models than Windows Phone.
Another flexible point of Android was in its predictability. Nokia wanted to publicize the new software features earlier than when the phones go into sales. The reason was brutal: Nokia was more solid than its Korean competitor and needed more time to build a phone. If the information about the new Android features was available earlier, Nokia would have enough time to get them in the first wave, like the others. Google was willing. It promised to make the publicizing of its plans earlier and to release the source code to its partners. The solution would have been useless for other Android manufacturers in relation to Nokia, but would not have broken the OHA rules.
Google made a substantial offer regarding distribution of income. Nokia would have gotten a portion of the income from Google’s search engine, app store, and other services which originate from Nokia phones, and the terms would be in relation to Nokia’s influence in the ecosystem. We don’t have information about precise percentages, but at any rate, Google’s promise was quite exceptional, considering that Nokia would still have been able to keep its own services in its phones.
Contrary to what Nokia has claimed, Google was ready for concessions. It was ready to flex as far as it could in the framework of OHA, and even then some more.
Then some big money stepped into the game, as well as the mysterious Nokia employee with the name Rahul Mewawalla.
https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52...
diktat just for those wondering
I don’t believe the engineers spent thousands man-years developing in-house Symbian, then significant time working on (mostly) in-house Maemo, then some day they said “screw that, let’s throw away everything we’ve developed and move to Android”.
I don't think one can say they killed Nokia. Nokia's phone business was basically doomed after Android gained traction, and Microsoft just helped the company to pivot by overpaying for that part of the business, while leaving Nokia with everything that actually was making money.