Nokia's woes were on software side, not hardware. Building a competitive software stack proved too slow an undertaking for a hardware company. It was Android in the end that ate Nokia's pie, not Apple.

My feeling is that had Apple not released the iPhone, Android would have probably joined the long list of products that Google killed.

It is competition from the iPhone (and the possible control of search traffic on mobile devices that Apple would have) that forced Google to focus on Android after acquiring it and this lead to the demise of Nokia and the mobile division of Microsoft.

I don't know if Nokia knew the marketing budget going towards launching the iPhone along with other resources planned for its launch would that have changed their view on how serious of a competitor the iPhone is going to be.

Apple showed them the way. Before iPhone Android was a nokia knockoff.

Also they only took Apple seriously way too late.

Agree. See my comment above. Having access to info about marketing budget etc. could have possibly changed that.

Which was very foolish of them, considering the success of the iPod !

I think another HW (Semiconductor) company is facing the same problem; its competitor is surging ahead full steam and the future may put the smartphone as one of the inflection points where it all began, connecting the dot backwards of course.

They swapped to Android too late but honestly I would have seen them turning it around some. Bringing in Stephen Elop to then have Microsoft strangle em some more to push the winphones was what fucked em up more imo.

By the time Microsoft bought Nokia, they were already in deep trouble, having lost major parts of the smartphone market.

And they already had Elop as their CEO for a long time and under his guidance started their alignment with Microsoft and had to lay off countless people. Someone who wasn't a trojan horse would have likely acted differently.

It wouldn't have made any difference.

Nokia R&D had a touchscreen-only phone prototype in early noughties. It got killed, and while I have not seen the actual memo, I've heard people quoting from it: "Nokia will never make a touchscreen-only phone."

Apple launched iPhone a few months later.

Also, after talking to people who were employees at the time, it seems Nokia could have put an order of magnitude more resources behind MeeGo, but decided not to. When they realized their mistake, it was too late and jumping to Windows Phone looked like the only reasonable move.

It's probably about customers as much as competitors. If you are launching a new device next month that is twice as fast as the current one for the same price then customers will hold back their purchases. See the Osborne effect for an extreme example[1].

They tend to be a bit more open when this isn't a concern, for example Apple TV or the new Mac Pro.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

Quite a lot of Apple's success is in the supply chain. They're very keen on the secrecy but I'm unconvinced that they actually need it; it's as much about avoiding the "Osborne effect" as dealing with competition.

Not really - industrial espionage is really rare. Google is much more open and their technology doesn't get stolen. Sure, product designs leak before their release, but that doesn't really matter much.

That you know of. Just because it does not make the news does not mean it does not happen.

Usually it is in neither parties interest to reveal such an event. I know of at least one such instance and the extreme lengths a Chinese competitor went to steal (not google).