How much help did Nokia have from the EU?? Sure it was very Finnish, but not clear the EU helped. And it wasn't MS, it was Nokia itself in the face of Apple. I worked at Nokia and saw it first hand.

Finland's economy opened up significantly when we joined EU. It's no coincidence that Nokia's success followed soon after.

Europe gave us GSM[0]. At a time when everyone in Europe had a GSM phone penetration in the US was embarassingly low.

It's hard to remember now, but Nokia exploded in the consumer market at a time when mobile phones were still niche in the US.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM

Back in 2000 everyone and his dog had a payg Nokia 3310 in the U.K.

The US was (as always) late to the party, arrived in force, drove everyone else away, then claimed it was their party all along.

I can’t let this go. You are viewing Nokia as a consumer company. That’s wrong. Like Ericsson and Nortel they were huge in service provider. By the time MS rolled around Nokia had already flubbed the consumer market but had more importantly completely lost in the high tech arena around service providers. I competed directly with Nokia in the early 2000s and we produced a solution in the mobile backhaul space that was not only 10x more performant but also denser and more reliable. We did this with ease and crushed them. Nokia still does work on the space (notably building the dissident tracking system for Iran) but it was killed outright as soon as the Valley tech companies (the actual tech companies, not the consumer web crap) went after them. Now theyre replaying that by clinging to a product (deepfield) that is already past its expiration date.

Microsoft came along once the company was flailing and demoralized. It was already dying.

I haven’t seen anyone discussing Rim/BlackBerry - who were Canadian, made great smart phones, but lost out because of the crucial mistake of concentrating on corporate IT as the customers, and by the time they pivoted to consumers with thins like BBM they were too late.

Nokia dismantled itself. Just one trivial example. Nokia backup software. It was 10x worse than anything Microsoft ever produced. They did bot care about the feedback.

How long can you push a shitty product? Not that long I guess.

Until apple and Android made it irrelevant

Chances are Nokia would have been a great competitor. Have you seen Nokia N9? It was in my opinion ahead of both iOS and Android at the time. But it was killed and replaced with Windows Phone.

Apple and Android didn't make Nokia irrelevant. Nokia made bad decisions and chose the losing player. After which said losing player gutted it.

Nokia had the might to a) build their own great OS, and b) continue to be a market leader. But when you have management making bad decisions, this is all you get. Whether you're in the EU or in the US, doesn't matter.

Talk about moving the goalposts

How is that moving the goalposts?

It is irelevant to the present that Nokia was a big player in the past. The fact that I was a top student in high-scool is irelevant to my current job where I underperform.

Nokia is now a shadow a its former self both in money it brings to the EU economy and in the amount of tech jobs it provides.

That's what's relevant now and there's no pride in this defeat.

Did the EU build an Apple? Yes, Nokia was a dominant phone manufacturer, so it clearly did. But it made a mistake and died (like Apple almost did in the 90s).

So you moved the goal posts by claiming that somehow it dying meant that it never counted.

Nothing is forever, just because the US has been briefly dominant in a field does not make it's approach right, especially as it's pretty obvious to the whole world there's a good chance it's going to become number two soon.

> The fact that I was a top student in high-scool is irelevant to my current job where I underperform.

Maybe spending less time on HN will improve your job performance?