I like to think that it was Microsoft which destroyed Nokia from the inside in order to make Windows phone great at last

https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/microsoft-nokia-deal-a-...

Nokia's then CEO's Elop's "burning platform" memo leak in 2011 seemed to hurt Nokia a lot by painting their existing and upcoming phones as inferior.

> I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform.

https://www.engadget.com/2011-02-08-nokia-ceo-stephen-elop-r...

Which is what they were. It's 2024 and Android phones still don't hold a candle to Apple phones...

Karaportti 4 lyfe

By the time of Elop's memo Nokia was already in the death spiral: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35030334

Well, the Linux based Maemo OS I had in 2005 0r 2006 on my Nokia 770 was already promising, although the hardware was quite slow and limited, but it was an open system one would have root access to out of the box. Then it evolved into Meego, which was even better and was then employed by the Nokia N9. Nokia already had the OS to transition to from the old Symbian, but after the Microsoft deal, they scrapped it to adopt Windows Mobile, and the rest is history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9

Maemo and MeeGo and other Nokia OSs were more coherent than Microsoft's phone OSs at the time, and Symbian would have had a long life on cheap devices. Smartphones were expensive back then.

Nokia was long gone when they were acquired.

They were beaten by RIM/BB

They tried gaming, didn’t succeed. Later on messaging, but didn’t have the platform (ping)

Not outside USA

Blackberry come nowhere close to beating Nokia. It was Apple.

In the UK there was a brief period from 2009-2011 where everyone seemed to replace their Nokia with a Blackberry before iPhones became common (BBM was a big thing)

BBM was big and blamed for the london riots in 2011

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/aug/08/london-riots-f...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/blackberry/8688651/Lo...

I can remember one Christmas, perhaps 2010, where my Facebook feed was just folks posting their BBM pins. Ah, what a throwback.

In retrospect, a better idea than giving out your phone number as WhatsApp requires. And indeed, people were more willing to share BBM pins than phone numbers.

In the UK + US they did.. In the EU, Nokia was king, but there were many other brands and OSes (windows mobile). Japan always had a different market though.

Nokia was still a large player, but was loosing ground.

Android at the time (the betas) resembled blackberry, and didn't feature any touch capabilities.

Right after the iPhone was released, Android changed its UI.

Nokia was globally dominant until 2010, when Android started rapidly eating its market share.

Japan and the US were both countries with their own weird mobile phone markets. The US market was not as relevant in the 2000s as it should have been. Mobile phone adoption was lower than in Europe and the plans were ridiculously expensive, mostly because of the dominant business model. The plan was the primary product and the phone was a generic device locked to the plan, making the market uninteresting for phone manufacturers.

I don't know if I've ever seen a Blackberry phone knowing that it's a Blackberry phone. Blackberries always sounded like the Atari ST: a device you constantly heard about but never saw in the real world. And when I saw some statistics much later, I was surprised how popular it had been in the US.

Nokia was dead long before Microsoft thought about buying them.

Not really. It was the Nokia board that wanted to be taken over. They were looking for a mark, and Microsoft walked right into it. Nokia dropped the phone division on Microsoft and Microsoft then had to write it down.

Funny how well that applies to Microsoft and its internal battle over UI layers for the past two decades.