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This article seems to have a personal axe to grind. Building an OS is hard, building an SDK is hard and so is building an IDE to go with it. Nokia is not a sof

by aleem 11y ago

This article seems to have a personal axe to grind. Building an OS is hard, building an SDK is hard and so is building an IDE to go with it. Nokia is not a software company. It could not have competed with Google, Apple or Microsoft on the software platform. These companies have their own OS. They have their own browsers and even programming languages they can claim their own. They have massive developer ecosystems. The fact that Nokia failed has little to do with Nokia itself and more to do with the disruptive power of software. It really had just two options. Get acquired or adopt a third-party platform. Google was not interested post Motorola acquisition. Microsoft had its own demons to deal with. There was little wiggle room. Had Motorola not been acquired, it would have gone the same route, fizzled into oblivion. RIMM is going the same route. For all their trying, these companies don't have the software DNA.

trm42 11y ago
According to rumors Nokia had lots of discussion with MS and Google about which platform they should take. Got the impression that the proposition from MS was somehow better and at least initially gave more room to move for Nokia. Later on got the impression that lots of things didn't went as was promised. But, Nokia is still alive and the situation seems to be a lot rosier for them after selling the mobile phone business. They got good price and got really cheap loan from Microsoft as part of the deal. Of course in PR side Nokia didn't have to kick out the phone engineers. Microsoft is handling that still and getting the negative PR from that. One has to remember that earlier Ericsson quit the phone business as well by selling that to Sony. Actually those phones got better after that :)
- aleem 11y ago
  Yes, that's exactly right. Ballmer wanted to react to Google's Motorola acquisition and Nokia got a good deal out of it. Ballmer was heavily criticized (by the board no less) and the acquisition was mostly a write-off [1]. Compare this to Google's Motorola acquisition, it's clear that Nokia was a bad buy and Elop netted the company the most amount of money possible so all in all a good outcome for Nokia. As per Don Harrison, head of M&A at Google: [2] > I think the Motorola transaction has been a success for us. Financially, we bought the asset for $12.5 billion. It had $3 billion in cash; we were able to sell the Home division for $2.5 billion; we ended selling the handset division for $3 billion. There were some other tax assets as well. When you work through the math, you realize we spent between $2.5 billion and $3.5 billion for the patent assets. At the time, the nearest comparable transaction was the Nortel patent auction where Microsoft and Apple teamed up to buy that asset for $4.5 billion. And there’s a good argument that the Motorola patent portfolio is a better portfolio. Which is why the INSEAD article seems so off base. [1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/satya-nadella-just-undid-steve-ballmers-last-big-mistake-2015-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/satya-nadella-just-undid-stev... [2]: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/02/12/a-peek-at-googles-ma-ambitions/ http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/02/12/a-peek-at-googles-ma-...
raverbashing 11y ago
Yes, but Nokia had a big head start with Maemo/Meego but they were playing with it for too long without focus while the Symbian people treated Maemo as a toy They had the n800 6 months before the iPhone
- Aoyagi 11y ago
  Yeah, I heard the infightings between Maemo/MeeGo and Symbian teams weren't very nice...
andmarios 11y ago
It is much more complex than this. Nokia invested heavily in the open source world but failed to catch on to the consumers. The work that was done on Maemo was impressive and they tried to create libraries that were cross-factor; the same library that you would use on your PC to read and write openoffice files, you would use on your mobile phone as well. You claim for example that Apple and Google have their own browsers. Guess what, the first thing Apple had to do when they started working on webkit, was to decouple it from Qt (you know, TrollTech's and then Nokia's framework). Of course khtml/kjs weren't developed by Nokia, but Nokia was closer to this and many other technologies from the start. Even on Symbian there was software that took many years for Apple and Google to catch up with. An example would be muvee, an automatic video creator using videos, images and mp3s on your phone, in 2005. Another one, my brother's 6600 at 2004 had pseudo augmented-reality games. They even had a fitness app (sport tracker) in 2004.

by aleem 11y ago

trm42 11y ago

According to rumors Nokia had lots of discussion with MS and Google about which platform they should take. Got the impression that the proposition from MS was somehow better and at least initially gave more room to move for Nokia. Later on got the impression that lots of things didn't went as was promised. But, Nokia is still alive and the situation seems to be a lot rosier for them after selling the mobile phone business. They got good price and got really cheap loan from Microsoft as part of the deal. Of course in PR side Nokia didn't have to kick out the phone engineers. Microsoft is handling that still and getting the negative PR from that. One has to remember that earlier Ericsson quit the phone business as well by selling that to Sony. Actually those phones got better after that :)

aleem 11y ago
Yes, that's exactly right. Ballmer wanted to react to Google's Motorola acquisition and Nokia got a good deal out of it. Ballmer was heavily criticized (by the board no less) and the acquisition was mostly a write-off [1]. Compare this to Google's Motorola acquisition, it's clear that Nokia was a bad buy and Elop netted the company the most amount of money possible so all in all a good outcome for Nokia. As per Don Harrison, head of M&A at Google: [2] > I think the Motorola transaction has been a success for us. Financially, we bought the asset for $12.5 billion. It had $3 billion in cash; we were able to sell the Home division for $2.5 billion; we ended selling the handset division for $3 billion. There were some other tax assets as well. When you work through the math, you realize we spent between $2.5 billion and $3.5 billion for the patent assets. At the time, the nearest comparable transaction was the Nortel patent auction where Microsoft and Apple teamed up to buy that asset for $4.5 billion. And there’s a good argument that the Motorola patent portfolio is a better portfolio. Which is why the INSEAD article seems so off base. [1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/satya-nadella-just-undid-steve-ballmers-last-big-mistake-2015-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/satya-nadella-just-undid-stev... [2]: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/02/12/a-peek-at-googles-ma-ambitions/ http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/02/12/a-peek-at-googles-ma-...

raverbashing 11y ago

Yes, but Nokia had a big head start with Maemo/Meego but they were playing with it for too long without focus while the Symbian people treated Maemo as a toy They had the n800 6 months before the iPhone

Aoyagi 11y ago
Yeah, I heard the infightings between Maemo/MeeGo and Symbian teams weren't very nice...

andmarios 11y ago

It is much more complex than this. Nokia invested heavily in the open source world but failed to catch on to the consumers. The work that was done on Maemo was impressive and they tried to create libraries that were cross-factor; the same library that you would use on your PC to read and write openoffice files, you would use on your mobile phone as well. You claim for example that Apple and Google have their own browsers. Guess what, the first thing Apple had to do when they started working on webkit, was to decouple it from Qt (you know, TrollTech's and then Nokia's framework). Of course khtml/kjs weren't developed by Nokia, but Nokia was closer to this and many other technologies from the start. Even on Symbian there was software that took many years for Apple and Google to catch up with. An example would be muvee, an automatic video creator using videos, images and mp3s on your phone, in 2005. Another one, my brother's 6600 at 2004 had pseudo augmented-reality games. They even had a fitness app (sport tracker) in 2004.