Stephen Elop Costs Nokia 10 Million Dollars of Lost Profit Every Day

While it's clear Symbian is going nowhere in the smartphone space (it could have a temporary future in the high-volume dumbphone segment as S40 gets pushed down by better hardware) and that MeeGo took ridiculously long to mature into a non-competitive-but-cute OS, the idea to bet Nokia's future on the unlikely success of Windows Phone 7 is one of the stupidest mistakes I ever saw. The only explanation would be that this was the only way Nokia could raise the money needed to continue operating.

But this whole thing looks suspicious to the point I can risk a couple predictions:

- Microsoft will become immune to lawsuits for violating Nokia patents (either by eventually acquiring whatever will be left a couple years down the road or by licensing them for peanuts as part of a WP7-related deal). This may be particularly relevant with W8's new interface.

- The patents will be sold to a fund that will then use those patents to extort Android phone makers (Apple is probably already immune), creating a pressure for manufacturers to endorse WP7 as a patent-safe alternative

- Elop will retire or be hired by a company where Microsoft holds a stake, either directly or indirectly.

> While it's clear Symbian is going nowhere in the smartphone space (it could have a temporary future in the high-volume dumbphone segment as S40 gets pushed down by better hardware) and that MeeGo took ridiculously long to mature into a non-competitive-but-cute OS, the idea to bet Nokia's future on the unlikely success of Windows Phone 7 is one of the stupidest mistakes I ever saw.

Why was this stupid? The Android space is way too cluttered to really make an entrance. Nokia probably couldn't get much marketshare from Samsung or HTC in either the high-end or low-end Android markets at this point. They have years of experience in getting the software to work with their hardware, and are making great phones at this point. Nokia, as a newcomer, can't really compete with them.

Symbian is basically dead, so what would they put on their phones? Win 7 makes a lot of sense in that context, especially with the discounts that they're surely getting from MS. Google doesn't have much incentive to give anything to Nokia, considering the overall success of Android with everyone else.

I have to say that I think Toni is wrong over symbian. It has the same set of basic problems that Windows Mobile 6.5 had, basically it's a system designed for resistive screens in a capacitive world.

Nokia needed to make that decision to kill off Symbian in the same way that Microsoft made the decision to kill off Windows Mobile in both cases there is only so much lipstick you can put on a pig.

The decision process then becomes what OS choices are available to you:

Maemo - Dead killed by Meego but I rather liked the N900 I have and in many ways it's a better OS for hackers than Android (On the N900 it came with a terminal, a copy of vi and getting root is a simple download from the repositories) .

Meego - Alive but unclear if it's ever going to be good enough and it's probably at least a year away from shipping commercially (note this is at decision time presumably around December last year) Judging by the progress on the back port to the N900 it's still not all there. http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/N900/Status (see the notes on receiving a call)

iOS4 - Good luck there

Android - Definite maybe here but then you're in a very me too space.

Windows Phone 7 - Plausible and possibly Nokia are able to push Microsoft into giving more customisation than other vendors.

If you're the Nokia board that leaves you with three options - Meego,Android and WP7. I think they've done the right thing by putting Meego on the back burner and going with WP7.

Toni seems to have a hard on that Elop is a trojan horse, sadly while I don't think announcing the death of Symbian was a great idea it's really hard to see why anyone with an iPhone or Android phone would buy a Symbian phone. The N8 burnt a lot of folks with it's poor firmware (and slow upgrades) So I think Nokia was ALWAYS going to fail hard this year.

I like the look of the N9 and N950 but after my N900 experience I wouldn't buy either of them as who (outside of the OSS folks) is going to develop for them commercially?

WP7 has it's problems the Mango update took too long and I don't believe that tethering is properly supported (some phones have a "modem" mode in their test menu) but when I've had a quick play with it I rather liked it (and I haven't heard many users complaining) The developer tools and APIs seem to be getting there.

Finally I would like to point out that when I buy a Nokia phones (9500 & N900) the OS seems to get killed so I'm not very trusting in Nokias long term plans.