Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones

The old Nokia crowd seem to have a tough time admitting that all of Nokia's old software operations were beyond salvage by 2010. Symbian had turned into a sprawling pile of crap, and Maemo/MeeGo was painted in a corner by internal politics that had marginalized its development. Nokia was spending ten times as much as Apple on R&D, yet had very little to show for it.

Having two competing OS teams was a bad choice made much earlier by Elop's predecessors, who didn't understand software (the previous Nokia CEO came to that position from the legal department — a terrible mismatch for a company about to be overrun by Apple and Google). Elop was fundamentally right in killing both of Nokia's operating systems. Symbian sales were collapsing in early 2011 because the devices just couldn't respond to user expectations anymore, not because of anything Elop did.

I can see why Elop picked Windows Phone over Android: it truly was a more innovative UI and Microsoft was willing to pay Nokia a billion USD per year for the partnership. Elop's grave mistake was not having a replacement ready to go. The Lumias shipped way too late. Playing "armchair CEO", I have no idea how I would have solved that either.

In any case, Nokia didn't end up too poorly. Microsoft bought the phone division that was bleeding cash, and that money gave Nokia the opportunity to buy back its network division that had been a joint venture between Nokia and Siemens. The outcome was probably better than if Nokia had tried to downscale itself into a commodity Android vendor.

The choice to go with Microsoft was reasonable; a way to distinguish themselves from all the other (unprofitable) Android manufacturers. But the whole execution of the plan from both Nokia and Microsoft was terrible.

When they announced the move to Windows Phone, I thought it seemed like a good idea. Meego clearly wasn't ready, Symbian was an antique, and Windows Phone was promising in so many ways -- even now I believe we will never see another smartphone OS as well-designed as Windows Phone 7.

Then some months later, for some reason, I ended up owning a phone with the last release of Symbian on it (Symbian Belle). And I realised that the original Nokia plan wasn't as stupid as it seemed.

Symbian Belle was a surprisingly smooth and pleasant OS -- much smoother in many contexts than Android at the time. It had some serious pitfalls, but it turned out there was quite a lot of productive turd-polishing that could be done. A lot of the good stuff on Belle was down to Qt Quick, which was the same framework as they were intending to carry through for Meego developers. And although I never used Meego, I can believe that it could have worked very nicely in the end, and a polished Symbian could have seen it through for a while.

But I was just as surprised to find out how much infrastructure there was behind it all. Nokia had an app store and billing platform serving a lot of countries and languages, that could bill you for apps either from credit card or straight from your carrier balance. They had one of the best mapping providers, a decent weather service, and a fine music provider. They had first-class hardware and a lot of public goodwill.

The experience changed my mind completely. Nokia could have done it with Symbian and Meego.

I'm pretty confident that the choice of Windows Phone over Android really didn't have to do with the UI, or even with Elop's past Microsoft connections: it had to do with services. Nokia wanted to bring their own services to the platform, especially relating to maps and navigation, and they wanted to have the new OS vendor be a full branded partner. With Google, that was an either/or choice: they could have used AOSP and their own services, but they wouldn't get the Android branding and Google's support. Microsoft was more willing to play ball.

Personally, I think they should have gone with AOSP and leveraged Qt: by the end of 2010, they'd already gotten their two operating systems (Symbian and MeeGo) to a point where it wasn't a lot of work to recompile applications for one to run on the other. (N.B.: I don't know how much of this work ever actually made it out of Nokia. I was working there in 2010, when all of this was going down.) Given that Qt already ran on Android, IIRC, it might not have been that much work to do the same thing on top of AOSP, producing a Nokia-specific release that could run Android software and provide a clear path forward for Symbian users and developers. I was a little shocked that they didn't release a Qt compatibility layer for Windows Phone, instead choosing to pretty much leave their existing developer community on that burning platform.

The Lumias did ship too late, but I think the previous commenter who referred to the "Osborne Effect" has it right; a Nokia that had appeared firmly committed to Symbian and forging a bridge from the existing to the forthcoming generation might have fared considerably better. The Nokia N8 and N9 should have been supported as flagships rather than sort of apologetically shoved out the door with "DEAD PHONE WALKING" written on the boxes. On a practical level, this might not have saved them (especially if they'd stuck with Windows Phone, which it turned out the market really hadn't been waiting for after all), but it might have given them a fighting chance.

I don't think Nokia would have tried to downscale itself either way, by the way -- they'd have kept their network equipment division, and might have even kept their mapping division. They'd balanced that with consumer mobile hardware for years before that, after all; I don't see why they couldn't have kept doing that with Android devices.

BlackBerry tried that exact strategy with BlackBerry 10: brand new OS with an Android app compatibility layer. It didn't work.

Nokia was coming from a similar position as BlackBerry, so I don't see how it would have worked for them either.