[nivla]

I have heard this statement so many times and I feel it doesn't justify the truth. Here are some counter points. Nokia came back into my view when they started launching the Lumia phones. It was slick, fast and solid phones with amazing camera. Any mention of Nokia here on HN and Reddit before that was met with DOA as the top comment. When they started releasing the Lumia phones, the tune started to switch to "if they made an android phone, I would totally buy!". Remember the whole silly fiasco with even Siri calling Lumia 900 the best phone in the market? [1]

I think Microsoft gave it a premiere spot with Windows Mobile which would have otherwise gone unnoticeable in the Android market. Despite me jumping ship from Windows Phone, I still believe Windows Mobile was one of the best (*subjective) of all mobile OSes. Its extremely fast, less resource hog and well designed (flatness before it got trendy). Given the stereotypes about Windows OS, the mobile OS seemed nothing like it. Heck, I bought a $15 Lumia phone from Best buy and it seems like a $200 buttery smooth phone.

Lumia also had good set of apps, which created an amazing group of loyal buyers. Offline GPS - You could download the maps for the entire world on your phone. Offline Radio - Download the entire mix radio to you phone and use it where you went. Camera Apps - Nokia cinematography, Live Images, Selfie, Panorama.

However, I do believe that Microsoft's Nokia buyout was a stupid idea. Nokia was amazing at advertising, viral marketing and creating a brand loyalty. Microsoft however sucks at both advertisements and marketing but they seem to be very good at pissing off even their loyal followers.

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/255508/siri_says_nokia_lumia_...

[matco11]

There is an interesting story by the New Yorker: "It wasn’t just that Nokia failed to recognize the increasing importance of software, though. It also underestimated how important the transition to smartphones would be. And this was, in retrospect, a classic case of a company being enthralled (and, in a way, imprisoned) by its past success. Nokia was, after all, earning more than fifty per cent of all the profits in the mobile-phone industry in 2007, and most of those profits were not coming from smartphones. Diverting a lot of resources into a high-end, low-volume business (which is what the touch-screen smartphone business was in 2007) would have looked risky. In that sense, Nokia’s failure resulted at least in part from an institutional reluctance to transition into a new era."

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/where-nokia-went-...

[Zigurd]

> Diverting a lot of resources into a high-end, low-volume business (which is what the touch-screen smartphone business was in 2007) would have looked risky. In that sense, Nokia’s failure resulted at least in part from an institutional reluctance to transition into a new era.

It's a bit of a nitpick, but Nokia had put considerable resources into Series 60, Symbian, and subsequently Maemo. Nokia's management, before Elop, was in no way reluctant about a smartphone future beyond high-volume S40 devices. The S60 features of integrated PIM apps are foundational to smartphones, and Maemo/Meego was a credible smartphone OS. As I recall, Tomi Ahonen had good reason to think the N9 was outselling Windows Phone when Meego was killed.

[Nullabillity]

> Offline GPS - You could download the maps for the entire world on your phone.

The maps and related software (Nokia/Ovi Maps/HERE) came from Nokia, not Microsoft.

[nivla]

I guess I wasn't clear. I dint claim Microsoft made them, just that it came exclusively with the Lumia phones. If I recall correctly, back then if you searched for it in the store using a non-lumia phone, you wouldn't even find it listed.

[rndmio]

I wonder if you're from the US, because I heard that Nokia as a brand never really quite took off in the way it did Europe. Over here before smartphones came along you were pretty much mad to buy anything except a Nokia. So why didn't it work with windows mobile? It did to start with, people bought them because of the Nokia name, but the lack of apps for the platform killed that good will pretty quickly. Combine their superb industrial design with android and it would have been significantly more potent.

[nextweek2]

>> Such a shame trojan horse Elop tanked the company by partnering with Microsoft

> I have heard this statement so many times and I feel it doesn't justify the truth

To me when people talk about the Windows Phone being great they are talking about the hardware. Which is something Nokia used to excel at. I have a Lumia on my desk and it is a really nice phone, its the lack of the latest Apps that lets it down.

Elop failed to leverage the software developers at Nokia, you had great Qt/C/C++ developers and suddenly the company is Silverlight/C#?

The biggest mistake I attribute to his management was his announcement that the phones they were just launching would not upgrade to Windows Phone 8. As a buyer you are just going to wait 6 months, that killed the sales channel and App developers decided to hold off.

I don't think Elop was a trojan, I think he was out of his depth or the wrong man. The board should never have appointed him. But he did tank the company through a string of bad decisions.

[aeturnum]

To echo nivla's point: One of my favorite phones was the Lumia 950. Its fatal flaw was the lack of app support, but everything else was fantastic. The OS was fast and easy to use, the apps that were there were well done, the build was fantastic, etc.

Instead of being "just another" high-end android, Nokia got to be the flagship phone for an entire OS. Today it seems like a crazy call, but it's easy to understand why they would pick WP over Android.