| I worked at Nokia as a SWE in Berlin when that email dropped into my inbox. A few days later, it reached the press. We mostly thought ok, fine. What’s next? Before that, we’d been building an app for Nokia N97 handset users, an ever-decreasing market - all the engineers on the team had iPhones. We thought after that email that the next step would be to go on Android. Sure, Nokia would contract a little as it lost its platform, but the platform wasn’t that valuable. It was the great handsets - software wasn’t Nokia’s forte - the leadership structure just didn’t have the vision to bring it together. When the meeting rolled around, we all went to a big conference centre at the heart of Berlin to watch the announcement of the future vision. Stephen Elop appeared on a gigantic screen, talked a bit before laying down the new vision. It was going to be Android, right? It made perfect sense, the ecosystem was growing and aligned to Nokia. But, no - Stephen announced that the future of Nokia was with Microsoft. I walked out of the conference when I heard that - standing outside of the conference hall. I knew two things at that moment. One, there wasn’t going to be a future for Nokia - there was no way Microsoft under Ballmer’s leadership could produce an ecosystem. Secondly, I realised that Elop was still Microsoft’s man - He didn’t make the logical choice that fit with Nokia’s culture - It was going to be a takeover by Microsoft. The project I was working on soon got a new boss. We thought this would align with the new vision of the company. He took us into a room and projected a picture on the wall of a mountaintop surrounded by clouds. He said, “I know you must feel a bit like this, unclear about the direction, clouded about what the future holds. Don’t worry… I also feel like that, too”. The new boss did eventually make a decisive decision - the N97 app that we were building was to be kept, but it was going to be focused on an even smaller niche of the market, N97 users who were pro skiers. I left soon after. The takeover by Microsoft did eventually happen, and the rest is history. |
People sometimes think that we can see Android was the right route only with hindsight. No, every engineer at the time knew that Android was the right way to go and that there was huge opportunity for Nokia there. Sure enough, in the following years we all had to read reviews of Nokia's phone that always concluded: "The handset is fantastic, if only it was running Android". I won't bother going into all the reasons that Windows Phone was a disaster. Elop used some nonsense justification that Android would be a 'failure to differentiate'.
Ultimately though, I take a different view about what the real strategy was. The Nokia board had seen their phones business drop in value from around $120b to around a third of that. They wanted to get out, whilst there was still something left to sell. Choosing Windows Phone effectively saddled Microsoft with the risk too (a joint future), and at that point it was obvious they would have buy the unit entirely in time. Elop wasn't a Trojan horse, the Nokia board saw Microsoft flailing in phones and used their riches to get out.
It's sad because Nokia could have been an Android powerhouse. Particularly getting in early, with really interesting hardware innovation. But someone wanted to cash out. They weren't happy to risk having a phone business worth not 40bn but nothing at all.