[Geee]

Nokia doesn't have money any more to develop Android phones on their own. They don't even have money to continue with WP strategy on their own. Elop spent billions of Nokia's money to boot Windows Phone and restructure the operation as a Microsoft division. It was 'all in' with Nokia's money.

[Mikeb85]

> Nokia doesn't have money any more to develop Android phones on their own. They don't even have money to continue with WP strategy on their own.

They actually do. If you were to check their quarterly reports you'd see they have plenty of cash...

[adventured]

Not accurate. They're flush with cash.

End of fiscal 2010, they had $16.4 billion in cash.

Today they have $12 billion in cash. With zero long term liabilities.

They have drastically more money than they would need to remake their business and target Android.

If it didn't work, that might be the last shot they get at it however.

[Danieru]

To be fair if I was Nokia and wanted to save myself this microsoft deal would still make sense. It all depends on the contract terms.

Sell the smartphone division, aka Windows Phone division, to Microsoft. You get rid of Elop and still scavenge a portion of the money poured into WP. Then start a new smartphone division leveraging Android. On the employees front most of your best former designers and engineers are still local just working for Jolla or Intel. Buy Jolla for the hardware designer then partner with Intel and get help on the engineering front. Hype the hardware at some consumer electronics conference and try hiring back the few of your best engineers which stayed and were included in the Microsoft deal.

Boom, you now have Daniel's untested and high risk plan for an Android Nokia. Please vote for me as the next Nokia CEO.

[Geee]

This is quite plausible scenario, if that's what they want. The truth is that the smartest engineers have jumped ship a long time ago anyway to the network division or other companies, and rest of them will leave soon.

Most of what Microsoft bought was truly just dead weight and Elop. Also, the deal included just the employees and Nokia brand licensing, not patents or other valuable IP, so it's not comparable to Google/Motorola deal, which was mostly about patents.

The 'new' Nokia will soon release their new strategy, that'll be interesting. They have already released information that they will stay in 'device business' although they can't release phone products until 2016.

[Zigurd]

Nokia has, at least, the resources to operate its infrastructure division. There have been sorrier messes in the mobile OEM business.

Nokia has Android ready to go on existing devices. Bringing up Android isn't rocket surgery. You would have to ask the Jolla people how much it would cost to put Sailfish on existing devices. I bet their answer would be under $10M.

In other words, claims that Nokia had to "focus" on one OS due to costs were bunk then and they are bunk now. Lots of newcomer OS are hitting the market and the costs to try them are low enough that many OEMs will sell Tizen and Firefox OS devices just to test market acceptance. Nobody will spend so much they bet the farm.

[throwawaykf02]

I'm not sure that was bunk in Nokia's case. When they realized that Symbian had to go, they also realized that the vast bulk of the company was organized around that one OS. And if sources are to be believed, most of that deadweight was fiefdoms jealously guarded by entrenched groups, which meant they were not going to be conducive to "pivot" to a new direction. Now they had to shed that humongous deadweight and produce a competitive "modern" smartphone. I think it's entirely possible that in that situation whatever resources you have left, you may well have no choice but to bet the farm.

Nokia may have used Android to force Microsoft into a buyout, but I doubt they were going to seriously pursue it, for one big reason: that would have entailed compulsorily licensing Google Maps, which is a direct competitor to their own mapping division. You may think that doesn't sound so bad, but consider this:

1) It dilutes the billions they paid for Navteq.

2) As the SkyHook lawsuits have shown us(IIRC) Google demands all location data produced by Android devices to improve their own geo services. As such, Nokia would have ended up building devices that end up improving a competing service.

3) Considering the mapping division is one of only three divisions Nokia held on to, it's undoubtedly important to them long term. I am not sure, in their eyes, the pros of having an Android phone out there would have outweighed the cons of improving a competing mapping service.

[Zigurd]

Re Skyhook: Google has made no such demand on any OEM. Google demanded Moto not replace Google location services with Skyhook. Many Android phones have shipped with, e.g. Verizon's location services and maps.

Based on what has appeared in commerce, you can run, and preload if you are an OEM, any competing service on an Android device. But Google draws the line at denying Google data from their own apps. Seems reasonable.

[objclxt]

> you can run, and preload if you are an OEM, any competing service on an Android device. Seems reasonable.

...that's only kind of true. OEM's who are members of the Open Handset Alliance are prohibited from producing devices which run forked versions of Android. This is why Amazon has so much trouble finding manufacturing partners to produce Kindle devices.

So OEMs can load competing services onto Google supported Android devices. They cannot produce devices which run flavors of Android not supported by Google. This seems less reasonable.

[throwawaykf02]

This link, which goes into some detail about the Skyhook lawsuit, paints a starkly different picture:

http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-la...

Google may have allowed Verizon and AT&T maps because, of course, they are the ultimate gatekeepers. But they still demand data for their own services and forbade SkyHook completely. The article lays it all out.

In light of that, your point agrees with mine: Google did not allow denying their apps with data, which sounds reasonable for Google. But for Nokia that would be selling phones that improved the service of a direct competitor. Google certainly forbade SkyHook from getting any data, so very likely Nokia faced the same problem, which would have meant they'd be giving Google data without being able to use it themselves.

[Zigurd]

I have read the available Skyhook litigation documents in detail, and I have worked with multiple location services APIs in Android and other mobile devices. I don't want to argue about every point in detail, but Google isn't demanding location data from other location/mapping/location-services stacks. If you really have you own whole location ecosystem, as Nokia does, Google won't go after you because you could make a good case that is, in fact, anti-competitive in an illegal kind of way. So I do not think "But for Nokia that would be selling phones that improved the service of a direct competitor." is correct. The Skyhook case is about changing the way the Android location APIs work, and those are NOT part of AOSP.

Bottom line, though, if you stepped outside of Google's constraints, like replacing the Android location service internals with Skyhook and keeping the data to yourself, Andy Rubin would personally leave a horse's head in your bed. The article says "Skyhook claims Google uses the threat of incompatibility to act anti-competitively." Which is the less nice way of saying if you don't follow Google's rules, whether or not they are spelled out in any contract, they will make it impossible for you to sell Android-based products with Google's ecosystem. Whether that is actually anti-competitive, is, of course, the subject of that litigation.

One thing Andy Rubin knew is that carriers can be dicks, and being a dick to carriers and their OEM partners, to the point of threatening with losing access to Android products is something he did not feel apologetic about. He learned that at Danger.

It's too bad Skyhook ended up in the middle of that. I have my own stories to tell about OEMs afraid to use interesting technologies because of the AFA, and the way Google used it. Some people think Google's behavior is similar to a case where a mainframe software maker got RICO'ed for bundling.