> It’s interesting to see how Nokia succumbed to the bad strategy that had almost killed Apple in ‘97.
Well, here is one take;
> Nokia’s ultimate fall can be put down to internal politics. In short, Nokia people weakened Nokia people and thus made the company increasingly vulnerable to competitive forces. When fear permeated all levels, the lower rungs of the organisation turned inward to protect resources, themselves and their units, giving little away, fearing harm to their personal careers. Top managers failed to motivate the middle managers with their heavy-handed approaches and they were in the dark with what was really going on. [1]
Well, the Linux based Maemo OS I had in 2005 0r 2006 on my Nokia 770 was already promising, although the hardware was quite slow and limited, but it was an open system one would have root access to out of the box. Then it evolved into Meego, which was even better and was then employed by the Nokia N9. Nokia already had the OS to transition to from the old Symbian, but after the Microsoft deal, they scrapped it to adopt Windows Mobile, and the rest is history.
Maemo and MeeGo and other Nokia OSs were more coherent than Microsoft's phone OSs at the time, and Symbian would have had a long life on cheap devices. Smartphones were expensive back then.
In the UK there was a brief period from 2009-2011 where everyone seemed to replace their Nokia with a Blackberry before iPhones became common (BBM was a big thing)
I can remember one Christmas, perhaps 2010, where my Facebook feed was just folks posting their BBM pins. Ah, what a throwback.
In retrospect, a better idea than giving out your phone number as WhatsApp requires. And indeed, people were more willing to share BBM pins than phone numbers.
In the UK + US they did.. In the EU, Nokia was king, but there were many other brands and OSes (windows mobile). Japan always had a different market though.
Nokia was still a large player, but was loosing ground.
Android at the time (the betas) resembled blackberry, and didn't feature any touch capabilities.
Right after the iPhone was released, Android changed its UI.
Nokia was globally dominant until 2010, when Android started rapidly eating its market share.
Japan and the US were both countries with their own weird mobile phone markets. The US market was not as relevant in the 2000s as it should have been. Mobile phone adoption was lower than in Europe and the plans were ridiculously expensive, mostly because of the dominant business model. The plan was the primary product and the phone was a generic device locked to the plan, making the market uninteresting for phone manufacturers.
I don't know if I've ever seen a Blackberry phone knowing that it's a Blackberry phone. Blackberries always sounded like the Atari ST: a device you constantly heard about but never saw in the real world. And when I saw some statistics much later, I was surprised how popular it had been in the US.
Not really. It was the Nokia board that wanted to be taken over. They were looking for a mark, and Microsoft walked right into it. Nokia dropped the phone division on Microsoft and Microsoft then had to write it down.
Well, here is one take;
> Nokia’s ultimate fall can be put down to internal politics. In short, Nokia people weakened Nokia people and thus made the company increasingly vulnerable to competitive forces. When fear permeated all levels, the lower rungs of the organisation turned inward to protect resources, themselves and their units, giving little away, fearing harm to their personal careers. Top managers failed to motivate the middle managers with their heavy-handed approaches and they were in the dark with what was really going on. [1]
[1] https://alumnimagazine.insead.edu/who-killed-nokia-nokia-did...