this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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Nokia had great hardware, but crappy software (and I say that as a heavy Series 60 user back in the day). In a parallel world, Windows Mobile could have ridden that hardware to a glorious future, but it was transparent that Elop's acquisition was just part of a Byzantine internal Microsoft play.
Well, the annoying part is that the burning platform talked by Elop was Maemo/Meego, which was full Linux. Without Elop and Microsoft we would have pure Linux running on phones today. Now we are stuck between two closed source OS for phones.
It was running Qt, so basically any KDE app would be portable on it quite easily.
I was working with Maemo and Qt Symbian in Nokia while this happened, and it makes me sad.
Maybe... like I mentioned, Nokia's S60 application stack was a mess. The underlying phone software and platform might have been there, but the 3rd party ecosystem wasn't. This was a huge part of the success of the iPhone, that 3rd party developers had a stable platform to develop for, and a steady financial partner (Apple) paying them.
No offense against Nokia but I really don't think the company had the mentality to offer that.
I think this is correct.
Nokia managed to push Ericsson out of their dominant position because Nokia were more of a consumer products company, including consumer electronics. But because Nokia did phones as consumer electronics, they didn't think about them in terms of a platform and had a poor position to compete with smart phones. Their best bet would probably have been to make hardware that ran Android, and at the time I was a bit surprised that they didn't. Their hardware reputation was stellar.
Elop's and Microsoft's actions were still scummy, though from Nokia's perspective they sold a failing part of their business for billions. Microsoft of course continued to run the phone sales into the ground.
when I started work at Ericsson Australia in late 2000, they'd found out that a third of Australian employees had Nokias, lol. So they bought everyone an Ericsson with a company plan! My first mobile! I hated it so much.