A legend on life support

It must be said that Nokia is not in danger of going bankrupt, at least not yet. It has four billion euros in cash in its accounts, so it can withstand a half-billion quarterly loss for some time. That’s for the pessimists. Other scenarios are more likely.

On the one hand, it is technically understandable why Nokia needs almost a year to be able to offer phones with WP7. It needs to adapt a hardware platform that Nokia has never worked with before, as well as a whole range of programs, from synchronization to Ovi services and Maps, so it’s probably obvious why Nokia didn’t unveil prototypes of its WP7 phone in February and put them on the market in March. But in doing so, it effectively cleared the field for a year. There is no business logic for such a brutal move, and the company felt the impact in its results.

On the other hand, it must also be said that Nokia did not have many options. Its own development of Symbian and MeeGo has not yet led to a successful outcome; Nokia was clearly not a good development company. It was very good at suppressing competition with money, which is why it scored points against weak competitors such as Palm, but it simply did not have a good modern system. Buy one? There was nowhere to buy one: Palm had been bought by HP, RIM was still confident at that point, and the owners of Android and iOS were not selling. Products such as Limo were not to be taken seriously at that point. So the only options left were to license a mobile operating system or put maximum effort into in-house development. It’s no surprise that Elop chose the first option—no matter how much Finnish developers beat their chests today, they haven’t caught up with Android and iOS after so many years of lead, let alone now that Apple and Google are investing all their energy in both systems. It is also not surprising that Elop opted for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7. Leaving aside his ties to the company, a number of manufacturers had already jumped on the Android bandwagon and invested in its expansion, leaving Nokia with little chance of offering added value and remaining competitive.

It is not surprising that Elop chose WP7. What is baffling is the forcefulness with which he burned all bridges and sank sales of current and future Symbian and MeeGo phones at a time when he had nothing to replace them with. Yes, if shortly after the announcement the company had offered a trio of WP7 phones that could transfer data and settings from old to new phones via the supplied Ovi Suite, corporate customers would have mostly remained silent, and they are Nokia’s largest customer group.

But there was nothing to offer them.

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