The Rise and Fall of Nokia

<blockquote><a href="#290179"><em>In reply to ghostrider:</em></a></blockquote><p>Agreed. Adopting windows as their mobile platform turned their decline to free fall. </p><p>Many will support the <em>Nokia was dying before msft bought them</em> narrative, but anyone can recognize the fallacy that killing is different than potentially letting die.</p><p><br></p><p>Another interesting aspect in msft's inflexible and mono-cultural approach to the acquisition is that, while competitors (like apple and google) acquired companies with the goal of successfully integrating their operating systems (NeXT, Android Inc, etc), msft acquired Nokia and immediately and completely extinguished everything they had in order to clear the path for windows.</p><p><br></p><p>I believe the above is really insightful, especially in the case of windows. In a company where windows was supposed to be a cohesive project (one metro, modern, universal UI – UX, etc), it really was a fragmented mess, run by different teams, siloed in their little echo chambers, completely hostile to any kind of external influence.</p><p><br></p><p>This really goes a long way to show their inability to turn an acquisition into a productive and meaningful collaboration that goes both ways. They literally bought Nokia, stripped them of anything they had and used them as a shell to market a failing OS (windows).</p>