Nokia is Back, Sort Of, But Let’s Not Rewrite History

Nokia will formally re-enter the smartphone market in early 2017 with a family of Android-based handsets. But make no mistake: This is not the Nokia of old.

More important, had Nokia chosen Android over Windows phone in 2011, it would have failed even faster than it did. So let's get that bit of revisionist nonsense out of the way.

Nokia was once the largest maker of phones, and smartphones, in the world. But like so many companies of its ilk---we can count Microsoft, Motorola, Palm, RIM/Blackberry and many others here---Nokia stumbled badly in responding to the iPhone and then never recovered. In Nokia's case, this involved sticking with its outdated Symbian OS for too long, belatedly starting a project called Meego to replace it, and basically believing that just being Nokia gave it the edge it needed over Apple.

Nope.

Three years too late, Nokia finally hired an outsider, Stephen Elop, to clean up its mess. What Elop found was a company mired in the past, and he penned his infamous "Burning Platform" memo---and leaked it to the press---in a bid to convince the company that it needed a drastic change in order to survive, let alone thrive. It was already too late, of course, the damage having already been done by Nokia's slow-moving and insular CEOs of the past and a hubris-laden corporate culture that led employees to believe they could do no wrong.

Elop deserves credit for quickly identifying what was wrong with Nokia and then moving decisively to try and fix the problems.

His first big decision was to choose a next-generation mobile platform. He scrapped Meego, and correctly determined that Android was a non-starter, noting that had Nokia chosen Google's platform, it would have been lost in a sea of Android-based smartphones. "The single most important word is 'differentiation'," he later said, explaining his decision. "Entering the Android environment late, we knew we would have a hard time differentiating."

So Elop chose Windows phone. Looked at with hindsight, many revisionists and Nokia loyalists claim this was the wrong decision. But Windows phone was a Hail Mary Pass for a company that was already living on borrowed time, and it was Nokia's only shot at succeeding. Aside from the technical and design promises that came with choosing Windows phone, Nokia could benefit from financial help from Microsoft. And as a partner in the development of the OS, Nokia could actual impact Windows phone at a deeper level than any company outside of Microsoft. It was, in short, the right decision because it was the only decision that could have saved Nokia.

(The theory that Elop, a former Microsoft executive, was a "Trojan Horse" sent to Nokia to force Windows phone on it is disproven by the fact that the entire management organization at the company made the platform decision collectively. That said, there is little doubt that Elop's close relationship with Microsoft's upper management made this deal easier to swal...