Comment by jayceedenton

If anyone wants to know what it was like at the time, for SWEs working anywhere in Nokia's phone division, this post captures it perfectly.

People sometimes think that we can see Android was the right route only with hindsight. No, every engineer at the time knew that Android was the right way to go and that there was huge opportunity for Nokia there. Sure enough, in the following years we all had to read reviews of Nokia's phone that always concluded: "The handset is fantastic, if only it was running Android". I won't bother going into all the reasons that Windows Phone was a disaster. Elop used some nonsense justification that Android would be a 'failure to differentiate'.

Ultimately though, I take a different view about what the real strategy was. The Nokia board had seen their phones business drop in value from around $120b to around a third of that. They wanted to get out, whilst there was still something left to sell. Choosing Windows Phone effectively saddled Microsoft with the risk too (a joint future), and at that point it was obvious they would have buy the unit entirely in time. Elop wasn't a Trojan horse, the Nokia board saw Microsoft flailing in phones and used their riches to get out.

It's sad because Nokia could have been an Android powerhouse. Particularly getting in early, with really interesting hardware innovation. But someone wanted to cash out. They weren't happy to risk having a phone business worth not 40bn but nothing at all.