I wonder how it would have played out for Nokia if Microsoft had not bought them. Rather better in some ways I'd imagine.
It's hard to imagine a better outcome for Nokia than Microsoft buying the phone albatross in 2013. I honestly believe that it was part of a contingency plan that had made Nokia's board approve the Windows Phone plan -- that Ballmer basically promised a buyout in case WP doesn't fly. (I don't have evidence of this, but clearly Ballmer really, really wanted Nokia's phones and Nadella really, really doesn't.)
In the alternate universe where Nokia's board decided to go with Android instead of Windows, I think they would have ended up as a kind of European HTC or Sony in the Android market. And in that scenario the Nokia phone unit wouldn't have been worth $7.2 billion either.
They imagined they could speed time to market for devices by eliminating frictions inherent in being 2 companies working on 1 product (and as an employee I can say there were indeed inescapable frictions). But ultimately it couldn't get around the core problem: (almost) nobody wants a Windows Phone.
If they had carried out that switch (and survived in the short term - they were on the brink of bankruptcy at the time), Nokia would be doing pretty well nowadays.
I think their situation is somewhat similar to Sony. Sony is also well-recognised electronics brand globally. But Sony pushes on with its 'premium' Android smartphone brand (Xperia).
Xperia is the closest you can come to a Nokia-like Android phone these days: it has a great physical build, good camera and excellent battery life. The pre-installed apps seem like they were carefully selected unlike with Samsung phones.
Sony's mobile division is not doing super-well, but it's not a disaster either. I'm myself a proud owner of a Xperia Z3 device and will likely also buy my next smartphone from Sony. I keep wondering, is the existence of a 'premium' Android manufacturer really an oxymoron, like Nokia's management in 2013 predicted?
PS. Nokia is doing pretty well nowadays, though not as a handset manufacturer.
I say this as an unfortunate shareholder.
you mean Nadella?
The interesting question is, what would have happened if Nokia had gone the Android route in 2011 instead of Windows Phone.
I agree with him to the extent that, in hindsight, it would be hard to make more destructive management decisions than what actually happened. The people inside Nokia often seemed to be trapped in a nightmare. It was a sad, hollowed-out place well before it was sold to Microsoft. Stephen Elop killed several projects that would have provided alternatives to Windows Phone. Nothing was allowed to encroach on that failing product.
All that said, Nokia had missed the boat in modern smartphone OSs, much in the way Blackberry had done. There is no guarantee they would have found a good answer on their own.
Where they failed it was assuming their market leads at the time would allow them to take their time deploying a solid OS while the app ecosystems for iOS and android blew up. By the time they shipped it became a question of where they fit in the world anymore.
While Nokia had the resources to succeed in smartphones, and a unique market position with S40 that would have been even stronger but for some of Elop's decisions, I don't think one can claim Meego would have been a slam-dunk. None of the efforts to mobile-ize Linux that have been short of the kind of rethink of the userland that went into Android have gone very far. Tizen, Jolla, Meego, and Canonical's mobile products are all variations on the theme of incremental changes to Linux, all with about the same outcomes.