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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

Phone hardware was always a bad fit for microsoft. They always saw it as a vehicle for making a platform play, but to make good phones you have to see it as an end unto itself. The phone is the business you are in, not the platform that the phone happens to run on.

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Agreed that Microsoft saw it more as an accessory to Windows PCs, at least early on. However, ultimately WP lost because it was too late. iOS and Android were too much ahead. Exactly why it was such a catastrophic mistake for Nokia to go with WP over Android "because it was different."

Not saying that Android would've necessarily saved Nokia's crown in the smartphone market, or even saved it as a company, but I do think it would've been a smarter strategic play than going with WP. And the only reason I'm even saying that is because Nokia did a ton of mistakes on its own, before it even had to make that choice - like waiting until it was too late to make the decision, or neglecting the Maemo platform, and so on.

Also, Nokia didn't have to choose between Microsoft and Google. They could have done both, like Samsung did.

In terms of attracting programmers, Android could be programmed on Mac, Windows or Linux. A developer account was a one-time fee of $25. Apps needed no approval.

Windows Phone had to be programmed on Windows. A developer account cost $100 a year or so. Apps went through an approval process. Not that different than Apple, but Apple was first to market with a modern smartphone and could get away with this.

Nokia couldn't do what Samsung did. They lacked factories for NANDs, CPUs, RAM, screens, camera sensors.

I think Nokia could have done both Symbian and Maemo and even something else still (if the leadership had not been complacent). But that is all water under the bridge.

They tried to improve Symbian - I've got their latest and greatest Symbian device, the 808 and it's a joke.

Even if they could do Maemo, there would've been no apps - Microsoft failed to attract enough devs, given that there were already 10M .NET devs out there.

Actually, Nokia as a company is doing rather well. Just the handset business was rebooted.

Actually Nokia market cap is 30G, while Apple's 750G, 90% of which is "the handset business".

Sure, but a 30G company is still not exactly small.

Nokia's cap was 300G at one time, it was bigger than Apple when the iPhone came out and it was the leader on the booming smartphone market. They lost a lot of value, fired a lot of people, lost their biggest market - which is not "doing rather well" for a publicly traded business ...

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