I think the biggest mistake was adopting Windows as their OS. It negated any technical advantages they could have over Android.

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toast0 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've written lots of comments, but Windows Phone 7.5 and 8 worked pretty well on low end hardware; much better than Android on similar hardware. If Windows Mobile 10 had continued that trend and delivered on the promise of all WP8 phones being upgradable to WM10, things would be different now.

Microsoft also made some big mistakes IMHO; having a terrible browser and a terrible app marketplace doesn't work: mobile IE was garbage, mobile Edge had a better renderer but worse UX, and they prohibited other browsers at least initialy (Firefox wanted to make an internal port, but were told no thanks). The way they managed APIs for apps led to multiple generations of apps and developers noped out at each stage; WinCE -> WP7 -> WP8 -> WM10 all wanted significant reworking, and WP8.1 wanted a minor reworking. A lot of WinCE apis were available in WP7, but Microsoft wouldn't tell you and wouldn't be happy if you did it. You could run WP7 apps in WP8, but to get new features you had to do the rework and distribute two separate apps. Same for WP8.1, but now you had 3 apps. And again for WM10 ... with the bonus that if you had a WP8 app installed when you upgraded to WM10 there was a 50% chance it wouldn't launch after the upgrade. Apple sometimes did some of this, but major OS upgrades usually applied to all phones, and their users upgrade regularly. Android generally puts backports in the jetpack library so you can build for the newer APIs but still work everywhere.

Of course, Microsoft should have understood the importance of backwards compatibility from their decades of experience on PCs... but they were in full forget about everything mode. :P

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afavour 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm not so sure. There will always be viable alternative histories of course but their existing Symbian OS was already long in the tooth and would have required a lot of work to catch up to the smartphone world and I'm just not convinced they had it in them.

Arguably they should have just gone with Android, and it's easy to say that in hindsight. But Android was a horrible mess in its 2.x era, Windows Phone seemed like a genuinely interesting alternative. Until Microsoft repeatedly messed the whole thing up.

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TFNA 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Today the vast majority of people I know rarely use the browser on their phones. They interact with the internet through apps from various walled gardens, and even for news on the open web they are likely to install someone's app. Windows wouldn't have stood a chance if app development became so quickly an iOS/Android duoply.

Same goes for Nokia's Maemo and Meego. We nerds loved those OSs for being full-blown computer OSs, but the general public doesn't want a full-blown OS, they want a bunch of icons to corporate apps.

	▲	afavour 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Windows wouldn't have stood a chance if app development became so quickly an iOS/Android duoply. That was always the problem. But IMO Microsoft were probably the company best placed to compete there, given the existing developer mindshare they had. But they just messed it up, over and over. Incredibly to look back on, really.

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5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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qwytw 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Arguably they should have just gone with Android,

It's not obvious Nokia could have realistically competed with the East Asian phone manufacturers for more than a few years. It was/is a very low margin market with very cutthroat competition.

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VulgarExigency 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As others have said, they had Maemo/Meego. As the owner of a N900 myself, it was really good, but they decided not to bet on it for some inexplicable reason.

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afavour 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I think the reason was a lack of thriving app ecosystem. Microsoft seemed like a much better bet in that regard, they just messed it up in incredible ways.

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seba_dos1 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Microsoft was a horrible bet in that regard. Maemo was a natural development platform for many products (just straight out of my head: Mozilla, VMware and Rovio have all chosen it organically), to the point where there was plenty of notable stuff that was first developed on Nokia N900 and ported to Android/iOS afterwards, but only officially released for iOS and Android because Maemo was already abandoned as a consumer platform. Windows Phone had no such gravitational pull at all and its lack of software eventually became an internet meme.

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afavour 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not convinced by that. If Maemo was a natural fit then Microsoft surely was equally so, given they already had Windows Mobile. They also had a large army of developers familiar with Microsoft APIs and the financial backing a large tech company can provide (IIRC MS literally paid people to make apps for Windows Phone). That's the kind of thing you'd need to catch up in an app library race you're already losing.

Yeah, we can look back in retrospect and say it was an obvious failure but that's because of the various insane choices MS made over the years. In the moment I'd argue the decision was nowhere near as clear cut.

	▲	seba_dos1 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		They had no developers familiar with these Microsoft APIs as Windows Phone was starting from scratch with new APIs that were incompatible with neither Win32 nor Windows Mobile. The only thing that could save them that they were betting on was that these new APIs were also made available on desktops, but were pretty much ignored by developers there as well and ended up largely replaced with an even newer set of technologies. Compare that with Maemo, where both GTK+ and Qt were first class citizens and which had an army of developers familiar with Unix and X11 before Maemo even existed.

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merelydev 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think that's their biggest mistake. Their downfall was because they where mainly a hardware company without any network effects. Customers could easily switch from Nokia to any other hardware without an issue.

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TheOtherHobbes 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No, their biggest mistake was having no clue what they were doing or, why.

Nokia were a tech slop factory - one new model roughly every two weeks, with no obvious strategy or rationale, many only superficially different.

Every so often they'd produce a classic that was ahead of its time, like the Communicator series, then by the time the surrounding infra had caught up they'd moved on and allowed a competitor to eat that space.

iPhone and Android were both killing them, and they had no idea how to respond.

Elop was the undertaker, and much hated for reasonable reasons. But the brand was already a zombie by that point.