The Decline and Fall of Nokia
Journalistic account of the Elop years and the Microsoft deal.
Summary
David Cord, a business journalist based in Finland, wrote this account of how Nokia went from holding roughly forty per cent of the global mobile phone market to selling its handset business to Microsoft in 2013.
The narrative covers the company's earlier transformation from a conglomerate with paper, rubber and cable businesses into a mobile phone maker; the period of dominance through the late 1990s and 2000s; the failure to respond effectively to the iPhone in 2007 and to Android afterward; the Symbian operating system and its accumulating technical problems; the internal organisational conflicts, particularly between the divisions responsible for hardware and software; the appointment of Stephen Elop in 2010, his memorandum describing the company as standing on a burning platform, and the decision to adopt Windows Phone rather than Android; and the sale to Microsoft.
Cord's reporting draws on interviews with Nokia employees and executives. His account emphasises that Nokia's engineers had built touchscreen and internet-capable prototypes years before the iPhone and that the organisation could not bring them to market, which locates the failure in structure and decision-making rather than in technology. The book is journalistic and Finnish-sourced, and readers should note that the Windows Phone decision remains contested. It stops before Nokia's later network equipment business, which is what the company now is.
Key takeaways 7
- Nokia's engineers built touchscreen and internet-capable prototypes years before the iPhone and the organisation did not bring them to market.
- Symbian's technical debt made each new feature slower to develop than the last, which compounded the response delay.
- Internal conflict between hardware and software organisations prevented the company from committing to a single direction.
- Market share dominance produced an organisational confidence that treated the iPhone as a niche product for years.
- The decision to adopt Windows Phone rather than Android eliminated the option of competing on the platform that won.
- Elop's burning platform memorandum destroyed demand for existing Symbian devices before the replacements existed.
- Cord argues that Nokia's failure was organisational rather than technological, since the technology existed inside the company.
Who should read it
Operators and investors studying incumbent failure in technology who want a detailed account of an organisation that had the technology and could not ship it.
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