http://stratechery.com/2013/blackberry-and-nokias-fundamental-failing/
BLACKBERRY – AND NOKIA’S – FUNDAMENTAL FAILING
Nokia should have adopted Android-stock, and used their unmatched supply chain and distribution to do to their competitors, well, exactly what Nokia had been doing to their competitors for the last decade (if you think Samsung is running roughshod over everyone today, in 2007 they could only manage 41 million phones compared to Nokia’s 110 million3).
As an aside, a few months ago Stephen Elop came up with a new reason why Nokia was right to choose Windows Phone:
This is revisionist ******** of the first degree. Had Nokia gone with Android, and the result had been one dominant player, it very likely would have been Nokia. More likely it would have been Nokia in first, Samsung in second, and everyone else fighting over scraps.
Both BlackBerry and Nokia would have gotten a good OS and thriving ecosystem for free and been able to compete and differentiate themselves on the exact same vectors they had previously. To put it another way, RIM and Nokia had never been successful because of their OS or ecosystem, yet both decided their best response to iOS and Android was to build a new OS!
In fact, the strategic superiority of the Android option for RIM and Nokia was even then so obvious that I suspect their core failing was not so much strategic as it was all-too-human: pride. Owning an ecosystem seems much more important than owning services or supply chains, even if building said ecosystem completely devalues what you’re actually good at.
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Nokia got Samsung dominated in 2010 (100 million smartphones to 23 million smartphones). Yet, 1 month later
On 11 February 2011, Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop, a former head of Microsoft business division, unveiled a new strategic alliance with Microsoft, and announced it would replace Symbian and the MeeGo project with Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system.
Who was stronger on February 2011?
Nokia
or
Samsung
BLACKBERRY – AND NOKIA’S – FUNDAMENTAL FAILING
Nokia should have adopted Android-stock, and used their unmatched supply chain and distribution to do to their competitors, well, exactly what Nokia had been doing to their competitors for the last decade (if you think Samsung is running roughshod over everyone today, in 2007 they could only manage 41 million phones compared to Nokia’s 110 million3).
As an aside, a few months ago Stephen Elop came up with a new reason why Nokia was right to choose Windows Phone:
This is revisionist ******** of the first degree. Had Nokia gone with Android, and the result had been one dominant player, it very likely would have been Nokia. More likely it would have been Nokia in first, Samsung in second, and everyone else fighting over scraps.
Both BlackBerry and Nokia would have gotten a good OS and thriving ecosystem for free and been able to compete and differentiate themselves on the exact same vectors they had previously. To put it another way, RIM and Nokia had never been successful because of their OS or ecosystem, yet both decided their best response to iOS and Android was to build a new OS!
In fact, the strategic superiority of the Android option for RIM and Nokia was even then so obvious that I suspect their core failing was not so much strategic as it was all-too-human: pride. Owning an ecosystem seems much more important than owning services or supply chains, even if building said ecosystem completely devalues what you’re actually good at.
-------------------------------------
Nokia got Samsung dominated in 2010 (100 million smartphones to 23 million smartphones). Yet, 1 month later
On 11 February 2011, Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop, a former head of Microsoft business division, unveiled a new strategic alliance with Microsoft, and announced it would replace Symbian and the MeeGo project with Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system.
Who was stronger on February 2011?
Nokia
or
Samsung
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