I don't think so. Nokia got $7.2 billion from Microsoft for a loss-making device business. Nokia still exists today and swallowed Alcatel-Lucent last year.
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.
Either way, how was the unit worth $7.2 billion in 2013 to anyone? Why did Microsoft pay such ridiculous money for a loss-making business, only to essentially burn it down over the next two years? From April 2014, when the deal was finalized, to May 2016, when the last employees are being laid off, the damage Microsoft incurred from this deal amount to about $1.8 million per HOUR of business. Did they really think they could pull off some magic trick to make Windows Phone fly, or were they bound by some backroom deal to buy the phone business at set price in case it started to weight down on Nokia?
It was driven by Ballmer's ego more than a rational plan.
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.
Maybe, as Pavlov suggested, this was part of the deal - that MS would have to pay at least $7.2bn for the phone business if Windows on Nokia didn't work out.
Nokia had far better industrial design, logistics, marketing and brand recognition than any current Android manufacturer.
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.
What were they indeed thinking when they decided to turn Android down? I fully agree with your points about Nokia's strengths. My understanding is that they decided to go with Microsoft because going aboard Google would be entering a "race to bottom": they thought Android manufacturers can not differentiate themselves, and are essentially reduced to minions which compete to make cheap hardware to run Google's ecosystem. They thought all Android manufacturers would see diminishing profits, and only Chinese vendors would probably remain in the long term.
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.
Their was a time when they could have competet with their own software. Maemo was great back in 2009 and if they had continue to push it, it could have been a viable alternative.
It is clear that at this point that in 2013 Nokia was in such a bad situation, getting $7,2 billion for the handset business was a very good deal for Nokia. Nokia Chairman of Board Risto Siilasmaa has been hailed as a saviour and a magician for orchestrating it.
The interesting question is, what would have happened if Nokia had gone the Android route in 2011 instead of Windows Phone.
For the view that it would have been better without Microsoft, I'd recommend Tomi Ahonen's blog.
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.
Are you kidding me? Both BB10 and Harmattan/Meego were far ahead of iOS and Android when they were released. There's a lot of arguments you can make, but they both have created modern OS's. People think of BBOS and Symbian but they were in the roadmap to be replaced.
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.
It's questionable whether QNX has any advantages over a Linux kernel anymore, and BB10's application APIs were unremarkable. I've used Meego, and it's a nice tablet Linux, but it has nothing like the userland innovation of Android, with a unified managed language runtime for both apps and system middleware. Both Android and iOS created new app APIs, and new UI/graphics stacks on top of open source kernels, and new multimedia stacks. They both went much farther than "a nice tablet Linux."
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.
