Being a Nokia fan i never thought it will come to this that one day i will write an article criticizing Nokia and the mistakes they made which led to there decline, but one thing history teaches us is that even the most power full of kingdoms fall, and the bigger they are the harder they fall.
The innovations Nokia made in the smartphone world can never be forgotten, Nokia defined the term smartphone with there Symbian operating system and the first ever Camera Equipped smartphone Nokia 7650 in early 2000s, smartphones were not the only area Nokia shined in, Low end phones market was also dominated by Nokia, Who can forget the ever lasting Nokia 3310 which some claims to be the strongest phone ever made, Nokia 1100, Nokia 1112, Nokia 1202, Nokia 1280..... These phones were sold in billions and were cheap enough to be afforded by poor people.
They remained the leading smartphone manufacturer in from 2003 to 2008, between this period they experimented with new form factors(Communicator devices, Nokia 7710, Nokia 7280, Nokia 7373, N-gage Series) , new operating systems (Series 90, Series80, Meego), They even introduced some of the best hardware in imaging (Nokia N82, Nokia N8) although SonyEricsson was a strong competitor with there Cybershot camera phones.
By the end of 2007 Nokia owned 40% World smartphone market shares which means that every 4 out of 10 mobiles sold were Nokia, this was also the same quarter when Apple introduced there iPhone.
The problem begin when other companies got into play and introduced there operating systems which offered some amazing features, although Nokia also had touchscreen smartphones by then but they used the same old Symbian S60, Nokia needed to evolve by this time which they did not, they kept rolling the same decade old OS in there touch screen phones, not to mention resistive touch screens, Apple took full advantage and year after year introduced New Iphones which offered some amazing capacitive multitouchscreens and fluid UI.
The things got worse for Nokia when google came storming with there Android OS.
Around the end of first decade we could already see the trend that nokia shares started to fall and Apple's picking up pace in world smartphone market shares.
Nokia went through a lot of changes, they had to make some tough decisions now but that wasn't easy with the new CEO Stephen Elop (Former Microsoft Executive) and the falling market shares, Elope had lots of options here some of which were
- Invest in development and evolution of Symbian
- Go with Android OS
- Go with Windows Mobile OS (which according to me was worst of the three)
Somehow Elop decided to go with Windows Mobile, He also decided to ultimately drop symbian support by the end of 2014 which was a bad move considering millions of people who were still using Symbian had to abandon it due to no future.
Nokia should have trusted in there own operating system and shouldve invested in the overhaul of Symbian operating system. The decision of going with Windows Mobile have led them no where even though the hardware is quite nice both Lumia 800 and Lumia 900 are some of the best built phones but that was not enough to be a success in the market dominated by Android and iOS, windows mobile might need more time and developers support to expand its application database but at the moment its no where near Android & iOS
According to NASDA Market survey by the end of 2012 Android will own 60% smartphone market share most of which is dominated by Samsung.
Nokia seriously needs to go through there Future Plan, they still have the potential to innovate, like they recently did with the pureview technology in there Nokia 808 41Mega Pixel Camera phone which i doubt will be huge success due to its Symbian Operating System but still its quite an innovation in camera phone world.
