Ex-Nokia employee here - I used to work directly for the CTO of Nokia. It's amazing, but unsurprising, to me the strength of Nokia's phone brand after all these years. There's a lot longer of a story to Nokia's decision not to use Android than most people realize. For example, Intel figured prominently, the Symbian vs. Maemo debate raged internally, discussions with Google were marred by massive cultural differences and arrogance on both sides. I'm surprised no one has written a book.
For what it's worth, Windows Phone was actually an amazing platform for both users and developers, and shows a fundamental rule of technology: There Is No Third Ecosystsm. The most dominant hardware maker (at the time) and software/os maker teamed up with a really great product, but couldn't break the established smartphone duopoly, even though it was only a few years old by that point. I wasn't a Microsoft fan by any stretch (the opposite actually), but even I agreed with the decision at the time, especially after using Windows Phone. First mover advantage is huge, and developers only have so much bandwidth.
Edit: Heh. Apparently someone did write a book. See comments below. Wow.
Wow. Thanks... That will probably help fill in a lot of missing blanks for me. (Actually, I'm not even sure I want to read it... Still a little bitter).
That was just the beginning. Once you are done go for "Smartphones and beyond - lessons from the remarkable rise and fall of Symbian". It's an 800-page tome from David Wood, who, according to the publisher, is "the only executive to remain on the Symbian leadership team throughout virtually the entirety of the company’s history".
> For what it's worth, Windows Phone was actually an amazing platform for both users and developers, and shows a fundamental rule of technology: There Is No Third Ecosystem
I don't think this is fundamental. Microsoft really dropped the ball on Windows 10 Mobile. Building a third ecosystem is very hard, and it's a long term commitment. Microsoft had made good inroads on cheap phones with reasonable performance, and they didn't follow through with that for W10M; instead they were focusing on flagship phones. Flagship phone buyers are a lot more discriminating about everything including OS polish, app marketplace, and upgrade experience (edit to add, and a browser that doesn't suck).
I owned Lumia 920 and 930. Hardware was good, I liked the OS. I eventually switched to iOS due to 3rd party app support. It was annoying when the apps you wanted to try were either not available or were lacking features.
In my view the app support killed the platform. It would have been impossible to fix. Even if Microsoft had paid for the development it would not have made sense for companies to spend time with WP versions for just a few users.
App support was problematic, in part because Microsoft kept coming up with new, incompatible ways to develop apps. Apps for WP7 could work on WP8 and W10M (except sometimes, when the app compat didn't work right on upgrade, and users had to wipe their phone and try again, and Microsoft never fixed it); but there was also a 'new way' to build apps for WP8 that was required for some features, and a new way to build 'universal' apps for W10M that didn't work on any of the other versions of Windows Phone. To say nothing of the apps for Windows Mobile 6 that were thrown away (despite WP7 still being Windows CE, but with a fancy skin).
It's one thing to build an app for a platform with not very many users; it's another to build three similar apps for three similar platforms that don't have very many users. This is something Microsoft should have done better, and falls in the camp of if you're going to be a third ecosystem, you have to be consistently good.
And that was basically what allowed iOS and Android to flourish. Microsoft already had an established platform with the PocketPC lineage (damn it, Opera Mobile originated on such devices!) and yet they dropped that like hot potato once the media started yakking about iPhones.
You would have thought that Microsoft of all companies understood the value of platforms, having maintained Win32 compatibility for a decade already at that point.
Similarly Nokia bought Trolltech for their Qt UI toolkit, because it would allow software to be developed that could be compiled for both Maemo and Symbian. But before that could be put into effect, the board panicked and brought in Elop (in large part because of American pension funds, apparently).
This is the reason progressive web apps are good investment. In future if a new mobile platform evolves, it only has to support PWAs and they will have thousands of apps.
The real crazy is that Microsoft, who you would have thought would have known better given their long Windows on desktop history, dropped all support for an established platform (PocketPC) to focus on the Phone7/8/10 stuff.
This more than anything was perhaps what allowed Apple and Google to take over, as it signaled to companies that Microsoft was not committed to support them for the long haul.
Not long after we started to see abominations like iPhones fitted with barcode scanner cases to handle warehouse inventorying!
The worst part I remember of developing for Windows Phone was that the development tools were superficially the same as for the new desktop API but not enough for any benefit. Specifically none of the UI code was portable.
Windows Phone 7 was horrible. No native apps, no background tasks, no globally accessible storage, no serious graphics API, no API for audio streaming, no API for anything!
It got slightly better in WP8, but bad impression remained.
The phones worked more smoothly than any other mobile device I can recall, though. After I tried to switch away from WP7 for the first time, I had to return the Android flagship at that time (Samsung Galaxy Nexus) because it lagged so much. The lack of apps and no way to sync with Linux computers made me eventually migrate to Android, which still seems clumsy and slow even today..
i could never find a $100 windows phone to buy. I always had to get it 'free' with a 2 year service contract. The 'retail' price without a service contract was still, IIRC, in the multiple hundreds ($499? $599?). Not spending that on what would have been a secondary/dev device to play with. FWIW, I never saw too many on ebay or craigslist at the time either.
My Galaxy Nexus was a nice phone IMO, considerably nicer than the LG Nexus 4 that followed it. I actually bought a Nexus 4 and then didn't use it until my GN's screen cracked.
Update: the solution in that repo builds a WP7 app using WP8 SDK. Earlier versions used WP7 SDK. I had to upgrade a few things, e.g. replaced Async CTP with Microsoft.Bcl.Async but the changes were minor.
Right, they have added background tasks, media streaming and many other features in WP7.5. Happened less than 1 year after the initial 7.0 version, all original phones were upgradeable to 7.5.
BTW, when original iPhone was released in 2007, it didn’t have any user-installable apps at all, only the built-in ones. The store with the apps was launched a year after the phone.
Also while there was IE11 on Windows on Windows Phone the web view was based on IE9 or IE10. So we were unable to port our app to Windows Phone. But I'm happy that Windows Phone lost the market becouse Microsoft cooperates with opressive regimes (unlike Google and Aplle) in order to be able to sell their Windows operating systems and Microsoft Office to civil servants.
Windows phone was a great platform, but the constant abandonment of hardware made many people really angry. First WP7 phones could not get WP8, then WP8 phones could not get WP10. Both times the users were promised years of upgrades and support when they bought the devices.
This is where Intel figures in. The lead time for a new phone is 18-24 months. Intel had been going around to OEMs and Microsoft promising that the Atom would catch up and surpass ARM, and started making deals. Palm also got screwed by Intel as well if I remember correctly. Nokia cancelled at least one Symbian phone and a Maemo tablet late into development because of this, and Microsoft as well lost a lot of time focusing on a chip that never came. By the time Elop wanted to launch a Windows phone, the only option was to go with a phone in the pipeline. The other option was to wait a full cycle. The phones that could run WP8 came out the next year, I'm pretty sure, and all of the original Lumia buyers (me included) were stuck.
The whole Maemo+Moblin=Meego were also a mess thanks to Intel.
Moblin, much like Maemo, started out as a modified Debian.
But right after the merger was announced, Intel released Moblin 2, that was RPM based.
End result was that Nokia was left hanging high and dry with their N900 that used DEB and also attempted to switch out GTK with Qt (Nokia bought Trolltech) because Qt could be used on both Linux and Symbian.
There was already an established duopoly when iOS and Android first shipped.
But what happened was that for some reason the focus shifted from the well established European market to the backwaters American market, rolling back some 2 decades of progress in mobile tech in the process.
Nokia was demoing Symbian phones that could operate as a pocket computer (just hook up to a TV a keyboard and a mouse) while Android barely could show a video on a external screen by blanking the internal one.
Yet the established players flinched, bought into the MSM hype, and ran their ships aground, leaving themselves wide open to be overtaken by upstarts.
So why is there only two and both from the US? I am no following what you are trying to say? Also not sure where MSM plays in if this means mainstream media?
> For what it's worth, Windows Phone was actually an amazing platform for both users and developers
Inability of Nokia/Microsoft to see that it wasn't amazing at all - in my opinion is the reason they got destroyed by iOS and Android. Windows Phone 7 was far from amazing, and by the time windows phone 8 came out - everybody already realized that and were not going to purchase another phone with WP8 that will be bricked by a new update again like all the WP7 phones did.
Windows phone was the worst thing ever. You could only open 4 tabs in your browser. Give me a break. The floor of stacking everything on top of each other was a mess where once you popped off an app you couldn't go back. I used windows phone via proxy, first thing I did was to get everyone to give it up and switch to Android.
I used Windows Phone 8 for two years, initially it was a $180 Nokia 520 that was as snappy as iPhone. Every popular app worked or had a decent 3rd party replacement. I liked the consistent and simple OS, much better than Android in terms of UX design.
One day it fell down about 3 meters on a stone floor and survived almost without a scratch. Great hardware, nice software, but a poor mobile strategy by Microsoft.
This, windows phone works well as a phone, but the lack of quality apps and crappy browser that chokes/crashes on avertising make the "smart" part a complete fail.
What office you worked in? I used to meet a lot of Nokia refugees in Vancouver and Seattle. Almost all retell the same story: C-Levels spending more time flying than on the ground, complete sturpor with platform development, internal sabotage in between internal symbian teams
I was in Palo Alto. Despite the name, the CTO of Nokia at the time was basically the head of Nokia Research, which was focused on fundamental research - like nanotech and low-power comms like Wibree (which became Bluetooth LE). This is a part of the company present-day Nokia kept when they split off the phone manufacturing bit. I don't think the CTO had much to do with the Android decision really. He used an iPhone daily anyways (no joke).
I agreed with y'all as well at the time. Anytime someone hated on windows phone I would show it to them and it wasn't at all uncommon for them to go out and buy it later. The PDF viewer is the only thing I've ever had an issue with.
I was choosing between that and a Moto G5 Plus in the price bracket. Perhaps the Moto has better features, but the Nokia has a solid steel plate running through its entire body[1].
So, I could have had a better camera and battery on a Moto, or I could get the assurance that if I end up in a Star Wars garbage compactor scenario, I'd have something I could wedge into the damn doors to avoid being crushed completely flat.
Absolutely can relate to this, as a Nokia user pre-Android era. Nokia 1100 was pretty much indestructible. It was love. It was life.
One of the ex-engineers in my team worked for Nokia in Finland and he spoke abt this Finnish concept of _sisu_ and how big of a deal it was.
I think it badly translates in English to 'unbreakable' or 'full of grit'. And he claimed that that pretty much explained the Finnish engineering ethos: Everything built to last forever.
I can confirm this. My oldie is still going strong, I don't even remember just how old the thing is. The chrome has worn off but the phone still works as good as when it was new, and the battery is doing just fine as well.
Nokia has been the timeliest about pushing out updates too, beating Google to the punch by a few weeks for the December Android security patches recently. Realistically, the Nokia 6 will probably have modern Android updates longer than any of the Nexus or Pixel line.
This was the reason I bought a Nokia and I was very happy already participating on the beta program to get Oreo for my Nokia 5. However the poor support (and by that I mean, none at all and saying that's google's issue when on all my other Android 8 Motorola devices it worked perfectly) of Android Auto made me ditch it.
Every single time there is an article about Nokia I cannot believe how little people actually know about Nokia, the company.
* The cellphone division was entirely sold to Microsoft ages ago.
* The cellphones coming out today is just a branding agreement with HMD.
* The Nokia of today is a huge company (more than 100.000 people) that focuses on backbone networks and telecom services. Almost every single ISP and provider in the world is using Nokia tecnology. Every other core router or service router on Internet is a Nokia router (or Alcatel-Lucent router that was bought by Nokia couple years ago).
I know the Name Nokia is not Hype like an Apple or Google, but there is very cool stuff happening in the Backbone telecom business.
Pretty well done considering that they were in very deep troubles before selling the (worthless) mobile phone business to Microsoft for quite a nice price.
Apparently HMD is across the street from Nokia and is run be former Nokia execs. HMD gets the brand, Nokia gets the royalties. Almost like a step-subsidiary. Not sure what the agreement was with MSFT but certainly a great save of their IP and brand given the circumstances.
They should have also stayed with Maemo. A dual Android and Maemo strategy could have been very successful. IMHO the Nokia 770-900 series is the best mobile saga in history.
I would still carry out that strategy. Android for the masses, and a real Linux as a different product aimed at enthusiasts, privacy aware and governments. That market is growing. Even Apple is focusing on privacy-aware people.
My Nokia N9, which is inferior to the N900 in some ways, is still ahead of many smartphones of 2018 in a few key aspects. The UI is incredibly elegant. Furthermore, its a real Linux machine, with a real terminal and a regular userland. And offline navigation is amazing.
I still use it often. The hardware is beautiful in a way very few products are.
Every competitor that has tried to kickstart their own OS has failed (Microsoft, Palm, Mozilla, Ubuntu, etc.)
Maemo might have been a great OS, but Android and iOS have sucked the oxygen out of the room. There’s no way Nokia could build and support an alternative OS just for enthusiasts.
Exactly. And there's still no mobile platform that gives one the same experience as a PC does in terms of separation of OS and hardware, plus the possibility of running a fully open source stack. That's why Sailfish (not fully open, though), Mer, Librem, PostmarketOS, Pyra, Neo900 and many other projects keep trying.
Yes, and one should recall that Android is just a Linux usermode abstraction layer. You can have Android apps within a traditional Linux distro, and Sailfish are already doing that. My understanding is it can be technically made work pretty flawlessly, but bundling the proprietary Google Play libraries is a legal hurdle. So you are stuck with an Amazon Fire OS type "Android-clone".
Yeah, I still use N9, it didn't lose anything from its elegance. I wish they still had Meego, but MS' change agent made sure all internal competition to WP was obliterated, first indirectly then directly.
The Nokia N9 I had way back in 2012 was one of the best phones I've ever used.
It was fast, well built, good battery life, the gesture based UI was awesome to use (the iPhone X UI, while alright is inferior to the N9's IMO). If only it could have survived through to today. :(
Really? First, Linux at Nokia was drawing very little resources. Second, have you heard about barbell strategies? Third, do you know that Nokia was running several mobile OSes for most of its time? Symbian and Maemo, Symbian and Windows, etc.
I would pay serious money for a modern version of the N9.
That OS was seriously so good. Put it in some modern hardware (Nokia 8/Nokia 9 body??) and update the OS (said like it's some small task) and I would buy that day 1.
Same here, even though they are a bit more expensive than the Google branded phones from two years ago and earlier.
Nokia also sounded quite sad about not being able to put project Treble on the Nokia 8. Maybe because they now have to put in more effort into putting out Android updates but I welcome their strategy of bringing those updates to the consumer very fast. Sometimes even faster than Google.
Likely because Treble will insulate them from SOC shenanigans.
At least until Google comes up with something that require a more recent kernel to implement, as seen with the whole ChromeOS support for Android apps...
I think you misunderstand my question. There are no new nexuses to update to and probably never will be. I'm still enjoying my 6P.
My question is, why should the next one be a Nokia? Is it just the stock Android and fast updates (which is why I always went Nexus, along with price), or is there another compelling reason?
But I suspect that the Nexus phones have problems because either Google are too ambitious and pushy or differences* between Google and the hardware manufacturer make things less reliable.
For perspective. Apple shipped 77.3 million smartphones in Q4 2017. Samsung shipped 74.1 million. Huawei shipped 41.0 million. Xiaomi shipped 28.1 million. OPPO shipped 27.4 million. And everyone outside the top 5 shipped 151.3 million. So these figures mean that Nokia shipped roughly 3% of the not-top-five-brands in Q4.
Nice to see people choose phones that get security updates.
I've had an opportunity to try Nokia 8 and Nokia 3. Basically go for the highest model number that you can afford.
Nokia 8 is very good. No complaints that wouldn't apply to Pixel, too.
Nokia 3 is remarkably good _for its €150 price_ (camera underwhelming, screen blue-tinted and unreliable wifi [at least with November software] compared to flagships, but in Europe unreliable wifi doesn't matter since you can stay on mobile data all the time, so better choose the security updates than a competitor with better wifi).
Nokia used to be where apple is today. They had a majority of the smartphone market share. It was a smaller market. They also dominated the feature phone market. It just shows you how fast things can change.
This graph is pretty awesome in showing how big Nokia was:
I remember the old "cool" cell phone platform cycles are 3-5 years. StarTac, Moto Razor, Nokia, Blackberry, etc.
The current smartphone platforms probably will last a lot longer - probably because of the App ego systems. I was thinking that IPhone might drop off around 6 years after it was introduced.
Who would have guessed that pairing the most popular mobile phone brand, with the most popular smartphone OS in the world would have led to success. Especially if they maintained the hardware quality the brand was renowned for?
Clearly what they should have done is paired with a new OS with basically no base from a company that had failed in almost every consumer venture it embarked upon.
The shocking thing here is that Google sold less than 4.4 million smartphones in a quarter. Why is that? I thought with Google's brand name, they should be selling a good number of them. Don't they have affiliations with carriers? Can people only buy them on their site?
The Google phones start around $900 in most countries, they only sell to like 5 countries, and they only partnered with a single carrier in the US.
So, first of all, they don't sell in most countries where people would buy such expensive phones, and in the countries where people would buy these, Google either only sells through a single carrier, or through a web shop that requires a credit card.
Which, for example, in Germany almost no one has (I think last time we discussed this @germanier linked a study showing 22% CC ownership?)
Either way, they're limiting the people they sell to to a tiny market, and then they don't actually offer something special.
The Pixel devices are some of the most expensive smartphones ever, but both special. They have the same waterproofing and features as a normal mid range phone, they have no exceptional warranty such as apple, they have no special software or hardware features like the Samsung Galaxy Note Series' Stylus.
> The shocking thing here is that Google sold less than 4.4 million smartphones in a quarter. Why is that?
Google sells a couple flagship phones, no downmarket phones (they don't, AFAIK, even still sell their older flagships), and doesn't really market them heavily compared to the big players in the handset industry. I don't know if they have any carrier deals besides VZW.
Compare this to Samsung, who currently has four flagships (S8/S8+/S8 Active/Note 8) and a dozens of downmarket phones plus still selling older flagship generations. Google isn't trying to compete across the whole spectrum of feature preferences and price sensitivity the way, say, Samsung is, and their unit sales reflect that.
I bought myself a new Nokia phone on the weekend, wanted a second handset so got myself a Nokia 3310 (the new model). Maybe some of that decision was based on nostalgia (my first phone was the original model), but I haven't regretted it. The funny thing is I found a new use for it after I bought it... it allows you to use a 32GB SD card in it, and has an MP3 player app. No big deal there. However, the battery life when just playing back MP3s is allegedly 51 hours! I'm pretty lazy when it comes to charging my devices so I was pretty happy to find that out. :-)
I bought one too. It is a very nice device and the ability to import contacts from Android is very cool. If they ever got some tethering/hotspot ability, I would make a real effort to make it my daily driver.
They are nice devices, I agree. With the tethering/hotspot ability, I think that may only be practical after a hardware refresh, as it's a 2G-only phone. Perhaps in future revisions it'll support 3G (or 4G).
This is an exciting development. On reading more, my enthusiasm was a bit damped when I learnt that this model is running a forked version of Android (YunOs) - I am still going to check it out as the appeal of a barebones phone with some of Android's functionality might actually be a pretty cool compromise.
First time I heard about. I like that they have a word for it and its fairly short, I might just start using it myself. I speak almost 4 languages and always fascinated by concepts that can't be directly translated.
Also like that there is a scale applied to it and it can be a negative thing:
---
[...] there can be too much sisu, and according to the survey answers this leads to bull-headedness, foolhardiness, self-centeredness and inflexible thinking.
Nokia has no ownership in HMD Global who licensed Nokia brand for 10 years to make phones. Nokia gets license and patent fees from the deal.
The future prospects of Nokia stock are tied to 5G network deployments. 5G deployments start already this year, but they will be slow at first. Things start move along 2019 when first 5G networks and devices (including phones) start to appear. 2020-2022 will show if Nokia is the winner in the battle for market share.
I have an ailing 1020 that I'm dreading replacing.
Are there any new user-serviceable phones on the market? or should I just keep doing the Ship of Theseus thing with Amazon greymarket parts until the phone market shakes out into less of a nightmare for users?
I'm glad to hear they're doing well in the featurephone market. It's nice to have a phone that has great call quality, long battery life, and can actually play FM radio. I hope they keep selling in the US market.
So will these phones ever support CDMA or is that just going to be ignored? I wonder how they're doing in the US specifically considering their phones can't be used on two of the larger carriers in the country.
As far as I'm aware, two Chinese carriers, China Mobile and China Telecom, use CDMA. China Telecom I believe for everything, China Mobile for its 3G (4G in general is a bit harder to come by there in my experience, so often the only option for mobile data is 3G).
We're already seeing this transition happen in other markets - in Japan, while KDDI is still running their 3G CDMA network, new iPhone models are not being provisioned to connect to it, using solely LTE (thanks to the LTE coverage being superior as they can use the low spectrum freed up by analog TV).
What does LTE-only coverage look like on Verizon? Do you miss out on much if you pop a Verizon SIM in a device without CDMA? And do they support VoLTE?
When I go to more rural areas I find LTE isn't as frequently available on Verizon. I'm not sure if they're still eventually planning on expanding coverage there or if they've abandoned any plans given other carriers have filled the market.
Strictly speaking Nokia isn't selling smartphones, HMD is. Nokia itself it primarily an IP company, the Nokia brand being part of that IP. Nokias business-model is about licensing their precious IP to other companies, in this case to HMD.
Not at all. There are more than 100k employees in Nokia as of today.
Nokia is a B2B company that sells most of the backbone equipment for telecom (Those 4/5G stations, every other Service Routers or core routers out there, etc etc ).
The acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent in 2016 helped a lot here.
The 'Nokia' in this article is a brand, licensed and stuck on some phones made by some other people.
So this is not 'real Nokia' in my opinion. However, an Apple product or a Google product that is actually made by an OEM (Foxconn/HTC/LG etc.) is 'real Apple' or 'real Google'.
Those other people are HMD Gobal. They are in essence Nokia's former employees who worked in the Mobile phone division. When Nokia sold the mobile division to Microsoft most of those employees, management, sales, marketing, design and engineering went to Microsoft. Subsequently when Microsoft shutdown the old Nokia mobile division those now ex Nokia, ex Microsoft staff started HMD. It's literally based across the road from their original office's in the Nokia HQ. For the most part it is Nokia, just with a different name and different ownership but same design and engineering principles.
HMD Gobal. Building 2, Nokia Campus, Karaportti, 02610 Espoo, Finland.
HMDGlobal deal is Nokia's way to keep the consumer brand recognition without risk or investment. Nokia still owns the brand, licenses technology and patents, has one member in the board and gets royalties. Anything they cook up in Nokia Technologies / Bell Labs can appear in these phones.
Money comes from Foxconn and Foxconn also manufactures the phones.
If HMDGlobal continues to progress (in sales, tech, etc.) I wouldn't be surprised to see Nokia just purchase them. Or in an AT&T/SBC/Cingular scenario, see HMDGlobal purchase Nokia and become "the new Nokia".
It's HMD, another Finnish company with some managers ex-Nokia, so there is certain continuity. However, manufacturing is done in China and no they don't own any factories.
Is there any evidence these are low quality though?
I bought a Lumia 720 which I used for 3 years and still works perfectly another 3 or 4 years later, although the Windows OS was lacking in many ways, the phone itself is engineered extremely well, drop resistant, and doesn't even require a case.
I've broken more Samsungs than I can count in extremely short periods of time.
If the Nokia quality is still there I would love to go back to Nokia.
The quality is still there though, its definitely a phone you can rock with a minimal case, and if you don't mind it getting a little dinged up, no case is also fine.
That's quite a surprise giving that Nokia 8 was quite disappointing in my opinion. I think they would've sold more without the 'bothie' gimmick, and just marketed their quality and security.
Thing is, so long as Nokia can be the best "me too" brand with immediate Android updates and long support lifespans, coupled with decent hardware design, they'll beat out nearly all their competitors. Do you really want to buy that HTC phone or midrange Samsung that will never see an update to Android 8? Generally not!
"Mostly it was the execs that didn't want to go with Android, because they feared they would end up just another me-to brand fighting over scraps."
I know this is what they claimed, but this made absolutely no sense. Windows Phone wasn't a closed OS available only to Nokia. Windows Phone would only make them another me-too brand fighting over even fewer scraps, but with an OS that was far more immature, had little to no user base, had little to no 3rd party support, and had a UI they could personalize even less than Android.
With Android at the very least they could have had some differentiation by creating their own skins and launchers, etc. but Windows Phone did not allow them to do even that.
And if they did not want to differentiate on OS, then why not go with the OS that had far more 3rd party support than the one that had virtually none?
> I know this is what they claimed, but this made absolutely no sense. Windows Phone wasn't a closed OS available only to Nokia. Windows Phone would only make them another me-too brand fighting over even fewer scraps,
It makes sense, even if it turned out to be a bad choice: while, yes, they wouldn't have been alone and the committed WinPhone audience was, well, negligible, they wouldn't be playing catchup to established vendors on the platform; they'd be on a more level playing field, and if the platform took off and they managed to be (one of the few) early dominant players on the platform, the rewards could be great.
Well this "nokia" is actually a different company wearing a mask.
The part of Nokia that was making Symbian phones was sold of to Microsoft and is now long dead. The Nokia that remains is focused on mobile and wireless infrastructure. The company now making Nokia branded Android phones is actually HMD Global.
That said, HMD is based basically across the road from Nokia and staffed with many former Nokia people.
Yes it's not totally the Nokia that Microsoft bought but it's still infused with legacy Nokia's blood. And also recapturing market share after such an accident is quite a surprise.
For what it's worth, Windows Phone was actually an amazing platform for both users and developers, and shows a fundamental rule of technology: There Is No Third Ecosystsm. The most dominant hardware maker (at the time) and software/os maker teamed up with a really great product, but couldn't break the established smartphone duopoly, even though it was only a few years old by that point. I wasn't a Microsoft fan by any stretch (the opposite actually), but even I agreed with the decision at the time, especially after using Windows Phone. First mover advantage is huge, and developers only have so much bandwidth.
Edit: Heh. Apparently someone did write a book. See comments below. Wow.