Nokia: How the Market Leader Missed the SmartphoneMissed the SmartphoneContent for Intellectualsmagazine.berelentless.in
19 October 2026 · 6 min read · 50 reads
Nokia ruled phones, then it didn't. A look at the decisions, the culture and the memo, told without hindsight.
In the last quarter of 2007, Nokia sold more mobile phones than anyone else on Earth. According to the Wikipedia article on the company, its share of the global phone market hit an all-time high of 40.4 percent that quarter. Four out of every ten phones in the world.
A few years later, the company was telling its own staff that its "platform is burning". What happened in between is one of the most studied stories in business. I have been reading about it, and I want to tell it without hindsight, because hindsight makes everyone look foolish.
First, a fair picture. Nokia was not a lazy company. According to the history article on Nokia, Symbian, its operating system, had a 62.5 percent share of smartphones in its 2007 financial year. (An operating system is the basic software that runs a phone, like Android or iOS today.) Nokia had been a leader in smartphones before most people used the word.
Then Apple launched the iPhone in 2007. The article makes an interesting point here: the iPhone did not immediately outsell Nokia's top smartphones, such as the N95. So if you were inside Nokia in 2008, the numbers still looked fine. That is exactly what makes this story a useful warning. The trouble was not what customers were buying that year. It was where customers were heading.
The history article says Nokia's own share of the smartphone market fell from 50.9 percent to 40.8 percent in a year. For 2010 it gives Symbian 32 percent and Android 30 percent, though Wikipedia flags that figure as needing a better source. Either way, the lines were crossing.
One thread I keep noticing in the Wikipedia history is how often Nokia's software plans changed. On 24 June 2008, Nokia bought the Symbian operating system outright. Later it moved to make Symbian open source, so that anyone could use and change it. In February 2010 it also announced MeeGo, a second platform, together with Intel.
Read in order, that looks like a company with more than one software plan at the same time. I do not want to say it was wrong at each step, since each move had reasons. But phone makers need app developers to build for them, and developers need to believe the platform will stay put. The Wikipedia article on Nokia notes that its own app store, the Ovi Store, faced stiff competition from Apple's App Store when it launched
This is the part I find hardest to judge from outside. A great phone with a shaky software story is a bit like a great shop in a street where the electricity keeps cutting out. People may admire it and still shop elsewhere.
In February 2011, Nokia's new chief executive, Stephen Elop, wrote a note to employees that became famous. It opened with a story of a man on a burning oil platform in the North Sea who has to decide whether to jump into icy water. Elop said Nokia was standing on a burning platform, and the note includes the line "Nokia, our platform is burning."
I read the text as it was reported at the time. As far as I can tell from those reports, it said several things plainly:
That last point is the one I keep thinking about. The memo does not say "the market changed". It says "we fell behind", and it points inward.
In the same month, February 2011, Nokia announced a partnership with Microsoft. Nokia would use Windows Phone as its main smartphone software. The first Nokia Windows Phones were launched in October 2011.
It did not turn things around. The history article says Nokia's smartphone sales fell from first in the market to tenth between 2011 and 2013. Nokia then agreed to sell its mobile phone division to Microsoft. The deal was completed in April 2014 for about 3.79 billion euros, of which 1.65 billion was for a ten-year licence to Nokia's patents. In 2016 the Nokia brand on basic phones moved to a company called HMD Global, which
I want to be careful here. There is no single cause, and I would not pretend there is. People who study this point to different things: slow software, internal problems like the ones the memo named, the choice of Windows Phone, the speed of Apple and Android. The sources I read agree on the outline, not on one clean reason.
Your sales today can hide the trend. Nokia's share was high while the ground was moving. If your business looks healthy, ask which numbers would have warned you a year earlier.
Speed is a product feature. The memo's own example was a joke that Chinese makers built phones faster than Nokia could polish a slide deck. If your customers can get something similar sooner, your better version has a shorter life than you think.
Bad news needs a safe road upward. The memo blamed a lack of accountability and poor teamwork inside the company. In many companies the people closest to customers know first. If it is not safe to say it, the leader hears it late.
I will not say I have a trick that would have saved Nokia. Nobody can know that. What I can take is a habit: when something is going well, I want to ask what customers are starting to do that is different, even if the numbers do not show it yet.
One thing to try this week: write down the three things your best customers started doing in the last year that they did not do before. Have a coffee with one of them and ask what else they are trying. Then ask yourself which of those habits your product depends on, and which could replace it.
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