ColdFusion - HOW Did Nokia Fall? [Finalé]

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

This is part 3 of a 3 part Nokia documentary series. In this episode we'll be taking the how Nokia made one mistake after another before being destroyed from within. Nokia's phone business may be gone but the company is releasing an Android tablet, so there may still be a glimmer of hope. Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyRb_4-cquc Soundtrack: Burn Water (Dagogo Altraide) - Hide Max Elto - Shadow Of The Sun (Adventure Club Remix) Chase & Status - Alive (TCTS Remix) Imagined Herbal Flows - Clouds Portico Quartet- Isla Perseus - Shadow of the Beast Yakamoto Kotzuga - Your Smel べたTOPAZ GANG - 写真photo-me (feat. nmesh) Faux Tales - Atlas Shining Bird - Distant Dreaming » Google + | http://www.google.com/+coldfustion » Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/ColdFusionTV » Patreon | https://www.patreon.com/ColdFusion_TV » My music | http://burnwater.bandcamp.com or » http://www.soundcloud.com/burnwater » Collection of music used in videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOrJJKW31OA Editing website: www.cfnstudios.com ColdfusTion Android Launcher: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nqr.coldfustion.com&hl=en » Twitter | @Coldfustion Cut scenes: Capacitive Touch Technology (The Curious Engineer): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyCE2h_yjxI Textures: https://vimeo.com/115935010 Traveling Lights: https://vimeo.com/108405825 --- ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You are watching Cold Houston TV. Hi, Degogo here and welcome to the final episode of the rise and fall of Nokia. It's been an amazing journey so far. We've travelled from the 1800s to the year 2006, looking at Nokia's history and how they rose to power. Thanks for joining me thus far. In today's final episode of the series, we'll be taking a look at how Nokia fell. The story of Nokia's decline starts badly but ends up terrible. As you'll soon see, the company

succumbed to a wolf in sheep's clothing. Let's begin. In the mid-2000s, Nokia's end series was the flagship product line. The N95 was a case in point. It had all the makings of a modern smartphone, just the wrong type of human-machine interaction. The series received a generally positive reception until the industry was shaken in 2007. The major blows to Nokia arrived when Apple released the iPhone. It was a phone with a full-touch interface, much like the LG Prada before it. But the difference with Apple's product and the secret to its success was the capacitive touchscreen display and desktop routes in its OS. Suddenly, the N95 didn't look so

impressive anymore and the very next year the game was about to change again. Google released their first Android phone and the famous battle of the smartphone OS's had begun. However, Nokia did actually respond with the old touchscreen 5800 Express Music phone. It was a commercial success and was largely praise for its supplied stylus and a low price, but it was actually viewed negatively by critics for its poor software implementation. So great, here we have Nokia responding to Google and Apple, right? So where did it all go wrong? How did Nokia fall?

Well hold on to your hats people because what you're about to hear is the real employee inside information that you will not get anywhere else on YouTube. A special thanks to the Wall Street Journal for this one. The first set of inside information we get is from former vice president and chief of designer Nokia, Frank Nuovo. He was at this position during Nokia's glory days and resigned in 2006 when the management changed. This is Nuovo speaking.

I look back and I think that Nokia was just a very big company that started to maintain its position more than innovate for new opportunities. He continues. All of the opportunities were in front of Nokia and they were working on them but the key word was a sense of urgency. there was a real sense of just saying, we'll get to that eventually. For example, Nokia had prototype 8-inch tablet computers years before the iPad even emerged. Okay, so we see that Nokia was a bit slow to move, but that couldn't really be all.

Let's take a deeper look into Nokia's mindset. This is actually pretty incredible. Nokia's engineers stated that the iPhone was way too expensive to manufacture and only worked on 2G networks, primitive when compared to Nokia's 3G technology. They scoffed as the iPhone didn't even come close to passing Nokia's rigorous. drop test. It seems funny today, but it's almost understandable from Nokia's point of view back then. Despite this, the iPhone ended up selling like hot cakes, and by 2008, Nokia's executives realized that matching Apple's slick operating system amounted to their biggest

challenge and their number one priority. So internally, within Nokia, one team tried to revamp Symbion, the aging operating system that most Nokia phones ran, and another effort, eventually dubbed Migo, tried to build a new system from the ground up. People involved in both efforts say that the two teams competed with each other for support within the company and attention from the top executives. It was a problem that plagued Nokia's R&D operations. As the saying goes, anything that's divided internally will never succeed. As a Lister Curtis, Nokia's chief designer from 2006 to 2009 put it, you were spending more time fighting internal politics than doing design. Key business partners were also

frustrated as well. The chief executive of chip manufacturer Qualcomm, Paul Jacobs, started working with Nokia in 2008. His The main complaint was that Nokia really took too much time when working on strategies. This is a quote from Mr. Jacobs. We would present to Nokia a new technology that to us would seem a big opportunity. But instead of diving into this opportunity, Nokia would spend a long time, maybe six to nine months assessing the opportunity. And by this time, the opportunity just often went away.

The real problem was that Nokia's management just couldn't steer the huge multinational company quickly enough. They seem to just keep throwing money out the problem instead of innovating through it with wisdom. Even jumping over to Android seemed like a short-term solution, a shortcut. Nokia's smartphone division management, Asi Vanjoki, dismissed the idea of Android as peeing in your pants for warmth in the winter. Ouch.

In 2010, Canadian Stephen Elop took over the helm. A bit of his history first. In 2005, he worked for Macromedia, which got bought by Adobe during his time as CEO. and from 2008 to 2010 he worked for Microsoft, working on Microsoft Office products. At the time of Elop's arrival, Nokia was spending $5 billion on research and development. That's 30% of the entire mobile industry's total. Yet, it remained far from launching a legitimate competitor to the iPhone. However, Nokia did release the N8 and N900.

Both good attempts, but it was still clear that Nokia was struggling to focus on useful R&D. Mr. Elop had had enough. He sifted through data and visited labs around the world to personally terminate projects that weren't core priorities. As it turns out, the organizational structure of Nokia was also extremely convoluted. In 2010, for instance, Nokia was hashing out some details of software that would make it easier for outside programmers to write applications that could work on any Nokia smartphone. At some companies, such decisions might be made around a conference table.

But in Nokia's case, it was a nightmare. According to some inside attendees of the meeting, this is how it went down. 100 engineers and product managers from different offices as far as Massachusetts and China were all called into a hotel venue in Germany. Over three days, Nokia employees sat down and jotted notes. Meanwhile, representatives of Migo, Symbion and other operating systems within Nokia all struggled to make themselves heard. As one person recalls, people were just trying to keep their jobs.

Each group was accountable for delivering the most competitive phone. As you could see from this situation, it was pretty much cutthroat, dog eat dog, not a good environment. However, out of these meetings, two OS has emerged, a new version of Symbian, a successor to the old Symbian OS, and Migo, a promising software that finally arrived in the Nokia N9. Although Migo was a pretty good attempt and was a great step in the right direction, it was too little too late. The App Store was severely undeveloped at a time when Apple and Google's App Store were rocket shipping off. Unfortunately, it was all fruitless as the Migo operating system was discontinued in 2012. In February 2011, Stephen Elop and Microsoft CEO Steve Bulmer jointly announced a major partnership between Nokia and Microsoft, which would see Nokia adopt Windows Phone as its primary

platform of future smartphones, replacing both Symbion and Migo. Nokia unveiled the first Windows Phone 7 devices on October 26 in 2011. They were the Lumia 710 and Lumia 800, which was quickly followed by the Lumia No. In April 2012, while Nokia's internal divisions were squabbling, Samsung overtook Nokia as the largest phone manufacturer in the world. In 2013, Nokia introduced the 925, which is a slim-down version of the 920, also incorporating an aluminium design. After this, Nokia went on to release the Lumia 1020.

This phone was all about the camera, a 41 megapixel shooter with a Symbian-based 808 Pure View technology. The phone did receive critical acclaim for its camera and general design and, but performance. Unfortunately, there was still the problem of apps. You see, the Windows marketplace used in Windows phone devices wasn't exactly that vibrant. Quality app developers were slow to get on board the platform, and this ultimately hurt Nokia. Although the Lumia series was doing better than Blackberry, Nokia still made an operating loss of 115 million euros, with revenues falling 24% during the second quarter of 2013. But looking

at the bigger picture, it's even worse. Since 2011, Nokia sustained 4.1 billion euros worth of operating losses. By this stage, the game was pretty much over. The ship was sinking, and the Windows platform wasn't providing much of a lifeboat. Nokia, as a company, it was under a bit of pressure. Finland's a beautiful device that is making its appearance in Finland for the first time as this show airs. But as for future products... 928, when is it coming out?

I'll say a couple things about future products. I can do one thing. I have an iPhone. Oh, how embarrassing. I don't want to have an iPhone. I want to have a... Look, I can take care of that for you right here. There you go.

I want to have a Nokia phone. It's gone. I want to have a Nokia phone because I believe in you and I believe in Nokia. Yes. But I want to have that Lumia 928. When do I get it? So let me tell you what we're doing in the future. Tell me before that.

I will not... Sorry, can't answer those questions. On the 3rd of September, 2013, Microsoft announced that it would acquire Nokia's mobile phone division in a deal totaling 7 billion US dollars. Stephen Eelop would also step down as Nokia CEO and rejoin Microsoft as the head of devices. But the question is, was this a conflict of interest for Eelop? Was there a dark side behind this move? As it turns out, this sadly may have been the case. It is reported that Eelop got an 18.8 million euro bonus after he sold Nokia to Microsoft and stepped down as CEO. What's more is that this agreement was only made on

the same day as the announcement. Was Eelop's shaky CEO position in Nokia just a part of Microsoft's plan to enter the smartphone game all along? We may never know for sure. In October 2014, the burial had begun. Microsoft officially announced that it would phase out the Nokia brand in its promotion of the Lumia smartphones. It would now be known as Microsoft Lumia.

And this sadly was the end of Nokia as a brand. Maybe in some distant time and some throwbacked nostalgic way they could be. come back, but right now this really does look like the end of the trail for an absolutely amazing company. So, throughout history we're seeing the same thing over and over again, like Palm with WebOS or Intel with mobile internet devices or even Xerox with the graphical user interface. It's been repeatedly demonstrated that being the first to a good idea is no guarantee of commercial success.

So I put it to you, what do you guys think of the demise of Nokia? Do you think that Mr. Elop was guilty of purposely selling Nokia for his own own personal gain or the gain of Microsoft, I think this may be a very interesting comment section. So broadening our field of view, let this be a lesson to any of us that are thinking of ever running a business. Be diligent, be very aware of your competitive surroundings, and most of all, be prepared to swallow your pride in order to usher in a positive change.

And to leave a positive spin on things, this multinational company started from just one man's paper mill and lasted for over 100 years. So it just goes to show, if you do what's right, you can do a lot. Hey guys, Degogo here and I just want to thank you for watching the whole way through my rise and fall of Nokia video. It's quite an interesting story when you think about it from start to finish. Quite a lot of stuff went down throughout Nokia's history, so it's quite interesting. So yeah, if you're new here, take a look around, there's a few other videos that are quite interesting. And also if you want to share this video, feel free.

I'm sure there's some other people out there that would be quite interested in the whole business idea behind why Nokia fell or, you know, just any other interesting things about technology they may be interested in. So, yeah, that's all from me. Thanks for watching, don't forget to subscribe, give a thumbs up, and I'll catch you again soon for the next video. Have a good one, guys. Cheers. Cold fusion. It's new thinking.