4 Embarasing Mistakes That Led To Nokia Downfall

The downfall of Nokia is one that eluded all tech pundits and industry analyst. No one saw the heavy catastrophe that crippled the company which dominated the global mobile markets for a decade. Nokia is dead, and we will examine what caused the mistakes.

Nokia spent millions of dollars in the late 1990s, they saw the future of mobile phones and were equally poised to dominating it for eternity. Unfortunately, Nokia made dangerous decisions when they decided to attempt the smartphone race.

The Mobile phone giant foresaw the dooms day; it is unlikely to think that they didn’t. Unluckily, the response by Nokia to the technological trend failed to take the company forward.  These four costly mistakes by Nokia would prove to be the reasons why Nokia has seen it’s once dominant brand go into oblivion.

4. Ignored The Market

In 1998, Nokia over threw Motorola as the World’s biggest mobile phone vendor. Nokia continued to dominate and went on to become the largest mobile vendor for straight 14-years. Fast-forward to 2015, the whole scenario has changed! Nokia no longer has that prestigious crown, it has been toppled by Samsung.

Although, Samsung seem to have lost its course and charm. What befell Nokia may befall the South Korean company soon, because Samsung’s Mobile future is falling apart.

Nokia’s inability to make custom phones for the U.S market didn’t win itself many allies among the local carriers; this lead to a further decline in it’s market share. While other companies made friends in the US, Nokia was too conformable with the ego of being the World’s largest phone maker. It had loyal fans in Africa and other European countries, when these fans decided to jump camps, it spelt the beginning of doom days for the multi-billion dollar company.

In the Smartphone market share, Nokia is on a steady decline, while Samsung and Apple take the larger cut.

3. Ignored The Threat Of The iPhone

When the iPhone first launched in 2007, it sent shock-waves through-out the industry. It was a landmark achievement by Apple, seeing the massive leap from what the conventional Windows Mobile, Symbian and Palm OS had to offer.

Nokia was particularly blind to the threat of the iPhone. They saw the iPhone as an expensive piece of gadget that would not stand the test of time.

No doubt, the original iPhone was extremely expensive, but it soon became a mainstream gadget once Apple strucked a deal with AT&T; which saw the price fall to as low as $200. From that moment, every iPhone released has sold in millions. iPhone 6 and 6 Plus sales which were very strategic gave the guys at Samsung sleepless nights whose competing flagship, Samsung Galaxy S5 was an embarrassing flop.

The introduction of App Store on the iPhone tied consumers into a world of apps that worked on only the iOS. This cemented the dominance of iPhone, making Nokia phones look like toy.

2. Not Dumping Symbian

Nokia owns the Symbian OS which simply explains why they were literally stucked with the OS for so long. In 2007 when the original iPhone was released, it showed the weakness of the Symbian OS. In fact, Nokia’s Symbian OS was dated once the iPhone hit the store-shelves.

Symbia OS become a total joke  when Google’s mobile operating system; Android was released. Android was cross-platform, it gave other phone manufacturers a new bound-less mobile operating system to work with. Enabling them to compete against the iPhone, Nokia again, didn’t give a hoot.

Symbian OS still had enough juice, Nokia would have thought. That’s a genuine imagination, but Nokia’s loyal fanbase thought otherwise. They saw the age of Symbian OS, and were already jumping camps. Nokia only needed to act during that period but they didn’t, even Motorola which was lost in the Mobile industry found light once it adopted the Android operating system.

Immediately Verizon saw the events, they too gave the Android OS a major push in reaction to counter AT&T’s iPhone. HTC was quick to adopt Android and saw an immediate benefit. Sony and LG followed more slowly, and then Samsung but in a big way.

1. Choosing Windows Over Android

Nokia finally decided to dump the Symbian OS as their plans to create a new OS that would be distributed as an open-source was an utter disaster. That OS was Maemo.

Nokia wanted something entirely new, something hot and decided to stick with Intel’s Linux-based operating system – Moblin. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned, Mobiln was later merged with MeeGo which caused further delays.