Did Nokia Go The Right Way with WP7?

Symbian Market Share 2012 - From Onlinemarketing-trends.com

February 11, 2011.  A day for Nokia and Symbian fans alike that will live in infamy. Two days on the heels of Stephen Elop's 'burning platform' memo, Nokia and Microsoft announced a new strategic partnership that would  see full adoption of the Windows Phone 7 OS at the expense of the home-grown, much maligned (at least in North America) Symbian and Meego OS.  The future of Nokia would be put in the hands of an OS that only garned 5% market share and had failed to garner much attention since launch in late 2010. Support for the 'Dead Man Walking' OS's would be continued to 2015, but what developers would continue to create  updates and apps for such a platform? Symbian was still king at the time of the announcement, and Q1 sales were up 9% year over year. The issue was however, that the actual smartphone market share was down 15% (41% to 26%) from the same period in 2010.  The numbers shown in the article include all handsets, not just smartphones, so it is very misleading.

This announcement sent shock-waves around the Nokia world especially in Finland, where many Nokia employees feared for their jobs as Elop had already begun implementing cost-cutting measures for bloated, but listing Nokia ship.  The trend of Nokia's value in the stock market continued downwards. A potential backlash from hardcore Symbian OS as well as US originated OS-phobic users loomed.  A potential perfect storm could finally bring the once dominant smartphone player to it's knees.  So what's happened in the last 10 months since?

Nokia proceeded with finally launching it's Meego as well as updated the Symbian OS to Anna and Belle.  Though Anna was more of a small evolutionary step over Symbian3, Belle brought many improvements was a revolutionary step forward, albeit 1.5 years too late. Meego via the N9 displayed stunning innovations and demonstrated a refreshing alternative to any OS on the market.  The problem was that with the February announcement, the N9 will be it's first and last of it's kind.

Also the first two WP7 devices were released under the Nokia Lumia banner (800 and 710) to a limited # of countries in Q4, but not in North America.  The Lumia 800 basically stole the chassis of the N9 (admittedly not quite as good) and stuck in a different OS.

Financially, smartphone sales have continued to drop (Q3 results: 15% year over year) and an operating loss was incurred.  Both were expected.

The real impact of the Nokia-Microsoft partnership will probably not be felt until late 2012 after the broad launch of Nokia Windows Phones in North America and around the world and I for one think that it will turn out to be successful.  With an relatively fresh OS that can differentiate itself from Android and IOS, Microsoft's innovations and of course MS $$$, Nokia will slowly but surely return to a relevant force in the smartphone marketplace.