Microsoft are a midwife at Nokia Rebirth
A peculiar press release appeared on Nokia’s website this week. It said that Nokia were re-joining the mobile phone device market again. However not with the Windowsphone platform but Android. You can read the detail here; Hello again The wording is a little more careful saying the “Nokia brand” is returning. So what has happened at Microsoft? In short two years ago Nokia had 97% of the Windowsphone sales but, despite making nice devices, it wasn’t making money. So it was slowly going bankrupt. This wasn’t new. When Stephen Elop, the former Microsoft executive, came to Nokia as CEO he cancelled the development of Nokia’s own smartphone OS called Symbian and went all in on Windows. His reasoning was that there was no distinctiveness in Android. This latter comment was also true because most Android phone makers are also not making much money. As Nokia headed downhill if they suddenly went under then Microsoft would have almost no-one making Windowsphone. So CEO Steve Ballmer spent $7