zlacker

>>sirkne+(OP)
The Nokia fate will be remembered as hostile takeover. Everything worked out in the favor of Microsoft in the end. Though Windows Phone/Tablet have low market share, a lot lower than expected.

* Stephen Elop the former Microsoft employee (head of the Business Division) and later Nokia CEO with his infamous "Burning Platform" memo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#CEO_of_Nokia

* Some former Nokia employees called it "Elop = hostile takeover of a company for a minimum price through CEO infiltration": http://gizmodo.com/how-nokia-employees-are-reacting-to-the-m...

>>frik+M5
But Nokia was a company that was already starting to falter when Elop came on board. What else could the company have done to survive? Their options seem limited from what we know about the marketplace. They could have release an android phone, but then they just would have been fighting for a piece of the pie that Samsung, Moto, and other phone makers are eating. They could have stayed with their phone OS and probably would have had just about the same fate as picking up Windows Mobile.

Maybe they would have had more sales with an Android phone, but I'm not sure it would have made a bit enough difference to prevent this buyout. Elop set Nokia up to be bought out by being a major windows phone maker. It may have been a better long-term bet than Android.

>>kyrra+Zg
Fighting for share of the pie in the Android market would have created far more sales than fighting for crumbs of a virtually non-existent pie in the Windows market.

Having said that, I agree with your final point. If you view the whole thing as a setup to extract maximum value via an acquisition, it might make sense. They may have been worth more as a MS acquisition target selling Windows phones than they would have been had they gone down the Android path.

It's entirely possible that neither path would have led to sustainability as a standalone entity.