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- Nokia’s chief executive explains why they choose Windows Phone over Android
Posted by : Unknown
Sunday, September 1, 2013

A perennial question thats been revolving since 2010 around Nokia, why did it choose to go with Windows Phone OS instead of Android to replace Symbian when it decided to kill it as smartphone operating system. Well Nokia did discuss the idea with Google, but didn’t follow through. That led to the tweet from Google’s Vic Gundotra just ahead of the announcement of the Windows Phone tie up in February 2011 that “two turkeys do not make an eagle”.
Naturally such a small jibe wasn’t the reason to ditch Android, the chief executive of Nokia Elop explained the reason on a talk with journalists from European papers. The question was did he ever regret not choosing Android as the platform for Symbian OS replacement?
“I’m very happy with the decision we made,” he said. “What we were worried about a couple of years ago was the very high risk that one hardware manufacturer could come to dominate Android. We had a suspicion of who it might be, because of the resources available, the vertical integration, and we were respectful of the fact that we were quite late in making that decision. Many others were in that space already.
“Now fast forward to today and examine the Android ecosystem, and there’s a lot of good devices from many different companies, but one company has essentially now become the dominant player.”
This, he continues, becomes important in negotiations with carriers – who are the gatekeepers to getting a phone in front of so many people, especially in the US.
“Strategically that’s important for us to be offering an alternative OS because having a conversation with [chief executive] Ralph de la Vega at AT&T, the first step in the conversation is the recognition that we’re not Apple, we’re not Samsung/Android – used to be Android/Samsung, it’s actually about Samsung now – we’re a third alternative.
“And as an operator he wants to negotiate with different people and keep pressure on everybody and have the best range of options, he wants that third alternative. So strategically we have an opening with AT&T and every other operator in the world – because we’ve taken that path as the third ecosystem.
Whether Windows Phone has staked its claim as the third ecosystem ahead of BlackBerry should become clear on Thursday, when Nokia will announce its second-quarter results. Figures shows that in this quarter to the end of May BlackBerry shipped 6.8m handsets, which if forecast analyst are to be believed,Nokia has already shipped 7m and 8m handsets and will have the credibility as the third ecosystem. But still there are 75m BlackBerry subscribers worldwide as of now and Nokia as shipped only about 30m handsets in total Windows Phone.
The above ELOP’s reason clears why Nokia didn’t go with Android,he and his team were pretty sure, that Samsung would be well placed because of its manufacturing capability and history in the mobile space to dominate, which would leave no room for anyone else.
Well they have certainly been proved right – HTC’s figures show continuing falls in revenue despite the critical success for the HTC One. It’s impossible to know, of course, whether it was the right decision – but at least we know why it was made.