How Nokia Blew A Big Lead in Mobile Phones! A Case Study for Entrepreneurs



Subscribe to Valuetainment: Nokia Case Study for Entrepreneurs- The Biz Doc, Tom Ellsworth dives into case study #2 with a lesson on why a once very dominant company, disappeared. This lesson is derived from one of mobile communications legendary handset manufacturers – Nokia.

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About Tom Ellsworth: THOMAS N. ELLSWORTH, is an experienced CEO / COO and veteran entrepreneur. He has been disrupting industries and driving consumer shifts through Venture-backed companies in technology, software development, publishing and mobile that have generated exits totaling over $1B. Watch the interview with Patrick Bet-David:

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34 Comments on “How Nokia Blew A Big Lead in Mobile Phones! A Case Study for Entrepreneurs”

  1. Tom, we're shopping for a new bank to serve our small business. Our current bank is closing its doors in our market. What can you tell the small business owner about shopping for a new bank?

  2. Actually. You don't know anything about Nokia. You ignore the plant Microsoft put in nokia. Ignore the changing platforms of gtk to qt. You don't understand this industry at all.

  3. I was in Nokia back in 2001, Cingular->AT&T in 2005 then TMobile in 2009, went through all of these in front of my eyes.

  4. I love your show…and im learning to ignore your shirt.

    I think its great how you tell the story of firms imploding like the Roman empire being sacked the barbarians…

    Put on a a business suite.

  5. As a perennial student of case studies, I too witnessed the incredulous demise of Nokia but to further pinpoint exactly what it was that caused their demise was not simply hubris. It was open apps. Typical of giant corporations, Nokia did not want to open their OS and allow outsiders to build apps and contents without their proper control. Steve Jobs at Apple already learned his painful lesson when his Apples lost out to IBM PC clones. So this time when his Iphone launched he made his iphone open for app developers. The iphone became an open market where thousands of people were able to develop thousands of apps. Android phones also followed this path of open architecture for app developers. Nokia kept their system closed so you only ended up with a handful of pretty lousy apps. Microsoft came late to the party and by then developers were first developing apps for iphones or androids, porting to a third os with small numbers was a low priority. So what killed Nokia? They killed themselves by closing their doors on apps. Just a runaway hit from a third party developer and iphones and androids were the phones to get. Remember Angry Bird, Candy Crush, Farmville, etc. There were landmark 20,000 apps available by the time you wanted to buy iphone 2. And how many apps did Nokia have? Less than a hundred?

    So in summary, an open system where you are willing to share is what made ios and android succeed, and symbian fail.

  6. Watching on a 2018 Nokia 6.1. They might not have the marketshare they used to have but they are by far making the best phone on the market in the sub-$600 price range.
    It's fast, it's nigh indestructible, it's usb-c, it's stock Android so no horrid bloatware and it has a microSD slot which is a must for me. I'll never need an over priced piece of shit like a Samsung or Apple with solid companies like Nokia and OnePlus still in the game.

  7. I also heard somewhere that Nokia pitted two divisions of its own company against each other to develop competing mobile operating systems. There were a lot of missteps along the way.

  8. My Windows phone on the Nokia 650 was one of my favorite phones.. $35 new, solid, stable, efficient-it never slowed down, android was a RAM hog in comparison….the only problem was lack of software support

  9. Great video. I wish you had gone more into detail and mentioned the big problem that eventually led to their demise; their choice of an OS. They kept their own OS for far too long, and even though it was great and innovative for the time, the age of smartphones required something more. There were people inside the company advocating for switching to Android pretty early on, but the management didn't budge. Eventually they made two development teams compete with each other; one making a reworked version of their old OS and I think the other one was making a version of Android. All in all, they hummed and hawed for too long. The management side was too bulky.

    Nokia means a lot to me because I'm Finnish and a programmer no less, but their current phones are awfully mediocre and the Windows OS sucks. But even though the Nokia we knew and loved no longer exists, the talent here is more plentiful than ever. Even though we've a tiny nation, we have the ability to do great things in this industry.

  10. When Microsoft bought Nokia, they released a smartphone that completely destroyed every single phone on the market at the time… and then almost immediately, the iPhone 6s and the Galaxy S6 were announced, and completely demolished that new Windows phone. That was the death blow.

    What I think really sucked was that Nokia, towards the end, made some really great phones. My Lumia Icon still works and is damn near indestructible. The camera was better than any phone I had after it until my current one, and there was even the Nokia phone that was basically a digital camera with a phone built into it.

    I'd like to have seen Microsoft continue manufacturing Nokias on a smaller scale for a more niche crowd, like Blackberry does, but I guess it was just too big an investment. Bummer.

  11. Nokia, Kodak, RIM, all thought their products were forever. No one's product is forever. They needed to be like Apple. If you can't create it, steal it or buy it. Apple bought or stole much of their most advanced hardware and software and repacked it to make it cool.

  12. You know, its incorrect to say that Nokia was always about "simple phones" and no innovation. Actually they tried to make smartphones way before there was such thing and hype. They invested in SymbianOS (anyone remember it?) which was. actually, quite good! With very limited resources there was pretty complex apps, which was running fast and didnt required dozens and even hundreds megabytes of storage or ram to run. Even gaming wasnt nonexistant. There was also, more late developement, Maemo, Linux based os, which, after a lot of merges and mutations now have descendant called Tizen. But Nokia made it open waay too late, when nobody cared much.

  13. Just to clarify, Microsoft bought Nokia's handset division, not "what was left". Their equipment side of the business was profitable, and since the sale of their handset division, they have been able to invest in it.

    They licensed their brand out HMD Global to make phones. HMD Global are doing pretty good at making Nokia phones popular again!

  14. I honestly think you should be a seperate YT Channel from valuetainment. It seems Valuetainment is selling a different product than your educational material. So it would be best to seperate brands like how VICE is split off in multiple genres

  15. I enjoy your video's but this one simply was filled with mistakes, including Microsoft buying Nokia, which is false, they bought the Nokia Mobile unit, licensed the name and ran it further into the ground, Nokia still exists as a networking infrastructure company. Additionally, Nokia only failed because they hired Stephen Elop, a former Microsoft exec, as their CEO, if they had not and opted to focus on Maemo, which became MeeGo, then the smartphone market would be very different today. He was a trojan horse, and not a very good one at that either. I still have a Nokia prototype or two that I got just from pressing the right buttons at the time, excellent software and hardware, but Windows Phone was Nokia Mobile's demise.

  16. I don't feel like i learned anything in depth here. This just shows the timeline of what happened and not exactly how it happened. A case study should ideally explore the list of bad decisions/strategies that caused the company to fail. Just saying that nokia had hubris is painting a situation with a very broad brush and doesn't explore the intricacies of what caused it to fail. Dissappointed with this video

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