So it's official now, as of yesterday: Microsoft actually owns Nokia's phone business. The deal closed April 25th, and Stephen Elop is back at Microsoft, this time running the newly formed Devices group instead of running Nokia into a wall (more on that in a second). $7.2 billion, roughly 25,000 people moving over, and somewhere in a legal filing there's a clause about how long Microsoft gets to keep putting the Nokia name on phones before it has to switch everything over to "Microsoft Lumia." I give it a year, maybe less.
I've got weird feelings about this one, and I've been trying to figure out why for most of the morning instead of doing actual work.
Part of it is nostalgia, I think. I still have a Nokia 3310 in my desk drawer, the grey one with the snake game, and it still turns on if I dig up a charger for it, which I genuinely cannot say about any smartphone I owned before 2011. That thing survived being run over by a car once. Not my car, a friend's, in a parking lot, long story. The phone was fine. This is the company that used to make phones you could hand to a toddler without flinching, and now it's a hardware division inside a company best known for spreadsheets and an operating system people mostly tolerate.
And the Elop thing is just strange to watch play out. Back in February 2011 he wrote that "burning platform" memo comparing Nokia to a guy standing on a burning oil rig who has to jump into freezing water because staying put means certain death, and a few weeks later Nokia bet the entire company on Windows Phone instead of Android. I remember thinking at the time that it sounded less like a rescue plan and more like Microsoft had just acquired Nokia's soul for free and would pick up the rest of it later at a discount. Three years on, that is basically exactly what happened, except it wasn't free, it was $7.2 billion, so I guess Microsoft paid full price for the part they didn't already own.
I'll say this much for the Lumia phones themselves: they're better hardware than they get credit for. I've had a Lumia 920 since it came out and the camera on it is genuinely good, better than what was on my old Android phone, and the thing has survived two drops onto concrete without a scratch on the screen. The problem was never really the hardware. It's that Windows Phone still doesn't have the apps people actually want, and "the camera is great" is not a sentence that sells phones to people who just want their bank's app to work.
What I'm actually curious about is whether Microsoft running a phone business turns out anything like Microsoft running the Xbox business, which took basically a decade and multiple hardware generations before it stopped losing money and started being something people respected. Satya Nadella's only been CEO since February, and now on top of everything else he's got a device manufacturing arm and 25,000 new employees to figure out what to do with. That's a lot to inherit in your first ninety days.
There's also the layoffs question hanging over all of this that nobody's saying out loud yet. Whenever a company this size absorbs another company this size, "redundancies" show up in a press release a few months later, dressed up in language about "streamlining" and "focus." I'd bet real money we're looking at a round of cuts by early summer, probably concentrated in whatever overlaps with Microsoft's existing Windows Phone team. Hope I'm wrong about the timing at least.
Anyway. If you're the type who still has an old Nokia phone lying around somewhere, dig it out today and turn it on. Mine's sitting next to my keyboard right now, mocking my current phone's battery life.