So the Nokia deal actually closed this week. September of last year Microsoft said it was buying Nokia's phone business for something like $7.2 billion (€5.44 billion if you want the number Redmond actually wrote on the check), and everybody sort of shrugged and figured it would grind through the regulatory approvals eventually and here we are, April 25th, done. Stephen Elop is back at Microsoft now, running the combined devices group, which is a weird sentence to type because he only left Microsoft to go run Nokia into a position where Microsoft could buy it. I'm not saying that's what happened on purpose. I'm just saying it's the kind of thing that makes you raise an eyebrow if you've been paying attention since 2011.
And I have been paying attention, because I owned a lot of Nokia phones. My first "real" phone was a 3310 that survived being dropped down a flight of concrete stairs twice, no case, no complaints, just picked it up and kept texting. Then an N95 that felt like it was from the future in like 2007, GPS and a 5 megapixel camera and a slide mechanism that clicked in a way that no phone since has managed to replicate. I even bought a Lumia 920 two Christmases ago, the bright red one, mostly because the camera reviews were so good and partly because I felt bad for the platform. Windows Phone deserved better than it got, is my honest take, and I say that as someone who eventually went back to Android because the app situation never stopped being annoying. You'd want some bank app or a decent podcast client and it just wasn't there, or it was there and it was a garbage port that hadn't been updated since 2012.
The thing that gets me about this whole saga is the "burning platform" memo. Elop wrote that in February 2011, barely a month into the CEO job at Nokia, comparing the company to a guy standing on a burning oil platform who has to jump into freezing water because staying put means certain death. Pretty dramatic stuff for an internal memo that leaked immediately (of course it leaked immediately, it's 2011, everything leaks immediately). Symbian got killed off, Windows Phone got picked as the lifeboat, and now three years later the lifeboat and the guy who launched it both end up back at Microsoft anyway. I don't know if that's irony or just how consolidation works in this industry. Probably both.
What I actually want to know is what happens to the Nokia name on hardware. Microsoft's said the phones will be "Nokia by Microsoft" or something like that for a while, then presumably it all becomes Microsoft Lumia and Nokia the brand just recedes into being the thing that still makes network equipment and owns a pile of patents. That part of Nokia isn't going anywhere, the Nokia Solutions and Networks stuff and the HERE maps business both stayed independent of this sale, which people forget. It's specifically the phones-and-featurephones division that moved over, about 25,000 employees worldwide as part of the transfer if I remember the announcement numbers right.
I keep thinking about that Nokia 3310 though. There's something almost embarrassing about how much better built a $50 dumbphone from 2000 felt compared to devices costing ten times as much today. Not a criticism of Microsoft specifically, more a general complaint about the entire smartphone era, where "premium" mostly means "glass on both sides so it shatters twice as easily." I dropped my current phone off a couch onto carpet last week and got a hairline crack in the corner. Off a couch. Onto carpet.
Anyway. The deal's done. Whether Microsoft can actually make Windows Phone relevant against Android and iOS with Nokia's hardware chops fully in-house is a completely open question, and I'd guess the market share numbers a year from now won't look dramatically different than they do today, because platform problems don't get fixed by an org chart change. But I hope I'm wrong about that. Somebody besides Apple and Google should be making phones people actually want.