I've had the Nokia layoff news sitting in a browser tab since last Thursday, half-written responses piling up under it that I kept deleting. 18,000 jobs, most of them tied to the phone business Microsoft bought off Nokia back in April for something like $7 billion. Stephen Elop sent around a memo full of phrases like "bold, sweeping changes" that read less like an internal announcement and more like a eulogy somebody wrote weeks in advance and just needed an occasion to publish.
I'm not going to rehash the numbers, everyone with a tech blog has already run those. What I keep coming back to is the actual object sitting on my desk: a Lumia 1020, the one with the 41 megapixel camera sensor that stuck out of the back like a tumor. I bought it used off a guy at work in the fall of 2013 mostly as a curiosity, and it's genuinely the best camera I've ever had in a phone, better than the iPhone 5s I was using at the time, better than the Galaxy S4 my roommate had. Low light shots that had no business looking that clean. Zoom that didn't turn into mush the second you used it. Nokia knew how to build a camera into a phone before anyone else figured out that was going to matter.
None of that saved it. And I don't think it was ever going to, because the hardware was never the problem. The problem was opening the app store on a Tuesday afternoon and finding that half the apps I actually used day to day either didn't exist for Windows Phone or existed as some abandoned husk that hadn't been updated since 2012. My bank's app was a mobile website wrapped in a frame. Instagram showed up eventually but felt like a tolerated guest rather than something anyone at Facebook cared about maintaining. You can put the best sensor in the world into a phone and it doesn't matter if the software ecosystem around it is a ghost town.
So when the layoff news hit last week, my first reaction wasn't shock, it was something closer to watching a slow car crash you'd already predicted the outcome of a year ago. The acquisition always felt like Microsoft buying a very good camera company and getting a phone division attached to it that they weren't sure what to do with. Elop goes back to being just an executive on an org chart instead of the guy everyone loved to blame for burning platforms, and a lot of actual people, mostly in Finland, lose their jobs over decisions that were made in Redmond boardrooms.
(Sidebar, because I can't help it: I still think "burning platform" as a phrase should be retired forever. Every tech exec memo since 2011 has tried to invoke it and it's never once landed the way the original did.)
What actually bugs me is that this wasn't really a hardware failure story getting told as one. The narrative that's going to stick is "Nokia phones were bad, Microsoft cut its losses," and that's just not true. The phones were fine. Some of them were better than fine. The 1020's camera is still, as of this week, sitting unbeaten by anything Apple or Samsung has shipped, and I say that as someone who does not carry the thing as my daily phone anymore because I got tired of explaining to people why my texts showed up green and weird. The ecosystem problem killed it, not a design problem, and ecosystem problems are exactly the kind of thing that raw layoffs can't fix and that Microsoft had four years to solve and didn't.
I don't have a tidy prediction here about what happens to the Lumia line going forward, or whether the Microsoft Lumia branding change actually helps anything. Feels a little like renaming a store after you've already fired half the staff. I'll probably keep the 1020 in a drawer for a few more years just to pull out when I want to take a picture of something across a parking lot without looking like a weirdo with a real camera.
Also, completely unrelated, my AC died on Saturday during the actual hottest weekend of the summer so far and I spent four hours trying to figure out if it was the capacitor or something worse before an actual technician told me in about ninety seconds that it was the capacitor. Some systems really are simpler than you think they're going to be. This was not one of the times that was comforting.