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Microsoft and AI: spending billions to make millions
(pivot-to-ai.com)
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this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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I was entering high school in 2011, so no.
The only real experience I have with Nokia is my dad's Nokia 3310 (which he exclusively uses as an alarm clock these days) and nonstop memes about the 3310's supposed indestructibility. Kinda wild to me that Nokia once ruled the entire goddamn phone market.
And at worst...well, by my guess, its gonna be "Microsoft accidentally brings forth the Year of the Linux Desktop"
Nokia had great hardware, but crappy software (and I say that as a heavy Series 60 user back in the day). In a parallel world, Windows Mobile could have ridden that hardware to a glorious future, but it was transparent that Elop's acquisition was just part of a Byzantine internal Microsoft play.
The biggest issue of Windows Phone was that it was even more closed than iOS, thus forcing you to use Microsoft's tooling for developing software. Yes, Android also have similar issues, and the fact that a shitty browsers are being used to run GUI apps is an insult to life itself, but still not as bad as forcing you to rewrite your app in C#, then use Mono to make it run on both Android and iOS. At least on Android, you can write a loader in Java to run your AArch binaries, and at least ALSA will be available for you alongside some other POSIX standards.
Well, the annoying part is that the burning platform talked by Elop was Maemo/Meego, which was full Linux. Without Elop and Microsoft we would have pure Linux running on phones today. Now we are stuck between two closed source OS for phones.
It was running Qt, so basically any KDE app would be portable on it quite easily.
I was working with Maemo and Qt Symbian in Nokia while this happened, and it makes me sad.
I tried using a Nokia with Symbian around the time and browsing on it was just fuckin' infuriating, so
Maybe... like I mentioned, Nokia's S60 application stack was a mess. The underlying phone software and platform might have been there, but the 3rd party ecosystem wasn't. This was a huge part of the success of the iPhone, that 3rd party developers had a stable platform to develop for, and a steady financial partner (Apple) paying them.
No offense against Nokia but I really don't think the company had the mentality to offer that.
That's Symbian, though. Nokia managed to launch a grand total of two or three Maemo/MeeGo phones (N900, N9, maybe another one I forget) before Elop killed it in the crib. It would have been one thing if the Burning Platform meno had been about S60, but it wasn't.
Being basically just a Qt-based DE on a pretty standard RPM-based Linux distro (much much more so than Android, even at the time) Meego had a low barrier to entry into application development and a rather stable and mature API to work with.
Then again, if you "don’t think the company had the mentality to offer that" I guess you're right in the sense that the alleged trojan horse CEO killed the platform before it had the chance to gain any traction.
Yeah, Symbian really was quite a thing. It was insanely optimized for memory and battery, but was nightmare to code.
FWIW, maemo still lives… Jolla released their C2 phone which runs the maemo-descended sailfish OS about 6 months ago. I don’t know anything about it, other than its existence, and that it doesn’t have the N900 form factor 😔
I think this is correct.
Nokia managed to push Ericsson out of their dominant position because Nokia were more of a consumer products company, including consumer electronics. But because Nokia did phones as consumer electronics, they didn't think about them in terms of a platform and had a poor position to compete with smart phones. Their best bet would probably have been to make hardware that ran Android, and at the time I was a bit surprised that they didn't. Their hardware reputation was stellar.
Elop's and Microsoft's actions were still scummy, though from Nokia's perspective they sold a failing part of their business for billions. Microsoft of course continued to run the phone sales into the ground.
when I started work at Ericsson Australia in late 2000, they'd found out that a third of Australian employees had Nokias, lol. So they bought everyone an Ericsson with a company plan! My first mobile! I hated it so much.
The Burning Platform debacle was huge where I live and I remember it quite well.
It seems that Microsoft was planning on coasting on brand recognition, while the public correctly noticed the lack of any real synergy between Windows Phone and Microsoft's desktop computer software. Nokia's hardware was indeed top notch, but WP lacked a killer app, or indeed most apps at all. It missed the train and developers ignored it in favor of iOS and Android.
I doubt MeeGo would have managed to recapture the dominance Nokia had on the pre-iPhone market, but at least nerds like me would have vastly preferred it.
Never underestimate the ability of these companies ability to lobby government officials.