Yet another iconic brand ends up being swallowed by a tech giant. The only difference this time is that Nokia might act as a Trojan horse for Microsoft.
It is rather obvious that Microsoft made this move in order to counteract Google and Apple’s actions. The Redmond giant’s competition have the biggest market shares, while the Microsoft-Nokia collaboration came on the third spot ever since the two companies announced that they would be working together.
For some, Nokia is a synonym for mobile phones, considering the long history of this Finnish company in this field. Unfortunately, in the past few years the mobile phone manufacturer faced some serious financial problems. Nokia’s decision to make exclusively either Windows Phones or dumb phones led to its downfall. Many thought that the only way out is for the company to switch to Android.
Now that Steve Ballmer is stepping down from the position of Microsoft’s CEO, Stephen Elop, who has been Nokia’s CEO for the past 3 years, has great chances of taking that place. For the moment, however, Elop will have to make do with the position of Executive Vice President, Devices & Services. Since part of the deal was that all of the Nokia employees will continue their work for their new employer, Elop will eventually get to work for Microsoft, as CEO or in some other position.
The thing that worries me the most is the thought that Microsoft might someday give up on using the Nokia brand, just to replace it with Windows Phone or something similar. Nokia is definitely among the most popular brands in the world, so it would be sad if this name became history. One could say that the brand is too important for Microsoft to give it up, but the same thing was valid for Ericsson, when this Swedish company started collaborating with Sony. Recently, Sony has bought Ericsson’s share and deleted their name from the brand.
One thing to remember, though, is that Nokia’s mobile phone business does not only resume to smartphones that are good or bad. There’s also a lot of technology that Microsoft could use in its future products. I’m not saying that Microsoft is a bad company, since some of the products they came up with are truly revolutionary, but maybe there might have been a different solution for Nokia besides this takeover.
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