Something that's becoming more and more clear to me and is making me more and more angry is how much the Microsoft / Nokia thing has affected the economy and workforce in Finland.
For a country of less than 6 million, the loss of tens of thousands of qualified, high paying jobs and the international income from sales has had quite an impact.
Nokia was the most innovation-focused and internationally recognised and respected company in Finland
In 2011 Nokias revenue equaled 20% of the national GDP of Finland and they were responsible for 27% of all patents filed in the country.
From an internal perspective (working on-site at Nokia from 2008, as an employee of Nokia from 2010 and transferred to Accenture as part of Symbian), the writing was on the wall from the the moment Elop came on board. He started trimming down and cutting out the most important parts of the company, the ones doing active research and developing the effective replacement platform for Symbian (Maemo / MeeGo). So many projects that were active got cancelled and the most promising one was hijacked (and WP was forced into the N9 hardware with some small mods to become the Lumia 800). I had started to work on the QT version of one of the internal Symbian apps, but that got cancelled.
There was already a system in place to manage the transfer of developer interest and range of apps to MeeGo, by using the QT platform. An app coded for QT on Symbian can be recompiled to run on MeeGo. So developers could write their apps for a single platform and have them run on the current devices AND future ones, making it possible to continue to run everything from a single app store. The "ecosystem" was already in place and had active development.
I firmly believe Nokia could have turned around device profitability by reducing their range, focusing on MeeGo and QT and slowly transitioning from Symbian to MeeGo starting with flagship devices and then the midrange. Instead we got the same hardware planned for this, but with WP instead and US getting the revenue instead of Finland. Jobs cut, crappy sales, more jobs cut and eventual sale of the whole division to MS, so nothing remained for us in Finland.
I'd like to give Microsoft a nice big salute with thanks for all you've done for this beautiful country.... Our economy is a great deal worse off, many professionals are still unemployed and you've ruined the reputation of a great company.
