I Was There
Hervanta, 2002. A suburb of high-rise blocks on the edge of Tampere. I am 26, a green economist working for one of Nokia’s suppliers, and my job is to find what is wrong with Nokia’s phones.
Around me sit engineers from every corner of the world. Between us we test thirty or forty languages, and every phone must work in all of them.
The phone in my hands is called Shark. It has a screen you touch. Almost nobody outside Nokia knows it exists. It feels like holding the future.
But the future does not answer. I press the screen, and it reacts late, or not at all. The hardware is not ready, and the bugs lie deeper than any tester can reach.
Day after day we test it, in Danish, my third language, and in all the others. Day after day the bugs win.
Then a meeting ends what the bugs began. Shark is shelved, and we go back to the old software.
Copenhagen, 2005. Now I work for Nokia itself. The campus holds more than a thousand engineers, and on the roof a sauna looks out over the city. Up there we talk about one thing: the next big phone. These are the golden years.
Dubai, the year of the iPhone. I am the first in my office to carry one to work. I hold it up to my colleagues. “This is what we had in our hands in 2002,” I tell them. “And Steve Jobs made it.”
That evening I come home and tell my wife, Jannie: from today, Nokia’s phones are doomed.
The warning was never hidden. It sat in our bug reports in Hervanta, years before anyone outside had seen an iPhone.
I held the future at 26. Then I watched someone else sell it. This is how a giant lets it happen.2
The Fall
Nokia’s phones, 2004–2013: the throne it would not leave
Espoo, January 2008. Nokia’s chief executive, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, reports the results for 2007.3 In the last three months of 2007, Nokia sold four in every ten mobile phones bought on Earth.3
Over the whole year, it sold about half of the world’s smartphones, the phones that run apps and the internet. Its operating profit rose by almost half, to €8 billion.3
Its own software, Symbian, still ran on more than six in every ten smartphones in the world.4 From the top of the tower, the view has never been better.
Now go back one year, to San Francisco. It is 9 January 2007, in a hall called Moscone West. The lights go down to James Brown singing “I Feel Good”.5
Steve Jobs walks out and tells the room that Apple will make history today. “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” he says.5 Then he shows them a phone with no keyboard.6
The iPhone goes on sale on 29 June 2007, at $499 and $599, and at first only in America.7 From Finland, that looks like comfort. It is only a head start.
The danger was never the phone alone. It was what would soon stand behind it: a shop full of apps, built by outside developers, all working for the same phone. Back in 2004, Ari Hakkarainen, a marketing manager at Nokia, and his team had designed such a shop. Management did not approve it.8
Nokia’s smartphones ran on its own software, called Symbian. Juhani Risku, a manager who designed what users saw on Nokia’s screens, later said his team had offered about 500 ideas to improve it. None was approved.8 Decisions, he said, were made by committee.8
Years later, two professors, Quy Huy of INSEAD and Timo Vuori of Aalto University, interviewed 76 Nokia managers, engineers and outside experts. They wanted to know why the giant had moved so slowly. Their answer was not stupidity. It was silence.9
Middle managers were afraid to disappoint the top, so they sent good news up and kept bad news down. Top managers were afraid to admit to investors and partners that Symbian was behind. Nobody, the researchers found, wanted to be the bearer of bad news.9
One middle manager remembered a chart on its way up to the top executives. Before it went, a supervisor told the manager to move the data points to the right.9
Some of those at the top, the researchers were told, shouted at people.9
The phones showed it. The N95 went out with its software cut back. The 5800, Nokia’s answer to the touchscreen, came about a year and a half late. One top manager later called the N97 “a total fiasco in terms of the quality of the product”.9
A throne is a very comfortable seat. It is also a very hard place to hear anything from.
Central London, 11 February 2011. The stage at Nokia’s annual meeting with investors is lit blue, and the photographers at the front are adjusting their cameras.10
Days earlier, the man about to walk onto that stage had written to his staff. Stephen Elop, Nokia’s new chief executive, told them about a man on an oil platform in the North Sea. Woken by an explosion, the man jumped into the freezing water, because staying meant burning. Nokia, Elop wrote, was standing on a burning platform.11 The first iPhone had shipped in 2007, he added, and Nokia still had nothing close to it.11
Nokia had made the fire worse itself, he admitted. “We poured gasoline on our own burning platform,” he wrote.11
On the blue stage, Elop said the fight was no longer phone against phone. It was ecosystem against ecosystem.10 An ecosystem, in plain words, is the phone, the apps and the people who build them, all pulling the same way. Then Steve Ballmer, the head of Microsoft, joined him.10
Nokia had chosen Microsoft’s Windows Phone as its main smartphone software.12 It was a brave jump. It came four years after the fire had started.
In the first three months of 2012, Samsung shipped 93.5 million phones and Nokia 82.7 million. Nokia’s 14 years as the world’s biggest phone maker were over.13
Espoo, 3 September 2013. Nokia’s chairman, Risto Siilasmaa, faces the press with Elop and Ballmer. Nokia is selling its phone business to Microsoft.14,15 For him, Siilasmaa says, it was a very emotional decision.15
Microsoft paid €5.44 billion, most of it for the phone business and the rest for the right to use Nokia’s patents.14 The sale closed in April 2014, and about 25,000 people moved to Microsoft.16
Three men face the press in Espoo. One already runs Microsoft; one is expected to join it when the sale closes.14 Only the chairman stays with Nokia.
The Rise
From paper and tyres to phones, and now to the networks of the AI age
Nokia had once known this law better than anyone. To see how, leave Espoo and go back to 1865, when a mining engineer, Fredrik Idestam, founded his first wood-pulp mill in southern Finland.17 A second mill, by the Nokianvirta river, gave the company its name.17
In 1967 Nokia merged with Finnish Rubber Works and Finnish Cable Works.18 It came to make paper, tyres, cables, televisions and computers.17,19 It could sell you the tyres for the drive to work and the television for the evening.
Then came the hard years. In 1991 Nokia lost $87.7 million, and its sales fell by a sixth.20 That autumn its owners agreed to sell the whole company to Ericsson, at 140 markkaa a share.21
On 10 October 1991 the deal died, because Ericsson would not take the televisions.21 Ericsson’s own history gives the reason in seven words: “Consumer electronics involved too great a risk.”22 Not even a buyer wanted the kingdom Nokia was sitting on.
Finland, 1 July 1991, three months before the deal died. Harri Holkeri, a former prime minister, picks up a car phone and calls Kaarina Suonio, the deputy mayor of Tampere. It is one of the first calls on Finland’s new digital phone network, called GSM. The line is so clear, he says, that it is like talking to someone in the next room.23 Nokia supplied the network that carried it.24
Finland, 16 January 1992. Nokia’s board names a new chief executive: Jorma Ollila, a former Citibank banker who has run the phone unit since 1990.25,26 “No one was happy when I was chosen,” he later wrote. That afternoon, he recalled, Nokia’s shares fell 10 per cent.27 His plan fitted on one line: “Focus, global, mobile phones and high value added.”27
On 10 November 1992 Nokia launched the 1011, a GSM phone for the hand. Its name was its birthday: the tenth of the eleventh.28
Leaving cost money, and people. The computers had already gone to ICL in 1991, for £330 million, with about 7,000 staff.19 In 1995 Nokia put its tyres on the stock exchange and kept 36 per cent.29 In March 1996 it sold the last 55 per cent of NKF, a cable maker.30
Getting out of televisions cost 2,340 million markkaa in 1995 alone, the year’s losses and the cost of leaving together.29 In June 1996 the television factory in Turku went to Semi-Tech, and about 1,500 people went with the business.30,31 By then Nokia called itself one of “the leading focused telecommunications companies”.29
It worked. In 1998 Nokia became the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones. It built 40.8 million of them that year, nearly twice as many as the year before.32 Its profit margin, Ollila wrote, was “clearly above industry averages”.32
Meanwhile, Nokia kept a second business: the networks that phone calls travel on. In 2013 it bought Siemens out of the network company the two had run together.33 In 2015 it agreed to buy the French network maker Alcatel-Lucent, in a deal valued at €15.6 billion, and took control in 2016.34,35
Now Nokia is making another leap. In February 2025 it bought Infinera, an American maker of equipment for the networks that carry data as light between the huge computer halls behind the internet.36
Espoo, 28 October 2025. Nokia announces that Nvidia, the company whose chips power the AI boom, will invest $1 billion in it, for about three in every hundred of its shares.37 Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, calls telecoms “a critical national infrastructure”.38
In November 2025, Nokia rebuilt its strategy around artificial intelligence. It set aside four units with about €0.9 billion in yearly sales as no longer central to its future. “Nokia changed the world once by connecting people — and will again by connecting intelligence,” said its chief executive, Justin Hotard.39
On 22 October 2026, Nokia reported that its sales to AI and cloud customers had grown 123 per cent from a year earlier. In that quarter, they were 12 per cent of group sales.40 “Demand for connectivity in AI and cloud is massive and it’s insatiable,” Hotard told investors.40
Whether the leap lands, nobody yet knows. What is known is the pattern. Once before, Nokia left its old kingdoms for a new one, and it lived to rule. The one time it stayed seated, it lost the throne.
The Verdict
Nokia built the future in 2004, then spent seven years guarding the past.
The Way Back
You are not the first to sit comfortably on a throne, and you need not be the last to leave it late. This Monday, take one hour to write down the product that pays you most, and the one person who could build what kills it. Book thirty minutes with them this week to hear the bad news, and thank them for it. Nokia made this choice once, in 1992, and you can make it before you have to.
Keys to Power
- Pay for bad news. A throne muffles every sound from below. Reward the first person who says the product is slipping, and promote the messenger before the optimist.
- Fund your own replacement. The best time to leave a business is while it still pays. Let the old kingdom pay for the new one while it still can.
- Watch the builders. Customers follow the apps, and the apps follow the builders. Count which side outside developers build for first, every quarter.
What You Watch For
In your company
The sign: the team behind your best product sends up only good news. The check: ask two levels down what they would stop doing if they ran the company. The move: give one of them a direct line to you for a quarter.
In your investments
The sign: the leaders call the newcomer a toy, year after year. The check: set their words beside the newcomer’s growth in the same years. The move: in the next results, read what changed, not what was promised.
In your career
The sign: you are the finest expert in the product your company most needs to replace. The check: could you explain the newcomer to your boss tomorrow? The move: give it a few hours a week, and if you are already behind, carry your customer knowledge to the new team.
The Signal
July 2008. Apple opens its App Store to outside developers, and in about three days more than 10 million apps are downloaded. The iPhone was a product; the shop was a crowd of builders working on Apple’s phone. Watch where the builders go, because the customers follow them.
The Power Test
If a new chief executive took over tomorrow, would they stop protecting your best-selling product?
The Reversal
The law fails when you leave faster than your customers can follow. In 2011 Netflix tried to leave its DVD kingdom early: it raised prices, announced a separate brand for DVDs, lost a net 805,000 US members that quarter, and then dropped the brand. The test: are more of your own customers paying for the new thing this quarter than last?
Written in October 2026, from public records and from more than ten years with Nokia. Nokia sold its phone business in 2014. In October 2026 its sales to AI and cloud customers had grown 123 per cent in a year.
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- ↑ The 2004 prototype. VentureBeat, “Nokia had iPhone-like prototype in 2004 but killed it”, 27 September 2010 archived
- ↑ I Was There: in 2002, at 26, testing the Shark touchscreen prototype in Hervanta, a high-rise suburb of Tampere, as a green economist (Danish his third language), for Lionbridge, a Nokia supplier, among engineers from around the world testing 30–40 languages, including Danish; slow touch, hardware not ready, deep software bugs; a meeting stopped the project and testing went back to the old software. Nokia from 2005, at its Copenhagen campus (more than a thousand engineers, a rooftop sauna looking over the Copenhagen skyline, talk of the next big phone). In Dubai when the iPhone came: the first in his office to carry one; his words to colleagues and to his wife, Jannie. More than ten years with Nokia; later led internal controls in the Middle East and Africa region of Nokia Siemens Networks during its turnaround. The author’s own account, given for this book, 31 October 2026
- ↑ Q4 and full-year 2007 results, reported by chief executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo: four in ten phones; about half of smartphones; profit up 46% to €8 billion. Nokia, Q4 and full-year 2007 results (Form 6-K), January 2008: 40% Q4 market share; 60.5 million of about 122 million converged devices; operating profit up 46% to EUR 8.0 billion archived
- ↑ Symbian on 65% of smartphones in the last quarter of 2007 (Canalys). iTWire, “Apple takes No. 3 spot for smartphones in Q4 07” (Canalys data), 6 February 2008 archived
- ↑ Moscone West; the lights dim after James Brown’s “I Feel Good”; Steve Jobs: Apple will make history today, “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along…”. Macworld, live update from the Macworld Expo 2007 keynote, 9 January 2007 archived
- ↑ Macworld, 9 January 2007. Apple, “Apple Reinvents the Phone with iPhone”, Macworld San Francisco, 9 January 2007 archived
- ↑ iPhone on sale, 29 June 2007. Apple, “iPhone Premieres This Friday Night at Apple Retail Stores”, 28 June 2007 archived
- ↑ The 2004 prototype, shown to business customers at Nokia’s Espoo headquarters, judged expensive and risky, and shelved; the 2004 app shop design, not approved; Ari Hakkarainen, Series 60 marketing manager; Juhani Risku, user-interface design manager, about 500 proposals, “management by committee”. The New York Times, via CNBC: former Nokia insiders Ari Hakkarainen, Juhani Risku and Kai Nyman on the 2004 touchscreen prototype, the 2004 app shop design and about 500 Symbian proposals, 27 September 2010 archived
- ↑ Quy Huy and Timo Vuori; the 76 interviews; the bearer of bad news; the N95, 5800 and N97 (“a total fiasco in terms of the quality of the product”); the chart whose data points a supervisor said to move to the right; managers who shouted “at the top of their lungs”. Quy Huy and Timo Vuori, “Who Killed Nokia? Nokia Did”, INSEAD Knowledge, 22 September 2015 (from their Administrative Science Quarterly study) archived
- ↑ Central London, 11 February 2011: blue stage lighting; photographers adjusting their cameras; Elop’s “battle of devices to a war of ecosystems”; Steve Ballmer on stage. Engadget, live from Nokia’s Capital Markets Day, London, 11 February 2011 archived
- ↑ Stephen Elop’s burning platform memo; “The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience”. Engadget, the full “burning platform” memo, 8 February 2011 archived
- ↑ Windows Phone as Nokia’s main smartphone software. Microsoft, Nokia and Microsoft partnership announcement, 11 February 2011 archived
- ↑ Samsung passes Nokia, Q1 2012. Telecompaper, “Samsung passes Nokia to become world’s largest handset maker” (Strategy Analytics), April 2012 archived
- ↑ The sale to Microsoft, 3 September 2013: €5.44 billion; Risto Siilasmaa, chairman and interim chief executive; Elop steps aside as chief executive and is expected to transfer to Microsoft at closing; Siilasmaa stays chairman. Nokia, stock exchange release on the sale of Devices & Services to Microsoft (Form 6-K), 3 September 2013 archived
- ↑ Espoo press conference with Siilasmaa, Elop and Ballmer; Siilasmaa: “a very emotional decision”. Scientific American (Associated Press), “Nokia: Selling phone business to Microsoft painful but necessary”, September 2013 archived
- ↑ The sale closes; about 25,000 people. Microsoft, “Microsoft officially welcomes the Nokia Devices and Services business”, 25 April 2014 archived
- ↑ Fredrik Idestam, a mining engineer, founds his first wood-pulp mill in southern Finland, 1865; a second mill by the Nokianvirta river gives the company its name; the conglomerate of rubber, cable, forestry and electronics. Nokia, “Historiamme” (Our history), nokia.com, accessed 31 October 2026 archived
- ↑ The 1967 merger of Nokia, Finnish Rubber Works and Finnish Cable Works. Cable Factory (Kaapelitehdas), “History of the Cable Factory”, accessed 31 October 2026 archived
- ↑ ICL to buy Nokia Data for £330 million, adding about 7,000 staff, 29 May 1991. Tech Monitor (Computergram), “ICL to buy Nokia Data”, 29 May 1991 archived
- ↑ Nokia’s 1991 loss of $87.7 million; revenue down 16%. Tech Monitor (Computergram), Nokia results for 1991, 15 September 1992 archived
- ↑ Autumn 1991: Nokia’s owners agree to sell the whole company to Ericsson at 140 markkaa a share; the deal collapses on 10 October 1991 over the television business. Yle, “Ylen dokumentti: Nokian myyminen Ericssonille peruuntui puheluun 1991”, 17 August 2021 archived
- ↑ Ericsson’s board: “Consumer electronics involved too great a risk”. Ericsson History, “Too great a risk”, accessed 31 October 2026 archived
- ↑ Harri Holkeri, former prime minister, calls Kaarina Suonio, deputy mayor of Tampere, from a car phone, 1 July 1991; “like talking to someone in the next room”. Nokia, “Thirty years on from the call that transformed how we communicate” (Nokia blog, 2021), accessed 31 October 2026 archived
- ↑ The first GSM call, July 1991, on Radiolinja’s network supplied by Nokia. Yle, on the first GSM call in Finland, 18 May 2016 archived
- ↑ Jorma Ollila: career began at Citibank; president of Nokia Mobile Phones 1990–1992; chief executive from 1992. Sitra, “Jorma Ollila” (biography), accessed 31 October 2026 archived
- ↑ Jorma Ollila’s career: Citibank; president of Nokia Mobile Phones 1990–1992; chief executive from 1992. Alma Media, Jorma Ollila CV (in Finnish), 2021 archived
- ↑ Chosen chief executive on 16 January 1992: “No one was happy”; the share price fell 10% that afternoon; “Focus, global, mobile phones and high value added”. Jorma Ollila and Harri Saukkomaa, Against All Odds: Leading Nokia from Near Catastrophe to Global Success (Maven House, 2016), as quoted by D. Shivakumar, Founding Fuel, 13 May 2017 archived
- ↑ The Nokia 1011, launched 10 November 1992; its model number taken from the date. The Register, “Nokia 1011”, 9 November 2007 archived
- ↑ Leaving televisions: FIM 1,988 million for discontinuing operations, FIM 2,340 million in all for 1995 (p. 22); Nokian Tyres listed, Nokia’s holding cut to 36% (p. 20); “one of the leading focused telecommunications companies” (p. 6). Nokia, Annual Report 1995, pp. 6, 20, 22 archived
- ↑ The remaining 55% of the cable maker NKF sold, March 1996; television production in Turku sold to Semi-Tech (Global). Nokia, Annual Report 1996, p. 41 (note 9, discontinued operations) archived
- ↑ About 1,500 staff go with the television business to Semi-Tech, June 1996. Tech Monitor (Computergram), “Nokia sells unit to Semi-Tech”, 13 June 1996 archived
- ↑ World’s biggest phone maker, 1998; 40.8 million phones, production up 92%; operating margin “clearly above industry averages”. Nokia, Annual Report 1998, pp. 6–8 archived
- ↑ Siemens bought out of Nokia Siemens Networks, 2013. Nokia, “Nokia completes the acquisition of Siemens stake in Nokia Siemens Networks”, 7 August 2013 archived
- ↑ Alcatel-Lucent deal, €15.6 billion. Nokia, “Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent to combine”, 15 April 2015 archived
- ↑ Control of Alcatel-Lucent, January 2016. Telecoms.com, Nokia holds nearly 80% of Alcatel-Lucent after its exchange offer, 4 January 2016 archived
- ↑ Infinera, February 2025. Nokia, closing of the Infinera acquisition (Form 6-K), 28 February 2025 archived
- ↑ Nvidia invests $1 billion; about 2.9% of Nokia’s shares. Nokia, NVIDIA to invest USD 1.0 billion in Nokia (Form 6-K), 28 October 2025 archived
- ↑ Jensen Huang on telecoms. Nokia, “NVIDIA and Nokia to pioneer the AI platform for 6G”, Espoo, 28 October 2025 archived
- ↑ New strategy, November 2025; Justin Hotard; four units with about €0.9 billion in sales; Hotard’s quote. Nokia, Capital Markets Day 2025: new strategy and portfolio businesses (Form 6-K), 19 November 2025 archived
- ↑ Q3 2026: AI and cloud sales up 123%, 12% of group sales; Hotard: “massive and it’s insatiable”. Nokia Q3 2026 earnings call transcript, 22 October 2026 archived
- ↑ The Signal: the App Store opens to outside developers in July 2008; more than 10 million downloads in about three days. Apple, “iPhone App Store Downloads Top 10 Million in First Weekend”, 14 July 2008 (via MacTech) archived
- The Reversal. Netflix announced, then retracted, a separate DVD brand; domestic net subscriber change of (805) thousand in Q3 2011: Netflix, “Q3 2011 Letter to Shareholders” (SEC Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1), 24 Oct 2011 archived · Price change and DVD rebranding announcement in Q3 2011; rebranding plans retracted: Netflix, Form 10-K for fiscal 2011, Feb 2012 archived