Never Underestimate Your Rivals: Microsoft and Nokia Never Saw Android as a Threat

[dgstorm]

Sometimes it's both enlightening and entertaining to revisit older articles from the past. In this case, a Reuters article from November 2007 shows how foolishly arrogant both Nokia and Microsoft were after hearing that Google would be entering the mobile market with a new operating system. The executives at both Nokia and Microsoft vastly underestimated the impact that Google could have in the market.

Here we are almost seven years later and Android is the dominant mobile OS on the planet by a large margin. Android devices make up 80% of the world market with a total of 1 Billion activated devices. Now Nokia has fallen so far that Microsoft had to buy them out, and Microsoft is still struggling to get mobile marketshare percentages in the double digits.

Here's what Nokia said back then,

"We don't see this as a threat."

And here is Microsoft's comment,

"It really sounds that they are getting a whole bunch of people together to build a phone and that's something we've been doing for five years. I don't understand the impact that they are going to have."

This seems like perfect proof that you should never underestimate your competition, especially one as capable and powerful as Google. As an interesting sidenote, at that time Apple didn't have any comments about whether they felt Google entering the market would be a threat, but here's what they had to say,

"We have a great relationship with Google and this doesn't change anything. They are certainly an important partner for iPhone."

That didn't turn out the way they thought it would either, did it?

Source: Reuters Article from 2007

 

[Jeffrey]

Excellent David....

 

[pc747]

Nice article. I have to agree, in fact when I first saw the G1 on T-mobile (who the rep called it an iphone competitor) I remember laughing like "Google is making a phone what next Yahoo". Compared to the look of the iPhone (at the time) the G1 did not look like it was on the same level. But Google just kept marching along making improvement on improvement. I think the biggest advantage for Google was allowing manufacturers freedom to have their own vision of what the phone should look like. Unfortunately for users that meant we had to deal with fragmentation and locked bootloaders but having more brilliant minds working on a project resulted in Android improving year after year where iOS got stagnant.

 

[mountainbikermark]

Froyo was my favorite Android experience. That and when it was called the Market and I could update all my apps simultaneously instead of 1 at a time. The Inc 1 was truly a device that lived up to its name before being updated to Gingerbread.

Sent from my LG-D801 using Tapatalk

 

[LoudRam]

And if you scroll down to "similar threads" you'll see a story posted just last week about Microsoft's newest Android phone the Nokia X2. Irony anyone?

 

[jroc]

Its also funny Ballmer basically laughed at the iPhone....

2 huuuge mistakes by MS...underestimating both.

 

[Vulcan1600]

When I got the OG Droid on VZW in 2009, my friends laughed and asked why I would buy that piece of junk over the iPhone.