Nvidia seems to be operating more like a sovereign wealth fund than a traditional business. They have a very-in-demand product, that is not likely to last forever, and is getting their fingers in as many pies as possible with the money and influence while they have it.
As it seems now, they are into producing silicon that does massive parallel calculations, and variants on it thereof.
To me, that seems to be a requirement for the computing industry for a long time.
And, they seemed to have amassed enough capital to comfortably pivot to the next great thing that requires similar calculations.
I think this is their super power.
The next logical step would be to get into CPUs, to become a fully integrated computing solutions provider.
> To me, that seems to be a requirement for the computing industry for a long time.
Sure, but they have a market cap of 5 trillion. It's about 10x that of AMD, which also sells similar silicon (and isn't in any distress). It's more than Apple, Google, and Microsoft - and these companies historically found ways to make more money than the vendors they buy chips from.
The problem isn't that Nvidia doesn't have good fundamentals or good products, it's that the market is expecting miracles.
In the case of Nvidia, the funny thing is that their high valuations started not with AI, but with cryptocurrencies. Just never really came down - they coasted from a silly hype cycle to a more substantive one. Ten years ago, NVDA wasn't an interesting stock at all.
Stock values go up when people buying stocks expect them to go up.
Stock values go down when people holding stocks expect them to go down.
Why would you hold a stock if you think it should go down? If you think the stock is valuable but in the near term should go down, why not sell and then buy in increments as it goes down?
Because not everyone is in it for the short term.
Tax reasons might be one as well, long term capital gains are taxed less.
There are few investors that can spend the time it takes to be active like that.
Most people buying individual stocks are better of buying ETFs anyway.
In the end it's a choice on what to spend your time on.
Indeed. Since most stock are mostly held by institutional investors, prices are heavily guided by sentiment.
Except when they aren’t, see GameStop and Beyond Meat.
Nvidia is already doing that under MGX. They also offer their Grace CPUs on that platform.
The problem is not demand going away. No margin in a late stage company goes unassailed for long. Intel has nothing to lose. AMD has everything to gain. Untold other players are finding oxygen in various places. Nvidia is smart to use their spotlight as long as it lasts, but in their pitch, they're saying, "this will put you ahead," not "this will last forever."
> The problem is not demand going away.
The problem for Nvidia is when demand doesn't continue to increase as much as expected.
Google?
Perhaps not forever but GPUs for AI is likely to be a very solid and profitable business for a long time. CPUs made plenty of money for their makers in that era.
AI, while undeniably powerful and transformative, is in the midst of the biggest, most insane tech bubble we have ever seen. And nearly all of that money is ending up, directly or indirectly, in GPU data centers. And NVIDIA is the largest cost (profit maker) there.
When that investment firehouse gets turned off, the AI providers will stop building new data centers. Likely for some years. That revenue stream for NVIDIA will go to zero so fast…
The unknown, as with any bubble, is timing.
Demand for chips has only increased since their invention and never gone down, much less "to zero." Chips are a critical part of the tech business for the foreseeable future, regardless of what happens with AI or any other use case for them. They're raw material for computing, and computing use only goes up.
NVIDIA growth in data center sales the last 4 years: 2022: from $6.7 billion +58.5% to $10.61 billion; 2023: +41.4% to $15.01 billion; 2024: +216.7% to $47.53 billion; 2025: +142.4% to $115.19 billion
NVIDIA isn’t a startup. It isn’t disrupting a market. It is the ESTABLISHMENT. Low double-digit growth numbers for market leader in established industries would be, by itself tremendously remarkable. Apple was 6% last year, for example. That’s doing great.
NVIDIA grew 142% this year and 217% the year before. That’s… that’s f%#£ing unbelievable is what that is.
The entire consumer market for NVIDIA is less than 10% of their data center market. NVIDIA is a ln AI company with a side hustle in computer graphics. Oh and a nontrivial amount of that is researchers and small companies buying consumer chips for non-LLM AI training and inference, so real numbers are even smaller.
“Zero”, while not mathematically accurate, is indistinguishable here. Elimination of most of the data center sales would immediately move market valuations by trillions of dollars.
Man, I feel old. I remember feeling this way during dot-com bubble. The few months of unemployment grounded me. Anyway, better positioned this time. History is a good teacher.
Demand for networking equipment has only increased since their invention and never gone down, much less "to zero".
I'm sure that same phrase was echoed at Nortel and more offices in the 90s.
It's all hot stuff until you have a few billion dollars worth of inventory manufactured that you can barely give away for a million dollars one day. Sure it's not zero, but you're still pretty fucked in the end.
NVIDIA doesn’t separate their networking revenue, but at time of acquisition mellanox had less than a billion dollars on sales. Less a half a percent of NVIDIA’s current data center sales. That has undoubtedly grown, but I would be surprised if the networking share of their data center business was more than a rounding error. Keep in mind they sell GPUs for $50k, 2-8GPUs per box, and even a state of the art Infiniband card to put in that machine is only a few thousand bucks.
You are missing his point.
I think I replied to the wrong comment, thank you.
> most insane tech bubble we have ever seen.
the current "bubble" hasn't surpassed the dot-com boom yet.
The total aggregate loss of value from top to bottom of the dotcom crash was about $5 trillion. That’s the current market cap of NVIDIA alone, to say nothing of other AI companies. So yeah, it has.
that number back in 2000 is about $9.7 trillion adjusted for inflation. You can't merely just compare the numbers at that time with a number today. It's meaningless.
You have to compare forward earnings to share-price ratios.
I think you missed that I'm comparing a single company to the entire market crash in 2000.
What about OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and the other foundation labs that have collectively raised trillions?
What Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta, which would likely survive but maybe lose up to a trillion each in valuation?
What about the very long tail of venture-backed AI companies that will go bust? You might complain that the dotcom number was just public companies, but back in 2000 everything was a public company. A company with thousands of high-earning employees going bust matters to the greater economy whether or not it is Nasdaq listed or not.
If a single company represents the entire dollar amount of the dotcom bust, or half when inflation-adjusted, and that valuation is entirely predicated on that growth continuing at historically unprecedented rates.. yeah we're in a bubble, and the damage when it bursts is going to be big.
That was the point I was making, and I fail to see how forward earnings to share-price ratios has any relevance here. The whole point of a bubble popping is that the market suddenly finds out those forward revenues were a mirage, a house of cards, and are very much made up.
> fail to see how forward earnings to share-price ratios has any relevance here.
the relevance is that these earnings expectations are lower than when the dotcom bubble happened.
The fact that a single company can have a market cap today that is greater than the losses from the dotcom bust is irrelevant. We have more wealth today than back in 2000, and these market caps reflect that.
>the relevance is that these earnings expectations are lower than when the dotcom bubble happened.
[citation needed]
cant find the forward earnings chart, but PE is close proximation
https://www.macrotrends.net/2577/sp-500-pe-ratio-price-to-ea...
The dotcom bubble peaked at around 46, while we are currently at 30. Will it grow? Who knows. But the bubble certainly isn't as big as claimed by the grandparent comment.
Maybe the most insane tech bubble you've seen. We'll have to wait and see how the superbowl goes.
AI is a bubble and will pop soon, theres no way even 80% of the spending has yielded the returns they were looking for. Nvidia cards will lower in demand though probably the bubble will be a net gain for nvidia over the preceding 4 or 5 years, though it will take them a while to regain their peak market cap
They know their time is running out. CEO has been selling shares like they are going out of business the next monday, but nobody talks about it because market could wake up from the dream and crash the entire market as the AI bubble is the only thing holding up the entire USA economy(yes, not just the markets) right now.
Seems like he's sold 10% ish of his shares in 2025, not really that extreme
Which is not not smart.
edit: highlight: "not not". I think it's very smart.
Why is it not smart?
The classical answer would be RCA, who famously bought Carpetland, Banquet Foods, and Hertz car rental, and was bequeathed the moniker "Rugs, Chickens, and Automobiles" by the investment community.
Buying a stake in Nokia is admittedly different than taking it over and managing it, but the danger there is very clear. Distracted management that strays away from core competence can easily kill the golden goose driving revenue.
The contrarian view is that Berkshire Hathaway is able to hold an array of successful manufacturing and service businesses (Kirby vacuum cleaners, Dairy Queen, Clayton Homes, and the prominent Sees Candy) without losing management control of GEICO and their other insurance holdings.
Hopefully, Nvidia sees the example of RCA and Gulf Western, and will not lose focus on their core competence.
RCA famously birthed the semiconductor industry in Taiwan. I think that focused trade regulation would prevent a repeat of that event in modern times.
Edit: It appears that RCA bought Coronet Carpets, not Carpetland.
There were two nots
you calling nvidia dumb not smart
When an organization reaches a certain level of wealth they become what amounts to as lawyers. Placing money in areas that demonstrate their understanding of the situation even if it may result in potential losses strengthens their brand and reputation.
Nokia today is the combination of the network businesses of Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel and Lucent.
They have substantial operations in North America. T-Mobile uses primarily their hardware. Nokia still operates Bell Labs which came originally from AT&T via Lucent.
As the other global options for network hardware are Ericsson, Samsung and Huawei, Nokia is the closest to a “Made in USA” solution. Its HQ is in Finland but at least it’s a NATO country now.
So they’re more important to US infrastructure than might appear at first glance.
What do you imply with "atleast its a nato country"? Its not like finland have ever been anti-west, if this was your point. Nato alone does not imply pro-west (the US/trump leadership being the prime example)
I think the context is clear from what was written:
> As the other global options for network hardware are Ericsson, Samsung and Huawei, Nokia is the closest to a “Made in USA” solution. Its HQ is in Finland but at least it’s a NATO country now.
i.e. with the current US administration, a "Made in USA" solution to critical infrasctructure would likely be seen as ideal; and viewed through this lens, when the other options come from Sweden, Finland, South Korea, and China, Finland is probably the best option.
I didn't read any implied criticism of Finland.
How is Sweden worse than Finland? Considering they both are neighbors and have been a neutral country? (technically Sweden has been for longer).
During the Cold War, Finland was officially neutral, but for pragmatic reasons leaned heavily towards the Soviets in foreign policy. There's even a word for this:
That's not the whole story. Excluding the pro-Soviet fringes, Finland always wanted to be free of Russia. When Soviet Union fell, Finland moved significantly to the west and also started inching towards NATO.
But only the real NATO membership significantly diminished the country risk that foreign investors correctly perceived in Finland.
It's of course obvious to everyone now that there has been no reason to trust Russia. US investors have been resourceful enough to realize that investing in Finland carried a significant country risk due to Russia, even in times of relative peace.
That risk is lesser now thanks to NATO.
It's not about being anti-west, it's about the likelyhood of being invaded.
Nokia expanded into data center networks. Nokia sells optical data center interconnects.
They also plan to provide AI services in the Edge, that's why Nvidia invested.
Unless they bought back Siemens into NSN, I think not.
I was part of the Nokia => NSN transition, and saw that S change back from Siemens into Solutions, with the money they got back from selling Nokia Mobile to Microsoft.
Ericsson is swedish Samsung is south korean I can agree that Huawei is chinese so that's a bad choice
But why is Ericsson(swedish), Samsung(south korean) not considered made in US in the sense that atleast south korea has strong relations with america iirc and also I just recently checked and it seems that sweden has also become a part of nato. So some of these can be just as good.
Although I still agree that Nokia might be important in general but I just wanted to point/question it out I suppose.
UPDATE: the production facilities seem to be closed; only office buildings remain somewhere.
Per Wikipedia [1], Lucent's factories and offices are^W were situated in places like Murray Hill and Mount Olive, NJ, North Andover, MA, Reading, PA, and a bunch of other places in the US.
I think it makes^W made Nokia, which owns Lucent properties, "more US" than, say Ericsson and Samsung, until these facilities were closed.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucent_Technologies#Divisions
A large number of telecom companies have Alcatel routers like the 7750 . My personal thought was that the control plane OS was likely based on Plan9, though I never had access to any source code to verify that.
its based on TiMetra's TiMOS, a router startup alcatel acquired around 2013
Why are you forgetting about Cisco, Juniper (now HPE), and Arista - all of which are US companies?
Also, why is Nokia closer to the US than Ericsson?
Cisco, Juniper, and Arista make carrier hardware like cell phone radios and controllers and traditional telephone network switches?
While there's probably a little overlap in all of their product lines with Nokia (I mean Nokia makes simple ethernet switches so that carriers can buy all their gear from one vendor), most of those companies don't really compete in the same markets as Nokia
Cisco isn't selling into T-Mobile and AT&T's customer networks. Nokia isn't selling into JPMorgan's or Walmart's IP networks
Nokia also makes complex backbone carrier-grade network switches based on the Intellectual Property portfolio they acquired from Nortel.
That kind of stuff is the closest that they would come to compete with the others cited. They're all trying to get into datacenter gear, but Cisco specifically has gotten out of various levels of service provider network gear (they sold off all their cable network stuff, for example) which is where Nokia, Ericsson, etc all make their bread and butter
> As the other global options for network hardware
Hence my comment :)
Nokia does in fact compete with Cisco and the others, but less so than in the past.
Because context is important and we're discussing Nokia and/or Nvidia in this particular thread.
Re-read the comment I replied to. I wasn’t the one who brought up how Nokia is the closest company to the US for network hardware.
>Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel and Lucent
That's an amazing trove of IP!
I think the US Gov probably "incentizied" Nvidias stake in Intel, and I wonder if they did here as well.
It's like "if your going to sell chips to China, you have to spend some of the money funding non-Chinese tech".
Nokia's capabilities to deliver 5G networks is a direct competitor to Huawei, right?
Is Nvidia functionally an strategic hedge fund of the US Government? Would this fall under Jeffrey Sach's realm?
>I think the US Gov probably "incentizied" Nvidias stake in Intel, and I wonder if they did here as well.
They definitely did, Intel existing is probably an issue of national security at this point, if Intel fell then there'd be the risk of some other nation's company being part of the duopoly.
> They definitely did, Intel existing is probably an issue of national security at this point, if Intel fell then there'd be the risk of some other nation's company being part of the duopoly.
Mind elaborating? Who are the players in the duopoly?
We currently have an all American oligopoly on the CPU market - Intel, AMD, Apple(ARM) and Qualcomm(ARM).
There's hardly any non-American CPU designers out there
I'm not sure why Arm is in parenthesis twice, when it's a full-blown, non-American CPU designer on whose coat-tails Apple and Qualcomm have been riding.
Risc-V moved HQs to be a non-American CPU designer, but perhaps you don't find them credible (yet).
Presumably referring to the logic foundry business where TSMC is the monopoly power and Intel, Samsung and SMIC are looking to turn it into a duopoly.
Or they could be referring to the Wintel monopoly (Windows+Intel), or the x86 duopoly (Intel+AMD), or the FPGA duopoly (Altera=>Intel + Xilinx=>AMD)...
Let's not forget GloFo although they are more interested in bulk at this point.mm
Global Foundries sent their EUV machine back (and paid a fat restocking fee to do it), they've stopped trying to compete at the leading edge of logic processes.
SMIC has a DUV multi-patterning 7 nm node which is already economically uncompetitive with EUV 7 nm nodes (except for PRC subsidies) and the economics of DUV only get worse further down, but at least they're trying and will certainly be the first client to use the Chinese EUV machines, whenever those come online.
Not a direct competitor, they are at a No3 slot behind Ericsson with a small global footprintmainly concentrated in NorthAmerica and some EU markets. However most of the 5G/5G+ patents are Huawei owned and FRAND so in any case the entiti in the drivers seat is H , thas why even the whole OpenRAN project didnt get far. Most likely like you surmiseits a geo-political hedge play.
Correct if I am wrong, but it is also noted that most essential 5G related patents are held by trio of Qualcomm, Ericsson and Nokia.
Yep the big three plus Huawei with a bit of an edge on them with te standard essential patent , that they collaborate in a pool with.Although in the matter of mobile modems/radios Qualcomm has an edge over all the others - not so much in the backend/longhaul telco space. Additionally if i recall most of the 6G stuff is being pushed by Huawei since most of it rests on the current 5G/5G+ work.
I get that they are now involved and contribute to 5g. But its pretty shameful how huawei had acquired the ability to do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerns_over_Chinese_involvem...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-01/did-china...
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/13/us-charges-huawei-w...
Yes, worked there and can confirm Nokia (previously known as Alcatel Lucent) is Cellphone infastructure.
Do you mean David Sacks, the AI czar?
Yes, sorry
> I think the US Gov probably "incentizied" Nvidias stake in Intel, and I wonder if they did here as well.
If you wanted something in the x86 space it was either Intel or AMD. AMD is a direct competitor. If I was Nvidia I'd have done something about Intel. At least stop them from crashing further.
Diversify before the AI money dries up.
AI hardware really is the new oil, this sort of thing reminds me of the saudis.
The stock of NVIDIA can buy the 230 smallest S&P 500 companies. Which are still quite big companies. I recently learned this fact and I think it is pretty wild.
Do you mean their market cap? Sure but that doesn’t equal their profits or cash reserves which are considerably less so NVIDIA couldn’t buy the 230 companies even if I wanted to
They could buy with stock. They can do this limitless times each time an effective merger.
The SP500 could merge into one company, regulation permitting.
They can not, as Nvidia owns very little of its own stock.
It's the owners of the Nvidia stock who potentially could trade their Nvidia stocks for the other 230 companies stocks. But then they have no Nvidia stocks anymore, on the other hand.
That’s a good point, which immediately makes me curious — how many of the smallest sp500 companies could nvidia outright purchase (or obtain a majority stake in)? It’s just a curiosity, not trying to demand an answer. I might look at it tomorrow if I have time
Its' getting more crazy by the day. Today NVidia added >300B USD in market cap. That's enough more than the valuation of Intel for example. Or more than Toyota. That 1B USD investement was money well spent !
This is also why them collapsing will take out the US stock market
In year 2000, Nokia had a market cap of around $100 billion and Nvidia had a market cap of around $2 to 4 billion.
Nvidia just made graphics cards, at a time when games were still being written for MS-DOS. Nobody was to imagine the real money to be made from repurposing these graphics cards for crypto and now this AI 'application'.
Tbf only 6 years after that Jensen was already betting on GPGPU
And even the games market.
Each of them separately, or all of them together?
If it were separately, they’d be able to buy 499 of S&P 500 companies…
Maybe they got so much money with the AI boom that they don't know anymore what to do with the cash at hand and so starts to invest it in direct now.
they need to ensure future, potential customers and the best way to do that is to own them and tell them to buy your goods.
in five years, NVDA's business strategy will be like CocaCola's, forcing bottlers to buy their syrups.
I was reading an article earlier today that said passive investing is more than 50% of the market--and since most ETFs allocate by market cap, it causes a reinforcing feedback loop for market cap leaders.
Passive investing is not an issue, but the default bias towards large cap equities like SP500, Nasdaq100. Passive investing through total market ETFs (like VTI) maintains the status quo.
For example, if they are only two companies, say with 1T and 4T market cap. If one invests 5M into a total market ETF, 1M is allocated to company A and 4M to company B. But since company B is 4x bigger than company A, the upward price pressure is the same for both companies.
The money you buy stock with l goes to the former/selling shareholder, which is most often not the company. It is possible the company is holding its own stock and selling for cash, or emitting new shares for cash, but that is much much rarer.
What is the mechanism behind that?
In a hypothetical market with 100% ETFs, you’d have a status quo.
Edit: maybe not, since you have ETFs that invest in, say, Nasdaq only, which is tech oriented and would influence S&P500.
The problem is that companies with large market cap will get more of any subsequent investment because many fund's allocate new money by current market cap.
If you ever played Risk, or most other games, once the snowball starts, it's hard to stop it.
Of course, since the market has never been like this before, it's a speculation...
Interesting move. Nvidia’s already owning the AI hardware space, and now teaming with Nokia shows telecoms want a piece of it too. Feels like the next battle is about who controls the data pipes, not just the chips.
I was thinking more that they already own Mellanox, so it makes sense to buy into a networking company. Nokia still makes telecom gear, but they also make switches and routers.
Add to the list of AI cash merry go round [1]
This isn't the gotcha everyone in the media thinks it is.
Nvidia is using its revenues to quickly invest in bets that are simultaneously customers.
If anything, it's a triple win.
- taking advantage of cash it needs to deploy
- making new investments in areas NVidia wants to shape
- making new customers that continue to buy Nvidia GPUs, especially if they're successful
Some of these ventures may fail, but it's better than distributing dividends or issuing stock buybacks if you believe this technology will be useful in the future.
Companies doing this purely off of equity, stock valuation, and product/services agreements are even smarter as they're using pure hype to fund strategy.
Cooking your books and calling it a "triple win" is certainly interesting. Nokia just diluted their shares in hopes that AI hype keeps the price pumped up. They do keep the $1B so I guess we'll see what they do with it (other than buying NVDA GPUs, of course)
I always forget that Nokia bought out Siemens part of "Nokia Siemens Networks" and it is now just "Nokia networks".
And they also bought Alcatel-Lucent.
Nokia today is sort of “everybody who was making networks in Europe and North America except Ericsson”.
Based on the stock price, some people knew it already a week ago :-)
What exactly is "AI-RAN"?
AI-RAN is the strategic play here because it's unknown (outside of research lab NDAs ?) what potential real-time physical AI/ML implementation will have on the future of edge processing like organizing the low-layer 6G spectrum contention mechanisms. It's a near certainty that custom AI accelerators are a part of every radio base station in the near future so this is not cash investment but a new product line Joint Venture similar to the Intel story.
The radio access network (RAN) is all the RF part of a mobile network: towers, base stations, the signals between our phones and the towers, phone-to-satellite comms (non-terrestrial network or NTN).
AI-RAN uses AI/ML for adaptive behaviors and optimizations in all these links.
For example, fine-grained RF and modulation details, called the channel state information (CSI), is constantly being exchanged between a phone and a base station. The volume of information creates transmission latencies. Using autoencoder models, this information can be semantically compressed to reduce its volume and decoded with high fidelity on the other side.
That's just one example. In the upcoming 6G, RAN will be "AI-native", using AI/ML everywhere. The standards may require AI accelerator chips in most base stations, NTN satellites, phones, and other elements.
It's the name given to an initiative by telco vendors like Nokia and Ericson to explore using NVIDIA GPUs to supply the core compute needs of next generation Radio Access Networks (RAN).
It's a potential 6G architecture.
Circular deals marching on
ITT: Bubblers in full force!
Does this signal the a big market for AI processing is at the edge?
That growing narrative regarding all these AI-centric companies "funding each other" is beginning to look a lot like Attrition.org's (former) sexchart..
Given 5g patent mostly h, usa has missed the boat. Somehow has to find its way back or be dominated. Not necessarily can build an empire or even a duopoly… but at least stay in the game like Intel. Understandable from usa point of view.
Why? I don't get what's in it for Nvidia or Nokia?
AI on IoT devices?
Quietly supplying telecom equipment all this time, it really isn't the Nokia most know. Crazy that Nokia is still even a thing. Who noticed that logo had even changed (two years ago in 2023).
Honestly, I feel like this is what Nokia always was, and why they fell behind in consumer tech
The bubble burst is going to be devastating for these smaller companies caught up in the frenzy. I'm staying invested in companies like Alphabet that are taking part in the race but offer more than just AI hopium.
Microsoft (Elop and Ballmer) ruined Nokia's cell phone line that led to massive layoffs.
Let's see if this investment leads to the final elimination of an EU tech company. Why does Finland permit this?
NOKIA IS NOT PHONE COMPANY. Never have been. They produce ayt of telecom stuff. Nokia was never ruined.
Nokia never executed on a touch screen OS. If i remember their final attempt with a Linux based OS was considered "good", but it was too little, too late. It was already over when they were scooped up by Microsoft, who were desperate themselves.
Pretty sure Nokia was glad to offload the handset business so they could feed money into markets they were still competitive in.
Yes they did, a few Symbian models used touch, as did original Maemo device that only did wlan initially.
All the Symbian devices used resistive touch screens, though, didn't they? E.g. the Sony Ericsson Vivaz. So the user experience was not quite the same as with capacitive touch.
No, there were quite a few Symbian models which used capacitive touch, combined with a modern Qt based Symbian OS. Check out "Symbian Belle" and the phone models released with that OS version. I loved my Nokia 603 :)
But I think they only released such models with Symbian for a couple of years, before switching to Meego and then later Windows Mobile OS.
It is still touch, and yes you could use finger nails as well on those models.
However you have not read the links, not all models were alike.
> The Nokia 7710 is a mobile phone developed by Nokia and announced on 2 November 2004.[1] It was the first Nokia device with a touchscreen
That isn't really true. The N9 was definitely ahead of it's time with a buttonless gesture based UI similar to the modern iPhone.
Microsoft did no such thing. Nokia is very directly responsible for its own cell phone failings.
This line of thought really needs to die.
The Nokia board hired Elop from Microsoft because they wanted to bet the company on the Microsoft phone, full stop.
If you want to assign blame, then its on Nokia for wanting to pursue that strategy.
As someone that was an employee at the time, I am also fed up with the anti-Microsoft narrative.
Also there are some errors there, Windows Phone only became an alternative after the burning platform memo, that wasn't at all well received neither internally, nor by the 3rd party devs that had just started to migrate their Symbian tooling yet again, this time to Qt + PIPS + Carbide.
The biggest blame with the board, as revealed on the Finish press, was the bonus clause on Elop contract to sell Nokia Mobile business.
yes Nokia had years to come up with a better OS and they didn't. Even Samsung failed at this endeavor years later.
Nokia's market cap is over $40B, so $1B is not really Microsoft level coup. At least yet.
Nokia has been teetering on the edge for a period, so they would welcome such an investment.
Nokia has been at the edge of the abyss for a period, and then they made a giant leap forward /s
To be fair Nokia, like Blackberry, was effed the moment iPhone launched. Elop hastened the decline but it was coming regardless.
It wasn't iPhone that doomed Nokia, it was Android. All of the sudden all Nokia's competitors could ship fairly good touch screen phones, while previously Nokia had a virtual monopoly on advanced mobile operating systems (barring BlackBerry in the US).
Granted, it was going to happen anyway, probably through Microsoft if Google hadn't commoditized that market first.
It's not quite the same, BlackBerry was mostly a 'phone' company and not a 'full telecom' company, in terms of hardware the produced. Nokia has other products that are more b2b than b2c.
Nokia has existed for over a hundred years. The success of its phones made it a major name and a ton of money in the early 2000s. Its other lines of business have continued to operate quietly. But it's no longer the force it was.
MSFT accelerated the invetiable.
There was just no way Nokia could match Apple on the OS who spent years prior to the idea of a smartphone making it a good match for the hardware of the time. And MSFT deservedly got punished for not investing in creating a better OS and Apple deservedly rewarded for doing so.
They may never have had the chance to beat Apple but they could certainly have bet on Android instead of Windows Phone and today they probably would have been in a different place like Samsung.
Finally. NOK to the moon. Now do BB.