Nokia

“When Huawei first started their sort of global export push they certainly were not the very best technology in the world. They were current, they were certainly, you know, subpar compared to Ericsson and Nokia, yet they were good enough and they were subsidize…”

“So we went from about 40 distributors to about 400. We went from I think, 10, 15,000 outlets to more than a lakh outlets or two lakh outlets, which is more outlets than China mobile phone industry.”

“Market share wise, the iPhone has never been more than 20% of the global market. So who has more than 20% that can actually take on Nokia? It's the Chinese competitors. They have 55% market share, right? So you couple that with Apple, couple that with Samsung,…”

“Like that's not supposed to be the case, but I would talk to Apple people who'd been to the Nokia line. I would talk to Nokia people who'd been to the Apple line. Like that's not supposed to happen. And yet it comes up all the time in anecdotes.”

“I'd been trying to buy a hard, I had talked about buying a phone company for years, a number of years before the Nokia deal. I forget what year it was. I flew to Taiwan and we were looking at buying HTC. They were the biggest Windows phone OEM at the time. Nok…”

“The problem with the partnership with Nokia is they didn't have the money to invest in marketing. We did. We did. They didn't have the market to go. They did not have the ability to go deep pockets. We did. But if we didn't have the monetization capability bac…”

“But the problem with the free trial is even if, you know Nokia, I think Nokia comes with music. They tried a year long free trial. But even then the user knew that if I start investing in playlist now, a year from now, my playlist investment is going to disapp…”

“When Nokia got sold, we had the, you know, we took all the top Nokia, they had the gold, you know, division. We got all gold guys from Nokia and doing the R&D at that time.”

“The auction happened. Shah Rukh won the team at 12 o'clock at three o'clock. He had a signed agreement with Nokia to pay the five million for the front of the shirt for that year.”

“At the time you didn't have iOS and Android. You had Nokia running the Symbian operating system, and you had Microsoft Windows running Windows Mobile. And there's this very interesting problem where most of the devices in the world that were smartphones and ha…”

“That was the first deal That we would consider, like, enterprise in the traditional sense. It wasn't that big of a deal. I think they're paying, like, you know, like, 3000 dollars a month, but, like, you know, when we closed that, we're like, oh, wow, it's lik…”

“It was like Blackberry's and Nokia's best sales years happened in the lot, the years after launching the iPhone. So it doesn't, these things don't actually change immediately.”

“When it doesn't cost you focus or your best people or whatever the scarce resources are and it only costs you cash, then you should totally think about it as, am I willing to bet 2.3% of my company or whatever percent of the cash that I'm not getting any credi…”

“At one point, as Satya talks about in the book, there's a straw poll taken of all the division heads, all the top leaders in the company, whether they're for or against the acquisition. The majority are against the acquisition. Satya is against the acquisition…”

“We made a bunch of money in BlackBerry, and then we lost a bunch of money in BlackBerry. We were early, one of my partners was like, this mobility thing is going to scale much faster than people think, and the winners are going to be Apple and Google and Black…”

“One way it happened was they replaced the engineers who used to run the company with lawyers and accountants. Nothing wrong with lawyers and accountants, but they didn't have a feel for this hardware software set of issues. And another was they put in a matrix…”

“Yahoo, BlackBerry, Nokia all failed to become platforms, right? Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon all successfully became platforms, and that business model basically carries you through because now you wire yourself into the infrastructure.”

“Every single, almost every single thing I've ever done, the first thing is the incumbents laugh at you. So whether it was an iPod, what happens? Microsoft laughs, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. IPhone, iPhone comes out. Nokia, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Nest, Honeywell, ha, ha,…”

“When he took the company over, they have 40% of the business geared towards wireless and Nokia was a massive customer, their largest customer, and he bled that down to zero.”

“I think so. The scale of the market, and the way that the kind of advertising auctions and data asymmetry is in place is just much stronger than kind of these previous generations.”

“So, Nokia, Drive AI, Johnny Morse's Wonders of Wildlife Museum, they all signed up in October.”

“If you think back again, 15 years ago, none of the companies that kind of created cellular are in the handset business anymore. Like, none of them. They're all out of it. Like, Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens, you know, Motorola. All of those companies are out of the…”

“Apple sold more phones than Nokia. I mean, the Nokia, you know, this is still Microsoft, because Nokia did, Nokia Microsoft did ten million numis and forty million feature phones. Right. Apple did seventy-five million smartphones.”

“Because of the smartphone wars, the war between Apple and Samsung and Google and Nokia and Blackberry, a lot of the components that you find in a... Everyone was trying to get a low-cost camera, low-cost accelerometers, low-cost Bluetooth chips and Wi-Fi chips…”