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Symbian Sells Millions, Despite Nokia Pushing Windows Phone
Nerval's Lobster writes "During the fourth quarter of 2012, Nokia sold 4.4 million Lumia smartphones—a significant rise from the previous quarter, which featured sales of 2.9 million Lumia devices. The Lumia line runs Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system, which largely replaced Symbian as Nokia's smartphone software of choice. Despite that shift and Nokia's emphasis on Windows Phone, however, the company still sold 2.2 million Symbian smartphones during the quarter. The question remains whether Nokia should have gone with Windows Phone in the first place, or embraced an alternate platform such as Android; an anti-Elop camp has emerged in recent months, arguing that Symbian was still a viable platform before Elop consigned it to the dustbin of tech history. For now at least, both sides seem to be right: Symbian still sells despite Nokia's attempts to take it increasingly offline, and Lumia phones are selling well. It'll take more time—perhaps a lot more time—before the ramifications of Elop's bet become clear."
The world's biggest smartphone maker (and biggest dumb phone AND feature phone maker, while we're at it) inexplicably abandoning two popular platforms, which combined were outselling all rivals literally doubly so, and which the company owned all rights and licenses to internally, to pick Microsoft's platform instead. If that doesn't sound like something that is being done for Microsoft's benefit, I don't know what is.
Admittedly, I'm more a fan of the stupidity argument rather than the malice one. But it's hardly outlandish to say that Microsoft is getting a better deal out of Elop's custodianship of Nokia than Nokia is.