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Google Is in Talks to Buy Nokia's Airborne Broadband System: Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
Google is in advanced talks to buy Nokia's airborne broadband system, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. Google would use Nokia's system, the report claimed, to tap into new services and reach more users by offering in-flight high-speed internet. From the report: Nokia's technology could help Google offer a faster alternative to existing Wi-Fi on airplanes, said the people. Talks are advanced and an agreement may be reached soon, the people said. A final decision hasn't been made and the companies could still decide against a deal, the people said. Nokia's LTE A2G cellular-based system creates a direct link between an aircraft and the ground instead of bouncing the signal off of a satellite, enabling in-cabin high-speed internet services using Wi-Fi, according to its website.
The engineers were great, at making hardware and embedded software to run on memory constrained system like their cheaper phone models.
I'm sure some people internally said in 2004-2007 that they needed a new OS since they were basically running a macOS8/win3.1 like operating system on phones that had better specs than most win95 machines had used when the internet became a thing, but the thing was that Nokia's culture was not one that could appreciate the need for something like that in the future because the higher rungs were full of salesmen or other risk averse people that usually climbs in big organisations like Nokia was.
(I'm not familiar with Nokia history so maybe they had some teams on that but then they did the whole Copland thing that Apple had done in the 90s)