Why Nokia lost, and Samsung won

[Commentary] Nokia was once the world’s biggest cell phone manufacturer, having introduced the first mass-market mobile handset. It sold its devices division to Microsoft for $7.2 billion — a fraction of the $250 billion it was worth at the turn of the century. The natural question becomes: What went wrong?

It wasn’t disruption. Instead, like so many first movers before it, the Finnish company clung to the source of its greatest success, and couldn’t adapt when the competition moved beyond it. But there was another path for Nokia: Leveraging its talent and its importance to the Finnish economy to move into parallel industries, like other kinds of electronics, so that falling behind in one of them wouldn’t doom it to be sold for scrap. In that counterfactual future, the example of Samsung is instructive.