Why Nokia Couldn't Beat the IPhone

In autumn 2007, Jorma Ollila, who had stepped down the year before as Nokia’s chief executive officer but was still the chairman, polled 12 top company executives on whether they thought Apple’s new iPhone posed a big threat. Two said no, Ollila recalls in “Against All Odds,” a surprisingly engrossing memoir first published in Finland in 2013 but just now translated into English.1476819104303

The subtitle of Ollila’s book is “Leading Nokia from Near Catastrophe to Global Success,” and the story of the company’s transformation from failing Finnish conglomerate when he took over as CEO in 1992 to global mobile-phone juggernaut by decade’s end really is pretty amazing. But so is the story of what happened after 2007, as Nokia’s market share collapsed and it finally sold the phone business to Microsoft, which is now shutting much of it down.