Nokia at the inflection point

Sujoy forwarded an article that quoted an internal letter from the CEO of Nokia and I remembered myself commenting months back about Nokia losing the cellphone game. Not that I was prophetic, fact is many people outside Nokia realized that Nokia is missing its steps in the fast-changing handset technology market. For those in hurry, let me try to bulletize what the boss of Nokia has said.
He acknowledged that:

1. Nokia lost the high-end smartphone game to Apple
2. Nokia's symbian strategy failed in delivering its promises
3. Nokia is losing at both the mid-tier phone market and low-end phone market 
4. Nokia was caught sleeping while Android and Chinese OEMs have captured the segment fast

and finally he forewarns of a drastic change in Nokia's handset business segment. There is another article that talks about the possibility of removing the entire management team of handset business wing.
He is going to announce his new mobile strategy on 11th i.e. today. While we must accept that he has got his facts ruthlessly correct, the difficult question is: what option has he got to change the game so late. Nokia is quite badly sandwiched between Apple's iPhone and low-cost very affordable and gizmo-friendly chinese phones.
He said that Nokia's mobile platform is like a burning ship and only way to survive would be to jump out of the ship. He sure knows his turf well. But will he be able to swim over the rough sea after jumping out? We will have to wait for the answer.
But from an outsider's perspective it looks like that he is going to join android platform. 
Why? 
For an answer, we would have to start with another question instead: what was the reason people loved Nokia phone for? People bought Nokia because 1. it used to be sturdy, 2. it used to be predictable 3. it used to be user-friendly and 4. affordable. You could drop it, it would still work without any fuss. We got used to Nokia's tactile keypad, very intuitive, even a kid could use. Those all changed with the advent of smartphone. Suddenly you have emails, music, camera - all component to use and Nokia's core competency did not cover any of those areas. They brought symbian and made it their central platform. However developer community was not exactly enthusiastic about. To top it all, ever changing web-technologies brought different ways of "connecting people" and those apps were not very symbian-friendly.
In addition, Nokia's internal quality system suffered fast deterioration. With the pressure of integrating external technologies, it had to bank on 'generic' test methodologies rather than 'full-knowledge product verification methods' that Nokia used before symbian. The result was that many of the apps were integrated badly, had many glitches, sometimes unstable and very unintuitive. The product flaws that were almost unheard of with Nokia's early phones, became commonly acknowledged issue. Nokia smartphone crashes too often; may be Nokia thought that, well, MS Windows crashes too and it still sells! But Nokia does not enjoy the almost monopoly that Microsoft enjoys. In short the very durability and user-friendliness that used to be hallmark of Nokia were severely compromised. Customer recognized that lot faster. Enterprise users moved to Blackberry. High-end users who care about the experiences moved to Apple, and low-end customers found cheaper alternatives in Chinese made phones. Chinese OEMs in that sense really brought a disruption in a market that was otherwise controlled by western companies.
Series 60 has become a dead product platform, too cumbersome and complex for fast development. Nokia needs new platform and only platform that has won over its competitors is Android thanks to Google's patronage. Nokia knows that by joining Android bandwagon, they will be able to come back to mainstream. They would be able bring down the development cost quite a lot and could compete Taiwanese, Chinese OEMs credibly. They would be able to focus on their winning MMI which created differentiator for Nokia phones in thr first place. So what I think? I think they are going to announce a tie up with Google and thereby strengthen Google's position as most popular mobile OS. But I also think that I spoke enough!
Now let's wait to see what Mr. Stephen Elop actually unfolds in next few weeks. I, personally believe Nokia will come back, Nokia has proved itself to be a great survivor in the past, they changed their main business 17 times in their long eventful journey so far. They cannot be eighteenth time unlucky..shouldn't be!