Former Nokia exec: Microsoft means death for the company

The partnership between Microsoft and Nokia in the mobile space? According to former Segmentation Manager of the Finnish giant Tomi Ahonen, in the end it will mean certain death for Nokia. The Lumia line of smartphones doesn’t sell and Windows Phone is actually losing market share, Ahonen says, basing his statements on the United Kingdom market data collected by British company Kantar Worldpanel.

The data seen by Ahonen depicts a bleak and very short-living future for the Microsoft-Nokia partnership. After the adoption of Windows Phone as its lead mobile platform, Nokia steadily lost market share in the UK: the combined share of Symbian and Maemo-based phones in September 2010 was 23.1%, one year later (just before the Lumia launch) was down to 6.7% and now (February 2012) Symbian and Windows Phone smartphones sold by Nokia equals to 4.6% of the UK market.

Ahonen says that even the unloved N9, the device based on the open source Linux-OS Meego (now known as Tizen), outsold the Lumia line with 1.5-2 million units sold worldwide (in the fourth quarter of 2011) compared to 600,000 WP phones sold during the same timeframe.

And it’s not that Nokia “somehow needed Microsoft to survive”, Ahonen says, because the Windows mobile ecosystem was dying a sudden death even before the partnership took off: “Microsoft was totally doomed and its ‘awesome’ Windows Phone operating system was doing a death-dance globally”, Ahonen states, “from a Microsoft Windows Mobile peak market share globally of over 12% just five years ago, to 5% in year 2010 when Windows Phone launched, to a paltry 1% for Q4 of 2011 (which includes Nokia Lumia sales)”.

“The Microsoft strategy for Nokia is a certain road to death”, the former Nokia exec states, “The Lumia smartphones will doom Nokia. The Windows Phone OS is never going to be the third ecosystem”. Nokia should abandon Microsoft as soon as possible and start a long road to recovery, Ahonen suggests, but first the Nokia CEO (and former head of Microsoft Business Division) Stephen Elop “must be fired”.