A new low for Nokia

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 18:50:00 +0000

I can still remember the Nokia coat hangers. Twelve years ago, during a visit to the company's Helsinki headquarters, I marveled at their sleek and stylish design. Angled bars of steel, hanging in serried rows in the vast coat racks on the building's first floor, they were modernist, functional, beautiful. To see them was to crave them, a feeling very much in keeping with how Nokia's phones were lusted after by the whole world in the year 2000. The pride of Finland paid attention to every detail. In a country where winters were long and hard, every building I visited in Helsinki had a prominent coat rack. Nokia's was, without question, the best.

Those coat hangers of yore were brought to mind by the news this week that Nokia is trying to sell its headquarters. The plan is to save cash by leasing the building back as a tenant. It's not the kind of news that bumps up the stock price. Ozymandias has got nothing on Nokia. Twelve years ago, the company utterly dominated the global market for cellphones. It was hiring employees at a rate of 1,000 a month. In an article I wrote about Finland and open-source software that spring, I described Nokia as "an aggressive, fast-growing, fully global company that makes Microsoft look like an old fuddy-duddy."

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A new low for Nokia