Nokia shareholder tells CEO Elop he's going to hell Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has been taking flak from angry shareholders at the company's annual investor's conference, with accusations flying that he's running the company into the ground by keeping Nokia as a Windows-only operation. "You're a nice guy ... and the leadership team is doing its best, but clearly, it's not enough," …
If the product is 'cool' people will pay the price.
Android and windows are not 'cool'
At least Android phones try to one-up apple by being more open and trying to be larger and faster.
Windows phone is great, but what difference is there between the Nokia, HTC and Samsung phones again????
Why Why Why Didn't Nokia release even ONE Android Handset..............based on a compatible chipset to reduce delivery times/dev cost.
Oh I know, it has to be clear to everyone the Elop is a Trojan.............Obvious is obvious........
Or insane................It's funny, but whenever he made his famous "burning platform" speech this came into my head
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjVWORC3Wcc
Exactly,
Elop's decision to unilaterally go with Microsoft, killing Meego and put all the company's eggs in Redmond's basket would be justified if at least one of the following were true:
a) Win8 were a much better platform, which is not.
b) you could only go with a single platform at a time. The rest of manufactures have proven just otherwise. Or at least they were more any of them would be more interested in Winphone8 than in Android.
c) Win8 were free of charge, but still why not using both, plus Meego? Especially, when Android is free as in freedom and you can configure it better than the proprietary one. Meego might have been quite interesting on tablets, e.g. You can make you phones dual-trial-boot
d) Microsoft would buy every phone Nokia makes by the Nokia's price and resells it for them
e) Steven Elop were not a crazy MS fanboy, nor a Microsoft payee, nor a liquidation manager appointed by S. Ballmer
Its clear Microsofts orders were to kill off any OS that could compete with WP
Meego looked awesome but they refused to sell it in the UK also presumably as part of this agreement
Found this, and it is SCARY !!!! - soon there will be a 2nd Nokia Entry when they are bankrupt
http://www.asymco.com/2011/02/11/in-memoriam-microsofts-previous-strategic-mobile-partners/
The shareholders need to show Elop the door NOW
I had an n900 too, nice kit, but if i remember rightly it ran maemo while the N9 ran meego
How was Elop acting in Nokias and its shareholders interests with this ?
http://nokiagadgets.com/2011/06/23/elop-theres-no-return-to-meego-even-if-n9-would-be-success/
Sorry the Guy was sent into Nokia to kill anything that was not WP
"Windows Phone 8 is a much better platform than IOS or Android"
Thats a pretty sweeping statement, tell me what metrics are you basing this on ?
Quality / Quantity of Apps ?, Features ?, marketshare ?, *rumours* Apple are copying them ?
Nah, your just talking bulldust i'm afraid.....it's a failure
I'm sure with Nokia's Patents they could have got a deal with Microsoft with very little money changing hands.
This post has been deleted by its author
Well the Nokia WiFi patents are a well known one. Microsoft FAT is another. Apple's bounce back at the end of a scrolling list is another.
The fact that many very large multi billion dollar corporations - including those that have been up for a fight in other cases have just paid up says to me that the patents are significant and valid.
What they should of done is release the N950, as both a Maego and Android (with different product names to avoid confusion obviously).
At the time the N950 was a fantasticly spec'd bit of a kit. It looked great with it's metal casing and having a QWERTY slider was and still is an unusual feature that there is a market for. Especially if it can be done without increasing the phone to the size of a brick like the N900, and the N950 wasn't a bad size at all.
Look at the current world's top smartphone manufacturer...
Does this company produce phones for different OSes, hedging their bets? Yes. They might not have a wide range of devices but they do have a wide range of OSes, therefore keeping knowledge and skills they might otherwise have lost. It also keeps the suppliers on their toes as they know they need to continue improving.
Does this company somehow manage to promote their brand over the brand of the Operating System? Yes. The platform / Operating System is the enabler, not the crutch.
Now look at Nokia. They have one smartphone OS and they trumpet this as a sales ploy.
Nokia took the wrong turning sometime in 2002. Even without Elop they were doomed. As if he is slowing or accelerating the end, I don't know. But they are doomed. It's too late. They are now really just a Marketing and Distribution company. Maybe they should flog that bit and the name to someone instead of the long drawn out demise of Kodak and Polariod?
"Nokia took the wrong turning sometime in 2002"
Yeah I agree, but what I can't understand is why Shareholders allowed Elop to Gamble Nokia, and that is exactly what he has done, he put all Nokia's eggs in one basket and gambled the company on an untested OS.
It makes sense if ultimately there was a MS agenda at play, any sensible CEO would not have released the "Burning Platform" memo...nor would they have put all their eggs in one basket.
If Nokia continues on its present course with WP, Elop may well soon finding himself having to write another "Burning Platform" memos.......................
Disclaimer: I worked for Nokia for a few years back at the turn of the century.
IMHO Elop was a disaster for the company; yes it was in trouble and yes they needed to change the way they managed their software stack but signing up to Microsoft the way they did was utterly foolish. I felt at the time it was the wrong move, and kept saying to my wife (who still worked at Nokia at that point) that the obvious choice was to go multi-platform like Samsung and HTC.
Something that I still think; if you want a phone for calling people or for data use outside the urban environment (or where signal quality is not so good) you can't beat Nokia hardware.
What you can beat is the Nokia software stack.
I've played (rather than used) Windows Phone and simply couldn't get along with it. I'd love to see someone porting something like Cyanogen onto a Lumia to see how well it works. However, as with all other 'current' smartphone OSes (it seems), even Android suffers the battery gobbling issue that Symbian never did.
Perhaps if there had been more focus on improving app interoperability and UI usability on Symbian that bit earlier it wouldn't be dead now and Nokia might still be king of the roost.
"We make adjustments as we go. But it's very clear to us that in today's war of ecosystems, we've made a very clear decision to focus on Windows Phone with our Lumia product line," he said. "And it is with that that we will compete with competitors like Samsung and Android."
Interesting language there: he's not claiming that he's doing the right thing, only that he's committed to doing what he's doing. Although you could argue that he leaves the door slightly open by limiting Windows Phone to "our Lumia product line", it's very telling that he considers "Samsing and Android" to be competitors.
I've found that attitude to be pervasive among many executives; especially when they know they've made a mistake. Some weird thing in their brain makes them believe that people see them as infallible & if they admit their mistake(s) and try to correct them they will be seen as weak.
Personally I'd rather be seen as falliable as opposed to stupid though.
Honestly, some people just WANT to see conspiracies. Competing against "Android and Samsung" is a perfect summary of Nokia's challenges.
Nokia is a full-range manufacturer, as is Samsung. Both companies make everything from simple voice-and-text phones all the way up to high-end smartphones.
In smartphones, Nokia competes with Android as a platform. Below that, their only significant competitor is Samsung's line of non-Android featurephones (against Nokia's Asha series) and Samsung's plain voice-and-text phones (against Nokias 1xx and 2xx series).
You know that both Samsung and Nokia make more money on every simple phone they sell than Sony Ericsson have with any of their Android efforts to date... dumbphones and featurephones might not be in the tech-nerd's line of sight, but they're popular devices, that people want to use, and that produce actual profit for their makers. If you want a future, you need a profit.
Really sounds like something MS would say, you know, someone who is trying to push an OS rather than handsets.
Past comments from Elop have always given the impression that his primary objective is to make Windows Phone a success - the performance of Nokia always seemed of secondary importance.
Doesn't want to get caugh misleading the market with phrases like "we are hopeful that..." when he knows all hope is lost. Could increase his exposure to criminal prosecution.
So here he is... "all along now, over the cliff we go. You there in the rear - no stragglers." But he is a billionaire and isn't going to miss a meal no matter what. Probably laughs himself to sleep at night.
No it wouldn't. It would be a Nokia. That name still rings a bell with a lot of people.
As evidenced by it's continued declining smartphone marketshare. The Nokia brand alone isn't enough to sell smartphones that run a platform that consumers aren't interested in buying. Don't make the same mistake that Nokia did, which is to believe that Nokia customers will continue to buy Nokia come what may. Customers are a lot more savvy than you - and sadly Nokia - give them credit.
"As evidenced by it's continued declining smartphone marketshare. The Nokia brand alone isn't enough to sell smartphones that run a platform that consumers aren't interested in buying. Don't make the same mistake that Nokia did, which is to believe that Nokia customers will continue to buy Nokia come what may. Customers are a lot more savvy than you - and sadly Nokia - give them credit."
That's precisely the point - Nokia + Windows Phone = something very few people want to go anywhere near...
Nokia + Android however... mmmm, that's going to be somthing seriously tasty, and I'd happily drop my Samsung allegiance to have some of it, as would many, I'd wager.
Sadly, Elop and his puppetmasters are unlikely to allow Nokia to go that route now, and Nokia will die a slow and painful death :-(
Rounding error?
Some parts of the world they are at 10%; many parts at 5%+ and there are over 20 million in circulation. That's far less than Android or iOS but so what?
As long as it is a big enough market to be worth serving does it actually matter? There is now sufficient mass behind it that virtually all top apps come to WP8 (Instagram being the obvious exception) anyway.
So you're saying Nokia shouldn't release an Android 920 because most people don't bother about Windows Phones? Or what?
How much of an effort could it have been to put out an Android 920 phone? Don't you think it would grab some sales? But no they couldn't because it doesn't fit in the BIG STRATEGY. What strategy is that? "Sales is no longer our priority". I've heard a Fin say that before. And he's driving another Finnisch marketleader into the ground.
"Might I ask exactly how is 920 amazing? Aside from being pretty."
The Lumia 920 still has the best camera, microphones, high refresh rate screen and touch panel on any smartphone even though it was relased last year. Plus the best nav and maps (although cut down versions are available on other WP handsets). And wireless charging.
But if you are going to charge me the same as a reasonable Samsung or an iPhone, I want history of goodness.
It works in the fashion and car industry: come into the industry with a new high prices product and people think it is luxury (e.g. lexus) ... but MS seem to forget that for most people who managed to rid themselves of MS, they are not trying to win new customers, but convince old ones that they are different now.
Whenever i see MS marketing stuff, it reminds the of the song by Sadam Hussain in the south park movie.. "i'll change, i'm different now" .... yeah right... this Apple -esque demo of the surface made me laugh because its actually quite truthful... the surface tablet fails to perform and crashes... lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1zxDa3t0fg
They don't charge like that. Check the prices. Don't compare specs (WP8 is less demanding on hardware) but compare performance.
You don't get the same *comparably performing* Android as a Lumia 720 for the £300 it lists at. As for the £120 Lumia 520 the Android competition is laughably poor in operation in comparison. Specs aren't everything.
And iPhone? It's worth noting that there is a reason Apple have so much money. Profit doesn't just appear magically. It is siphoned at a ridiculous rate from their customers. Almost by definition you cannot go from nothing to billions in the bank without having overcharged for your product, regardless of it's popularity.
"As for the £120 Lumia 520 the Android competition is laughably poor in operation in comparison."
Well, the ~£100 Huawei Ascend G300 (Android!) phone performs quite well for me. The single core G300 is rather modest but does everything I need quite well. I don't play mobile games much though, but for my kid's games it's been ok.
I've come to believe that Windows 8 performs better than Android on the same hardware having read it here over and over. I've yet to be made to believe that Android doesn't perform well enough on what's being sold today. Especially when you can install Jelly Bean on it.
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