Presumably somebody still remembers the Nokia X Series and still isn't too chuffed about it.
BOOM! Stephen Elop shuffled out of Microsoft door
Ex-Nokia chief Stephen Elop is officially out of Microsoft. Redmond announced the cull of top execs at the software company in the past hour, and Elop is the most high-profile victim of the bloodletting. Elop, Kirill Tatarinov and Eric Rudder will be leaving Microsoft following a handover period at the firm. It means that …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 18th June 2015 04:14 GMT Christian Berger
"There's s theory his job was just to stop Nokia launching an Android phone, thus making things easier for Microsoft to launch a mobile OS of their own."
Actually Nokia had 2 operating systems which, compared to Windows Mobile, were perfectly competitive.
One was Symbian, which was held up by its momentum, but clearly at the end of its life.
The other one was Maemo which even today is a serious competitor for people who actually want do _do_ stuff with their mobile devices.
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Wednesday 17th June 2015 20:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
"However this strategy has completely failed
... as the WP is a pitiful 3.2 % world wide market share".
There are a number of Android manufacturers who would be delighted with a 3.2% market share.
WP's problem, I think, is simply this: Apple has sewn up the profitable part of the US market so tight it can't fart without a pair of scissors. The iPhone has become the outward sign of some sort of respectability; it doesn't require technical skills to make it work and it does work very well. For Microsoft to succeed, it has to compete with iOS not Android, since to get status-conscious eyeballs around the world it needs to be seen to succeed in the US. (Sony make some very good products, but they are invisible in the US and this seems to affect worldwide sales.) Samsung spends a lot of money to get its US market share, but it is already known as a hardware maker. Microsoft isn't.
I don't think Elop could have succeeded, even if he had the RDF of Jobs, because conditions in the 21st century are different from those in the 20th.
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Wednesday 17th June 2015 21:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "However this strategy has completely failed
@ Arnaut the less
There are a number of Android manufacturers who would be delighted with a 3.2% market share.
You forget that MS once had an enormous market share with Windows Mobile which through sheer incompetence and complacency have flushed down the toilet and it's costing them billlllleeeeeeons (look at me I'm a Reg Hack) to maintain a pitiful position in the market. Ballmer just didn't see Jobs, Page and Brin coming and utterly failed to react.
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Thursday 18th June 2015 01:16 GMT hoverboy
Re: "However this strategy has completely failed
No, he was a fat f*ck and than god for everyone's sakes we now have Nadella. If you haven't tried a Windows phone recently you really ought to get out more. Take the US out of the figures and Windows Phone is doing very well. Jobs could maybe face up to Nadella, but Cook? Really??
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Friday 19th June 2015 22:06 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: "However this strategy has completely failed
If you haven't tried a Windows phone recently you really ought to get out more.
If you think playing with a smartphone is "get[ting] out", I don't think there's any profit in taking advice from you.
And even that aside, I don't understand the warrant for this argument. Suppose Windows Phone was the greatest damn phone OS ever. If my phone does what I want, why should I care?
Frankly, if my Symbian S60 phone were still working, I'd still be using it. I only switched to Android because the Symbian one died and various Android models with similar capabilities were by far the cheapest choice.
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Thursday 18th June 2015 11:18 GMT dogged
Re: "However this strategy has completely failed
> A big share of a very small market that was at the time almost entirely corporate. I've hardly seen any WM phones in the wild.
This is true. I had one (I bought it thinking I'd be able to while away the quiet times writing code on my phone but that - with the Motorola MPX200 at least - was not an option) and it remains the only WM phone I've ever seen except for it's replacement, also owned by me as an experiment. That was the 1st gen HTC Touch which was actually a pretty good little phone.
The stylus was nifty for taking notes.
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Thursday 18th June 2015 03:08 GMT Esskay
Re: "Chief insights officer"
hmm I don't know... "Chief Insights officer" sounds like where you put the unwanted office equipment...
"Why are we losing market share?
Why aren't people buying our products?
Why didn't we see this coming?"
*Entire boardroom turns to 'Chief Insights Officer'*
"erm...."
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Wednesday 17th June 2015 17:24 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Ain't karma a bitch?
"Let's hope he's Ratner'ed his CV to the point where he can't do any more damage."
Don't be silly. At those rarefied heights of employment, you can walk into a company, destroy it, and still easily move on into an equally lucrative role somewhere else. You'll even get a golden parachute from the devastated company and a golden hello from the soon to be devastated company.
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Wednesday 17th June 2015 15:14 GMT asdf
WP forever? not so much
With the runaway success of Windows Phone and Lumia who could have seen this coming? Also so much for Win10 lifting all boats. Seriously though good riddance ass hat. Still it will be different to see Microsoft executives suddenly "wanting to spend more time with their families" because they are incompetent yes men instead of because they threaten the insecure sweaty CEO like in the past.
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Wednesday 17th June 2015 16:45 GMT asdf
Re: WP forever? not so much
I am not saying btw that Microsoft is going to pull out of mobile any time soon (that would be suicide long term) but simply that their approach so far obviously needs a major adjustment. Jury's still out on the universal app thing but really that should have been ready to go when Win8 was released (which seemed to be the plan but the massive infighting with clueless Captain Ballmer couldn't deliver). That has been Microsoft's story since the Ballmer days started, nothing but me too products released 2 to 4 years too late or when the rare somewhat new comes out its not what people want (see hard Kinnect fail). Things do seem to be changing with new blood. Time will tell.
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