Nokia: When pigeons fly home to roast

in hand

He could have announced the shift when he had new product to ship. He did not.

All they need to do...

..is create a smartphone that actually lets you make telephone calls while you're still indoors.

An Alienated Developer???

http://twitter.com/#!/ceoStephenElop

Basically if you wanted to fix Nokia do start from where Elop had to.

The big mistake was announcing the switch before having anything to immediately launch. There were two reasons for that. 1) Keeping anything secret seems to be a problem for Nokia. 2) Legally a switch to Microsoft (or Google) would have been too big a relevant factor to keep secret from the shareholders and Nokia could easily have been sued in the States for trying.

Elop unlike his predecessors has actually taken the time to talk to his workers. Nokia Employees have seen and heard more from Elop in 9 months than they did from Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (OPK) in in his whole tenure. He has spoken frankly, and like the message or not, Nokia Employees have been happy about the level communication.

The big problem at Nokia is that the Finnish management in particular is extremely risk averse, they stuck to Symbian because it was working. They didn’t invest in Meamo back when the Nokia 770 first came out as a long term replacement. They were afraid to take any big decisions to re-write S60 preferring the ‘safer’ route of evolving it. This is exceptionally strange in a company and country that doesn’t have a cut throat business culture and one or two bad calls were unlikely to get you canned.

Elop now has the company in a position where they have to make Windows Work there is no longer an internal power structure thinking it can just carry on with Symbian and maybe the windows thing will just go away.

Personally I don’t think Nokia would be in any better a position if it had gone with Android rather than Windows. It could have flogged off Navtech since it wouldn’t need it, but it would still be faced with the apparent death of Symbian and the lack of an immediate replacement.

Personally I might of gone for padding out Maemo by ‘nicking’ open source bits from Android (including Dalvik) and allowing people to run QT or Android Apps. Beefed up OVI store to sell Android Apps as well but in a more controlled way than Google. With hope that the QT migration path would retain the Symbian Camp during a long migration to MeeGo. However it’s Just as risky a strategy and would be at higher cost than the clean break.

Basically if I wanted to fix Nokia I wouldn’t have started where Elop had to. I’d have put someone else in, instead of nice safe OPK back in 2005, but that would have been a risk, and as I said Finnish Management is risk averse.

Sleeping on the job

Microsoft's development of their Windows Mobile platform was abysmal and half hearted at best. They are trying to play catchup by doing some actual work on Windows Phone 7 rather than letting it wither away like they did with Windows Mobile. Nokia have been resting on their laurels for years thinking past glory's will keep them alive. Much like Motorola and look where they are now.

How well does it run

Does Windows Phone 7 actually even run on any current Nokia phone model? Or are the requirements a bit higher?

Oh dear...

"The idea of Windows-on-Nokia has great support from the operators, who have already counted out RIM, and don't wish to be faced with a duopoly of Android and Apple. Pundits should be more concerned that Microsoft, now Nokia's most important supplier, can maintain a reasonable place of development."

Andrew, Andrew...the operators and you can say whatever you want but costumers buy what they want, not what someone wants to impose to them. It's funny, you turn from a Symbian supporter to a Winphone one now, why? Get over it, and in the way Elop and Ballmer, people dislike Microsoft on mobile. Period.

I bought a new smartphone. Not a Nokia, not a Winphone, not a iPhone. It was one with Android on board. I just sidelined Nokia forever, and like me, many more. Got it?

Market, legacy, destiny

I used to be a massive Nokia fan. Their hardware was modestly excellent, their UIs were absolutely top notch, and their understated brand oozed elegance. From my subjective perspective, the smartphone killed them. They felt they had to build their own (their feature phone firmware was always great on a UX level), and they obviously invested massively into it. That's when they stopped being cool for me. I had massive difficulty visualising their future in that market, so the initial investment in those clunky Symbian devices, as opposed to Apple, HTC or even RIM's offerings, never struck me as serious.

Having said that I really believe they are throwing the baby out with the bath water. What I see at the minute is a kind of negative capitalist speculation. The whole dump Symbian move to Meego confusion, rushing out that awful new corporate font with its hideously embarrassing bugs when the old one was still timelessly elegant, modern & distinctive, the humiliating Microsoft-courting when MS are known for bloated, distinctly un-hip and UX-hostile software and Nokia's legacy was that of a somewhat cultish but universal synonym for simple, intuitive mobile UIs… This combined with the drastic management shuffles and bleak confessional PR…

They seem to be getting good at fire-fighting and turning to arson to keep themselves busy. As far as I can see they are leaping from drastic tactic to tactic without giving any of them the time to prove themselves.

If they were slightly less suicidal in their "something must be done, jump now look later", I can imagine them having a bad patch as the underdog, learning some lessons, steadily improving what they have, coming back stronger from the mistakes. But on a gut level, the present apparent strategy of continuous firesale speaks to me of stupid desperation posing as bravado. They're repeatedly throwing away their historically strong points with no apparent alternative.

And yeah, as a fanboi the MS deal just makes me cringe. The Americans were the problem in the first place.

It wasn't the Burning Platforms analysis

It was what he decided to do about it.

Nokia has a huge command of the stupidphone market, but these are just comodities and probably little profit there. For smartphones he had the following options

1. Carry on with their existing OS.

2. Make a new one

3. Use someone else's

They had stuck with option 1 too long and were sliding down the tubes ever faster with it.

Making a new one could take years and the problem was now.

They had to buy one in. So which one?

a. Apple

b. Blackberry

c. Windows

d. Android

e. Something obscure that nobody had ever heard of.

a and b were obviously non-starters. They werre in-house jobs so closed off.

c had a minor market share and poor customer acceptance. It did however have a huge marketing machine and famously sharp business practices.

d was growing hugely but defining your Unique Selling point is very important to executives.

e. was pretty much the same as point 2 above. Too uncertain.

They knew then they were going to follow someone else. Either MS or Google. It all comes down to which is more important - market trends (Android) or friendly and welcoming for the corporate mentality.

WebOS

WebOS was there to be taken. no Android, no Symbian, see? But who cares now?

Sent from my Android :-)

Nokia Shares

In another 6 months, Nokia shares might be an interesting pick for the contrarian (and brave) investor.

why windows?

I said in the pub a year ago that if nokia brought out an android phone, I'd pay a lot to have it. Windows, not so much. I like windows on desktops, but it always seems a bit clunky. Windows phone is better, but not enough.

OK I said it in a pub, so it's not like it has any value or anything. But now I'm sober I stand by it.

Jumping out of the sinking boat

We all knew that Nokia was in trouble... but why MICROSOFT?

Does anyone believe that Nokia would have been considered so doomed, had they gone for the Android route?

Still do not know what the M$ icon is supposed to represent.

.....but android is rubbish

I see we have the usual 'nokia should have chosen android' freetards moaning away on this thread. However, as per usual, none of them know what they are talking about.

Android is an unfriendly, unstable, unsecure and unpolished phone operating system. It is free for a reason. I recently had the unfortunate experience of having to move from a WinPhone 7 device to an android device. It was horrible. It was like moving back a generation. Comparing android to winphone 7 is like comparing windows mobile to the iphone.

Elop has chosen the platform that has the best long term potential. Sure, android will remain in use and people who want to make cheap and nasty phones for poor people will still use it as it is free. But if you want a classy, consumer friendly device that will appeal to the mass affluent marketplace (like the iphone) then the OS has to be windows phone.

Strange times...

Nortel dead, Nokia dying, Skype worth $8.5b.

What's going on?

Only six months two late

I bet Elop would've swooped in and grabbed Palm if he had been in place six months earlier. They would have hardware ready to go in a couple of months, and I bet Trolltech could whip up a WebOS QT library in the blink of an eye.

Bu the also had to dump the whale (Symbian managers and subcontractors) overboard. He couldn't do it by keeping Symbian on life support. If you have to cut, do it clean, do it fast, measure twice and cut ONCE.

Switch to Android

So much talk here about using Android instead of Windows.

Can someone really point me out where and how I can port Android ( whichever version) onto my brand new Sony Ericsson Satio (still boxed after 3 attempts to use it) and Nokia N97? Would really appreciate it.

Being so open source, surely some bright engineer ought to have figured out this dual boot options to save this burning platform/hard rock .

It will create a great secondary market for this product and save everyone. Nokai would then become more multiplatform/ Open platform and carry on making good hardware.

Why let thier ego come in the way and stick to one platform? Copy the Samsuns/ HTC and offer multiple OS choices to consumers. Anyone thinks with such offerings, consumers will abandon them.? They will prefer the OS of their choice and get on with life.

Wow

For once I entirely agree with Andrew. Shocking.

You can agree with or disagree with Elop's approach to solving the gigantic problems Nokia has, on a pragmatic or an ideological basis. But the thing is, if the company had been vaguely sanely run before he showed up, _he wouldn't have a gigantic problem to solve_. Meego and the hardware on which it was to run might actually have been developed efficiently and well, and they might have had products in the marketplace in vaguely the right timeframe. It's painfully clear that this did not happen; whatever the merits of Meego, it's very hard to argue that it had any chance of being delivered on anything like a timeframe that would make it competitive. Or Nokia might have picked a different strategy which also might have worked. They didn't.

Throw Elop out the window and you're still left with the biggest phone company in the world still trying to sell phones based on a platform that's an outdated, antiquated joke, which no-one in their right minds actually wants to use, up until at least 2012 (the vaguely believable date for any sort of mass-market phone based on Meego; the first was to have been a developer device in the same style as the N8xx / N9xx series). Even current Nokia fans tend to cite things like hardware design and quality - i.e. they're Nokia fans _in spite of_ Symbian, not because of it any more.

Why blame Elop for the sins of his (metaphorical) fathers? You can argue that he might have switched to Android and not WP7, sure. But don't kid yourself; that would have caused most of the same consequences _right now_ for Nokia.