[Interest] Semi-OT: What could / should Elop / Nokia have done differently?

[Pau Garcia i Quiles]

Hi,

IMHO they should have released a Qtopia (Qt 4-based) phone 6 months
after acquiring Trolltech, then keep developoing Maemo and replace
Qtopia with Maemo only when Maemo would be ready. That would have
given them a lot of Qt developers and a lot of applications and an
operating system more powerful than Symbian.


On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 11:06 PM, K. Frank <kfrank29.c at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello List!
>
> Most of us have been following and talking about this whole
> Nokia / Microsoft thing.  A couple of recent discussions on
> this list got me thinking about it again:
>
>   [Interest] Is Nokia officially done with Qt?
>   http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/interest/2012-June/002454.html
>
>   [Interest] Qt on Windows Phone 8
>   http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/interest/2012-June/002703.html
>
> I would like to ask a related, but somewhat different question:
> Clearly Nokia and Elop were and are facing a big business challenge.
> What might they have done differently?
>
> I'm hoping to avoid comments like this or that company is bad /
> stupid / evil.  It's easy enough to say that some folks did the
> wrong thing, but harder to say, okay, here's what they could have
> done differently.
>
> I think that it's arguably the case that:
>
>   Nokia missed the iPhone revolution
>   therefore faced a significant threat to their business
>   therefore needed to make a dramatic (desperate?) move
>   so they joined forces with Microsoft
>
> Now I like to hate on Microsoft as much as the next guy,
> and so on and so forth, but what might Elop have done
> differently?  It's his job to try to save Nokia (or as
> much of Nokia as he can), and not his job to try to save
> Qt in particular.
>
> It's not like Nokia could have partnered with Apple.
> (Or maybe they could have.  If somebody thinks that
> could have been the case, that's exactly the kind of
> discussion I'm looking for.)
>
> It's easy but not very helpful to say things like
> everybody's an idiot or so-and-so is a Microsoft
> tool or Nokia should have invented the iPhone before
> Apple did.  I would like to approach this like a Harvard
> Business School case study: Let's say you were appointed
> CEO of Nokia instead of Elop back then.  What -- in the
> face of the very real challenges Nokia faced -- would
> you have done?  And a follow-up question:  Let's say you
> are appointed to replace Elop now.  What -- given whatever
> water is already under the bridge, and in the face of the
> very real challenges Nokia faces now -- would you do now?
>
>
> Thanks, and best regards.
>
>
> K. Frank
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-- 
Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
(Due to my workload, I may need 10 days to answer)