[Interest] Semi-OT: What could / should Elop / Nokia have done differently?
Bo Thorsen
bo at fioniasoftware.dk
Fri Jun 22 14:52:17 CEST 2012
Hi Atlant,
This was quite a lot better than most of the pretty useless mails in
this thread. (No, this isn't a subtle insult, I think you did pretty well.)
But you're missing one important point: No CEO comes in and does what
Elop did without a clear mandate from the board. He was hired
specifically to introduce Windows Phone, not the other way around. He
started around November and it was only about 9 working weeks later that
the Windows Phone edition was announced. It's *impossible* that this
decision was made after he was hired. Also, why on earth would they have
hired him, if it wasn't because of his ties with MS? This was a board
decision, not Elops.
However, the execution of doing it was done so badly that it's hard to
find comparisons. Tomi wrote that the burning platforms memo would be on
MBA courses as an example of what you should never do. And indeed it was
mentioned in one of my MBA courses this spring :)
Bo.
Den 22-06-2012 13:41, Atlant Schmidt skrev:
> Dear all:
>
> In my opinion (informed by some time spent actually
> working for Nokia), Nokia's biggest problem was that
> their early, stunning success in mobile phones led them
> to develop a culture which was risk-averse. They were
> the largest manufacturer of mobile phones in the world
> so they would routinely conclude that what they were
> doing must be maximally right and any other approach
> would be less right.
>
> There were literally *THOUSANDS* of middle-level managers
> at Nokia who all had the authority to say "NO!" to new
> things and almost no one who was willing to say "Yes!".
> E.g.,
>
> "We want to change the way the browser zooms."
>
> "Well I'm the manager in charge of blue things on the
> right side of the screen and I say you can't do that!"
>
> "But it's almost impossible to successfully zoom a
> web page so that it's readable."
>
> "Look, we're the largest mobile phone manufacturer in
> the world so we know what we're doing. If you don't
> like it, you can always go elsewhere."
>
> So eventually, I did. So did many other talented folks.
> So, eventually, did the customers.
>
> Nokia became unable to make revolutionary changes or even
> fast evolutionary changes. This was true even when the
> iPhone meteor hit the Nokia planet and the dinosaurs
> started having trouble breathing. In an interview I
> watched, Executive VP Mary McDowell characterized the
> iPhone as "a toy". Not only could the leadership not
> react to the iPhone, they couldn't even see the magnitude
> of the impact. Then the Android comet came by as well...
>
> Yes, Nokia was running the Maemo/MeeGo skunk works, and
> given just a little more time, that phone family was
> going to break out as the proper successor to Symbian,
> but Nokia's leadership's hearts weren't really in it; they
> were still certain that the next release of Symbian would
> bring back their glory days and let business carry on as
> it had been carrying on. Never mind that (for a while
> there before Anna) each release of Symbian was less
> reliable than the previous release; the *NEXT* one would
> surely be okay! After all, we've instituted new processes
> and controls to ensure that development was being done
> more slowly and carefully!*
>
> I believe Elop was brought in with the deliberate purpose
> of blowing up that culture of being entirely risk-averse
> and unwilling to change.** He decided that Nokia couldn't
> wait for another release of Symbian and so he wrote the
> burning platform memo. Unfortunately, he also torched
> Maemo/MeeGo with the same firebrand. In one fell swoop,
> he completely Osborned Nokia's smartphone business.
>
> "Ahh, but we have featurephones and dumbphones!" the
> leadership said. "They'll carry us until Microsoft comes
> through for us!"
>
> Unfortunately, the dumbphone and featurephone market lives
> and dies on manufacturing costs and Nokia, while good at
> that game, was being bested by the Shenzen manufacturers.
> So it has also seen its market share decay in that sector
> of the market as well.
>
> Now we've all speculated on whether Elop was just inept
> or a deliberate Trojan Horse, planted by Microsoft. Up
> until the cancellation of Meltemi (the Maemo/MeeGo child
> that was going to replace S40 in featurephones), I was
> willing to entertain the idea that Elop was just totally
> inept. But the cancellation of Meltemi, the last known
> internal competitor in the "could be a smartphone" space
> has driven me to accept that Elop's motives are not pure.
>
> What happens now?
>
> Well, Microsoft just Osborned Nokia again with their
> WinPhone8 announcement of non-support for everything Nokia
> has recently sold and everything they'll attempt to sell
> for the next few months. So at this point, I'd guess that
> Nokia burns through their cash and fails as a free-standing
> business. I don't think there's *ANYTHING* they can do to
> stop that now. No Android "Hail Mary!" phone, no waiting
> for Win8, nothing.
>
> I think Apple should buy them for Nokia's IP portfolio.
> Apple won't do that, of course, because Apple would have
> a hard time getting regulatory approval. But they should.
>
> Instead, as Nokia's stock becomes worthless, I think they
> will simply fall into Microsoft's hands, almost by default.
> And the world will be a much poorer place for that; Nokia
> was a fine, moral corporation that made a good product for
> a while. If they'd let me run the place instead of Elop,
> they'd probably still be doing so.
>
> Atlant
>
>
> * Never mind that Symbian still built with (no exaggeration!)
> more than 7,000 warning messages from the compiler. Those
> warnings couldn't mean anything, right?
>
> ** Note: Elop arrived after I left so I don't have any
> insider knowledge at that point.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: interest-bounces+aschmidt=dekaresearch.com at qt-project.org [mailto:interest-bounces+aschmidt=dekaresearch.com at qt-project.org] On Behalf Of K. Frank
> Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2012 5:07 PM
> To: Qt-interest
> Subject: [Interest] Semi-OT: What could / should Elop / Nokia have done differently?
>
> 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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Bo Thorsen,
Fionia Software.
--
Expert Qt and C++ developer for hire
Contact me if you need expert Qt help
http://www.fioniasoftware.dk
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