I worked at Nokia during OPK and Elop. I always have to cringe when I read these articles blaming everything on him, he’s Finland’s favorite scapegoat. Truth is, the rot set in at Nokia long before Elop arrived. What most people don’t realize was that the issue was not strategic it was cultural and political. Elop could have been the best leader, making the best strategic decisions in the world but it wouldn’t have made any impact at all on the outcome because the people in the company were just the wrong people. Changing the mindset and reskilling a 100k people company is no small feat. The only way Apple was able to turn the ship around in the 90s was through massive lay-offs and teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, when Jobs came back he had the luxury of a small lean organization which he could easily change the direction of, had he come back a few years early he would have also probably failed. Nokia was so tightly tied to the Finnish political establishment, it became too big to fail and thus large necessary lay-offs were out of Elop’s reach, even if he had wanted to pursue them. It’s easy to blame one man, fits in nicely with our simple, linear, reductionist, narrative loving minds but the truth here is there was a giant systemic failure. Same thing is going on with Germany’s car industry at the moment with the attempted shift from ICE’s to Electric, the machines, the factories, the value chains, the politics and the culture are all pulling in one direction but the market is pulling in the other. Sometimes the environment just changes and the organizations and entities are so tightly adapted to the old environment that they can’t survive in the new environment and have to perish - no matter who’s at the helm.
Nokia had all sorts of structural issues, true, and a bewildering array of self-competing products, but it also had a lot to work with and the brand recognition was absolutely enormous. He effectively flushed it all down the toilet for a punt on Windows Mobile, which was already looking like an "also-ran" by that point. When it (predictably) didn't work out, MS took the brand and some of the company, then ran it into the ground.
A sad end to what had been a huge success story.
(I'm not challenging the idea that nokia was on a downward slope by the point he came along, but he just accelerated it, see e.g. the burning platforms memo)
And remember Nokia had Qt and Navteq. The former gave a great migration path from Symbian. The latter made offline navigation and routing possible in the late 2000s at a standard that is still unmatched by Google or Apple Maps in 2020. I often use my N9 as a car navigator as it's exceptional.
My 2013 model year car has maps from 2011, so even if no map updates were installed after Nokia killed support, it is probably pretty modern by automotive standards.
Annual map updates (typically with a subscription) are already standard across all the major automakers. Most are also developing continuously updated maps as part of other initiatives like SDC.
Nokia had a fairly successful Mobile operating system, Symbian, which had decent multi-tasking way before even Palm OS or Windows CE attempted such things. However there was a huge learning curve and it wasn’t for everyone.
I guess abandoning Symbian to switch to Microsoft should be considered a significant misstep, even if motivated by the then financial motives.
Symbian was way behind iOS and Android by 2010, both in terms of functionality and developer experience. Abandoning Symbian to switch to Microsoft was a massive step forward in both respects, although the original plan had been to drop Symbian and move to Meego with Qt available as a developer transition path.
(Maemo, the precursor to Meego, was originally a GTK-based platform. The Symbian faction of Nokia acquired Trolltech in order to be able to advocate for Qt to be a shared development platform for both Series 60 and Maemo, which meant throwing out large parts of the existing Maemo codebase and starting again. This delayed Maemo significantly, and somewhat ignored the fact that there were basically 0 apps on Symbian that anyone cared about in the slightest)
> somewhat ignored the fact that there were basically 0 apps on Symbian that anyone cared about in the slightest
That's not fully correct. Symbian was the leading smartphone operating system years 2000 - 2008 or so in Europe and some parts of Asia. Skype, browsers, games existed. I remember Skype offering me a refund when they discontinued the app.
I remember visiting software conferences in the US maybe 2005:ish and all the Americans had only feature phones. They seriously told me "All I want to do is call and text, I don't need anything else". The truth was that packet data coverage sucked in the US in those days.
These were Smartphones with keypad navigation (qwerty models also existed). They had packet data and the possibility to install apps, both native Symbian and Java (J2ME MIDP).
The problem was that developing for Symbian was too difficult for many programmers. Not only outside Nokia but also inside. I would claim that at least 40% of the Symbian developers did not fully understand how strings worked. Which had several types, none of which was called string and conversion between them or using the wrong one was a continuous source of bugs.
MIDP was too limited in its sandbox to build truly competitive apps.
When the iPhone came and capacitive touch started to win Nokia had nothing to offer. They had a couple of models with resisitive touch (requiring a pen or long nails), but all too little and too late.
When the Smartphone development started in the US Nokia was just obsolete. No competitive hardware and a difficult software platform. So Apple and Google conquered the world.
This is true. Symbian was very versatile. I worked at Playsoft - then, at 2007 it was company dedicated to porting games. We had big safe cabinet full of phones from all of the European countries. It was more then thousand of them. Some had TV built in, some had chatting apps, push to talk apps, beautifully animated built in games, calendars, internet browsers, Bluetooth sharing content apps, etc, etc. These weren't Android phones, all of them were Symbian with Java ME.
> and somewhat ignored the fact that there were basically 0 apps on Symbian that anyone cared about in the slightest
Depends on the time. It must have been christmas 2002 that I took my first skiing videos using the video recording app. Probably still in beta then. And I sent the app to the recipient by Email. Sending the videos went by MMS. Max size 50 KB IIRC, maybe 100 KB but I believe that came only in the next model.
Yeah, those smart phones came only with a still camera. But being able to build a video recorder show the strength of the platform. Of course there was no security model, access control or anything at the time, which made things easier.
Of course in 2010, being able to build a video recording app was no longer a competitive advantage.
Symbian didn't provide a UI. Mobile phone manufacturers applied their own on top. Series 60 was Nokia's chosen UI, and the API was appalling. But yes, Symbian C++ was a difficult paradigm for newcomers to get their head around.
In the very old days Symbian did not provide a UI.
Around 2003:ish Nokia was the only Symbian licensee left and they had even 3 UIs: Series 60, Series 80 and Series 90. Only Series 60 survived. Series 80 had 2 products and Series 90 one public prototype. Series 90 was the only with touch input originally. Series 60 got touch after the iPhone, but that was too late.
Yes, Symbian C++ was too difficult even inside Nokia. Productivity was very low, many products got cancelled before seeing the market and those who did were massively delayed.
I don’t believe that is correct: Sony Ericsson had the UIQ3 interface on top of Symbian — my favourite phone of all time, the M600i ran it. That was 2005, 2006. A few more UIQ3 smartphones were released after that, as well.
Wikipedia claims that UIQ company went bankrupt only 2009. If that is correct I remembered the history wrong. So they still tried while Symbian was 100% owned by Nokia.
I remember that Symbian C++ just like QT back in the day barely looked like C++ with all annotations and macros. You basically had to learn a new very ugly language for no good reason. Also it seemed that there was no way to earn money on apps as the friction to buy apps where too big.
> You basically had to learn a new very ugly language for no good reason.
Agree with the ugly. Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some say it was an engineering master piece of the 1990s. But it was different from everything else and it was difficult, I don't think this can be disputed.
The no good reason is not the whole truth:
* When Symbian (then called EPOC32) was developed there was no C++ compiler that supported exceptions without major problems. "Don't use them" was typical in style guides at the time. So EPOC came up with their own macro hackeries instead, which worked when used correctly. The latter was too difficult for many developers.
* Early devices had just single digits of megabytes of RAM. So 500 times less than a phone of today. More macro trickeries to save Bytes were the answer.
I’ll give you that the c++ exceptions had some issues if you agree that they should have removed the macro hackeries as soon as c++ exceptions was the norm. QT also had their own signal implementation with macro hacks way longer than necessary (maybe still do?)
I may be misremembering, but I believe that at the time Elop joined, Symbian was still the largest smartphone OS by the number of devices. And (my memory is shaky here), the fact that Symbian and Maemo both used QT meant that there was a path for existing Symbian app developers to transition to the new platform. Maemo was slow coming, but killing it at launch still seems like an odd move.
The Qt SDK was released for Symbian just a few months before Elop joined. Symbian applications and developers were not yet using Qt when Elop killed off both Symbian and Meego, just a few months later. It was part of a long-term strategy that did not have any time to play out. Quite possibly it would have been too late anyways.
Killing off Symbian in a speech while shipping more phones than any company on earth was, generously, not part of any strategy but a horrific blunder, less generously, it was sabotage. I've got no love for Symbian, but when you're selling that many phones, you phase it out, you don't announce to the world that there's no reason to buy the phones you're still trying to sell.
Porting Symbian UI to Qt meant that they could at least merge surface-level stuff and have core apps that ran on both Maemo/Meego and Symbian, then retire Symbian when no one would care or notice.
I don't see how people give Elop a pass on that: He very publicly declared that they were End-of-lifing the entire product lineup, but the next OS version (WinMo) wasn't ready. How else did he possibly think customers and developers were going to react? Keep buying then-deprecated phones?
Yeah, as if the Osborne effect was not bad enough (people skipping on existing products when announcing new) - he basically went out and said "all of our products are worthless and we dont have anything new to replace it anytime soon". I mean, even if when it is true, you just don't say anything like that - ever.
> I may be misremembering, but I believe that at the time Elop joined, Symbian was still the largest smartphone OS by the number of devices
I think this is correct. It had a traditional market base but was already hopelessly noncompetitive except for old reputation and brand value (see my other comments here) and on a steep decline. Compared to iPhone and Android which were more modern and on a steep growth path.
I'd argue Nokia sunk Windows Mobile and not the other way around. Hardware was hard to come by, countless models were never released despite the OS being light years ahead of Android.
Around the official death of Windows Mobile, most of us just wanted them to launch hardware that wasn't a joke.
I know many people that loved Nokia phones, but I don't know a single person that wanted a Windows phone. Windows is a toxic anti-brand associated with viruses, instability, bloat, and forced restarts. Meanwhile iPhone is seen as the hip brand, and Android was marketing itself as the choice for user freedom.
Owned and loved several Windows Phones, 7, 8 and 10. Nokia 920 was my favorite. No viruses, no instability, no forced restarts.
That's the problem with anecdotes... they only represent your very narrow window of experience while ignoring literally every other person on the planet.
That's the problem with anecdotes... they only represent your very narrow window of experience while ignoring literally every other person on the planet.
...no apps. Windows Mobile just couldn't attract quality developers to its platform. After witnessing that - I fully understood why Android went with Java (the language): there was already a deep pool of seasoned Java developers.
Windows phone's apps were built in C#, which arguably had also a deep pool of developers, and it didn't help. Visual Studio was also the arguably best IDE around at a time where XCode and Android's Eclipse plugin sucked hard, and still it mattered zilch. The real problem was market share and mind share, two factors in which Windows phone tanked bad.
For instance, Apple forced people to write iPhone apps in Objective-C for years and nobody avoided the platform because of that, even buying Macs and paying 99 dollars a year for the privilege of writing and selling iOS apps.
I'm not saying those problems affected Windows phone, but that's the association customers have with Windows as a brand due to decades of facing those problems with desktop Windows.
Windows phone had the most sensible mobile UI I have used. Not all decisions made by a losing brand are wrong. I comparison, Android UI seems ill-thought out.
Well, you need no one to support you in the first place :)
I like not having apps pester me for updates or pollute my notifications, when all I care about is email, websites and phonecalls (oh and offline maps, I almost forgot)
I had a Lumia 520 running WP8 for several years. If there's one word for this OS, it's "disciplined". It was easy on battery, it was totally stable (in my experience anyway) and it was absolutely miserly with mobile data. For example the email client still used ActiveSync, a protocol which was designed when every byte still counted, and there was virtually no unexplained "operating system" mobile data usage.
The discipline also extended to heavy sandboxing of the apps so a lot of functionality was simply unimplemetable, such as reminders for missed notifications.
But the phone worked, the UI was intiutive and responsive, and the only reason to move on, other than general phone obsolescence like the 5MP camera, was the lack of mainstream apps.
We had a brief experience with WP10 on another phone, and it seemed spiffier but less stable. WP8 was the high point.
I did. I got a Lumia 1020 because it made a clear setting point other than "it's 5% faster" with the insane camera design. I think it replaced a Galaxy SII LTE variant which was a quivering mess software wise. I then got a 635 when the screen broke and it was too costly to repair locally, and a 640 when they were selling them for like 30 bucks on Black Friday one year.
I appreciated the consistency in design and that even the cheap devices like the 635 felt quite snappy. They also seemed a bit more coherent with update support. Yes, the no WP7->8 update path was a huge mistake, but I think by the end they were updating the OS for all WP devices (capable of being updated) centrally, rather than relying on the OEMs; the WP10 update betas I tried seemed competent enough but there was a growing sense their heart wasn't in it.
Microsoft’s control over the hardware specs and the behavior of the software allowed it to run smooth as silk on older, single-core processors. I’ve always thought that Windows Phone looked particularly good (as mobile platforms go) at lower pixel densities..
With each new generation of Windows Phone, Microsoft not only closes the gap with iOS and Android in important ways, but it also differentiates in important ways
I had a non-nokia windows phone; the HTC 8X. It was a blast to use the windows phone UI. Everything just felt "right". In addition, even compared to phones today, the HTC 8X was a beauty in my opinion.
What killed the experience, was the ongoing app revolution. And apps weren't being released on Windows Phone.
Former Nokia employee, I had two Lumias, still use my 650 as travel phone.
On its heyday (approaching 10% in Europe), Windows Phones were seen as the alternative for those that wanted an Android alternative and didn't care about iPhone.
> But Windows Mobile was a breath of competency in a market of basically all bad Google phones.
The first modern Windows Mobile phone launched in November 2015. The market of Google phones at that point in time was the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 5X, and Nexus 6.
Now I'm not a huge fan of the Nexus 6 (though I certainly wouldn't call it "bad"), but the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 are still to this date the best value smartphones ever released.
I think you misunderstand: All Android phones are Google phones. You had two options to avoid Google's terrible software, iPhone and Windows Mobile.
Everything else outside of the Chinese market has Google Play Services with root access to the system and as controlled by Google's MADA agreement with manufacturers which has already been found illegal in multiple jurisdictions across the globe.
Convention dictates that "Google phones" specifically means e.g., Nexus/Pixel devices.
Fortunately, if you're unwilling to distinguish between hardware and software, there's already a very convenient and unambiguous term for mobile devices that run Google's OS. In fact, you just used it in the same sentence!
I have read a developer complained that Windows Phone/Mobile development was the most annoying one (foobar2000 developer, he was developing for Windows 10 Mobile). Also the closed source nature of Windows (Microsoft only open Windows Phone source code to Nokia with Windows Phone 8) makes Nokia phones hard to differentiate, the gap between Windows Phone releases, as the usual Windows releases was 3 years apart while Android was improving every year.
Ballmer let old WinMo hang around too long, was too arrogant to take Apple seriously, and thought MS could just bully their way into consumers' hands like they did PC makers. By the time WinPhone came around, it was too late, iOS and Android had too much of a head start.
(a) N9's sales were a drop in the ocean. It is like if you have a game with 100% good customer reviews. But there are only 50 reviews. The tiny but vocal segment who loves it, loves it. That doesn't matter.
(b) There was no room for a third ecosystem. Developers were busy writing apps for Android and iPhone. Nobody would write apps for (random 3rd OS that has a couple of million phones). It wouldn't matter if the N9 had had working desktop fusion and teleportation. The platform was dead.
The N9 had a very good reception, and with Nokia's prestige and loyal customer base it would have been possible to compete against the iPhone. The N9 built on top of the N700 series, which was launched ahead of the iPhone. It was essentially Debian running in your pocket. It already had a huge "app store", all Linux repositories. Polishing this was not that hard, given that they also controlled Qt. Qt also meant a simple migration path for Symbian applications.
People don't realize how mature the N9 was. Read some reviews. Their maps application had incredibly good offline coverage and offline routing in 2011. So good, I've been using it for that purpose till 2020 as nothing compares. Mind that Google Maps still licenses lots of mapping data from Navteq, which was Nokia's mapping spinoff.
Aside from this, even if they wanted to go with Windows Mobile, it sounds like a really bad strategic move not to have a backup. Especially because going with Windows Mobile was a bigger gamble, which ended up failing spectacularly. Going ahead with the N9 didn't use many resources. Windows Mobile devices by Nokia would eventually reuse the same hardware. Why not selling both.
As someone who actually used n900 for a while, thinks it was really cool device, and who developed software for it, I say N9 was a fantasy. Way too little even more too late. This comes back to the cultural issues OP mentioned, there was still too large part of the organization who really believed in Symbian, and on the other hand Meego ended up as kind of punching bag for some "strategic" efforts (like Qt and the Intel/Samsung "cooperation") without enough actual engineering.
> It was essentially Debian running in your pocket. It already had a huge "app store", all Linux repositories.
They dropped Debian as a base and switched to Moblin, which was one of the problems. Also it is telling that you refer the community repos as app store, and ignore that it also had actual proper app store too ("Nokia store"). The utter failure of Nokia store was another glaring issue that they never figured out. Critically the community repos, no matter how awesome, did not support commercial apps in any way, nor did it bring any income to Nokia.
> Polishing this was not that hard, given that they also controlled Qt
Arguing of sales numbers doesn't work for the N9. It was a dead phone walking when it was released: The Microsoft partnership had been announced, Elop already had publicly stated that whatever its sales numbers MeeGo wouldn't be continued and it wasn't even sold in major markets like the US (here in Germany a few shops imported them from Switzerland!). Of course it (and more importantly the platform) didn't stand a chance like that.
(I'd tend to agree with the second point that MeeGo would have had difficulties and likely would have failed later, even if they'd focused on MeeGo and the N9, but there was something to it)
Yup, my claim isn't that Windows was a good decision. The article suggests the alternatives were Meego/Windows/Android. Only Android was possible. Meego was a fantasy. Windows Phone was a fantasy. Network effects are a thing.
If you agree Windows phone was never going to work, then you need a story how Meego could have worked when Nokia had a fraction of the resources to put into it.
Meego was "already working" (with scare quotes.) Maemo was great, and shipping. People used it and enjoyed it. It had an extremely lively developer community, and the cheat that since it was based in Debian, new apps could be written as UIs added to common, standard commandline applications. The scare quotes are because the relaunch as Meego was pointless, but was also working well enough.
Windows phone was not going to work because the brand is herpes, and Microsoft makes technical decisions based on business strategy rather than merit (and everybody know it.) It had nothing to do with the amount of resources put into it, which I'm sure were vast; Microsoft is happy to lose money in markets for a decade or two in order to block new entrants, waiting for the market leader to make a mistake. If people wanted a phone that would trap them into a rent-seeking ecosystem, they already had a choice in iPhones that was at least attractive and common.
Meego phones could have slotted into the nerd/serious phone category that various Android distributions have awkwardly tried to fit in. It would have also been a non-US alternative for markets like Europe and China. They also could run Android apps within a VM.
I think your last paragraph concedes that Meego could only have gone for a small niche. Nokia had huge market share. There’s no way they would have limited themselves to being a phone for nerds. If they had done Android right, they could be up there in Samsung’s place.
Reports at the time indicated that the N9 outsold Nokia's Windows phones by 3:1 even though Nokia intentionally sabotaged the N9 by not selling it in the biggest markets (e.g. the US).
I remember going through the Verizon specs for phones and manufacturer at the time (N9 wasn't properly out yet, so we were targeting N900). Verizon had not updated their hardware requirements so it was impossible to get approval for a modern phone at the time.
For context: less than 18 months earlier the phone manufacturers had finally agreed, after a long consumer campaign, to all support combined data and power over a single cable. This allowed to get rid of custom chargers everybody hated.
Verizon's specs at the time still mandated that any phone they sold had to have separate power and data sockets. How do I remember? I spotted this brilliant piece of malice in their specs and raised it with the project lead, who then took it higher up.
Compared to iPhone, N9 had a practically zero marketing budget, and an announcement at launch that the platform has no future as Nokia is going all-in on a Microsoft partnership.
As far as an apples-to-oranges comparison can be made, N9 did great.
Must be hard to be an engineer and have management destroy your beautiful project. “Bridge on the river Kwai.”
However, management had reasons. There was no room for a third platform.
I also note the unfalsifiability of some of these claims. On the one hand if N9 beat the Windows phone, that shows how awesome it was. On the other hand, if it was destroyed by the iPhone, well, it was sabotaged.
> Same thing is going on with Germany’s car industry at the moment with the attempted shift from ICE’s to Electric,
I call that BS.
The market was shifting to Android. Industry veterans like Jean-Louis Gassée wrote that during OPK era, he was approached by Nokia board asking for advice, and he told them to go Android. The board refused, and it was decided to bet the company on Windows Phone. Not for some technical or organizational/cultural reason, but purely for strategic reasons.
German carmakers are waking up late to electric vehicles, but they are acting now to pivot to the winning technology, before their marketshare reaches 3%. Nokia bound themselves for a multi-year exclusive contract with Microsoft, that even Microsoft folks were surprised they would enter at such a minimal payment for MS. I remember reading reports that the Microsoft negotiations team was authorized to go considerably higher than what they ended up paying.
So it was overconfidence on Nokia's part to what extent they would be able to sell the turd that was Windows Phone, coupled with the lack of exit strategy if that didn't work out. And that's even before talking about Elop's financial incentives to run the smartphone business into the ground and sell it to Microsoft.
I think the handset business of Nokia stood on two legs - logistics supremacy and radio technology as secret sauce. The advantages given by them were made moot by Chinese manufacturing and commoditization of handset chipsets. Being run over by IPhone was the symptom, not the disease.
It's often said that in 1996, NeXT acquired Apple and paid negative 400 million dollars.
Jobs was able to bring his team and technology from NeXT to become the new core at Apple, and fire everyone who didn't want to play along. Elop had no such luxury.
Elop did not have Jobs’s CV, inclinations, instincts, or knowledge either. Jobs was a founder, Elop is a careerist. He was handed the biggest job of his life and, in the most charitable reading, blew it horribly.
The mobile devices unit was on a rapid trajectory towards zero already in 2010. In an alternate reality where Vanjoki bet the company on Meego, that business would still be bankrupt today, just without the $4B payment from Microsoft.
Nokia kept the parts of their business that actually were worth something, and used the MS money to buy more marketshare in networks. It was a good deal.
As creator/chief architect of Meltemi (p.132 of the pdf), I was way too close to the events in the book. In the end, I think that Elop was pretty honest, if not too bright, "good old boy" type of person. Sadly, he never came to really trust anyone inside Nokia, but relied for advice primarily on Ballmer, who is another personality altogether...
A lot of the disfunction mentioned above really comes from the social climbing nature of the EVP team, since OPK didn't hold them to account for operating numbers until quite late.
If he couldn’t lay off, why not have the small competent team working on the us to Jeff, the other working on something else?? Not being able to fire us a poor excuse.
I have a lot of disagreements with your post, but I’m most curious about the part where Jobs had a lean organization to come back to.
From what I’m aware, Jobs instead actually came back and axed the vast majority of projects that were being worked upon. I’m fact, there’s a relatively famous town hall where a Mac user complains about this and Jobs explains why he needed to cut nearly everything.
The book actually comes to pretty much the same conclusion: it would have been extremely difficult for any leader in his position to retain Nokia as major player in mobile phones, and there's no evidence that Elop was a Trojan horse etc.
That said, he did make a large number of unforced errors, mostly notably the Burning Platform memo, which accelerated the decline.
He was hired to stop the disease from spreading and he did a great job; he lopped off the infected limb. Nokia is better today because of it.
In 2006, my girlfriend at the time worked in HR at Nokia's US headquarters in Irving, Texas. The writing as on the wall and the company was preparing for a major layoff because Nokia's mobile phone business in the US was tanking. Luckily for her, she was able to transfer to Nokia-Siemens Networks. This was before the iPhone was released and before Elop joined the company in September 2010.
If your company is dependent on the CEO to make 100% correct decisions, 100% of the time then it’s not the CEO that’s the problem - it’s the company. A strong, resilient, adaptable, agile company can weather a poor leader, a weak, brittle, rigid one cannot.
> On October 7, 2014, two Finnish journalists Merina Salminen and Pekka Nykänen published their book Operaatio Elop in Finnish, probing into the events that took place in Nokia’s device business under the CEO Stephen Elop’s period in 2010–2013. The authors had interviewed over 100 people for the book, most of them being current or former Nokia employees... The full English translation is now published here the first time, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.
> For readers who prefer a Kindle or PDF version instead of this online version, we provide exports in PDF/EPUB/MOBI [1] formats from Medium.
I worked at Macromedia with many people who worked for Elop before he rose to executive heights. All had very nice things to say about him. One speculated that he might even serve as Canada's prime minister one day.
Reading him branded as the worst CEO in the world makes me feel bad for him considering all the nice things I've heard about him. It is easy to throw around insults and labels, but let's remember that the truth can be nuanced and not so simple to explain.
Edit: fixed the political title based on comment below
I will never understand what his line of thinking (and argumentation towards the board) was to go Windows-exclusively on phones.
Back then, Windows had about 2% share in the mobile phone market. Betting literally Nokia's entire future on Windows Phone seemed reckless, given that the competition (most notably Samsung) was being so successful with Android.
And this exclusivity was one-way: Nokia would commit to Windows Phone (or death), but Microsoft would continue to happily supply Windows Phone to Nokia's competitors, like Samsung.
So while Samsung, HTC, and the others were building both Android and Windows Phone devices, Nokia was going to go down the Windows path exclusively. How was that ever supposed to work out?
I look forward to reading this book, because Elop's decision bet Nokia's future on 2%-market-share-Microsoft is something that I have never understood. And I may be arm-chairing, but Nokia's demise went exactly as I expected it to go from day 1 of this announcement.
This, so much. Maybe Elop brought more to the table than meets the eye, but the Windows choice stinks so heavily given his history, Microsoft's history with OEMs, and the specifics of the deal that it almost doesn't really matter if there was some kind of logic that didn't make it out into the popular world. Nokia may have been in a bad position but like you, I anticipated the trajectory things took. If they were going to take the risk of trying to make any platform a third major player, it should have been one they owned the upside of. Failing that, buying into the Android ecosystem (maybe with a bid to extend it, bring in rockstar S60 emulation and/or better native Linux support) and competing on their hardware capabilities and reputation is the only thing that made sense.
I also don't understand the line of reasoning 'Nokia had no choice, they were already way behind Android and iOS". Why, oh, why did Elop have to choose "differentiation"? Nokia could have simply said, "oh, so we all have the same OS[+] now? Fine. Let the best industrial design, carrier relations and manufacturing prowess win! Oh and BTW our phones come with offline navigation".
WinMo was a _very_ risky bet with little upside and huge downside.
If I remember correctly, he went to Nokia, killed MeeGo, made the deal to make Nokia produce Microsoft phones, then left to become a Microsoft exec => I hated him for doing all that.
I suspect people labeling Elop as "worst CEO" are largely same group of people who ultimately led to Nokias downfall. Completely misreading and misunderstanding the market and the trends of mobile at the time and wanting to shift the blame to others who do not appreciate the genius of their products.
If you're talking about Nokia's customers, they weren't actually involved in the decisionmaking at Nokia, as they were not employed there. Nobody is complaining about their products, they're complaining about a CEO who publicly told the market that all of the products that Nokia was currently selling were obsolete dead-ends, followed that up by killing the only thing they were working on, transitioned them to a loser OS in Microsoft, and ultimately sold the entire devalued division to them.
The "poor Elop" narrative is bizarre. He trashed a company in exchange for a vast amount of money. Now we're supposed to be sorry for him because he can't be Canada's PM. I do not understand the (neo)liberal love for failures. I'm sure he's a nice guy over brunch. I'd rather have a PM who has been successful at something other than accumulating money.
A strange interpretation. Here in America we're experiencing the opposite - nearly half are worshipping a sociopathic failure. And its not 'neo-liberals'.
> ...are largely same group of people who ultimately led to Nokias downfall.
I think the people who ultimately led to Nokias downfall worked at 1 Infinite Loop where the iPhone was developed. Prior to the iPhone, Symbian was the dominant "smartphone" OS in Europe, or at least competitive with Blackberry, but the carriers shut Nokia out of the high-end phone market in America. I think Elop's strategy was to win over the American carriers/market but the strategy backfired and accelerated the exodus to iPhone/Android in Europe while not gaining a foothold elsewhere.
Apple left the door open for one or more alternative smartphone vendors. Nokia and Blackberry dropped the ball and Google filled the gap with Android that Verizon marketed splendidly. I'm not sure if Elop's strategy could ever have worked but it certainly had no chance when both Nokia's employees and customer base resented the approach.
I have not read the book so I'm not sure if my views mesh with what was written there.
> I think the people who ultimately led to Nokias downfall worked at 1 Infinite Loop where the iPhone was developed.
I always found those reports about the iPhone causing Nokias downfall to be not credible. Nokia's vast majority of sales were in price segments where the iPhone didn't even compete.
The iPhone destroyed its North American competitors at that time, Blackberry, Palm, etc.
Nokia was clearly destroyed by Android. Surveys at that time found Nokia customers mass defecting to Samsung and other Android vendors.
> I think Elop's strategy was to win over the American carriers/market
A foolish plan, something Nokia never had accomplished even in the heyday of Symbian, when it dominated the rest of the world..
> Nokia and Blackberry dropped the ball and Google filled the gap with Android that Verizon marketed splendidly.
Agreed wholeheartedly. If you want to know more about Verizon's kingmaking process to go all in with Droid over their previous partner RIM, see the book 'Losing the Signal', an excellent read on the rise and fall of RIM.
While we're recalling daydreams, I remember a Globe & Mail "Report On Business" glossy insert from Elop's impending Nokia takeover that had all the hallmarks of a Microsoft PR product. Its probable the following article is sourced from that publication, although the byline date is odd:
Essential further reading comes from mobile phone industry analyst Tomi Ahonen, who was front-and-centre in the Elop opprobrium, and coined many of the English-language quips about the Nokia-Microsoft mess as it was happening:
"Calculating the Elop Effect: He's already destroyed a company the size of Oracle, and profits the size of Google"
If you read the book that's the original post here, it becomes very clear that Nokia had already managed to destroy itself by 2010. Elop salvaged a substantial amount of value by offloading Nokia's unprofitable mobile devices division to Ballmer.
Tomi Ahonen is a Finn with personal relationships to the old Nokia guard. Spinning the story as Elop's failure was a convenient way to let them off the hook for destroying $100B shareholder value in 2000-2010.
It's true to say that Nokia was in difficulty and initially laughed at the iPhone when it was first released.
Elop may have had the right idea but how that idea was delivered should be a lession in how not to do things. I remember the Burning Platform memo appearing on the intranet homepage. Instantly thousands of people stopped caring. They just hung around waiting for Voluntary Redundancy offers. Truths were told, it got very dirty.
In 2010, Nokia was fucked. Series 60 wasn't competitive and the repeated ground-up rewritings of their Linux platform meant it was way behind schedule. The N9 shipped late, and even then only shipped as early as it did because development of the followup device had been sacrificed to put more people on the N9. Realistically, in 2010 it was already clear that Nokia would have nothing to ship in 2012.
It could have been salvaged, but there were issues if you know what you are looking at.
Even looking at the Nokia finance numbers you posted the issues are clear. Both revenue (-2%) and profits (-6%) are down in a growing market, and the bigger drop in profits is indicative of them losing high end market share.
BlackBerry was growing its sales for years after the iPhone, but observers knew that the coyote had run off the cliff, gravity simply hadn’t recognized it yet.
I know the linked book "Operation Elop" is a long and occasionally tedious read, but it's worth reading a couple of the initial chapters if you still believe Nokia was fine in 2010.
The problems started already years before, but Nokia management was successful for a while in hiding its dysfunction behind the immediate effects of the 2008 crisis.
We all know they where in trouble then. The point is that Elop made it 10x worse. Doubling down on Windows Phone was a terrible choice. Nobody wanted that.
I know a lot of Windows fans have convinced themselves Windows Phone was awesome but it wasn’t.
Avoiding Windows Nokia could still have been alive by going for Android. Sure a smaller company than in the heyday but still alive.
Nokia is still alive and worth about 20 billion euros.
The billions in cash that they made from selling the loss-making mobile devices albatross to Steve Ballmer allowed Nokia to purchase both Siemens’ share of the networks business as well as Alcatel.
I take it you're reacting to the title of the Ahonen article? It is a huge piece with many, many links.
Regarding Ahonen's past, look at his accuracy over the years in all things mobile phone marketing when many other supposed experts were floundering, particularly about Windows Phone.
"Compared to Facebook, MMS reaches a 3 times bigger audience - its lead is radically bigger compared to smaller social networking sites like MySpace, Twitter, Flickr etc. The same is true of the total installed base of all brands of smartphones. If you only think of apps for Apple's iPhone including the total shipments of all iPod Touch and iPad devices, MMS will reach an interactive multimedia mobile phone audience... that is 20 times larger."
If you had invested based on his analysis, you'd have got a business built around last-gen messaging technology just as it was being wiped out.
I worked (very briefly) at the Ruoholahti R&D branch of Nokia in 2011.
If anyone wants any information on how it felt on ground level I’d be happy to answer any questions.
I recently visited the building and it is no longer Nokia owned, quite sad as it was impressively beautiful inside. Now it’s segmented with lots of smaller companies taking chunks of the building. :(
I worked there -- as an outside consultant -- quite a few times. It was a pretty ordinary, meh, office building. What I remember most vividly was sitting there in the office with two Nokia people, one quite senior, when the N8 was released, and seeing them watching the release video with lots of excitement -- until they realized the darn thing was running _symbian_. Everyone in the Maemo group thought it was (going to be) running Maemo -- every single engineer!
I had a wonderful time, but what a broken company...
This sentence set a lightbulb off in my brain and I went and reread Parkinson's Law[1] from 1942:
"The institutions already mentioned - lively and productive as they may be - flourish in such shabby and makeshift surroundings that we might turn with relief to an institution clothed from the outset with convenience and dignity. The outer door, in bronze and glass, is placed centrally in a symmetrical facade. Polished shoes glide quietly over shining rubber to the glittering and silent elevator. The overpoweringly cultured receptionist will murmur with carmine lips into an ice-blue receiver. She will wave you into a chromium armchair, consoling you with a dazzling smile for any slight but inevitable delay. Looking up from a glossy magazine, you will observe how the wide corridors radiate toward departments A, B, and C. From behind closed doors will come the subdued noise of an ordered activity. A minute later and you are ankle deep in the director's carpet, plodding sturdily toward his distant, tidy desk. Hypnotized by the chief's unwavering stare, cowed by the Matisse hung upon his wall, you will feel that you have found real efficiency at last.
In point of fact you will have discovered nothing of the kind. It is now known that a perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse....
The intention to found New Delhi was announced at the Imperial Durbar of 1911, King George V being at that time the Mogul's successor on what had been the Peacock Throne. Sir Edwin Lutyens then proceeded to draw up plans for a British Versailles, splendid in conception, comprehensive in detail, masterly in design, and overpowering in scale. But the stages of its progress toward completion correspond with so many steps in political collapse.... It would be possible, though tedious, to trace the whole story down to the day when the British finally withdrew, showing how each phase of the retreat was exactly paralleled with the completion of another triumph in civic design. What was finally achieved was no more and no less than a mausoleum."
I think you're talking about different buildings here: the previous poster is talking about a random office complex in Ruoholahti, not the Nokia House HQ in Keilaniemi.
Correct. I've been saying since ~2013 that Elopcalypse was the best thing to happen to Finnish ICT sector. Sure, it was painful and horrifying, and a lot of really good talent left the country for good. (Headhunters and recruiters for major tech companies basically camped in hotel conference rooms for the first half of 2011, courting anyone and everyone who had ever written code for Nokia projects.)
But the fact is that Nokia had become a massive (if lucrative) black hole for tech talent. A very large part of the Finnish technology scene was working for Nokia, either directly or indirectly. There was little room for small-scale innovation, because Nokia projects just hoovered up everything.
Finnish startup scene of today is a direct beneficiary of Nokia's collapse. All that talent had to find something to do to pay the bills. They knew how technology worked, and had ideas that had never got tried out.
Slush already existed in 2011, but it got huge because from 2012 onwards there was so much desperate energy directed at making new ideas work.
I was a cog at Nokia during the time the iPhone was released. So look forward to reading this and hope it sheds some light on Nokia's implosion. It felt like Nokia cut its own head off pretty needlessly. Nokia was still making better hardware in lots of ways (better call quality, better cameras). Symbian was pretty terrible though. It could do a lot but was hard to use. I always thought Nokia should have ditched Symbian and adopt Android, as it was pretty clear that had potential coming from Google, and they needed better hardware partners. I would like to see how what would have played out in an alternative reality...
I'm pretty sure Nokia did have a team working on Android phones too at one point. Which exactly demonstrates the problem with Nokia. They were just flailing around
I liked that part where Nokia shortly before acquisition of mobile division by MS sold their Espoo headquarters for 10mln EUR and simulanously leased it for 1m EUR per year for 10 years. Headquarters were part of the deal. This way Nokia fetched 10mln EUR in cash and MS got a 10 years lease contract paying 1m EUR per year.
Coming from country where it's mostly outsourcing, one earns scraps and jumps the ship in case of turbulences, it impressed me how employees can work in their collective interest.
Nokia has become a really good acquisition target. The company as it currently operates is worth more in pieces.
American firm might buy Nokia Networks to get US back into the 5G infrastructure business. Reefshark SoC with Intel failed spectacularly and killed profit hopes from Nokia Networks.
Nokia's telecom software and services does well. Small in revenue over Huawei and Eriksson.
Nokia Technologies/Bell Labs makes money from R&D IP without a product.
Selling licensing for Nokia branded phones is nice extra.
Fixed/IP/Optical/Submarine networks and other parts have little common with the rest.
I hold Nokia stock for years and assumed they'd have been bought out by now. I don't know why they haven't and I had high hopes for some action on that front when the US kicked up the storm about Huawei and 5G infrastructure. But even after that Nokia couldn't benefit. There's something wrong with the company. Maybe it's too Finnish.
The problem with nokia is, still, that it's badly run. It didnt just suddenly stop when elop came and drove the mobile phone division to the ground. It is just full of mediocre people with a lot of bureaucracy to make some people feel important while contributing negatively to the overall output.
Suri i think is the latest example yet the fault also lies totally in the board of the company. Siilasmaa and co should have resigned alongside suri since they clearly are as mediocre as leaders as him. But it appears that status and ego is more important to a lot of nokia's leaders so it is what it is. Too bad since a similar finnish company of the same size, kone, demonstrates how well the company could be run with better culture and leadership.
Yes. It would not decrease competition or increase concentration in the markets. There are no significant US based businesses competing with Europeans and Chinese in mobile infrastructure. The market is divided between 4 companies Nokia, Ericsson , Huawei and ZTE.
If Ericsson and Nokia were to merge or Huawei would attempt to buy Nokia or Nokia Networks that would be different. I think EU would agree even to Nokia-Ericsson merger.
From the quick glance I made at the book, it seemed like Nokia was bleeding money, Symbian was dying and Meego was not ready for prime time despite good potential.
Nokia had to make some tough choices. They had to go with another platform made by someone else and both Google and Microsoft were really interested in having Nokia as their partner.
Nokia needed money badly and it seems like massive layoff were out of the question. They wanted Google/Microsoft to pay them to put their respective OS on their phones.
Only Microsoft was willing to do that, since they too were desperate to have a strong device maker to push Windows Phone.
I'm really curious in getting my hands on the Nokia N9, just to explore the UI and UX of Meego. Unfortunately the devices on eBay are going for prices outside of my budget since I suspect my exploration will last all of half an hour. I see a lot of refurbished models from China, so hopefully their prices drop over the next few years. I'm interested to see if Meego could have been the viable competitor that Windows Phone wasn't.
Sailfish is similar, although I do prefer Harmattan. The basics are similar, but clean design is missing. I also remain unsold on "pulley menus" after years of using them.
It could have. Both maemo and meego were lightyears ahead anything at that time. I had a N900. Best smartphone ever. Android is a hot mess compared to it.
If it had shipped two years earlier, perhaps. By 2011 iOS and Android already had sufficient mindshare that Meego (while a fine OS!) didn't stand out sufficiently to have stood a chance (although obviously Nokia's pivot to Windows Phone meant it didn't in any case).
If you want to play with something similar, Sailfish is derived from Meego and has been ported to various widely available devices.
Nokia had a number of problems back before Elop joined. Those were the cause for the actual demise. Elop did his own bad by going Windows Phone instead of Maemo but that's another story.
Nokia did a very good move in 2008 by acquiring Trolltech (Qt). And then they screwed it royally: instead of immediately started launching phones with Linux and Qtopia (which was mostly ready for mainstream market), Nokia kept launching Symbian phones.
They had this plan to use Qt as the migration platform from Symbian to Maemo. That was a good plan. Except they could have started a lot earlier: why were the Nokia N770, N800 and N810 only tablets and not phones, when what everybody was asking for were phones?
Because back then Nokia middle management would internally destroy any attempt to actually improve or replace Symbian with a serious alternative. Symbian ruled. That's why the first thing Elop did was to fire (outsource to Accenture) everybody working on Symbian. It was a blunt way of saying: "you no longer are Nokia, you will no longer decide what this company does".
Everybody was very excited about Maemo back then. While it was no iOS or Android, there were A TON of developers (and companies) looking into migrating their Symbian apps to Maemo with Qt, or even writing new applications.
And Stephen Elop decided to use Windows Phone instead of Maemo. This is what actually destroyed Nokia: Windows Phone 7.5 was released with no support for C++, which left Qt out, which meant you needed to rewrite your app from scratch. That was the single defining moment where 99.9% of app developers decided they would rather go Android or iOS, and Nokia was doomed from that moment on.
As for the comments regarding the little success of the Nokia N9 or Nokia N950, the reason was they were simply not launched in many countries. When they announced the countries where those phones would be available, it looked like a bad joke.
By the way, another very stupid decision by Nokia, which shows you the power of the Symbian people back then: the Nokia N900 was released in November 2009 with 256 MB RAM and 32 GB storage for 599 EUR. Back then, phones had 64-128 MB RAM (256 MB was rare) and 512MB-1GB storage. Do you know how expensive was 32 GB flash in 2009??? They could have sold this phone for 400 EUR with only 8 GB flash, which was still a lot in 2009, and it would have reached a lot more public.
Really, Elop made the fatal mistake of chosing Windows Phone instead of Maemo. But Nokia had inflicted a lot of damage on itself already. In fact, the only bad thing about Windows Phone was not allowing C++ (and therefore Qt), which rendered all existing apps useless. But Elop probably never knew about this.
Oh, and don't even get me started on another huge mistake: trying for many years to use Gtk instead of Qt. Nokia lost at least 2 years with that. Guys, Gtk was nowhere near Qt back then, and it's even more far apart today!
(I was very very close to Nokia, with many friends inside, in those years and was about to work for them when Elop announced Windows Phone would be the next big thing)
