I used to work directly for Elop and thought he was/is an amazing leader. So while I'm biased, it's only because I know and have deep insight on him - I have nothing to gain.
This feels ironically similar to saying Obama failed because he didn't fix Bush's mess fast enough. Nokia was heading for a slow decline. Elop's strategy accelerated that decline short term in hopes they could turn around. It's a risk he and the board fully knew existed. It hasn't gone the way they want fast enough, which sucks, but they had the guts to give it a shot.
Android would have been the safe bet. I don't think any can argue that Nokia would be a much more valuable company today if they took on Samsung for Android leadership instead of going down an empty road with Windows Phone.
Instead, they swung for the fences with WP7. They missed. But, they have a few more chances to try to make it happen, and they're now effectively bankrolled by a company with much deeper pockets and motivation to win then if they stuck with Meego or Symbian.
I can't say I'm confident, but I am optimistic. I wouldn't count them out yet.
...they're now effectively bankrolled by a company with much deeper pockets and motivation to win then if they stuck with Meego or Symbian.
I think this is a good point that's completely overlooked by the other doomsayers in this thread.
Nokia : Microsoft :: General Motors : the US government. Having alienated every other hardware OEM of note, Ballmer can't afford to let Nokia fail. Their relationship is strategic, not tactical.
This wouldn't have escaped Elop's attention when he had to decide between betting the house on Android versus Windows Phone.
Microsoft can easily let Nokia fail. Microsoft is already considering making its own phone, just like they've made their own tablets and game consoles:
This article completely ignores the concept of mindshare. Which equates to how many people are thinking about a product, and thus how many people are more likely to buy that product someday. In 2010 Nokia's mindshare was slim to none and slim was heading out of town. He tries to make it sound like Nokia was doing well then but it may have been doing well in the moment, but we all know what the derivative was.
My opinion: Nokia is fine. They have a good business strategy in their new smartphone pillar that I strongly believe will work. Why? Because it's a two pronged strategy. They're selling performant inexpensive smartphone like the Lumia 510 in the developing world that will be retailing for $150 (off contract!). While they're doing this to increase their marketshare, they're making high end 'hero' devices like the Lumia 920 that will ship in the developed world and increase mindshare. Its unrealistic to expect a 'breakthrough' in western markets because many customers are entrenched into certain ecosystems and are difficult to move. That said, mindshare is easier to get, and if you can convince people that your stuff is cool, you can start to slowly nibble away at the western markets. Nokia is fine. Elop is fine. I'm tired of all of this doomsday predicting crap.
From an American persoective, yes. Nokia was a titan everywhere but in American smartphones. They owned the low end, the owned the high end, and they owned everywhere in between.
Now they have completely lost the script on smartphones and are losing their grip on the dumb phones that have paid the bills for more than a decade.
It's hard to imagine nowadays, but in the late 1990's, Nokia made cell phones Americans craved. Their blunder in the US market was to think they didn't have to get in bed with specific carriers and make phones exclusive to one or another. A titan the world over, Nokia was surely surprised at how effectively they could be diminished by the business model the US carriers settled on. They never recovered in the US, and I don't think they ever will.
I'm not as close to Nokia as you, so can you explain where Nokia lost the script on smart phones?
I ask because I pre-ordered a 920 off-contract on the basis of a number of features unavailable anywhere else -
- Offline maps, search and navigation
- PureView/OSI camera
- Being able to use the phone wearing gloves
- Wireless charging
There are a number of other reasons I chose to pre-order the 920 without knowing what it'll cost. UEFI. Knowing that the phone won't come with some crazy manufacturer's interpretation of a UI skin. Knowing that no manufacturer or network operator will include bloatware that can't be uninstalled without rooting the phone, or being forced to use iTunes.
I've no doubt it's a great phone, and those are all good features.
But it's late, it's not shipping today, it's only on one carrier in the USA (odd considering capturing the American premium smartphone market was the whole rationale for 'Burning Platforms'), it's based on an ecosystem that's still a distant third-to-fifth in many metrics, and it's part of a brand that's struggling mightily to mean anything in the minds of customers.
Nokia's late 00's Symbian lineup wasn't necessarily competitive with the premium side of the market, but it was quite competitive in the lower tiers and was still selling like gangbusters in the lower-grade markets. Publicly throwing them all out overnight was an extraordinarily bad move that suffocated Nokia just as they needed cash to compete more than ever before. Their ASPs dropped like a rock, carriers told them to fuck off now that they had a legitimate and thriving alternative (Android 2.x), and the idea of Nokia being a vendor of status phones evaporated overnight. One great phone isn't going to fix their situation.
I don't see a reason to go with anything else than the 920. The exclusivity thing is a bummer for US users for sure, but that will be short-lived, if my sources are correct.
I disagree about the lateness. That's dependent on the release of Windows Phone 8 by Microsoft. You may argue that the announcement a month ago was too early, but the counter argument to that is that Nokia is growing mindshare.
I think Nokia's big chance is the apps they're providing. No other manufacturer produces apps as useful as Nokia. We know Maps and Drive will now be available on all WP8 devices, but there's City Lens, free streaming music, Nokia Transport, Nokia Xpress...
Android was never an option for Nokia, given Nokia Maps. As we know from many sources, Symbian was dead in the water, and awesome as it is, the N9 wasn't competitive with iOS and Android (there being even fewer 3rd-party apps today than Windows Phone went live with).
As for one great phone not fixing anything for them? Not sure. It worked for Samsung. Sure, that doesn't mean it'll work for Nokia. But predicting where this goes is like predicting the weather. I've owned every smart phone of Nokia's starting with the 9000 Communicator, and ending with the N900. I'm optimistic.
Elop is playing a long game, and his strategy makes sense to me. The 920 will, by all accounts, be the most innovative device when it's released later this month.
Just curious, why did Maps make Android not an option? Samsung bundles their own apps with their skin of Android. Is there something that prevented Nokia from doing so too?
>there being even fewer 3rd-party apps today than Windows Phone went live with
Well that's just a silly comparison to make given that the Meego was pronounced dead before the N9 was even released.
2. There's already news on other carriers having it (or a very similar phone).
3. Their new featurephones are supposedly selling well now (Asha).
4. Their strategy isn't just one phone. In terms of phones there's a range at all price points, however Nokia has other lines of business that are doing well (e.g. Navigation, patent licensing).
I wouldn't be quick to keep saying it'll only be on one carrier... We saw what stunts nokia is pulling with giving AT&T exclusivity on the 820 and then proceeding to give exclusivity of variants of the 820 to other carriers. There's no saying they won't do the same with the 920.
When I decided to switch from an iPhone 3GS to an Android, I just went to the first store I saw and bought one. That was over a year ago. No preorder necessary.
It's a first gen Galaxy S, it did came with some bloatware on it. Never bothered me though, plus because it's an Android I was able to install Android 4 on it, even though Samsung doesn't support it.
I would love offline maps, but I also cannot give up GMaps.
Selling something for $150 off-contract isn't anything to get excited about when the developing world (India and China mainly) already has huge market penetration from the likes of Samsung, ZTE, SE etc. - they are all selling equally capable phones at similar price point.
I.E. the situation is not very different from western markets - Samsung/Sony/ZTE already have a mindshare there at low and high end - even if you forget the low end iPhones. Plus to Nokia's detriment, Samsung can always release their "better" $150 Windows Phone in those markets.
Also the app situation isn't changing - at this point they really needed the app development scene nailed - Microsoft hasn't even released the SDK for WP8. Developing world is not somehow going to ignore that and spend $150 buying a dumb phone replacement.
Selling something for $150 off-contract isn't anything to get excited about when the developing world (India and China mainly) already has huge market penetration from the likes of Samsung, ZTE, SE etc.
Actually, $150 is waaaay too high for the developing world. You can get a kinda-OK Android phone for half that in places like Brazil.
They're obviously going to keep pushing lower and lower price points. This is just the beginning. But the point is that android phones you get for 150$ or less off contract are rough, very rough. If you can offer someone a phone that's a wee bit more but that is so much more performant, you can sway them over. But that said, this is just the beginning. You'll see Nokia push even lower price points later.
Actually, smooth performance is something very few consumers in the developing world actually care about. I bought an android phone for ~$130 in 2010. It ran eclair. Now it runs the latest version of gingerbread. I never really felt it's performance was a deal breaker at any point. And consequently, the galaxy Y duos, a gingerbread phone that retails for ~$160 today, runs pretty smooth. Here's a video of it http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&v=qZdAbI0ZMuE It's performance is really good enough and something most consumers would buy.
Now in China, the mainstream mid-end Android phones from local brands price at $150 or so. Less and less people buy Symbian and feature phones. And Windows Phone only has very small market share, maybe 3%. Nokia is dying.
Nokia's sales have collapsed. It's not "doomsaying" at this point-- more like "doom observing."
The only real assets they have left are their patents and their NAVTEQ division (whatever they're calling it now). Now would be a good time for them to break up the company, sell those assets, and maybe manage to return something back to the shareholders.
On the other hand, if you still think it's "fine," then you should buy some Nokia stock.
It's prett easy to hate on this analyst and his strident, obsessive tone, but he's right on the money. Nokias financials have gone from fine to apocalyptic in short order and they are now burning cash at a crazy clip with no evidence of any competitive products in the pipeline.
They have months left, not years, and no amount of 'mindshare' is going to pay their bills in the new era.
Regardless of anyone's opinion on Windows Phone, the Lumia 920 should be a pretty competitive phone. Furthermore I always had the impression that owners of Lumia 800 & 900 devices were very happy with.
It remains to be seen how successful the 920 will be but saying Nokia hasn't anything in the pipeline seems far from accurate.
My father bought a Lumia phone. He's been anything but happy with it. The fonts are too small to read numbers off the screen from the phonebook, and cannot be zoomed. The menu structure is confusing. We had to get some images and videos from the phone to a computer and it was an incredible pain. It would not work as a mass storage device, the only options were to upload stuff to microsoft's cloud offering, email them or sync them to the computer. We had to download hundreds of megs of Zune crapware to talk to it from A computer. It didn't work at all on a mac or on his windows 7 computer - it wouldn't talk to the phone at all. In the end we could get it to show up in an XP virtual machine running under Linux. The email and upload options did not work because the videos were above some unspecified size limit. The sync option did eventually work, but took 6 hours to transfer several gigs of video, and showed no progress bar. Nightmare experience. The video and audio quality of the recordings was wonderful, but everything else about the device sucked.
I've never used Zune, but iTunes has always bothered me. I get that people took to it because you could buy new music and get it to your phone from the same application.
But I've always considered the interface to be a cross between the worst web page on the web and the worst native app. What the hell were they thinking?
It's especially a nightmare on Windows with all the extra services it installs that start with up with the OS. Does anyone actually use Bonjour? The automatic updates that decide to install Safari & Quicktime, it runs like molasses even on the latest and greatest hardware, you also seem to have to resign-in to your apple account every time the software even thinks about doing anything. One of the worst offenses is it won't monitor folders for new music, if you decide to acquire music outside of iTunes you have to manually tell it to rescan for music each time. iTunes is an offense against humankind and will probably be what starts WWIII.
You have to understand a few things. First, iTunes has grown a ton over the years. It has some serious warts. For some reason the integrated stores are slow as hell despite displaying simple webpages. Navigation has gotten worse and feature after feature has been added to the left hand pane.
But by and large it works. It plays music, you can purchase music easily, it does a good job syncing my iPhone or my old iPod. That puts it head-and-shoulders above some manufacturer software for controlling hardware devices.
I'm also going to guess you're a Windows person. I promise you that iTunes ran much faster on my old G4 PowerBook than on my much more powerful P3 desktop I had at the same time. iTunes runs on Windows... and that's about all you can say. Apple wants it to look like the OS X version and it does, but they clearly don't care much about making it perform well.
As for Bonjour, it's actually very nice. When I open iTunes my iPhone shows up if it's on the network and they can sync. The button to play sound or video on my Apple TV shows up and with one click I've got playback on my home theater. It's been doing that since I got an Airport Express when they were released in 2004. It's amazingly simple and easy to use.
If it doesn't work, you're sort of up a creek as there is no way to know why the devices don't see each other, but that's quite rare. And Apple announced a total rewrite of iTunes during the iPhone 5 event, which is long over due. While iTunes works pretty well on OS X, it could certainly be better in many respects. I'm quite hopeful.
As for the reason the iTunes store is a web page, I'm sure that's so they can totally restyle it without having to push software updates. It's too bad because it's easily the slowest part of the application, and not having tabs means you can't open a few store pages to compare applications.
> it does a good job syncing my iPhone or my old iPod
And I think that's a big plus over a lot of Apple's other software offerings. iTunes is usually the last thing to still work with old software and hardware. If it was a typical Apple app, it'd require 10.8.2 and would reject icky old armv6 devices.
> As for the reason the iTunes store is a web page, I'm sure that's so they can totally restyle it without having to push software updates.
It seems to have its limits — the new layout in iOS6 has not appeared on iOS5 at the same time.
I think the point is that TODAY it's a bit bloated and slow. I don't believe it really matters if it ran fine in the past (on your G4 or wherever) or what led to where it is now.
I'm sure Apple acknowledges this and will rewrite it sometime before long, but until then it's a bit of a sore spot for many (including myself).
My point with the G4 comment was that it ran much better on my G4 than it did on my much more powerful P3 because the software was so poorly optimized for Windows.
I agree that, in general, it could be a LOT faster. Hopefully the rewrite that's due out soon will fix that.
iTunes at least works on a Mac. Microsoft have failed at creating a usable UI on their own platform. The formerly-known-as-Metro design has completely failed when implemented in Zune.
It's also missing features such as backup and sync for contacts and messages, while offering a mandatory(!!) sync with their cloud. No thanks, I just helped a friend switch from WP to iPhone for this last reason alone.
In this day and age it seems like the phone's ecosystem is even a stronger driving force than the quality of the phone itself. While the Lumia 8xx and 9xx are very nice devices (and I even think Win Phone 7/8 is a very nice OS), I wouldn't purchase a Lumia solely on what I perceived to be a young and unproven ecosystem around the OS.
All I hear is Win Phone 7/8 (3rd party) apps are limited in variety and and quality. Its a very hard sell when iOS and Android have such an expansive catalog of (quality) apps.
Phones these days are about the software -- good HW is table stakes.
That's where I think I'd be. Even if you ignore my investment in iOS apps over the last few years, I'd much rather go with Android because I know the platform is alive.
One of the other developers I work with bought a Windows 7.5 phone (used). He actually really likes the interface and says it works quite well. But he's looking to buy a used iPhone to replace it because there are so few apps available. That was the same thing that drove both my siblings off their Palm Pres - the app store was empty, with the exception of a few "demo" apps like Connect-4. Windows Phone 7.5 is doing much better than that, but it's a dead phone anyway with Windows Phone 8 coming out in the next month or so.
But you can't sell the Lumia 920 without WP8, so you can't separate like that in your theory. Either WP8 is a benefit or a hindrance. There's no other way but those 2. I think this was Nokia's biggest mistake, that they tied themselves to Microsoft, and they really didn't have to do it, as they had the bargaining chips when Microsoft came to them. But I guess with a former Microsoft CEO, it must've been pretty hard to consider any other options but Microsoft.
He was a business division president not the CEO. Ballmer is the CEO. Actually, iirc, he was the business division president for Office, so he didn't even have a history with the phone division. I suspect his move was due less to some undying loyalty to Microsoft and more to him deciding it was his best option (one may disagree, but we also aren't aware of the other options/limitations/incentives in place when the decision was made, so we are just arm-chair quarterbacking).
This just seem like blind hate. I don't know if the 920 will do well but how is it not competitive?
Nokia's mistake was a year or so ago in picking Windows Phone over Android, it was five years ago just sitting on their lead and not coming out with innovative products.
Its not hate. I've used Lumias and they're just fine. The design is certainly a wonderful breath of fresh air. But their new flagship is still two months out, its not even priced yet, has poor carrier support (domestic AND global), a fourth(?) place app market, and fourth place consumer mindshare. It also represents a partial reboot of the Windows Mobile 7 platform, with all that entails.
There are so many more things that need to go right just beyond the handset for it to be a competitor, and they're not going right.
To expand on that, even long before 2010 it was really clear that Symbian as a technology could not compete with newer approaches like iOS and even Android and Nokia's own Meego/Maemo. Maybe Nokia could have changed that situation by actually improving Symbian dramatically, but they didn't. It's pretty much a turd of an operating system from the user's and technological point of view. (Now don't get me wrong, I absolutely accept the Joel Spolsky "Never do rewrites" school of thought, but it's no excuse to let your software stagnate.)
And in 2010, iOS and Android were growing much faster than Symbian and Blackberry, even if the latter had some growth - mostly due to price reductions, I suppose. I know that in 2010, I no longer considered Symbian a smartphone operating system. "Smartphone" is a relative term: the bar rises with time.
By the way: one thing that struck me as odd in the original Elop presentation was that he projected that a very large fraction (IIRC half or so) of the future handset sales would be feature phones and dumbphones that wouldn't even run Symbian...
You are right about Symbian losing, but it is definitely a smartphone in the true sense of the word.
From a user's perspective, the poor UX of the OS and apps is what dragged it down. From a technical perspective it had huge technical debt, which led to enormous development time and bugs.
And it is easy to show the fallacy of that. RIM/BlackBerry was winning too at the time.
The thing he missed is that the profits are a lagging indicator - they are the results of what you did in the past, not about the future. The companies in The Innovator's Dilemma had exactly the same profile - they had worked out how to be profitable and serve their customers well, right up to the point both fell off a cliff because what customers valued had changed.
It is. But if you keep reading and just look at his sales graphs (assuming they are not tampered with or biased in a way I can't detect) his overall point is very hard to argue with. By its own benchmarks and predictions, Elop's reign has been a massive disaster.
Personally I think that the crucial mistake was that they should have had Android devices ready to ship as Plan B and that Plan B should have been executed the minute Microsoft delayed or restricted them in getting to market decent Windows Phone devices. They were promised special access and privileges and then when it came to the crunch, were forced to ship devices with pathetic specs - WVGA screens, single core processors, no NFC, lots of other design compromises.
Now they are in the situation where MS has betrayed them multiple times, now treating HTC as a preferred partner right at the crucial time when Nokia's do or die last gasp effort with their Windows 8 phones are imminent. If there weren't insults enough already that should have been the last straw for them to start shipping Android devices. But whether because of his allegiances, general incompetence or otherwise, Elop has not executed this strategy, and he's absolutely culpable for that.
If you take a very naive view of what it means to be "winning", then sure. But I don't think such a view is ever warranted in business (heck, or even sports).
A team that is up by a few points heading into the final period, but has been thoroughly out-played and out-scored in the preceding period is not "winning" in the same way as a team that has been dominating for the entire game.
For a company (or team) to be truly "winning", they must be on a trajectory that will lead to long-term sustainability and growth. Nokia (their smartphone business, anyway) was on a downward trajectory, just like RIM (which, up until just a few years ago had a commanding lead over iOS and Android).
I could buy the idea that Nokia should have stuck with Meego, or even Maemo and pushed harder to make one of those platforms a commercial success. But the idea that Symbian was winning, under a non-naive definition of the term, is more or less a joke.
They were pushing the N97 back then. A lot of them. Unfortunately, it was the most overhyped "flagship" piece of crap they've ever produced. All those contract-bound customers who were sold an N97 between 2009 and 2011, betting on the "anti-iPhone", ran like hell as soon as their contracts expired.
Ahonen is a smart cookie in a lot of respects, but he can't let go of the idea that Symbian and MeeGo were the future for Nokia. While I think in retrospect Elop made a few bad calls, when he got there MeeGo was not in production-quality shape. Nokia's own assessment was that they would have one MeeGo unit ready for shipping in 2011, and that particular unit--what eventually came out quietly as the N9--was an intriguing but crashably unusable demo unit even in late 2010. This isn't speculation on my part, either: I was at Nokia in 2010 and used one of them briefly. Or tried to. There was a lot of stuff that just didn't work. In November 2010. On the only device that was far enough along to have hardware that could be shown to other groups.
And Symbian? Jesus. To implement a "search as you go" feature for Symbian^3, something that would narrow down search results both on the phone and off as you typed (like iOS and Android devices do, so this was just achieving parity), we had to write our own keyboard because the Symbian keyboard took over the whole screen. You selected a text field and got the keyboard, then hit the keyboard dismiss button to see the screen again. But look on the bright side: in addition to the "Universal Search" team in San Francisco working on that, there were four other groups around Nokia, both employees and contractors, working on what was, essentially, the exact. Same. Product.
And this was de rigueur for Nokia. This was the problem that Elop had to fix beyond anything technical: massive duplicated effort on what, at any other company, were already solved problems, because Nokia had become a bunch of fiefdoms all fiercely protecting their own turf. I'm pretty sure this is why Symbian stuck around in essentially the same form for so long. I'm sure Tomi Ahonen loved it as a user, but the number of engineers working on Symbian who liked working on it that I talked to was, to the best of my recollection, zero. (Just getting the developer toolchain running on my machine made me feel like I'd time traveled back to the days of SLS Linux.)
If I ran the zoo, I'd have probably gone with Android rather than Windows Phone; Elop went the other way not because of his past connections with Microsoft, but because he wanted to keep using lucrative Nokia services (rather than Google counterparts, most notably Maps) and be allowed to use the Android branding, and Google said no. I wouldn't have cared about the Android branding--instead I'd have cared about porting Qt to Android and not burning bridges with Nokia's existing development community. They'd just spent a lot of time, money and effort convincing everyone that Qt was the Way Of The Future: instead of writing to Symbian or MeeGo APIs, you'd write to Qt APIs, and then porting would be simple. Losing that was a bad call.
But I'd say the most serious mistake Elop made had nothing to do with technology. Love Apple or hate them, one of the things they're really good at is not talking about products before they're ready. The rumor mill may be in high gear for months, sure, but when Apple makes their official announcement, it is nearly always in the form of "Here is our new Superlative Magical Thing. Here is a video of Jony Ive talking earnestly about it. It will be available for this price (two weeks from now|tomorrow|as soon as the band stops playing)." If Elop had been running Apple during the PowerPC-Intel CPU switch, he'd have leaked an internal memo describing the PowerPC in some colorful apocalypse-invoking metaphor, then three months later announce the switch, then six months after that introduce one laptop with an Intel chip that wasn't the most current generation and say they'd have more coming next year.
The lesson to draw from Nokia under Elop isn't that they should have stuck with MeeGo; it's that they should have kept their mouth shut, kept shipping Symbian phones through 2011, and started 2012 with their new devices ready to ship when they announced them. I wouldn't be surprised if Ahonen gets his wish within a year and Elop is canned by Nokia's board -- but I'd be very surprised if doing so improves their situation.
I agree with all your points except for the one about Meego. All reviews I've read of the N9 when it was released half a year after your experience with it were positive. All praised the innovative design and the fluidity of the device while it was running on dated hardware.
Would Nokia have been saved by choosing Meego over WP7? We'll never know and I think that's a shame.
Well, as I said to another commenter, my observation wasn't "MeeGo was poop," it was "MeeGo wasn't ready."
I'll admit that when the Windows Phone rumors started -- which was right after I'd been laid off from Nokia, as the product I was working on was being transformed into something that no longer needed the server-side components I was developing -- I dismissed them out of hand. (And got some level of unintended fame by calling them "loony" on my blog, and having that picked up by BGR. I'm surprised Nokia didn't hire me back at that point just so they could fire me again.) While I think MeeGo was fairly unusable at that point, it seemed to me that in 6-8 months with serious work it could have been awesome. And, apparently, in the shipping N9 it was.
The specific "what if" question I've thought of that parallels yours is whether they could have gotten, say, two MeeGo devices out in 2011, and three more in 2012, which would have put them in roughly the same place they're in with Windows Phone, but with an OS that was entirely theirs and with what might well have been a larger ecosystem. The MeeGo team had only predicted being able to get three devices out by the end of 2012; maybe if they'd been convincingly optimistic things might have gone differently.
This is exactly The Thing; N9 with MeeGo(more strictly Maemo) has been idolized by everyone, everywhere. Yet, Nokia tried to kill it and in fact still tries to, because it does not sit well with their earlier strategy(Symbian) nor with the current one(Windows Phone).
Nokia was brought down by the internal issues between divisions, Symbian people fought against Maemo/MeeGo people and executives threw plans and requirements around at such pace that whatever got nearly finished had to be scrapped and the whole process began again. Add in other strategy decisions, issues with hardware(LTE not available, no-go for North American market) and fierce competition and it's not really surprising they've gone down at the pace they had.
Well, luckily there are people who still believe on what MeeGo and N9 were built upon...
> N9 with MeeGo(more strictly Maemo) has been idolized by everyone, everywhere.
Idolized? Yes. Is it enough to make people purchase the phone? Not at all.
If a fancy UI and eye-candy animations were enough to be successful, webOS would be the leader of tablets, and I'd be using BeOS to write this.
What Elop realized was that Nokia was, indeed, sitting on a "burning platform". And MeeGo wasn't the lifeboat they needed.
MeeGo was fancy, but too incipient as a platform to compete against iOS/Android. No developers, no industry support, no technical expertise within the company to develop it (plus the political fights with Symbian). It'd be a long, slow, expensive and bumpy road ahead. It'd cost him 3-4 years of development time, and the the board and investors would crush him well before he could deliver on the plan.
Symbian was completely f-ed up, broken to its core, so this was never an option (and it's laughable to read "Symbian was winning" as put by the OP). A much better review was also posted on HN today - "Symbian, a post-mortem" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4648843.
So the only real options were between Microsoft or Google. Android offered no differentiation against Samsung/HTC -- and no insurance against patent lawsuits. And I guess Microsoft offering a pile of cash probably helped to sweeten the deal.
Will Elop be fired? Well, it wouldn't surprise me. The odds are against him, as they were since the day he joined. But I highly doubt it'll make things any better for Nokia.
Well, you seem to forget that Meego and the N9 were built on Qt. And you cannot say about Qt that " No developers, no industry support, no technical expertise within the company to develop it".
To continue your idea, n9 was stable at launch and with v1.3 it is pretty solid for a platform that was effectively abandoned.
If Nokia had continued to invest in performance optimizations, bug fixes and new hardware it would fight shoulder to shoulder with the Android and iOS of today.
The OS would be ready to fight on features, but not on audience- that's the problem. Anyone launching a new platform in today's mobile landscape needs to have significant aces up their sleeve. Though there's no guarantee of success, Microsoft pairing up their desktop and mobile offerings is one such way to increase your chances of breaking the market.
Nokia had no such benefits. It's very uncertain how they would manage to persuade people to make apps for their devices, and for customers to buy the phones.
I always wondered how the write ups from this individual jived with the rest of what I had heard about Nokia. Like you said, he's clearly a smart guy. However, he glosses over Nokia's ridiculous management strategy and practices like subcontracting hardware design. Not to mention the clearly dying Symbian OS, which was abundantly clear to anyone who had used it and a modern smartphone at the same time.
Elop has a significant share of the blame to take, but I wouldn't chastise him for killing Symbian and MeeGo. Symbian was an old-world mobile hellhole akin to PalmOS, and MeeGo wasn't even close to ready in 2011.
It jives extremely well with a lot of traditional business management especially in hardware and telecoms oriented companies. It's a top down approach which satisfies the needs of the business development people first.
Nokia grew up in a world where the network operator was king and put complex and intrusive demands on the handset vendors, you still see this effect today.
If you look back further in his blog you'll see how he was perplexed that the original iPhone appeared so lacking in the bullet point features vs S60/Symbian.
Nokia employed a whole horde of business guys and product managers to slap these features on to OS so they could sell the platform, but simultaneously neglected the intrinsics that make an OS 'good'.
If you look at the history of Symbian, especially articles on The Register you'll see that this problem was actually well understood inside engineering. There were several points throughout the years where things could have been different. Elop rolled the dice, but cannibalized his own company at the same time. Steve Jobs 2.0 obviously didn't.
FYI, to both you and shinratdr, the word is jibe. It jibes extremely well with a lot of traditional business management. Jive is a dance and a manner of speaking.
Interesting, maybe it's because I'm English, it felt like the right expression.
"The British Oxford English Dictionary flags jibe in the sense of “to agree with” as “chiefly U.S.” Unlike Merriam-Webster, however, the OED includes this definition under the word jive:
b. intr. To make sense; to fit in. U.S. Cf JIBE v."
I loved it(now I use an Iphone), it is rock solid and what it does does it great.
Meego would had been at least a Bada (Samsumg OS) equivalent, and it would had been very important if it had not been murdered by Elop.
There was an internal war in the company with Meego and Elop made sure it was killed, doing things like using underperforming hardware, getting rid of this people as well.
In fact if it were for Elop, there would had never been a Meego phone.
Well, keep in mind my point wasn't "MeeGo was poop," but rather that MeeGo wasn't -- at least according to Nokia's own internal estimates -- ready to go with products beyond the N9 in a reasonable timeframe.
I don't think I'd blame Elop for the N9's hardware, though; Nokia tended to go with pretty low-juice designs as a matter of course, from what I saw. There were some good reasons for that in terms of overall cost and battery life, but the first iPhone came out in 2007 and the first Android phone came out in... also 2007, I think, and it wasn't until 2010 that Nokia had anything resembling a credible competitor in the N8. And frankly, the N8 was a credible competitor to the iPhone and Android phones of 2008. This is a venerable Nokia tradition that Elop perhaps can be blamed for not doing enough to change.
But I'm pretty sure that MeeGo was doomed at Nokia from about five minutes after Elop was handed the same test unit that I saw in late 2010 -- and that unit, both hardware and software, was designed before Elop had been hired. The idea that there was an internal war that crippled it seems completely plausible to me, but it would have been a war between Symbian and MeeGo partisans.
I agree with most of what you said, except that Nokia taking the Windows Phone strategy and keeping it mouth shut would've killed Windows Phone before they could even ship a phone.
Which makes the decision to go Windows Phone (and kill the company in the process) even more intriguing.
That's quite possible, and that's part of why I would have probably gone with Android instead. Windows Phone is a really interesting OS, but Android -- even if you couldn't use the official Google branding -- gives you access to a much bigger ecosystem than WP's and a more vibrant one than Symbian/MeeGo's, while porting Qt would have let them keep the existing development community from feeling torched while also likely letting them bring along their new MeeGo UI, which was actually pretty cool.
I think Elop placed a very high -- possibly too high -- value on having a "partner" in whoever made their new OS. Microsoft was willing to be a partner on Nokia's terms because Microsoft was desperate; Google wasn't.
This seems to be micro-analysing graphs and completely ignoring the prevailing public mood, and even the products.
Anybody any idea of how the Lumia 920 is likely to go? It seems like their marketing division (apart from the fake pictures) and hardware division etc are all on their game, and i can't imagine the phone being a flop.
I agree quite a lot with this but I think the main point is that he analyzes financial graphs. I am sure the graphs that bothered Elop were ones that said how many applications were developed for each platform and so on. Nokia had not been doing well in this department, and a smartphone without apps is not an interesting proposition.
He goes through a lot of interesting analysis of the past, then asks THE KEY question about the future, and just dismisses it with a negative answer without any analysis and calls Elop clinically insane. Instead of a personal attack on Elop, I'd like to see more about why the strategy will fail going forward. Being that these are now occurring:
1. WP marketshare is increasing very very steadily.
2. WP reviews are great and user satisfaction is great.
3. WP8 and Windows 8 are both about to come out in a few weeks, and although Microsoft has taken some risks, there is massive potential.
4. Nokia's new phones look great, have several impressive unique points of differentiation, and in some ways are clearly superior to any other phone on the market (e.g. Pureview).
5. The news about positive WP phone sales in China and India. Taking into consideration the fact that they have great phones at several price points.
6. The existing reports of the new feature phone line are promising (Asha).
I think Nokia's strategy is to bet everything on windows 8 on both phones and tablets but also to offer better hardware (such as the camera), if this strategy fails then I would agree to call Nokia's strategy a failure. It's too soon to tell for now, the only sure thing is that Nokia's strategy so far in the smartphone market has been a succession of failure and bad decisions. Let's see how it turns out this time. There's also the conspiracy theory that Microsoft may buy them and that they're failing on purpose to lower their value...
The market for mobile Windows 8 is embryonic, and will remain so for longer than is relevant to a Nokia turnaround. Windows 8 is for high-spec phones, and will take several years to move down-market. It isn't the high-end phones that drive a million Android activations per day. Windows 8 tablets are even less able to turn Nokia around. The game therefore has already been won or lost.
This was foreseeable. Windows CE Core was never competitive with Linux. Killing Meego looks like a career-management move. It could have been a bridge, at the cost of casting some doubt on Windows as a strategy.
Nokia could still buy Jolla, but that would be a hell of a climbdown.
> The market for mobile Windows 8 is embryonic, and will remain so for longer than is relevant to a Nokia turnaround
This is the key problem. Even if Windows 8 is a wild success on phones we're probably talking 15% market share over the next 12 - 24 months. And that will be split between multiple OEMs. Nokia in its current form is just not sustainable long term on 5% market share, or even 10%. What they need to happen is so unlikely (say 30% market share of Windows 8 phones in 12 months) that it's truly insanity to bank the future of your company on it.
Nokia has to quickly post haste load android on all their smartphones. They will probably have to kick out Elop first, but that won't hurt at all. So (1) kick out Elop, (2) load Android.
It is fricking amazing how a board of presumably tech savvy businesspeople cannot understand the network effect. So let me put it simply -- it is over there are no more smartphone operating systems in the present smartphone segment. Google barely got in with android and the door slammed behind them. Meego was too late and Windows Phone was far too late. It does not matter how good Windows phone is, their DOA based on the network effect.
There are so many apps made already, there is so much investment in app production for both iOS and Android, that any new OS in the same space has unsurmountable obstacles to overcome.
There is actually an opportunity to make a new breakthrough in mobile devices, but one has to reinvent the market, like Apple did. The opportunity is for cheaper phones in the third world. Right now everyone wants a smart phone but most people in the world cannot afford the 600-700 prices (and no they cannot afford the higher subsidized monthly fees either). If someone comes up with a lightweight OS, that has similar features to modern smartphones, but perhaps with worse performance, worse screen, etc., that will be succesful. It will be succesful mostly because it will appeal to people that are outside of the network effects of Android and iOS. But that is not Windows.
> Google barely got in with android and the door slammed behind them. Meego was too late and Windows Phone was far too late. It does not matter how good Windows phone is, their DOA based on the network effect.
This. If you draw a Venn diagram of competent iOS developers, Android developers, and Windows Phone developers - there is very little intersection in my experience. An individual developer's bandwidth is limited - they can't simultaneously easily grasp the intricacies of UITableView and ListView. It's like the old cliche about multi-tasking - it simply does not work in practice. I have met a few who claim to do both iOS and Android well but in practice they are sacrificing depth for breadth.
Windows Phone is DOA for the reasons you stated and the fact that if there is a small consultancy or product shop that does iOS and Android - it is likely two different people. If you add Windows Phone, it will likely be a third person. From what I've heard from reading MSDN-type magazines about Windows Phone, those third persons are griping about how Microsoft keeps on changing the technology stack (e.g. WP7 is not compatible with WP8, Silverlight's evolution, etc.).
Also, I have yet to see a Windows Phone in the wild in the hands of the coveted 18-39 Female demographic. That is dominated by iOS with some Android and Blackberry exceptions.
You've all completely missed the point: anyone who knows technology thinks that Nokia phones are junk (myself included). But the clear message from the article is that the developing world still thought Nokia was awesome!
Elop destroyed the brand. It's very clear from the timing of his burning platform communication to the destruction of sales.
The game is over for Nokia. Pretty soon they'll be worth the collective value of their patent portfolio, and that's it.
This feels ironically similar to saying Obama failed because he didn't fix Bush's mess fast enough. Nokia was heading for a slow decline. Elop's strategy accelerated that decline short term in hopes they could turn around. It's a risk he and the board fully knew existed. It hasn't gone the way they want fast enough, which sucks, but they had the guts to give it a shot.
Android would have been the safe bet. I don't think any can argue that Nokia would be a much more valuable company today if they took on Samsung for Android leadership instead of going down an empty road with Windows Phone.
Instead, they swung for the fences with WP7. They missed. But, they have a few more chances to try to make it happen, and they're now effectively bankrolled by a company with much deeper pockets and motivation to win then if they stuck with Meego or Symbian.
I can't say I'm confident, but I am optimistic. I wouldn't count them out yet.