It’s all Elop fault right?
Now listen, some of you would like to blame Nokia’s nigh-dismal Q1 figures on the February 11th announcements or on Stephen Elop’s now hated “Burning Platform” memo and a few more still blame Microsoft from sending in their Trojan to take over Nokia’s mobile division in their mad quest to finally conquer the smartphone market (something they’ve been failing miserably at since 2006).
Well guess what guys and gals, it’s time to take off the blinkers. None among you can deny that Nokia have been floundering and failing miserably since the mobile market was so splendidly flipped on its head in January of 2007 by a certain other Steve. But before you come calling for my head, lets look at just a few of the failures shall we?
Failures:
Failure #1:
The N96 – For whatever reason, Nokia decided it would be smart to produce an exact copy of the N95 8GB edition with the following brilliant improvements, DVB-H. No seriously, Nokia took a year+ to add the much desired feature of DVB-H to their flagship phone while keeping nigh-on the exact same physical dimensions (and design) as a device they had announced way back in Q4 2006. Worse still is the fact that they downgraded the CPU, graphics processing power, video processing power and a smaller battery. The supposed software improvements via the newer version of Symbian and S60 were buggy for the most part leaving users with a more expensive device with marginal at best and laughable at worst, improvements over a device from an earlier generation.
Failure #2:
S60 5th edition/Symbian^1- Say what you want, but the first implementation of Symbian on touch devices was clunky, counter-intuitive, sluggish and altogether not exactly a positive one. Value-for-money, in terms of durability, functionality and staying power as compared to its peers, I’ll say from experience that the 5800 (the first in the line) was definitely the best of its time. That however, doesn’t excuse the pitiful software that it was laden with. This in a time when iOS was really starting to find its feet in terms of feature/API parity and Android under HTC’s hard work and Sense UI was starting to catch the public eye. It took Nokia a good year and a half to get even marginally close to the user experience present on other competing platforms while it took the other platforms ~12 months to get feature parity(for most users) while utterly destroying Symbian^1 in terms of usability. It didn’t help that Nokia literally dragged Symbian dead and mangled through 2009 and pretty much all of 2010 with few changes on the software and even worse still the hardware which remained literally stagnant from 2008 until Q3 ’10.
Failure #3:
The N97 – I could have rolled this into the S60 5th edition/Symbian^1 but this device was a catastrophic fail in its own right. The fails started with the cheap hardware, ranging from anemic RAM and C: memory to the dastardly 434Mhz ARM11 CPU in a time when even the weakest Android’s were running 528 MHz and both Apple and Palm had transitioned to much more capable and powerful Cortex-A8 processors with functional GPU’s on board. There were also build quality issues but the GPS issue and camera cover scratching were definite deal breakers and that’s before looking at the shoddy, buggy software it shipped with. Coupled with the utterly false advertising campaign, this is probably the second to last nail in the coffin.
Failure #4:
Delays of the N8 – Now while it might seem like me nit-picking quite a bit, but the N8 was released to end-users much, much too late to have the sort of effect that Nokia wanted. Leaked in April of 2010 and extensively reviewed by a certain Russian blogger soon thereafter, it really was a device tailor-made for 2010. Had it been announced before the myriad super-powered Android devices and in particular the iPhone 4, Nokia could have made handsome inroads in the high-end smartphone market. Alas, the device was only made widely available after Nokia World 2010 in September and its sales were less than stellar in Q4 ’10.
Failure #5:
Meego – The idea of putting the two largest companies in their respective areas together and asking them to build an open source mobile operating system that would be the child of their previous offering in that regard sounded promising but there was always the chance that bureaucracy would get in the way, in addition to a few other possible issues. While Intel has stated publicly that “Nokia was perhaps the wrong partner to have picked”, having seen and used a Maemo device or two, Nokia actually having mobile products on the market and many of us still waiting on some sort of Intel chip on the market, I think I’d be forgiven for thinking that maybe Intel was the wrong partner for Nokia instead.
Failure #6:
Not pursuing Maemo – Maemo 5, while half-baked in many respects and not nearly a consumer-friendly product was categorically better than Symbian in almost every significant metric and that is far from hyperbole. While I might not be privy to the internal details surrounding its development, it was and still is better from many perspectives (in particular UI-wise) than Symbian in all iterations. Shoot, anything Nokia related that can get Engadget to say the words “brilliance” and “compelling” is worth looking at IMO.
All of these failures, some more significant than others point towards a common trend within the company. Maintain the status quo, do JUST enough, don’t change too much and more importantly get as much as you can value-wise for as little as possible effort-wise. Sadly enough, this was the regular course of events during OPK’s reign as CEO of Nokia.
Now that we’ve looked at the failures that befell Nokia under his reign, let’s look at the knock-on effects that we’ve seen since then.
Knock-On effects:
Brand Image:
Nokia’s brand-image due to it’s relation with Symbian amongst other things, is more or less tarnished in the public eye: Once seen as the paragon of innovation, hardware and functionality, that mantle is being taken over by players that nigh-on didn’t exist in the mobile landscape, and certainly not in the smartphone landscape. ZTE and Huawei are eating their lunch at the low end, Motorola, HTC, Samsung and Apple everywhere else.
Marketshare and Revenue positions both falling:
Deny all you want, but it is happening and has been happening since Q4 2009, OPK’s plan to price competitors out of the market clearly failed and now Nokia are left with a conundrum, raise prices and lose even more customers or leave prices as they are and unnecessarily cut into revenue. Many of you will cry foul saying that Nokia sold 24.2 million smartphones/converged devices last quarter (Q1) or 24% of all smartphones sold. Nokia has bled marketshare for the past 2 years without a shadow of a doubt and the stats prove it. According to Gartner the smartphone sales for Nokia as compared to Apple are as follows:
Change
Now before you bring in the “Nokia still has marketshare argument”, Nokia as a Public Limited Company aims to make a profit on their sales. The average selling price of their (Nokia’s) smartphones just so happens to lag behind RIM and Apple for starters. Apple’s ASP is around US$622 per device sold, Nokia’s smartphones supposedly hover around the US$155 mark. If your product is equally as good as another’s and you’re selling for less, in this case 3-4 times less, you’d expect proportionally greater volumes. Clearly this is no longer happening due to lower consumer interest. It should be noted that current devices selling were all created and sanctioned under OPK’s reign. As for Symbian^3 devices, 5 million in sales is respectable and whatnot but Apple sold 40% as many on a SINGLE carrier in the US in 1 quarter. Symbian is seemingly not wanted by consumers anymore 
.
Symbian and Maemo development behind the curve:
Lets be honest, Symbian has needed a UI overhaul since the first touch devices came on the market and nothing’s changed since then. Symbian Belle is supposed to be just that but by the time it’s actually released, it’ll likely be a year too late. Maemo was merged into MeeGo and similarly suffered from time-to-market related issues. Sure when it eventually comes out it’ll be great but chances are, the goalposts would have already moved. Plan ahead, beat the market to the punch; be revolutionary and not reactionary.
Elop’s mess to clean:
Now pretty much all of this was set in motion well before he took over the company and while Elop’s made one or two mistakes along the way like announcing WP7 move pretty darn early and likely worsening the Symbian play quite a bit. He hasn’t been liable for half of the crapstorm we’re now wading through. Many of us, myself included saw promise in things like Qt and Maemo 6 as well as a vertically integrated internal strategy built on Qt but it was simply not going to happen in a reasonable enough time-frame for the company to stay relevant.
If today’s new of a downgrade in outlooks for Q2 is any indication of things to come, life will get a helluva lot worse before it gets better for Big N and only time will tell if the brave gamble with Windows Phone pays off for them. To be fair to them they really had only two choices. Slowly fade into mediocrity and disappear or eviscerate themselves and start over, Symbian of course being the former and Windows Phone the latter.
Alas, all of this will probably fall on deaf ears. Keep blaming Elop for all the bad that we’re seeing now if it makes you happy. To me though, he’s simply tried to rectify an already untenable situation.
Category: Nokia
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- Elop is delusional? – Tomi Ahonen thinks so : My Nokia Blog | June 7, 2011
what’s the issue…..
Speed up symbian’s and meego’s development refresh the image of symbian with a new UI and features,better specs….solidify and up the development of Ovi services. Speed up the launch of mentioned SW updates and models once presented…..this shit is not hard to do
The only thing Nokia is capable of speeding up is their own demise. From the time Nokia decided to stop using GPUs, all went down hill from there. Nokia got greedy after the n82 and thought they could sell us inferior hardware while competitors opened consumers eyes to the very things that Nokia abandoned. I remember showing people my n82 and convincing them that gpus and mobile gaming were the future only for nokia to change their strategy and allow apple and others popularize gaming and media.
For crying out loud, the n82/95/e90 were more powerful than the original iphone and nokia did nothing to seize the opportunity.
Andre is spot on with this article! I have watched all of these failures happen first hand, so much so that I didn’t buy another nokia for 2 years after buying my n82. They made the above mistakes in that timeframe and it wasn’t until the n900 that nokia got back into the hardware game. even then, nokia continued promising big while delivering little.
Once again, great article Andre.
I HAVE TO SAY, me of all people thinks you’re right Andre (and thus this is a good article) and I think most well informed observers would agree with you.
*THE POINT* however is as deepspacebar implies, what Elop did to resolve the dire situation. No matter what OS Nokia decided to try and revive their fortunes with, publicly and effectively ditching Symbian was a huge mistake as all the desperate backpedalling since then shows.
The 2nd huge mistake, made worse by ditching Symbian, was to adopt what is very obviously the world’s worst mobile OS in terms of features, technically, consumer demand, sales figures and market share. On all those fronts WinPho is a disaster no matter how much you and Rant might like it Andre.
The one and only reason Elop is Nokia s CEO is to bring Nokia and MS together…every step from ditching symbian to divide the company into divisions leads to this aim. Or do you, Andre, know why he did, as one of his first actions, divide the company? Was there an urgent need for that step?
+1 ten times
That’s a conspiracy theory (and I do not mean that as a dismissive insult because it’s not, just a statement of fact) that may or may not prove to be true, we’ll have to wait and see. I very much hope that you are wrong (as I’m sure you do!)
I wrote a long reply to this but then you seemed to remove your post, so my comment was lost.
To sum it up:
1) Nokia messed up by not advertising. Apple will advertise and say how amazing the iPhone is with features others already do. Nokia phones do things nothing else on the market but who knows? The fact people still think the Symbian on the Satio is comparable to that of the N8, or don’t know Symbian^3 has integrated social networks, multiple homescreens and so on, is a sore testament to the lack of Nokia advertising. Andre you live in the US so you’ll know exactly what i mean by this, all i’ve seen since i’ve been here since January is iPhone and Android adverts, only one for the Astound played a handful of times and it doesn’t say what the phone can do. Symbian is a great OS but interest has waned because people don’t know how it’s progressed since the N95 or 5800.
2) Maemo. This was Nokia’s golden ticket to regaining lots of marketshare and forcing itself firmly back into the minds of consumers. Maemo remains THE most versatile OS available at any point in history, totally feature packed and allowing things to be done that others can’t even dream of. I went through the N958GB, 5800 and N97 in about 3 months, 18 months on and i still have the N900 and nothing compares to it on an OS level. Nokia should have stuck with it, developed it, put it on various devices and made it their top-end OS. Then as and when MeeGo developed it could replace Maemo. It was always a stupid plan to ditch the one OS that ran rings around all the competition and deciding to wait and release a whole new OS a year down the line.
There’s nothing wrong with Symbian, yes it could do with a UI overhaul but in terms of what it offers, it’s fantastic. The problem is not the OS but Nokia, through and through. THey have the funds to advertise massively, and that’s exactly what they need to be doing. Ram Symbian features into the public eye, pack WP7 with the missing features, and keep going with Maemo6/Harmattan i.e. the N9/50.
This is particularly important now. When WP7 is mature enough and packed with Symbian’s features, phase Symbian out. But for crying out loud KEEP the OS the N9 will be running on. Nokia needs the two OSs because the market is different these days, people have a lot of choice and if Nokia can offer two separate things it’ll bolster marketshare, confidence in the company and in turn profits.
i wouldn’t phase out symbian but make it even more affordable just like s40 since maemo is there
I don’t think if/when WP7 is mature Nokia will need S40, SYmbian, WP7 and Maemo/MeeGo. That will just distract focus and funds and will probably lead to half-baked OSs rather than one or two great ones. Unless Symbian is just kept more or less ‘as is’.
symbian is fine they just needs a new UI and a solid face go
Right, but it’s needed that for a long time now. It’s what we were all hoping for instead of the WP7 deal but that’s where we’re at now. I firmly believe if Nokia improved the UI and advertised the damn thing then sales would improve. But with the WP7 deal they’re not going to try to salvage Symbian.
Maybe they could no longer extricate the Symbian UI from the Symbian OS, meaning they could do little if anything for the UI in a reasonable timeframe
What’s ‘reasonable’? They should and could have started in 2007/08. I don’t think it’s that difficult to change things like that anyway. They had time to rebuild Symbian but not change the homescreens? I don’t buy that.
Pffft. Symbian has been used with at least 3 different graphic interfaces:
Avkon (S60), UIQ and whatever the name of what Japanese makers use.
There is so much misinformation posted about poor old Symbian. And no, it’s not restricted to 640×360.
Incompetent ditherers at the helm. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP3u58uvJ4U
This was already possible in 2009.
Hi. We’re really sorry your post went missing. We did not actively remove it. (We never remove posts except very bad circumstances – e.g. warez).
We have been facing problems with hosting recently. Too much traffic at certain hours of the day so had to move Andre’s post whilst the traffic settled. Otherwise it makes opening posts/posting a mess (sometimes if you post and the site hangs, your message will just randomly disappear).
That’s alright, i didn’t think the comment was deleted i figured it just got lost when Andre’s post went down.
Ive been hanging up the site by having it opened on my laptop, desktop, g2, n8 and n900 at the same time!! Now that is multitasking! Just kidding
And as for Elop, no one blamed him for the situation, but there’s simply no denying the tumbling of the shares after his announcement in February. His plan itself may be fine, but he announced it in the most braindead, incompetent way. Proof? To this day people are still confused by Nokia’s actual strategy, consumers think Symbian is already dropped, bloggers contradict each other and themselves, no one is sure of Nokia’s MeeGo plans and no one knows what Nokia will contribute to WP7 yet to make sure people buy that phone over HTC or Samsung WP7.
+1
Now, with Nokia being on it´s way down, it´s hard to define wheter Elops black friday 11. Feb. is responsible for that or not…BUT
I´think that the demise of Nokia wouldn´t have been that fast. There were immense problems under OPK concerning speed and focus – Elop did (apparently?) solve these. But Nokia did have an identity! They had their own way! Where is that now? Thanks Elop for killing the identity of a company with a tradition!
Tomi Ahonen wrote a 10.000 word essay on the black friday event – now he has reviewed his assumptions:
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/
Article: Final Numbers for Q1 in Smartphones Bloodbath year 2: Electric Boogaloo
It´s even worse for Nokia tha he has predicted…
I’m sorry but you can not defend his ‘burning platform’ memo. That was plain stupid and a insult to everyone who works at Nokia and bought a Nokia phone.
Apart from that he is doing a great job and I fully stand by him.
Hi Andre,
I totally agree with you. I hate Elop for killing off symbian but I would prefer that to Nokia closing up and packing out entirely. I use the E7-00 and it should have released with Anna in december 2010 with Belle to look forward to at this time of the year.
I still hope that Symbian can make a turnaround and exist peacefully with Windows Phone 7 in the coming years.
that wont happen at all wp7 is finally getting their second batch of new models and it’s going no where
Nice Post Andre. Same thing i was saying before. Why did nokia dump maemo for meego. Maemo would have been easy path for the nokia to take. But you could also blame somewhat intel for that. Trying to create a really powerful os was like a double edge sword for nokia. It was meant to compete with android or ios. But the slow development and nokia’s bad managmet is too blame for that. Maemo would have been powerful os if nokia could have make a little bit of commitment to it and invest their money on it to make it market consumer product os. Little bit UI changed and added feature could have make the maemo a better contender to android and ios. But then again nokia’s bad stragedy failed miserably. Let’s hope that shifting to wp7 might pay’s off for nokia.
The talented child Maemo was born in a house of stupid parents.
So who am I to blame for such stupid movements in Nokia?
Because I do remember seeing a graph a while back showing how much each company had spent on R&D. Nokia stood out by a large margin.
Where did all that money go? Can’t of been Symbian.
I’ve also wondered where all the money in Symbian R&D actually went, because while the OS is certainly more efficient and better to use, i’m struggling to understand why none of the UI changed very much. At the very least it’d be nice to have the option to resize widgets and icons or to have just one icon added instead of a row of 4, and this can be done within the same ‘space’ currently used to allow portrait and landscape homescreens, the only difference would be instead of putting 4 icons, ones unused would be blank so the user wouldn’t know. Easy.
But Andre’s point is, quite factually, Nokia was in a mess before Elop came in.
Yes I too realised it was a mess since the N97. But seriously all that money wasted. All I can think off that it went to was; OVI Maps, Meego, Maemo.
They also said Maemo is just for research. Well everyone seemed to love it, are they ignoring their own ‘research’?
Agreed, Maemo is incredible.
And there’s no reason why Symbian can’t receive small updates with the portrait qwerty and browser and get a bigger update when it’s ready.
I agree, we have all been nagging for features for years and they still have not been implemented. For example google Nokia x6 protatit qwerty and you can find forums on this topic from about the month after it’s launch. To be frank; it a disgrace and who ever is paid to do the r&d should be fired because try clearly do no have a clue what they are doing.
Can someone please contact them and make them continue to develope meeGo or Harmattan or Maemo 5? they are still up to date and awesome,! Symbian is slow and laggy shit that is obviously HARD to uppdate!
Nokia is a shit company, i will say goodbye after my n900 or n950!
I don’t care for Nokia’s WP7 future and have no interest in buying any of those phones and I now regret spending precious funds on a N8 for development and testing but I got sucked in on the early 2010 Symbian/Maemo promise. I do care about the future of Qt and that’s the only reason I have not tossed my N8 in the trash in disgust because it’s one of the few mobile touch devices that will run Qt/QML apps. I do appreciate and respect Nokia for the effort they put into Qt but that is turning into fear and loathing for what may happen to Qt in the next 12 months as WP7 devices roll out and the M$ influence becomes entrenched within Nokia. I’m sure they will do everything they can to kill off any cross platform Qt influence. I’m torn between wishing Nokia all the best, so they keep up the Qt effort, but OTOH I hope the WP7 experiment fails and goes to hell. Qt/QML on top of an open linux based subsystem is the most powerful mobile OS possible and to see Nokia throw that oh-so bright future away is just heartbreaking, especially so when they were so close to having something usable (like Maemo).
As for Elop, his mismanagement of the WP7 transition by announcing the premature death of their current main product and income stream will, and is, costing Nokia dearly. I think he was so blinded by his M$ past that he really did think blustering forth with the WP7 announcements would be overwhelmingly welcomed and had no idea that the push back against anything to do with M$ around the world would be so intense. Every Nokia pro-WP7 blog post I’ve seen is half filled with comments that are entirely negative about Nokia, WP7 and Elop. It’s been an extraordinary spectacle.
LOL the Symbian fanboyism is strong on this one
What pushback? Who are these people? the average users, the main demographic who support the bread and butter of Nokia? Certainly, it’s not those people.
I just laugh at people who say that Nokia betrayed most of their customers with the WP7 transition when the bread and butter of Nokia’s sales are people using their feature phones. These people don’t care if it’s Symbian or something else in these phones. They just want a reliable piece of hardware, which Nokia does best.
Nokia is like the Toyota of phones and people buy their phones for their reliable hardware. You (and your fellow haters) whine is like whining at Toyota for using engines from Honda for their Corollas and people will abandon Corollas because of this “betrayal” when the fact is these people don’t give two shits about it. They care about a inexpensive, reliable and well built hardware.
Huh! I bought a N8 for Qt/QML development. If there was a MeeGo option available I would not touch Symbian with a 10 foot pole. I said nothing about how customers might consider WP7 but how I felt personally about the M$ takeover of Nokia.
Actually, Symbian is quite good. I just blew away a friend by plugging in a USB stick to check for some photos. He had no idea a phone could provide a host USB port.
Andre…Thank you for the historical context – I am relatively new to the Nokia blogs, and this is a very interesting read, especially with regards to Nokia’s previously released devices. I definitely agree with you on ‘Elop’s mess to clean’, and although Nokia has a huge market share, it is VERY clear that the decline has been ongoing for several quarters. Love your commentaries – PLEASE keep them coming!
Great post!
My take:
WP7 for the US market. Sybmian slowly pushed down to S40 level (like deep space bar already said. While all of this is happening, keep developing maemo/meego until its ready for prime time and make it the MAIN OS. Elop’s strategy bothers me because he was very quick to send symbian to the grave yard, and eliminate the meego project(i know he says that is not the case, but that is bs, the only reason we will see the N9 is because it was too far into development when he came in). The whole thing makes no sense at all.. Every other manufacturer out there dreams of having their own OS (Samsung-BADA!) so that their are not dependent on others(google), Nokia, for some strange reason, wants to do just that. Throw away their independence, so that someone can pull their strings.. we all know that software rules over hardware, and having both (apple) os the winning recipe
Elop is also getting rid of the software department… wonder why.. oh ya, because once MS buys them, there will be no need for that one..right
Microsoft gets to kill Meamo(linux) and QT development tools in the process.
It’s not only Elop’s fault but mainly the board of directors are too stupid to understand. Falling market shares but increase sales is good.
Things don’t add up here. In fact Nokia’s smartphone technology was finally at the stages where it go gain back it’s lost ground.
Well sure it’s not Elop’s fault. It’s people before him those who did not jump of Symbian in time and did not put all efforts to make Maemo to their touch phone platform.
They had head start from Google but they did not take the road and others (google) did.
Looks like I’m going to join now to side that thinks Nokia is really done and out of the game permanently unless MeeGo dig up Nokia from it’s MS grave in 2020.
so tell me one thing now.. Is it foolish to have hope for anything now..should i stop dreaming about stuff like haptikos…what should i realistically expect as a nokia fan..i will confess i almost planned to buy sgs2 a few days back..should i move on now before i entrap myselp in a dark and gloomy future.. Is there someone who can peek at the future and tell how it will all end..please people..i deserve clarity..
I don’t think it’s as gloomy as people perceive. If the market is the same by october i’ll get a Symbian device. It’s all about what OS works for you. Nokia will be announcing the N9 soon and apparently they have just patented a new, never before seen type of technology, expected to be on that device. The question is how much Nokia push it or will it be another N900.
In any case, unless Android code is fixed so the UI sees the GPU, real multitasking is implemented and the data leaks fixed, i won’t be getting it (and if that does happen, it’ll be ice cream sandwich, so there’s a way to go yet).
I may or may not get WP7 from Nokia. In order to do so, it needs Nokia Maps, wifi needs to stay connected when the screen is locked because currently that messes up the push email badly. And it needs to let me do a backup whenever i want.
The iPhone 5 needs to be incredible to even tempt me, because right now it’s just a feature phone as far as i’m concerned. No turn by turn navigation, a real lack of multitasking, terrible notifications, no bluetooth transfers, everything needs to be done through iTunes (which i no longer use), etc etc.
So my next device, as things stand, will be the N9 or a Symbian device (N8 unless the 1GHz ones get released or at least announced before christmas). WP7 or Android could win my business if the major shortcomings are addressed and fixed. Until that time, Nokia is the only manufacturer that fulfills my needs – real multitasking, great battery, social integration, backup whenever i want, customisable, great ecosystem, Nokia Maps, and the best hardware on the market.
Nokia clearly made mistakes under OPK. Most of these IMO were down to execution. They needed to bring their phones to market much more quickly. They needed streamlining of their portfolio.
Given the proliferation of phones coming out from various manufacturers, Nokia was always going to lose market share. We’re in the middle of a transition phase for the entire industry, not just Nokia. Nokia still had the largest market share by far, second most profitable app store, and still very profitable. Things were challenging, but not critical.
On Feb 11th, Elop basically says in his now infamous “Burning platform” memo, “Our products are crap”. He then declares that WP7 is going to be the new OS, and Symbian is effectively dead. He didn’t introduce any Nokia WP7 devices. We have to wait a year or so before they show up.
That is massive incompetence. He could have said that Nokia will be partnering with Microsoft to introduce WP7 phones in various markets, and not spook the entire customer, retailer,network and developer bases.
Anyone who listened to the Feb 11th announcement was left with the message: Symbian is dead. It makes no sense to buy or develop for Symbian devices.
Here’s engadget’s take:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/11/rip-symbian/
Tomi Ahonen did some analyses and forecasts after the Feb 11th announcement about what he expected for the rest of the year.
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/page/2/
He forecasted Nokia ending the year with 12% market share. He’s long winded, but his analysis is sound. He sees the Nokia-MS partnership as an amazing windfall for the competitors, and boy, is he right.
Nokia’s problems didn’t start with Elop, but IMO he increased them by an order of magnitude.
I have never seen a more spineless capitulation by an industry leader. This will be a classic business case in the years to come.
Totally agree. Elop was given a difficult task but Nokia WAS on the right track completely – Symbian, Maemo, Qt. Adopting WP7 too is no problem in and of itself, but Elop handled the whole thing with spectacular incompetency and that, now, is Nokia’s biggest problem.
+1 billion
flop is a horrible ceo for this move. Its surprising that thw board signed off on this horrendous move. Couldn’t they have predicted the drop in market share and profits. Imagine they all have adequate business acumen so how did they agree on such a disastrous path. I understand nokia had problems but flop ruined the company in one day.
Goodbye nokia, welcome to life as the new motorola
My most favourite analogy is a duellist that drops his sword. “Oops”.
It’s so horrible to see a successful EU company mishandle itself so many times.
Well now it’s a not so successful EU company. In a future many something heading for the history books.
The downwards spiral of Nokia started way before Elop. At around 2008 / 2009 it looked to me as they had a plausible strategy – Maemo for the top, Symbian for the middle tier and S40 for the feature phones. QT would be the glue to tie the first two tiers together. Their major problem was EXECUTION (!!!) – they had good ideas but failed to bring them to market in proper time or with proper marketing support.
It is execution where Nokia failed badly!
In 2010 (in reality earlier) there was the dire need for a switch at the helm of Nokia. The Board – under apparent pressure from major shareholders – brought in a new CEO, Elop, to turn the company around and bring them back to a leadership position in the mobile market.
Now, the numbers don’t lie: If WP7 is such a great strategy, why did the stock price tank immediately after announcement? If Elop is a talented CEO, why is market share, ASP and maybe even sales volume tanking one year into his reign?
Looking at Nokia today I see that their main problem – execution – is still not resolved. How long does it take them to bring essential improvements to their existing Symbian system? How long is the the N900 on the market, where is a proper successor? Where is the Nokia Windows Phone, can I buy it now?
In addition to the massive execution problem – definitely not helped by layoff announcements and end of live comments regarding Symbian system, Nokia has now a massive strategic problem with all bets on Windows Phone, which currently is a huge market failure. Look at the numbers sold, it’s dismal.
So, you are right, Elop is not the main culprit for the demise of Nokia. Nokia’s share price is in serious deterioration since late 2007. However, since he became CEO he is contributor and accelerator. He destroys what’s good (QT strategy, Ovi, the most sold mobile OS). He is definitely not the person capable to make Nokia great again.
Numbers don’t lie. Nokia’s share price was $11.75 when Elop announced his new WP centric strategy. The share price hit $7 today, a massive loss for shareholders.
Yes, Elop is a flop. Not because he is the culprit for all of Nokia’ woes. But because his prescriptions accelerate Nokia’s demise.
One last thought: Think what would have happened if Steven Elop would have become Apple’s CEO in 1997. And think about what a Steve Jobs could do with a brand name and resources like Nokia has (had?) available!
“I see that their main problem – execution – is still not resolved.”
And it won’t be resolved. Execution for Symbian depends on Symbian developer workforce. Elop has just axed that. And transferred what’s left to Accenture. Not only does this not motivate anyone to produce anything new, it totally screws up anything that was already in production.
As regarding Elop, I see people here calling him “incompetent”. Dear readers, nobody is THAT stupid. What Elop has done was done with hindsight and perfect understanding of the consequences. These are not children playing with a toy, but mature businessmen that know the value of money. In some way or other, the Feb11 memo and the current Symbian delays play into Microsoft’s hands, and this is why things are what they are. Don’t expect any better times to come for Symbian. Or Nokia for that matter, unless Nokia board of directors get rid of this Microsoft pawn and actually decide to take their company out of the gutter. Which seems unlikely because they too are mature businessmen and obviously have personal things to gain from all these developments.
+1000000000000000000000000000000000
plus another +1000000000
I think this whole delays is going to affect Nokia-MS partnership instead of benefitting it.. Nokia’s image is getting tarnished everywhere and with bad projection for Q2 and even worse for Q3, I don’t think Nokia will be in a strong position when the first WP phone. Also, by the time Nokia develops a range of WP devices by 2012, the climb to reach the top would be a big time..
Another worrying point is the language support in WP. One of the argument here when it comes to WP sales is the lack of language support. Symbian’s supported language list is huge and to get this supported in WP is going to be a massive task..
Andre, everyone knew before 11feb that Nokia was in trouble. The reason everyone blames Elop is because of his mishandling the situation. Why did he announce it last week that Symbian will be supported until 2016 even though annoucing its death on Feb11 and shifting Symbian development to Accenture. The effect of the Feb11 is taking it effects now with poor projectons until this year end and $200 off on Amazon for N8 and E7.
I very much agree with this and one thing I think was a shame is that they didn’t try and polish Maemo and release another device with it. The principal UI is a much better one than Symbian’s. Execution has been slow. Maemo is a mess though I get the feeling Nokia pulling out from that was the right thing. The shame will be that Maemo6/Harmattan will probably be great but be another one off device they don’t ever build on, much like Maemo.
Ultimatley, this Windows Phone thing is one thing, but the next disruption stuff is entirely another. Ultimatley, what’s acknowledged here in both paths is that Nokia are to start over from the bottom up and if they do their own OS it is unlikely to grow out of Symbian. I hope Nokia don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater so to speak and that they develop a future disruption that is Qt based, and the keep the Nokia services ecosystem. If Windows Phone is a success, great, if not, they will need something good to get back in the game, otherwise, at least to some people, they may as well go back to tyres and bog roll.
I really want Nokia to do well – i don’t want an android/ios world where android becomes the windows of mobile (everyone has it except for the guys who think their too cool and get Macs or too nerdy and get some sort of linux device). Choice and competition are good, and Windows Phone right now is the only viable cross manufacturer alternative to Android.
Nokia will continue working on MeeGo even after the launch of N9\N950.
I hope so, though i doubt it will be strictly MeeGo, more likely if anything, an extension of Maemo 6, or perhaps something built off MeeGo core rather than using MeeGo handset.
We all knew Nokia had problems prior to Elop that goes without saying…
Problems which occur during Elop are all on Elop especially when things become predominantly worse since his reign
If Nokia was tipping into the ocean prior to Elop they were at least balancing themselves; Elop brought on too much weight when he jumped onto that platform and lay anchor
you can’t defend that no matter how much baggage you want to draw out
+1
Hello Andre, nobody here is denying that Nokia made a lot of mistakes, cf. all the rants here on MNB even before Elop kicked in. You’re right about that.
Yes, I disagree with some of your points: for example, that the 5800 had a pitiful software. At that time, Apple was *very* far away from feature parity with Symbian, the original iPhone wasn’t even a smartphone as it did not have “apps”. Android 1.6 was, feature-wise, well below S40. Nokia’s real mistake was to be very slow to improve S60v5 (i.e. to bring forth Symbian^3 so late, to put the same software as the 5800 on the N97, to take YEARS to create a decent browser when a much smaller company, Opera, managed to do it on Nokia’s own platform in a much shorter time).
However, the point is that if the platform was “burning”, then Elop made it blow with TNT, when he released – cough – “leaked” that shameful memo. Publicly. And then announced he would kill *the whole* ecosystem of Nokia, leaving both users and developers stranded, *one year before* the new ecosystem was ready, and with no migration path! This has beeen useful only for the Windows Phone platform, because before 11/2 it was considered dead by both buyers and analysts, while now it receives some media interest not because of its sales, which remain pitiful (1% in the USA according to Nielsen in Feb-Apr 2011, 9 times less than Windows Mobile itself), but because of the future possibilities given to it by the Nokia deal.
“Analysts” and “usability experts” kept criticising Nokia because, according to them, Nokia didn’t understand their users’ needs. It turns out that it was them who didn’t understand Nokia users, probably due to the fact that they live in those countries which do not buy Nokia, and have never done so. By bowing to the analysts’ recipes for success, Nokia effectively killed itself in the other parts of the world, those where the Nokia brand effectively had value. It’s just like selling your own home (well, more like setting fire to it in this case) before you’ve bought a new one: you end up living in the streets in the meantime.
Brands don’t die easily, and so I think that Nokia, even if it went bankrupt, would be back to business soon. Hopefully not in the same form as other once-glorious brands such as Amstrad and Telefunken: now small companies, selling cheap chinese-built products, designed and researched by somebody else.
Agree
Great post Andre, sparked an idea for another one with me along with the discussion going in the Anna post.
Things which have already completed cannot be traced back.so,without ranting much on Nokia mediocre strategy during 2008-10 whose ultimate result was the rise of android market and demise of Symbian OS on Feb11,2011.
still Nokia has strong position in African, Asian and northern Europe.
They can ponder about the following things.
1)To beat Chinese & Indian phones,Nokia should invest on s40 series OS.Its like “poor man fruit for Nokia”(like guava for the people instead of apple.s40 has lot of potential underneath.
2)Basic feature to be added on s40 should be-multitasking, Symbian browser and document support because Chinese phones don’t have any of these features.
NOW TO BEAT ANDROID AND APPLE IOS
1)Fingers cross for coming WIN7 by Nokia.WIN 7.5 has lot of potential and if the deal successful WIN OS will become the best selling OS.It has completely new UI and its human tendency to attract towards new things.
2)Faster updates,speed up Symbian belle for s^3 phones before November.
3)make different strategy for different markets.Analyse,evaluate and then execute the plan.
sorry Jay. IMHO Nokia has done a very very strong strategy. The problem that you have deal are only unhappy tattics not a strategy (like n96 and n97 flop)
While your points are valid, I don’t feel like they address the recent issue. Not a single person that I know of doubted Nokia’s slip from greatness starting years ago, but I believe that the issue with Elop is he had made many mistakes that have done the opposite of help increasing the slide to obscurity in the Smart Phone market. Announcing the death of Symbian before it is dead AND a good year before there is even another Nokia option was a mistake on GRAND scale, especially stock wise.
Personally I think there is absolutely no chance that Nokia is bought by Microsoft, but I would not be will to bet anything that Elop is making choices which may be much much better for MS than Nokia in the long run. Who knows why he is doing so, but he certainly has so far.
What I’m still waiting from Elop defenders like you is an explanation why Symbian had to be ditched on Feb. 11th.
Nobody is arguing Nokia did many mistakes, but the fact that you Elop defenders always miss is not acknowledge
Failure #7: “Annouce that Nokia will have no platform to offer for one whole year. Nokia WP7 handset is not here and we will kill the rest of our line by announcing the death of Symbian and Meego today.”
You might argue he did not really announce Symbian’s and Meego’s death. Ask the investors or Intel what they really heard…