Delusion – they’re the crazy one, not me.

BTW, The title is just playing on another of Tomi's post calling Elop delusional.

We’ve got to hand it to mobile Guru, Tomi Ahonen. He’s certainly on a mission to get Elop out of Nokia. I’m sure looking at Tomi’s plans to ‘Save Nokia’, that’s what many Symbian’s die hard fans would love to see too:

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/06/to-save-nokia-would-take-these-steps-urgently-as-in-right-now.html

1) Kick Elop Out

2) Cancel Windows Phone

3) Return to Symbian as Main OS

4) Reinstate Anssi Vanjoki or wait for it, someone from top management of an Asian Operator.

Frankly, I do not know where to begin except see that should we follow this, we would see Nokia’s certain destruction. Speaking on Twitter, James Burland and Micky Aldridge seem to think so too (these are Nokia fans who have Nokia’s best interest at heart) and now a few more in the time I’m writing this.

If you agree with Tomi, then that’s ok. If you disagree, that’s ok too, BUT don’t be harsh on him. Everyone is entitled to an opinion and Tomi’s has put his out with great effort.  He has a great reputation as an analyst and has made many great posts. Just in this particular instance (and perhaps some other recent ones) I’m not inclined to think along his lines.

The comments on that post echoes some of my feelings.

You are high as a kite. Seriously. Hook me up with some quality Asian narcotics.

Step 1: Fire the handpicked CEO whose plans the board approve of and make the board’s Chairman the new CEO.

Step 2: Bring in some random dude who jumped off Nokia because he (correctly) viewed Nokia as a hellhole as co-CEO and name a phone after him as a proxy for constant blowjobs from the interns.

Step 3: ???

Step 4: PROFIT!!! Where Symbian + MeeGo somehow equal profit.
You’ve lost it. Regardless of whether or not the current plan is right, the alternate plan is from South Park. You ignored profits for something like three years because you were obsessed with market share. You’ve now been proven wrong, since Apple makes more money off iPhones then every single other entity in the industry (possibly combined, IIRC, and indeed Apple could theoretically buy every other mobile handset maker in the business in cash). If Nokia in 2006 dumped their entire operations and—magically—made the iPhone they’d be making more money then Nokia of 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011.

-EM

Saving us from the saviour

Finally here’s a comment from UnwiredView’s @UVstaska – replying to another of Tomi’s post:

Getting back to your heart patient analogy. Your own posts show that the patient (Nokia) have developed a serious hear condition in early 2010. Doctors (OPK and the team) tried to cure it with drugs (price dumping), when that stopped working they turned to a more radical treatment and hired a surgeon (Elop) and fired the previous doctor.

They (Nokia board) also stopped the drug treatment. And the patient went into immediate cardiac arrest. Q3, Q4 market share loses.

CPR helped a bit (S^3 Q4 bump up) but it was too little too late. Nokia’s heart (Symbian, Meego) was ruined way before by unhealthy diet and fat (bureaucracy,empty pride-we are the biggest and the best, self deception- we are doing great even when competitors are running rings around us and taking all the money, laziness-inability to produce anything worthwhile in software, and addiction to the unhealthy food that sustained it before – selling what it called smartphones to people who just bought cheap Nokia phones)

By Feb. 11 it became clear that the old Nokia heart is no good and to save the patient, a transplant is necessary. Yes, the patient is near death now, he’s on life support until the new heart is here. And there’s no guarantee that the new heart will take, adapt to current immune system (Nokia legacy) and revive the patient. But it’s very unfair to blame the surgeon who diagnosed the decease, put the patient on life support and is in the middle of the heart transplant for the condition the patient is in.

And it does not matter if the patient survives or not. Maybe he chose the wrong heart. Maybe he made a mistake during the operation. The thing is – the patient got where he is all by himself.

As one of the other comments say, we are pretty much on a path of NO RETURN. There is no other way right now except seeing the Microsoft Windows Phone partnership through. It’s much to early to declare it to be a failure when the devices have not even been released and the strategy has not even played out.

Nokia either dies slowly with Symbian and MeeGo (remember their Oh Sh_t moment?) or possibly die quickly with Microsoft if they make a mistake, but with the latter, there is a chance to come back, to live and win again.

With the ‘strategy’ that is outlined by Tomi, Nokia would face certain destruction RIGHT NOW.

Perhaps we’re all missing something. We’re not really in the industry like Tomi is, so perhaps he has an insight we’re missing. That’s not sarcasm, I am in awe of what this man knows, and sometimes wish I could devote as much time to gain even half the expertise of Tomi.

Tomi’s not the only ones expressing doubt in Elop and the WP strategy but I’m not quite sure they’d follow this new plan either.

Do you agree with Tomi? As arm chair CEO, what would you do?

Category: Windows Phone