Jorma Ollila: Nokia to turn things around at the end of the year, success in the next few years…
Fossi mails in a translation from the Finland’s leading Swedish newspaper, Huvudstadbladet, that talked about Jorma Ollila, ex CEO soon to be succeeded as Chairman by Risto Siilasmaa.
He says that turnaround of Nokia will be seen at the end of the year, confident that Nokia will sort out their problems. Ollila says that the major changes are slow, and only in the next few years will we see how Elop has succeeded. Elop has had a year and a half already, but Ollila estimates that it takes 18 months minimum to bring about significant change and so in the next two to four years, we will see the impact Elop had.
Is this confidence from knowing Nokia’s future strategies and products? Ollila was expected to stick around with Nokia and not retire sooner than he did to shepherd Nokia through difficult periods. Is he leaving because Nokia is now on the right path? Or perhaps that’s just executive speak and he’s just leaving, either because he has been at Nokia for 27 years or maybe, worryingly he doesn’t really think Nokia will turn things around?
Success in the next few years? This year is mostly said to be the year of transition (again :/) but with the new strategy. Hopefully Nokia has some class leading products at the end of the year in all aspects of Nokia’s portfolio, and that the current phones sell enough to be seen as a start of healing and turn around at Nokia.
- Jorma Ollila, who soon resigns as chairman of mobile phone maker Nokia believes that a turn for the better will be done within the company at the end of this year.
- In an interview with MTV3 Ollila says that he is confident that Nokia sort out their problems.
- Ollila stresses that major changes are slow. Only the next few years shows how CEO Stephen Elop has succeeded.
- Elop has led Nokia in a year and a half years.
- Over the next two to four years shows what kind of impact he had. 18 months is the minimum time during which you can bring about a significant change, estimates Ollila.
- According to Ollila solves a merger is not Nokia’s problems.
- Company cultures are so different that there is great reluctance to start combining them.
- Ollila has been working with Nokia for 27 years. He resigns as chairman next week. Ollila is succeeded by Risto Siilasmaa
Cheers Fossi for the tip and translation!
Category: Nokia
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- Ollila: la svolta di Nokia entro fine anno | April 25, 2012
Isn’t Huvudstadbladet the main Swedish newspaper in FINLAND, not Sweden?
Yes, I think he means that one.
Jay: It’s a Finnish newspaper but written in Swedish. Bilingual country, you know.
Sorry, I misread only ‘Swedish newspaper’ in the tip as from Sweden. Will update. Checking again it did actually point out if was from Finland. heh. My excuse is having to find my mac’s charger which I seemed to have lost so rushing to write. :/
Yes, nokia will give us successor of N9 with Qt5.
I can’t see other way to be successful.
+1
I recently started learning Qt so that I am ready for that
Well, extrapolating from the interview, at Elop is not getting the boot from the current board of directors. So, the current Nokia board has answered the call and said no – Elop needs more time, it seems.
(Speculating outside the interview, main worries in that regard come from a takeover big – or the next board, but I’d expect them not to do anything drastic unless something like takeover or other hostile moves happen.)
It has been pretty clear for some time that the current board is committed to the WP strategy and is willing to extend Elop the benefit of doubt in its execution despite his obvious errors in 2011. Some have speculated that this is partially because the major US investors also still trust on Elop’s ability to make this strategy successful. If this is the case, it is unlikely that the new board will do anything either, unless something really drastic happens, like you wrote. Some small investors may make some noise at the shareholders’ meeting, but that will be the extend of it, because they don’t have any real power.
Oh, small investors are sure to make noise at the meeting. They always do.
And as they should, too. It is good to see a solid discussion happen.
Should be fun…
As for the board letting Elop stay, I say good from two perspectives: 1) Of course it is my own belief that Elop should be allowed to stay to let the Lumia strategy a chance to succeed. 2) I’ve said, and I think the board probably would agree, Elop should be fired if the internal projections say Lumia strategy will not work at all. So I guess they still see it has chance to work out.
I hope the Lumia strategy will in the end prevail on some level. Much damage has of course already been done, no denying that.
It’s not like firing him would do any good. What are they going to do? S40 isn’t really a smartphone platform yet, nobody wants anything to do with Symbian, convincing devs to support Maemo would be very hard – not to mention if they could have gotten the N9 running on an OMAP4, they would have, so keeping up with Android and getting it out on an OMAP5 before Android is on OMAP6 is unlikely. They could grab onto open webOS, the devs like that, but switching strategies this late would need a few othe OEMs backing open webOS as well. They could also do boot2gecko, given the projected system requirements and performance it could be a full smartphone experience at S40 prices, but S40′s going to achieve that eventually anyway. Android isn’t an option either, Samsung is the preferred partner and already has a lead, HTC is even having a challenge, and only Motorola is safe. Sony changed their stance and is trying WP as well as an Android only strategy doesn’t seem reliable to them anymore.
A lot of these options would have worked a year ago, but now that the WP stratgey has been picked, there’s no changing it. If you’re not going to change it, why fire the guy who picked it?
Bravo, except that I don’t share your pessimism regardin running Maemo on OMAP4 or higher.mproblem was most likely that the hardware was targeted for a 2010 release, but the sofware got messed up too many times and caused huge delays. If they would have needed to design new hardware as well, we’d probably still be waiting for it to launch…
Ok, that is a possible explanation, of course then Maemo would still be screwed because it takes them too long to get anywhere with it.
40% of the market share is success
(the stats they used to have with symbian)
anything below that is failure!!!!
Bollocks. More profit is success. If they get that with 20% it’s a far, far better place to be.
by your argument, they could stay where they are right now, only try and eke out more out of the existing set of customers
5% should be plenty as long as they can get the wp7 phone lover to fork out $400-600 in profits per handset!
Yup. Pretty much. You would have to work out what market share would give maximum return though.
100% market share is success not 40%.
+100!
First thank you Mr Ollila for years of your work, even if you never will see this “thank you”. I have ambivalent feelings about what you’ve said. Yes and No, together. Elop has introduced fresh approach and COULD succeed, however haven’t so far. He is well known of his potential and involvement like almost workholism and great skills. Unfortunately he is still “under spell” of Microsoft, and deny Nokia legacy exists and is quite alive. Transition to Windows system period has already finished. Customers either switched (if accepted) to new offer or clams (also here) or moved to competition (and disappeared from stats). Now Nokia must look for NEW customers and COMPETITOR’S customers to ask them to become Nokia customers. From Microsoft POV this OK as they don’t have any significant customers base in mobiles. That fits. But that does not create any comeback for Nokia, even “in a few years”, this is just kind words of the person who soon will not be involved in any operations and want to have friends and colleagues, and perspectives for a company are not his concerns any longer, at last not in a way it was till now.
Nokia with current strategy, as we know it, will not be back. I think Nokia even will not get better. I don’t believe, however I would like to. MeeGo is still unused chance. MeeGo Meltemi also unknown. Microsoft only use Nokia to reach it’s goals. I think thanks to Nokia contacts Microsoft has make an agreement with China ZTE to produce ZTE TANIA with WP which is almost-almost identical to some Nokia’s models. They don’t care for Nokia. ZTE TANIA has Qualcomm chips, 1GHZ proc, 512RAM, 5Mpix cam, WIFI, touchscreen with WP and services – just let me know why user would buy Nokia when he has the same specification form Chinese ZTE? And when ZTE is almost as big manufacturer as dieing Nokia? Have a look yourself http://www.gsmarena.com/zte_tania-4304.php and let me know to which Nokia it would be similar? And without writtings? Nokia with gigantic Lumia advertising marketing company has made the biggest gift to competitors advertising them, because it is advertising their products layout also! Small letters somewhere there will not change it. MS is in win win situation, they don’t care on which hardware will run Windows. Can you see now why Lumia just can’t make Nokia better? Cheaper competitors with the same specs, the same chips, the same system, even looking almost the same, and what then? Celebrate of the only 1M Lumia sold? Does this makes any sense? Financial, economical, PR, marketing? What can guarantee that customer will choose Lumia instead of ZTE TANIA? I think nothing. A shark without teeth is just a fish, not any predator. Nokia without MeeGo/Harmattan/Meltemi and Symbian is just small Finnish company producing some spare parts for big players like MS, nothing more. Does MS concerns any small hardware producer will fall or will succeed? See PC market – that is the same. One goes, another comes, windows is the same for all. And this above example must be considered by financials, they know there is no way in fair competition with China (when they want to win), so when nothing is different in product itself then China low costs (fair or unfair – who cares) will determine winner, and will soon eliminate Nokia from markets. Nokia is advertising a lot, but competitors will gain advantage on this. Banks if see threats then don’t want to credit uncertain strategies or just certain suicide strategies. Elop could win introducing windows, but only when this would not be equal to destroy all what is loved in Nokia, in MeeGo, in Symbian. But he instead has tried to make a revolution and “kill” any different opinion. This as the only one option has triggered many kinds of opposition and counteractions. So now Nokia is fighting with own customers who want Nokia’s products and Nokia denying them right to decide what they prefer. This turns slowly into a strange kind of monopoly. Following strategy of “only windows or death” will lead to end of Nokia as famous company. Now it has only lost leadership in manufacturing mobiles. And one more question: MS is a producer, MS produce Xbox, got money – why they don’t start to produce mobiles on their own? Perhaps windows does not guarantee any success. So why Nokia limits it self to uncertain option?
Would be easier to consider your arguments if you had used paragraphs, mate.
Agreed.
don’t be a grammar douch
jah, just b a plain douch lyk u
walloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftext
you are smart enough to use your common judgement on punctuation ….you are not in grade school and your parents did teach your to read
Anyway this is good to be wise enough to understand punctuation also.
100% agreed
didnt elop say we would see his impact on nokia this year? seriously if changes are so slow that its gonna take years, why the hell did they go with this option? Do nokia really think they have years to see if this change has worked? by then nokia will be dead! geez this means we still have to put up with elop at least for 2 more years!
Have we not?
This is not anything for sure. Nokia can bankrupt quite sooner. This is situation like an airlines company would accept years of delays in departures. Company can do this, but clients can choose a competitive offer meanwhile.
Because apparently other option was slow AND would not lead to success, according to Nokia. It says above we will see turn around at the end of the year, which is an impact seen this year, no?
BTW, Two more years of Elop as CEO of Nokia…well as bad as that might be, if it happens at least there is still a Nokia. On the extreme scale, all the sowing and realigning to the new strategy may be seen to pay off. ElMu said he would be stepping down and MS would buy Nokia this year so at least that might not happen.
“ElMu said he would be stepping down and MS would buy Nokia this year so at least that might not happen.”
you never know. they always try and throw people off the trail
Sir if you ask me, Ollila is saying good bye and tank you for the goods things, good luck on the path you’ve choose…
The real problem is, Nokia have a few more years??? at least as a fully indepent company and not just a MS toy, if I look to the last info, I say no, we don’t have those few years, things are going really slow…
They will talk like this right until the end. The end of Nokia that is, not the end of BoD and Elop. I I am sure that Elop will be happy to retire with few tens of millions USD. His ego may be bruised but his wallet will provide a solid consolation.
elop also suspected to sell 150 million symbian phones which will not happen. What if nokia don’t turn things around end of the year? I mean with phones like the S3 and IP5 coming out soon!
No option wouldn’t take years. Takes them 8 months to just build a phone, quite a bit longer to get them rolling out in volume.
BTW, Rapuyama V2.13 sell in china (TAOBAO).
http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=14836963812&
AND samsung MCP
http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=16294356239&
+ The supported languages [with dialects] (and scripts) in Symbian Belle are:
Arabic (Arabic),
Basque (Latin),
Bulgarian (Cyrillic),
Catalan (Latin),
Chinese [PRC] (Simplified Chinese),
Chinese [Hong Kong] (Traditional Chinese),
Chinese [Taiwan] (Traditional Chinese),
Croatian (Latin),
Czech (Latin),
Danish (Latin),
Dutch (Latin),
English [UK] (Latin),
English [US] (Latin),
Estonian (Latin),
Finnish (Latin),
French (Latin),
French [Canadian] (Latin),
Galician (Latin),
German (Latin),
Greek (Greek),
Hebrew (Hebrew),
Hindi (Hi),
Hungarian (Latin),
Icelandic (Latin),
Indonesian [Bahasa Indonesia] (Latin),
Italian (Latin),
Kazakh (Cyrillic),
Latvian (Latin),
Lithuanian (Latin),
Malay [Bahasa Malaysia] (Latin),
Norwegian (Latin),
Persian [Farsi] (Arabic),
Polish (Latin),
Portuguese (Latin),
Portuguese [Brazilian] (Latin),
Romanian [Romania] (Latin),
Russian (Cyrillic),
Serbian (Latin),
Slovak (Latin),
Slovene (Latin),
Spanish (Latin),
Spanish [Latin America] (Latin),
Swedish (Latin),
Tagalog [Filipino] (Latin),
Thai (Thai),
Turkish (Latin),
Ukrainian (Cyrillic),
Urdu (Arabic),
Vietnamese (Latin).
+ Symbian OS was created with three systems design principles in mind:
1. the integrity and security of user data is paramount
2. user time must not be wasted
3. all resources are scarce
+ SYMBIAN Market share and competition
In the number of “smart mobile device” sales, Symbian devices were the market leaders for 2010. Statistics showed that Symbian devices formed a 37.6% share of smart mobile devices sold, with Android having 22.7%, RIM having 16%, and Apple having 15.7% (via iOS).
Prior reports on device shipments as published in February 2010 showed that the Symbian devices formed a 47.2% share of the smart mobile devices shipped in 2009, with RIM having 20.8%, Apple having 15.1% (via iOS), Microsoft having 8.8% (via Windows CE and Windows Mobile) and Android having 4.7%. Other competitors include webOS, Qualcomm’s BREW, SavaJe, Linux and MontaVista Software.
Symbian has lost market share over the years as the market has dramatically grown, with new competing platforms entering the market, though it’s sales have increased during the same timeframe. E.g., although Symbian’s share of the global smartphone market dropped from 52.4% in 2008 to 47.2% in 2009, shipments of Symbian devices grew 4.8%, from 74.9 million units to 78.5 million units. From Q2 2009 to Q2 2010, shipments of Symbian devices grew 41.5%, by 8.0 million units, from 19,178,910 units to 27,129,340; compared to an increase of 9.6 million units for Android, 3.3 million units for RIM, and 3.2 million units for Apple. In 2006, Symbian had 73% of the smartphone market, compared with 22.1% of the market in the second quarter of 2011. Over the course of 2009–2011, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG, and Sony Ericsson announced their withdrawal from Symbian in favour of alternative platforms including Google’s Android, Microsoft’s Windows Phone, and Samsung’s bada.
Q2 2009 to Q2 2010, shipments of Symbian devices grew 41.5%, by 8.0 million units, from 19,178,910 units to 27,129,340.
+ Let’s just make conservative estimates that even if half of these devices never sold, then that is still 20% of the market share, or roughly 13,000,000 units (13 Million units).
+ Now compare:
+ Windows Phone
+ Windows Phone Market share
According to Gartner, 1.7 million smartphones using a Microsoft mobile OS were sold world wide in the second quarter of 2011, for a 1.6% market share. In the third quarter of 2011, Microsoft’s world wide market share dropped slightly to 1.5%. In the fourth quarter however market share increased to 1.9%. However it should be noted that such reports include both Windows Phone and Windows Mobile marketshare under the same “Microsoft mobile OS” banner, and do not make the distinction of separating the marketshare values of the two.
Studies carried out by Nielsen Company indicated that in the US, WP7 had a smart phone market share of 1% each in the periods March to May, and May to July 2011. For Q3 2011, Nielsen reported a US market share of 1.2% for WP7, which rose to 1.4% in Q4 2011.
+ Conclusion:
+ So essentially Nokia threw out their SYMBIAN 41.5% (about 27 Million) market share or conservative 20% market share (about 13 Million) in favor of WINDOWS PHONE 1.9% market share (about 2 Million).
+ So… which is the REAL BURNING PLATFORM? Which operating system is REALLY the DEAD operating system? Who rescued who? Did Microsoft Windows Phone platform rescue Nokia or was it the other way around, Nokia rescued Microsoft Windows Phone platform?
+ After the burning platform memo, killing off SYMBIAN, now what do you think the remaining SYMBIAN 20% market share (about 13 Million) will do? Suddenly embrace WINDOWS PHONE? Even WINDOWS PHONE 8? Or will they eventually migrate to iOS, BB10 or Android?
(All data taken from Wikipedia)
I agree, without any pleasure. Sadly. And would like to add this: even when MS introduce a new kind of Windows and even when new one is incompatible then MS never actively kill their customers base, however technically they could do this. But if they would they would loose customers trust, and future users. So they serve older ones even many years and never says “we kill XXX” they just “stop servicing”. So that means they also have incomes from them. Could you imagine one day with introduce win9 MS will try to kill all their win-s from before? I can’t! So why Nokia is trying to do this? MS don’t, so why Nokia?
And they all dropped this for what? Apps? Ecosystem! Many people don’t even need an ecosystem
You are right.. My N9 has all the apps I will ever need, whatsapp is also coming to N9.. dont need it, but for those who need it surely will appreciate having it on N9. Ecosystems.. blaah blaah! Love my N9 and gonna use it for quite some time.. Great OS!
Bottom line is that Nokia re less interested in market share and more interested in profit now.
That’s the way it should be.
There’s no point having a huge market share in Symbian when your profit per device is tiny and your market share is ever sliding downwards. Apple managed just fine with a tiny market share in the iPhone’s beginning yet they had the industry’s highest profit margin.
Now, 40% or whatever for the iPhone is a bit obscene, but the industry has changed enough that it’s not just about making boatloads of cheap phones anymore.
They way it should be?
Prove it.
They are interested neither in market share nor profit.
Lumia is less profitable than their Symbian lines.
Nokia got rid of their market share and their profits.
So in essence, you are lying.
According to the NetMarketShare stats, Symbian’s global data usage share last month was 2.7% and it has been falling like a stone since 2010. So the Symbians that are out here mostly used for phone calls and nothing else. WP’s marketshare is smaller but the big difference is that it is rising and the rate of its rise is accelerating and most important of all it is modern, compelling OS. Symbian cannot surive in this modern era of smartphones.
bs. I work in a very “Smartphone dependent” environment and my Symbian does everything the iphones and the android do, sometimes even better. Its a perfectly capable platform.
Let me tell you a true story. I went to a mall, carried around a Samsung Galaxy Ace GT-S5830 (needed another for data plan only so I got it from my carrier, subsidized). Went to the mall to meet my wife. Was about to check in Foursquare, so I proceed to slide unlock the Ace. Darned phone won’t respond, tried wiping the glass, still no response. So reboot I did. Counted 100 seconds for it to reboot (it has A2SD and most apps are in the SD-EXT). Finally booted to usable state, but lo! Samsung Home FC’d! So, long press Home Key to invoke task manager, then cleared all memory. No response. Finally I just whipped out my Nokia N82, then opened Foursquare on it, 40 seconds flat finished.
Galaxy Ace hung in shame.
How’s that for a 4 year old dead burning platform phone?
p.s. my backup phone is the Galaxy Ace, my primary phone is the N82, with Nokia SU-8W BT kbd.
I had repeat problems like that with the Nokia 5230, it’s not just Android, Symbian locks up just as bad. So does BBOS. Windows Phone doesn’t. Nobody has an anecdote about their WP crashing or freezing, only some bugs in functionality that get quickly fixed. No way Symbian can beat a 2 day turnaround between announcing a fix and delivering it.
I have read some stories on how WP crash… If you ask me most system failures has more to do with bad/poor written apps… Of course Symbian has something more againts it, it had limited hardware compare to others and the current times, just the olds S60V5 hardware is merely to make it run, I always use Wellness Diary app, and that apps eat half of the total memory on system for apps… on the other side the lastes bach of symbian device (700, 701 and 603) with 512 Mb of ram runs smooth enough and reliables as hell (they can crash too, with that has happened to me in very specific cases)
One more point about Symbian I have notice that if your Operator Network is crappy (well really crappy), it will affect the device behaviour, Just try on a crappy spot on your carrier network, connect to the web, an after a I while (if you get connected) try to end the connection, the device will restart if it can finish the connection…
In an ideal world, a properly written OS should never crash due to some app running on it. Unfortunately, there is a hardware component to that story – the hardware doesn’t really let the OS to reserve a certain amount of resources that cannot be touched by applications even if axes are falling from the sky.
So, OS makers do various things to cope with it. Usually they require you to use APIs for managed memory access and so on, but each of those layers slows down the application speed and eats more unnecessary resources – at one point it’s declared enough of OS mingling with the actual app as a calculated risk of some things never occurring. But they do. And that’s when the feces hit the proverbial fan.
Some take even more radical approach – by completely virtualizing the application layer – that way the app has no direct access to the hardware whatsoever, and the OS can control every single aspect of it. In such environments (Android (if the app doesn’t utilize NDK!), WP) it’s inexcusable for the OS to crash due to bad app given that a huge chunk of resources and potential application performance is sacrificed for greater control and stability.
Having a program within WP crash is different from the whole OS going down.
That doesn’t mean that the OS itself doesn’t crash – it happens rarely (if it’s not a defective device where you can blame the hardware), but it does happen and there are reports on the internet – i.e. http://forums.wpcentral.com/lumia-900-ace/190239.htm
That being said, unlike my N900, my N9 never, since I had it, had crashed on me, and I only had one random freeze for about 10 seconds (wouldn’t register the touch at all), so at least with it I had no stability issues either. I might have not have those with the N900 either, but I modified that one so heavily that I can’t really blame the out-of-the-box OS for possible problems I might encounter. When I start with heavy modifications on my N9 I expect the level of instability to rise, so far it has been rock-stable.
I still maintain it’s possible to get WP crash. Usually, as the other poster noted, a badly written app is the case. Couple of times it was a web page that (for a reason I do not know) managed to “reboot” my device.
Then you explain Symbian’s 2.7% data usage share.
I agree, but unfortunately 95 % of the folks out there buying smartphones do not.
I would like to add one more point in here. Symbian has been developed considering telecom network standard and requirement. I am telecom engineer, I know how great is symbian compatibility with network. Nowadays, operators are giving blame to iOS,Android to make network congestion by useless signaling. I did some device testing with windows OS also. It’s just a rubbish from network point of view. As windows has small market share, operators don’t bother to mention it in same bracket. Nokia loose many things by abandon symbian/meego platform bcoz some largest operator (like china mobile, some indian operator and japanese operator) has full support to this path.
nokia’s and microsoft’s culture are totally different, which is why they lost a lot of key people in key positions. loss of meego & symbian wizards/ think tanks will hurt nokia in the long term. they may think that it’s less of an overhead, but to downsize massively, run in massive losses, change the entire culture of the company, loss of face and brand value thanks to a crazy despotic ceo – all are going to affect nokia employee morale drastically. wp7 fans say better that nokia survives than limp along slowly. we’ll know by the end of the year whether nokia will survive or be a takeover target. this quarter is crucial for them to see how many lumia 900 sell. if they sell something 8-10 million lumia 9/8/7/600 series – then nokia-wp7 partnership is going solid.
anything less – we’ll have fitches/ moodys and other vultures circling for a kill. behind those vultures i would probably see a certain ballmer too, waiting to make a kill, and elop would then be seen as running with hares and hunting with hounds
if, microsoft EVER buys nokia, elop should be tried for grand treason, then and there by the Finnish people.
I give you, sir, 1.1+ Million Lumias!
Nokia, as far as I know, really liked the idea of open source software. They wanted to give Maemo/MeeGo to the Linux Foundation for further development, where they will be a contributor. Its pretty much the opposite of what Microsoft are about. The whole “DNA” of the company needs to drastically change.. their principals as a company are gone out the windows. No more open computing approach. A lot of people out there respected Nokia for that.. i don’ think they realize that.
Also, there is no way this isn’t morally affecting the people that have worked there for years
“The whole “DNA” of the company needs to drastically change.. their principals as a company are gone out the windows. No more open computing approach. A lot of people out there respected Nokia for that.. i don’ think they realize that.”
+1000000000000
MS is one of the biggest contributors to Linux. Seriously MS works with a ton of companies that use Linux as their main source of profits. Clearly MS depends heavily on private code for major projects, but they also put time and money towards open source projects.
No they are not. If Microsoft could somehow kill (F)OSS, they’d give all their money towards that goal. Microsoft is not even close to being the biggest Linux contributor – they got to that list because of their contributions for the Hyper-V virtualization drivers in the 3.xx kernels which is, for the most part, one-time deal, and of course has a sound reason – Linux reigns supreme in the server world and Microsoft cannot push their enterprise solutions to more than 60% servers out there. So, what to do? Why, yes, contribute to virtualization environments so your (closed, non-standard, proprietary) solutions can be side-loaded on those servers. Don’t kid yourself they did it for the love of Linux.
And Linux kernel is at best 10% of what the Linux world revolves around – the GNU and similar standard stacks that go on top of it are the actual things that make Linux so versatile and proliferated. If you take at contributors list to the whole GNU/Linux ecosystem, Microsoft wouldn’t appear in the first 1000. Nokia would not be close to the top either, to be clear…
Sadly, it’s a misconception that Nokia adores open source software. No they don’t, not even remotely (just read @ TMO how forthcoming are they to give us the sources for what they’ve abandoned long ago, and what we need to fix at least some of the Maemo 5 blunders). The only software/solutions company from the big ones that actually ‘loves’ (F)OSS is – IBM. Others are there for various reasons…
Nokia didn’t want to give Maemo/MeeGo to the LF out of the good of their hearts. They did it because after the Symbian nobody in this world would accept Maemo/MeeGo as a system where Nokia pulls all the strings.
Granted, Nokia was far, far more friendly to the (F)OSS community than many others, and by that they were on the opposite side of the pole than Microsoft, but don’t think for a second they did it out of the good of their hearts. Same goes for Novell, Oracle, Google… The only honest-by-heart FOSS contributors are either those who’s business revolve around Linux (Red Hat, IBM) and hardware producers as it’s more flexible for them to develop and test their hardware under Linux (Intel, TI, Atheros, AMD, Broadcom…)
I don’t think that they need to sell that much, although it would of course be really nice. Around 4-5 million Lumias sold should be a decent enough figure. That should put Nokia at or around 30 million Lumias sold for the whole year if keeping a steady pace. And profitwise, one Lumia probably equals 2-3 Symbians, so the results would not be all that bad.
Nokia problem pre-Elop was too many device choices so as to differentiate between them they made idiotic compromises – you can have an E-series but without a great camera, you can have a multimedia device but without all the business features.
Nokia current WP strategy will be effected by the same problem when the likes of ZTE, Huawei, Samsung and LG start ramping up WP production.
So you will have the same problem – too many device choices. The only way Nokia can win in this environment is that they take an early lead and establish a sub brand like Samsung have done with their Galaxy range.
However I still maintain the next 1bn strategy is wrong and people like Harlow and Mcdowell should be shown the door.
So far WP has been more resistant to a glut of models than other platforms. We’ll see if that sticks with WP8. Nokia needs to up their camera game fast though, and that means getting PV to Lumia within a year.
Ollila is as delusional as Flop. Another Bagdad Bob trying to convince the world that there’s no problem and everything is under control.
that seriously sounds more like the old nokia than the new.
seriously.
Well, you are speaking about the man who laid the grounds for the Nokia that was at the height of its power in 2006… Y’know. Perhaps also the grounds for the fall, too.
When Ollila was shown the Apollo phones and the W8 tablets under development he concluded things will be better for Nokia at the of the year. I made the same conclusion but I only saw those devices in my imagination–I hope they are as good as I envision them!
We end up getting the same old Symbian vs. WP debate again. The board has spoken, they’ve chosen their man, and diehard Symbian fans are left out. Symbian is dead. Nokia themselves could not make it work, so just deal with it and move on.
And Symbian market share at 41.5%? Does anyone ever break this down into actual Symbian variants which are mostly incompatible with each other? Only the latest S^3 models are getting new apps, the older variants are pretty much out of contention already because developers don’t bother to target them and the latest Qt and QtQuick components can’t run on them.
How much market share does Symbian^3 actually have?
Symbian requires *flashing* to add new languages and input methods. Want Russian and Chinese together? Good luck finding a firmware that has this… or you could cobble one up. That may have worked in 2000 but now it’s 2012. iOS, WP7 and Android all support on-the-fly system language changes and installable languages, but iOS still does it best.
Singling out Symbian^3 from Symbian is not the point. Note that Stephen Elop mention the Symbian collective in his “burning platform” memo.
“At the midrange, we have Symbian. It has proven to be non-competitive in leading markets like North America. Additionally, Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements, leading to slowness in product development and also creating a disadvantage when we seek to take advantage of new hardware platforms. As a result, if we continue like before, we will get further and further behind, while our competitors advance further and further ahead.” – Stephen Elop
Taken from http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/02/09/full-text-nokia-ceo-stephen-elops-burning-platform-memo/?mod=rss_WSJBlog
“Like the N8, the N7 (sic) runs the Symbian 3 operating system. In a Nov. 8 statement expressing Nokia’s support for the less-than-popular OS, Jo Harlow, Nokia’s senior vice president of smartphones, said the expected shipping date for the N7 (sic) was “before the end of 2010.” (She also added that Nokia expects to sell more than 50 million Symbian 3-based devices.)” – Jo Harlow
Taken from http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Nokia-E7-Smartphone-with-Symbian-3-Delayed-Until-Early-2011-368056/
And now it seems that there is no “burning platform” anymore.
“That (burning platform state) was the position more than one year ago and a lot has changed since then,” – Stephen Elop*
Taken from http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=164732
So as you can see, your point is moot. Elop decided to kill (“burning platform memo”) the goose (The Collective Nokia Symbian) that laid the golden eggs (market share and profit), no matter in which size (S40, S60, ^3, Anna, Belle), shape or form (Touch and Type, Smartphone, Businessphone, Feature phone, etc.,) they came.
*p.s., and oh yes some things did change. Some, if not most, Nokia Symbian users are now boycotting Nokia as a whole because of Stephen Elop’s “burning platform” memo.
Series 40 is not Symbian.
True. Thanks for the correction. Yet its sales also was affected due to the association of Nokia and Symbian with it.
Series 40 does run on Symbian OS.
Wrong, you fail at the internet forever.
No, it’s Nokia OS, just like S30.
“Singling out Symbian^3 from Symbian is not the point. Note that Stephen Elop mention the Symbian collective in his “burning platform” memo.”
Well, it’s not like there would have been any new S^1-devices coming either way, so I don’t see much harm in “singling out” S^3 in this particular matter.
You do need to single out S^3 because those are the models actively being developed for. Qt libraries are only actively being updated on 4.7.4 and above which runs only on S^3 devices. S60v5 runs 4.7.3, S60v3 runs 4.6.3, and they’re missing lots of the bugfixes, new QML and Qt Mobility features. Nokia themselves don’t support older Qt versions on the Nokia Store.
The people who buy S60v3 or S60v5 handsets use them more as feature phones and they don’t have much app support.
For Android, if I use common APIs and a basic interface, I can target anything from 1.6 to 4.0. I assume the same works with iOS unless I want to do something fancy with sensors, camera or whatever.
For Symbian, I would have to use different UIs and possibly different APIs depending on the Qt version available.
S^3: Qt 4.7.4/4.8, Qt Quick 1.1, latest QML elements for UI for Belle look
S60v5: Qt 4.7.3, Qt Quick 1.0
S60v3: Qt 4.6.3
The latest QML elements only works on S^3. To get an app working on all three Symbian versions, I could use Qt widgets instead but it would look out of place on S^3 and would need to target the oldest Qt version. I could use Avkon but Nokia themselves are moving away from that and again, it looks out of place in S^3.
It’s a right old mess.
Where is the source link?
Since we have so many in Finnish in other articles we might as well have some in Swedish.
http://hbl.fi/nyheter/2012-04-25/ollila-till-mtv3-nokia-vander-i-ar
Do we know what Nokia (CEO, BoD) will constitute as success?
Did they release any target numbers for i.e. Q4/12 or Q1/13? Profit, Revenue, RONA, Share Price, Market Share, # devices sold,.. ?
I guess they do have a transition plan, they don’t tell the public and their shareholders how they’re executing against the plan.
I just would like to understand what the current leadership thinks a successful Nokia looks like end of this year, beginning next year. Is a market share of 5% good or bad? Are sales of 10 Mio smartphones per quarter good or bad? Is making $100 Mio per quarter profit good or bad?
I don’t think that there are any statements regarding this, but I’d say that nobody will be disappointed if they manage to post a positive financial statement for the year 2012.
As for market share, I’d say that 5 % is the number to reach to begin with, judging by how iOS and Android carved out their success. Both were doing “so-so” up to about that point, and then they started to reach proper mainstream popularity.
But these are just my thoughts, I certainly can’t speak on behalf of the Nokia leadership team.
Sigh.
Thanks for disclosing your thoughts. Even if you are not – as you say – speaking for Nokia leadership, it shows me how low the expectations for Nokia already are. While I think showing operational profitability for 2012 would be really a good result, a market share of around 5% in Smartphones is even lower than the 7% Nokia achieved in Q1/12.
I begin to understand why Elop thinks he is on the right track when 5% is deemed a success.
Regardless, thanks for your thoughts.
Obviously I meant 5 % for Windows Phone alone, every Symbian sold at this point seems to be just icing on the cake.
This is what I’m talking about:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ae/World-Wide-Smartphone-Market-Share.png/500px-World-Wide-Smartphone-Market-Share.png
There seems to be a point somewhere around that 5 % mark after which an OS gains “mainstream acceptance” and has enough mindshare to start becoming truly popular. That is what Nokia should be aiming at in the first phase with the Lumia line-up.
Jorma Ollila already destroyed Nokia back in 2005.
Hasn’t every year for the last three or four, been a ‘transition year’ at Nokia?
At long last, most investors in the company have said, ‘No mas’.
Yes they have. Nokia has been transitioning since 2008, first to S60v5, then Symbian^3, then Maemo, then MeeGo, then WP, various management and org changes throughout the years… Transitions need to finish, Nokia needs to stick to a plan and transition to it in my opinion. Now the plan is Lumia. Keep it up, make it happen (unless internal projections show there is no hope in it).
No more delays, no more U turns, steady progress instead please.
Quite true it’s been never ending and despite his getting a beating on Nokia fan pages Eldar’s leaks of (never ending) internal reorganisations turned out to absolutely true as smartphone development was shunted around sliced diced and had various members of the BOD trying to make it part of their fiefdom (of course poor old Maemo got completely sidelined in this). Look at Anssi Vanjoki’s various roles in the period.
In the midst of this let’s also not forget the master stroke of the Symbian Foudation. Forget Open Source Nokia thought they were going to be able to fend off Apple and get one over on their rivals by getting them to help developing it’s platform, squash all rival variants and carry on taking the loin’s share., Except they got played for fools by Samsung (who out manoeuvred Nokia so completely that all in power at Nokia at the time have this as a millstone on their record) and completely blindsided by Android.
Don’t forget as these new OS’s were gaining ascendency there were never ending briefings (including Anssi and OPK) from senior Nokians about how qwerty was their big new form factor and how locations services and mapping were where the entire mobile ecosystem was going to revolve around – driven one would suspect by their forthcoming N97 and desire to ape RIM and their recent (overspent) acquisition of Navteq – except their strategic call was almost entirely wrong. Hence the lack of productive direction.
“No more delays, no more U turns, steady progress instead please.” – Janne
Yes. Release the Nokia 808, N9 and the Nokia N950 to the mainstream market now, please.
Don’t care what they do with the Lumias/WP, release, keep or promote, doesn’t matter to some of us.
Just release the other models to the mainstream market.
No, not the N950. It was rejected by carriers. Would make sense to keep making the N9 for people who want to buy it. 808 is still being worked on. Couldn’t be released yet.
And yet it’s been proven countless times by N950 owners since, that the reason it was rejected (faulty hinge) is bogus.*
But you can continue to twist facts the way they suit you if you want, nothing will stop you anyway.
*and yes that was the primary reason coming out of Nokia at the time.
So don’t try to twist it into something else.
Other issues present in the device now, are merely a result of it never being finished.
Yep, incapable of actually getting there. One plan initiative after another
Some species shed their skin at regular intervals to grow larger. Nokia seems to do the reverse – it keeps shedding its skin and shrinks and shrinks!
Transition strategies are no good when they end in another transition.
Agreed.
Only if Nokia WP would be something like Nokia Symbian (the better part of it, like I/O, more open platform, efficient, etc.,) then I would have no objections to it.
Then again, Nokia WP in its present iteration, it fails to capture the hearts and minds of Symbian users like us.
A testament to this when I (regrettably) bought my middling Android device (got screwed with the updates, too, PROBABLY just like *cough* the present state of WP7.x to WP8.x).
So definitely I have been that road before, knows the consequences, and would totally make no sense at all to make the same decisions, same mistake.
If only there’d be some voodoo magic to perhaps meld Symbian with WP and vice versa SOON (Q3 2012), without the worse bugs, then I’m all for it. Unfortunately, Nokia doesn’t even have control on the GUI/UI/UX of Nokia WP.
And… Samsung, ZTE and Huawei are hot on the trail with WP also.
Nokia, quo vadis?
WP, its current iteration, does nothing for me. I don’t bother with Facebook or Twitter and my Symbian phone handles email just fine. I use mine more like a pocket computer rather than an Internet terminal.
But I realize I’m in a tiny minority and the majority of users in the developed world *do* want cloud access and social media sync. Nokia are too big to cater just to niches so they have to cater to what most users want… us Symbian fans are most definitely a niche now.
The best way forward for me would be to have an open source OS under an overseeing organization, a bit like Symbian Foundation but without the crazy politics. Open source and free (as in libre) software running on open source hardware for mobile computers… that’s the future, not walled gardens which end up trapping people.
BOYCOTT FOR NOKIA there are millions more symbian users that WP7 we all get Symbian devices and screw WP7 and nokia will be officially fucked USA can’t save them,…..to make it worse why would you depend on the US if they can’t even save themselves >.> doesn’t make sense at all
It’d be nice to read your opinions if you didn’t feel and sound so much of a broken record, y’know…
Go ahead. All of you who actually like Symbian can boycott WP all you want, it won’t make a dent.
Oh, yes it will. It would probably affect the sale of 100 devices
C’mon guys, Elop is an all powerful wizard. Who cares about profit and global market share when Nokia *might* achieve a high single digit share in the US. That’s infinitely better than the past few years! Elop is the man! After all, the good old USA is all that matters.
There’s a Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner moral somewhere in that comment!:D
I tipped this article:
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/nokias-windows-phone-bear-hug-is-choking-the-mighty-finn-50007750/
I don’t know if there is much to discuss here, but the article is a good summary in my opinion. I think most of us can get behind much of what is written. I agree with this article 99%, hence I tipped it.
Although I am not exactly sure this quote is very flattering of Symbian: “When I was at Nokia and we shipped a Symbian product and it was bad, in its worst incarnation we knew that if we just flipped the switch, we could move 2.5 to three million units — overnight, no matter how bad the product,” he tells me. “That was Nokia. That was Nokia’s brand, we knew we could count on that.”
Unfortunately the risks Elop took with the transition have been realized. He changed too much, too fast. Damage is done, milk is spilled. Had it worked, maybe it would have been bold brilliance, but in reality it turned out to be far more bad than good (e.g. more losses than savings). So, what next? Execute like hell on Lumia – or change course/CEO if it is failing – and fix the Next Billion.
No use crying over it, but a good summary nonetheless. Thanks CNET for the good read.
Has it struck anyone else that Ollila displays classic control freak and reckless symptoms and is incapable of hiring a decent new CEO (OPK, Elop) because he doesn’t want to let go of his baby and hence all the stupidly set up internal politics too.
I upgraded from a C7 to Lumia 800, and I must say that Windows Phone is way better OS than Symbian. Also Nokia have done a great job with the hardware, Lumia 800 is arguably their best designed phone ever. The Lumia phones have received great reviews, both from the pros and the buyers, check the rating on Lumia 900 on Amazon.com for example. It also seems like Lumia 900 is bout to become Nokias biggest sucess in the US for years. So, Q1 was poor, Q2 also, but in Q3 we should see signs of improvements in Nokias financials. And hopefully before X-mas- sales they will launch something spectacular, they need to create more buzz.
Lumia 900 is a Q2 device, so Q2 will look a lot better.
Time will tell.