TheRegister says Nokia’s demise wasn’t Elop’s Fault, TheVerge asks what will Elop Steal Next?

An Editorial from TheRegister actually has Stephen Elop’s back. I think it’s interesting to mention this perspective given that Elop is synonymous amongst many Nokia fans and Finns as the “Trojan Horse” sent from Microsoft.

Andrew Orlowski feels that blaming Elop is,

“chauvinistic nonsense, which seeks to transfer blame away from years of complacency and mismanagement at Nokia”.

He recognises that Nokia knew about future and platforms would shift to where iPhone has shaken things up with touch and easier to use interfaces. Nokia was an innovator, it had the ideas and know how to keep setting paces. But it just poorly executed these brilliant plans.

Orlowski says no one was willing to license MeeGo. The only choice was Android or WindowsPhone. Long story short, Android didn’t give Nokia the independence it wanted. Android OEMs weren’t doing brilliantly on Android, many still aren’t. Nokia also saw the importance of Location and going Android at the time meant having to use Google’s services, Google Maps and not Nokia’s Maps (HERE). Perhaps with the power of hindsight, it’s easy to say they could have gone the Amazon route and continued to push their own services. Elop had more confidence in what he was already aware of and so there was WindowsPhone Nokias. WindowsPhone was a big risk but offered big gains. Nokia as the top player in WindowsPhone (which it easily and quickly did) would have been even better if WindowsPhone actually registered on the radar.

Steve Litchfield agrees with Orlowski’s article, saying,

“This is a pretty objective account and I’d largely go along with it. Clearly Symbian had been plagued for its entire history with Nokia’s ‘Corporate bureaucracy and infighting’, as Andrew puts it.”

Whilst Steve is very understanding of why the choice of WP was made, it’s still difficult to accept how and why Elop published the whole Burning Platform memo.

“My (personal) biggest beef with the whole saga was the way Elop slammed Symbian quite so publically(sic) long before Windows Phone was ready for the big time – a more subtle transition period would have saved Nokia 100 million lost device sales by my estimation.”

In contrast to the whole thing, TheVerge asks What Will Elop Steal Next, referring to his character of seemingly heading a company which then gets sold/merged. Nokia was no different. Nokia as D&S inside MS itself even got folded into a single unit under Myerson. We likened Elop to be a merge catalyst. Once there, a merge/take over takes place, and then he’s free to be used again to catalyse another ‘reaction’.

11 Companies Elop might go for, according to Nilay:

1. HTC
2. Twitter
3. LG
4. Motorola
5. Apple
6. Meizu
7. Spotify
8. Fiat Chrysler
9. BlackBerry
10. TheVerge
11. Nokia (Hearing or rumours and now supposed confirmation of a Nokia return, he might come back to Finnish (ok ok) the job)

Category: Nokia