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Nokia Names Microsoft's Elop As New CEO
itwbennett writes "Nokia has tapped Stephen Elop, former president of Microsoft's business software group, to become its new CEO effective Sept. 21. Elop will replace Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, who loses his board seat immediately and will step down from the CEO position on Sept. 20. Microsoft said Elop will leave immediately, but the company doesn't seem to be rushing to fill the vacancy at the top of one of its largest divisions. 'I am writing to let you know that Stephen Elop has been offered and has accepted the job as CEO of Nokia and will be leaving Microsoft, effective immediately,' Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrote in a letter to employees late Thursday."
One of the key components of Nokia's current attempt to regain relevance is the (open source) Qt toolkit, powering KDE on Linux. It will be very interesting to see how Nokia under Elop will manage that asset and how Nokia's relation to the Open Source community will evolve.
I for one wish him, Nokia and all ex-Trolls well.
The only reason I just bought an Android phone instead of an N900
NITDroid(Android 2.2) runs on N900 just fine, if you don't like the Nokia software, switch.
Thats why N900 is superior platform, it gives YOU the ability to choose the OS yourself instead telling what you can and can't do with the hardware.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
That was my first thought, but to be fair this guy is coming from one of Microsoft's most succesful divisons- the one that brings in one of the largest shares of Microsoft's profits, whilst Microsoft's attempts at entering the mobile market have not come from this division.
It's unlikely this fellow had much real involvement in Windows Mobile, but does have experience of running one of the most succesful divisions of the largest tech company in the world.
My biggest concern if anything would be that perhaps this background may leave him too business focussed, and with the current battle for mobile phones being more centred around fun and personal use he may end up just pushing dull handsets that only compete with the likes of the Blackberry and aren't interesting enough to challenge Android and iPhones in the hearts of consumers. Potentially though his skills are transferrable and working in a business focussed division doesn't mean he can't use his management skills on non-business focussed stuff too.
And I wonder what impact he made on that? Office is as close to a rent as one could dream of.
What I wonder also is what kind of guy Elop is. If you look at his LinkedIn profile, he stayed sufficient time at his first two companies (Boston Chicken, CIO, and Macromedia). Then it's job hoping: just over 1 year at Adobe, same for the stint at Juniper, and now 2.5 years at Microsoft. That doesn't mean the guy is bad, but for the Adobe and Juniper part he left before the consequence of his decisions could be really felt.
In other words, the guy raised fast, and moved too fast recently to see clearly his impact. I'm sure he has qualities to raise like this, but I saw some of those hoppers: very good at selling themselves and seducing, sometimes less at delivering.
But now, where he landed, it's certainly time to deliver. So we'll see what the guy is really worth in a few years now. Good luck to him.