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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.
Not to defend the decision, but Elop is from the Office division, so you can hardly blame him for Microsoft's failure in the mobile market.
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.
I bought a e52 because it had a bunch of things that I wanted and hey, symbian is open source now too, right?
Well, in a word, disappointment. Serial disappointment. It's not the surface of the interface, it's not qt or lack thereof, it's complete cluelessness in functionality. Every single feature disappoints in some way, down to the calendar and the timer -- both of which are far inferior to the very same thing in my 2001 vintage 6310. The only thing you might run the "open sourced" symbian on within the foreseeable future is beagle boards. Nothing wrong with beagle boards, but I wouldn't run symbian on them. I want to fix my damned phone, but that part isn't open.
It really is impressive just how much nokia failed to "get". It's like they're dead set on finding irrelevance from within heaps and heaps of potential.
Not really. This guy is taking the role of CEO, not chief engineer. Elop probably has a proven track record in managing Microsoft's business-software division (which does better than most divisions at MS) so they want him to deliver the same success to Nokia.
Also, it's worth noting that Nokia's financial success is not dependent on competing with Apple in the smartphone market. They could simply continue making featurephones and dominate that segment, and make tons of money doing so.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
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.
Because you're experienced in hiring executives and know that executive != company. Which google exec would you go for? How many executives at a company primarily focused on advertising would really be appropriate to run one of the largest manufacturing companies in the world? I have no idea. Are you just more willing to share your opinion on matters you don't have in depth knowledge of, or is hiring execs your day job?
Maybe Nokia's hoping to move in more of a business direction and eat up Blackberry's market?
Elop comes from Office, which is about as close to a license to print money as you can get in the Office world. Clearly he knows something about managing a product that the business world will want. Cue a handful of people who are convinced that any day now Google Docs or OO will finally make real headway against Office in much the same way that Cubs fans are convinced that this will be their year in the World Series, but seriously -- even if Office somehow went down in flames today, it's still enjoyed utter dominance of its market for, what, 15 years? I'm sure if Nokia ended up with only that kind of dominance over business smartphones out of this move (and I don't think they will, but for the sake of argument... ) they'd be happy with it.
On the other hand MS Office as software is very bloated and inelegant.
On the other other hand, Office enjoys ridiculous market share and makes a staggering amount of money.
I wonder which of those things would be more important to a corporation.
Nokia phones now come in Home, small business, big business, magcorp, media and facebook editions.
A lot of people are asking why a guy from Microsoft?
Basically, Nokia didn't hire a "Microsoft exec", but Stephen Elop of lately Microsoft, but previously of Juniper Networks, Adobe and Macromedia, a software guy with a reputation of excellent communication skills. That might be a very good move, Nokia can make mobile hardware as well as anyone, it's their software and services that have been the problem and not just lately, but at least since 2000.
One of article gives a good overview.
http://www.itworld.com/business/120236/nokia-names-microsofts-elop-new-ceo
The Guardian has very nice article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/sep/10/nokia-stephen-elop-smartphone
Only thing I can think to add, that I read in Finnish media, was that Elop handled Microsoft's relations with Nokia and is relatively well known inside Nokia's boardroom already.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
In what Microsoft spokesmen called an "unfortunate accident" Elop got hit by a flying chair while trying to leave the Redmond campus.
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.
This guy isn't Mr Microsoft. He simply worked for them. Have some damn perspective.
True, but I'm not sure there is such a thing as a functional chief engineer in the consumer space. If they were designing aircraft, I can see the suits deferring to the engineers except for general requirements, budgets, and such. It'll probably be harder to convince any CEO that he doesn't understand cell phones enough to have an opinion...