Slashdot Mirror
The Three Pillars of Nokia Strategy Have All Failed
An anonymous reader writes "'When all 3 legs of your 3-legged strategy fail, what do you do? You rush — run run run — to change your total strategy. But what would a madman do?' Ex-Nokia exec Tommi Ahonen's new article has a few suggestions. Is the Nokia board either asleep at the wheel, or incompetent, or in collusion with the incompetent CEO? Ahonen provides an insider's view not just of how Nokia's Windows phone strategy has failed, but how this has spread to other parts of the company's technology. He says the 'Elop Effect' has 'single-handedly destroyed [...] Europe's biggest tech giant.' He raises the question: Why is Nokia's board failing to act? We've discussed Tommi's articles before, where he was correctly predicting Windows Phone's market failure at a point where others were claiming that 'the Lumia line is, in fact, selling quite nicely.'"
Hatred towards Nokia on Slashdot... Why not failing HTC, patent troll Motorola Mobility (nobody in Europe buys that Chinese crap btw)...
"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity." It's the Occam's Razor of the corporate world. Yes, people get greedy or manipulative, it's true... but that's the exception, not the rule. For the most part, people are just really, really, fucking stupid. Senior management in particular tends to develop problems like target fixation, confirmation bias, and even when everything is in the spiral of death and the alarms are going off, engines on fire, they somehow think they'll be able to pull out of the dive and fix the problem... right up until the part where they crater. They teach this in every management course studies... Have an exit strategy. Know what your breakpoints are and when to bail. And company after company, even big ones, really really big ones, still fail at this, not because of greed, but because of stupidity.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Oh, a link to blog post by Ahonen, with nothing really new.
I agree that execution by Elop has been sub-par. But calling that "SYMBIAN WAS WINNING" is even by wearing Symbian-goggles a very red-rosed opinion of what was going on. Nokia was in huge trouble, it's UI teams competing with each other and handset teams not building on the same platform as noted in in an article from yesterday. Symbian as it was was dead. Developers hated it, users disliked it compared to competition and why it did so good up until the end was good quality Nokia hardware.
Ahonen is right on some points, but he seems to totally disagree on that Nokia had to do something, by going on with Symbian without major rework was just not feasible, the whole MeeGo thing was really screwed up with competing package managers, UIs and teamwork with Intel so as a CEO what what would have he done - he doesn't tell. Maybe MeeGo strategy would have proved to be success.
I don't want to resort to ad-hominems but in case of Ahonen I would take his comments with a grain of salt - he clearly has an axe to grind with Nokia and the postings he has made and appearances on interviews smell like bitterness. And they always boil to one point: Profits before elop and profits after Elop.
Neither Windows phone 8 or the Lumina 920 have been released and we have people already yelling "rrruuunnn!!!"
There is a fine line between working vigorously to save a sinking ship and trying to work the pumps and hand bailer after it is too late. You need equal quantities of balls and intelligence to make the correct decision.
What TFA is doing is seeing a puddle on the floor and immediately sounding abandon ship and running for the life boats.
There is no low hanging fruit left in business. Sometimes you need to slug it out and take risks because changing strategies every two seconds is not a winning proposition either.
I'm not saying they won't fail or that windows phone is good or bad. I'm only asserting it is too early.
Nokia had an alternative, MeeGo. The trouble was at the time it was already outpaced by iOS and Android, so Nokia thought they probably could not catch up without a lot of rework.
And that's why they chose Windows Phone 7. But, as one of the comments in the article notes, the real problem is that Windows Phone 7 was not really a way to catch up either. It was a temporary solution, to be abandoned by Microsoft to the degree that even fairly powerful Nokia phones running Windows Phone 7 could not be upgraded to WP8.
If that were known (as the comment alleges) then Nokia probably would have been better off putting in an All-Hands effort to make MeeGo compete with other modern smartphone OS's. I'm not sure they would have been in a worse place than where they are now, and then they would be in full control of their own destiny.
But as things stand the fate of Nokia and Microsoft are intertwined (with more risk to Nokia than Microsoft).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You call Apple, and say "Hey, I hear you have a maps problem. Guess what? We have lots of map data and experience."
Response from Apple: "Sounds good, but we'll rather wait until you're bankrupt and pick up the patents and your map data for cheap."
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Android is generic, so they have no edge over Chinese manufacturers.
Nokia makes excellent hardware at a good price. Their gear tends to be much more rugged than Apple's fragile mobile devices.
Your second quote puts paid to your first. Nokia was a hardware company. They made good hardware. They should have jumped into Android with both feet. A proven, reliable, popular operating system, that lets vendors customize it, and would have let them concentrate on their strengths - hardware.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
the iphone stole 14% of mobile PROFITS a year after it was first released. and that was only 1 million units sold.
almost all of those cheapo phones sold around the world make no money. all the profits are made on a few devices.
apple is now at something like 60% of PROFITS of all cell phones sold around the world. Samsung is 30% or more. everyone else is fighting for scraps
iPhone never stole anything! Apple make massive mark-ups to their products and have people prepared to pay for it. Most people aren't which is why Androids market share is 4 times that of Apples...and Apples is dropping. Apple does well with early adopters, but now the market is maturing not so much!
"Ex-Nokia exec Tommi Ahonen's new article has a few suggestions. Is the Nokia board either asleep at the wheel, or incompetent, or in collusion with the incompetent CEO?"
..
No, they are just another in the long line of suicide-by-Microsoft victims
AccountKiller
Android is generic, so they have no edge over Chinese manufacturers.
I really don't get why this argument applies against Android but misteriously doesn't apply against Windows Phone. Hello, WP is also a generic, third-party licensed operating system, not a in-house solution. After all, HTC is a Chinese manufacturer and also uses Windows Phone...
Response from Apple to MSFT. Bring it on!
We are not talking about 1997 Apple here. This is 2012 Apple with more money than God. Well, than Microsoft at least.
Followed by Apple deftly driving the price up, and letting M$ pay through the nose for a soon to be obsolete database. If there is one thing that history has proved its that Balmer can't resist paying twice what something is worth. He believes his customers should pay more than the products are worth, and likes to lead by example.
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
If Microsoft wants it that bad, then Apple would be stupid not to bid the price up. They win if they win, and they win if they lose.
If any hate is spewing, is targeted against the ex M$ bigwig Elop which brew this destructive strategy.
As pointed out above, it was the board that was already decided at ditching the previous CEO and hiring Elop/MS instead.
Now, as Dilbert has pointed out, this was a strategic move of sheer genius, with which MS has realised three very strategic goals:
1. Windows phone introduced in the market,
2. Nokia, the biggest competitor for their own phone hardware sales ambitions has been crushed,
3. Linux as OS for the mobile phone has been disabled.
Luckily, there is still the Jolla (currently connection time out) initiative with Tizen.
The grand question: How did the Nokia board get played up so much by Microsoft?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Google is either lying when they 1.3 million phones are activated per day, or Android is such a piece of shit operating system that you have to activate it continuos over and over again to get it to work.
In 2011 there were a total of 491.4 million smart phones sold. 491.4/365 is ~1.3 million. As we all know not every one of those phones is an android phone.
Fun chart plotting Androids activation a day.
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-android-activations-per-day-2012-9