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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.'"
"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
Paid by Microsoft to take a dive, and open a "Microsoft-sized hole" in the market.
But that's not working put as planned, either...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
No sir, we are really sorry for Nokia.
If any hate is spewing, is targeted against the ex M$ bigwig Elop which brew this destructive strategy.
Far-well Nokia, once pride of Finland.
You are dead and we are really sorry.
Windows Phone 7 is dead. Microsoft declared it dead the exact moment Nokia needed it the most, but nevermind. Nobody in his right mind would buy one right now, even if they liked the platform, with Windows Phone 8 on the horizon. If 8 takes off, *and* Nokia can survive until 8 takes off, they could do fine, albeit as a somewhat smaller company. But when you read TFA, and look at the graphs, and look at the general user community reaction to 8 in general, neither of these things (8 takes off, and Nokia can survive until Windows 8 phones become profitable) seem particularly likely.
Why (from TFA) haven't the board fired Elop? Corruption, perhaps? Payoffs?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Apple sold 5 million iPhone 5s on opening weekend. As of 1 month ago, Nokia has sold 7 million Lumias. Total.
The Lumia was introduced in November 2011, so that's 10 months of sales. Apple sold over 100 million iPhones last year.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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
What phones aren't made in China?
Ironically Nokias before Elop sacked Nokias workforce
For that to be true MSFT would have had to plan that 1.- Nobody would buy WinPhone...okay I see that one, 2.- Nokia would leave them with a product to sell in that gap...which if they wouldn't buy WinPhone on Nokia a change of brand name sure as hell isn't gonna help move units, and 3.- The gap wouldn't just be absorbed by Google, with the CCC Android 2.x phones taking the low end while the more expensive Android and Apple units take the high.
So you see this is the problem I have when people describe Bill Gates kind of evil moves at MSFT....Ballmer just ain't that smart. I mean who was on stage bragging about his squirting Zune and not getting why he was being laughed at? Who spent a fuckton of money on products like Zune, Kin, Sidekick, etc, with no real plan on how to monetize the purchases? Who fucked over what few loyal WinPhone customers they had by not giving them Win 8 on their Win 7 phones and thus burnt the brand with many a customer? Who was fucking retarded enough to let IE get horribly fragmented in the vain hope that they could pretend its 2003 and they can actually get people to upgrade the OS just for a new version of IE?
Hell I could write a post the length of a Harry Potter book just pointing out the fucking DUMB moves that has gone on under Ballmer, his mobile "strategy" is a trainwreck, he is taking a shit on one of the few remaining cash cows MSFT has in order to push Windows onto...ARM? WTF? Are you shitting me? WTH would ANYBODY want Windows on a chip that...won't actually run Windows programs? Why, because they think the Win 3.x color scheme of Metro is just too damned sexy?
Actually I think one could argue that Nokia and MSFT are the same company, its just that MSFT has...for the moment at least..a couple of cash cows to keep its head above the water ATM but the simple fact is both companies seem directionless, completely devoid of any real innovation inside, waited until the market was already in the middle of a huge shift before simply reacting with half assed products, and both are acting like they have no real competition when in reality they have to bring their AAA game or get curbstomped which even Ray Charles could see the latter is exactly what is happening.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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
I think it's clear now that Microsoft, as always, used a stopgap solution to make their followup successful. Winphone 7 was never going anywhere and the plan was always for Win8. Nokia fell into the EEE trap and was used to crack into the market to pave the way for Win8. Their carcass may still prove useful to MS down the road with their patents and such and also as an inroad to European and other world markets. This is yet another brilliant move by MS. I still find it hard to believe that companies partner with them knowing how it usually turns out. I guess the short term benefits are just too tempting. I expect to see Win8 phones from Microsoft. Wonder how that will play with Nokia? I'd say they are helpless.
Because Elop did what was best for Microsoft, not Nokia and wilfully sacrificed all the assets of his own company to benefit his previous one. Why he is not being investigated for breach of fiduciary duty is beyond me.
I don't buy this argument, because I don't think Elop was a Microsoft mole. I think he is a Windows True Believer.
People talk about Steve Jobs and his Reality Distortion Field; but I've known Microsofties that believe just as strongly in All Things Windows. They truly believe Windows is the solution to everything, and everything else is an also-ran. They truly think that the world is just waiting for a Microsoft solution to any problem, and as soon as it's released by golly the world is going to flock to it in droves.
I remember sitting through a talk just before Internet Explorer 7 was released. This was at the point (pre-Chrome even, IIRC) where Firefox was starting to seriously eat into IE's market share. The speaker waxed eloquently on just how great Internet Explorer 7 was going to be, and how Mozilla should consider just folding up shop once the final version was released because no one was going to use Firefox after that point. It wasn't hyperbole - he really believe that.
#DeleteChrome
Woah, he predicted Windows Phone would not succeed at the level of iPhone and Android? Better tell James Randi to hang it up, because we got a real god damned psychic right here!
Bra-vo, very sarcastic and blasé, but unfortunately it makes you look quite ignorant. Ahonen predicted this in February 2011 right after Elop's announcement. For example:
The optimism for Windows Phone in the press really does surprise me. Windows Phone 7 was really feature incomplete at launch but people made the excuse that it was their first Version. Ahhh No it was not, Microsoft had been making mobile OSs for a long time and Windows Phone 7 was Major version 7 and used the same kernel as Windows Mobile.
Microsoft has chopped Nokia off at the knees when it announced Windows Phone 8. Not only will it not run on the Nokia Lumia 900 it would not run on any existing Windows Mobile device. At that moment Microsoft was telling everyone to not buy a Windows Phone but wait for the next version and new hardware. Sales probably dropped to as close to zero.
Microsoft and Nokia need to understand that Windows Phone can not be almost as good as IOS and Android, it can not be as good as IOS and Android, it can be a little better than IOS and Android. It has to be much better than IOS and Android. Any new mobile OS that launches will have few apps than IOS and Android so you must be a much better platform than IOS and Android. RIM might get by with good enough because they have a large customer base that trusts them. Microsoft could have gotten by four years ago with Windows Phone 7 when IOS was limited to a few carriers and Android was just getting going. MeeGo could have leveraged the Nokia user base. Palm could have made it because it was at the right place and the right time but had a crippled SDK and not great hardware.
Also Nokia gave up the potential profit center of running the app store and selling media to the devices.
Nokia smelled smoke and jump off the platform and into a cold heartless sea and had to hope for Microsoft to save them. They should have put out the fire.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
> Apple gets flack for changing a CONNECTOR after NINE years...
By some, I guess. By many (including me) it gets flack for changing the connector to yet another proprietary connector, when the rest of the world has standardized on micro-USB.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Who modded this garbage "Interesting"?
[citation needed]
[citation needed] - (see: Samsung's recent profit reports)
[citation needed] See the ratio to which the N9 completely outsold the Lose-mobiles. Without marketing, and being excluded from the major markets by Nokia.