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A Timely Revision of Elop's "Burning Platform" Memo
Nerval's Lobster writes "Microsoft's purchase of Finnish phone-maker Nokia will enrich the latter's CEO, Stephen Elop, to the tune of roughly $25.4 million. That's a generous number, considering Nokia's much-publicized travails over the past few years — generous enough, certainly, to prod angry reactions from the Finnish media. As Elop came aboard Nokia in 2011, he wrote the infamous 'burning platform' memo, in which he suggested that radical moves would be necessary to halt the company's market-share declines. In light of these latest revelations, however, I offer an updated version of Elop's memo: ''
On a related note there is a rumour that Nokia were about to switch to Android just before the buyout.
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/nokia-reportedly-considered-switching-to-android-before-microsoft-deal/421972-11.html
This leads some analysts to speculate that Microsoft bought Nokia to save Windows phone:
http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/09/microsoft-bought-nokia-to-save-windows-phone/
There's more to be sour about than bad investments in this case. The whole nokia board and elop included should be dragged out into the street and shot for their extreme mismanagement of the company.
Huh? The problem is, he killed Symbian at a time when is was still highly profitable and had increasing sales (but not market share). Don't spread the myth that Nokia was already failing when he took over. This is not true and the numbers speak a clear language. And yes, the had a replacement for Symbian already working: Meego. Switching to windows phone - a system already failing on the market - was the least sensible thing to do. And guys, please don't rate things insightful just because it sounds sensible. Actual numbers cleary disagree. Nokia smartohone sales:
http://www.asymco.com/2013/04/18/lumia-is-the-light-visible/
Quartely earnings reports:
http://www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/investors/financials/reports/results---reports/
You missed a key fact: Elop took a good brand that now had only unwanted, aging products that could no longer compete, executed the most expensive failures, and sold the rest before the marketplace killed them completely.
Funny how they were still selling quite a lot of them until Elop came around.
Had he pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Symbian, and tried to make a go of it based on an existing loyal fan base and lots of marketing, he would have ended up EXACTLY like Blackberry -- warehouses filled with unsold phones, flat broke, and completely irrelevant in the marketplace.
FYI - All those Symbian devs and their Symbian apps had a migration path from Symbian to Maemo/MeeGo.
Also Nokia didn't have the same issue BB had in having a central network that was essential to the platform and have a major crash that took weeks to fix and caused headaches for their customers. That is really why BB fell in market share - everyone was looking for something more reliable. BB10 is a great little platform, but they have a reputation they have to fix - something that takes a long time to do and they may not be able to recover from.
At least with Microsoft owning them, they're not broke. I don't know why everyone on slashdot has remained so deluded about Nokia's potential future had Elop not taken those actions. They were not competitive, and their prospects were poor. If Symbian and Meego were as great as everyone here imagines, why weren't they crushing iPhones back in 2010?
In 2010 MeeGo wasn't out. It was just about to be released when Elop wrote the "burning platform" memo; and during the presentation to the press he stood up on stage and said "We're not doing this; look I have another one running Windows Phone and that is our future" - intentially sabotaging it before it even hit market. Yet, as others have pointed out, with no marketing the MeeGo Phone outsold the Lumias wherever they were both sold in the same markets - and not by small margins - by 3:1 ratios. Every review of the MeeGo phones compared it to the iPhone; it would have been a killer - and at the very least a very strong third, leaving everyone else to fight for fourth - had it not been for Elop.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Just before the first Meego phone (N900) launched, Elop took over. It was killed without even given a chance. To answer your question, that is why Meego never competed with Android and the iOS.
Huh? The N900 was released in 2009. The N9 program was launched some time before that, and the device was released, after all, in late 2011.
Right as Elop took over, Nokia took a 180 turn away from Meego. They spent 3, 4 years completely redeveloping their processes, completely revamping their developers, wasting countless resources that were Meego-based, just so they could put Windows Phone on their hardware.
What alternative timeline you live in? The turn was announced on February 2011. The first Lumia was released in November the same year.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Just before the first Meego phone (N900) launched, Elop took over. It was killed without even given a chance. To answer your question, that is why Meego never competed with Android and the iOS.
Huh? The N900 was released in 2009. The N9 program was launched some time before that, and the device was released, after all, in late 2011.
Also, the N900 runs Maemo which has nothing to do with Intel. Nokia had a line of Maemo tablets since 2005, and N900 was the last of these, finally allowed to include full phone capabilities.
Meego was intended as a merger of Maemo and Intel's Moblin, but it never really appeared anywhere (N9 is pretty much Maemo), and I'm not sure how exactly it was supposed to improve on Maemo. The name is not important, though, it's the idea of a regular GNU/Linux distro running on your phone. Which is why you can pry my N900 from my cold, dead hands, as long as you avoid stepping on my lawn.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.