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: ''

Comments

It shoud have suprised no one

[geekoid]

everyone know this was his goal from the beginning. You don't become CEO, and make a statement like that without the intention of selling.

Re: It shoud have suprised no one

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like what microsoft did to a number of other companies in the 90s, like SGI for instance.

Cripple your competition to get a leg up.

Seriously how anyone would be stupid enough to hire a microsoft manager for ANY critical strategic position in their company after the past two decades of activities show that most companies aren't paying attention to history and thus dooming themselves to repeat it.

Re:It shoud have suprised no one

[roc97007]

everyone know this was his goal from the beginning. You don't become CEO, and make a statement like that without the intention of selling.

I would submit that it didn't surprise *anyone*. The people who insisted that this outcome was not planned from the start are the same people who benefit from the results. (In other words, they were lying. Everyone knows it, so they don't have to feign surprise.) The people who were hoping against hope that this was not the case, really had to know in their heart of hearts that this was the intended end game. And the rest of us could see this coming from 4100 miles away.

This should be yet another lesson to companies across the planet. Your CEO may not be working for you. If what any executive says doesn't make sense, INVESTIGATE. Don't just take their word for it. Their goals may be entirely different from the company's goals.

Re: It shoud have suprised no one

[Znork]

Maemo could easily have been adapted to run android apps as well and the capability was even commercially available before Elop took over. An android track at Nokia could have had a decent chance competing with Samsung. Having an OS that there are actually people who want would have put Nokia at least in a better position.

Considering Nokia was selling 10 times as many phones as Apple in 2010 they certainly were utterly crushing iphones.

So, Nokia certainly had a future and Elop certainly ran one of the greatest destructions of value in history. Hopefully he'll go on doing the same and finish what Ballmer's started at Microsoft.

Re:It shoud have suprised no one

[NatasRevol]

Also, ask these guys why they sold out.

http://www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/governance/board/board-of-directors/

Re: It shoud have suprised no one

[Anonymous Coward]

Meego wasn't even released back in 2010. It was released in 2011, AFTER everybody knew that it had no future, Nokia made all they could to stop people from knowing about it, and still the only Meego phone (the N9) sold better than the Lumia 800 (which was exactly the same phone, but with Windows Phone 7).

Re: It shoud have suprised no one

[chuckinator]

Funny that Motorola did the exact same thing except with Android instead of Windows Mobile and had resounding success.

Re: It shoud have suprised no one

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

Re: It shoud have suprised no one

[steelfood]

Everybody here wasn't interested in Symbian. Everybody knew at the time it was a dead end, even with their plethora of existing apps. S60 sucked as a smartphone OS, even to the developers who wrote for it.

Meego was the way forward. It was built using Qt on top of Linux. It wasn't as popular as Android outside of Nokia and Intel, but it had a future. 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.

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. And to boot, they produced some less-than spectacular phones for an OS (Windows Phone 7) that was going to die before it hit the shelves.

All those wasted resources could have gone to Meego, and polishing what was already a fairly good OS. They had an OS in-house that was close to being ready. Elop threw it out and spent a fortune bringing in a third-party OS which suffered from the same flaws as Meego (namely not having a large app base) and had no advantages over it whatsoever.

I'll skip the uglier parts of the analogy, but if Meego was Nokia's baby, created to ensure the survival of the company, it was forcibly aborted by Microsoft two weeks before a full term. Then Nokia took in Microsoft's then-newborn, inbred child, despite having been told beforehand that it was born with severe genetic problems and whom the doctors had already said would not live for more than a few months. This child drained all of Nokia's resources in the process, the excuse being that this had to happen to prepare for Microsoft's next child. Microsoft's next child turned into, well, nothing too special. And you wonder why Nokia's now broke and ultimately had to sell itself to Microsoft.

What? Corporations are people, no?

Re: It shoud have suprised no one

[TemporalBeing]

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.

How To Accomplish The "Elop Effect"

[Freshly Exhumed]

Tomi Ahonen has the formula down perfectly, with explanations:

ELOP EFFECT = RATNER EFFECT + OSBORNE EFFECT

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/09/the-do-it-yourself-elop-analysis.html

Re:How To Accomplish The "Elop Effect"

[Anonymous Howard]

Yeah, but Tomi Ahonen is a moron. This is the same guy who claimed that Symbian was clearly the best mobile smartphone OS and would crush iOS & Android if only given a chance. Riiight....

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/02/nokia-misery-in-single-pictures-today-part-8-in-series-the-elop-strategy-to-go-windows-from-feb-11-2.html

Re:How To Accomplish The "Elop Effect"

[Freshly Exhumed]

Yeah, but Tomi Ahonen is a moron.

Ah yes, good 'ol character assassination is alive and well here. Never mind the accolades Ahonen has received over the years, nor his lectures at Oxford, nor his authoritative books, nor his amazingly accurate record of predictions in the Mobile Phone industry, year after year, nor his personal network of staffers at almost every Mobile Phone company and provider in the world... nor how many times he made other supposed expert analysts look like fools (ZDnet, Howard Forums, etc. etc.)

fun right back

[gbjbaanb]

What would be funny is if....

shareholders launched a court battle to prevent the takeover, and claim compensation and/or charges against Elop and while that dragged through the courts for years (as they do) the new CEO decided that actually, Windows phone isn't the profit thing he wants and changes the OS platform to Android across the board of Lumia phones, dropping Windows Phone completely.

Years later when the courts finally decide that "meh" is the answer to the charges, Microsoft can go ahead with the purchase for the manufacturing arm, if they still wanted to, and Elop could then find a new job - as I doubt even Microsoft would appoint him as CEO whilst he was fighting an active court case.

Could happen? hehehe. and you never know, Nokia could turn things around like Samsung did with Android.

(and yes, they could do Meego, but frankly this isn't about making a success of the company for Microsoft's benefit..)

Nokia were about to switch to Android

[edxwelch]

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/

Re:"Burning Platform"

[h4rr4r]

Because you don't have the money to buy the company, nor are you friends with their friends.

I would have driven their company into the ground for a mere fraction of what Elop was paid or squandered. Yet, they never called me.

Re:Why did this make the front page?

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Never ascribe to hubris and fate that which can be attributed to incompetence and greed.

This should not be a surprise

[sl4shd0rk]

I don't know why anyone is upset about this. It shouldn't be a surprise. Tech history is littered with the remains of corporate entities who once partnered with Microsoft. What part of "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" did Nokia think did not apply to them?

Re:Looks like you were had

[tqk]

The whole nokia board and elop included should be dragged out into the street and shot for their extreme mismanagement of the company.

Did you read TFA (yeah, I know)? It says there was a clause in his contract awarding him a bonus for making the company "saleable." It was sold to Microsoft. Success!