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Stephen Elop Would Pull a Nokia On Microsoft
Nerval's Lobster writes "A new Bloomberg report suggests that Stephen Elop, who's apparently on the short list of candidates to replace Steve Ballmer as Microsoft's CEO, would eliminate company projects such as Xbox and Bing while focusing resources on Office. Before he left Microsoft to join Nokia, Elop headed Microsoft's Business Division, so it's no surprise he'd want to focus on Office and the company's other, highly profitable enterprise software. But as head of Nokia, Elop made similarly bold strategic realignments that, while they probably looked good on paper, didn't quite work out. Specifically, Elop decided to abandon Nokia's popular homegrown operating systems, including Symbian, in favor of Microsoft's Windows Phone. That caused Nokia's share of the overall mobile-device market to dive into the single digits. At the time, Elop insisted he made the decision because Symbian and its ilk were incapable of competing in the broader market against Android and iOS; revelations by the Finnish media over the past few months, however, suggest that he'd been offered a generous cash incentive for selling off the company, which gives his 'strategic realignment' (which everyone knew would initially collapse Nokia's market-share, as its product pipeline emptied out) a whiff of self-interest. So while it's likely that a Microsoft run by Elop would make some decisive moves, his previous attempt at game-changing quickly transformed Nokia from a communications powerhouse into a second-tier competitor and (eventually) a Microsoft subsidiary. And by eliminating Bing and Xbox, Microsoft would be giving up completely on the search and gaming markets in favor of becoming more of an enterprise-centric company—something that could please analysts mostly interested in the company's bottom line, but basically an admission of defeat in the consumer realm."
That moron completely destroyed Nokia, he will do the same to Microsoft.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Nokia's OS work was absolutely terrible, in fact it was so bad that it made what Microsoft had look good. The one thing Elop couldn't do was stick with the old Nokia way of doing things, it simply wasn't relevant in this time and age. The mistake Elop made was not in getting rid of Nokia's homegrown OS developments, it was in choosing Microsoft's developments to replace them.
Elop should have chosen to go with Android for the killer platform of the their OS with Nokia's hardware. Unfortunately for Nokia he went for the lethal platform of the Microsoft OS with Nokia's hardware. The result was the choosing of industry contacts that Elop had at Microsoft instead of going with Android and systematic destruction of billions of dollars in equity.
Elop can be counted on to make hard choices and get rid of losing platforms. Unfortunately he can also be counted on to make foolish choices to fill the void. Inevitably he will therefore be the next Microsoft CEO...
That's nice, but nobody's suggesting xbox should cease to exist or follow a completely different direction, they're just suggesting that Microsoft could sell it off as a separate business.
Who'd buy a company that's lost money over its entire existence and is only making operating profit on old products that it's about to replace?
as in, "Marissa Meyer is going to 'Elop' Yahoo if it kills her"
or "J.J. Abrahms had better not 'Elop' the franchise..."
yep...
TFA headline actually made me LOL: "Stephen Elop Would Pull a Nokia On Microsoft"
Right?
I think M$ is going to undergo even more headline grabbing changes and someone spinning off a major division or brand (like Xbox) is exactly the kind of way this would happen.
Did you see the article on Playstation 4? I have never bought a PS (from the beginning IMHO it was a lesser nintendo but i'm old school like that...) and I'm not any kind of gamer fanboi but the PS4 looks badass all the way around. It's going to be $100 cheaper on launch and the 3rd Party game situation will be killer
Xbox is M$'s next casualty...seriously...
But yeah, to get back off-topic...let's make "Elop" a verb meaning to abandon a company's popular proven products in favor of an over-designed unusable system, which causes the company to lose sales & eventually be purchased by a competing interest.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Evaluating Elop with respect to good/bad done to Nokia:
-Good: ditching Symbian
-Bad: Picking MS, the last place platform
-Bad: Focusing on higher end, North American market and neglecting Nokia's thriving global market.
Basically, the only measure by which Elop was 'good' would be microsoft's measurement of loyalty, willingness to sink his company for the sake of giving microsoft more of a chance.
Just imagine if Nokia had been the provider of things like Lumia 520 but with Android on it....
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Symbian wasn't a really competitive smartphone OS, but it had a lot of market share and a good transition path towards Maemo/Meego with Qt, which would have been a strong alternative.
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Especially when your 3 biggest competitors would suddenly be two companies long established in the console market (Sony and Nintendo), who both have significant revenue they can operate with, and your other competitor is the guy you just bought the division from - Microsoft, and Windows, who ultimately control most of the underlying technology you rely on.
Unless sony or Nintendo wanted to buy it no one with much sense would want to buy the Xbox division. I can't really see Sony or Nintendo wanting it other than to shut it down.
Blackberry stuck with their own stuff, which was even relatively entrenched in the enterprise... a lot of good it did them.
The thing that killed off Blackberry was not the fact that they stuck with what they were good at. The problem was that they sat with their thumb up their ass for far too long and didn't improve the things they were good at. It might also have helped if they had tried really hard to become extremely good at new stuff. Microsoft, Apple and then Google, with it's Android OS starting doing everything Blackberry did, including push-mail which was one of the Blackberry killer features, but the competition was doing it better. By the time Blackberry finally got off it's ass and innovated it was too late. Once Android started taking off it became increasingly obvious that for any OS to compete with Android it needed to be able to run Android apps and Blackberry realized that too late. That's still true today, any upstart Mobile OS that's just hit the market and that wants to compete seriously with Android needs to be able to run Android apps seamlessly. You need a large volume of Apps for your upstart (Linux based?) Mobile OS to even be considered as an option by consumers and the place that has the biggest App collection is the steadily growing Android monoculture. You can also try to break into Apple's walled garden but I don't recommend it, I hear their lawyers have sharp claws and they bite.
You sure about that? Microsoft Is Making An Astonishing $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties
As an OS, Symbian sucked. As an interface to a phone, it worked well. People who wanted a phone to run games and run all the bells and whistles didn't buy Nokia phones. People who bought Nokia phones wanted a phone that made phone calls, and in a pinch could do some other neat tricks, too.
For comparison, consider my wife's old Android phone, which crashed when the Phone app was opened... or my iPhone, which has trouble figuring out whether it wants to use Wi-Fi or 4G for data transfer at any given time. My old Nokia phone was just a phone, and for a large market segment (such as the elderly retirees whose kids insist they have a cell phone "for emergencies"), that's all they need.
Nokia had a niche market all ready as the manufacturer of reliable low-end phones. Elop led them down the familiar Microsoft path of following the latest trends, so they lost that one market they dominated.
That, (coupled with the sales figures to support it) is a better explanation of reality. The GP/PP/etc need to stop thinking as techie geeks, and start thinking in the way the highly diverse consumer market thinks. There's a reason the Symbian phones sold. Decent hardware that did the job for people who don't want (or are scared of) smartphones, but want something better than a dumb "calls/text only") phone.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Someone who believes that they could manage that line of business profitably.
If they moved more towards interoperability with Windows as a platform, then they'd be much more profitable, IMO. Steam's heading in that direction with Steambox -- you can buy a game on Steam and it'll play on both your PC and your Steambox, and you can stream/play games from your PC on the TV screen through Steambox's streaming functionality.
If XBox had binary compatibility with Windows, and the ability to play Windows games on your console (through streaming as Steam's doing, or directly), it'd make the platform much more saleable. They really dropped the ball, not integrating it more heavily into the Windows environment when they had the chance.
The only people I ever hear complaining about the Wii-U are anonymous cowards who claim they won't buy one because the press says its a flop, and constantly parrot that its a flop, but wouldn't have bought one to begin with. The built-in community features on the Wii-U, where users are allowed to share in-game experiences and fan art and coordinate multi-player events and do video chat, etc, however tell an entirely different story of nearly 100% buyer satisfaction. So, just FYI don't believe everything you hear on the street. When the Wii came out initially, all the same parties were parroting that it was a huge flop too. The fact the Wii-U hasn't met the same sales figures hardly constitutes a "flop." Sounds more like wishful thinking from Sony and Microsoft shareholders to me, honestly.
The problem is that WinRT is a closed platform that MS gets a cut of all software sold on. Many software houses know how that ends, with them wanting a cut of all subscriptions and everything else, thanks to Apple. Steam will allow you to install anything you want, just like you currently can on a (non-Metro interface) Windows PC. That Metro interface if why Valve is creating SteamBox; they know how this plays out as well, and doesn't want to hand Microsoft 30% of their income.