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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."
Yes! Let's watch him do to Microsoft what he did to Nokia!
But, that said, maybe a breakup and spin-off of non-core divisions is exactly what Microsoft needs. This whole 'chasing Apple/Sony/{$newTechMarket}' thing is slowly killing them.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
So the plan is he'll gain stewardship of Microsoft and hand it over to... Microsoft?
Seems a bit redundant
Oh right we're going to pretend Elop wasn't an infiltrator sent to hasten the ripening of a patent laden company down on it's luck
He sinked his own company once, he could do it again. But why? I mean, even slashdot had realized Elop was working for microsoft all along, whom would he work for now? Is google planning to buy microsoft? apple? the NSA?
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
That moron completely destroyed Nokia, he will do the same to Microsoft.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Blackberry stuck with their own stuff, which was even relatively entrenched in the enterprise... a lot of good it did them.
He is a double agent! He tricked Microsoft into believing that he was their agent working for them to run down Nokia, all the while he was really working for Google! This could be the plot of a new Mission Impossible movie, Tom Cruise playing Elop?
Anyone who thinks Symbian was a decent alternative OS and that abandoning it for virtually ANYTHING else was a mistake needs to have their head examined. In fact I'd credit sticking to Symbian for too long with as much of Nokias problems as anything else.
Article: ... 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.
Depends on what you mean by "didn't work out."
That decision didn't work out for Nokia but apparently worked out real well for Elop himself.
Trimming the fat would probably be better for Microsoft at this point. They are trying to dance in too many rodeos, and it's starting to show. Focus on Enterprise, Windows, and Office products. That's a really strong foundation for them. If they want to stay in the mobile phone industry, buy rights to the Blackberry name and focus on the Enterprise and professional markets with solid phones built around security rather than entertainment.
Something like that would free up all kinds of funds for R&D projects into potential technologies, while playing to their strengths. Microsoft is not -- and never will be -- the entertainment company it seems to desire. Yes, there's potential money in it, but it simply doesn't align with their core business.
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...
Elop said he will abandon Microsoft's failed attempt to create a modern operating system and simply bet the whole company on getting in bed with Nokia and use their Symbian operating system. Either that or Meego.
The long term strategy is that after the company craters, Nokia can purchase it for a song, and he can then be tapped to be CEO of Nokia.
He noted that this strategy has worked in the past. "Nokia's cratered stock price doubled after they sold me off of Microsoft, And I can confidently predict that after I crater microsoft, it's price will double when they sell me back to Nokia."
He also pointed out that essentially the same strategy was used by Gil Amelio when Apple abandoned it's OS developement and bought Steve's Jobs and his Next OS, shedding Gil in the process.
"it's proven. Buy another company's OS and bet on it. That's what I know how to do better than anyone."
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The XBox unit is profitable. The entire first generation of the XBox was financial lose, but in the last few years, the business finally started to make money.
Bing, not so much. Bing seems to be a dumping ground for Microsoft managers. Every year or so, there's a new management team at Bing. Their business strategy is "copy Google". To some extent, they have to - for a while, their ad system was completely different from Google's, and advertisers wouldn't bother to use it. Something like 80% of Bing users use Internet Explorer. Those are the people who don't know how to change the default search engine.
Google as the only major search engine, though, is scary. The remaining competition in web search is tiny in the US - IAC, InfoSeek, Yandex, and Baidu. (DuckDuckGo and Bleeko are resellers of Bing and Yandex, respectively.) With no competition, Google could charge much more for ads and become even more intrusive.
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....
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Open VS to other platforms, provide a decent .NET implementation on those platforms, and support languages that weren't invented at MS. This, along with selling their enterprise software on other platforms, could make MS a lot of money.
He was and always will work for himself - most CEOs are pathological sociopaths, and have interest in no-ones benefit but their own.
Putting all your eggs in the Office camp seems very dangerous. Our office recently
migrated to openoffice and never looked back. I use google docs at home. Both
are currently weak and can only get better. Google has recently added office tools
to android. I see standalone high dollar office suites as a dying breed. I personally
would not double down on them. Same with high-end computer OSes, another one
of Microsoft's cash cows. If microsoft wants to exist in 20 years they need to be in
the tablet, smartphone, tv console, and other growing markets that continue to reduce
the need for a full blown desktop at home. I know a lot of people who no longer have
a desktop computer or see no need for one. This number will probably continue to
grow as tablets/smartphones and roku/xbox type devices continue to add features.
I wouldn't trust Elop to keep a popsicle frozen. He'd sell off the freezer to save on energy and make his only product, a popsicle, more profitable.
Even if Elop was staying loyal to Microsoft while working at Nokia, he failed them big time. Microsoft expected him to drive Windows Phone market share up, not to burn Nokia down.
I find it hard to imagine the Microsoft board is dumb enough to view such an underachiever as a serious candidate for the CEO job. All these stories leaking to the media telling the contrary might just be made up to give the impression that the whole Elop / Nokia / Windows Phone story was not the tragic failure it really is, and that the current Nokia buyout plan is not a desperate move where they don't get anything of value, but have to do it because there is no other choice.
Until more carriers start offering bargain-basement plans for Android phones, there will still be a market niche for dumbphones. Currently I pay $7 per month for a Virgin Mobile dumbphone; if I were to switch to a smartphone on the same carrier, my bill would rise to $35.
Let's put Windows in the line of fire
> 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.
Firstly this seems like wild conjecture to me, but let's say for the sake of argument that this is actually Elop's plan, and that he'd have the authority, personal power, and get the buy-in necessary to do all of this. (A huge leap of faith, but let's say it all happens.)
Is this necessarily a bad thing, moving forward? The time where you could make huge amounts of money selling operating systems is past. We can all see that. The practice of tying all products irrevocably together to, I dunno, circle the wagons, and make other Microsoft income streams mandatory in order to participate in any other Microsoft income stream, also appears to becoming less and less effective.
So, if you're going to sell software, what software is there left to sell? Why not drop (or spin off) the side products that aren't part of the company's core comptency, and also drop the infrastructure and operating system stuff (let other people do that for free) and concentrate on applications? I've felt for a long time that Microsoft's attempt to own everything is a conceit from a time that doesn't exist anymore, and will ultimately result in owning nothing. As an app developer, they could eck out a long term existence, although perhaps as a somewhat smaller company. But a smaller company that has long term survival prospects is a heck of a lot better than a huge company approaching a wall at speed.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I think part of the reason Microsoft is slipping on the office suite is their insistence on tying their office tools to their operating system products. (The only exception of which I'm aware is Office on Mac.) If they dropped the OS and concentrated on apps, there'd be a lot more incentive to have Office on a variety of operating systems, rather than trying to force people into Winders so that they can use Office, which as a strategy is demonstrably not working anymore.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Microsoft doesn't need to concentrate on Office. Microsoft needs to concentrate on integrating all these many pieces of the puzzle that they already have.
They could do some kick ass stuff if they could make it easy to do all the things people would like to by having settings / media ownership and compatibility between all the different platforms and form factors.
No one else has all the pieces that they do right now. If they could just stop infighting and head towards a common goal they could accomplish really cool stuff.
I've had a dislike for the company since the 90's. But I'm thankful to them for the job security I enjoyed supporting and maintaining their products in enterprises. But I come home at night to Mac and Linux systems.
But seriously, Long term, Office and Windows are doomed. There is some interesting tech in Xbox Connect that could create some game changing product categories in enterprises such as Medical Tech etc. Bing, is the only thing that I can see that could even approach giving Google a ride but it's way too far behind. These 2 divisions should be spun off or at least unleashed (e.g. MSFT retains an ownership stake but takes them public) and run on a profitable basis (if they can). The bureaucracy at MSFT is killing innovation.
The other interesting things MSFT is doing are their Azure platform and universal identity management. But a mistrustful tech community will hamper adoption of these products.
There was an interesting piece a few months back, What if Microsoft exited the search business?, arguing that the abandonment of Bing would lead to a near-immediate antitrust action against Google, either from the FTC or as a private action undertaken by Microsoft itself.
It may be that Google needs Bing to hang around as plausible competition the same way that Microsoft needed Mac OS to soldier on in the late 90's as a putative competitor to Windows (and remember, Microsoft was still found to have engaged in illegal monopolistic practices anyways, something that Microsoft arguably never recovered from).
Microsoft has a different problem: their older products are their own stiffest competition. Why will anyone buy Office 2016 when Office 2013 already does everything the typical consumer needs?
It used to be easy to sell new versions, because the old versions were buggy, bloated, hard to use, and missing a lot of useful features. But Microsoft has dramatically improved their quality. They've added piles of features. They've improved usability for the average John and Jane Does of the world. They've built a system that does everything the typical user needs. So their old free-ride path of "upgrade our old crap because you need to" is over, because it's no longer needed.
What they've since recognized is that their customers suck at owning computers. Most people don't make backups, they get viruses, they don't know how to manage a home system. So they are offering Office365 in the cloud to appeal to people to not have to care any more (for only $9.95/month). All John Doe has to do is remember his password, and everything else is taken care of for him. They can continue to offer token features and upgrades thrown into the price, but the real money of tomorrow will be made hosting people's data for them, not in the software. It's not the back-to-the-basics approach you advocate, but it's what they're betting will be their future.
John
Good point. Windows computers keep the free-to-tinker PC ecosystem alive which in turn allows setting up any kind of Linux installations that one wants.
If their OS work was terrible, then why did the N9 win design awards, and receive overwhelmingly positive reviews? Agreed that Symbian was showing its age (in spite of not being the dog of a seller that MS reputation mgmt drones imply - it still was growing in sales when Elop axe-murdered it), but MeeGo was in-house as well, and took the N9 to a position that Windows Phones have never matched, in terms of critical acclaim.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
Here's what they should do. Sell off the XBox division for a pretty good price. Then, after a few years, arrange for a former Microsoft Executive to be put in charge of the new company. He would then drive that company into the ground and arrange for Microsoft to re-buy the company for pennies on the dollar.
Somehow, I just know that would work.
"Secure" Boot says hello.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.