Comment by nanairo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nanairo | Hacker News Reader

NOOOOOooooo... I actually knew Olilla (we went to sister schools those a few decades apart, and listen to some presentation he gave).

And I thought that Nokia was on the right foot finally. They seemed to have a coherent plan and vision. From the mess they were in they've slowly tried to push themselves out: buying Qt was a great move, imho, and focusing on the Meego (for the smartphone market) and Symbian (for the cheap, non smartphone) seem pretty good. They just had to wait a bit and I think they would have pulled through. :(

Now I feel they are back on square one: running around like headless chicken looking for a solution. They should have given their current solution a real chance. Apple didn't turn into what it was today in a month or a year. It took a lot of pain, cutting products, focusing, developing a new OS... I'd say it took probably around 3--4 years before Apple was a healthy company again.

Changing your CEO now seems pure panic and not a logical/reasoned response. Especially getting someone from outside the company??? Are they basically asking for the guy to come and throw what all the progress they had made on their new Meego/Symbian path?

Argh... bad move... bad move... I am getting really worried for Nokia... and I liked them back in the days for their phones.

It sure doesn't feel like they have a coherent plan. They have two new OS (Meego and Symbian^3), they say "QT everywhere" but most of their apps don't run on Symbian and Meego/Maemo at the same time.

They don't provide much support for the n900 users which was supposed to be a developer's phone but said "Maemo is dead, we're moving on to Meego". Some of those users are moving away to Android and it won't be easy to win them back.

Nokia can't wait an extra 3-4 years, they've already lost 2-3 years.

I think the coherent plan is simply: Meego+Qt for the smartphone, Symbian+Qt for the lower end.

Transitions are hard though, so I am not surprised they are still in the middle of it. Such big changes take time.

But from all I've heard the Qt improvements they made and the IDE are very good and welcome. And the hardest choice---to drop Symbian for Meego to compete with other smartphones---has already been taken.

I don't think they'll be ready tomorrow, but I think with this plan they would have been ready in 2 years. Is that too much? Sure, but that's the panic talking: they've got a plan, they are in the middle of it, if they drop it and try something else... and maybe drop it again and try something yet again... and so on, they'll go nowhere.

As another example take Microsoft. They came up with Windows Phone 6.5, the two "trendy" phones that were discountinued in a couple of weeks, while they were working on Zune and Windows Phone 7. They kept moving from one to the other, always making great speeches of how they made this huge change and it will be great from here onwards. But it wasn't until recently that it felt like they had a coherent strategy.

Samsung is another company that seems to be running around like a headless chicken. (Though better than Motorola that seems to have thrown down the towel, and tried to squeeze as much value as they can from their brand until they become a anonymous Android clone, with nothing to make them unique.)

>Now I feel they are back on square one: running around like headless chicken looking for a solution. They should have given their current solution a real chance

They are most likely to continue with their new products and solutions. I believe it is quite common for publically traded companies that have been having problems to switch CEO when things start getting better. The point of that is to restore the trust of the stock holders. Nokia stock gained 5% in Helsinki stock exchange after the news was published. Kallasvuo will even continue at Nokia-Siemens so one might think the change of CEO is mostly cosmetical.

Ollila has stated that he will also exit after a short transition period.

The analysts think that it will happen in Spring 2011 at Nokia's Annual General Meeting.

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