Nokia USA president is out, replaced by Microsoft vet Chris Weber
engadget.com
engadget.com
It might that this is "responsible". But it is worth consider that Apple wouldn't exist if that logic had been followed.
You can't interpret stock signals on such a short-term basis. A better snapshot of the market's confidence in Elop would be to look at NOK performance since his hiring (since many have been predicting this move for MONTHS) - NOK is up over %15 since September 2010.
There may be unannounced considerations that make this deal reasonable. But if you're going to bet your company on a single third-party platform (something that you don't need to do), it seems odd for it to be one that has yet to gain any serious traction in the marketplace.
Hence (I think) the suggestions that, to put it politely, Elop's past affiliations have skewed his judgment...
In short: Nokia would give Android so much market share that Android would be unstoppable. Which sounds nice, but it would mean that Nokia would very quickly have almost no leverage over the ecosystem.
You have leverage when your partner needs the partnership more than you do. In this case, Microsoft has as much of it as it wants. As soon as Nokia is committed to WP7, Microsoft can do whatever it wants with them and they'll just put up with it, because they need the "partnership".
Elop is not dumb. He is screwing Nokia for Microsoft.
There is also short-term benefits for Nokia choosing Microsoft, like dedicated engineering resources from MS and money put toward marketing the OS.
Windows XP and Windows 7 are sold bundled with computers - you basically can't buy one without the other. The case of Vista is different - it was so awful people bought computers with Vista (counting as a Vista sale) and upgraded them to XP. Low sales indicated people put off buying new computers because it wasn't worth it - the new computer with Vista would be worse than the old one with XP. Windows 7 success was caused, in part, by those computers - they wouldn't last forever and, one day, would have to be replaced. Windows 7 was being bundled by then. And it was good enough as not to warrant upgrades to XP.
Office has no credible competition. Weren't various versions of Office using undocumented Windows APIs that their competitors couldn't and, thus, had lower performance and worst integration with the environment? I remember something in these lines. That and bundling it with Windows in corporate licenses that made others non-competitive.
And, please, Sharepoint is a joke. The only reason someone still uses it is because it's impossible to migrate its contents to any sane platform. And, of course, fear of admitting such an incompetent decision choosing it.
As for SQL Server, it's a decent platform. I have to admit it is Microsoft third best product, behind only the natural keyboard and their mice.
... and purchased from Sybase. Though, to be fair, it has come a long way since then.
I'm in Seattle, and I've worked with a lot of ex-Microsoft people on various projects. I find that they are often committed to the Microsoft way of doing things, which is often appropriate for a huge software company, but wildly inappropriate for a small startup.
But I also observed this behavior many times.