Nokia Plan B fails after only 36 hours | Hacker News Reader

Nokia Plan B fails after only 36 hours

nokiaplanb.com

89 pointsnyellin35 comments

radical initiatives like seating a bunch of kids on the board of directors

This seems to be the clearest description of what this "plan" was about. A management of a big company is not a government that you can overthrow. Moreover, doing this is absolutely unnecessary: unlike being a citizen, being an employee is voluntary. If you do not agree with your company's politics you can always quit. Nokia's case is special with this regard: for people living in Tampere there are virtually no options for alternative employment. They do have my deepest sympathy.

As a side remark, I guess, nobody on HN doubt that Elop's business, strategic and management skills significantly exceed those of plan B authors. Turning to this "opposition" (pardon my political parallels) would be even worse for the company as a whole.

> A management of a big company is not a government that you can overthrow.

Strictly speaking, it is, but you do it with money, not ideas. Offer the Nokia board $20 or $30 per share and they will throw out the management and institute your own faster than you can say "revolution."

Nokia’s current market cap is about US$34 billion, so the only people who can do this are the people who control institutions with massive quantities of money to throw around, such as... Microsoft.

If you had an absolutely iron-clad plan, it's not inconceivable that you might be able to raise the required money for an LBO. Doubling current stock price is probably out of question, but you might have some luck at least getting the board to look at your proposal. It would require much more than a blog post, though.

I don't know about Finland, but in the US there are many laws which make shareholder activism very difficult. It's not usually as easy as simply buying up 51% of shares and voting.

http://nokiaplans.com/

Wow.

(All letters except n, u, w are registered; most are jokes but a few are earnest.)

http://nokiaplanh.com/ would buy!

Plan Y was my fav!

http://nokiaplanv.com could really do with some filtering to remove javascript on the output page after the form... :/

Yep. Pretty crap site. The 2nd question reads: What operating systems Nokia should use? Not only is it a grammatical error, but it's almost the same as the first.

looking at the results, i think the employees voted a lot.

You mean the javascript that alerted 'hi' and redirected to a porn site?

What was missing were compelling nominees for the executive board. I'd thought that e.g. Haavard Nord (former Trolltech CEO that took the company public, investor and on several small boards) would have made an interesting nomination. (Though I personally don't see abandoning Meego as a poor decision.) It was pretty clear that a collection of small-time anonymous shareholders weren't going to be welcomed by investors with open arms.

That and the plan of action was basically "do what we were doing before, only better, and in fewer places". I think Android was a better option than that, and perhaps a better cultural fit in some ways.

And, if I may be permitted a bit of a dig: it was very Nokiaish of them to change their minds so quickly.

Nokia had three options they were considering:

A MS WP7 B Google Android C Both MS WP7 and Google Android

Apparently, they were also looking at RIM. Link I submitted didn't get much attention. :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2222379

I think it's becoming obvious Nokia's investors are betting against the company. The Microsoft partnership is not about making good phones people want. It's about getting resources, developing some IP assets and making time so the company can be divided and sold for its parts. It seems they consider this the best value for their money.

Now that Oracle has usurped the Sun patents, Microsoft is keen on getting the Nokia ones. Plus, they can control Qt better, which is used in a few desktop systems that compete with Microsoft's products.

At least, Nokia released Qt under the LGPL. Plus there's the KDE Free Qt Foundation which guarantees that "This agreement ensures that the Qt will continue to be available under both the LGPL 2.1 and the GPL 3. Should Nokia discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under these licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses. The agreement stays valid in case of a buy-out, a merger or bankruptcy." (see http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p... )

Yup, that's a bit of a solace. But nevertheless, without Nokia putting their shoulders under it, development of Qt as a whole might be impaired somewhat. (Not that it hurts me personally; I still use KDE3 ;-)

It's sad if that's true because that's exactly what Michael Dell once said about Apple. Look where Apple is now. Albeit, Nokia probably doesn't have the visionary leadership that Apple has, but give them a chance. Let's see what happens.

I wish people wouldn't be so quick to judge them now that the strategy's out. I, for one, love a leader who's really willing to take the reins to execute a vision and face obstacles head on instead of dilly dallying in an unsure state. Elop so far has demonstrated himself to be that kind of guy.

It was, sadly, never going to work. If MeeGo had been a more viable competitor then it may have stood a chance.

But anyone reading:

"The worst product I've seen so far at Mobile World Congress is Intel's MeeGo OS running on a netboot"

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2380359,00.asp

Must have realised it was game-over.

I'm still skeptical of this whole affair. They got their 15 mins of fame and came across as the ones trying to make a difference. I understand that they genuinely like Nokia, etc. but this was all too hasty and ill conceived.

The so called "9" never revealed or hinted towards who they were and all they were banking upon was "Meego is our saviour. We don't need Microsoft. We will revolt against the management" etc. without having really put an effort on having a long term plan beyond 1 blog post.

Also, how clairvoyant of them to say that most of the remaining talented software devs would have left by the time their "vision" came to fruition? Are they just talking about themselves here!?

I can understand why they chose not to reveal their identities so soon. If they were young as they say, they probably didn't have any power in the organization to speak of, and would almost certainly have been fired within weeks.

Now that the plan didn't work they still have the option of staying at Nokia until they can find a better fir for them.

I understand that, I'd probably have stayed anonymous as well but it seemed like it was a hasty decision as staying anonymous sort of took out the credibility since nobody knew how much stake or influence they really had in the organization. FWIW it seemed like a few software developers who were working on Symbian if I had to guess, pledging their stock options and not really anybody from management.

The link is not working for me; going to http://twitter.com/NokiaPlanB/ only shows the following quote: "there are no 'nine young investors', just one very bored engineer who really likes his iPhone"

If this is the case, then I guess that explains the anonimity.

I guess that's "fail fast" in action.

Pity for Nokia! 5 Years ago, I worked in Maemo (now Meego) platform for 1 year as a subcontractor. I was in charge of one application on the official Nokia 770 firmware. There was lots of fun but the device release was still months later then scheduled.

Nokia's been missing on the web. It doesn't have a real online product. Its browsers on different phones really do not work as I wished, they crash quite often. And this is a huge miss!

Nokia didn't create a software community that are inspired by something|someone. I get inspired by Apple stuff because I admire Steve Jobs. I would have developed Android apps because of Google search engine and lots of stories on how Google succeeded

My 2 cents

>I was in charge of one application on the official Nokia 770 firmware.

Ooh, which one? I had a 770 (sold it and bought an N810, which I still use).

>Its browsers on different phones really do not work as I wished, they crash quite often.

The browser on the N810 is rock-solid. The one on my N86...well, I don't think I've ever seen it crash; but that might be because I almost always use Opera instead.

An interesting explosion of Nokia plans after the B one. There's certainly not a lack of creativity out there.

It begs the question: what if Nokia, instead of selling their soul to Microsoft, simply would have asked their fans for help?

Yes, I know. Crazy. But, what if...?

You mean open to their customers and leverage their not-insignificant technical base to nurture creative development and create a genuine ecosystem around their products? That'll never work!

Meanwhile, I'm a little bit smug about the shout out to NokiaPlanX.com. I feel like the meme has come full circle.

>"But, what if...?"

Nokia had enough trouble trying to keep internal developers on task, e.g Mobile Web Server for S60 [http://research.nokia.com/page/231] with Python Integration. One can only imagine the huge time waste that managing all the tangential and marginal ideas produced by third party developers would require.

Nokia has immediate access to a sound mobile OS, a suite of high powered development tools for it, and a technology roadmap extending out for a decade of more. To say they sold "their soul to Microsoft" is unsupported by the facts. It is not as if going with Android would be morally superior - given the way in which Google leverages individually identifying user data one could even argue that adopting Android would be a less ethical course.

I wasn't referring to any third party developer ecosystem with the word "fans". They could involve their fanbase in more fundamental questions like openly asking "which path do you want us to take?".

No, I don't expect any company born in the 20th century (or before) to ever do that. But maybe they should.

> To say they sold "their soul to Microsoft" is unsupported by the facts.

And yet the things you mention are exactly what the soul of a technology company consists of. The nitty gritty OS, the vision of the future.

Of course there are many benefits in joining forces with Microsoft and no, Android is not necessarily a better choice. But the fact is that the software _is_ to a high degree the soul of the devices that Nokia sells.

I thought Nokia plan 9 was to run Plan 9 OS on Nokia :D

Plan M is the superior one. I don't think you can top that one.

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