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Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

"Never presume an action is caused by ill will if it can be explained by ineptitude".

Reading materials related to Nokia at that time period it was pretty dysfunctional as it was. The only mistake I can accrue for Elop was his "Burning platform" memo - which is basically paraphrazing crisis management 101. So he was clearly out of his depth when running Nokia.

I think the sale of Nokia handsets to Microsoft was quite the coup. At that time the value of that IP was close to zero and Microsoft paid billions for it.

If there was foul play intended then the players surely lost. The fall of Nokia was the best thing to happen to Finland. It was far too big an enterprise for a small country. It basically stifled innovation and entrepreurship accross the board.

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Not sure, if you look at how Elop (mis)managed the company piece-by-piece, first by sidelining MeeGo, then one by one closing Indian factories that made NOKIA independent (ask Indians how fun that was), then splitting off Qt to prevent any kind of internal competition to MS' platform, including the sell-off bonus Elop had in the contract, the Hanlon's razor applicability is pretty low. If you want to believe there wasn't some background deal between top management, rendering all NOKIA employees sacrificial lambs for MS, OK.

Hanlon's razor becomes more credible once you understand how mismanaged Nokia already was at the point Elop took in the reins. He may have been in the boat when it sunk, but it already had lot of holes in it.

Both Jorma Ollila (the Chair) and Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the CEO preceding Elop, were financial experts, not tech visionaries. The organization that had created the rise of Nokia was split to pieces before Elop took control with no understanding that you can't run an technology corporation like an investment bank.

There are two pretty good books exploring this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Ringtone-Exploring-Nokia-Mobile-Phone...

https://www.amazon.com/Transforming-NOKIA-Paranoid-Optimism-...

"rendering all NOKIA employees sacrificial lambs for MS"

'Sacrificial lamb' is quite hyperbolic. The laid of people enjoyed quite good benefits. You don't become an instant destitute in Finland just because you are temporarily out of a job.

The way the handset business was going, Microsoft basically paid 8 billion for the privilege of a dead-in-the water platform and the nicety of laying off the staff .

If there ever was an evil plot to steal value from Nokia's shareholders then it was thoroughly botched.

>The way the handset business was going, Microsoft basically paid 8 billion for the privilege of a dead-in-the water platform and the nicety of laying off the staff .

It was having issues when Elop came in but still had potential for rebound and good market share. Elop just stomped any potential for that in the ground making it dead in the water.

I was horrified when they signed that deal with the devil. Nokia shares suffered 20% drop. By that time everyone already knew what were going to happen eventually.

https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/elop_invests_in_nokia_sha...

This is an accurate account of what happened to Nokia / Symbian, from insiders. Symbian hated Nokia and vice versa.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smartphones-beyond-Lessons-remarkab...

> Reading materials related to Nokia at that time period it was pretty dysfunctional as it was. The only mistake I can accrue for Elop was his "Burning platform" memo - which is basically paraphrazing crisis management 101. So he was clearly out of his depth when running Nokia.

I just did some very superficial reading on the "Burning Platform" memo (the first time I had heard of it).

I'm intrigued by the idea that the memo shows Elop was "out of his depth". Is there something I can read to explain why this was such a terrible management move? What would have been a better response?

The burning platform memo basically triggered the Osborne effect [0] on the whole range of Nokia's smartphone offerings.

If you read crisis management literature this "burning platform" metaphor is literally in the "For dummies" section (at least what I recall). It implies he was desperately trying to find something to drive a message trhough the organization and he grabbed the most obvious and stereotypical thing he could find.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

The Symbian eco-system had just started to finally move into Qt as main development platform, Qt on Symbian got PIPS (POSIX compatibility layer), there was the third reboot of the Eclipse based IDE (Carbide), Symbian Java was getting JavaSE extensions, Python and Web Runtime were made available, Symbian Open Source project had just been made available.

So everyone was putting the effort to move away from Symbian C++, J2ME into a more pleasant environment, and then comes Elop with that memo saying to everyone that all their efforts were gone to the trashcan and it was time to embrace Silverlight and XNA instead.

Also from internal point of view, this memo was very bad, because until then Nokia had an heavy anti-Windows culture, and now everyone had to suck it up, leave HP-UX, Linux, Symbian behind and embrace Windows.

I was in Nokia at the time. As soon as it was released onto the intranet news feed, a couple of thousand employees immediately stopped caring and were more focused on hanging around for their redundancy payment.

The Nokia London office had an emergency Town Hall session in The Oval cricket ground building where execs tried to convince us that Symbian was safe. Those claims were met with actual laughter from the crowd.

microsoft paid for the name, not the IP.

Ah, you mean all device and radio patents were left with Nokia? Sorry, can't seem to remember the details on a moments notice - but I think you are correct. Hence MS underwrote all of Nokia acquisitions as a complete loss eventually.

MS got licence to all NOKIA patents as well.

Oh well, why didn't they just gifted the whole company to Ballmer instead and maybe it would be "developers, developers" focused /s

They did, and the company exploded in their hands.

The shockwave lasted 2-3 milli-millennium, and was observed as far away as Seoul from Finland, but not Tokyo.

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