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Comment by nmfisher | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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.

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

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.

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