Nokia Chief Elop Is Top Gambling Pick to Be Next Microsoft CEO
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
We're announcing a platform shift to Symbian, which we'll be licensing from Accenture Consulting at $15/pop. But they're our strategic partners so they're going to give us marketing money to market the new Microsoft Symbian 800, so it's almost like it's free.
In order to take advantage of the synergic benefits of outsourcing our core business, I'm going to sell the Microsoft headquarters, fire all the obsoleted software engineers along with 50000 employees who cost too much to employ in our new revenue structure. We will also be EOLing Windows, Xbox, Windows Live, Hotmail and Office and focus on rocking the world with Bing and the Microsoft Symbian range of products, supported by the amazing Accenture Symbian App Store.
Our exclusive partnership with Lenovo to sell Microsoft Symbian in countries where we have traditionally done badly is going to form the cornerstone of our new strategy. The new $1999 Lenovo Symbian smart tablets are industrial-strength products designed to make a massive impact from Sichuan to Gansu.
Microsoft needs Elop running Nokia as part of a bigger strategy.
Why would Nokia want to be another Android pusher with no competitive advantage? Value-adds on Android are all shit (crappy launchers and bundled shitware) and the platform is fragmented to fuck. Firefox OS isn't even off the ground and Ubuntu is dead as well.
Nokia hit the spot with windows phone. People will realise that in time.
The platform is worth it just for Nokia Here+ for a lot of people (myself included) and the fact that the hardware is decent.
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That's some great comedy material you have there. How many years before this happens do you think? They've already had several. Elop has been an MS stooge since the word go and nokia has paid the price for it.
In 2016 I reckon the market will look like the following:
25% - iOS - Luxury/fashion sector.
25% - WP - business/teenage/student sector.
40% - Android - Mainly generic landfill sector + Samsung
10% - Everything else (probably still mostly S40)
People used to take the piss out of me when I decided to invest in ARM Holdings, Microsoft, Apple and Raytheon. Who's laughing now?
But your predictions for winphone are hopelessly optimistic, and MS has already lost the business sector for phones. They had a strong position a few years ago and threw it all away...
MS's business sector proposition had a reasonable position in the market. The market was fragmented to bits then as well. A lot of it was Symbian and WinCE stuff with some fallout from proprietary platforms and the POS that was J2ME.
They let that go with WP7 and to iOS a bit (c'mon it's a version 1 product) but are clawing it back now with WP8.
Not one business person I know uses Android anymore though citing it's unreliable. I see a rough distribution of 70/30 iOS/WP8 and that's falling because dropping an iPhone is an expensive problem to sort for corporate IT departments and individual users. You can afford to throw away a couple of WP8 devices a year for the same cash per user as a 4S and 4 WP8 handsets for the price of a 5.
I haven't seen a single person with a winphone that likes it. I know a couple who were suckered into it and hate it, and a few more who were persuaded to take a trial of a lumia for a week and took it back in a day.
You've got built in: Word, Excel, OneNote, Powerpoint, a decent mail client, decent web browser, Facebook / Twitter client, Calendar, image manager, cloud sync, wallet, music player, search, music recognition, decent calculator, product comparison and turn by turn navigation.
You can't compete against that.
The only apps I've added are: ebay (because their mobile site is shit) and Weather.
Sure there are apps by the thousands developed by people but as per iOS and Android stores, most of them are buggy shite.
App usage count doesn't mean the device is useless.
So yes, you can compete with that, and do it much better.
They want Outlook to be the same as their desktop (which it is).
They want integrated calendars and contacts (which they are) so they can maintain their schedule on the road.
They want to view documents straight up without some third party piece of shit viewer that can't render anything properly (which they can).
They want their OneNote notebooks (which they can have).
Not only that the whole shebang actually works 100% flawlessly.
All the rest can be and is done flawlessly by any of the other OS's out there.
Win phone has no killer feature. If it did we'd see people actually using it.
OTOH, developer engagement _with_ the platform eventually draws a user crowd to it - that's what the 4D motto means. I don't see any significant push in this direction (as opposed to, say, such past occurences with Win32API, or .net, or other MS technologies). If there's already "everything the user should ever need" (not to be confused with "everything the user needs"), then why bother?
Imagine if instead they went for android, and took that 70% market share in the Android space? It was possible for them to do in the WP space, why should it not have been possible in the Android space?
As I see it, they wasted their engineering abilities to gain a big chunk of an unimportant market, rather than shooting for the big fish, because their idiotic CEO puts Microsoft's interests before Nokia's.
Would Microsoft sacrifice their only real friend in the mobile world just to grab their executive back? If Elop comes over, either Nokia follows or Microsoft disappears from the mobile market.
Sticking with Windows Phone exclusively in light of its failure at other OEMs looks more like career management than strategy. Launching a Windows RT product, as Nokia is rumored to be doing, is recklessness bordering on insanity.
As for Microsoft disappearing from mobile, it looks to me that Ballmer's departure anticipates that happening. Nokia can't keep going the way it is for much longer.
There is no reason Nokia couldn't have had Meego and Android alongside Windows Phone.
Really? How will their marketing handle this? Imagine three entirely incompatible operating systems. Add to that, they need to sell Symbian for a few more years anyway.
Samsung and LG launch products with alternative OSs because they don't want to be caught out if OS preferences change.
OS preferences don't change just like that. You need apps in the app store. It gets harder if you've already spent money on paid apps. Also, Samsung has gotten nowhere with their alternative OSes.
Those products failed to gain traction and were abandoned.
Windows RT was lame and deserves to die. Windows Phone is by no yardstick dead yet. It is actually doing a better job than many expected.
Several OEMs tried Windows Phone and/or Windows RT.
Exactly what Nokia wants. Nokia has become _the windows phone_. As of now, Lumia accounts for 75% of windows phone sales.
Microsoft disappearing from mobile, it looks to me that
Microsoft is not disappearing from mobile. Lumia sold 7.4 million phones this quarter. Up from 5.5m and 4.4m earlier. How is this a failing company, or a failing product?
As such, I see no sign of imminent collapse like Palm. Or that they will (or can afford to) fold in the high stakes smartphone game.
It's not like Nokia didn't have experience in that.
Prior to the Elopcalypse, even prior to Meego they already had three incompatible operating systems: S60 ("symbian") running on their smartphones; S40 (basically a fleet of slightly different J2SE variants) running on their feature phones; and debian-based Maemo running on N900.
Sure, Maemo as a platform started from the original N770 tablet, followed by N800 and N810. As far as I know, Maemo got most of the phone features from certain internal Linux projects, eventually making the N900 phone possible.
Prior to the iPhone, people (mostly) used whatever software that came with the phone. There was no concept of an App Store. At least, not in the same way we have now.
I bought the N800 when it came out. It was a geeky toy and had a nice community. But it was no platform to dislodge iOS or Android when Elop joined Nokia.
Exactly the same way Samsung, HTC are/were handling it.
Add to that, they need to sell Symbian for a few more years anyway.
Nokia essentially dropped Symbian two years ago.
Also, Samsung has gotten nowhere with their alternative OSes.
Funnily enough one of their alternative OSes that is getting them nowhere is Windows and they decided to focus on Android instead.
Nokia has become _the windows phone_.
I don't see how that is helping them. They had huge brand recognition. It used to be that 1 every 3 phones sold was made by them. Not saying that Elop was the source of all their misery, but the Windows Phone strategy doesn't seem to be helping them much.
As of now, Lumia accounts for 75% of windows phone sales.
The latter being around 3% of total smartphone sales, comparable to the marketshare of Bada OS two years ago.
Samsung, HTC, LG are selling Android. Their other phones aren't selling really. If Nokia sold Android, they would be far behind in the Android market, and won't sell too many Lumias either.
Nokia essentially dropped Symbian two years ago.
They sell low cost Asha phones here in India (and probably in SE Asia), which I thought was an S40 derivative. (It seems so.)
The latter being around 3% of total smartphone sales, comparable to the marketshare of Bada OS two years ago.
Breaking into smartphones is hard. Nokia knows than Windows Phone isn't going to be shuttered. Windows Phone 8 was the first real Windows Phone OS. I recently was at a Nokia showroom. The $140 off-contract Lumia 520 was smoother than my Nexus 4. You should try it.
My feeling is that they are not selling because they are not pushing them much. I don't think Samsung ever made a serious, competitive Windows Phone. Also Lumia is not selling the volume it's selling just because of the OS (actually for some is a disadvantage because of the smaller marketplace). It would be interesting to see how a Lumia with Android would fare.
Anyway, three years ago Samsung had 5% of the market and Nokia over 35%. They had a good lead over everyone no matter what OS they decided to back. Admittedly going with Android would have meant that they would have more competition, but I believe that they had a good chance on brand recognition alone. Perhaps it would have been worse, no way to tell now.
Nokia essentially dropped Symbian two years ago.
I think they have outsourced Symbian support. I am not sure anyone is developing for it or updating it any more.
Do you have any relevant reply to my post? Let me remind you, the topic was "who, if anyone, would replace Elop at Nokia if this happened?".
Aug 29 2012: 2.75 Aug 29 2013: 3.97
Compare that to Apple.
"...Chief Executive Officer Stephen Elop, who has presided over a 62 percent decline in market value..."
Except he hasn't. He's just bailed water a little faster, and slightly reduced the sink rate.
I give them credit for doing something daring and different (betting on Windows when they knew noone else would). It was a big gamble, though, and at least so far, it hasn't paid off. Android would have been a far safer bet in the short-term at the very least.
Look at the last 5 years, you can't really paint it as hopeful right now: http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=NOK+Interactive#symbol=no...
Elop wasn't the worst CEO possible, but he was the worst CEO available.
That hint, etc. plays well with consumers who see computing just in terms of consumer client devices.
Here are two blunt facts:
First, many more client devices need servers, and Microsoft with Windows Server, SQL Server, and many software tools for system installation, monitoring, and management has demonstrated that it knows how to run one heck of a big server farm with surprisingly small staff.
Second, people still need to work, at a computer 'work station' complete with a good, physical keyboard, the old kind with keys that move, and one or more screens, hopefully large, and maybe more than one. And they need to run some major software applications in graphics, high end word processing, video creation, editing, and production, engineering, statistics, etc., and for that people still need a high end desktop computer with, from Microsoft, Windows 7 that can run both 32 bit and 64 bit software. That work station may have 32 GB of main memory and 12 TB of disk memory. So, no smart phone or tablet can compete.
Yes, Apple sold a lot of iPhones, and McDonald's sold a lot of hamburgers, but that doesn't really mean that Microsoft should get in either the phone or hamburger business or was beaten by either Apple or McDonald's.
For the new CEO of Microsoft to push Microsoft into mobile client devices in competition with Apple and Samsung and software for such devices in competition with Apple and Google and to ignore desktops and servers would be huge mistake.
Yes, generally if there is a new business opportunity that involves software, Microsoft should consider getting in, e.g., search and Bing. And maybe Microsoft should push mobile client devices and associated operating system and application software, etc., but to ignore desktops and servers would be dumb, dumber than anything Ballmer did.
Traffic looks like 20k/day visits or so (https://siteanalytics.compete.com/ladbrokes.com/)
I suspect one of the spread betting sites would actually give a more realistic view. (I have however got £5 on Bill Gates at 50/1 as a real outside chance)
(Edit) Reasoning:
1) He's one of the few Microsoft executives (at the time) who saw the rise of the internet in the 90's and the rise of mobile in the early 2000's
2) He spearheaded Xbox, Zune, and Courier, which appear to be the direction Microsoft wants to head towards
3) He must still be somewhat connected with Microsoft, as he appeared in the Xbox One video reveal
1. Steve Ballmer : Best man in Gates Wedding. 2. Elop : Killed Nokia single-handedly! 3. -- : Doesn't matter: There is no MS anymore?
Old, bald and stubborn is no longer going to cut it.