A Timely Revision of Elop's "Burning Platform" Memo 144
Nerval's Lobster writes "Microsoft's purchase of Finnish phone-maker Nokia will enrich the latter's CEO, Stephen Elop, to the tune of roughly $25.4 million. That's a generous number, considering Nokia's much-publicized travails over the past few years — generous enough, certainly, to prod angry reactions from the Finnish media. As Elop came aboard Nokia in 2011, he wrote the infamous 'burning platform' memo, in which he suggested that radical moves would be necessary to halt the company's market-share declines. In light of these latest revelations, however, I offer an updated version of Elop's memo: ''
fun right back (Score:5, Interesting)
What would be funny is if....
shareholders launched a court battle to prevent the takeover, and claim compensation and/or charges against Elop and while that dragged through the courts for years (as they do) the new CEO decided that actually, Windows phone isn't the profit thing he wants and changes the OS platform to Android across the board of Lumia phones, dropping Windows Phone completely.
Years later when the courts finally decide that "meh" is the answer to the charges, Microsoft can go ahead with the purchase for the manufacturing arm, if they still wanted to, and Elop could then find a new job - as I doubt even Microsoft would appoint him as CEO whilst he was fighting an active court case.
Could happen? hehehe. and you never know, Nokia could turn things around like Samsung did with Android.
(and yes, they could do Meego, but frankly this isn't about making a success of the company for Microsoft's benefit..)
Why did this make the front page? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd expected something funny or at least insightful.
Sadly it seems neither.
But then neither is the actual situation. It is sad to see Nokia essentially go (yes, the corporation lives on, but without what had become the heart). And it is hard to see how there is an upside for Microsoft in this. A lose-lose, with bad actors taking home lots of cash.
Oh well, perhaps someday someone will turn it into a great play. It has all the seeds of a classic Greek tragedy (Hubris, fate, etc.)
Re:It shoud have suprised no one (Score:5, Interesting)
everyone know this was his goal from the beginning. You don't become CEO, and make a statement like that without the intention of selling.
I would submit that it didn't surprise *anyone*. The people who insisted that this outcome was not planned from the start are the same people who benefit from the results. (In other words, they were lying. Everyone knows it, so they don't have to feign surprise.) The people who were hoping against hope that this was not the case, really had to know in their heart of hearts that this was the intended end game. And the rest of us could see this coming from 4100 miles away.
This should be yet another lesson to companies across the planet. Your CEO may not be working for you. If what any executive says doesn't make sense, INVESTIGATE. Don't just take their word for it. Their goals may be entirely different from the company's goals.
Re: It shoud have suprised no one (Score:5, Interesting)
Maemo could easily have been adapted to run android apps as well and the capability was even commercially available before Elop took over. An android track at Nokia could have had a decent chance competing with Samsung. Having an OS that there are actually people who want would have put Nokia at least in a better position.
Considering Nokia was selling 10 times as many phones as Apple in 2010 they certainly were utterly crushing iphones.
So, Nokia certainly had a future and Elop certainly ran one of the greatest destructions of value in history. Hopefully he'll go on doing the same and finish what Ballmer's started at Microsoft.
Re: It shoud have suprised no one (Score:5, Interesting)
Everybody here wasn't interested in Symbian. Everybody knew at the time it was a dead end, even with their plethora of existing apps. S60 sucked as a smartphone OS, even to the developers who wrote for it.
Meego was the way forward. It was built using Qt on top of Linux. It wasn't as popular as Android outside of Nokia and Intel, but it had a future. Just before the first Meego phone (N900) launched, Elop took over. It was killed without even given a chance. To answer your question, that is why Meego never competed with Android and the iOS.
Right as Elop took over, Nokia took a 180 turn away from Meego. They spent 3, 4 years completely redeveloping their processes, completely revamping their developers, wasting countless resources that were Meego-based, just so they could put Windows Phone on their hardware. And to boot, they produced some less-than spectacular phones for an OS (Windows Phone 7) that was going to die before it hit the shelves.
All those wasted resources could have gone to Meego, and polishing what was already a fairly good OS. They had an OS in-house that was close to being ready. Elop threw it out and spent a fortune bringing in a third-party OS which suffered from the same flaws as Meego (namely not having a large app base) and had no advantages over it whatsoever.
I'll skip the uglier parts of the analogy, but if Meego was Nokia's baby, created to ensure the survival of the company, it was forcibly aborted by Microsoft two weeks before a full term. Then Nokia took in Microsoft's then-newborn, inbred child, despite having been told beforehand that it was born with severe genetic problems and whom the doctors had already said would not live for more than a few months. This child drained all of Nokia's resources in the process, the excuse being that this had to happen to prepare for Microsoft's next child. Microsoft's next child turned into, well, nothing too special. And you wonder why Nokia's now broke and ultimately had to sell itself to Microsoft.
What? Corporations are people, no?
Re:Looks like you were had (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole nokia board and elop included should be dragged out into the street and shot for their extreme mismanagement of the company.
Did you read TFA (yeah, I know)? It says there was a clause in his contract awarding him a bonus for making the company "saleable." It was sold to Microsoft. Success!