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The Elop Effect

B

BladeVenom

Lifer
http://communities-dominate.blogs.c...-failed-why-nokia-must-fire-ceo-elop-now.html An interesting article showing the effect Elop had on Nokia by switching to Windows.

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That about sums it up.
 
Wow, that article really puts Elops head on the block.

I'd argue that they couldn't stay with symbian for ever but the way he's handled the transition has been horrific.
 
It was folly to just focus on Windows Phone 7. This is what happens when you put all your eggs in one basket. What they should have done was make both WP7 and Android phones. This exclusivity didn't get them anything, especially now that Microsoft is making their own hardware.
 
It was a harsh cut, but ultimately a necessary one as well. Symbian was going nowhere really, unless they put a lot of work into it and got other people onboard. Windows phone has the best shot at the moment of becoming more mainstream and if Nokia can use it to get another foothold in the us market then that will greatly help Nokia. I'd love to get another Nokia phone, it they basically pulled out of our market once dumb phones became less popular.

A Nokia nexus would be pretty awesome though, but I get why they didn't go Android.
 
Demo24 said:
It was a harsh cut, but ultimately a necessary one as well. Symbian was going nowhere really, unless they put a lot of work into it and got other people onboard. Windows phone has the best shot at the moment of becoming more mainstream and if Nokia can use it to get another foothold in the us market then that will greatly help Nokia. I'd love to get another Nokia phone, it they basically pulled out of our market once dumb phones became less popular.

A Nokia nexus would be pretty awesome though, but I get why they didn't go Android.
Click to expand...

Problem was they were trying to replace symbians sizable market share with WPs nonexistant one.
 
WelshBloke said:
Problem was they were trying to replace symbians sizable market share with WPs nonexistant one.
Click to expand...
The problem is focusing on 12 months of data for a decision that set the path for that division for a decade or more.

RIM, through at least mid 2010 also had a very solid looking chart, if you projected it straight forward. They did not do the 'burning platform' thing, and have performed almost as badly (likely hard to choose which company looks worse, depending how you measure). Both companies enjoyed massive sales of legacy products which were certain to fade.

Nokia is at least 12 months ahead of RIM in transitioning to a long-term viable OS. Given the massive uncertainty about RIM in the corporate world, and the initial promise of WP7, I would classify Nokia's decision as high-risk/high-reward, but definitely defensible. iOS and Android are leading the charge, but there is certainly room for a more productivity-focused OS to beat them in a number of market segments.

There will be a time for reckoning, but that time is likely no sooner than Q1-2014, unless we are considering HP as an example worth repeating. I.e. A solid platform given about 6 weeks to shine and then dumped.
 
I agree with 3chordcharlie. Put that graph up against RIM as well - who, as charlie said, didn't burn their bridges. It doesn't look much better. Elop most definitely could have, and should have, handled things better but he didn't bungle things quite as badly as the graph and article suggest. If they'd done nothing, everything would have fallen apart anyway... although not quite as quickly as Elop managed to do. And I agree with charlie's assessment of Nokia's future... there is room for a 3rd OS focused on corporations... the outcome hasn't been decided.
 
Elop only accelerated what was going to happen anyway. Symbian had absolutely no traction in the US and was fading away in the rest of Europe.

I also have issue with people wanting to claim that Android would have "saved" Nokia as it hasn't saved any other phone OEM besides Samsung. HTC is the only other company making profits at this point besides Apple and Samsung, and at the rate they are moving year-over-year, it may soon slip into losses.

You cannot go into a market and assume that similar actions will produce different results. There's no way Nokia is geared up to produce the hundreds of phone variations that honestly makes Samsung successful in the first place. And honestly, none of the US carriers want yet another Android phone to place in their stores. Certainly Verizon has said that they want to have a 3rd OS in the market so they aren't beholden to the whims of Apple and Google.
 
WelshBloke said:
Wow, that article really puts Elops head on the block.

I'd argue that they couldn't stay with symbian for ever but the way he's handled the transition has been horrific.
Click to expand...

They should have at least kept it around until they could transition to something else in earnest. Windows Phone 7 getting the axe pretty much screwed them over even more, so really they should have only been announcing that they're ending development when they get Windows Phone 8 devices out.
 
Mopetar said:
They should have at least kept it around until they could transition to something else in earnest. Windows Phone 7 getting the axe pretty much screwed them over even more, so really they should have only been announcing that they're ending development when they get Windows Phone 8 devices out.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure how keeping something around that clearly wasn't going to survive in the future would have been a good idea since it costs money to develop it. The decline of Symbian started long before Elop arrived, he simply formalized it and cut off spending more money on it.

And I don't think any consumer would honestly have continued to buy a Symbian phone when it's obvious Nokia was putting its best resources into another operating system. I think consumers are smarter than that (just like how it makes no sense to buy a Windows 7 PC this close to the launch of Windows 8 if you can hold off and wait).
 
Despite being outdated their Symbian phones are still outselling their Windows phone.

Windows was already losing market share before Nokia adopted it.

To people who say they couldn't just do nothing, they weren't, they were developing Meego. Considered Meego's limited release, it would have done better than their Windows phone did.
 
BladeVenom said:
Despite being outdated their Symbian phones are still outselling their Windows phone.
Click to expand...

And probably making no money or actually costing them money. I don't care how many widgets you sell, if you have to do it at cost or a small loss, it's better to sell a small number of gadgets that actually make money.

Windows was already losing market share before Nokia adopted it.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't even lump Windows Mobile and Windows Phone together as they're so different. It would be better to say that Microsoft was losing market share.

To people who say they couldn't just do nothing, they weren't, they were developing Meego. Considered Meego's limited release, it would have done better than their Windows phone did.
Click to expand...

MeeGo was pretty much an internal mess and not the silver bullet that everyone expected it to be. Here's a really good article about all of the redesign work and other problems that impacted MeeGo over its development cycle. There were a lot of bad decisions made early on that pretty much doomed the project or seriously crippled the chances of getting a product out in a timely manner.

They certainly haven't done themselves any favors by announcing that they were axing Symbian before they had anything else in the pipe to replace it, but continuing to spend development effort on it would just be a waste of resources.
 
Mopetar said:
MeeGo was pretty much an internal mess and not the silver bullet that everyone expected it to be. Here's a really good article about all of the redesign work and other problems that impacted MeeGo over its development cycle. There were a lot of bad decisions made early on that pretty much doomed the project or seriously crippled the chances of getting a product out in a timely manner.
Click to expand...

The N9 started shipping in September 2011. Despite the delays, it still came out before their Windows phones.
 
They should have jumped on the Android bandwagon IMHO. Instead they took something like $250 million from Microsoft to only do Windows. Stupid move.
 
Nokia's problem was waiting it out with Symbian too long, and wasting time on meego, Elop had nothing to do with that. Windows phone thing isn't played out yet, and only Samsung is thriving in Android, so that wasn't a sure thing either, only time will tell.

Nokia should of been on android from day one but at the time Symbian was doing great, the fall of Nokia (and RIM) may have been unavoidable 1.5 years ago when Elop took the helm.
 
Killing your current product by talking up the next one.

It's from the days when mobile computing looked like this:
Osborne_1_open.jpg
 
Elop definitely messed up the transition from symbian to wp7. Guy announced a deal with ms and tells the world they're ditching symbian. But they didn't have a product to sell until 7-8 months later. Sales plummeted.
They was nothing wrong with multi-os approach. Look at Samsung. They promote multiple os
 
dagamer34 said:
Please show me a successful Android OEM not named Samsung.
Click to expand...

HTC was doing well until they stopped innovating and re-releasing the same phone over and over and over again. Moto kept one upping themselves and released so many phones in so little time they turned off customers (also almost all of their phones are Verizon only). Samsung is the only one that went from bad design (many confusing names/models) to good (single name for flagship across all carriers). That's obviously not the only reason, but I'd say it's a big part of it.

My point is they didn't have to go exclusive. Why didn't they simply make phones for both Android and Windows? Instead they took Microsoft's money and sadly couldn't even beat the older Windows Mobile.
 
Not sure if it's Elop's fault so much as WP7 turning out to be a dog. If the game was WP8 all along, as MS fans now claim, why the heck did Nokia make its switch SO far in advance with no real transition strategy?

If WP8 succeeds, I see Samsung and HTC reaping a lot of those rewards too. It's sorta no-win for Nokia.
 
Red Storm said:
HTC was doing well until they stopped innovating and re-releasing the same phone over and over and over again. Moto kept one upping themselves and released so many phones in so little time they turned off customers (also almost all of their phones are Verizon only). Samsung is the only one that went from bad design (many confusing names/models) to good (single name for flagship across all carriers). That's obviously not the only reason, but I'd say it's a big part of it.

My point is they didn't have to go exclusive. Why didn't they simply make phones for both Android and Windows? Instead they took Microsoft's money and sadly couldn't even beat the older Windows Mobile.
Click to expand...

I've never seen a company support multiple operating systems equally. Whenever you look internally, one ALWAYS gets more support than the other.

It is not a coincidence that most of the OEMs that have made Android tablets in the past are now jumping on the Windows 8/RT train with far more interesting designs. We never saw anything like the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga or Sony Vaio Duo 11 when those companies were making Android tablets. And none of those companies certainly came out with 3-4 different models at a time.

Companies don't do separate product teams with equal development resources very well.
 
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