
Jean-Louis Gassée: Nokia should fire Elop and the board should go too - mtgx
http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2188976/nokia-elop-board-jean-louis-gassee
======
mtgx
My favorite part is that Nokia didn't want to go with Android because they
would have to depend on someone else, and yet they've completely given up
control to Microsoft. At least with Android they would've had some control of
what they put on their devices and how different they look from the
competition's devices, in both hardware and software.

~~~
rogerbinns
With Microsoft they only have one other party to depend on, and they know they
are a big deal to that party. Heck the rumour is that Microsoft pays Nokia
$200 per Windows phone shipped. The reality is that the success of Windows
phone is tied to the success of Nokia.

If using Android Google wouldn't have been able to play favourites much with
Nokia. (See how they treat Motorola who they own.) If Nokia was on Android,
the success of the platform wouldn't be that relevant to the success of Nokia.

So do you want to be a big fish in a little pond where the success of the pond
depends on your success, or a small fish in a large pond where you are mostly
irrelevant, but have more "control"?

Nokia's fundamental problem is that they have difficulty executing on software
development. Getting someone else to do substantial chunks of development
helps, but I've never seen anything indicating they have figured out
development yet. So even if they had gone Android, what evidence is there they
would have done it well?

~~~
muuh-gnu
> So do you want to be a big fish in a little pond

But how is this a little pond? Basically every other big player offering
Android phones also offer Windows Phones. If Nokia starts making money with
windows Phones, everybody else will also start making money with windows
phones. If the pond grows, all other fish will also grow and consume the
growing pond, so Nokias share will remain the same. The pond is only little as
there is no money in it.

From all the other big players, only Nokia for some reason limited itself to
offering only Windows phones. If they think their Android phones couldn't beat
other Android phones, how exactly are their Windows phones supposed to beat
other Windows phones? If they somehow can apply a magic formula to make
Windows Phones a success, what hinders them from applying that same formula to
Android?

Nokia didnt want to become just another Android manufacturer and get a small
piece of the big Android pie, instead they've become just another Windows
Phone manufacturer and will get a small piece of the small Windows Phone pie.

~~~
lawdawg
My interpretation as to why they went with Windows Phone:

1\. The $$$, it's hard to turn down more than $1 billion dollars in a year
(and probably more per device sold). Just makes the stupid gamble harder to
turn down. 2\. Nokia can still go with Android at anytime (and maybe they will
once their exclusivity contract ends with Microsoft).

~~~
silvestrov
But $1 billion isn't really that much money for a company of Nokia's size
(122,148 employees) when the company goes into a tailspin.

It's $8,187 per employee. That's 1-2 months of wages!

~~~
PakG1
Yes, but if all things are equal, it's still enough money to fund the
development of a new phone. Now, the question is all things are equal.

------
Spearchucker
Having done a freelance gig at Nokia, working on some Windows Phone stuff pre-
Mango, I can say that Nokia is, and always has been, fully aware of the WP
roadmap. The Lumias were brought out quickly, but have never been
representative of what Nokia is capable of.

Don't fire Elop, retain the board as-is, deal with the fact that there will be
incompatibilities. And wait for a Nokia running Windows Phone 8 and a Pureview
camera. This strategy has legs.

~~~
jeswin
Completely agree. Like Elop said, it has become a battle of eco-systems.
Sticking to Symbian would have meant being where Blackberry is now; where
except the delusional CEO no one cares about version 10 whenever it comes out.

Early reviews of Windows Phone 8 have been uniformly positive. And given
Elop's background, he must have known this way back. This is all according to
plan, and like you said a device with Pureview could turn this around.

~~~
spiralpolitik
I disagree. They had the N9 which was/is a superb device. If they had
refocused on migrating their Symbian existing ecosystem around that platform
then I think they would been in a much better place today than they are.

The risk Nokia has with Windows Phone is it ends up being one vendor of many
and doesn't control the software. It means that they can't amortize their
costs across the ecosystem as full stack vendors can which makes them very
vulnerable to other vendors bleeding them on the hardware margins.

It also risks that Microsoft might Surface them with their own device leaving
them ultimately with nothing.

~~~
jeswin
For the ordinary user, the N9 doesn't have any of the niceties that you see on
iPhone or Android. It was going to remain that way; there was no way Nokia
would have convinced people to write software for it. Also, the tooling around
Maemo/Meego+ and Symbian doesn't compare to what iOS, Android or even what
Windows Phone has.

I have owned half a dozen Nokia devices, and really I want them to succeed.
They really didn't have a choice.

~~~
blub
I have to partly disagree with you about N9.

True, it's unfinished and the recent update for PR 1.3 is probably its last.
The development environment is not as mature as iOS, since the Qt SDK didn't
have as many years of use.

On the other hand Qt and QML are in a completely different league compared to
the primitive way of building UIs in Android or iOS. Nokia hit the jackpot
with declarative UIs, and then completely failed to build and support a
product around them.

e.g: Think about iOS - you either code your UI in Objective-C or use a
designer. Borland was doing this with its C++ Builder and Delphi lines in
1996. On Android you had to edit XML files by hand for the longest time. WP
tooling is the most modern of the three you've mentioned. C# is much nicer
that the aged Obj-C and XAML is also a declarative language, but the XML
format is bloated and completely uneditable outside of specialized design
tools.

~~~
daliusd
I completely agree here about QML. While Visual Studio allows to make drag-
and-drop development what is very nice for beginners but you should support
your apps as well and QML wins here.

------
aeturnum
The more time goes by, the better Elops bet on windows phone looks to me. Now
that Google owns a device maker, developing for android is less attractive as
you'll always be dealing, in part, with Googles hardware divisions priorities.
On the other hand, Nokia is, more-or-less, Microsoft's hardware division.
Other people make windows phones, but Nokia is the biggest player and their
best bet. That's a pretty good place to be in if you're not going to make your
own OS.

Of course, maybe windows phone will be a total failure, but given the
alternative is being a "me too" Android developer I think it's a reasonable
strategy.

~~~
hristov
Google has shown nothing that indicates they will favor Motorola over anyone
else. Furthermore, the point of open source is that you can always fork the
software if you do not like the way the main branch is going. Forking Android
would not be easy but it is a possibility and it forces Google to play nice.

I do not know what is the big problem with being a "me too Android developer".
If you are going to use someone else's OS, might as well use one that is
wildly successful already. So no it is a terrible decision and it continues to
be a terrible decision as Windows phone market share languishes.

~~~
spiralpolitik
First up outside of Samsung and HTC none of the other Android vendors were as
of Q1 2012 operating at a profit. Everybody else is bleeding red ink. I would
expect that several of the second tier Android vendors to throw in the towel
over the next few years as their losses become unsustainable.

Secondly margins in the Android world are going to get much tighter. Google
has essentially slit other the Android tablet makers throats by selling the
Nexus 7 at cost. Effectively this gives the vendors the choice of competing
with the Nexus 7 and Kindle (both of which are sold with little or no margin
in hope to recoup via the app and content ecosystem) in the 7" space or the
take on the iPad in the 10" space. Essentially the way the market is heading
unless you control the whole stack, your margins will be impossible to sustain
against those that do.

While Google has not yet favored Motorola, I'm sure Samsung is watching very
closely especially after the release of the Nexus 7. I would not be at all
surprised if Samsung forks Android to become a full stack vendor. I believe
that they have the Cyanogen developers on staff already so it wouldn't be a
huge hardship for them to do that providing they could get a content ecosystem
off the ground.

~~~
hristov
I do not know if you have noticed but Nokia is also bleeding red ink. This
whole idea of the Android market being too competitive is wrong, because it
mistakenly segregates the Android market from the WP one.

There is no such separation. At least not on the WP side. In the real world,
in almost every wireless store in America there is a stand with a bunch of
phones where Android phones sit next to Windows Phones, Blackberry's and
sometimes iPhones. A shopper comes in and looks at them all and decides which
one he wants. So Android are in the same market as the Windows Phone and the
iPhone.

Yes there is high competition in Android. Which means that there is high
competition in smart phones period. Nokia are feeling and will feel the
competition and the pressure for low margins regardless of whether they make
Windows Phones or Android phones.

~~~
tmzt
They sell WP phones in stores?? (Half joking here)

------
jeswin
If I had Gassee's track record I would refrain from criticizing.

1981-90 - Exited when Apple was on a downward spiral.

1991-02 - BeOS, didn't get anywhere.

2004- - Palm, didn't get anywhere either.

Come on.

~~~
melling
BeOS was a great product. Apple almost bought it. Part of their problem was
that Microsoft was charging people for DOS on every PC that shipped,
regardless of whether it actually shipped with DOS. Once Microsoft did that,
it pretty much killed a other PC operating systems. The Microsoft of the 90's
was lethal. Nothing compares to them today.

~~~
taligent
BeOS was a great technical experiment and a terrible product.

It had no drivers, no printing support, no decent SDK and was generally
immature across the board. It would have been a disaster for Apple to use it
who actually had real customers to support. I really wonder whether BeOS was
ever a serious consideration over NeXT.

~~~
tsunamifury
The talent who made it ended up managing the creation and development of the
iPod though.

------
edwinnathaniel
... and replace them with who?

... and the new regime will do what?

... so Elop can't do X,Y,Z but why not ask him to hire the right people to do
X,Y,Z?

How fast can Nokia turn Symbian around into some sort of magical software that
can please developers and users all-around the world?

Going with Windows Phone may be the not-so-bad alternative for short-term
while stabilizing the company (i.e.: moving from old regime to a new regime is
very very very tough, if you know what I mean).

Once the company has stabilized (if they can...), even though you get a hit by
siding with Microsoft, start your plan B: build your own ecosystems.

You don't bulldoze your way out of mountain of problems. You come up with a
step-by-step plans.

------
ChuckMcM
I find these sorts of things (chewing over previous decisions) to be rather
painful and less than productive. I'd much rather talk about solutions moving
forward since really, that is all you can do. I'm all in favor of figuring out
what information or skill might have given you better insight in the past but
that's really as far as I would go there.

Nokia's bread and butter has always been 'feature' phones, and that is
something they really can't afford to give away. One strategy I could
certainly see them taking would be to start with Android, replace the user
land part with an application to run a feature phone, and push the footprint
of that software down to allow for the least expensive hardware to run it.

Then leverage the core competence in the Android kernel to create the best of
class kernel for a Nokia branded 'smart' phone.

I do wonder however if Elop is the guy to push such a strategy.

~~~
tmzt
And do what with it? The transition is happening too fast for that. Nokia was
always the one to push features down the stack (S60 to S40) but ZTE can do
that cheaper with Android. The reality Nokia never saw was that Android is two
systems, 2.x is S40 and 4.x+ is S60. Both run on a Linux kernel and run
basically the same apps, with games running better on newer hardware.

------
correctifier
Nokia had reached the end of the road on Symbian and needed a new direction.

This is a risky thing to do and going with Windows Phone gave Nokia the
backing a very large and still influential company. Going with anything else
would have meant going in alone. This includes Android which would be going
alone into an already crowded market.

The current situation isn't great for Nokia, but they are in a deal that has
the potential to help both companies, Nokia with short term financial help and
Microsoft with a strong vendor to create showcase phones and the distribution
network to get them into consumers hands.

Contrast this to RIM who tried to go in alone.

EDIT: fixed typo

~~~
tmzt
Microsoft killed RIM a few years ago, the monster is just taking a while to
succumb to it's injuries. Microsoft shipped an update to Exchange that enabled
wireless syncing and push to WM5 devices, and licensed to client to Apple for
iPhone and some of the Android OEMs, then finally to Google. This killed the
need for BES. The carriers opened up real IP0 connectivity for iPhone and
Android as well as WM eliminating the need for the BB internet service and
email, and the extra fees payed to RIM. That part of the business isn't dead
yet, and the BB is still popular in a number of markets, but RIM is unlikely
to succeed in the US with a tohc device

~~~
correctifier
While that contributed to the fall of RIM, what really did them in was that
they didn't have a real operating system that could be leveraged to properly
compete with Apple and Android.

------
JVIDEL
Maybe he knows what he's talking about: Apple was doing great when he was in
charge of products, and after Sculley fired him Spindler almost destroyed the
company.

