Nokia lost 17 million euros a day it's market value while Elop was CEO of Nokia. I guess he is going down in the history as one of the worst CEO's. Though, some say he wasn't a mole but was hired to sinking ship but somehow it is hard for me to believe from his actions.
Nokia (as a cell phone company) died the day the iPhone came out. They were too big and bureaucratic to react with competitive products, and there's no way you can turn that around (regardless of CEO) on the timescale that consumer cell-phone purchasing decisions are made.
Note that Blackberry, Motorola, and Palm also died, and LG and HTC aren't doing so hot.
That's not exactly true. Nokia pretty much owned the featurephone market and had all the right relationships with telcos that were the primary channel.
The excuse they were too large and bureaucratic to change does not fly when you are the CEO - he had the power to make the required changes. Nokia also had good technology, on par with Android, at least. The mistake was not to realize that iOS's and Android's strength is not on their technology, but the rich ecosystem built around it.
CEOs have less power to steer the ship than you think. The main assets of a corporation in a knowledge industry are the particular skillsets of its employees and the web of personal relationships between them. If the knowledge required to adapt to a market shift doesn't exist within the company, then the only option that a CEO has is to bring it inside the company, and assimilate it into the existing web of relationships without having the existing power structures reject the new talent. This is challenging in the best of times, with the most forceful CEO, and virtually impossible when you've got only a couple years to live, a complacent workforce, and a board that's only interested in salvaging what they can.
Assuming that you're right that iOS and Android's strength is their ecosystem rather than their technology, there's no way Nokia could've capitalized on that. They couldn't bring on hardware partners, like Android, because all of the hardware partners were their competitors and wouldn't trust anything they did. They had no expertise in engaging independent developers; Nokia has never had a product where they've had to, and their OS (Symbian) was reportedly a pain in the ass to develop for. And while they knew how to build a mass-market consumer product, they didn't know how to build a mass market consumer platform - first-hand experience of what consumers could do with an open-ended computational device wasn't in their DNA the way it is in Apple & Google's.
CEOs cannot make magic, but Nokia had everything they needed inside the company except perhaps the willingness to realize the market had changed and that they had no longer a viable application layer. That much was evident since the first Android - it would be a two horse race and Android was the only one they could ride.
Except they weren't so strong on software and platforms. Their programmers had mostly worked on feature phones, and Symbian was made by an external company at the time.
The first reaction to the iPhone was to buy Symbian in 2008, which in retrospect is so wrong that's surprising, but the vast majority of people at all level (people in the street, geeks, executives) didn't understand the real change that iPhone was bringing until maybe 2009-2010.
Then Nokia tried to fix the software problem buying Qt. That ended up as being a mistake as well. Qt was built on the idea that you can create a UI framework that unifies all platforms; that was realistic when the support OS were all desktop and thus similar in main concepts and interaction patterns; Qt also nominally ran on embedded at the time, but the experience was suboptimal at best. So Nokia drank the idea that adding "another backend" to Qt was the solution, also because developers loved Qt. But of course it's not that easy. It took them 2-3 years to come up with a new codebase that could handle the new interaction patterns (QML) and that's a geological era in smartphones. At that point, they still didn't have a complete working solution for a qt iPhone killer, and Elop had to cut the chord. That day, the fate of Nokia was already written.
Once upon a time there was the presentation of the first Maemo device to the employees. The feedback about it becoming an hit if GSM support was added, was just ignored.
Very few also had the opportunity to see a Nokia 7710 live besides us, as it was quickly killed after a few months on sale.
Also the famous blog post about how shitty Symbian C++ was, that only Nokia employees would be willing to use it.
Some years ago The Register had a pretty good report about the internal politics going on there.
>Prior to joining Nokia in 1985, Ollila worked for eight years in corporate banking at Citibank's London and Helsinki offices, and when he joined Nokia his tasks involved international investment deals. A year later, in 1986, Ollila found himself as head of finance during Nokia's renewal under then CEO Kari Kairamo. He was appointed as chief of the mobile phones section in 1990, and CEO two years later in 1992. When Ollila first came to power, the company had suffered from internal disputes and had had a financial crisis for a number of years.
>As CEO of Nokia he has led the strategy that restructured the former industrial conglomerate into one of the major companies in the mobile phone and telecommunications infrastructure markets.
>In 1999, Ollila seriously considered taking part in the Finnish presidential election, following a request from a member of the National Coalition Party, Sauli Niinistö[citation needed] who was at that time Finnish finance minister and who later became Speaker of the Finnish Parliament. This was in spite the fact that Ollila belongs to a different party, the Finnish Centre party, which he has been involved with since his activities in student politics at the University of Helsinki[citation needed].
>He was CEO of Nokia from 1999 to 2006. He was succeeded as CEO by Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. On 15 September 2010, he announced he intended to step down from the position of Chairman in 2012[2] and did so on 3 May 2012.[3]
>Ollila is the Chairman of the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (ETLA), the most reputed economic and social studies think tank in Finland. Since 2005, he is chairman of the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT).
That doesn't look like someone who would trash a company they built for whatever conspiracy theories people cook up about how Elop got hired.
It's funny how Microsoft is ascribed the superpowers of a comic book super villian around these parts while they barely break 3% in the mobile market.
Nokia isn't dead though. They are a top-tier player in network equipment along with Ericsson and Huawei.
The company is profitable, its market cap is around $26 billion USD, and they recently announced a major deal to acquire Alcatel-Lucent. They seem to have survived the amputation of the mobile phone division quite well.
Buying Alcatel-Lucent suggests to me they aren't all that healthy, based in part on my working at Lucent in 2001 and paying attention to that field since then. And "amputating" what was once more than 2/3rds of the company, going back to 2002, yikes. But, still, you might be right depending on how you define this sort of business health.
Scary how their revenue peaked the year the iPhone came out....
