Stephen Elop’s Nokia Adventure
A nice article by Business Week on Stephen Elop, CEO of Nokia. “Market share dwindling, stock cratering, persistent takeover talk. How the CEO is trying to lead Nokia past its epic fail”.
Worth a read =)
Much of what Elop had to say wasn’t news to his audience, but it was still distressing. In his measured telling, Apple and Google (GOOG) had changed the industry from handset-focused to software-focused. Symbian had fallen too far behind to have any hope of catching up. Worse, the company’s great hope for the future—a software platform created with chipmaker Intel (INTC), called MeeGo—wasn’t ready to pick up the slack. He tried to negotiate a deal with Google to run Android, but Google refused to give the world’s biggest phonemaker any advantages over its smaller partners, meaning Nokia’s corps of 11,600 engineers would have next to no ability to add their own innovations to Google’s software. “It just didn’t feel right,” Elop says to the crowd. “We’d be just another company distributing Android. That’s not Nokia! We need to fight!”
Silence.
For a moment, Elop, 47, lays into the complacency he sees settling over the company. When he asks how many people in the crowd use an iPhone or Android device, few hands go up. “That upsets me—not because some of you are using iPhones, but because only a small number of people are using iPhones. I’d rather people have the intellectual curiosity to understand what we’re up against.”
Full Article: Stephen Elop’s Nokia Adventure