6 ms·

Such a shame trojan horse Elop tanked the company by partnering with Microsoft, I'd have loved to see more of their Linux based phones, I've still got a Nokia N

Such a shame trojan horse Elop tanked the company by partnering with Microsoft, I'd have loved to see more of their Linux based phones, I've still got a Nokia N9 which has to be my favourite handset so far. I hope Ubuntu for phones can gain at least some traction.

pjmlp 10y ago
He wasn't a trojan horse, how long is this lie keep being repeated?! The Nokia board themselves had a clause on the contract with Elop that he would get a nice bonus if he managed to sell the company! I blame those executives looking at their own bank accounts than Elop, which like any manager was just making sure the contract would be fulfilled. Lots of press already discussed this in Finland.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Are there any articles in english about this ? Why would the Nokia board throw this huge empire in the ground ? They won more by selling the mobile phone div. than by trying to compete ?
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Yes, here is some information. "Elop was entitled to immediate share price performance bonus in case of a “change of control” situation… such as selling of Nokia’s handset division. " http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/09/24/nokia-admits-giving-misleading-information-about-elops-compensation/#71a7abcc21d3 http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/09/24/nokia-a... http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/09/now-we-know-why-nokias-elop-had-a-25m-personal-bonus-clause-from-the-nokia-board-if-he-was-able-to-s.html http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/09/now-we-... There are lots of others sources if you search for "nokia board Elop clauses"-
doikor 10y ago
Nokia tanked well before Elop came around. Basically the refusal to accept the fact that Symbian was going nowhere killed them. If they did the switch sooner (while they still had some market share) to pretty much anything else I think they would have had a chance.
- bitL 10y ago
  That's a common myth, actually at the time Elop got in, Nokia's sales were still growing, though not at the speed of Android. That would have given them a nice cushion for a few years as many people loved the brand and were loyal (EU + India). In the US they weren't basically present as they didn't want to play the ball with cellular carriers. After Elop issued his burning platform memo, Nokia fell off-the-cliff as channels/carriers realized there is no future in selling Symbian phones and stopped ordering/subsidizing them. Mind you, Nokia dwarfed Samsung in market share at the time having way more resources - if they decided to go with Android, they could have been the leader Samsung became. Probably even going with MeeGo would have been way better than with MS.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    Sales were growing via the Asha low cost brand, Nokia was in deep trouble and heading in the wrong direction way before Elop. Nokia didn't fail because of the choise of an OS, it failed because they did not embraced the new business model, they were still selling and designing phones when everyone was already selling platforms.
    - riskable 10y ago
      No, just no. Nokia did fail because they chose an OS that failed. They bet everything on Windows Mobile and lost. You can't say with a straight face that if they choose Android instead that they would be in the same situation. Nokia could've had pro quality cameras that happen to be phones out long before any of the other Android phone makers. They blew it. Partnering with Microsoft was a huge mistake.
      - 10y ago
jpalomaki 10y ago
While the Nokia management did do wrong choices, they were clearly not stupid people. Nokia did after all do quite well for many years under their command. When the mobile phone business had gone south, they must have thought about different scenarios and how to save the rest of the company in case mobile phones don't recover. At that time, it would have been quite reasonable to come to the conclusion that if Nokia jumped fully to the Microsoft bandwagon, they might be eventually buy the business for strategic reasons even if did not do so well. And if this was then plan, then recruiting a Microsoft man and person with good relationship to Microsoft CEO was a reasonable choice.
- vesinisa 10y ago
  They definitely had not given up hope on the mobile phone business when they chose Windows Phone. At the time they were still one of the largest phone manufacturers and would have probably stayed relevant to this day if they had chosen Android. Microsoft told them all sorts of bulls*hit about how Windows Phone was as good as Android or at least was going to be by the next version. They thought it was plausible that together with MS they could break the Apple-Google duopoly, and since MS gave a massively sweeter OEM deal than Google, WP it was. Note that the board fully supported Elops actions at this point, it was not a backroom deal. Once Nokia engineers got to actually working with WP they found out it was technically in far worse shape than MS had led them believe, but at that point it was too late to backpedal to Android. It took almost half a decade and four huge upgrades (WP 7.5, WP 8, WP 8.1 and W10) before WP became somewhat competitive to Android, but that was much longer than what Nokia could reason financially, so the best option left was to ditch the sunken phone business to the highest bidder. Microsoft was luckily still believing they could break the duopoly so Nokia again got a pretty sweet deal from them.
Zigurd 10y ago
Tomi Ahonen has a very detailed history of the tragedy: http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/ http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/ Tl;dr: A Microsoft "trojan horse" bet Nokia's future on Windows Phone. Then he cut the lifeboats off the davits by killing Nokia's internal smartphone OS and phone projects, and an Android-based phone, and wantonly destroyed Nokia's chances to back off a fatal decision. One of the worst, most malign CEOs in history.
- belltaco 10y ago
  I guess you(and several others, including the parent poster) have no clue how boards of companies work.
rayiner 10y ago
Nokia was dead no matter what. The only way to make a significant profit selling Android phones is massive vertical integration like Samsung. Otherwise, you're talking about a low-margin high-volume business that Nokia could never have sustained in comparison to Chinese and Taiwanese competitors like HTC and Lenovo. Like what's the point of this new Nokia phone? It'll be commodity Qualcomm hardware running a commodity Android OS. There is no reason to pay any premium for it, especially when you can get a cheap Nexus phone.
- fossuser 10y ago
  They did make beautiful hardware though - at a time where everything that wasn't an iPhone was plastic garbage (with the exception of HTC which for some reason was largely ignored in comparison to Samsung). As someone who had a Nexus One, S and Galaxy Nexus I really wanted an android phone with really nice hardware (Nokia N9 plus android would have been amazing), but after the Microsoft partnership and the iPhone 5 having turn by turn navigation I bailed. Even today there aren't a lot of nice hardware options on the android side of things.
  - amiga-workbench 10y ago
    The only "nice" Android hardware I see now is coming from Sony. Understated black slabs, no lazy bulging camera lens protruding from the back, no half-arsed slapped-on fingerprint sensor mucking up the chin and no strange amorphous blob-like body shapes.
    - e12e 10y ago
      And a pretty good support for Open Source, unfortunately not a given in the Android marketplace: http://developer.sonymobile.com/open-devices/ http://developer.sonymobile.com/open-devices/
    - fossuser 10y ago
      Those phones do look nice - unfortunately for me google dropped the ball so hard with ignoring google voice for years and pushing a broken hangouts SMS integration that iMessage came and ate their cake. Not willing to leave now mostly because of iMessage (though iOS scrolling is nice too - probably lack of JVM?). Shame too because google was ahead of the game on a lot of this stuff, products just weren't focused.
nivla 10y ago
I have heard this statement so many times and I feel it doesn't justify the truth. Here are some counter points. Nokia came back into my view when they started launching the Lumia phones. It was slick, fast and solid phones with amazing camera. Any mention of Nokia here on HN and Reddit before that was met with DOA as the top comment. When they started releasing the Lumia phones, the tune started to switch to "if they made an android phone, I would totally buy!". Remember the whole silly fiasco with even Siri calling Lumia 900 the best phone in the market? [1] I think Microsoft gave it a premiere spot with Windows Mobile which would have otherwise gone unnoticeable in the Android market. Despite me jumping ship from Windows Phone, I still believe Windows Mobile was one of the best (*subjective) of all mobile OSes. Its extremely fast, less resource hog and well designed (flatness before it got trendy). Given the stereotypes about Windows OS, the mobile OS seemed nothing like it. Heck, I bought a $15 Lumia phone from Best buy and it seems like a $200 buttery smooth phone. Lumia also had good set of apps, which created an amazing group of loyal buyers. Offline GPS - You could download the maps for the entire world on your phone. Offline Radio - Download the entire mix radio to you phone and use it where you went. Camera Apps - Nokia cinematography, Live Images, Selfie, Panorama. However, I do believe that Microsoft's Nokia buyout was a stupid idea. Nokia was amazing at advertising, viral marketing and creating a brand loyalty. Microsoft however sucks at both advertisements and marketing but they seem to be very good at pissing off even their loyal followers. [1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/255508/siri_says_nokia_lumia_900_not_apple_iphone_is_the_best_smartphone_ever.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/255508/siri_says_nokia_lumia_...
- aeturnum 10y ago
  To echo nivla's point: One of my favorite phones was the Lumia 950. Its fatal flaw was the lack of app support, but everything else was fantastic. The OS was fast and easy to use, the apps that were there were well done, the build was fantastic, etc. Instead of being "just another" high-end android, Nokia got to be the flagship phone for an entire OS. Today it seems like a crazy call, but it's easy to understand why they would pick WP over Android.
- rndmio 10y ago
  I wonder if you're from the US, because I heard that Nokia as a brand never really quite took off in the way it did Europe. Over here before smartphones came along you were pretty much mad to buy anything except a Nokia. So why didn't it work with windows mobile? It did to start with, people bought them because of the Nokia name, but the lack of apps for the platform killed that good will pretty quickly. Combine their superb industrial design with android and it would have been significantly more potent.

pjmlp 10y ago

He wasn't a trojan horse, how long is this lie keep being repeated?! The Nokia board themselves had a clause on the contract with Elop that he would get a nice bonus if he managed to sell the company! I blame those executives looking at their own bank accounts than Elop, which like any manager was just making sure the contract would be fulfilled. Lots of press already discussed this in Finland.

agumonkey 10y ago
Are there any articles in english about this ? Why would the Nokia board throw this huge empire in the ground ? They won more by selling the mobile phone div. than by trying to compete ?
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Yes, here is some information. "Elop was entitled to immediate share price performance bonus in case of a “change of control” situation… such as selling of Nokia’s handset division. " http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/09/24/nokia-admits-giving-misleading-information-about-elops-compensation/#71a7abcc21d3 http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/09/24/nokia-a... http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/09/now-we-know-why-nokias-elop-had-a-25m-personal-bonus-clause-from-the-nokia-board-if-he-was-able-to-s.html http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/09/now-we-... There are lots of others sources if you search for "nokia board Elop clauses"-

doikor 10y ago

Nokia tanked well before Elop came around. Basically the refusal to accept the fact that Symbian was going nowhere killed them. If they did the switch sooner (while they still had some market share) to pretty much anything else I think they would have had a chance.

bitL 10y ago
That's a common myth, actually at the time Elop got in, Nokia's sales were still growing, though not at the speed of Android. That would have given them a nice cushion for a few years as many people loved the brand and were loyal (EU + India). In the US they weren't basically present as they didn't want to play the ball with cellular carriers. After Elop issued his burning platform memo, Nokia fell off-the-cliff as channels/carriers realized there is no future in selling Symbian phones and stopped ordering/subsidizing them. Mind you, Nokia dwarfed Samsung in market share at the time having way more resources - if they decided to go with Android, they could have been the leader Samsung became. Probably even going with MeeGo would have been way better than with MS.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  Sales were growing via the Asha low cost brand, Nokia was in deep trouble and heading in the wrong direction way before Elop. Nokia didn't fail because of the choise of an OS, it failed because they did not embraced the new business model, they were still selling and designing phones when everyone was already selling platforms.
  - riskable 10y ago
    No, just no. Nokia did fail because they chose an OS that failed. They bet everything on Windows Mobile and lost. You can't say with a straight face that if they choose Android instead that they would be in the same situation. Nokia could've had pro quality cameras that happen to be phones out long before any of the other Android phone makers. They blew it. Partnering with Microsoft was a huge mistake.
    - 10y ago

jpalomaki 10y ago

While the Nokia management did do wrong choices, they were clearly not stupid people. Nokia did after all do quite well for many years under their command. When the mobile phone business had gone south, they must have thought about different scenarios and how to save the rest of the company in case mobile phones don't recover. At that time, it would have been quite reasonable to come to the conclusion that if Nokia jumped fully to the Microsoft bandwagon, they might be eventually buy the business for strategic reasons even if did not do so well. And if this was then plan, then recruiting a Microsoft man and person with good relationship to Microsoft CEO was a reasonable choice.

vesinisa 10y ago
They definitely had not given up hope on the mobile phone business when they chose Windows Phone. At the time they were still one of the largest phone manufacturers and would have probably stayed relevant to this day if they had chosen Android. Microsoft told them all sorts of bulls*hit about how Windows Phone was as good as Android or at least was going to be by the next version. They thought it was plausible that together with MS they could break the Apple-Google duopoly, and since MS gave a massively sweeter OEM deal than Google, WP it was. Note that the board fully supported Elops actions at this point, it was not a backroom deal. Once Nokia engineers got to actually working with WP they found out it was technically in far worse shape than MS had led them believe, but at that point it was too late to backpedal to Android. It took almost half a decade and four huge upgrades (WP 7.5, WP 8, WP 8.1 and W10) before WP became somewhat competitive to Android, but that was much longer than what Nokia could reason financially, so the best option left was to ditch the sunken phone business to the highest bidder. Microsoft was luckily still believing they could break the duopoly so Nokia again got a pretty sweet deal from them.

Zigurd 10y ago

Tomi Ahonen has a very detailed history of the tragedy: http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/ http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/ Tl;dr: A Microsoft "trojan horse" bet Nokia's future on Windows Phone. Then he cut the lifeboats off the davits by killing Nokia's internal smartphone OS and phone projects, and an Android-based phone, and wantonly destroyed Nokia's chances to back off a fatal decision. One of the worst, most malign CEOs in history.

belltaco 10y ago
I guess you(and several others, including the parent poster) have no clue how boards of companies work.

rayiner 10y ago

Nokia was dead no matter what. The only way to make a significant profit selling Android phones is massive vertical integration like Samsung. Otherwise, you're talking about a low-margin high-volume business that Nokia could never have sustained in comparison to Chinese and Taiwanese competitors like HTC and Lenovo. Like what's the point of this new Nokia phone? It'll be commodity Qualcomm hardware running a commodity Android OS. There is no reason to pay any premium for it, especially when you can get a cheap Nexus phone.

fossuser 10y ago
They did make beautiful hardware though - at a time where everything that wasn't an iPhone was plastic garbage (with the exception of HTC which for some reason was largely ignored in comparison to Samsung). As someone who had a Nexus One, S and Galaxy Nexus I really wanted an android phone with really nice hardware (Nokia N9 plus android would have been amazing), but after the Microsoft partnership and the iPhone 5 having turn by turn navigation I bailed. Even today there aren't a lot of nice hardware options on the android side of things.
- amiga-workbench 10y ago
  The only "nice" Android hardware I see now is coming from Sony. Understated black slabs, no lazy bulging camera lens protruding from the back, no half-arsed slapped-on fingerprint sensor mucking up the chin and no strange amorphous blob-like body shapes.
  - e12e 10y ago
    And a pretty good support for Open Source, unfortunately not a given in the Android marketplace: http://developer.sonymobile.com/open-devices/ http://developer.sonymobile.com/open-devices/
  - fossuser 10y ago
    Those phones do look nice - unfortunately for me google dropped the ball so hard with ignoring google voice for years and pushing a broken hangouts SMS integration that iMessage came and ate their cake. Not willing to leave now mostly because of iMessage (though iOS scrolling is nice too - probably lack of JVM?). Shame too because google was ahead of the game on a lot of this stuff, products just weren't focused.

nivla 10y ago

I have heard this statement so many times and I feel it doesn't justify the truth. Here are some counter points. Nokia came back into my view when they started launching the Lumia phones. It was slick, fast and solid phones with amazing camera. Any mention of Nokia here on HN and Reddit before that was met with DOA as the top comment. When they started releasing the Lumia phones, the tune started to switch to "if they made an android phone, I would totally buy!". Remember the whole silly fiasco with even Siri calling Lumia 900 the best phone in the market? [1] I think Microsoft gave it a premiere spot with Windows Mobile which would have otherwise gone unnoticeable in the Android market. Despite me jumping ship from Windows Phone, I still believe Windows Mobile was one of the best (*subjective) of all mobile OSes. Its extremely fast, less resource hog and well designed (flatness before it got trendy). Given the stereotypes about Windows OS, the mobile OS seemed nothing like it. Heck, I bought a $15 Lumia phone from Best buy and it seems like a $200 buttery smooth phone. Lumia also had good set of apps, which created an amazing group of loyal buyers. Offline GPS - You could download the maps for the entire world on your phone. Offline Radio - Download the entire mix radio to you phone and use it where you went. Camera Apps - Nokia cinematography, Live Images, Selfie, Panorama. However, I do believe that Microsoft's Nokia buyout was a stupid idea. Nokia was amazing at advertising, viral marketing and creating a brand loyalty. Microsoft however sucks at both advertisements and marketing but they seem to be very good at pissing off even their loyal followers. [1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/255508/siri_says_nokia_lumia_900_not_apple_iphone_is_the_best_smartphone_ever.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/255508/siri_says_nokia_lumia_...

aeturnum 10y ago
To echo nivla's point: One of my favorite phones was the Lumia 950. Its fatal flaw was the lack of app support, but everything else was fantastic. The OS was fast and easy to use, the apps that were there were well done, the build was fantastic, etc. Instead of being "just another" high-end android, Nokia got to be the flagship phone for an entire OS. Today it seems like a crazy call, but it's easy to understand why they would pick WP over Android.
rndmio 10y ago
I wonder if you're from the US, because I heard that Nokia as a brand never really quite took off in the way it did Europe. Over here before smartphones came along you were pretty much mad to buy anything except a Nokia. So why didn't it work with windows mobile? It did to start with, people bought them because of the Nokia name, but the lack of apps for the platform killed that good will pretty quickly. Combine their superb industrial design with android and it would have been significantly more potent.