10 ms·

I worked at Nokia during OPK and Elop. I always have to cringe when I read these articles blaming everything on him, he’s Finland’s favorite scapegoat. Truth is

I worked at Nokia during OPK and Elop. I always have to cringe when I read these articles blaming everything on him, he’s Finland’s favorite scapegoat. Truth is, the rot set in at Nokia long before Elop arrived. What most people don’t realize was that the issue was not strategic it was cultural and political. Elop could have been the best leader, making the best strategic decisions in the world but it wouldn’t have made any impact at all on the outcome because the people in the company were just the wrong people. Changing the mindset and reskilling a 100k people company is no small feat. The only way Apple was able to turn the ship around in the 90s was through massive lay-offs and teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, when Jobs came back he had the luxury of a small lean organization which he could easily change the direction of, had he come back a few years early he would have also probably failed. Nokia was so tightly tied to the Finnish political establishment, it became too big to fail and thus large necessary lay-offs were out of Elop’s reach, even if he had wanted to pursue them. It’s easy to blame one man, fits in nicely with our simple, linear, reductionist, narrative loving minds but the truth here is there was a giant systemic failure. Same thing is going on with Germany’s car industry at the moment with the attempted shift from ICE’s to Electric, the machines, the factories, the value chains, the politics and the culture are all pulling in one direction but the market is pulling in the other. Sometimes the environment just changes and the organizations and entities are so tightly adapted to the old environment that they can’t survive in the new environment and have to perish - no matter who’s at the helm.

Hokusai 6y ago
So it was not so simple as one man bad vision, but it was so simple as laying-off more people? That also seems quite an oversimplification, and one that shifts the blame from leadership to the employees.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
fsloth 6y ago
I think the handset business of Nokia stood on two legs - logistics supremacy and radio technology as secret sauce. The advantages given by them were made moot by Chinese manufacturing and commoditization of handset chipsets. Being run over by IPhone was the symptom, not the disease.
Nursie 6y ago
From the outside it looked like a setup. Nokia had all sorts of structural issues, true, and a bewildering array of self-competing products, but it also had a lot to work with and the brand recognition was absolutely enormous. He effectively flushed it all down the toilet for a punt on Windows Mobile, which was already looking like an "also-ran" by that point. When it (predictably) didn't work out, MS took the brand and some of the company, then ran it into the ground. A sad end to what had been a huge success story. (I'm not challenging the idea that nokia was on a downward slope by the point he came along, but he just accelerated it, see e.g. the burning platforms memo)
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  I'd argue Nokia sunk Windows Mobile and not the other way around. Hardware was hard to come by, countless models were never released despite the OS being light years ahead of Android. Around the official death of Windows Mobile, most of us just wanted them to launch hardware that wasn't a joke.
  - swebs 6y ago
    I know many people that loved Nokia phones, but I don't know a single person that wanted a Windows phone. Windows is a toxic anti-brand associated with viruses, instability, bloat, and forced restarts. Meanwhile iPhone is seen as the hip brand, and Android was marketing itself as the choice for user freedom.
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      > a toxic anti-brand associated with viruses, instability, bloat, and forced restarts This is Android based on my eight years with them. I won't argue with you on iPhone, it's a great "I just want it to work" option. And since there's no other alternative, it's what I carry today. But Windows Mobile was a breath of competency in a market of basically all bad Google phones.
      - sellyme 6y ago
jacquesm 6y ago
> Elop could have been the best leader, making the best strategic decisions in the world But he wasn't and he didn't. Everything else is 'could be'.
- simon_000666 6y ago
  If your company is dependent on the CEO to make 100% correct decisions, 100% of the time then it’s not the CEO that’s the problem - it’s the company. A strong, resilient, adaptable, agile company can weather a poor leader, a weak, brittle, rigid one cannot.
- athms 6y ago
  He was hired to stop the disease from spreading and he did a great job; he lopped off the infected limb. Nokia is better today because of it. In 2006, my girlfriend at the time worked in HR at Nokia's US headquarters in Irving, Texas. The writing as on the wall and the company was preparing for a major layoff because Nokia's mobile phone business in the US was tanking. Luckily for her, she was able to transfer to Nokia-Siemens Networks. This was before the iPhone was released and before Elop joined the company in September 2010.
romwell 6y ago
It is hard to reconcile your comment with the history of Nokia N9. The critics and the customers loved N9. I would have loved to own one. Instead, it was silently killed off without even being given a chance. N9 was Nokia adapting to the smartphone/touchscreen ecosystem.
- dash2 6y ago
  I have heard this a lot. I think it is a fantasy. (a) N9's sales were a drop in the ocean. It is like if you have a game with 100% good customer reviews. But there are only 50 reviews. The tiny but vocal segment who loves it, loves it. That doesn't matter. (b) There was no room for a third ecosystem. Developers were busy writing apps for Android and iPhone. Nobody would write apps for (random 3rd OS that has a couple of million phones). It wouldn't matter if the N9 had had working desktop fusion and teleportation. The platform was dead.
  - seniorivn 6y ago
    n9 was announced to be the last of its kind even before they started selling it. It's a miracle that millions(really?) of people ended up buying them
  - detaro 6y ago
    Arguing of sales numbers doesn't work for the N9. It was a dead phone walking when it was released: The Microsoft partnership had been announced, Elop already had publicly stated that whatever its sales numbers MeeGo wouldn't be continued and it wasn't even sold in major markets like the US (here in Germany a few shops imported them from Switzerland!). Of course it (and more importantly the platform) didn't stand a chance like that. (I'd tend to agree with the second point that MeeGo would have had difficulties and likely would have failed later, even if they'd focused on MeeGo and the N9, but there was something to it)
  - nextos 6y ago
    I don't think it's a fantasy. The N9 had a very good reception, and with Nokia's prestige and loyal customer base it would have been possible to compete against the iPhone. The N9 built on top of the N700 series, which was launched ahead of the iPhone. It was essentially Debian running in your pocket. It already had a huge "app store", all Linux repositories. Polishing this was not that hard, given that they also controlled Qt. Qt also meant a simple migration path for Symbian applications. People don't realize how mature the N9 was. Read some reviews. Their maps application had incredibly good offline coverage and offline routing in 2011. So good, I've been using it for that purpose till 2020 as nothing compares. Mind that Google Maps still licenses lots of mapping data from Navteq, which was Nokia's mapping spinoff. Aside from this, even if they wanted to go with Windows Mobile, it sounds like a really bad strategic move not to have a backup. Especially because going with Windows Mobile was a bigger gamble, which ended up failing spectacularly. Going ahead with the N9 didn't use many resources. Windows Mobile devices by Nokia would eventually reuse the same hardware. Why not selling both.
pavlov 6y ago
It's often said that in 1996, NeXT acquired Apple and paid negative 400 million dollars. Jobs was able to bring his team and technology from NeXT to become the new core at Apple, and fire everyone who didn't want to play along. Elop had no such luxury.
- toyg 6y ago
  Elop did not have Jobs’s CV, inclinations, instincts, or knowledge either. Jobs was a founder, Elop is a careerist. He was handed the biggest job of his life and, in the most charitable reading, blew it horribly.
  - pavlov 6y ago
    He sold a loss-making business for $4 billion without giving up the brand or any other long-term IP. I wish I could blow my failed ventures so horribly. And it indeed was a failed venture by the time Elop got there.
    - huihe9849hjjgkg 6y ago
      How do you sell a business four billion? Easy, start with a business worth $30 billion.
      - pavlov 6y ago
        The mobile devices unit was on a rapid trajectory towards zero already in 2010. In an alternate reality where Vanjoki bet the company on Meego, that business would still be bankrupt today, just without the $4B payment from Microsoft. Nokia kept the parts of their business that actually were worth something, and used the MS money to buy more marketshare in networks. It was a good deal.
megablast 6y ago
If he couldn’t lay off, why not have the small competent team working on the us to Jeff, the other working on something else?? Not being able to fire us a poor excuse.
howlgarnish 6y ago
The book actually comes to pretty much the same conclusion: it would have been extremely difficult for any leader in his position to retain Nokia as major player in mobile phones, and there's no evidence that Elop was a Trojan horse etc. That said, he did make a large number of unforced errors, mostly notably the Burning Platform memo, which accelerated the decline.
pjmlp 6y ago
Same situation here, it is easy to just hate Elop given the M$ hate, when in fact this was mostly pushed by the Nokia board members themselves.
addicted 6y ago
I have a lot of disagreements with your post, but I’m most curious about the part where Jobs had a lean organization to come back to. From what I’m aware, Jobs instead actually came back and axed the vast majority of projects that were being worked upon. I’m fact, there’s a relatively famous town hall where a Mac user complains about this and Jobs explains why he needed to cut nearly everything.
jankcorn 6y ago
As creator/chief architect of Meltemi (p.132 of the pdf), I was way too close to the events in the book. In the end, I think that Elop was pretty honest, if not too bright, "good old boy" type of person. Sadly, he never came to really trust anyone inside Nokia, but relied for advice primarily on Ballmer, who is another personality altogether... A lot of the disfunction mentioned above really comes from the social climbing nature of the EVP team, since OPK didn't hold them to account for operating numbers until quite late.
chithanh 6y ago
> Same thing is going on with Germany’s car industry at the moment with the attempted shift from ICE’s to Electric, I call that BS. The market was shifting to Android. Industry veterans like Jean-Louis Gassée wrote that during OPK era, he was approached by Nokia board asking for advice, and he told them to go Android. The board refused, and it was decided to bet the company on Windows Phone. Not for some technical or organizational/cultural reason, but purely for strategic reasons. https://web.archive.org/web/20121225214448/http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2188976/nokia-elop-board-jean-louis-gassee/page/2 https://web.archive.org/web/20121225214448/http://www.comput... German carmakers are waking up late to electric vehicles, but they are acting now to pivot to the winning technology, before their marketshare reaches 3%. Nokia bound themselves for a multi-year exclusive contract with Microsoft, that even Microsoft folks were surprised they would enter at such a minimal payment for MS. I remember reading reports that the Microsoft negotiations team was authorized to go considerably higher than what they ended up paying. So it was overconfidence on Nokia's part to what extent they would be able to sell the turd that was Windows Phone, coupled with the lack of exit strategy if that didn't work out. And that's even before talking about Elop's financial incentives to run the smartphone business into the ground and sell it to Microsoft.

Hokusai 6y ago

So it was not so simple as one man bad vision, but it was so simple as laying-off more people? That also seems quite an oversimplification, and one that shifts the blame from leadership to the employees.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

fsloth 6y ago

I think the handset business of Nokia stood on two legs - logistics supremacy and radio technology as secret sauce. The advantages given by them were made moot by Chinese manufacturing and commoditization of handset chipsets. Being run over by IPhone was the symptom, not the disease.

Nursie 6y ago

From the outside it looked like a setup. Nokia had all sorts of structural issues, true, and a bewildering array of self-competing products, but it also had a lot to work with and the brand recognition was absolutely enormous. He effectively flushed it all down the toilet for a punt on Windows Mobile, which was already looking like an "also-ran" by that point. When it (predictably) didn't work out, MS took the brand and some of the company, then ran it into the ground. A sad end to what had been a huge success story. (I'm not challenging the idea that nokia was on a downward slope by the point he came along, but he just accelerated it, see e.g. the burning platforms memo)

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
I'd argue Nokia sunk Windows Mobile and not the other way around. Hardware was hard to come by, countless models were never released despite the OS being light years ahead of Android. Around the official death of Windows Mobile, most of us just wanted them to launch hardware that wasn't a joke.
- swebs 6y ago
  I know many people that loved Nokia phones, but I don't know a single person that wanted a Windows phone. Windows is a toxic anti-brand associated with viruses, instability, bloat, and forced restarts. Meanwhile iPhone is seen as the hip brand, and Android was marketing itself as the choice for user freedom.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    > a toxic anti-brand associated with viruses, instability, bloat, and forced restarts This is Android based on my eight years with them. I won't argue with you on iPhone, it's a great "I just want it to work" option. And since there's no other alternative, it's what I carry today. But Windows Mobile was a breath of competency in a market of basically all bad Google phones.
    - sellyme 6y ago

jacquesm 6y ago

> Elop could have been the best leader, making the best strategic decisions in the world But he wasn't and he didn't. Everything else is 'could be'.

simon_000666 6y ago
If your company is dependent on the CEO to make 100% correct decisions, 100% of the time then it’s not the CEO that’s the problem - it’s the company. A strong, resilient, adaptable, agile company can weather a poor leader, a weak, brittle, rigid one cannot.
athms 6y ago
He was hired to stop the disease from spreading and he did a great job; he lopped off the infected limb. Nokia is better today because of it. In 2006, my girlfriend at the time worked in HR at Nokia's US headquarters in Irving, Texas. The writing as on the wall and the company was preparing for a major layoff because Nokia's mobile phone business in the US was tanking. Luckily for her, she was able to transfer to Nokia-Siemens Networks. This was before the iPhone was released and before Elop joined the company in September 2010.

romwell 6y ago

It is hard to reconcile your comment with the history of Nokia N9. The critics and the customers loved N9. I would have loved to own one. Instead, it was silently killed off without even being given a chance. N9 was Nokia adapting to the smartphone/touchscreen ecosystem.

dash2 6y ago
I have heard this a lot. I think it is a fantasy. (a) N9's sales were a drop in the ocean. It is like if you have a game with 100% good customer reviews. But there are only 50 reviews. The tiny but vocal segment who loves it, loves it. That doesn't matter. (b) There was no room for a third ecosystem. Developers were busy writing apps for Android and iPhone. Nobody would write apps for (random 3rd OS that has a couple of million phones). It wouldn't matter if the N9 had had working desktop fusion and teleportation. The platform was dead.
- seniorivn 6y ago
  n9 was announced to be the last of its kind even before they started selling it. It's a miracle that millions(really?) of people ended up buying them
- detaro 6y ago
  Arguing of sales numbers doesn't work for the N9. It was a dead phone walking when it was released: The Microsoft partnership had been announced, Elop already had publicly stated that whatever its sales numbers MeeGo wouldn't be continued and it wasn't even sold in major markets like the US (here in Germany a few shops imported them from Switzerland!). Of course it (and more importantly the platform) didn't stand a chance like that. (I'd tend to agree with the second point that MeeGo would have had difficulties and likely would have failed later, even if they'd focused on MeeGo and the N9, but there was something to it)
- nextos 6y ago
  I don't think it's a fantasy. The N9 had a very good reception, and with Nokia's prestige and loyal customer base it would have been possible to compete against the iPhone. The N9 built on top of the N700 series, which was launched ahead of the iPhone. It was essentially Debian running in your pocket. It already had a huge "app store", all Linux repositories. Polishing this was not that hard, given that they also controlled Qt. Qt also meant a simple migration path for Symbian applications. People don't realize how mature the N9 was. Read some reviews. Their maps application had incredibly good offline coverage and offline routing in 2011. So good, I've been using it for that purpose till 2020 as nothing compares. Mind that Google Maps still licenses lots of mapping data from Navteq, which was Nokia's mapping spinoff. Aside from this, even if they wanted to go with Windows Mobile, it sounds like a really bad strategic move not to have a backup. Especially because going with Windows Mobile was a bigger gamble, which ended up failing spectacularly. Going ahead with the N9 didn't use many resources. Windows Mobile devices by Nokia would eventually reuse the same hardware. Why not selling both.

pavlov 6y ago

It's often said that in 1996, NeXT acquired Apple and paid negative 400 million dollars. Jobs was able to bring his team and technology from NeXT to become the new core at Apple, and fire everyone who didn't want to play along. Elop had no such luxury.

toyg 6y ago
Elop did not have Jobs’s CV, inclinations, instincts, or knowledge either. Jobs was a founder, Elop is a careerist. He was handed the biggest job of his life and, in the most charitable reading, blew it horribly.
- pavlov 6y ago
  He sold a loss-making business for $4 billion without giving up the brand or any other long-term IP. I wish I could blow my failed ventures so horribly. And it indeed was a failed venture by the time Elop got there.
  - huihe9849hjjgkg 6y ago
    How do you sell a business four billion? Easy, start with a business worth $30 billion.
    - pavlov 6y ago
      The mobile devices unit was on a rapid trajectory towards zero already in 2010. In an alternate reality where Vanjoki bet the company on Meego, that business would still be bankrupt today, just without the $4B payment from Microsoft. Nokia kept the parts of their business that actually were worth something, and used the MS money to buy more marketshare in networks. It was a good deal.

megablast 6y ago

If he couldn’t lay off, why not have the small competent team working on the us to Jeff, the other working on something else?? Not being able to fire us a poor excuse.

howlgarnish 6y ago

The book actually comes to pretty much the same conclusion: it would have been extremely difficult for any leader in his position to retain Nokia as major player in mobile phones, and there's no evidence that Elop was a Trojan horse etc. That said, he did make a large number of unforced errors, mostly notably the Burning Platform memo, which accelerated the decline.

pjmlp 6y ago

Same situation here, it is easy to just hate Elop given the M$ hate, when in fact this was mostly pushed by the Nokia board members themselves.

addicted 6y ago

I have a lot of disagreements with your post, but I’m most curious about the part where Jobs had a lean organization to come back to. From what I’m aware, Jobs instead actually came back and axed the vast majority of projects that were being worked upon. I’m fact, there’s a relatively famous town hall where a Mac user complains about this and Jobs explains why he needed to cut nearly everything.

jankcorn 6y ago

As creator/chief architect of Meltemi (p.132 of the pdf), I was way too close to the events in the book. In the end, I think that Elop was pretty honest, if not too bright, "good old boy" type of person. Sadly, he never came to really trust anyone inside Nokia, but relied for advice primarily on Ballmer, who is another personality altogether... A lot of the disfunction mentioned above really comes from the social climbing nature of the EVP team, since OPK didn't hold them to account for operating numbers until quite late.

chithanh 6y ago

> Same thing is going on with Germany’s car industry at the moment with the attempted shift from ICE’s to Electric, I call that BS. The market was shifting to Android. Industry veterans like Jean-Louis Gassée wrote that during OPK era, he was approached by Nokia board asking for advice, and he told them to go Android. The board refused, and it was decided to bet the company on Windows Phone. Not for some technical or organizational/cultural reason, but purely for strategic reasons. https://web.archive.org/web/20121225214448/http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2188976/nokia-elop-board-jean-louis-gassee/page/2 https://web.archive.org/web/20121225214448/http://www.comput... German carmakers are waking up late to electric vehicles, but they are acting now to pivot to the winning technology, before their marketshare reaches 3%. Nokia bound themselves for a multi-year exclusive contract with Microsoft, that even Microsoft folks were surprised they would enter at such a minimal payment for MS. I remember reading reports that the Microsoft negotiations team was authorized to go considerably higher than what they ended up paying. So it was overconfidence on Nokia's part to what extent they would be able to sell the turd that was Windows Phone, coupled with the lack of exit strategy if that didn't work out. And that's even before talking about Elop's financial incentives to run the smartphone business into the ground and sell it to Microsoft.