Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones (2017)

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.

EDIT: from Oct. 2017<p>&gt; On October 7, 2014, two Finnish journalists Merina Salminen and Pekka Nykänen published their book <i>Operaatio Elop</i> in Finnish, probing into the events that took place in Nokia’s device business under the CEO Stephen Elop’s period in 2010–2013. The authors had interviewed over 100 people for the book, most of them being current or former Nokia employees... The full English translation is now published here the first time, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.<p>&gt; For readers who prefer a Kindle or PDF version instead of this online version, we provide exports in PDF&#x2F;EPUB&#x2F;MOBI [1] formats from Medium.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asokan.org&#x2F;operation-elop&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asokan.org&#x2F;operation-elop&#x2F;</a>

I worked at Macromedia with many people who worked for Elop before he rose to executive heights. All had very nice things to say about him. One speculated that he might even serve as Canada&#x27;s prime minister one day.<p>Reading him branded as the worst CEO in the world makes me feel bad for him considering all the nice things I&#x27;ve heard about him. It is easy to throw around insults and labels, but let&#x27;s remember that the truth can be nuanced and not so simple to explain.<p>Edit: fixed the political title based on comment below

Essential further reading comes from mobile phone industry analyst Tomi Ahonen, who was front-and-centre in the Elop opprobrium, and coined many of the English-language quips about the Nokia-Microsoft mess as it was happening:<p>&quot;Calculating the Elop Effect: He&#x27;s already destroyed a company the size of Oracle, and profits the size of Google&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;communities-dominate.blogs.com&#x2F;brands&#x2F;2011&#x2F;12&#x2F;calculating-the-elop-effect-hes-already-destroyed-a-company-the-size-of-oracle-and-profits-the-size-.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;communities-dominate.blogs.com&#x2F;brands&#x2F;2011&#x2F;12&#x2F;calcul...</a>

I worked (very briefly) at the Ruoholahti R&amp;D branch of Nokia in 2011.<p>If anyone wants any information on how it felt on ground level I’d be happy to answer any questions.<p>I recently visited the building and it is no longer Nokia owned, quite sad as it was impressively beautiful inside. Now it’s segmented with lots of smaller companies taking chunks of the building. :(

I was a cog at Nokia during the time the iPhone was released. So look forward to reading this and hope it sheds some light on Nokia&#x27;s implosion. It felt like Nokia cut its own head off pretty needlessly. Nokia was still making better hardware in lots of ways (better call quality, better cameras). Symbian was pretty terrible though. It could do a lot but was hard to use. I always thought Nokia should have ditched Symbian and adopt Android, as it was pretty clear that had potential coming from Google, and they needed better hardware partners. I would like to see how what would have played out in an alternative reality...

I liked that part where Nokia shortly before acquisition of mobile division by MS sold their Espoo headquarters for 10mln EUR and simulanously leased it for 1m EUR per year for 10 years. Headquarters were part of the deal. This way Nokia fetched 10mln EUR in cash and MS got a 10 years lease contract paying 1m EUR per year.<p>Coming from country where it&#x27;s mostly outsourcing, one earns scraps and jumps the ship in case of turbulences, it impressed me how employees can work in their collective interest.

There is a open course on the net, Critical Perspectives of Management by Prof Rolf Strom-Olsen with a segment on Nokia, ‘Rise and Fall of Nokia’.<p>I originally watched from a different source, but looks like it’s also on Coursera and I thin YouTube as well.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.coursera.org&#x2F;lecture&#x2F;critical-management&#x2F;the-rise-and-fall-of-nokia-i-wIqtD" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.coursera.org&#x2F;lecture&#x2F;critical-management&#x2F;the-ris...</a>

Nokia has become a really good acquisition target. The company as it currently operates is worth more in pieces.<p>American firm might buy Nokia Networks to get US back into the 5G infrastructure business. Reefshark SoC with Intel failed spectacularly and killed profit hopes from Nokia Networks.<p>Nokia&#x27;s telecom software and services does well. Small in revenue over Huawei and Eriksson.<p>Nokia Technologies&#x2F;Bell Labs makes money from R&amp;D IP without a product. Selling licensing for Nokia branded phones is nice extra.<p>Fixed&#x2F;IP&#x2F;Optical&#x2F;Submarine networks and other parts have little common with the rest.

I don’t know if Elop was bad but insisting on Windows Phone was a terrible choice.<p>I know some people think it was awesome but the rest of us could see it was not a good phone OS.<p>It had terrible UI choices an so was far too late to the market.<p>Had Nokia stayed away from Microsoft, they could have saved them self by going for Android.<p>Nokia married the wrong technology stack and paid dearly for it.

This reminds me of an old beautiful long read on the decline of Nokia. Warning, 10k word+ read.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;communities-dominate.blogs.com&#x2F;brands&#x2F;2012&#x2F;07&#x2F;the-sun-tzu-of-nokisoftian-microkia-mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-whose-the-baddest-of-them-all-waterloo.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;communities-dominate.blogs.com&#x2F;brands&#x2F;2012&#x2F;07&#x2F;the-su...</a>

From the quick glance I made at the book, it seemed like Nokia was bleeding money, Symbian was dying and Meego was not ready for prime time despite good potential.<p>Nokia had to make some tough choices. They had to go with another platform made by someone else and both Google and Microsoft were really interested in having Nokia as their partner.<p>Nokia needed money badly and it seems like massive layoff were out of the question. They wanted Google&#x2F;Microsoft to pay them to put their respective OS on their phones.<p>Only Microsoft was willing to do that, since they too were desperate to have a strong device maker to push Windows Phone.<p>In the end, both Nokia and Windows Phone failed.

I&#x27;m really curious in getting my hands on the Nokia N9, just to explore the UI and UX of Meego. Unfortunately the devices on eBay are going for prices outside of my budget since I suspect my exploration will last all of half an hour. I see a lot of refurbished models from China, so hopefully their prices drop over the next few years. I&#x27;m interested to see if Meego could have been the viable competitor that Windows Phone wasn&#x27;t.

For an in-depth story on the fall of Symbian, see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.uk&#x2F;Smartphones-beyond-Lessons-remarkable-Symbian-ebook&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B00NAZTCTW" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.uk&#x2F;Smartphones-beyond-Lessons-remarkab...</a>

Nokia had a number of problems back before Elop joined. Those were the cause for the actual demise. Elop did his own bad by going Windows Phone instead of Maemo but that&#x27;s another story.<p>Nokia did a very good move in 2008 by acquiring Trolltech (Qt). And then they screwed it royally: instead of immediately started launching phones with Linux and Qtopia (which was mostly ready for mainstream market), Nokia kept launching Symbian phones.<p>They had this plan to use Qt as the migration platform from Symbian to Maemo. That was a good plan. Except they could have started a lot earlier: why were the Nokia N770, N800 and N810 only tablets and not phones, when what everybody was asking for were phones?<p>Because back then Nokia middle management would internally destroy any attempt to actually improve or replace Symbian with a serious alternative. Symbian ruled. That&#x27;s why the first thing Elop did was to fire (outsource to Accenture) everybody working on Symbian. It was a blunt way of saying: &quot;you no longer are Nokia, you will no longer decide what this company does&quot;.<p>Everybody was very excited about Maemo back then. While it was no iOS or Android, there were A TON of developers (and companies) looking into migrating their Symbian apps to Maemo with Qt, or even writing new applications.<p>And Stephen Elop decided to use Windows Phone instead of Maemo. This is what actually destroyed Nokia: Windows Phone 7.5 was released with no support for C++, which left Qt out, which meant you needed to rewrite your app from scratch. That was the single defining moment where 99.9% of app developers decided they would rather go Android or iOS, and Nokia was doomed from that moment on.<p>As for the comments regarding the little success of the Nokia N9 or Nokia N950, the reason was they were simply not launched in many countries. When they announced the countries where those phones would be available, it looked like a bad joke.<p>By the way, another very stupid decision by Nokia, which shows you the power of the Symbian people back then: the Nokia N900 was released in November 2009 with 256 MB RAM and 32 GB storage for 599 EUR. Back then, phones had 64-128 MB RAM (256 MB was rare) and 512MB-1GB storage. Do you know how expensive was 32 GB flash in 2009??? They could have sold this phone for 400 EUR with only 8 GB flash, which was still a lot in 2009, and it would have reached a lot more public.<p>Really, Elop made the fatal mistake of chosing Windows Phone instead of Maemo. But Nokia had inflicted a lot of damage on itself already. In fact, the only bad thing about Windows Phone was not allowing C++ (and therefore Qt), which rendered all existing apps useless. But Elop probably never knew about this.<p>Oh, and don&#x27;t even get me started on another huge mistake: trying for many years to use Gtk instead of Qt. Nokia lost at least 2 years with that. Guys, Gtk was nowhere near Qt back then, and it&#x27;s even more far apart today!<p>(I was very very close to Nokia, with many friends inside, in those years and was about to work for them when Elop announced Windows Phone would be the next big thing)

If curious see also<p>2018: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16468645" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16468645</a>

You&#x27;ve posted this link and title three times now