FINALLY.
Some clear thinking at Nokia. Wow. And what a memo it is.
FINALLY. Someone at the top of Nokia notices what I’ve noticed by traveling the world. Nokia is in serious trouble.
Can Stephen Elop jump his company off of the burning platform, as he put it, and do something interesting?
Well, at least the execs are not sounding arrogant anymore (first time in years!) and they aren’t saying “we are the marketshare leader.” As if THAT ever matters! Just ask all the “market share leaders” who have disappeared into the bowels of the Computer History Museum.
So, what’s the post-burn Nokia look like?
We’ll find out Friday, but it sure looks like he’s working on the list of things I laid out.
In the meantime Google’s VP, Vic Gundotra, is adding gas to the fire with his tweet saying “two turkeys do not make an eagle.” What does he mean? Oh, Nokia hardware with Microsoft Windows Phone 7 OS won’t make a good smartphone.
Vic is pretty correct. Microsoft is late to the party and Nokia is even later. Google is in a much better spot, especially on software and services.
But Vic better watch out for this “turkey” NokiaWP7 device, or family of devices. Why? They seem to be playing a lot of Angry Birds over at Nokia and if you put a turkey into a catapult it can do a lot of damage to Google.
It seems to me that Nokia is changing the game, or trying to. While Google is playing Flight Simulator, Nokia is playing Angry Birds. And, no, Google hasn’t been acting like the mighty eagle, either, lately. Just ask the Wave team.
I actually like using Windows Phone 7 better than I like using Android. Can they capitalize on that, or will Google come out with a revamped Android OS with new UI that makes them the user experience thought leader?
Also, counting Microsoft out seems like a no brainer. Hell, I left Microsoft four years ago because I knew the product pipeline was dry. I was right. But now Steve Ballmer has a fire lit under his own behind and can point to Kinect as a consumer success. A huge success. Fastest selling new product in history.
So, if Microsoft and Nokia can pull harder on the Xbox brand they have a real shot at doing some damage to Google. That turkey might end up looking like an Angry Bird that takes out a good piece of a building over in Mountain View.
Plus, Nokia does have nice maps (NAVTEQ and Microsoft have been partners for a long time) and they do make nice hardware. Love those cameras and radios!
So, with a new, flattened Nokia (what happens when your company jumps off something and hits the water? It gets flatter!) and a new partnership with Microsoft, Elop is ready for some Angry Birds wars with Google and Apple.
I’m not counting them out. But Elop sure has to aim that turkey carefully. He only has one shot and if he aims wrong that turkey will fly off the screen without hitting Google or Apple. Aim right, though, and we could have some new fun!
Oh, and GDGT’s Peter Rojas? Right on about the Nokia fanboys. They have always been wrong and now Stephen Elop has put them in the jail they so rightfully deserve being in.
Scobleizer 
If I was in charge at MS I would drop the name Windows Phone 7 and call it the Xphone. Window has to much baggage – Xbox not so…
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I agree. I think they are living off of the Windows brand and can’t break away from it. That shows weak leadership.
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Yes you are right. Ride that X Box wave.
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By going for WP7 Nokia is suddenly reduced to a hardware manufacturer competing with HTC, Samsung and others solely on hardware spec and design. Is that a smart move?
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My Wild-Ass Guess — Nokia goes with WP7 — Microsoft forgoes licensing fees & makes money like Google through Bing search ad revenues. Turns the Google model against them.
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I don’t really understand why Nokia would prefer WP7 over Android. There’s far more scope to differentiate Android devices in software as well as hardware (e.g. sense, motoblur) and it supports a much broader range of devices than WP7 does currently. Oh, and there are no license fees that need to be paid to Redmond.
Is MS really committed to WP7, or will they walk away from it 2 years down the road if it fails to get sufficient traction in the marketplace? While I don’t think they can afford not to be in the mobile space, that doesn’t mean they might not pull another plays-for-sure/Zune stunt and screw over their partners. Perhaps that’s one reason why their current crop of OEMs all have a foot in both the WP7 and Android camps.
Personally, I’d love to see phones like the N8 and E7 running Android, with a decent camera app and Ovi Maps, it would be the one thing that Nokia could do to make sure my next device doesn’t come from Samsung, HTC or Apple.
One final thought. If there’s anything positive for Nokia here, it’s the huge amount of debate Elop’s memo has generated. If the technorati had yawned and clicked through to the next story it would have been a bad day indeed.
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the memo talks about controlling the “ecosystem”, i.e. the whole stack. I don’t WP7 would give Nokia that level of control. Nokia do own trolltech and the QT dev framework so betting the company on Meego would give Nokia a full stack to work on.
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the memo talks about controlling the “ecosystem”, i.e. the whole stack. I don’t WP7 would give Nokia that level of control. Nokia do own trolltech and the QT dev framework so betting the company on Meego would give Nokia a full stack to work on.
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Robert, your best comment in the blog is that Vic is right. Nokia and WinMo are a day late and a dollar short, despite your preference for WinMo7 over Android (you are an apple fanboy after all). Sounds like Nokia listened to the European monopoly telephone carriers and decided against making Android even more powerful than it is (see Piper analyst comments today in eWeek–a $10 billion business for Google by 2012). Wrong decision. Agree with Stuart Bayley above.
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Robert, your best comment in the blog is that Vic is right. Nokia and WinMo are a day late and a dollar short, despite your preference for WinMo7 over Android (you are an apple fanboy after all). Sounds like Nokia listened to the European monopoly telephone carriers and decided against making Android even more powerful than it is (see Piper analyst comments today in eWeek–a $10 billion business for Google by 2012). Wrong decision. Agree with Stuart Bayley above.
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I think you are incorrect about WP7 being to late to the game, is HP also to late to the game with webOS phones? Is HP to late to releasing webOS on computers which would remove Windows? From your recent posts you don’t seem to think so, so why is WP7 to late to the game? It doesn’t make sense and MS knows how to be successful when they want to be.
It’s NEVER to late to enter the ring, as someone who is so involved with technology I would think you would agree. Look at Apple, they went from almost being bankrupt to the most wealthy company in the world in a very short amount of time. Look at Android, they were super late to the game and now look at them and it has a horrible user experience.
Smartphones are just starting to take off, the market is still huge, same with Tablets. It’s still anyone’s game in my opinion.
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I think a lot of people are also missing the point that Android really didn’t bring anything new to the eco system. Every non techie I show the HTC desire to says “looks like the iphone right?” When I show a stock Android (at least up till 2.2) it’s like ummm. ok bla.
If Nokia does indeed go with WP7 they come away with the major benefit of having the whole company behind them in putting an OS on their hardware where the OS is actually a different experience (Android 2.2 does actually for the most part feel like a slightly modded iphone theme). Maybe this might even see phones without crapware being preloaded coming out.
Either way Friday is going to be fantastic to watch for.
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Wow, that little comment almost makes me dislike Google. If that really understood his own market, he’d realize that there are a bunch of turkeys out there using Android. In fact, the only truly strong manufacturer out there that they have running Android is Samsung. Moto and SE are in bad shape and could easily be hurt if Nokia were to retake some of their share. And then let’s not forget the horde to small Chinese-domestic turkeys who now use Android as their platform. I’m not saying turkeys can’t do damage, I’m just saying this guy needs to understand he helps lead an army of them…
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