BOOM! Stephen Elop shuffled out of Microsoft door Ex-Nokia chief Stephen Elop is officially out of Microsoft. Redmond announced the cull of top execs at the software company in the past hour, and Elop is the most high-profile victim of the bloodletting. Elop, Kirill Tatarinov and Eric Rudder will be leaving Microsoft following a handover period at the firm. It means that …
"There's s theory his job was just to stop Nokia launching an Android phone, thus making things easier for Microsoft to launch a mobile OS of their own."
Actually Nokia had 2 operating systems which, compared to Windows Mobile, were perfectly competitive.
One was Symbian, which was held up by its momentum, but clearly at the end of its life.
The other one was Maemo which even today is a serious competitor for people who actually want do _do_ stuff with their mobile devices.
... as the WP is a pitiful 3.2 % world wide market share".
There are a number of Android manufacturers who would be delighted with a 3.2% market share.
WP's problem, I think, is simply this: Apple has sewn up the profitable part of the US market so tight it can't fart without a pair of scissors. The iPhone has become the outward sign of some sort of respectability; it doesn't require technical skills to make it work and it does work very well. For Microsoft to succeed, it has to compete with iOS not Android, since to get status-conscious eyeballs around the world it needs to be seen to succeed in the US. (Sony make some very good products, but they are invisible in the US and this seems to affect worldwide sales.) Samsung spends a lot of money to get its US market share, but it is already known as a hardware maker. Microsoft isn't.
I don't think Elop could have succeeded, even if he had the RDF of Jobs, because conditions in the 21st century are different from those in the 20th.
@ Arnaut the less
There are a number of Android manufacturers who would be delighted with a 3.2% market share.
You forget that MS once had an enormous market share with Windows Mobile which through sheer incompetence and complacency have flushed down the toilet and it's costing them billlllleeeeeeons (look at me I'm a Reg Hack) to maintain a pitiful position in the market. Ballmer just didn't see Jobs, Page and Brin coming and utterly failed to react.
No, he was a fat f*ck and than god for everyone's sakes we now have Nadella. If you haven't tried a Windows phone recently you really ought to get out more. Take the US out of the figures and Windows Phone is doing very well. Jobs could maybe face up to Nadella, but Cook? Really??
If you haven't tried a Windows phone recently you really ought to get out more.
If you think playing with a smartphone is "get[ting] out", I don't think there's any profit in taking advice from you.
And even that aside, I don't understand the warrant for this argument. Suppose Windows Phone was the greatest damn phone OS ever. If my phone does what I want, why should I care?
Frankly, if my Symbian S60 phone were still working, I'd still be using it. I only switched to Android because the Symbian one died and various Android models with similar capabilities were by far the cheapest choice.
> A big share of a very small market that was at the time almost entirely corporate. I've hardly seen any WM phones in the wild.
This is true. I had one (I bought it thinking I'd be able to while away the quiet times writing code on my phone but that - with the Motorola MPX200 at least - was not an option) and it remains the only WM phone I've ever seen except for it's replacement, also owned by me as an experiment. That was the 1st gen HTC Touch which was actually a pretty good little phone.
The stylus was nifty for taking notes.
hmm I don't know... "Chief Insights officer" sounds like where you put the unwanted office equipment...
"Why are we losing market share?
Why aren't people buying our products?
Why didn't we see this coming?"
*Entire boardroom turns to 'Chief Insights Officer'*
"erm...."
"Let's hope he's Ratner'ed his CV to the point where he can't do any more damage."
Don't be silly. At those rarefied heights of employment, you can walk into a company, destroy it, and still easily move on into an equally lucrative role somewhere else. You'll even get a golden parachute from the devastated company and a golden hello from the soon to be devastated company.
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With the runaway success of Windows Phone and Lumia who could have seen this coming? Also so much for Win10 lifting all boats. Seriously though good riddance ass hat. Still it will be different to see Microsoft executives suddenly "wanting to spend more time with their families" because they are incompetent yes men instead of because they threaten the insecure sweaty CEO like in the past.
I am not saying btw that Microsoft is going to pull out of mobile any time soon (that would be suicide long term) but simply that their approach so far obviously needs a major adjustment. Jury's still out on the universal app thing but really that should have been ready to go when Win8 was released (which seemed to be the plan but the massive infighting with clueless Captain Ballmer couldn't deliver). That has been Microsoft's story since the Ballmer days started, nothing but me too products released 2 to 4 years too late or when the rare somewhat new comes out its not what people want (see hard Kinnect fail). Things do seem to be changing with new blood. Time will tell.
"I'm sure there are plenty more douchebags at Microsoft, but this goes in the right direction!"
Not so sure here. At least Microsoft had him squirreled away with a nice title, far from anything worthwhile.
Now he's loose again, free to finish ruining other businesses.
(I'm waiting to see who hires him first, HP or Blackberry.)
"We are aligning our engineering efforts and capabilities to deliver on our strategy and, in particular, our three core ambitions," Nadella said. "This change will enable us to deliver better products and services that our customers love at a more rapid pace."
Translation : "We entered the stage were we do pretend that we are doing something".
*I* don't know, Mr Nadella just told me to come in here and say that there was trouble at the mill that's all. I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.
NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our core ambition is cloud... cloud first and mobile first, mobile first and cloud first. Our core ambitions are mobile first and cloud first... and reinventing productivity and business processes. Our three core ambitions are mobile first, cloud first, and reinventing productivity and business processes... and building the intelligent cloud platform... Our four... no... amongst our core ambitions are such elements as mobile first, cloud first, and reinventing productivity and business processes, and building the intelligent cloud platform... I'll come in again.
I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.
NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Amongst our core ambitions are such elements as mobile first, cloud first, reinventing productivity and business processes, building the intelligent cloud platform, and creating more personal computing... oh damn.
See icon for response to that..... Gotta' love the concept of "leadership" and "inspire". I've always believed a leader is someone I'd follow into combat. I'd only follow these guys once.... after they walked through the minefield* and cleared a path.
*A real minefield that can go "BOOM", not a business or legal minefield.
After reviewing the post-nuclear desolation left in the wake of Elop's mobile strategy, we have decided it is time to realign corporate strategy toward experiences that result in less carnage and devastation, at least here on Earth, Since there are no customers left alive on this planet, Microsoft has invested in a space capsule in which to transport Mr. Elop to the outer edges of our solar system, to boldly go where no marketing hack has gone before, to establish new markets and pursue new opportunities.
We wish Mr. Elop well in his journey, and remind him there are only 6 months worth of oxygen cylinders on board, so he will need to establish relations with an alien culture and convince them to buy our products within that timeframe.
...with what hardware has Microsoft ever made money?
Kinect, I guess.
Remember the Microsoft KIN Social Communicators? Died a month after introduction, and you can bet the development costs weren't insignificant.
Microsoft does software (passably) well. They should stick to it, build the best software they can and support it well. The term "best" does not at this time, encompass Office, Visio or Project. They all have flaws, some of which have existed for years. However, they all also have shiny new UI's. This says something about MS's priorities. (Hint: they're concentrating on form over function)
Stop releasing every year, stop changing the UI, go back to building quality....
Ahhh...why do I even bother?
Nokia were already screwed when Elop joined. Symbian couldn't compete with modern OSes such as Android and iOS, Nokia's escape strategy of moving to Maemo on high-end devices had fatally stalled with the ill-advised merger with Moblin to create Maemo. You can blame Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo for the mess that Nokia found itself in, not Elop.
Elop found himself at the head of a company with no roadmap, but still quite a lot of sales. His infamous "burning platform" memo was pretty accurate, but he was fatally undermined as CEO by whoever leaked that communication.
Getting out of the mess was always going to involve some risk. In the end he took a high-risk approach of dumping everything and going for Windows, hoping that Nokia would avoid becoming a "me too" Android player. In the end, that strategy did not work.
It was always a high-risk, high-reward strategy to tie Nokia up with Microsoft. If they'd have gone down the Android path, I am sure that Nokia would still be an independent manufacturer today.. but not a very profitable one. The low-risk, low-reward strategy.
Of course, since Nokia became Microsoft, more mistakes have been made. The last high-end device launch was over a year ago and the current product range is moribund. It's a shame because Windows is rather good, and Cortana is easily better than Google's offering.
Elop only had to execute on the plan of using Qt to unify Symbian and Meego then phase out Symbian and indeed that's what he was brought in to do. He then set about sinking Meego by launching the N9 in small numbers in the markets which didn't matter so it would never gain traction (he had to launch it somewhere as he was obliged to), burnt Symbian's platform, and put all his eggs in the Windows Phone basket. When this loyalty wasn't rewarded and the first buyout talks failed he set up Nokia X to force a second set of talks. Perhaps Wormtongue thought he would be rewarded once back in MS but MS have got trouble of their own it seems.
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