Originally Posted by MoJo

...heck Maemo existed before Android I'm not sure if it did before iOS.

Originally Posted by Vinh

How's this for a conspiracy theory:

1. MS encourages Nokia to hire Elop.
2. Elop says Nokia is a "dead man walking" company. Elop announces WM7 adoption. Elop kills existing Nokia development, thus there's no way to backtrack. Stock drops.
3. Nokia announces poor sales. Stock drops.
4. Finnish investments are probably heavily in Nokia stock.
5. Nokia releases WM7 phones to poor sales. Stock drops.
6. MS announces plans to purchase Nokia to help their partner out. Finnish government will approve to aid Finnish investors.
7. MS now has phone fab and world wide distribution for WM8 phones. Think of WM8 as Xbox 360, 2nd gen after the first gen fails.

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There's no sound rationale for Nokia to put all its eggs in one basket. Why couldn't have they dropped Symbian over time and added WM7 *and* Android phones to their portfolio? HTC must be much smaller than Nokia and they seem to be fine developing phones for two OS's... and with plenty of varied models to boot! The only thing I can think of that would make Nokia/Elop do something stupid like this is if MS promised "special privileges" if they didn't develop for Android.

Originally Posted by Vinh

There's no sound rationale for Nokia to put all its eggs in one basket. Why couldn't have they dropped Symbian over time and added WM7 *and* Android phones to their portfolio?

Originally Posted by 9000

Elop is a shameless lair when he used ecosystem as an excuse to kill Symbian. There's is no significant ecosystem in WP7 to justify the replacement of Symbian.

Originally Posted by geohsia

What future did Symbian really have? Besides catching up to where iOS / Android is today, where is it going?

Originally Posted by geohsia

What future did Symbian really have? Besides catching up to where iOS / Android is today, where is it going?

Originally Posted by cBeam

AFAIK Nokia was on a path to put in Maemo / Meego on the high end, Symbian in the middle (going downwards), and S40 for cheap feature phones. The first two tiers would be glued together by Qt, which would be the platform for Nokia's ecosystem.

One way to execute the transition better would have been to announce WP for selected markets (especially North America where Nokia is not present), but continue selling Symbian phones in as high as possible numbers ("WP is really good for our U.S. customers, but the unrivaled functionality of our Symbian phones, the best in class battery live, and super features like our Zeiss cameras and multimedia connectivity makes us certain that our Symbian phones are very desirable devices, blah blah blah..."

Originally Posted by cBeam

Deja vu - Nokia's WP strategy and its merits have been discussed on many forums previously - including tmo. What's changed is that we got Elop's PR piece in business week, and Nokia's profit warning for Q2.

Here are some facts:

• Nokia's share price is in a downward trajectory that started 2007 reflecting lower and lower expectations for Nokia's performance.
• Since Elop's burning platform memo and WP strategy Nokia shares lost another 40%.
• According to Elop Nokia Windows phones will be available in relevant numbers in 2012.
• Nokia says they will (try to) sell Symbian phones for a long time after Windows phones are released.

Now my opinion:
There are two major factors to make a company thrive:

• Do the right things (here sits strategy)
• Do them right (here sits execution)

Do the right things:
AFAIK Nokia was on a path to put in Maemo / Meego on the high end, Symbian in the middle (going downwards), and S40 for cheap feature phones. The first two tiers would be glued together by Qt, which would be the platform for Nokia's ecosystem. This was also Elop's announced strategy as I understood it until Feb 2011.
In Feb 2011 Elop did two things: He publicly announced that Symbian is inferior and dead, and Nokia will put all eggs into a partnership with MS.
I happen to believe that the strategy until Feb 2011 was the right one, and Elop's wedding with MS will leave Nokia without the chance for an ecosystem of their own.

Do the things right:
There is no sugar coating, Nokia did very few things right, at least since 2007. Wrong product decisions, unacceptable delays (N8 one year late, no acceptable browser on S3 until the update, N900 release with "Ovi maps" but without any usable map functionality, MeeGo announcement delaying Maemo updates, etc, etc).
However, even if the WP strategy is correct, the numbers now show that the transition away from Symbian is managed extremely poorly. Who in his right mind will spend $600 on an E7 when the CEO of the company offering the phone says that Symbian is inferior and obsolete? Fine, there is the argument that the end user does not know or care, the carriers do know, as do many sales people in the phone shops. And steer people to "superior" Android and iOS.

One way to execute the transition better would have been to announce WP for selected markets (especially North America where Nokia is not present), but continue selling Symbian phones in as high as possible numbers ("WP is really good for our U.S. customers, but the unrivaled functionality of our Symbian phones, the best in class battery live, and super features like our Zeiss cameras and multimedia connectivity makes us certain that our Symbian phones are very desirable devices, blah blah blah..."

This brings me to my conclusion:

Elop's WP strategy will be good for MS because they will sell more Windows Phones than they do today (a measly 1.6 mio WP7 in Q1), but devastating for Nokia as WP will not reach anything close to 27 million smart phones per quarter as Nokia's Symbian phones sold in Q1 2011.

Nokia's execution on a corporate level did not improve since Elop took office (might not be Elop's fault as changes in organizations take time, regrettably), however execution on the executive level (transition away from Symbian) is horrendous as the profit warnings show. And this is Elop's responsibility.

If Elop is able to fix Nokia's execution problem, Nokia might be very well doing the wrong things very well.

Not a good perspective from Nokia's point of view.

Originally Posted by sjgadsby

That strategy sounded good to me too. However, since February 11, I've read accounts from several (claimed) former Symbian system developers that the Symbian code is too crufty and brittle for the plan to have worked. According to these write ups, it is unimaginably difficult to get Qt work reliably and efficiently on Symbian. Every Symbian phone was a separate weight around the neck of the planned Qt ecosystem and every minor upgrade of Qt.

Perhaps that's all lies, but it's given me something to think about.

Such a phased transition, particularly if combined with massive managment and organizational shake ups, certainly sounds safer. From here, it appears Elop used the fire from his burning platform to torch some massive bridges.