Nokia boss’ brutally honest memo leaks

February 9, 2011 9:22 am

Categories: Mobile Phones News Tags: Android, Apple, Google, iPhone, MeeGo, Nokia, Stephen Elop, symbian, Windows Phone 7

A memo from new Nokia boss Stephen Elop has leaked and boy is it brutal. He slams Nokia for its slowness in delivering a response to the iPhone and Android, kicks the slowness of MeeGo development and effectively puts a bullet in the head of the ailing Symbian OS. Head through for some of the choicest cuts from the Elop memo where he describes Nokia as “standing on a burning platform”. Yes, really…

Elop is due to announce some major changes at Nokia with many speculating that the firm is about to embrace Windows Phone 7. We spoke to Nokia experts yesterday but this is detail straight from the head horse’s mouth. He says of Apple: “They changed the game and today, Apple own the high-end range.” Google also gets praise: “Google has become a gravitational force, drawing much of the industry’s innovation to its core.”

Not all of the Elop memo is negative. He says Nokia is still a great lab for innovation: “We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia but we are not bringing it to market fast enough.” MeeGo doesn’t come out well in his assessment though: “We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might only have one MeeGo product in the market.”

Symbian gets the most brutal smackdown: “Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements…” Nokia has a big problem and Elop doesn’t shy away from articulating it: “Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem.”

Elop’s conclusion suggests he really is going to push Nokia in a new direction and fast: “We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven’t been delivering innovation fast enough. We’re not collaborating internally. Nokia, our platform is burning.”

So there you have it. Nokia’s boss is brutally honest about its failings but what should he do next? Is a move to Windows Phone 7 right? Should Nokia be jumping to Android or are you Symbian ’til you die? Hit the comments and let us know where you stand on Nokia and its “burning platform”.

Out now | £free | Nokia (via Engadget)

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Phil

If I were Nokia I'd look at which platform gives the best experience AND battery life for the device and go with that, regardless of how hateful the decision feels. I would hope that that would be some Linux derivative, but it could be Windows – I have no idea.

bensillis

Well said. I think Android would ruin Nokia's reputation for great battery life immediately. WP7 isn't much better however, considering it doesn't allow for multitasking.

GtV

My Android phone eats battery for lunch, but that is the reality of running 3G, 4G, GPS, Bluetooth at the same time. I once burned through the iPhone 3G's battery after 2 hours of browsing.

Charlie

I believe the only way forward is the quality of nokia with andriod os for the smartphones and symbian 40 for others. This combined with superior cameras (auto focus please) and OVI maps would be a winner.
Danielsw

Elop's realization about “ecosystem” was one I had years ago when the then-rumored new Apple smartphone would be running its own OSX OS. The characteristic modularity of the OS's Objective-C programming language and its new Cocoa Touch frameworks would later prove it had a dramatic leg up advantage over anything else out there–not only in relative ease of learning, but in ease of use and expandability and time to market for developers. This same consistency of OS between phone and desktop GUI's went far towards establishing Apple's own “ecosystem” OUT OF GATE.

Everyone else was caught literally sleeping, including Nokia. It was like the epic battles in Lord of the Rings. Steve Jobs was Gandalf on his white horse, leading the charge against the overwhelming dark hordes. . .

How could anyone else answer such the sweepingly powerful new assault that the iPhone represented without a comparable approach? There was no TIME and noWHERE to retreat for the enemy horde.

Perhaps Nokia should simply lick its wounds and continue its successful actions with dumbphones while it somehow develops its own “ecosystem” somehow, some years down the road.

novak84

Nokia had more than enough time to get out of the position they now find themselves in.

This all started with the N97, they had millions of happy N95 users out there that were eagerly awaiting the next super phone from Nokia. Nokia went with the N97 and it did sound and look like the dogs nads, once the millions that upgraded got their hands on it, they realised it was pants, mainly down to Symbian OS.

Millions complained, did Nokia listen? No, they churned out phone after phone all running a shit OS, during this time Apple and Android are giving consumers what they really want.

Nokia have known for approx 2 years the OS is shit and users were not happy, people told them, they choose not to listen and now find themselves in a huge shitty dark hole, ha!

bensillis

Couldn't agree more. I cannot wait to see what Nokia will announce on Friday.

Jon Willis

Not that I am trying to defend Nokia, but keep in mind that when Apple entered the smartphone business no one could have known what was to come. No one had the slightest idea that a phone would be synced to iTunes, or that the mobile app business would take off so fast, or that iOS, which is essentially a stream-lined Mac OS X, would be so robust on a mobile platform (especially with Windows Mobile dying); and no one was ready for the touch screen paradigm shift even though touch technology had been out for years.

What shocked me most, however, was that most people thought that Apple would not sell a lot of those phones because of the virtual keyboard. Everyone thought the way to beat the iPhone was to make the touch keyboard a punching bag, yet in reality typing on some of the physical keyboards is far more difficult and arduous, especially that little thing Palm came out with.

All in all I agree with the Nokia CEO. Apple took time to build an eco system first (whether by design or chance), and then as the iPhone hit the market, the eco system of iTunes, apps, music, iPod features, a store in the cloud (iTunes Store), and many of the Macintosh OS X features were natural inclusions into the phone's features. Nokia didn't have that and now they are trying to build it. It took Apple 8 years to build that eco system (2000 to 2007). This is why he is pissed. In 8 years his company could be dead or simply relegated to something other than smartphones.

Danielsw

It never really “works” to plead ignorance on any topic or area of life. The knowledge is there, and the only missing ingredient is OBSERVATION.

Nokia's complacency condemned them to NOT observe when and where they should have way back when.

One of the major keys to Apple's current success was the relative genius of OS X's IDE, Cocoa and Objective C, with its OOP design patterns, and also its MVC design patterns.

These patterns establish “building blocks” called “objects” which communicate with each other and which are incrementally modifiable for tailor-made tasks, but which yet “inherit” all of the previously established functions, called “methods” of their “class.”

This all makes for fast and efficient programming, and, coupled with Apple's curated App Store they encourage and ensure a certain level of consistency of “look and feel” to iOS apps, which both developers and customers obviously value.

All of this is no small achievement. And any would-be rival would have to somehow improve upon such a system if they expect to outdo Apple's success.

Nokia boss’ brutally honest memo leaks

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