Jean-Louis Gassée: Nokia should fire Elop and the board should go too

http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2188976/nokia-elop-board-jean-louis-gassee

by mtgx • 14 years ago

81 78 14 years ago

computing.co.uk

Having done a freelance gig at Nokia, working on some Windows Phone stuff pre-Mango, I can say that Nokia is, and always has been, fully aware of the WP roadmap. The Lumias were brought out quickly, but have never been representative of what Nokia is capable of.

Don't fire Elop, retain the board as-is, deal with the fact that there will be incompatibilities. And wait for a Nokia running Windows Phone 8 and a Pureview camera. This strategy has legs.

jeswin5• 14 years ago

Completely agree. Like Elop said, it has become a battle of eco-systems. Sticking to Symbian would have meant being where Blackberry is now; where except the delusional CEO no one cares about version 10 whenever it comes out.

Early reviews of Windows Phone 8 have been uniformly positive. And given Elop's background, he must have known this way back. This is all according to plan, and like you said a device with Pureview could turn this around.

spiralpolitik5• 14 years ago

I disagree. They had the N9 which was/is a superb device. If they had refocused on migrating their Symbian existing ecosystem around that platform then I think they would been in a much better place today than they are.

The risk Nokia has with Windows Phone is it ends up being one vendor of many and doesn't control the software. It means that they can't amortize their costs across the ecosystem as full stack vendors can which makes them very vulnerable to other vendors bleeding them on the hardware margins.

It also risks that Microsoft might Surface them with their own device leaving them ultimately with nothing.

aeturnum• 14 years ago

The more time goes by, the better Elops bet on windows phone looks to me. Now that Google owns a device maker, developing for android is less attractive as you'll always be dealing, in part, with Googles hardware divisions priorities. On the other hand, Nokia is, more-or-less, Microsoft's hardware division. Other people make windows phones, but Nokia is the biggest player and their best bet. That's a pretty good place to be in if you're not going to make your own OS.

Of course, maybe windows phone will be a total failure, but given the alternative is being a "me too" Android developer I think it's a reasonable strategy.

Kell• 14 years ago

The problem with your reasoning is that Microsoft is also going hardware. And not by buying Nokia... Look at surface, it's only the start. So your main argument that it's not good to rely on the product of a competitor... is weak.

And it's not at all a reasonable strategy. A reasonable strategy is when you minimize the worst possible outcome of the strategy. This is maximizing it... while at the same time maximizing the best possible outcome. There is no way this is reasonable. It's a bet. A risky bet strategy. Might work... but computer history will remember it as a bold risk.

[Edited for typos]

tmzt6• 14 years ago

They are only serious about it if they push it to their channel and compete directly with the OEMs. They don't have enough stores to go it alone. If you read between the lines of the recent article in Vanity Fair, it seems Ballmer will not take it seriously and wants it to die by not being successful enough, because they never gave it a chance.

felipeko• 14 years ago

If Windows Phone ever get a good market share, you can be sure that Samsung (and others) will take notice, turning Nokia in a me too. The only company that has to gain from this situation (Windows Phone getting bigger) is Microsoft, not Nokia.

hristov2• 14 years ago

Google has shown nothing that indicates they will favor Motorola over anyone else. Furthermore, the point of open source is that you can always fork the software if you do not like the way the main branch is going. Forking Android would not be easy but it is a possibility and it forces Google to play nice.

I do not know what is the big problem with being a "me too Android developer". If you are going to use someone else's OS, might as well use one that is wildly successful already. So no it is a terrible decision and it continues to be a terrible decision as Windows phone market share languishes.

spiralpolitik5• 14 years ago

First up outside of Samsung and HTC none of the other Android vendors were as of Q1 2012 operating at a profit. Everybody else is bleeding red ink. I would expect that several of the second tier Android vendors to throw in the towel over the next few years as their losses become unsustainable.

Secondly margins in the Android world are going to get much tighter. Google has essentially slit other the Android tablet makers throats by selling the Nexus 7 at cost. Effectively this gives the vendors the choice of competing with the Nexus 7 and Kindle (both of which are sold with little or no margin in hope to recoup via the app and content ecosystem) in the 7" space or the take on the iPad in the 10" space. Essentially the way the market is heading unless you control the whole stack, your margins will be impossible to sustain against those that do.

While Google has not yet favored Motorola, I'm sure Samsung is watching very closely especially after the release of the Nexus 7. I would not be at all surprised if Samsung forks Android to become a full stack vendor. I believe that they have the Cyanogen developers on staff already so it wouldn't be a huge hardship for them to do that providing they could get a content ecosystem off the ground.

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

Are you saying that now that we have over 2 years of empirical evidence that WP is causing a decrease in market share and revenue for both MSFT and Nokia. It looks better after that than before when WP's future was uncertain?

You people seem to forget that WP is not a brand new player that no one knows what's gonna happen to it anymore. It's been over 2 years. The evidence is in. It's no longer a question of whether "will it be a failure". It already was a failure.

jeswin5• 14 years ago

If I had Gassee's track record I would refrain from criticizing.

1981-90 - Exited when Apple was on a downward spiral.

1991-02 - BeOS, didn't get anywhere.

2004- - Palm, didn't get anywhere either.

Come on.

drx• 14 years ago

You don't necessarily have to be good at running a company to be good at criticizing how others do it.

Same way you don't have to be a professional football player to commentate football.

mcav• 14 years ago

In fairness, a more accurate analogy would be a poor football player criticizing better ones.

Tloewald• 14 years ago

Apple was not on a downward spiral in 1990. (Stock price in 1990 was almost double 1985.)

The other points are fine but isn't that just ad hominem? His points seem valid.

jeswin5• 14 years ago

The industry exploded over that period, so the stock price isn't an accurate indicator of how Apple performed relatively. By 1990, Apple was clearly not competitive. Microsoft was winning, and what they had was DOS!

What ticked me off were his words: "...the board also needs to be renewed with people who have an understanding and working knowledge of the mobile industry." It is perfectly fine for me (since I am a nobody in the industry), or _maybe_ even you to say the same thing. Gassee's carries more weight though, and gets published, read and discussed.

I feel Nokia's management is doing what they can. No other handset vendor-developed OSes have succeeded. Blackberry, Bada, Meego,... The roadmap would have been shared way back when they signed up for this. Windows Phone 8 is the real deal; WP7 was too little, too late.

melling• 14 years ago

BeOS was a great product. Apple almost bought it. Part of their problem was that Microsoft was charging people for DOS on every PC that shipped, regardless of whether it actually shipped with DOS. Once Microsoft did that, it pretty much killed a other PC operating systems. The Microsoft of the 90's was lethal. Nothing compares to them today.

taligent• 14 years ago

BeOS was a great technical experiment and a terrible product.

It had no drivers, no printing support, no decent SDK and was generally immature across the board. It would have been a disaster for Apple to use it who actually had real customers to support. I really wonder whether BeOS was ever a serious consideration over NeXT.

specialist• 14 years ago

"If you're not failing now and then, you're not trying hard enough" -- Bill Joy (from memory)

Gassee cracks me up. The way John Dvorak used to. I read Monday Note because Gassee seems to one of two people who understand what's happening to traditional publishing and news. (The other being Clay Shirky.)

Gassee has been pretty candid about how Jobs schooled him when Apple was choosing between BeOS and Next. That Gassee has learned from both his successes and failures impresses me.

As for his time at PalmSource, I can't say much. I tried some Palm dev work, didn't light my fire, so I ignored Palm(Source).

However, there was a pretty good post mortem of HP, Palm, WebOS a week or two back. WebOS had a shot, but blew it Untouchable's style (brought a knife to a gun fight).

gnaffle2• 14 years ago

I think he can criticize because he knows exactly what the problem is.

But besides that, Apple wasn't in a downward spiral in 1990. BeOS got bought and basically took over Palm, Palm got bought by HP. (And if not for Apotheker killing it, WebOS could very well have been lauded as HPs savior now that Microsoft has stabbed its OEMs in the back).

edwinnathaniel• 14 years ago

... and replace them with who?

... and the new regime will do what?

... so Elop can't do X,Y,Z but why not ask him to hire the right people to do X,Y,Z?

How fast can Nokia turn Symbian around into some sort of magical software that can please developers and users all-around the world?

Going with Windows Phone may be the not-so-bad alternative for short-term while stabilizing the company (i.e.: moving from old regime to a new regime is very very very tough, if you know what I mean).

Once the company has stabilized (if they can...), even though you get a hit by siding with Microsoft, start your plan B: build your own ecosystems.

You don't bulldoze your way out of mountain of problems. You come up with a step-by-step plans.

mtgx• 14 years ago

My favorite part is that Nokia didn't want to go with Android because they would have to depend on someone else, and yet they've completely given up control to Microsoft. At least with Android they would've had some control of what they put on their devices and how different they look from the competition's devices, in both hardware and software.

rogerbinns6• 14 years ago

With Microsoft they only have one other party to depend on, and they know they are a big deal to that party. Heck the rumour is that Microsoft pays Nokia $200 per Windows phone shipped. The reality is that the success of Windows phone is tied to the success of Nokia.

If using Android Google wouldn't have been able to play favourites much with Nokia. (See how they treat Motorola who they own.) If Nokia was on Android, the success of the platform wouldn't be that relevant to the success of Nokia.

So do you want to be a big fish in a little pond where the success of the pond depends on your success, or a small fish in a large pond where you are mostly irrelevant, but have more "control"?

Nokia's fundamental problem is that they have difficulty executing on software development. Getting someone else to do substantial chunks of development helps, but I've never seen anything indicating they have figured out development yet. So even if they had gone Android, what evidence is there they would have done it well?

muuh-gnu• 14 years ago

> So do you want to be a big fish in a little pond

But how is this a little pond? Basically every other big player offering Android phones also offer Windows Phones. If Nokia starts making money with windows Phones, everybody else will also start making money with windows phones. If the pond grows, all other fish will also grow and consume the growing pond, so Nokias share will remain the same. The pond is only little as there is no money in it.

From all the other big players, only Nokia for some reason limited itself to offering only Windows phones. If they think their Android phones couldn't beat other Android phones, how exactly are their Windows phones supposed to beat other Windows phones? If they somehow can apply a magic formula to make Windows Phones a success, what hinders them from applying that same formula to Android?

Nokia didnt want to become just another Android manufacturer and get a small piece of the big Android pie, instead they've become just another Windows Phone manufacturer and will get a small piece of the small Windows Phone pie.

rbanffy2• 14 years ago

> The reality is that the success of Windows phone is tied to the success of Nokia.

The difference is that if WP7 fails (and it did, since it'll be replaced by WP8, W8 or whatever the thing is called), Nokia flops and Microsoft walks. It's a classic bacon-and-eggs partnership, where Microsoft brings in the eggs and Nokia is the bacon.

> I've never seen anything indicating they have figured out development yet

Why would they? They run a third party software stack.

> what evidence is there they would have done it well?

Not much, really. Meebo was technically impressive and poorly marketed, but then there is Microsoft, with a proven track record of ruining anything non-desktop.

gnaffle2• 14 years ago

It doesn't matter so much how big of a fish you are in the pond, if the pond is really small. Nokia was the biggest fish in the Symbian and Meego pond as well.

If WP7 was a runaway success, other manufacturers would flock around it in no time.

Do you really think Microsoft is a loyal, dependable long-time partner, based on their previous track record?

heretohelp3• 14 years ago

>treat Motorola who they own.

Whom.

Who is the subject, whom is the object.

In this sentence, 'they' is Google and they are the subject. The 'actor' in the sentence. The 'actor' mistreats and owns the object in this sentence. The proper word to use for the owned object is whom.

Sidebar: It is my sincere belief that people who take naturally to the structure and nature of grammar have an easier time programming (I'm a coder).

tsiki• 14 years ago

A big part of why they went with Microsoft was that the Android market is already saturated, as opposed to the WP market, where they have a chance to catch an ecosystem in its infancy and become the dominant player in that ecosystem.

fidotron• 14 years ago

Amazon and the Kindle Fire kind of destroy that idea. They beautifully demonstrated with that just how stupid Nokia were.

rbanffy2• 14 years ago

There is no such thing as iOS, Android and WP markets: it's a smartphone market where 3 platforms compete (2, really). To use a metaphor a couple messages away, Nokia is bringing a rubber duck to a gunfight.

correctifier2• 14 years ago

Nokia had reached the end of the road on Symbian and needed a new direction.

This is a risky thing to do and going with Windows Phone gave Nokia the backing a very large and still influential company. Going with anything else would have meant going in alone. This includes Android which would be going alone into an already crowded market.

The current situation isn't great for Nokia, but they are in a deal that has the potential to help both companies, Nokia with short term financial help and Microsoft with a strong vendor to create showcase phones and the distribution network to get them into consumers hands.

Contrast this to RIM who tried to go in alone.

EDIT: fixed typo

tmzt6• 14 years ago

Microsoft killed RIM a few years ago, the monster is just taking a while to succumb to it's injuries. Microsoft shipped an update to Exchange that enabled wireless syncing and push to WM5 devices, and licensed to client to Apple for iPhone and some of the Android OEMs, then finally to Google. This killed the need for BES. The carriers opened up real IP0 connectivity for iPhone and Android as well as WM eliminating the need for the BB internet service and email, and the extra fees payed to RIM. That part of the business isn't dead yet, and the BB is still popular in a number of markets, but RIM is unlikely to succeed in the US with a tohc device

correctifier2• 14 years ago

While that contributed to the fall of RIM, what really did them in was that they didn't have a real operating system that could be leveraged to properly compete with Apple and Android.

JVIDEL• 14 years ago

Maybe he knows what he's talking about: Apple was doing great when he was in charge of products, and after Sculley fired him Spindler almost destroyed the company.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

I find these sorts of things (chewing over previous decisions) to be rather painful and less than productive. I'd much rather talk about solutions moving forward since really, that is all you can do. I'm all in favor of figuring out what information or skill might have given you better insight in the past but that's really as far as I would go there.

Nokia's bread and butter has always been 'feature' phones, and that is something they really can't afford to give away. One strategy I could certainly see them taking would be to start with Android, replace the user land part with an application to run a feature phone, and push the footprint of that software down to allow for the least expensive hardware to run it.

Then leverage the core competence in the Android kernel to create the best of class kernel for a Nokia branded 'smart' phone.

I do wonder however if Elop is the guy to push such a strategy.

tmzt6• 14 years ago

And do what with it? The transition is happening too fast for that. Nokia was always the one to push features down the stack (S60 to S40) but ZTE can do that cheaper with Android. The reality Nokia never saw was that Android is two systems, 2.x is S40 and 4.x+ is S60. Both run on a Linux kernel and run basically the same apps, with games running better on newer hardware.

Jean-Louis Gassée: Nokia should fire Elop and the board should go too

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