Submitted by The first English translation of Operation Elop, an examination by Finnish journalists into the final years of Nokia phones, has reignited debate about the fate of what was Europe’s largest and most admired technology company.
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Operation Elop is largely negative about the Canadian CEO’s tenure, the first non-Finn to hold the position at the company, but nevertheless comes to his support when the authors find that criticism was unfair. For example, the vilification that Stephen Elop received on receiving a “$26m payoff” was completely unwarranted, the authors conclude, since the figure (and much of the reporting) was wildly inaccurate. If you want an American CEO, they point out, you need to pay an American CEO’s compensation. And Elop’s time at Nokia cost him his marriage, don’t forget.
But the collapse of Nokia also cost Finnish communities dear: the details of rising alcoholism, and child social services under strain as thousands of employees were laid off, make for grim reading.
Elop’s tenure at Nokia and the company’s downfall will be studied for decades to come.
Elop’s tenure at Nokia and the company’s downfall will be studied for decades to come.
Will it, though? Or is it just a reflexion of a new normal? Elop wasn’t the bug, he was the feature. Corporate sabotage is nothing new.
Corporate sabotage from Nokia themselves not Elop or MS, given that Elop did what Nokia board asked for, as written on his contract.
Edited 2018-02-22 06:26 UTC
The “Elop Effect”, when you combine Osborne Effect and Ratner Effect. Three Pictures from Nokia Financial Data:
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/10/pinpointing-th…
Ha, is it me or does that graph only go up right around the time the N9 was released? August 2011… so yup!
Someone had to bring the news expected by the board…
9I knew right away in 2009 what Elop was up to when they announced he would take over Nokia. At the time, I was working on Microsoft Zune and watching the hardware and OS team members leave the failing project for a top secret mobile project at an undisclosed building Microsoft was leasing. I knew then, that the leader of Office went to Nokia for two reasons: to drive adoption of Microsoft’s future mobile OS; and to drive down the stock price for Microsoft to acquire them. I kick myself all the time for not publishing a blog, tweet, or something to prove it…
This conspiracy theory of driving down stock price makes no sense… it was in interest of MS for Nokia to be succesfull.
But not on the Nokia’s board own interest, they gave a contract to Elop with a big bonus to do exactly that, as revealed by the Finnish press.
Articles that keep being ignored by those that prefer to assume it was somehow an insider job from Microsoft.
So what? Are the writers of this article trying to bias me to feel bad for him?
How many marriages did he cost to Finnish engineers that were fired? How much money did not go in tax revenue because of a trojan horse, that had no connection to the country or its communities, and wen unfunded to hospitals and even fire fighters (like in the city of Oulu)? How many people suffered and lost their jobs because of all the actions he (and the Nokia board) made to basically squeeze out every profit they could from this company.
Good for her that she left him, I wish Nokia could have done the same and given him the god damn boot too.
I suppose the fact that Nokia was selling hopelessly outdated, expensive and woefully underpowered ‘smart’ phones like the E71 is irrelevant.
Well, the were up to the E73 but… yeah. And their attempt at a Symbian-based touch screen device didn’t help much.
MS knew what could happen to Nokia phone’ division.
Read this (Wed 2nd Mar 2011)
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?464534
Now that Nokia is but a shell of its former self I am wondering if this kind of corporate sabotage isn’t part of an American conspiracy to make sure that European technology companies never get the upper hand in global markets.
I believe it is time for European companies to be just as aggressive when it comes to North American companies because in this world you either eat them or get eaten by them. It is up to each company to decide what it wants, but I think the choice is obvious.
You seem to have forgotten, or perhaps deliberately ignored–based on your ridiculous rhetoric I suspect the latter–the fact that Nokia’s board ordered Elop to do exactly what he did, and paid him a hefty sum to get it done too.
Your conspiracy theory makes no sense here, few years back Nokia bought (US) Lucent; and earlier, Navteq.
Nokia is still doing very well. It had 102,000 employees and 23 Billion Euros in revenue in 2017. It even owns Bell Labs.
https://www.nokia.com/en_int
Elop was keen on adopting Microsoft’ operating system. I remember he said about the N9 “even if it’s a success there won’t be new ones”. What kind of businessman says that? If people asked me for something I would sell it to them.
Rewarding why Nokia didn’t choose Android in my opinion is because
1) They had the biggest app store at that time. They didn’t want yo renounce to that.
2) They had Nokia Maps. Google Play Services requires vendors to have Google Maps installed and treat it as a first class citizen. This meant promoting a competing product.
3) They wanted to make Ovi services big.
Nokia didn’t have a technical problem, they had an organizational one. Symbian on the lower end and Meego on the high end with At as a common SDK was a good strategy.
Elop is my most hated character in the it world, slightly above Carlina Fiorina.
Hm, IIRC Nokia didn’t have anywhere near the biggest app store – unified Ovi store came as a response to other offerings (and then was mostly filled with simple j2me games). And Symbian was not stellar on the technical level / moderinising it was a big task (also, because it wasn’t that great nobody adopted it when it was opensourced, only wasting more time), and Maemo/Meego project took too long (with restarts along the way) / Android gained too much momentum in the meantime. Organisational problems were also there with how too many factions within Nokia hated Meego/Android/Linux…