Nokia Plan B Was Just a Hoax 142
suraj.sun writes "There's been a lot of chatter about a 'Nokia Plan B' over the past 48 hours — the site was put up by nine young investors who outlined an audacious plan to rally shareholders, get themselves elected onto Nokia's board, and radically change the company's direction by firing Stephen Elop and committing massive resources to MeeGo. There's just one problem, though: the nine young investors don't really exist — according to the last tweet on the @NokiaPlanB Twitter account, it was all a hoax perpetuated by 'one very bored engineer who really likes his iPhone.' Ouch. That explains why the now-defunct site abruptly gave up the cause this morning after just 36 hours of existence."
Re:Why was this story even news to begin with? (Score:5, Insightful)
It got around the tech sites cause it was so obviously a much better idea than Nokia Plan A...
Doesn't matter if it was a hoax or not, they would do well to heed it.
Do Finnish boards actually respect shareholders? (Score:5, Insightful)
When Obama actually tried to introduce an SEC that would allow shareholders to have a NON-BINDING vote on CEO pay the Republicans screamed bloody murder. Apparently according to Republican philosophy you only have to work hard and actually earn your keep if you aren't already rich. The people who have gotten to the top(often times not even on their own merit) are allowed to plunder the company as they see fit. CEO pay is increasing 2x as fast as the S&P 500 and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it. At least it seems in Finland shareholders have SOME power.
Re:Why was this story even news to begin with? (Score:2, Insightful)
I really don't think it was a better plan. Rather more to the point, it might have been a better plan with a lot more flesh on its bones, and had Nokia not already inked the deals that would drive "Plan A" forward. As it was it was a lot of vague hand waving and spending a fortune "re-reinventing" the wheel. I don't want to know how much money Nokia has spent re-aligning itself for the MS deal, but tossing that out that window and going with an entirely new plan would probably cost that much again (or even more).
I understand that people who like Symbian would consider the "Plan B" superior from their own personal "I finally get a MeeGo phone" point of view, but it was fairly unrealistic given the current state of Nokia. The likely result would have been a Nokia bankrupt or dramatically weakened and unable to produce the kind of phones you want anyway. For good or ill, Nokia's path forward was determined when the ink on the MS deal was dry.
An oxymoron (Score:5, Insightful)
'one very bored engineer who really likes his iPhone.'
An engineer who is
1. bored
2. likes iPhones?
Does not sound like much of an engineer.
Re:You mean... (Score:3, Insightful)
The plan is working as intended. Elop doesn't hold a single Nokia share, but is one of biggest shareholders of Microsoft -- trashing the company will make him lose nothing and get a nice severance payout once the investors finally get rid of him. All of his efforts go towards increasing Microsoft's stock.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You mean... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nokia is a world market leader in mobile phones. They were doing not so well, but bleeding to death is quite far from it.
Certainly they were not doing badly enough to warrant outsourcing whole software development out of coutry to Microsoft. By this Nokia has reduced itself to mere commodity hardware manufacturer, no different from LG, RIM and others.
And how to you think that WP7 helps Nokia to keep their domination of low end markets? It doesn't. a) WP7 won't run on such hardware. b) licencing fees are too expensice when every dollar counts. Android however without licencing fees is a viable option to Chinese manufacturers of cheap feature phones and will slowly begin conquering low end markets from s40. Symbian could have been possible contender at low end, but now it is dumped alltogether.
Nokia had a smartphone OS of it's own in Maemo, but they dumped it when it was almost ready and after releasing only one phone on it! Then about a year ago they went on to develop MeeGo instead. Either of these would have been far better choice than WP7.
When publishing the Microsoft deal Elop said that the reason for switching WP7 is that MeeGo is not ready and Symbian is not competitive. How does WP7 remedy this, with no new phones in 2011? Atleast (and with limited resources allocated to it) there is supposedly one MeeGo phone coming out from Nokia this year. Instead of giving up software R&D and laying off thousands of software engineers (and hurting Finnish society in progress) they could have put all these resources to MeeGo and Qt. I think after two years they would have been far better off. Think about it. WP7 is still missing basic features like multitasking and cut & paste, while Google and Apple are actually pushing new concepts to the market. In 2012 when first Nokia phones with WP7 are out WP7 is still playing catch up. How do you think Nokia is going to maintain it's position or even stay as healthy company as their sales crash during in 2011? Afterall who on earth will buy Symbian phones when it's future is doomed and the new Nokia CEO is calling it junk openly.
IMHO this MS deal is almost as good as suicide for Nokia.