The Three Pillars of Nokia Strategy Have All Failed 409
An anonymous reader writes "'When all 3 legs of your 3-legged strategy fail, what do you do? You rush — run run run — to change your total strategy. But what would a madman do?' Ex-Nokia exec Tommi Ahonen's new article has a few suggestions. Is the Nokia board either asleep at the wheel, or incompetent, or in collusion with the incompetent CEO? Ahonen provides an insider's view not just of how Nokia's Windows phone strategy has failed, but how this has spread to other parts of the company's technology. He says the 'Elop Effect' has 'single-handedly destroyed [...] Europe's biggest tech giant.' He raises the question: Why is Nokia's board failing to act? We've discussed Tommi's articles before, where he was correctly predicting Windows Phone's market failure at a point where others were claiming that 'the Lumia line is, in fact, selling quite nicely.'"
Re:Not like Nokia's other phones were selling (Score:4, Informative)
the iphone stole 14% of mobile PROFITS a year after it was first released. and that was only 1 million units sold.
almost all of those cheapo phones sold around the world make no money. all the profits are made on a few devices.
apple is now at something like 60% of PROFITS of all cell phones sold around the world. Samsung is 30% or more. everyone else is fighting for scraps
Re:I'm not much of a Nokia Fan (Score:5, Informative)
Apple sold 5 million [apple.com] iPhone 5s on opening weekend. As of 1 month ago, Nokia has sold 7 million [techcrunch.com] Lumias. Total.
The Lumia was introduced in November 2011, so that's 10 months of sales. Apple sold over 100 million iPhones last year.
Re:How many more? (Score:5, Informative)
The board probably had decided on a MS strategy before hiring Elop so they're as complicit in the current strategy as he is. That means they have face invested in the strategy which makes it unlikely that they'll fire Elop and change directions before it's too late. Once the board gets replaced the company may stand a chance, but that'll take some time.
Re:How many more? (Score:5, Informative)
What phones aren't made in China?
Ironically Nokias before Elop sacked Nokias workforce
Re:They had an alternative - MeeGo (Score:5, Informative)
Besides a few slashdot nerds no one was buying MeeGo phones. These same nerds knew other nerds with these phones and assumed everyone was buying them.
Nokia stopped making them becuase no one was buying them - the only people complaining about this are a few slashdot nerds and Nokia execs who lost their jobs.
This is a quote from the January 26th 2012 by Tomi Ahonen
“Luckily I didn’t have to do the math for this, the nice people at All About Symbian had tracked the numbers (read through the comments) and calculated the limits, finding N9 sales to be between the level of 1.5 million and 2.0 million units in Q4. Wow! Nokia specifically excluded all of its richest and biggest traditional markets where it tried to sell the Lumia, and these countries achieved – lets call it the average, 1.75 million unit sales of the N9 in Q4. So the one N9 outsold both Lumia handsets by almost exactly 3 to 1.” [1]
Re:Blogspam, on my Slashdot? More likely than you. (Score:5, Informative)
Woah, he predicted Windows Phone would not succeed at the level of iPhone and Android? Better tell James Randi to hang it up, because we got a real god damned psychic right here!
Bra-vo, very sarcastic and blasé, but unfortunately it makes you look quite ignorant. Ahonen predicted this in February 2011 right after Elop's announcement. For example:
Re:Not like Nokia's other phones were selling (Score:4, Informative)
OK, you didn't read it yet, here you go: The story of MeeGo [taskumuro.com].
Re:What Are the Three Pillars??? (Score:5, Informative)
I got way down the page and found that I was in reality not even a quarter through and still hadn't seen any explanation of the title of the article (three pillars). Just a bunch of rambling. I tried reading some more then hit the tl;dr; wall.
Can someone list succinctly (like the article should have) what the three pillars are?
From the Article "three pillars, one on the dumbphones unit (as before); one on Symbian but one that would be run down (changing from before) and one new leg, that built on Windows Phone, which would fully replace the Symbian leg over time - and more - would even take some of the business from the dumbphones unit."
Basically
The First part is saying how Nokia was doing great before Elop...In fact great up until the Burning Platform Memo. Where basically Elop said what Nokia was producing was garbage, and they should go for the three pillar stratergy.
The Second part is about the three pillars, Dumbphones(Keep em), Symbian Smartphones gracefully being replaced by Windows Phones, and about Nokias graph of the plan in graphical form with detailed explanation.
The Third part is showing how well this plan went sown (Spoiler now well) Explaining each portion of the graph from plan to execution.
The Fourth part is basically justifying getting rid of the Stratergy and Elop. The Twist at the end is that even though The strategy is not only failing Nokia's current stratergy is to keep following it!?
The short version is you should really read the article before posting here, the longer version is its an invaluable blog if you have the vaguest interest in Mobile Phones.
Re:How many more? (Score:2, Informative)
Not that micro-USB standards are all that standard. I just got a Blackberry Playbook through work to go with my BB phone. Imagine my surprise when my micro-USB charger and USB cable for the phone don't work to charge the Playbook. All the sins great and small attributed to Apple have been committed by RIM on its users since time immemorial.
Re:How many more? (Score:4, Informative)
Selling more phones worldwide than all others put together in every segment is not doing well? The only thing that sucked was their US smartphone sales, but globally they were selling more smartphones than all other suppliers put together. The iPhone wouldn't even work on a Chinese network at that time but Nokia were in there selling millions.
Re:How many more? (Score:5, Informative)
C'mon, you know the answer to this. You don't declare a previous platform dead until you're ready to ship the replacement. And if you're wise, you provide some manner of backwards or forwards compatibility. New versions of iOS will often install on older devices, as will newer versions of Android. iOS and Android apps tend (not always, but often) to work on a wide range of OS versions.
WP8 will not install on WP7 machines, making them orphans by definition. WP8 apps won't work on WP7 phones, giving developers little incentive to create WP8 apps until it's clear whether the platform will be a success, leading to a chicken-and-egg problem.
Every platform becomes obsolete eventually, but Microsoft should know better than to declare a platform dead months before the replacement becomes available. That's a newbie mistake. It's almost like they're trying to sink Nokia. Maybe they're thinking of buying the wreckage and fleshing out their hardware portfolio?