Nokia Windows Phone Revealed 211
DMiax writes "Nokia's controversial CEO Stephen Elop just revealed the prototype of the next WP7 handset. The CEO asked the journalists present to turn off the cameras because the new phone was 'super confidential.' Did he really expect them to comply? After all he must know that this has the potential to hurt the sales of the recently released N9, the last non-Windows Nokia smartphone. He would never want to do that, right?"
Internal presentation (Score:5, Informative)
This was a company internal presentation, not for journalists. If you watch the whole video, it becomes clear that this was not a controlled leak, there are other references to ongoing work which I seriously doubt Elop wants to have out in public.
Re:The Elop Conspiracy (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry about the earlier comment eating all the breaks! That'll teach me not to preview before I post :)
Reposting:
OK, the conspiracy theories are getting ridiculous now.
Full disclaimer: I'm an (ex)Nokia employee and was caught up in the great purge of developers following the feb11 announcement. So I'll very soon be out of a job (but as the redundancy package for all the employees at my site is extremely sweet, I'm very happy to bail -- plus this is not the company I joined all those years ago)
Even as an employee, I could see that there is no consumer device they have released in the last 4years (since the N95) that I actually cared about (except the N900; which is not really a consumer device, but it's certainly the best mobile computer on the planet! :)
Anyway, back to the article; that video was available on the Nokia intranet for employees worldwide to watch. The event was not filled with journalists/bloggers but employees (inside a Nokia site). This is not a vast conspiracy to hurt the N9 (as there are tons of similar videos released internally every week whenever an exec speaks "publicly" at a nokia site; that obviously no one bothered to leak) -- the difference this time is that there are a massive number of disgruntled employees worldwide who have been told their role is terminating/moved to Accenture/projects canceled etc. I assume a random employee leaked this.
You could still say that it's stupid to have confidential videos available to employees worldwide, but that's just how Nokia operates. There is a large amount of trust towards the employees (which is regularly broken), and they've resisted from turning into a massively secret organisation in full lockdown mode (& this is one of the things that makes it a wonderful place to work)
The above is not meant to be taken as me standing up for Elop. I disagree vehemently with his strategy; but there are parts of it that are yet to be made public (well, it is public now, but no one has joined the dots yet :). It'll make more sense in the next 12 months. It's extremely high risk and not guaranteed to succeed). But there is one thing most employees agreed with before he took centre stage; and that is Nokia's strategy before Feb11 was fucked.
Of course, it's still possible Elop's an MS stooge trying to run the company to the ground. If so, he's doing an amazingly good job of hiding it (internally; where the strategy is known). The only really stupid (public) mistake he's done so far is to EOL Symbian before the successor was in place. I have no idea why, but I assume MS gave Nokia a billion reasons to force him to make that statement.
Anyway, I think Nokia's finished. I'm glad the N9 is out. Full linux distro, root access with a shell out of the box (OK, you need to enable dev mode which is just a UI toggle) -- I have a phone for the next 3 years and a large payout & couldn't care less about what happens to the company
But do keep the conspiracy theories reasonable, guys :)