He canned their best phone (N9) and OS (Meego), only to pursue a clearly inferior business strategy, drive the stock price down, and enable a Microsoft takeover...
I was an owner of a N9 and really enjoyed the OS. Most of the employees that developed Maemo and MeeGo are carrying on at jolla.com. They still have not shipped a phone yet and I have been following them for nearly 2 years now.
As much as I love the close to open source atmosphere and very good UI of the N9, Elop is right. Android turned making phones into a commodity. The only place where money can be made is by providing an ecosystem. Customers demand an ecosystem too. Nokia was losing market share so fast that as Elop said they were on a "burning platform". I am not sure they had the might anymore to create a MeeGo/Maemo ecosystem in time to save them.
I really wish that Nokia would have continued MeeGo development but I understand the decision to can it too. Nokia for many years was offering contradictory statements and making half assed partnerships. So they had to say we are going all in and all of our resources are behind Windows Phone. Developers got burnt several times. Even with Maemo they suddenly partnered with Intel's mobile OS and had to spend a year porting stuff with no apparent gain to customers. So I wish Jolla well, but Nokia did what they had to do.
"Android turned making phones into a commodity. The only place where money can be made is by providing an ecosystem."
I agree with that. Having an ecosystem is the root of value in mobile device companies. Elop was correct to identify an ecosystem as the most important thing. Where it gets controversial is the subsequent MSFT decision, which could be interpreted as saying "Now that we have determined ecosystems are the most valuable thing a company can have, we are torching ours and outsourcing that part of the company to Microsoft"
The more logical thing would have been "now that we have determined ecosystems are the most valuable thing a company can have, we are all-in with Qt and MeeGo."
Of course, it ultimately boils down to whether Elop and Nokia's leadership had more faith in Microsoft than in themselves to build that ecosystem. In terms of execution, neither company had been firing on all cylinders for quite some time...
Best phone and OS according to who? The same folks who cheered on the OpenMoko? As Elop said, the market has turned from a battle of devices into a war of ecosystems. Meego would've ended up like BB10 running on QNX(remember how many folks on here salivated about a QNX based mobile OS?), critically appreciated but with no apps and sales.
Nokia recently became the fourth largest OEM in the US market.
http://pocketnow.com/2013/11/01/nokia-smartphone-sales
I doubt that given Nokia never really had a brand in the US for smartphones, it could've done so without Microsoft's support.
According to everyone who saw it and touched it. I was watching their unveiling of the phone, trading their stock and listening to market opinion, and I remember that very day. Everyone in the market agreed that Meego could have been huge (it was also open-source like Android, and in many ways a better OS), and it was only Elop's allegiance to Microsoft which killed it.
Meego was good enough that Jolla picked it up, and Intel spun it into Tizen. At the time of the N9 unveiling, it was better than Android.
Speaking of ecosystems, fast forward a few years, if Nokia had indeed attempted to push Meego and failed, Android would have been the logical choice. Now they're settling for scraps with Windows Phone, when they were once THE leader worldwide in smartphones...
Edit - by the way, Nokia was the smartphone market share leader as recently as 2011... In fact, it was during Elop's tenure that Nokia lost most of its market share, although they were on the way out for awhile before then. But had Meego had better traction, it could have been very different. Nokia had an ecosystem, and had mindshare...
Another problem is that the final (and truly brilliant) UI of the N9 didn't exist at the time Elop made the decision to kill it. At the time, the Swipe UI was not done, and was actually the 3rd "let's start over" initiative with the MeeGo UI at the time (so you can see why there was skepticism on it).
But man, they really knocked it out of the park. It was (and still is) the best smartphone UI ever made.
> (it was also open-source like Android, and in many ways a better OS).
Open source is not a very big selling point to the masses. WebOS was open source and better than Android at the time, had good reviews, but it flopped miserably.
>Speaking of ecosystems, fast forward a few years, if Nokia had indeed attempted to push Meego and failed, Android would have been the logical choice
You're assuming that Nokia would not be dead from all the losses in the meantime. Microsoft was pumping $250M into them per quarter to ease the transition. If Nokia went alone, it may not have survived the big transition to Meego.
>and it was only Elop's allegiance to Microsoft which killed it.
No, it was Nokia's board that hired him in the first place and approved all his big decisions.
> You do know that a company's board can fire the CEO at any time right?
Oh really?
> Open source is not a very big selling point to the masses.
No, but it enables other manufacturers to hop on board and create an ecosystem. Nokia had Intel and others in their corner...
> WebOS was open source and better than Android at the time, had good reviews, but it flopped miserably.
It wasn't open source until it had already failed. Plus it never felt as though HP really cared all that much about mobile devices, they were a huge monolithic entity making too much money on desktops, servers, etc...
Contrast this with Nokia, the world leader in phones (including smartphones) for quite some time.
Also, at one point Symbian held 70+ percent of smartphone market share, Nokia obviously did know how to create an ecosystem.
> No, it was Nokia's board that hired him in the first place and approved all his big decisions.
Obviously a mistake on their part. Corporate boards don't always make the best decisions, though in theory they should.
Also, at one point Symbian held 70+ percent of smartphone market share, Nokia obviously did know how to create an ecosystem.
That data point actually proves the exact opposite: Nokia knew how to sell mobile phones, but they had no idea how to create an ecosystem.
Despite Symbian's huge marketshare, the market for 3rd party Symbian apps was in shambles. There had been an initial enthusiasm for Symbian app development in 2002-2004, but that was slowly killed by Symbian's obtuse certification processes and SDKs that kept growing in complexity and crappiness.
When the iPhone was introduced, Nokia was marketing their Symbian phones with the slogan: "This is what computers have become." But almost nobody was doing computer-like things on Symbian phones. The browser sucked, even though it was WebKit-based (Nokia had forked the code and left it to linger). There was no channel for selling apps to ordinary consumers.
A few geeks installed weird stuff like Quake ports on their N95 phones, but the average Symbian user just did phone calls, SMS and occasional photos.
I agree with your points, but as a quibble, webOS was not open source at the time. The decision to open-source webOS didn't come until the end of 2011.
4th at 4.1%. Beating Motorola (which was stagnating, even after the Google buy) and ZTE (which didn't have much US brand recognition anyway) wasn't super difficult.
Also, Meego Harmattan (released with the N9) got pretty stellar reviews all round. See for your self:
N9 had more apps at the time than Windows Phone today. Nokia had a large developer base and the Qt development environment for N9 was really good. There was nothing to stop it gaining market share as it was overall a really decent platform/ecosystem.
Only thing that killed it was Elop who decided to limit sales to just 23 small countries, and left big markets for their WP launch device, which was horrible at the time (Lumia 800). Of course the whole MeeGo strategy was killed earlier which made the device DOA.. And it still sold 10x more than the Lumia 800.
As someone who loves the N9, I still feel compelled to point out that it is simply false that the N9 had more apps at the time than Windows Phone has today.
There were a lot of Qt developers (still are) and I definitely agree that the N9 was set up to not succeed, and that had a negative effect on the ecosystem.
Although even before feb 11, when Nokia was all-in with Symbian+Qt+Meego, developer interest was lagging behind iOS, Android, and even Windows Phone which was vaporware at the time. Here's one from mid-2010: http://www.appcelerator.com/assets/appcelerator-mobile-devel...
