Myths and misdemeanors: lets examine some very widely held myths about nokia, and the facts behind the story

Myths and Misdemeanors: Lets Examine Some Very Widely Held Myths about Nokia, and the facts behind the story.
Lets do some Nokiamyths! New and improved: Now fortified with Facts! I have recently looked at Nokia CEO Stephen Elop performance, and frankly have called him incompetent and fit to be not just fired, but to be sued for mismanagement of Nokia. Please allow me my opinionated views from time to time. As I am Finn and am an ex-Nokia executive, and Nokia has kindly supported me with tons of consulting work over the past decade since I left Nokia, and I have tons of friends still working there, I have a passionate personal connection with the biggest mobile phone maker of the world. And no doubt, that has colored some of my observations about how Stephen Elop has run the company recently. This blog is not about Elop’s failings. This blog is about Nokia’s survival. I am loyal to the bone. Not to the boneheaded management style of Stephen Elop. I am loyal to Nokia. And I don’t want Nokia to die. And even more than that, I believe Nokia stood for many of the better aspects of business, they always championed open systems, of partnering, of ecosystems, of a migration from hardware to software, of becoming an internet-like company.

So there are some myths about Nokia, its smartphones and its ecosystem, that need to be cleared up. This is my blog to expose those myths. And sorry, this is another long blog, but these are complex issues and I want to deal with them thoroughly, not superficially. And where we deal with myths, as you’ve no doubt seen on Mythbusters, the matters have to be examined in detail.

Understand that Nokia is no stranger to change, it was once a papermill and rubber factory. As a kid if Finland I wore rubber boots made by Nokia and our family car had tyres with the Nokia brand. Toiletpaper was made by Nokia etc. So for Nokia to face its transition from making voice-oriented basic mobile phone handsets, to

inventing the smartphone, and then guiding that change from enterprise/business oriented smartphones (like the Blackberry) to consumer-oriented smartphones (like the iPhone), that transition too was invented and pioneered by Nokia. If you are addicted to Angry Birds and download tons of games to your smartphone, the company that dared to put ‘frivolous’ videogames on ‘serious’ tools like a telephone – was of course Nokia. And if you think Apple’s App Store that bypasses mobile operators/carriers and sells those games directly to your phone is a great idea. Have a guess where Apple got that idea? Nokia pioneered that too with what was then the biggest app store and the most content you could buy to your smartphone completely bypassing the carriers, for a smartphone called the N-Gage.

But Nokia is a massive global organization of 120,000 employees making 58,000 US dollars of revenues (and 2,400 US dollars of profits too) last year. That kind of ship does not change course quickly. Nokia was however, managing the transition from cheap basic phones to smartphones by far more successfully than any of its traditional rivals, Motorola, Samsung, LG, SonyEricsson etc. Each of those four had experienced at least some quarters of loss-making while Nokia’s handset unit had never produced a loss in Nokia’s history. And better than that, Nokia led all of its rivals in transitioning from ‘dumbphones’ to smartphones – Nokia was the only handset manufacturer which had for every single year, a better market share in smartphones than it had in its dumbphones unit.