Of COURSE Stephen Elop's to blame for Nokia woes, says author Operation Elop, a new book on Nokia, got plenty of attention last week, with its suggestion that Nokia’s former CEO was the “worst CEO in history”. After I ridiculed the idea that Elop alone was solely responsible for Nokia’s crash, co-author Pekka Nykänen got in touch to say that isn’t quite fair. So we invited him to talk …
Elop wasn't the worst CEO in history, and the author of the book agrees. Elop made a strategic decision which would have worked if his business partner hadn't been so clueless about the merits of its own product. And he obviously believed that his connection to that business partner would give them the confidence to let him do it his way, to their mutual advantage. He was wrong, but could anybody have reliably predicted it at the time?
There are many candidates for worst CEO in history but the British laws of libel mean that they can't be identified until everyone involved is safely dead. Nokia still exists, Microsoft is lumped with its failing phone software platform, Nokia got some cash. Now compare that with the history of the British electronics industry which had world beating technology in WW2 (as even Stalin admitted) and frittered the lot away.
Fair enough, and I think I was one of them (I keep changing my identity on El Reg, owing to fear of black helicopters.) Several million people in the UK thought the Iraq invasion would be a disaster. It was. The point was that in both cases not enough people with enough clout agreed at the time. The fact that both Elop and Blair went on to be paid lots of money by US companies is possibly irrelevant.
EEE implied that Microsoft would have turned Nokia into a Microsoft subsidiary and killed it through internal turf wars. But actually Microsoft failed to embrace and extend; they seem to have thought that some other phone maker might come good with Windows Phone and must not be pissed off, so Nokia was treated as being just another OEM. How many people foresaw that, that Microsoft would fail through being insufficiently bold?
"He was wrong, but could anybody have reliably predicted it at the time?"A huge number of Reg readers predicted it. Well extrapolated from MS EEE approach that has existed since they got bigger than a shed.
A large number of Reg readers predicted the failure of the iPhone and iPad. The triumph of netbooks. All sorts of other things. You can always find someone to say "I predicted that". But unless they're consistent about being right most of the time, why would you listen to their opinion beforehand? A stopped clock is right twice a day...
Microsoft aren't a hardware company (even though they sell quite a bit of it). Why would they want to own Nokia? It's clear their board didn't, even after Ballmer decided he did. So that blows the trojan-horse bollocks out of the water. As if anyone believed they were capable of the machiavellian plot under Ballmer anyway.
Microsoft are a software company. It's how they see themsevlves. And they therefore want to sell software. This meant that they'd never give Nokia total control or priority. As they'd always be hoping for other partners to join the Windows Phone ecosystem. But it was clearly in their own self-interest to do everything they could to help Nokia.
It was perfectly valid for Elop to believe that his connections at Microsoft should get him some leverage. Remember Microsoft were paying Nokia well over a billion dollars in marketing support as well. So it's not as if he didn't get a commitment out of them. And everyone in both companies knew if Nokia failed, that Windows Phone would fail. Which is why Microsoft just bought a failing phone company they didn't even want for $4 billion. Although I suppose that's still a better purchase than $10bn for Autonomy...
Finally, the people who argue that MS weren't a suitable partner fail to say who was. Google weren't offering free money. They were offering to buy Nokia's patents off them, i.e. buy their crown jewels for cheap. Bearing in mind the Nokia board haven't even sold those patents to Microsoft, only given them a ten year license. So Google's deal was pretty shit. And Google don't give a damn about their hardware partners. Notice how only Samsung is making any money?
So Elop's options were to go MS, or keep on trucking with Nokia's internal development, and see if he could get something out the door from all their wonderful innovation. Which presumamably meant taking a couple of layers of management out into the forest and shooting them, then finding some more management that could pick a winner from all the competing projects, push more engineering resources into actually finishing one of them - and actually shipping some product. Nokia had failed to do this for the last 5-10 years, so although I think Elop was a wuss for not trying it, I can well understand that he thought it was too much of a gamble, and decided to bet the shareholders money on something a bit safer. And his bet paid off. They got to sell their phone division to MS. That was always a likely (if by no means certain) plan B, as MS would have to buy Nokia or see their entire mobile strategy go up in flames. Rather like Nokia, they were doing well in mobile up until 2003. But then masively dropped the ball.
The most telling thing from the article for me is the bit from Nokia's ex CEO. I very much doubt that it's unprecendented in the whole of history for two outside players to come and take over another industry. He seems to be drawing the lesson from that, "well what do you do?" Whereas the lesson I'd draw is that a large industry's leading players had failed so spectacularly that two outside companies had managed to come in, and kick seven bells of crap out of the incumbents, because the incumbents were crap. If theyve been well managed, there would have been less opportunity.
Also MS were a new player as well. Those with longer memories will recall how MS were going to fail, when they entered the mobile industry in the late 90s. And how Nokia and Sony were going to cooperate over Symbian, so that Windows Mobile wouldn't do to them what MS did to IBM. And yet by 2003, MS had half the smartphone market, and Sony and Nokia had totally failed to cooperate over Symbian. As I well know, as a former Sony Ericsson P800 owner. Great phone, but the software was crippled by the fact that Sony and Nokia had made their two versions of Symbian incompatible, so whenever you found a good app you wanted, it was always for the other version.
So my conclusion from the fact that Microsoft, then RIM, then Apple, then Google then Samsung entered the mobile market and all came to dominate (to various degrees) in their turn, is that the incumbents in the industry were shit. And managed by useless tossers. As they had all the patents, and all the contacts. Where are the mobile giants of Sony, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia now? Admittedly Sony are still going, but there seems to be a rumour every year that they're going to give up on phones, and I don't think they've turned a profit in the last 5 years. Maybe more.
I think the issue of incumbents vs newcomers in the mobile market is largely the same as lots of other electronics industries. For about 100 years the electronics industry had been about hardware. Make your hardware better, and your product is better. All the incumbents were/are hardware companies. But the last 10 years has been all about software, and the hardware only has to be good enough to run it. So it's no wonder that hardware companies are struggling and software companies have prospered. Sure, the hardware has to work, but beyond that it's mostly irrelevant, and difficult to differentiate on. It's no good bleating that Nokia had better hardware than Apple, when Apple killed them with software.
""He was wrong, but could anybody have reliably predicted it at the time?"
Bollocks, it didn't take the brains of an Archbishop to see that Elop, Windows Phone and Nokia were a slow motion train wreck.
Re my El Reg comment of the 15th August 2012 :-
"Long shot The best thing that Nokia can now do is to fire Elop and switch to the Android platform.
It would be messy, but it would offer Nokia their best chance of survival as an independent company."
"Elop wasn't the worst CEO in history,"
Of course he wasn't. He sold a business that had been in a death spiral to Microsoft, who actually gave Nokia a good sum of money for the business. He did exactly what he was paid to do, which was work in the interests of Nokia's shareholders. He realised that Nokia had irretrievably missed the boat on phone operating systems, and rather than becoming a me-too Android hardware maker struggling to compete with low cost Chinese OEMs (which would have been a very bad decision), he chose Microsoft's OS, and that inevitably led to MS having to buy Nokia's phone division.
Arguably Elop played a blindingly good strategic game, worked loyally and effectively for his Finnish employers and Nokia shareholders, in a game where he'd been dealt a really poor hand to start with. Given the lacklustre performance of the typical over paid CEO's of most companies I'd suggest Elop should be considered for the award of best CEO ever.
Those mourning Symbian already know in their hearts that the body was in the coffin long before Elop arrived. And if they'll be realistic they'd have to agree that had Elop tried to revive that corpse, Nokia's phones business would have suffered the same fate as Blackberry, of finding that after a year or three of developing something that was actually good enough to take to market, the whole world had moved further on, "quite good" was never going to be good enough, and the value of the business had shrunk yet further.
Yeah, you think that perhaps that a better outcome would have been Nokia keeping the handset division, 30000-or-so people in gainful employment, and churning out phones people wanted?
He inherited a company with the highest marketshare in the world. So far he burned two platforms and a toolkit (Symbian, MeeGo, and Qt), transitioned over to a dead-end platform (WP7), failed to persuade existing customers to transition over from Symbian to WP7, bought another platform (Meltimi), burned it, tried to sell the handset division to Microsoft and failed, started a new platform (WP8) without giving WP7 users an upgrade path so they wondered off to Android or iOS, started a new platform (Nokia X) as a way to force MS's hand, got Nokia's handset division sold, received a tonne of cash, burned another platform (Nokia X), and got 15000-or-so people fired. Microkia is now an irreverence in the handset market. Luckily Nokia (the parent company) came out of it relatively unscathed and able to jump back into the market in a year's time.
Whether or not he was a Trojan horse, and possibly he wasn't due to needing two attempts to sell the handset division, he certainly was a piss-poor CEO with a history of running companies into the ground and selling them off on his CV.
mourning Symbian ... quite agree with you there. Nokia may well have to take the blame for killing Symbian, but that technically had happened well before the time Elop took the helm there. Vulture Central ran an excellent series ("Symbian, The Secret History") about it, back in the time ...
Elop knew exactly what the burning platform memo would do; one way of reading it is "we've tried Symbian [ and eff'ed it up royally ], we've tried Linux/Maemo [ and made a royal mess of it as well ]. Let's take that as a lesson and try the only one we've never touched before [ and fingers crossed not mess up this time ] ...".
Symbian is a sad story of might-have-beens, one of those "heroism in defeat" things. Accusing Elop of murdering it is a stab-in-the-back myth; he only killed what had already become a zombie.
It wasn't in the interest of Nokia, but in the interest of Microsoft. He lowered the stock value of the company to sell it to Microsoft. This what he was supposed to do, and this is what he managed to do.
And seriously, Nokia could have aced the Android market. Just think of an Android powered Communicator. They could have slowly phased out Symbian instead of this abrupt end. Most people don't care what OS is running on their devices and Nokia was known for very decent hardware.
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Elop made a strategic decision which would have worked if his business partner hadn't been so clueless about the merits of its own product.
This is where the Elop defense collapses. Most people in the IT world that weren't tied to the MS ecosystem knew this could and would fail, including the reasons why it ultimately failed. There was also a lot of evidence pointing to the fact that buying into the MS mobile solutions leads to market loss and bankruptcy: the latest example would be Palm, and HTC almost got killed though it seems to have survived in a sense ... thanks to Android.
Betting on a new revolutionary OS is a good bet... as long as it isn't MS behind that "revolutionary OS" as they usually gravitate around Windows and they can't think away from that. We all know that Windows on the phone is useless. Even licensing BB10 would've been a better bet for Nokia!
I think that for shareholder value, OPK was probably about the worst CEO... he oversaw an Enron like collapse of the share price.
The Elop memo that killed Symbian was cruel and unusual at the time and probably did wipe out the last European phone OS at a stroke. I only wish there was a little more precision though, even these guys seem to mix the Nokia S60 UI (which was a dog) with the Symbian platform (odd, frustrating but effective). The idea that putting touch on Symbian was a ridiculous idea doesn't make sense as UIQ and numerous others were already doing it quite well (even before the iPhone)... putting touch on S60... ah, well.
Anyway, time has passed, we can all laugh about it now.
Elop being a trojan is a convenient scapegoat for those who still like to think Nokia could have survived rather than being a soon to be dead horse on its last legs. It is easier to believe the once great Nokia was deliberately ruined than failing of its own accord.
David Black,
UIQ was great. I had a Sony Ericsson P800 in 2003. But it was dead by what, 2005? Sony had given up on it well before the iPhone was even rumoured. And even in its heydey, whenever I found a good app, the bugger was always for S60.
Even when the best Symbian phones by far were the P800 and P900, Symbian was still Nokia. Which is one reason why Sony Ericsson decided to dump it, and abandon smartphones.
It's also the reason that I decided that smartphones weren't worth the hassle, and went back to a dumbphone. Motorola RAZR V3 as happens, my favourite phone. Didn't get another smartphone until 2010, I'd had enough of being an early-adopter.
Yup I had a P800 followed by a P900 way ahead of their time (e.g. handwriting recognition) but had a few poblems like the Sync stations.
Now running a 4yo HTC Android with a nice clean contacts app, synced with google; and a few really useful cheap apps.
"there's a quote from a senior Symbian kernel engineer (who I won't name) who spelled out what the issues actually were with Nokia"
I'd accept that the problems were diagnosed, and were individually treatable with time. But culturally and organisationally Nokia couldn't address them in any time frame, and even with radical action to make the organisation change, the business didn't have time as shown by the demise of Blackberry under the rule of Balsillie and Lazaridis. In 2006 both companies completely commanded their focus segments of the phone world. Both needed to address shortcomings in their phone operating systems, and both failed to anticipate the quality competitor offerings, failed to listen to customers, and failed to innovate effectively or quickly enough.
The interesting thing is that all of those criticisms apply to Microsoft in its core PC OS business. The only thing keeping MS going is the lack of a credible mass market alternative (Apple too expensive, Linux too fragmented, complex, and insufficiently compatible with a range of important programs).
He's hardly the a high achieving MS loyalist MS would have chosen to send. He was what they were faced with dealing with after the fact.
Make no mistake, MS would have paid a lot to buy a successful Nokia WP business and it's easy to believe they'd hope for Elop to facilitate that. They clearly aren't so keen on the train wreck he actually created (with plenty of help from MS's WP mismanagement), suggesting any 'conspiracy' didn't work as expected and you have to wonder just what leverage Elop had to get re-employed at MS now.
Elop does appear to have outwitted Microsoft though, despite all the other failures.
"Elop does appear to have outwitted Microsoft though, despite all the other failures."
So why is Elop employed at MS?
a. They think he is the best man for the job despite all the failures.
b. It's a reward for doing what they told him to do, even if it didn't work out like they planned.
>
This piece in Vanity Fair:
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/11/satya-nadella-bill-gates-steve-ballmer-microsoft
suggests that the deal was Ballmer's baby. He pushed it through against the instincts of the board, and they only went with it when he threatened to resign.
Whatever the reason, it remains a prime example of C-suite idiocy on both sides. Nokia had - to some extent still has - world-leading engineering talent. What it didn't have was world-leading management.
Microsoft - um, well, yeah, never mind. Ballmer was a typical sales droid, promoted far above his level of strategic competence. He was by all accounts incredibly good at selling Office and Windows, but unbelievably bad at thinking of cool new stuff for MS to do. (See also, Win 8.)
Now not even BillG can tolerate him.
There's something quite predictable about these screw-ups. The further you get from what used to be called the shop floor, the less of a grip you have on the reality that most people live in. Outcomes that are blindingly obvious to most people appear to be blindingly invisible at board level.
This wouldn't be a problem if the idiots in charge had to carry the can, but they never do.
Steven Elop aka "the Nokia trojan horse" seems to have been rewarded for public reaffirming of the obvious fact to not put all the eggs in the One Micros... the one basket. Especially, in that notorious basket so very well known to crush many eggs big and small in many past occasions. Going with all the Phone OS vendors would have been a much profitable solution for Nokia while not sinking their own, who'd have thunk that? No other phone vendor (except for MS) have ever done just that. With the ironic exception, that MS are making much more money on Android than on their own WP platform. For MS it is not a financial matter but an obsession and politics. (Some other famous CEO became even more famous after hurling a few chairs when hearing about Google.)
Instead, the trojan horse has gone with the former employer with which he had a lot of financial interests, what financial interests did this whole demarche bring for Nokia is now for everyone to see...
Having worked there until a bit over two years ago, I agree that Elop does not deserve the full blame. A lot of the problems he was trying to solve had their roots in well over a decade of bad decision making. S60 was a mess. The R&D organization was way too bloated. And there was a severe lack of a vision for the future. Having a banker (OPK) with no technical vision whatsoever in charge since 2006 before him did not help either. That being said, a couple of rather big bet the company style decisions happened on his watch and he pretty much got all of them wrong.
First he underestimated how long it would take to ramp up windows phone sales and how hard it would be to partner with Microsoft. After a flying start, basically Microsoft ripped the carpet from underneath and did the non backwards compatible windows 8 release. He couldn't predict that, but pulling off a major reorg and shift to windows phone was always going to take a 2-3 years. Anything else would have been delusional. As it is, the Lumia 1020 last year came more than two years after the early 2011 announcements and his late 2010 appointment. Arguably that was the first Lumia product to get really excited about. The Lumia 500 (which proved to be a major money maker) was launched around the same time.
Second, he killed Meego, and then later the mobile linux based successor (aka. Meltemi) intended to replace S40 in a market that was clearly favoring mobile linux based platforms such as Android. This cut him loose from doing a Android compatibility layer on either, which would have been technically feasible with little or no R&D. By the time Nokia did finally release an Android phone, it was merely a me too style release that didn't really add value. Getting out of mobile linux was a big mistake given the huge headstart Nokia had on others in this space and given where the market was clearly going already. All they had to do to make it work was to do what Amazon, Samsung, and Blackberry did: make Meego (or Meltemi) run Android apps. Not rocket science given that all major components needed for that were actually ported already. Elop killed two perfectly good, nearly product ready platforms for no good reason than removing competition for windows phone and burned several billions worth of prior investment in both while locking himself out of the only portion of the market that was actually growing. In so doing, he threw away the baby with the proverbial bathwater.
Third, he underestimated how quickly S40 was becoming irrelevant. He needed a replacement and he basically bet on windows phone. Ultimately with some success but he killed the sub 100$ S40 market in the process and gave it to Samsung and others. Killing Meltemi did not help of course. And the later introduced Nokia Android was both rushed to market and too little too late.
Fourth, he underestimated how quickly S60 would sink. A little published fact is that killing it was a hard requirement that came out of the microsoft deal. However, Nokia payed a big price in the form of an essentially overnight irrelevant S60 strategy that was still supposed to pay the bills for a few years. That revenue disappeared overnight.
Elop literally bet the company on this deal with Microsoft and arguably burned several magnitudes worth more in existing assets and investments than he recovered with the ultimate sale to Microsoft (5 billion $) while simultaneously decimating revenue. Ultimately, he bet wrong and he destroyed billions of investment and market cap.
All of these big decisions are on Elops plate. He did a few things right as well. Getting rid of the whole S60 org was a necessary evil, particularly its bickering senior management and its insane black hole style R&D cost: billions went in, nothing but bad products came out. There was just no justification for keeping that going and in fact the decision had been several years overdue. OPK was the wrong guy for the job from day 1 and the rest of senior management had too much personal ties to the failed S60 strategy (and honestly this was obvious by 2007/2008 already). Elop did what had to be done quite swiftly and it really did remove some organizational congestion. I would say this was actually the key reason the board looked for an outsider when they appointed Elop. They needed somebody to cut loose the dead weight fast. Also, the initial Lumia releases were delivered in record speed (for Nokia, and probably the industry) and were pretty solid products (despite ms related technical limitations).
I'd say the trojan horse label is both false and dishonest. The Nokia board fully knew what they were getting into both when they hired Elop and when they approved the decision to go with windows phone less than six months later. You may reasonably assume that was on the table from the moment they hired him.
jillesvangurp,
Thanks for an excellent post. I hadn't read anywhere that killing S60 was part of the Microsoft deal. I still can't decide if I think the burning platforms was the right thing to do. Nokia wanted to keep milking that for cash until they could get Windows Phone products out there. But, they also had to announce they were going Win Pho, so everyone would know or suspect that S60 was doomed. Also he had to make huge internal changes at Nokia, which needed a sense of urgency and an understanding of the threat to the company. Those S60 sales, and the S40 sales too, were already doomed. It was just a matter of time as to when the market moved on, and a race to see if Nokia could get something in place in time.
However I'm not sure I buy your argument that Nokia's experience in mobile Linux was much use to them. They were no longer the leader in mobile Linux, that was Google - who had far surpassed them. They didn't have a product ready to market using it. And given their previous failures to produce any Linux-based phones that were actually ready, why would they do better now? Could you honestly call the N800 and N900 finished?
Also remember that Amazon succeeded in the tablet market, due to their enormous existing market lead in films/music/books. That content is what sold their tablets, despite a disappointing operating system. Whereas their first attempt to get into the tougher phone market has so far failed, and came 2 years later.
Elop literally bet the company on this deal with Microsoft and arguably burned several magnitudes worth more in existing assets and investments than he recovered with the ultimate sale to Microsoft (5 billion $) while simultaneously decimating revenue. Ultimately, he bet wrong and he destroyed billions of investment and market cap.
I agree that Elop bet the company on Windows. I can't personally see any better choice. Whatever he'd done was a gamble with the company though. At the point he took over, there was no safe bet.
I think all the other choices would have failed too. The difference was that MS had a stake in saving Nokia, and had to. Had MS done their job properly, Nokia might even have succeeded. But as usual MS seem to have only committed resources to their mobile divsion half-heartedly. As with wasting their investment in Windows Mobile. Rather than going all out to catch up, and surpass the opposition. They went slowly to catch-up.
But the really sad thing is that he didn't destroy billions of value in R&D. There was no value in that R&D any more. Too much of it was half-finished. Too much had been made irrelevant by the market changing so fast. If Nokia could have brought some of their R&D to market in 2005-2010, they'd almost certainly stilll be a major player in mobile. But they didn't. The world moved on. And all that time, money and effort poured into R&D was pissed away by previous management. And it fell to Elop to dump it. What a waste.
On the point of Nokia going Android in 2009/10.
Their flagship N8 phone had a CPU a full generation behind the competition with pitiful RAM, Graphics and Storage capabilities.
What made Nokia special back in the day was being able to squeeze every last bit of performance from what were essentially weak and underpowered platforms (same as BB to an extent).
Compare the N8 with the Desire HD and if that Nokia was to run Android it would suck donkey's balls and only serve to infuriate customers further!
What do you think killed off BBerries too? Not the Android compatibility or lack thereof but the abysmal specs and the fact that when Androids were multitasking and acting as ad-hoc WiFi AP's BBerries would crash trying to load a page with more than 3 pictures on it.
The Android option on the then-current hardware was just not there.
Comparison Link: http://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=3252&idPhone2=3468
" A little published fact is that killing it was a hard requirement that came out of the microsoft deal. "
It's not a fact, it's an assertion - and a ludicrous one.
At the Feb 11th (2011) event Nokia said it expected to sell 150m Symbian devices as WP rolled out. It was depending heavily on S60 being viable for a while. Of course sales went off a cliff that year. Perhaps if Elop had stressed a "multiplatform strategy" it might not have looked Osborned, but he needed to refocus the company around the new platform as quickly as possible, and took the gamble.
Andrew O,
Thanks for joining the discussion. I did wonder about that Symbian thing, because Nokia always seemed to want to keep selling it, and drop it down to replace S40.
Does anybody know what Nokia's Symbian pre-orders were looking like, before the burning platforms statement. Or had any inside information about what the carriers were thinking? I suppose it's hard to get that now, as everyone's wise after the event, but would the carriers have dumped Symbian at that pace anyway, given that Android was now viable on much cheaper handsets? I remember buying a Lumia 710 quite early, to replace my under-powered HTC Wildfire - but at the time you could pick up decent top-end 'Droids from the previous year for £250 and there were various low-end 'Droids at the £100 mark. They were still 'landfill Android', but it was obvious that within a year or two that would no longer be the case, as the chips got cheaper, and so it proved.
Where is the evidence for this "Nokia was is a death spiral before Elop" nonsense? Before Elop, Nokia had more more unit sales than Apple and Samsung combined. The picture for growth, revenue and profit is even more damning.
When Microsoft extended their (now broken) monopoly into a new market, they bought a major player in that market. They did not buy the market leader because that was to expensive. The second place player always had hopes of becoming first rate, so they were out too. A third rate company knows they are third rate and price accordingly. That has historically been Microsoft's choice. Elop set up his bonus to pay out when Nokia was sold to Microsoft. Sale to others (there were offers) would not have been in the Trojan's best interest.
I thought Elop sending Nokia all the way to tenth place instead of stopping at third was a sign of incompetence. Microsoft rewarded him anyway, so perhaps that was the plan all along.
“Google and Apple were strong in industries outside mobile communications, who suddenly enter and in a couple of years become market leaders where they have never been before. That is unique in the business history of the world.”
Just like how a maker of paper and rubber raincoats became a global leader in cell phones? Just like how a pair of Ivy League drop-outs founded the largest software company in the world?
Kallasvuo was a horrible CEO and chairman, but at least he didn't kill the business while doing stupid things. Elop did.
Kallasvuo (CEO 2005-2010) dismissed the iphone in 2007 and did nothing to respond to it. By the time Elop was hired Nokia's market share in anything with a good margin was a disaster, the company was virtually unrecoverable. Kallasvuo is 95% responsible for what happened to Nokia.
When Elop took over they had Symbian (ancient but selling well), Series 30 and 40 (selling in the billions but for very little profit) and the stalled development of MeeGo from the Maemo / Moblin merger mess.
I seem to remember that before Elop the plan was to move Symbian downmarket to replace a lot of the Series 40 devices with ultra-cheap smartphones and build up the top end with MeeGo. However, MeeGo was a bust and Nokia instead had to keep Symbian at the top end of the range where they kept polishing it just enough to be acceptable.
So, when Elop came in he made the very wise decision to kill MeeGo which was going exactly nowhere. But he also made the mistake of saying that they were going to phase out Symbian which had the effect of making the market collapse completely. It was the way that Symbian was treated (and not the Windows tie-up) that in my opinion was Elop's key error.
Had he stuck with the the plan and simply shifted Symbian downmarket then that might well have protected sales. Remember, Nokia ended up spending a lot of time pissing around adding smartphone-like features into Series 40 (e.g. Nokia Asha) when they already had those feature in Symbian. Yeah, the Asha range sold pretty well but it was completely and utterly pointless to develop *those* when Symbian could do the job much better.
Nokia's fall from grace started before Elop took over, and Nokia is hardly the only mobile firm to suffer such woes. Motorola and RIM/BlackBerry made pretty much the same errors.
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