I’m not a Trojan horse: Nokia’s Elop hits back at neigh sayers

Elop is just doing his job

for his employer - Microsoft.

This deal destroys Nokia as a company and gives Microsoft what it needs for little up front money.

Nokia is dead. How many phones are they going to sell after this announcement (I can see the advertising - buy our smart phone, we think the OS is brain dead, any developers who have not slit their throats realizing all their efforts just went down the toilet are going to run away and the product will have zero support in a few years). But you can buy it real cheap!

And it gives Microsoft what they need. They have a serious case of Apple Envy and want to own the handset process from birth to death just like Apple. Plus they know even if they have all the patients in the world to get WP7 to be a hit the handset manufacturers do not.

The manufactures have limited resources and a warehouse of unsold WP7 phones means money wasted developing, getting approved and in inventory that was not spent on something that did sell. So all those phones not selling represents real money and market share pissed away.

It will not take long before they drop WP7 and it become Kin the sequel.

But if Microsoft gets into the Handset business today then every manufacture will run away from WP7 and WP7 will fade away before Microsoft can ramp up the manufacturing.

So Nokia sales go into a vertical descent and soon the company is looking at bankruptcy - I'm thinking it will not take long.

Microsoft comes in and "saves" the company for much less money then they would pay today and can claim they are the heroes. By then Nokia will represent a very much smaller slice of the mobile market there will be less push back from the regulators.

Now Microsoft is just like Apple and Elop can come back to the mother ship.

This says all you need to know

http://stashbox.org/1067900/patents.jpg

Elop seems to have forgotten that ...

without happy employees, he has no company.

Elop, born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario - the Pittsburgh-like steel town of Canada, obviously uses different criteria. That's a pity because a company that shafts it's employees will likely have as much loyalty to customers.

A few points

1. WP7 has had great reviews - obviously right now its a two horse race, but WP7 has only just been released.

2. Mobile operators feel very threatened by Google and Apple, and they also pretty much control the phones we buy. They like how WP7 plans to do things.

3. Businesses like Microsoft (in a way). I'm not sure of the numbers, but I suspect that businesses buy for their staff, a pretty large percentage of all phones sold - and they tend to be higher end phones.

4. Look what happened with the xbox. It took them a couple of tries, but even with terrible hardware they did pretty well in the end. And while on the subject, WP7 integrates xbox live and even kinect - which will make WP7 very cool with alot of young people.

5. Apple will drop back in market share over the next few years.

Nokia needed to make drastic changes fast, before it died. I'm sure android was very tempting but Elops job is to make decisions that we will only be able to judge in 5-10 years time. I suspect he hasn't made too bad a choice, considering the options open to him.