Trojan Aeroplane. If you don't believe me you can disembark now.
Elop was out of ideas. So what did he do? He asked his customers what they want. Shock horror, he did just that.
Now this isn't a bad thing per se. But between what people want and what they need might be oceans of distance. The success of apple isn't in giving people what they want, it's in giving people something that they perhaps didn't know they wanted, but find so appealing they won't want to do without afterward. While useful to ask, proceeding to plainly give people what they want isn't really the cutting edge innovation that you need to succeed in a cutthroat market like smartphones.
And it turns out the customers --that's the telcos and that's very much not you-- are currently being consumed by fear, uncertainty, and doubt about apple and their walled garden and google with their "we don't do evil, honest" double agenda.
So they'd like something that makes them feel safe. So nokia is now betting the company on being a safety blanket for large unimaginative companies, and for that they're willing to go to bed with and become exactly that which they've been avoiding for fifteen years.
They're doing it by ditching quite a chunk of investments in several OSes and replacing it with what by sales so far still looks like vista for your phone. It's bland, it's boring, it's therefore safe.
And yes, maybe it's a safety blanket for them too. It's quite damning if that's the case, because it's a clear statement of mistrust in their own ability. Always nice to have your own CEO rub that in, in public.
Not only does it sound exceedingly painful, but moreover it doesn't strike me as a cunning strategy, a shining bright vision, or even a solid plan to get out of dodge. It's more of a close your eyes and think of something else type of thing. But will it help anybody but their adversary in the long run?
If not, we can safely call Elop the new Belluzzo, even if he'll claim high and low he's not. It's his actions that'll speak for him, not his keynotes. In the meantime we can but guess what our redmondian canadian is thinking of.
I don't know if I could've done better. Certainly nobody hired me for this. Maybe there simply aren't any viable options left for a multibillion company that still, for the time being, is selling millions of handsets. Just about every analyst agrees that _something_ must be done or the company'll fizzle. But I don't see how this something will prevent failure. As already pointed out, it's more of a "dibs on the patents" type of deal.
Which leaves me with this one question: This is exactly what we feared when we heard the new ceo would be ex-redmond. He's not even being subtle about it, not even a little. Is the nokia board that stupid, that easy to lull? If not, they must've done it on purpose and then, what purpose must that be?