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A candid and detailed account of Nokia boss Stephen Elop’s efforts to revive the ailing phonemaker has appeared in Businessweek.
The report begins with new boss Elop’s town hall speech to 2,000 Nokia staff in which he announced the decision to drop the firm’s home grown Symbian operating system in favor of the barely nine-month-old Windows Phone.
Elop reportedly asked staff that used Android or iPhone handsets to identify themselves. Seeing just a few hands, Elop said this was upsetting. "I’d rather people have the intellectual curiosity to understand what we’re up against."
One of the most dramatic accounts of Elop’s Nokia revival was the realisation that development of the MeeGo operating system wasn’t working out.
"MeeGo had been the "collective hope of the company," said Nokia development chief Kai Oistämö. However after an extensive investigation into the state of development, "we’d come to the conclusion that the emperor had no clothes," said Oistämö.
"It’s not a nice thing," he added.
However Elop is apparently not content to farm out all smartphone innovation to his former employer Microsoft. Businessweek revealed that another priority was that of a ‘skunkworks’ invention factory calleed New Disruptions."
The goal of the group would be, Elop told the firm’s engineers, to "find that next big thing that blows away Apple, Android, and everything we’re doing with Microsoft right now and makes it irrelevant."
Anyone with an interest in the smartphone market is likely to find Businessweek’s "Stephen Elop’s Nokia Adventure" cover story fascinating reading.
