OPK out at Nokia. New CEO hired from Microsoft.
by Volker Weber
Stephen Elop, the president of Microsoft’s Business division, is going to be the new CEO of Nokia. He has only been with Microsoft for less than three years. Former experience: Juniper Networks (COO for one year), Adobe (less than three years), Macromedia. No rubber boots, no mobile phones.
At least he is coming from a company with a track record of sinking an aging mobile platform.
Comments
I am so curious, how this is going to work out. Could be the right mix to strengthen the Nokia 2.0 people and shock the dinosaurs. At least it seems clear to me why they chose him. He is rather stern and once had the nickname 'The General'.
Many things brought back on track under OPK and coming together right now will be profitable at the beginning of his term (Symbian^3, MeeGo, Qt everywhere plus devices (N8, E7, C7, N9 later)).
But I suppose OPK will not be too unhappy, getting 4,6 Million € plus 100k shares. which will go up in the next time.
4.6 million is small change for the CEO of a huge corp like Nokia. And he has been with the company for 30 years. Can't see him as being happy.
Nokia needs change, and Nokia needs to please Wall Street. The Nokia 2.0 people as you call them have not been too successful so far. They are spending the money that the old school feature phone people are raking in. Nokia is in an interesting position. They can win the race to the bottom by making a profit from ever cheaper feature phones.
True, he might be far from happy, being a scapegoat for Wall Street. Still, this change might turn out to be the best thing that could have happened.
The Telco-Nokians earned lots of money in the past and they still earn most of Nokias money. Unfortunately, the Smartphone space is not moving at telco-speed (3 years cycle for a new device or service), but rather at internet speed. And Nokia was caught by that.
Nokia needs both: Telco-People with good relationships but also Internet-People who know what is going on. The Google N1 is a good example: It failed because of a company having only the latter (and a weird market that is highly distorted by carriers and people unable to calculate). NOKIGLE, that would be it :)
As you said, the real race is another one. And they are most successful in the transition from featurephones to smartphones plus pushing that to the lower end.
