Stephen Elop in a message to the staff told about the failure of Nokia

Stephen Elop, who recently became CEO of Nokia, sent a message to his staff, the content of which is best described by the phrase “pounded all polymers” . In particular, he states “the iPhone came out in 2007, but we still haven’t been able to get close to its level”, compares the company with the man on the oil platform emblazoned with flame, the only way out for which is to jump into the icy sea they suspect that the ice sea means Android and / or WP7), and says “we put out fire with gasoline”. February 11, he promises to share a new plan, designed to bring the company out of crisis. Under the link you can read the text entirely in English, and under the cut - the translation of its fragment.



“While competitors took away our market share, what was happening with Nokia? We fell behind, missed the main trends, lost time. Then we thought we were making the right decisions; now, looking back, we see ourselves lagging behind for years.
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The first iPhone was released in 2007, and we still do not have a product, at least approaching it. Android appeared on the market only two years ago, and this week they took our leadership in selling smartphones. Incredible.

We have amazing sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not quickly bringing ideas to the market. We thought that MeeGo would become a platform for leading flagship smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011 we will have only one MeeGo product on the market.

In the middle price segment, we have Symbian. It turned out to be uncompetitive in major markets like North America. In addition, it turned out to be an inconvenient environment for developing, satisfying constantly increasing user demands, which led to slow product development and inconvenience when trying to take advantage of new hardware platforms. As a result, if we continue in the same way, we will lag behind more and more, and our competitors will overtake more and more.

In the lower price segment, Chinese manufacturers are releasing devices faster than, as one Nokia employee said, “we bring the Powerpoint presentation to mind”. They are fast, they are cheap, and they challenge us.

And the really perplexing aspect is that we don’t even struggle with the right means. We too often approach each price segment at the level of individual devices. But the struggle of devices has become a struggle of ecosystems, where the ecosystem includes not only software and hardware, but also developers, applications, commerce, advertising, search, social applications, geolocation applications, common communication channels and much more. Our rivals do not take our market share with our devices, but with our ecosystems. ”