Seismic shift
Something's clearly got to give at Nokia. It's losing market share across all segments and investors are, quite rightly, wondering what new CEO Stephen Elop is going to do about it. Well they've only got three days to wait, because Elop is hosting a strategy meeting for investors this Friday.
Nokia clearly wants to get corporate stuff out of the way so it can talk about products at Mobile World Congress, and we've been told there are no Nokia interview opportunities outside of the event this Sunday. Understandably there is much speculation about what exactly this strategic shift will involve.
As we wrote last week, a big source of speculation concerns smartphone platforms. Most people still like Nokia hardware, but Symbian compares poorly to newer mobile platforms such as iOS and Android. Nokia is developing another one - MeeGo - but investors are starting to panic that it doesn't have time to wait for a new platform to be completed and take hold.
Since Elop was a senior exec at Microsoft before joining Nokia as CEO, there's lots of speculation linking the two companies, specifically via Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 mobile platform. If Nokia were to adopt a third party platform, this would be the obvious choice, but there are many strategic reasons for Nokia to put all its eggs in the MeeGo basket.
A report in the FT indicates operators agree that sticking with MeeGo would be the best strategy, provided the platform measures up and arrives sometime soon.
More recently speculation has turned to corporate stuff. The Reg saw a report in a German publication suggesting there was going to be a cull of of Finnish senior execs. If true this isn't, presumably, just a xenophobic spasm on the part of Canadian Elop, but an acknowledgement that the corporate culture has to change, from the top down.
The same writer cites well-placed sources within Nokia for the speculation that Nokia might move a lot of its operations to Silicon Valley. This was also referred to in a story from TechCrunch, which mentions an internal memo sent by Elop equating Nokia's position to ‘standing on a burning platform'.
The point of that simile seems to be to stress that any radical action he takes is preferable to burning to death. That's hard to argue with and seems to set the scene for a major shake-up on Friday.
UPDATE - 18:30, 8 Feb 2011: Having read around a bit more, we wouldn't be surprised if Nokia announced it was moving to WP7 for smartphones and MeeGo for tablets.
If so, this would cement the alliance of the three formerly dominant tech players - Microsoft, Intel and Nokia - in danger of being left behind in the mobile Internet era.
And let's not forget Nokia and Microsoft announced a strategic partnership back in 2009, which was masterminded by one Stephen Elop. That union has yielded roughly bugger-all to date, but maybe that's about to change dramatically.
If this does happen, the big questions that will need answering concern the ownership of WP7, services revenue, and compatibility with MeeGo.
