Nokia Corp.’s still-fairly-new CEO, Stephen Elop, yesterday sent an internal memo to Nokia staff laying out his views on the company’s current market position. To say it probably didn’t make easy reading for Nokia employees could be something of an understatement. The 1,300 word memo was then leaked in various places, first a segment to the The Register, then TechCrunch, before the whole thing was finally handed to Engadget.
While many people will be quick to focus on the pretty emotive language used in the memo, quite aside from anything else I (speaking as a closet Nokia fanboy) am so glad that somebody at Nokia has finally had the balls to admit the company is on its knees, and needs to up its game in order to compete with the big boys. The fact that it was the CEO that made this admission just makes it all the more significant.
For years now Nokia has been spinning a yarn about developing markets, and how their phones are helping farmers in Bangalore, India, know when the correct time to take their harvest to market is (that’s not even an exaggeration – they demoed that App at Nokia World last year). Philanthropy is great, but Nokia have been completely ignoring the consumers that made them the company they are today (i.e. us) – and as a result those same consumers are now abandoning the Finnish company in droves.
Nokia have made some really bad decisions in the last few years both in terms of design and software. Their reluctance to switch to capacitive touchscreens springs to mind, as does their continued reliance on Symbian (although hopefully that will change on Friday). Elop even goes so far as to single out Symbian in his memo:
“The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable. […] Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements…”
The former Microsoft Corp. man also reality-checks Nokia’s big hope for the future, MeeGo:
“We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.”
The memo is half rebuke, half pep-talk. Elop is scathing – although fairly accurate – in his picture of Nokia’s current situation. Elop does, in true management style, manage to end on a positive though:
“We are working on a path forward – a path to rebuild our market leadership. When we share the new strategy on February 11…”
