This one doesn’t come as a total surprise: Nokia has replaced its CEO. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo is on his way out, and he’s being replaced by Stephen Elop, head of Microsoft’s Business division. This will be the first time someone from Foreign (from Nokia’s perspective) will lead the company, but some fresh, outside blood may be just what the doctor ordered.
The crazy thing about Nokia is that overall, the company is still doing pretty good. Even after all these years, I, and with me many others, still consider Nokia’s regular phones to be the best money can buy. Nokia’s feature phones are built to last (I still see people happily using their 3210s and 3310s), and the company has played a crucial role in spreading GSM technology and affordable phones to every corner of the globe – and all the benefits that has brought both first and third world countries. We keep talking about Apple, Google [phone-wise], and the likes as being special – but their impact on the world is negligible compared to Nokia’s.
Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo has been with Nokia for a staggering 30 years, the last four of which he was the CEO. Nokia is still doing very well on the feature phone front – it’s the booming smartphone market where Nokia is being kicked around the room by RIM, Apple, and Google. In addition, Nokia just can’t seem to get a hold of the US market.
It’s up to Stephen Elop to get Nokia back on track on both these issues. Elop currently works for Microsoft, and will officially join Nokia on September 21. Him being from outside Finland is kind of a big deal, and as such, during today’s press conference, Jorma Ollia, Chairman of Nokia, emphasized Elop’s cultural sensitivity and his awareness of Nokia’s special heritage. It might be hard for some to understand, but when a large and proud national company hires a foreigner as CEO, it always causes friction – the same thing applies to major Dutch companies.
“I also recognise, as Jorma mentioned, that I have a unique responsibility,” Elop said during the press conference, “The critical relationship which exists between Nokia and the society of Finland. So in the weeks and months ahead I have a great deal to learn about Nokia, but also about Finland. And that has already begun. The one thing I will say is that process has been greatly supported by my heritage as a Canadian. Canada and Finland share the Arctic Circle, and that will hold me in good stead as I move forward!” Elop will move to Helsinki shortly.
As for what Elop intends to do with Nokia, he remained fairly tight-lipped. “It is way to early to make comments [about changes],” he said, “The one thing I will say is that the process through which I will go, one of deep listening, recognises that I believe the challenges that Nokia face are well known within the walls [of Nokia] and the answers are also well known. My job is to surface those, to make sure we are dealing with them efficiently and are moving the company forward.”
Here’s to hoping Elop manages to get Nokia back on track in the smartphone business. Nokia has made some of the best phones in history, and I’m sure there’s enough innovation and class wandering the minds of Suomi’s finest to make a big impact in the smartphone market.
With the latest results I can understand them.
I really wonder how this will affect Meego.
Hopefully, Nokia is not a very immature company that a change in administration will cause a change in all programs and previous investments.
However, if the change is only because of Nokia’s weakness in smartphone market, then definitely there will be a change in their plans.
Personally, I hope Meego plans will remain unchanged. As a competeitor to iphone, android (to me, at least) seems very immature with a very bad user experience (and user interface).
So I hoped Meego wont be rushed into the market. And it trully seemed that Nokia wanted to build a powerfull platform, instead of just having something to sell.
“persepctive”, sounds like something a doctor would prescribe to a patient.
I hope that Nokia keeps supporting Meego (maybe change its name) My N900 is a fantastic product and I look forward to the next generation. I also hope they coninue down the computing path with a new Booklet…running Meego
wait… will the next Booklet run Meego???
… then…
SOMEBODY FETCH MY WALLET!!!
🙂
I’m still thinking on buying an N900.
You might as well wait for the next iteration: http://www.tgdaily.com/mobility-brief/51159-flagship-nokia-meego-n9…
I like how Meego is built around Qt and though I hope it does well I think it is going to get the squeeze.
People who don’t care about the iphone or android app library will likely go with WP7. Both WP7 and MeeGo are showing up late but WP7 at least has the Office tie-in and Live functionality.
Out with the Qt and in with the .NET?
Sometimes I think Nokia is a bit non-aggressive in engineering, marketing and design, but this may change now.
I have a n97 phone and while I find it a great phone, it is just not as good for surfing the web and most certainly does not have a great user experience overall as the iPhone (I haven’t used any Android-powered phone yet, so I can’t make any claims about it.)
But Nokia certainly have the manpower, experience and money to change this, and I really hope they succeed.
I’ve always been a great fan of Nokia’s products, and competition is always a good thing for customers.
There is a reason why websurfing on Nokia sucks, they have a shitty browser, litterally any nokia owner instantly installs opera mini. Why the even bother to run their own browser is beyound me. So far there are only two mobile os systems left where the browser stinks, one is WinMobile and non version 7 wont change it, you will get something between ie7 and 8 mostly 7 with som eie8 backports and Nokia with their simiarily absymal ovi browser.
At leat in Nokias systems you can install opera mini 10 which is quite a good browser (up to par to mobile webkit which rules the heap) but on WinMobile 7 you are stuck with what Microsoft tries to shove down your throat.
I literally expect the first cries of WinMobile owners of wanting *fill your favorite html5 feature in here* instantly on their phone on their browser because they have seen it either on an iphone or an android device, and I literally already can hear the pain of the poor guys having to suffer through the implementation via hacks and silverlight!
You realise that the nokia browser is WebKit, right? So it depends on what you’re complaining is bad about the browser.
The reason it is quite slow is that most symbian smartphone don’t have 1 Ghz processors that the iphones and androids require. So heavy sites don’t work too well. What symbian phones really lack is ram which nokia almost always skimps on
Permit me to disagree about this. The browser’s engine is WebKit, that’s true. But most webkit browsers have a better page rendering quality than the one of symbian s60, which tends to mess things up. This probably means that there’s more to page rendering than just the engine, although I don’t know enough about how web browser works to tell what it is.
I think you have a good point about hardware performance, though. Symbian phones tend to trade powerful CPUs and (especially) RAM for other interesting characteristics like low pricing or battery life. Moreover, symbian is not good at managing memory outage : instead of just swapping a not recently used app to main memory like every single other OS, it just tries to keep RAM consumption low at the detriment of performance, and when it grows too high displays a silly “blah, not enough ram” dialog and leave the user with a problem that it should not have to solve. That’s one of my gripes with this otherwise quite good and capable OS.
Now, I can tell the parent poster why people use the webkit browser : integration, in several sense of this word.
First, there’s one of the main reasons why IE gained such popularity still does apply : “There’s a web browser on my phone, so I don’t need anything else to browse the web, right ?”
Then there’s the fact that Opera’s interface is not much integrated to symbian’s UI. They use strange-looking buttons, tabs, keyboard shortcuts and a strange, poorly discoverable rolling menu, instead of standard symbian menus and widgets like every single other symbian app. Because of Opera’s choice to reinvent UI widgets, there are also some usability flaws popping up :
* On Opera Mini, keyboard does not work properly, last time I checked. And Opera Mobile became freeware only rather recently.
* Opera mobile uses its own font. Though it is good looking, it does not make the application feel integrated. And visually impaired people will rightly hate them for doing so, because you can’t change font size unlike with most other symbian apps.
* A small but important feature of the webkit browser for intensive use becomes quickly missing : you can just hover a text input control and start to type. On Opera, you have to boringly click on it first.
If you want to see an App that’s properly integrated in symbian, see the Skype app. The guys really made a wonderful work on this port, it almost looks like they had a look at the HIGs.
Edited 2010-09-12 05:35 UTC
You might want to read the following article before blaming the WebKit engine for the slow and primitive browser currently available on Nokia phones.
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/10/there_is_no_web.htm…
Here’s a direct link to the comparison table between the different browsers:
http://www.quirksmode.org/webkit.html
The point is, the Nokia WebKit browser has been forked ages ago, and by itself, it hasn’t really evolved much.
(And not having tabs available to the user is just sad.)
There is a tab equivalent, though it is impractical. You can have several “windows” open, and switch between them using the menus. For some idiotic reason, the symbian browser just won’t let you open one all by yourself, making this feature quite useless, but it exists.
The thing is, a visual tab UI like opera mobile’s, although more practical I must admit, is totally un-symbian-ish. That’s because symbian, unlike other smartphone OSs, also targets phones with a relatively small screens, like the N86 as an example. Putting everything in menus is best in this case, because UI clutter must be minimal in order to save some precious screen estate.
Edited 2010-09-12 13:43 UTC
Yes, I know, that’s what I meant by availability. I even know some who set a local page as the homepage, whose only purpose is to open a popup page – that spawns a new window automatically.
You’re right about the small screens, but 1) the Operas handle it just right (you don’t have to waste space by always showing the tabs) and 2) the 5th Edition screen resolution is much higher.
Hmmm… I might try this someday, this sounds like an interesting way of bypassing this silly browser limitation. At the moment, I finally got used to opera mobile after several months of trying it and going back to the symbian browser…
Then you think that Opera’s interface should vary depending on whether we use a phone with symbian 3rd or symbian 5th ?
(On my E63, I would like opera to hide the top bar when I’m not in menus so much… I don’t have such a desperate need to know about page title all the time, most of the time this data is just useless and wastes screen space…)
Edited 2010-09-12 14:25 UTC
I wonder what impact this will have on MeeGo and Symbian…
Can’t be worse .. =P
Major hit of nostalgia when I saw the 3210 mentioned. I was 10 years old when it first came out, and I remember being amazed by snake. Of course I wasn’t old enough to own a cellphone, so I would drain the battery playing snake of everyone with a 3210. When my cellphone broke 3 years ago, I found an old 3210 and it worked perfectly and instantly. Pop the SIM in, power on, ready to go. I used for about a year before dropping it in the sea…
Be happy because you gave him a very honorable burial
Still a happy 2310 (no typo) user myself. I bought it solely on its excruciatingly long battery life and my needs haven’t changed over the years. Or like I tell people: “I can call and text with it. That’s all I want from a cell phone.”
Still use my 9300i for occasional web browsing (with Opera Mini). OK, not as old as the 3210/2310, but is very old by smartphone standard.
My Pap still uses his 6210 — the old one, not the Navigator model — from like 2000, and never complains about anything other than its looks — because the thing really looks like it’s from another century.
As Steve said in his intial public speech, he will be listening to what people inside Nokia are telling him, and helping to accelerate changes that are necessary. It should be safe to guess that he would NOT suggest eliminating Nokia’s own RnD and start competing directly with Samsungs and Huaweis of this world by making Android / WinPh7 phones. And leave 7 graphics guys for skinning.
You can deduce what path Nokia is taking by following the job advertisements they put out.
CDMA
(OK, it’s really an acronym…)
Maybe widespread LTE deployment will make this moot.
I always thought their phones were cool, too, and like the Motorola of old, they seem to understand that call quality and reception are foremost design criteria. But being a Verizon customer relegated me permanently to spectator status.
A perfect example of win-win situation. For both Nokia and MS.
While I don’t think as somebody said that Stephen is a “MS guy” (he was there only 18 months), I do wonder if Nokia has snatched him from Redmond arms or if MS will have some ‘compensation’ for such a loss.
Elop’s dept as far as I can read is doing quite well, so so it’s not about a captain jumping sinking ship.
Working in a phone shop in Australia, about five times a day I hear some variation on “I just want a Nokia because they’re reliable”, and struggle to keep a straight face. I have to politely explain that while the 3315 they so foolishly drove over was one of Nokia’s best phones, no current Nokias are anywhere near as reliable. N97, and it’s friend the N97 mini, the 6710 nav, and most of our prepaid Nokias come back on warranty calls at a greater than 50% rate. In fact, I’d say the 6710 nav has come to us at a 300% return rate. As soon as Optus knew that sales reps in store had caught on and (the ones with a conscience, or at least a desire to not see someone come back) stopped selling them, suddenly our telemarketers went into overdrive and palmed thousands of the things off on unwitting fools who didn’t have the brains to consult someone before buying over the phone. Guess who has to deal with those customers. In extreme cases, I have seriously had 6710 navs THROWN at me!
Edited 2010-09-10 22:04 UTC
Of course, not all nokias are very reliable. All high-end phones tend to be crappy from battery life and reliability points of view. The correct sentence would be “nokia make reliable phones”.
Potential users still have to apply basic choice criteria (low weight, candybar form factor, keep only the features you need, choose low end but not lowest end, matte plastic over everything else) before they get optimal reliabilitty
Symbian sucking is the main reason. They need mainstream something new as soon as possible.
I tried an E71x. The hardware was really nice, but Symbian was the stopper. It’s like buying a Ferrari and finding out the interior and drivetrain has been swapped for those from an ’82 Ford Mustang. Half the experience is good, and half the experience is missing.
The good Nokia phones have nothing to do with Symbian, all of the S60 phones are horrible in software side. Nokia had almost perfect OS back in text era, now they have pretty good OS for basic phones, but it’s getting worse when they start adding new features.
While Nokia is often called pride of Finland and it values almost half of local stock market, it’s still largely owned by americans and other foreign investors. Also most of the Nokia employees aren’t finnish and company language has been english for years. It’s really intresting to see if Elop turns Nokia to hardware maker with multiple software platforms.
Also “Suomi’s finest”, is that really english? “Suomen finest” if you really want to mix languages :p. Nokia however today is much like IBM, very conservative and lacking innovation.
Nokia Makes The Same Mistake Again: Hires A Manager, Not A Product Visionary
http://www.businessinsider.com/nokia-makes-the-same-mistake-again-h…
Also this is good – as ever Asymco digs in to the deep background
http://www.asymco.com/2010/09/10/why-opk-was-fired/
let’s see. a smartphone-inept-and-market-share-losing company getting rid of it’s ceo, to be replaced by a new hire from another market-share-losing company.
the future looks bright, isn’t it.
Apparently after he has not been chosen as next CEO, he decided to “seek new opportunities”.