Posted by goldenface
Nokia at crisis point, warns new boss Stephen Elop
Nokia's new head has sent an outspoken and frank memo to his staff that suggests the phone giant is in crisis.
Stephen Elop describes the company as standing on a "burning platform" surrounded by innovative competitors who are grabbing its market share.
In particular, he said, the firm had been caught off guard by the success of Google's Android operating system and Apple's iPhone.
BBC News has verified that the memo is genuine
source:BBC
Posted by Bonovox
I would hardly say they are at a crisis point when they are still top of the market and their n8 phone is selling in the millions. I would say Sony Ericsson are in a worse crisis point.
Posted by titus1
On 2011-02-09 18:02:00, Bonovox wrote:
I would hardly say they are at a crisis point when they are still top of the market and their n8 phone is selling in the millions. I would say Sony Ericsson are in a worse crisis point.
Oh please...was it because you have an N8?
The one who spoked was an Inside Man. And when he said that Nokia is in crisis, then I believe him.
Posted by Bonovox
nothing to do with what phone I have owned. It's to do with what I see.
Posted by goldenface
@Bono
You know more about the company than the head of Nokia? lmao
It is worrying because I was just reading that their meego phone might be cancelled.
http://m.pocket-lint.com/news/38443/nokia-n9-meego-handset-canned
[ This Message was edited by: goldenface on 2011-02-09 18:39 ]
Posted by Bonovox
No,I mean what I see as in where Nokia still is even though yes it's losing market share it is still way ahead the likes of
Posted by goldenface
Bono, Why are we talking about
The Nokia head has stated the company is in crisis and meego, its answer to Android and iOS, is years away. That's pretty bad.
Posted by Dups!
On 2011-02-09 18:02:00, Bonovox wrote:
I would hardly say they are at a crisis point when they are still top of the market and their n8 phone is selling in the millions. I would say Sony Ericsson are in a worse crisis point.
I disagree. SE were in a crisis in 2008 and 2009 in particular when they were losing money one way. Their problems actually started in 2007. After their restructuring they are definitely in a better place, not completely out of the woods but in a state where shareholders are not in panick mode. They need a good strategy going forward this year and they will look great next year. This year should look better (from Q2) than last year and next year should be close to their best years.
Regarding Nokia, they definitely are in trouble. What notable phones have they come up with last year? The N8 is selling but not like a Nokia would. Their market plus their smartphone share are dwindling with every quarter. The next to follow are profits. It seems like they are about to adopt another OS outside theirs.
They actually remind me of SE when they had their troubles. Not so long ago they (Nokia) retrenched a sizeable number of employees and it looks like some of their management staff is about to get the boot as well. I read that somewhere, don't remember. At least the CEO is candid enough to admit their problems. How they solve those problems is the interesting part.
Posted by adsada
Mr Wood said "this could involve using Android or Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 operating systems".
Might actually consider Nokia if this is the case. To be honest who couldn't see this coming? Nokia with their love of Symbian couldn't let go. And they've invested so much in it, I can see how hard it would be to just to drop it. But it's life is really over. It may have the greatest market share at the moment, due to cheap handsets popular in various countries where high-end smartphones aren't popular. But this will easily change in the future when current high-end smartphones will be much cheaper in two years time, but still relativity modern for that market to afford.
But they seem to be so fixated on Symbian they didn't look around and see how the market is advancing progressively. Now it's sort of a 'can we fix it before it's too late?' question.
Gah, it made me think though isn't it a bit of a shame American companies are taking over the mobile area, Like Apple, Google and Microsoft. I mean 5 years ago phones (bar Microsoft) had they're own software which was styled to their design, and you buy a Sony Ericsson phone you got a part Japanese part Swedish phone. Now you buy one and its Google Android. Oh look over there an HTC with Android. I mean the lack in creativity or what? True that without Android SE would be a crumpled mess right now, but it would be nice to see an other country come out with really popular software for mobile. Not just America, you just take over the world.
Went a tad off topic there!
Posted by Bonovox
On 2011-02-09 20:17:50, Dups! wrote:
On 2011-02-09 18:02:00, Bonovox wrote:
I would hardly say they are at a crisis point when they are still top of the market and their n8 phone is selling in the millions. I would say Sony Ericsson are in a worse crisis point.
Regarding Nokia, they definitely are in trouble. What notable phones have they come up with last year? The N8 is selling but not like a Nokia would. Their market plus their smartphone share are dwindling with every quarter. The next to follow are profits. It seems like they are about to adopt another OS outside theirs.
What?? The N8 sold about 4 million in the first 4 months!!
Posted by goldenface
What is worrying for me is that Nokia is such a behemoth of a company that any shift in strategy will be a massive undertaking and will take years. Android is in ascendancy and is growing fast with a plethora of stunning devices appearing almost every quarter.
Sadly, it's looking like years before Nokia will bring about anything with which it can compete and by that time it will have lost a lot of loyal customers. SE was small enough for its turnaround to take a 2-3 years, Nokia could take a lot longer.
Posted by Dups!
@Bonovox
Did you read the whole sentence regarding the N8?
Normally a flagship Nokia would sell more than what the N8 sold.
Posted by Bonovox
Sorry I spoilt your thread
I'll go away now 
Posted by goldenface
" Hello there,
There is a pertinent story about a man who was working on an oil platform in the North Sea. He woke up one night from a loud explosion, which suddenly set his entire oil platform on fire. In mere moments, he was surrounded by flames. Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform's edge. When he looked down over the edge, all he could see were the dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic waters.
As the fire approached him, the man had mere seconds to react. He could stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames. Or, he could plunge 30 meters in to the freezing waters. The man was standing upon a "burning platform," and he needed to make a choice.
He decided to jump. It was unexpected. In ordinary circumstances, the man would never consider plunging into icy waters. But these were not ordinary times - his platform was on fire. The man survived the fall and the waters. After he was rescued, he noted that a "burning platform" caused a radical change in his behaviour.
We too, are standing on a "burning platform," and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour.
Over the past few months, I've shared with you what I've heard from our shareholders, operators, developers, suppliers and from you. Today, I'm going to share what I've learned and what I have come to believe.
I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform.
And, we have more than one explosion - we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us.
For example, there is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected. Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone and attracting developers to a closed, but very powerful ecosystem.
In 2008, Apple's market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent. They are enjoying a tremendous growth trajectory with a 78 percent earnings growth year over year in Q4 2010. Apple demonstrated that if designed well, consumers would buy a high-priced phone with a great experience and developers would build applications. They changed the game, and today, Apple owns the high-end range.
And then, there is Android. In about two years, Android created a platform that attracts application developers, service providers and hardware manufacturers. Android came in at the high-end, they are now winning the mid-range, and quickly they are going downstream to phones under ˆ100. Google has become a gravitational force, drawing much of the industry's innovation to its core.
Let's not forget about the low-end price range. In 2008, MediaTek supplied complete reference designs for phone chipsets, which enabled manufacturers in the Shenzhen region of China to produce phones at an unbelievable pace. By some accounts, this ecosystem now produces more than one third of the phones sold globally - taking share from us in emerging markets.
While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time, we thought we were making the right decisions; but, with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind.
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.
We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. 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.
At the midrange, we have Symbian. It has proven to be non-competitive in leading markets like North America. Additionally, Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements, leading to slowness in product development and also creating a disadvantage when we seek to take advantage of new hardware platforms. As a result, if we continue like before, we will get further and further behind, while our competitors advance further and further ahead.
At the lower-end price range, Chinese OEMs are cranking out a device much faster than, as one Nokia employee said only partially in jest, "the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation." They are fast, they are cheap, and they are challenging us.
And the truly perplexing aspect is that we're not even fighting with the right weapons. We are still too often trying to approach each price range on a device-to-device basis.
The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren't taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we're going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.
This is one of the decisions we need to make. In the meantime, we've lost market share, we've lost mind share and we've lost time.
On Tuesday, Standard & Poor's informed that they will put our A long term and A-1 short term ratings on negative credit watch. This is a similar rating action to the one that Moody's took last week. Basically it means that during the next few weeks they will make an analysis of Nokia, and decide on a possible credit rating downgrade. Why are these credit agencies contemplating these changes? Because they are concerned about our competitiveness.
Consumer preference for Nokia declined worldwide. In the UK, our brand preference has slipped to 20 percent, which is 8 percent lower than last year. That means only 1 out of 5 people in the UK prefer Nokia to other brands. It's also down in the other markets, which are traditionally our strongholds: Russia, Germany, Indonesia, UAE, and on and on and on.
How did we get to this point? Why did we fall behind when the world around us evolved?
This is what I have been trying to understand. I believe at least some of it has been due to our attitude inside Nokia. We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven't been delivering innovation fast enough. We're not collaborating internally.
Nokia, our platform is burning.
We are working on a path forward -- a path to rebuild our market leadership. When we share the new strategy on February 11, it will be a huge effort to transform our company. But, I believe that together, we can face the challenges ahead of us. Together, we can choose to define our future.
The burning platform, upon which the man found himself, caused the man to shift his behaviour, and take a bold and brave step into an uncertain future. He was able to tell his story. Now, we have a great opportunity to do the same.
Stephen.
"
Posted by Bonovox
Something not right in that story. The top part stating an oil rig in the north sea. And then it says he was staring down at the waters of the atlantic
God he moved fast
Posted by adsada
On 2011-02-10 19:28:20, Bonovox wrote:
Something not right in that story. The top part stating an oil rig in the north sea. And then it says he was staring down at the waters of the atlantic
God he moved fast
Geographically the Atlantic Ocean covers the area of the North Sea.
