With the release of N95, Nokia was on seventh heaven - with no obstacles in sight, it was resting contentedly on its laurels, basking in the domination it had over any other mobile phone manufacturer. The income was such that the company could afford buying a giant such as Navteq, just because they thought that it would be an excellent feat to offer GPS navigation as a standard feature in mobile phones. Money was being invested boundlessly into the American market, where Nokia has never managed to gain a foothold, and the entire thing went as far as financing films where Nokia phones would exclusively be the ones displayed. The fact that the company had been practically recycling phone models for a while, with no significant innovation taking place as far as user interaction is concerned, went unnoticed to many.
Looking in a completely wrong direction (from today’s perspective, of course), Nokia employed a bunch of programmers that would be in charge of ever crazier products. Spreading into hundreds of directions, the company simply lost its focus. From music, over navigational maps, all the way to social networks and mail servers, the Finns forgot to pay attention to much more important things. Instead of listening to the market, they decided to create one.
Nokia N95
If we add the slightly socialist and inert way of thinking typical of the company’s homeland, Nokia brought itself to the verge of falling apart. The first major problems should have been noticed after the hype surrounding RIM’s Blackberry, and subsequently Apple iPhone. Those phones were far from perfect, but it seems that no one in the Finnish company sat down and asked himself why these models stirred up the hive. Instead, the company keeps up with blurting out recycled models, with N96 being the first in line. The sales were abysmal. Gmail, Facebook and Twitter were exploding - all of them Nokia’s competitors instead of targets.
The final knock-out came in form of the company’s own N97, which was received exceptionally poorly, to the point where it had to be effectively replaced with the somewhat more successful Mini variant some months later.
Brokers
Although no entirely reliable information is available, it seems that American market brokers started meddling into the business as far back as 2009. As the frustration caused by the company’s bad selling numbers on American market increased, Nokia found itself under significant pressure from the other side of the Atlantic. The American investors’ main argument was that Nokia’s growth rate was far outmatched by the mobile market growth as a whole. The company underwent several restructurings, firing a number of its development teams. The pressure caused a caving around the middle of last year, when the former CEO left the company, paying attention not to go down unnoticed and kicking up a major fuss. New products were late, and even then, they couldn’t match up with what their competitors had to offer.
Out of the blue, a press release was released stating that the new CEO is the first one not to be Finnish - the little-known Stephen Elop, formerly a highly positioned operative in Microsoft, in charge of software suites.
Stephen Elop, Nokia CEO
The latter, together with the fact that other features in this Canadian’s CV are work experience in Juniper and Adobe, made the decision to name this man Nokia’s new CEO very bizarre. Elop’s appointment was greeted by everyone except the employees themselves. This is perfectly logical, since Nokia was never able to function by the American recipe of major corporations, where scaling the company to fit the market needs is nothing unusual.
Around that time, at the end of August 2010, a slide from a confidential internal Nokia presentation leaked. The slide showed the company split in two (production of “idiot” and “smart” phones, respectively), while the “smart” section of the phones included not only Symbian and MeeGo, but also Windows Mobile. Since this was a slide from a PowerPoint presentation, everyone was highly suspicious regarding the authenticity of the information. However, in December, new rumours surfaced, claiming that Nokia had secret negotiations with Microsoft that were well underway.
