Nokia CEO Stephen Elop really is Nokia's six million dollar man.
Nokia is a company which is barely alive. And Elop is the man who is supposed to rebuild it.
It has the technology, it had the capability to build the world's first reconstituted phone maker. Nokia will be that phone company. Better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster.
The only problem is that Elop had to leave his former employer Microsoft in a bit of a hurry and so Nokia has had to write him a $6 million cheque to make up for his lost salary.
According to regulatory filings, Elop received a payment of about $3.2 million last October and is due to receive another $US3 million this October.
Quite why Microsoft stopped paying him was unclear. His first move when joining the company was to sign a $1 billion deal with Redmond to replace Symbian with Windows Mobile 7.
Although it remains the world's leading mobile phone maker, Nokia has been losing market share like crazy of late and has been unable to get a popular smartphone onto the market.
Elop however has so far yet to prove he is anyone's six million dollar man. He has yet to turn the company around, he has not come up with a new smart phone, has not seen the share price increase and has not even tried to battle big foot yet.
Elop didn't fight over a mere fiver - he collected 6 Million from the accountants. He makes Steve Austin look like a complete and utter wimp.
"...has not seem tje share price increase..."
Seriously, people.
He installed his Microsoft stooge into Nokia. For an asking fee of 1 Billion (+ 6 million) dollars, Nokia did what Ballmer wanted.
What did Ballmer want? Kill the most open of all the major phone OSes, MeeGo. For Ballmer, throwing the knife into MeeGo was worth his 1 billion bucks alone. But wait, there's more.
After killing the open MeeGo, Ballmer coerced Nokia into joining the most closed OS in history, Windows Phone 7, which uses DRM to lock the OS to the hardware to stop jailbraking (not even Apple does that).
But Ballmer didn't stop there. Oh no. Ballmer got Nokia to agree to close its Ovi store, which hosts many open-source apps, and move to Microsoft's Windows Phone Marketplace, which has a clause that actually bans GPL open-source apps.
This is Ballmer's dream come true. Ballmer once described Linux and open-source as "a cancer". Now he has created a land where GPL open-source apps are banned.
You have a much better chance with WP7. was this open platform really going to Android a run for its money i dont think so.
Of course Nokia could have joined with Android and become just another handset maker and pump different versions of Android out but then that all they would be another oem
You need to face it, Symbian was the vast market leader in smartphones and for obvious reasons the only "real" platform for Nokia.
Check this to see what other developers have to say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfWFvCJJaNs
Check this to see what other developers have to say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfWFvCJJaNs
Funny I have not been hearing much about their flagship server OS, nor their flagship enterprise Database, nor their flagship Enterprise Email.
Perhaps the consumer space is where they should be focussing their attention and maybe in 2012 or 2013, when WP7 'awesome' phones and features are more than just vaporware, they may do something in the consumer space.
In the meantime the enterprise is adjusting to one less strong arm provider dictating what they should do.