Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones
The old Nokia crowd seem to have a tough time admitting that all of Nokia&#x27;s old software operations were beyond salvage by 2010. Symbian had turned into a sprawling pile of crap, and Maemo&#x2F;MeeGo was painted in a corner by internal politics that had marginalized its development. Nokia was spending ten times as much as Apple on R&amp;D, yet had very little to show for it.<p>Having two competing OS teams was a bad choice made much earlier by Elop&#x27;s predecessors, who didn&#x27;t understand software (the previous Nokia CEO came to that position from the legal department — a terrible mismatch for a company about to be overrun by Apple and Google). Elop was fundamentally right in killing both of Nokia&#x27;s operating systems. Symbian sales were collapsing in early 2011 because the devices just couldn&#x27;t respond to user expectations anymore, not because of anything Elop did.<p>I can see why Elop picked Windows Phone over Android: it truly was a more innovative UI and Microsoft was willing to pay Nokia a billion USD per year for the partnership. Elop&#x27;s grave mistake was not having a replacement ready to go. The Lumias shipped way too late. Playing &quot;armchair CEO&quot;, I have no idea how I would have solved that either.<p>In any case, Nokia didn&#x27;t end up too poorly. Microsoft bought the phone division that was bleeding cash, and that money gave Nokia the opportunity to buy back its network division that had been a joint venture between Nokia and Siemens. The outcome was probably better than if Nokia had tried to downscale itself into a commodity Android vendor.