{"id":2961,"date":"2011-02-14T22:51:04","date_gmt":"2011-02-15T03:51:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=2961"},"modified":"2014-03-17T08:40:50","modified_gmt":"2014-03-17T12:40:50","slug":"the-smartphone-wars-nokia-shareholders-revolt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=2961","title":{"rendered":"The Smartphone Wars: Nokia shareholders revolt!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, <em>that<\/em> didn&#8217;t take long.  Just a few hours ago I was speculating in a comment thread that Stephen Elop&#8217;s cozy deal with Microsoft Microsoft might lead to a fairly near-term shareholder revolt, and lo, it has occurred.  Welcome to <a href=\"http:\/\/nokiaplanb.com\/\">Plan B<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This is pretty dynamite stuff.  A group of Nokia shareholders is planning an attempted coup at the May 3rd general meeting.  They want to start by firing Elop and his henchmen, then reframe the Microsoft tie-up as a tactical play for the U.S. market, then put the company fully behind MeeGo as their bid for the smartphone future.<\/p>\n<p>The question is, can it possibly work?<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Maybe.  I have to say that on first reading Plan B sounds a helluva lot more sober and credible than Elop&#8217;s jump into the arms of Redmond.  Well, except for the part where they don&#8217;t tell Microsoft to pound sand, that is.  The points about concentrating rather than dispersing R&#038;D will strike most open-source programmers as an odd thing to focus on (our culture is used to cross-time-zone collaboration and does it pretty well) but as a tactic for fully concentrating on a six-month sprint to get a MeeGo handset out the door it probably makes sense.<\/p>\n<p>Why do I say six months?  Because I found a MeeGo dev who was willing to let me quiz him.  He thinks tablet MeeGO and the infrastructure for handset MeeGO is in good shape; the work that&#8217;s left to be done is specific handset applications.  When I asked him how long that would take, he considered a bit and said &#8220;6 months if it were being done entirely in house&#8221;.  He fingered the open-governance process as a drag on time to market, which I&#8217;m guessing reflects the same growing plains that led the Plan B group to put centralizing R&#038;D on their bullet list.  Sounds like the project needed that fine old open-source tradition of a benevolent dictator but didn&#8217;t have one.<\/p>\n<p>That six-month figure is interesting because it means my source could be low in his estimate by a factor of two without making MeeGo&#8217;s time-to-market worse than WP7&#8217;s.<\/p>\n<p>Absent from Plan B is any kind of Android story.  The Plan B backers seem to share Elop&#8217;s belief that Nokia would have its profit margins planed away to zero by Asian competition if it went that route.  And I think they&#8217;re unwise not to simply tell Microsoft to shove WP7 up its own ass.  <\/p>\n<p>Still, even with these reservations, I think Plan B is more likely to maintain Nokia as a viable company than Elop&#8217;s.  It has the advantage that Microsoft&#8217;s ability and willingness to hold up its end <em>aren&#8217;t<\/em> critical to the plan.  There&#8217;s a string of dead companies, including in the cellphone space both Sendo and Danger, that could tell you how very huge an advantage that is.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: Alas, the Plan B effort <a href=\"http:\/\/nokiaplanb.com\/2011\/02\/16\/calling-it-quits\/\">has folded<\/a>.  Institutional investors didn&#8217;t go for it.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE2: And don&#8217;t miss <a href=\"http:\/\/nokiaplans.com\/\">this artful mockery<\/a>.  Of the Elop deal, nor plan B.  I think&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE3: Now we learn that Plan B was a hoax.  You know what&#8217;s really sad?  That the hoax still sounds more credible than Nokia&#8217;s actual business plan <em>even when I know it&#8217;s a hoax<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, that didn&#8217;t take long. Just a few hours ago I was speculating in a comment thread that Stephen Elop&#8217;s cozy deal with Microsoft Microsoft might lead to a fairly near-term shareholder revolt, and lo, it has occurred. Welcome to Plan B. This is pretty dynamite stuff. A group of Nokia shareholders is planning an&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=2961\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Smartphone Wars: Nokia shareholders revolt!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[34],"class_list":["post-2961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-smartphone-wars","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2961"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5552,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2961\/revisions\/5552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}