{"id":4444,"date":"2012-07-10T15:04:04","date_gmt":"2012-07-10T19:04:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4444"},"modified":"2014-03-10T07:16:30","modified_gmt":"2014-03-10T11:16:30","slug":"the-smartphone-wars-timo-ahonen-carpet-bombs-stephen-elop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4444","title":{"rendered":"The Smartphone Wars: Tomi Ahonen carpet-bombs Stephen Elop"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The best strategic analysis of Nokia&#8217;s parlous position I&#8217;ve ever seen comes to us from ex-Nokia-executive and longtime company-watcher Tomi Ahonen: <a href=\"http:\/\/communities-dominate.blogs.com\/brands\/2012\/07\/the-sun-tzu-of-nokisoftian-microkia-mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-whose-the-baddest-of-them-all-waterloo.html\">The Sun Tzu of Nokisoftian Microkia<\/a>.  It&#8217;s thorough, entertainingly written, and includes some instructive diversions into military history.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s long and really can&#8217;t be summarized well &#8211; you need to plow through Ahonen&#8217;s detailed analyses of things like the impact of Microsoft&#8217;s Skype purchase on Nokia&#8217;s carrier relationships to understand how royally Elop has screwed the pooch. <\/p>\n<p>I see only one thing that I think Ahonen gets wrong.  I think he is too complacent about what the actual medium-term prospects for Symbian were at the time Elop took the helm at Nokia; he understimates the speed of transition to smartphones and overestimates the stickiness of Symbian as a platform under that pressure.<\/p>\n<p>Thus, I think Ahonen&#8217;s evaluation that Elop&#8217;s &#8220;Burning Platforms&#8221; memo wasn&#8217;t diagnosing a real problem is incorrect. On everything else, though, his indictment of Elop seems dead on target. He persuades me that Elop&#8217;s later blunders (beginning with tying Nokia to the Windows phone) were even larger and stupider than I thought at the time.<\/p>\n<p>This essay changes my mind about something significant. I thought at the time of the Burning Platforms memo that Nokia&#8217;s best move would have been to ride the Android tide, that MeeGo was a noble but doomed effort that could never have gained any traction.  Ahonen does a good job of arguing that Nokia had the marketing reach and good carrier relationships needed to make MeeGo seriously competitive. This, in retrospect, makes Nokia&#8217;s cancellation of MeeGo seem like even more of a tragic blunder than it did at the time.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, I know that some Nokia alumni have just launched a MeeGo startup aimed at making it competitive on smartphones.  I wish them every bit of luck, but they <em>don&#8217;t<\/em> have the co-factors for success that Ahonen ably describes, so I cannot think much of their chances.<\/p>\n<p>Finally&#8230;who knew Ahonen was so well-versed in military history?  That&#8217;s something I know more than a little about myself, and I&#8217;m here to certify that where my knowledge overlaps with his I find his command of facts excellent, and his judgment sound and incisive. Thus, I&#8217;m going to go read up on the Battle of Suomussalmi sometime soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The best strategic analysis of Nokia&#8217;s parlous position I&#8217;ve ever seen comes to us from ex-Nokia-executive and longtime company-watcher Tomi Ahonen: The Sun Tzu of Nokisoftian Microkia. It&#8217;s thorough, entertainingly written, and includes some instructive diversions into military history.<\/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-4444","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\/4444","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=4444"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4449,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4444\/revisions\/4449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}