Nokia CEO: "I am not a pipe"

At the end of the 1990s, Nokia made a name for itself by being easier to use than Motorola. The user-friendliness of Nokia cell phones was not exactly sensational, but compared to all other devices it was good enough to make Nokia a top 10 brand worldwide in a relatively short time.

Yes, Nokia hardware has always been very solid. But solid hardware is no longer a selling point today. In 2011, it goes without saying that the hardware works. What distinguishes a cell phone is not "that" it works, but "how" it works.

The interface is the product, the user experience is the brand. No one has demonstrated this as beautifully as Apple. Apple has taken what made Nokia strong at the end of the 1990s and taken it to the next level. In a very short space of time, the iPhone has conquered a market that was considered a nuclear bomb-proof bunker.

Nokia reacted quickly: at the end of August 2007, the Finnish company presented an insight into the future of its user interfaces. The future looked like a 1:1 copy of the iPhone. When asked that they were just copying Apple, Anssi Vanjoki, General Manager of Multimedia, said quite succinctly: "If there's something good out there in the world, then we'll copy it proudly." Nevertheless, the copy was abandoned and then the company went on to muddle about in other ways.

Four years later: Stephen Elop, the first non-Finnish CEO of Nokia, sends an internal email with the strangely poetic message that they are on a burning platform that they must leave as soon as possible by jumping into the ice water. Literally: "... we have more than just a single explosion - we have several scorching fires feeding the fire that is blazing up around us."

The burning platform: Symbian, Nokia's operating system. What reads like "cluelessness" or "lunacy" from a PR perspective - according to Tomi T. Ahonen, an ex-Nokia manager - and sounds like "a hoax" from an Internet perspective - Ahonen again - is nothing more than a complete PR and management failure: When the CEO of a company trumpets to the world that the core element of the user experience of its products is like a burning oil rig that you have to leave by jumping into ice water, it also means that millions of Nokia customers are traveling with a burning oil rig in the bag (under ordinary circumstances, the metaphor would choke here, but ...) and are probably being thrown directly or indirectly into the deep end with the company.

One day later, Elop announces that Nokia will leave its own platform and will now rely on Windows Phone as its operating system in future. I see. As the former Director of Microsoft's Business Division, Elop was of course immediately exposed to rumors that he had probably been sent by Microsoft to push this deal through at Nokia. To counter this, he emphasized: "I am not a Trojan horse." A-ha. Nokia's share price immediately plummeted.

One day later, Elop announced that Microsoft had not put 0 billion on the table for this deal, but a couple of billion. Aha. ¬Google had bid, but ultimately lost out to Microsoft's higher bid. The whole action is reminiscent of the strange move by Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, who decided a few years ago to hand over Yahoo!'s prime asset (search) to Microsoft. She, too, was anything but a PR genius.

And now the whole thing again in fast motion:
1. Nokia neglects the interface of its cell phones
2. Nokia copies Apple 1:1 and then muddles on in some other way
3. Nokia gives up control of the software and sells the cell phone file to a software house that rarely shines through user-friendliness and always through sales strategy

I know ... Maybe everything will work out. Selling is also important. Maybe Nokia customers won't realize that ice cubes will soon be melting in their pockets. Maybe the Windows Phone really isn't an ice thing, but really is much better than anything we've seen from Microsoft so far. But perhaps Nokia's days are just as numbered as those of Yahoo! or Macromedia: Because Elop was at the helm there until Adobe took over. You have to give him credit for one thing: The man has a clear profile.