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RE[5]: Go ahead and short
by jeffb on Sat 22nd Jun 2013 13:44 UTC in reply to "RE[4]: Go ahead and short"
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Elop's one single screwup (and it was a spectacular one) was burning Symbian before their WP handsets were anywhere close to shipping. That created a classic Osborne Effect where the existing Symbian customer base jumped ship to competing iOS and Android platforms - which were already available - instead of migrating smoothly to Nokia's new WP platform, which wasn't.

I don't think that was even much of a screw up. Symbian phones weren't making much margin and sales had been falling for 3 quarters. Elop by shocking his people get them to move off MeeGo fast. He bought himself a transition that say compared to RIM's BBOS to QNX transition took 11 months less. Nokia is not the CIA. He couldn't have killed off MeeGo as quickly as he did in secret.

Those 11 months were key to how Nokia passed RIM in sales and is having far greater manufacturing capacity than RIM has for this generation of phones. Given Nokia's high restructuring and write down costs I don't know that he did the wrong thing.

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