'Operation Elop' and the bungled transition

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Authors Pekka Nykänen and Merina Salminen published a book in Finnish, back in 2015, about the fall of Nokia from 2010-ish through to the (then) present day, 2015. The central character in all of this was Stephen Elop, as you'll have guessed from my headline. It's a very long book, but it has now been translated into English and is available for free. See the quotes and links below. It covers the latter Symbian years, the still-borm Meego, the switch to Windows Phone and the eventual decline and sale of the vast Nokia empire.

Operation ElopHaving just finished speed-reading it, there's a lot of direct interest and a lot of sense talked in the analysis.

And at the risk of saying 'I told you so', the eventual conclusion by the authors and most contributors, after over a hundred pages (even in A4 PDF form), is that despite all the other issues Nokia and the industry was facing, the absolutely crucial mistake that Stephen Elop made was leaking the famous 'Burning Platform' memo, effectively shooting Symbian OS in the head and cutting off sales of Symbian-based phones to networks within days, leaving Nokia with a sales shortfall in the billions of dollars, rather than delaying the public cessation of Symbian commitment until Windows Phone-based Lumias were ready for sale.

Which is what I said, many times, on AAS and AAWP back in the day, in articles and on podcasts. Ahem.

But there's vastly more in the book. It gives all sides of the Nokia story over this period, it'll have you cheering for Elop one moment and villifying him the next. 

From the post at React etc.:

Now there is a translation of the book that is translated by a community and made available for free under the under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.

The book is available in HTML format as well as suitable formats for Android, iPhone, iPad and Kindle formats. Operation Elop - Final years of Nokia Mobile Phones free ebook download:

There are masses of juicy nuggets and back-story that even I didn't fully appreciate, not least how close Nokia was to going with Google and Android back at the end of 2010.

If you have a spare afternoon then load this on your smartphone or Kindle and knock yourself out. You'll be better informed!

Source / Credit: React, etc.