It was not caveated [TurnVerbsIntoNounsWatch] - John Reid, UK Health Minister
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Plan B uprising against Nokia leadership dies an early death
A BID by a group of young Nokia shareholders to steer the Finnish phone company away from the course it is heading on has died with a whimper, rather than a bang.
The nine shareholders wanted to challenge the partnership with Microsoft and the direction of the company. They called it 'Plan B' and were planning to air their concerns at the next Nokia shareholders meeting.
If elected to a majority in the Nokia board of directors, they had planned to remove Stephen Elop as CEO, restructure the alliance with Microsoft, make Meego Nokia's primary smartphone operating system, extend the lifespan of Symbian, and aggressively recruit young talent.
But Plan B stopped before it even got started. Although it was contacted by hundreds of individual shareholders pledging their support, the same could not be said for institutional investors.
The rogue shareholders said on the Plan B blog, "These institutions have a fiduciary responsibility to their customers and are legally barred from supporting radical initiatives like seating a bunch of kids on the board of directors."
Plan B said that angry Nokia shareholders were better off divesting and putting their money in other companies that followed their strategy. It also said that even if the plan did kick in, all the software talent would have left by the time it was put in place.
We'd also suggest that Plan B's obvious love of Symbian made the plan flawed from the start. µ
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...which solves the burning platform problem by throwing the fire extinguisher overboard, and strapping yourself to the nearest thing that's guaranteed to sink.
Fire extinguisher = Qt = Nokia's most important strategic product.
Sinking thing = WP7 = Apple's feature set of 3 years ago.
Nokia - you were so nearly there. After doing all the hard work, you only had to hold your nerve while putting the finishing touches on Symbian Qt and SDK 1.1, using it to provide a sexy UI, and finishing Lighthouse (for Qt on Android).
Everything then snaps into place, putting you back in front for the next decade, on your own terms, without every having really lost your leadership position by units.
"..and now you've gone and thrown it all away" as a popular song would say.
History will remember Elop as instigator of one of the "greatest" corporate disasters in history.
RIP Nokia.
I agree with "horse": the problem with the present (lack of) corporate ethics is that the almighty short-term dollar trumps all else in most cases.
Of course, huge, long-lived companies like Microsoft "capitalize" (pun intended) on these short-sighted weaknesses and shareholder greed. Simple math: "let's see...the share price is low (because of Microsoft's manipulation), so lets back Mr. Ballmer's puppet so the share price will hopefully go up, and we can sell all of our shares at a profit...".
Microsoft similarly capitalizes on "short" consumer memory spans. They feel they can just openly bribe and bully their way into situations of power (such as when they bribed ISO delegates to get the flawed "OOXML" approved as an ISO standard). Then they wait until their latest sins become "old news", and happily carry on with their anticompetitive, dirty business practices.
Microsoft (and now Nokia) appear to view consumers' brains as so much "malleable mush". They insert corporate spies/plants into competing organizations (Nokia WAS a big supporter of open source), destroy the share price, and pull who-knows-what other types of dirty tricks to enslave an entire corporation. Then they fully expect, with enough "hard sell" advertising, that consumers will forget about all this "evil-doing", and just sheepishly line up at the tills to buy Microsoft (formally Nokia) phones.
What they are not counting on is that people DO have a choice, and do not HAVE to buy underfeatured, insecure products from companies that destroy competition and other companies. The other little problem is that the speed of development and price (free!) of open-source products like Android make it impossible for proprietary, expensive products like WP7 to keep up, feature-wise. This will be true, no matter how many millions or billons Microsoft pours into brainwashing, I mean, "advertising".
Of course, even if Micro-Nokia doesn't work out and Nokia goes bankrupt, Microsoft still wins, as they will have invested nothing and yet eliminated one more open-source competitor. Ballmer will get a big bonus either way.
So perhaps consider this before sliding ANY money over the counter to finance yet more dirty Microsoft tricks. The entire Internet is presently suffering from Microsoft's virtual monopoly of insecure software on PC's (botnets etc.). To repeat this folly with portable devices could be the demise of our global information network and freedom of choice for consumers.
Institutional investors aren't interested in anything other than whether a fat dividend is paid or whether any eventual sale of stock will reward them richly, especially if they're pension fund managers claiming to be scared witless that after years of bonuses for themselves (although they don't mention that bit), people will come after them with pitchforks for not making them a decent pension.
Of course, this "we must make money for our clients" excuse overrides everything for these people: ethics, basic respect for humanity, and so on. As long as a company pays the dividend, they're quite happy to see that company pollute, violate basic labour regulations, deplete natural resources, and do a whole catalogue of nasty stuff. In turn, the executives get on with their dirty business knowing that the investors want their cash. Everyone gets to be a coward, to shut up, and to take the money.
So of course institutional investors won't back anything other than a gutting of Nokia: they want their payday.
Symbian good
S60 bad
good != bad
Symbian != S60
That being said, I think Elops plan is doomed for a load of reasons that have nothing to do with Symbian
Telling the entire workforce that everything they have ever done is worthless, that they are useless and he is going to shut them down is unlikely to be a successful way to enjoy the support of the workforce.
Remember the workforce? Those pesky little biological lifeforms that ARE the company? I thought not.
Dweeb