We reported yesterday that Nokia's investors gave current CEO Stephen Elop threats during a meeting between the CEO and shareholders. The investors made it clear that they have given Nokia more than the original time it said it needed to make the Lumia brand a success, able to take on Apple and Samsung.
Apple sold 37.4 million iPhones last quarter and Samsung sold 69.4 million phones. The Nokia CEO, who promised investors an exclusive relationship with Microsoft and exclusively using Windows Phone as its only operating system, sold 5.6 million Nokia Lumia smartphones. It's very understandable why investors are frustrated with the company and its current CEO.
Nokia has been pressured before to diversify and possibly support another operating system. There were rumors that Nokia originally made a bid for Palm because it knew it needed a fresh mobile operating system like webOS in order to go up against iOS and Android. Can you imagine Nokia Lumias running webOS? It would have been a great fit, because Nokia would have gotten control of an already completed mobile operating system to stamp its name on.
Unfortunately Palm was acquired by HP, which had no clear idea what to do with the mobile operating system, but thought it needed to have one of its own. HP killed webOS and Nokia began an exclusive relationship with Microsoft. Investors once again pressured Stephen Elop to consider being like Samsung and support more than one mobile operating system, but, just as he did yesterday, he vowed that Windows Phone was the only smartphone operating system Nokia would use to compete against Samsung and Android.
New reports claim that an investor said that Nokia isn't displaying "the spirit and charisma" that Apple has been showing. The CEO spoke about Apple's current stock situation to deflect the criticism, and then, "he rhetorically asked if Apple was 'still cool?' " That was the best the CEO could respond with and he acted more out of touch with reality than the people who sign his checks. Elop isn't really helping Nokia out with some of his very poor choices running the company, as Brad Reed from BGR pointed out:
"His obsession with giving carriers exclusives of devices that limit their exposure to wider audiences seems particularly daft, especially in an era when Apple and Samsung sell the exact same devices across multiple carriers. What's more, Nokia's system for naming its smartphones is just bizarre - is the average person walking into a Best Buy going to know the difference between a Lumia 520, a Lumia 710, a Lumia 720, a Lumia 920 and a Lumia 928?"
It makes you wonder how these poor decisions just keep being repeated. If Nokia does move to Android, it will almost certainly get lost in the fold of all other Android licensees and will have a tough time carving out a name for itself in the Android world. Nokia's Lumia smartphones are the most popular Windows Phone smartphones, but Nokia is also the only Windows Phone licensee that does not use Android.
Nokia might be big in the Windows Phone world, but that's not enough to keep it afloat. Nokia would be arriving at the Android party too late to really differentiate itself from HTC, Motorola and LG, as John Paczkowski from All Things D points out. Nokia in a sense has lost its identity by not having its own mobile operating system, or at the very least supporting one that is successful — and so far Windows Phone isn't climbing up the charts fast enough for Microsoft and Nokia's shareholders. Now Nokia must understand how BlackBerry felt for a while,
