Thanks Ken and Matt, but Nokia is still the apple of my eye

Ken Camp was one of the first members in the Nokia Blogger Relations program that I found online. Ever since our first contact we’ve spoken about numerous topics, but in the end it all came back to Nokia.

Today he talks about the legal troubles I’m having:

Nokia, you simply screwed the pooch on this one. No other way to put it. Stefan is one of the most out spoken Nokia proponents on the planet. You could have handled it any number of ways. You could have turned it into a PR plus, and instead, you came out looking like a bully going after the little guy.

I’m quite impressed with the Nokia products I’ve had the privilege of evaluating. From a product standpoint, Nokia is clearly in a leadership role pointing the way to a very mobile future.

From a positioning standpoint, the Nokia Blogger Relations program has done wonders to position Nokia well, and for good reason.

Had I been in Stefan’s position, I expect this would have escalated into a very public, very large black eye for Nokia. But instead, you sent the lawyers after an ally who is, for all intents and purposes, a college student who wants to come work for you. He’s that big a fan.

Shame on you Nokia for one of the worst cases of mismanagement for 2007. You’re in the running for blunder of the year at this point. Get off your butts and salvage this and turn it into a win you fools.

Nokia doesn’t owe me anything Ken. The lawyers who filed this complaint against me are just doing their job and probably don’t even care about the telecommunications industry in the first place. They are just intellectual property security guards.

Could the Nokia Communications Team turn this into a PR plus? Doubtful. I just want them to tell Nokia Legal to drop their complaint and get off my back.

The company is so big that people have no idea what is happening next door. This is the sad truth of many multinational corporations, but it is also one of the reasons I started Ring Nokia in the first place. I know I’ve said this many times already, but I think the Channel 9 community is the best example of a company trying to humanize themselves. I still want to bring that same spirit of enthusiasm and desire to share passion within the walls of Nokia, but reality offered me quite a bitch slap in the face.

The situation I’m in is just something I want to go away. I have enough trouble with the law thanks to my speeding habit

Matt seems to echo Ken’s thoughts and goes one step further citing that Nokia has gone overboard:

This is absolute fucking bullshit Nokia.   These photos were posted on HowardForums, which is perhaps the most well known mobile phone forum on the web.  Stefan from Ring Nokia pulled those photos up, and like any blogger in his position would, posted about them on his site.

The fact is this Nokia: you fucked up.  Somehow or another, you had these prototypes jacked from one of your facilities.  It was your security blunder that allowed this to happen.

Now, if you want to protect your trade secrets, and you don’t want
these prototype pictures posted, why not do what you’ve done in every
other case: email Stefan and ask him to take them down.  Trust me, he
would do it.  He has a great respect for you as a company, and a lot of
passion about your products.

But no, instead Nokia has decided to take the extreme and unnecessary step of trying to get Stefan’s entire site removed!  So here’s something for Nokia’s crack legal team to consider:

1) Just because someone has pictures of your prototype (which they
obtained from a public internet forum) does not make them a party to
the theft of those prototypes.

2) Having Stefan’s entire site removed is not an answer here.  Are you going to have HowardForums shut down?  Engadget?  Gizmodo?
Instead, you could ask that Stefan remove the pictures from his site
(which he’s preemptively done by the way, since he’s not looking for trouble here).

It’s moves like this that sour people in the blogger community
towards your company.  Whether you’d like to admit it or not, blogger’s
have a strong impact on driving sales of your products, not to mention
your financial portfolio (Apple/Engadget anyone?).  Rather than biting the hand that feeds, why not try some simple 3rd grade diplomacy?

I think what I said to Ken applies to you as well Matt. When you talk about "Nokia," who exactly are you referring to? The company has over 50,000 employees and I bet the handful who read this blog are just about as pissed off as you are. If they had the power to hit the off switch for this whole fiasco they would do it in a heart beat, but they don’t work in that department.

OK so Nokia Legal is acting a little bit rude, but it doesn’t mean that the engineers working on the next mobile operating system, the developers brainstorming the next killer app, the marketers demoing advanced features to consumers and the designers creating devices that are absolutely stunning should be insulted and blamed.

Nokia is still the apple of my eye in this vast and complicated world of mobile telecommunications and just because a team of lawyers in NYC want to get rid of me it does not mean that Nokia as a company wants to silence my voice.

The lawyers can shut down RingNokia.com, but they will never get rid of Stefan Constantinescu.

Ever.