Victor Saeijs (pictured above, center), Senior Vice President at Nokia Europe, told Swedish newspaper Dagens Industri that Nokia doesn’t have a backup plan should their marriage with Microsoft fall to produce any meaningful results. His exact quote: “Plan B is for Plan A is to succeed.” Victor goes on to say that the recently launched Lumia 800 is the second best selling smartphone in Denmark, and the third best selling smartphone in Sweden, but even he admits that “we must succeed in the U.S. if we are to succeed in the world.” Understatement of the century! Now this isn’t the first time we’ve heard of Victor Saeijs. In June of last year he famously said that Nokia would make only 125,000 Windows Phones by the end of the year and that said phones would launch in just six European countries. Now he said that five months before the Lumia 800 hit the market, so at the time, with the knowledge he had, he probably wasn’t lying when he suggested it would take a while to ramp up their Windows Phone shipments.
Looking ahead, there’s only so much we can say about Nokia. The real people in charge now are the folks sitting in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft needs to deliver a compelling user experience and complimentary suite of services if they want their operating system to take off. Windows Phone Mango doesn’t cut it, but from what we’ve heard about Windows Phone 8, codename Apollo, that looks to be the version that starts making people pay attention. One slight problem though, Apollo doesn’t come out until the fourth quarter of 2012. There’s a reason Nokia didn’t provide any guidance when they posted their Q4 2011 financial results, they haven’t got the slightest clue how bad things are going to get.
Anyway, all we know is that if Windows Phone doesn’t take off then Elop is going to be put between a rock and a hard place. What then? Revive Maemo? Call up the Google brothers?
[Via: SlashGear]
Update: One of our readers (@chilko) pointed out that Stephen Elop said the exact same thing in June 2011!