Sotiris Makrygiannis, who according to his LinkedIn profile is “Director of Applications, MeeGo” at Nokia, has just tweeted that after 12 years with the company it’s time to call it quits. He sent several additional tweets saying how he remembers the hard work his team put into the N9, that February 11th, 2011, was a “bitter” day, and how, ironically, it was the MeeGo team that made Nokia’s first Windows Phone applications. This is, without a shadow of doubt, confirmation that MeeGo is NOT Nokia’s “contingency plan” should Windows Phone 8 fail to take off. Now Sotiris doesn’t talk about Meltemi, but according to Eldar Murtazin, Editor in Chief of Mobile-Review, that Linux based budget phone operating system has also been canceled. So again, we can’t stress this enough, Nokia has effectively handed over their destiny to an American company, Microsoft. If Nokia fails to turn things around, and that’s looking to be the case with each passing day, then Microsoft will be to blame here.
Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple Executive, was recently interviewed by Computing UK. He said that Nokia needs to get rid of their CEO, Stephen Elop, and get rid of the board as well. The company should have gone with Android from the beginning, and that they should have shut their mouth about killing Symbian. He also said what we’ve been saying since Microsoft announced Windows Phone 8. That it was bad enough Elop made prospective smartphone buyers ignore Symbian for two quarters, now they’re going to ignore Windows Phone for another two quarters while they wait for Windows Phone 8 devices.
Can Nokia be turned around? At this point we’ve lost all hope. Their market cap is now below $8 billion. To put that number into some perspective, Nokia paid $8.1 billion on NAVTEQ back in 2007. Will Microsoft buy Nokia? We don’t think so, we think Samsung will try and initiate a hostile takeover.
Expect this year to be a bumpy ride.