Anssi Vanjoki has been at Nokia for 19 years and was often seen as a next CEO after Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo left the company. That however hasn’t happened with Microsoft’s head of Business Stephen Elop jumping in to take the top spot, instead.
After that, Vanjoki resigned from Nokia to pursue other things in his life. The Verge asked him to comment the recent acquisition of Nokia by Microsoft and unsurprisingly, he didn’t have any nice words to say. Here’s what he thought of it:
… Shameful, but unavoidable. This is a complete failure of chosen strategy and its implementation. Nokia was not able to make it work. For Finland’s sake I hope Microsoft will.
Somehow we tend to agree with him. While Nokia was slow to react to the new wave of smartphones, we tend to think they could’ve done better than this. Alas, we’ll never know…