Lee Williams was the Senior Vice President of S60 Software between August 2006 and January 2009. During that 30 month time span we saw what was arguably Nokia’s greatest creation, the N95, and on the other side of the coin the company’s worst smartphone to ever be sold, the N97. So what does Lee think of Elop? Natasha Lomas from C|NET UK recently interviewed him, and what he had to say wasn’t exactly nice. He points out that Elop doesn’t have a vision for the company, that Nokia is basically Microsoft’s play toy now, that if the company has any hope of getting back on track it should stop worrying about saving nickels and dimes and instead focus on innovating again. It’s a lengthy read, coming in at just under 3,000 words, but it’s well worth it if you’re a Nokia fan trying to understand just what the hell happened to the company.
Deep down, we’re pretty upset that Nokia has essentially turned into a company who just puts things together. Think about it for a second. Who makes Nokia’s smartphone software? Microsoft. Who makes the chips that go inside of Nokia’s smartphones? Qualcomm. What exactly did Apple and Samsung do to collect 95% of the profits generated by the mobile industry in Q4 2011? Starting with Apple, they make their own software. They also use their billions of dollars in the bank to secure components, and in some cases they’ll even help their component suppliers out by buying them equipment in exchange for priority access to whatever rolls out of their factories. Then there’s Samsung, who supplies screens, chips, and memory to nearly every company who makes battery powered gizmos. In other words, Apple and Samsung are more “vertical”, meaning they control more of what goes into their devices, whereas Nokia is just like HTC, who takes chips from Qualcomm, software from Google, sprinkles a little bit of software differentiation on top, and then tries to be successful.
Nokia’s got to return to their roots, to make their own software, if they want to win.