Nokia should fire Elop and the board should go too - Jean-Louis Gassée

Silicon Valley veteran blasts mobile phone maker's CEO and board

Stephen Elop ought to be fired as the CEO of Nokia and the rest of the board should join him, according to Silicon Valley veteran Jean-Louis Gassée (pictured).

"I think that Elop will have to go, but I also think that the board also needs to be renewed with people who have an understanding and working knowledge of the mobile industry," Gassée told Computing in an exclusive interview.

Gassée built up HP in Europe during the 1970s before joining Apple in 1981, where he served as a senior executive from 1981 to 1990. He also founded operating system company Be Inc, and is now a partner at venture capital company Allegis Capital.

Double Osborne

Gassée criticised the company for allowing Elop to effectively ‘Osborne' its products not once, but twice: first in his infamous, Gerald Ratner-like "burning platform" memo in February 2011; and, more recently, when Microsoft pre-announced Windows Phone 8, which effectively obsoleted Nokia's new range of Windows Phone 7 devices months before the new mobile operating system will be formally released.

"Microsoft can do that with new versions of Windows; IBM used to do that in the olden days. But I'm shocked that the board of Nokia allowed Elop to do that," said Gassée.

The company was banking on burgeoning sales of its Windows Phone 7 devices this year - especially over the next two quarters - to arrest the company's sharp decline in sales and profitability.

Current mobile devices running Windows Phone 7 won't be upgradeable to Windows Phone 8 and apps built for Windows Phone 8 will not be backwards compatible. A point upgrade, though, will provide many of the features of Windows Phone 8 to users of the older operating system.

While acknowledging that Elop inherited a company facing many looming challenges, Gassée questioned whether the knowledge and experience Elop offered are appropriate to the role.

"He has zero experience in terms of what makes a smartphone maker tick. And what is his experience in supply chain management? Zero," said Gassée.

He added: "He did a very good thing, which is to tell everyone that it is an eco-system ‘play', not a platform play. That was very insightful. But then he reveals the plans without implementing them. Everyone knew that Symbian phones were dead-enders and Nokia's partners - the carriers - ran away from Symbian in large numbers."

In his "burning platform" memo of February 2011, Elop likened the company's Symbian platform to the platform of a burning oil rig in the North Sea from which the company needed to escape.

However, the memo, published in an internal blog, was leaked to the press.

Nokia should fire Elop and the board should go too - Jean-Louis Gassée

Silicon Valley veteran blasts mobile phone maker's CEO and board

Days later, Elop announced a tie-up with Microsoft, in which Nokia would adopt the software giant's Windows Phone operating system as its primary smartphone platform. But that deal was only finalised two months later and Nokia Lumia phones featuring Windows Phone 7 only started to emerge in modest volumes by the autumn.

In the meantime, sales of Nokia's products across the board have fallen and have yet to recover, despite a modest spike in sales of Lumia phones in the US since the introduction of the Microsoft-based products.

Going Android

Gassée reserves his most potent criticisms, though, for Elop's predecessor, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, a lawyer-turned-accountant who succeeded Jorma Ollila in 2006. "I've now doubt that Kallasvuo is highly intelligent, very hard working and dedicated. But that didn't matter. He had no connection with what makes the business work," said Gassée.

Kallasvuo failed to recognise the threat posed by Apple's iPhone and Google Android, launched in 2007 and 2008 respectively. Instead, Kallasvuo presided over a confused platform strategy featuring multiple iterations of the Symbian operating system and Linux-based alternatives.

Nokia's demise is all the more poignant for Gassée after he was consulted by the company's board in New York over its future two years ago. He recommended that they fire Kallasvuo, drop Symbian and adopt Android instead. "The board of Nokia were already thinking that Kallasvuo should go. They made no bones about their dissatisfaction with the top management," said Gassée.

He added: "I told them to drop everything and go Android. Do it in secret and let the rumours fly... I would have used Nokia's design flare to make very nice phones. I would integrate Ovi [Nokia's app store] into Android and people would say that Nokia sided with the winner.

"It would have been tough fighting Samsung, though, because Samsung takes no prisoners. They don't brush their teeth in the morning - they file them," said Gassée.

However, while they took his advice over Kallasvuo, they rejected his suggestion that the company ought to adopt Android, arguing that the company would "lose control of their destiny", they told Gassée.