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Is Nokia's CEO a Microsoft mole?

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Re: Is Nokia's CEO a Microsoft mole?

#31

Post by cpeterso »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #25
0x12 wrote: post #6

A mole is someone that is there undercover. Nokia's CEO is there in plain sight and has very strong connections to Microsoft, was brought in by the board to guide Nokia away from their homebrew stuff and onto Windows. How could he possibly be a mole?

That is what I was thinking, you could ask "is he a colonial governor?" You know, the guy the Colonial power installs as the head of state insuring that the colony will endeavor to make its patron state wealthier at the expense of its own citizens.

The Nokia board of directors probably hired Elop because they wanted to transition to Windows Phone. Elop's job was to the bearer of bad news (to employees).

Re: Is Nokia's CEO a Microsoft mole?

#32

Post by pohl »

0x12 wrote: post #28
harryf wrote: post #21

Wasn't there a myth that Microsoft killed Commodore with a mole on the board?

iirc it was the XOR patent, here is one part of that story: http://xcssa.org/pipermail/xcssa/2005-February/002587.html I'm not sure if that was all there was to it and possibly there is room in there for a 'microsoft mole' somehow, but a single mole on the board of directors would be just a way to get information out, you can't destroy a company in a straightforward way. And such a mole would have to be compensated v…

Hypothetically, would being the 8th largest individual shareholder of MSFT be large enough compensation to make a fiduciary suit an acceptable cost of doing business?

Re: Is Nokia's CEO a Microsoft mole?

#33

Post by kiiski »

thyrsus wrote: post #13
pavlov wrote: post #2

Summary: journalist visits a Nokia software development site in Tampere, where everybody used to work on two mobile operating systems that Nokia is phasing out. Understandably, these people are not particularly willing to admit that the software they spent years on wasn't good enough to keep up with Apple and Google, so the old conspiracy theory plops up: the Nokia CEO must be a "mole" who's intentionally driving the…

I'm curious about the misspelling of Torvalds. Was that a naive transcription of the spoken name, or a naive transliteration from a Finnish character similar to "eth"? ( https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Eth )

Just a mistake I think. Finnish doesn't really have any "special" characters except ä and ö. (Torvalds is written just the same in Finnish; besides I think it's a Swedish name anyway)

Re: Is Nokia's CEO a Microsoft mole?

#34

Post by zhwang »

kb101 wrote: post #14

It is definitely noteworthy that the N9 and the N8, both examples of excellent hardware running competitive software, have basically been sandbagged by Nokia. Contrast this with RIM, who just released a slew of stop-gap phones until QNX (BBX) is ready... but they still are promoting the hell out of those phones and are getting decent sales, keeping the company viable. And those aren't even world-beating phones. Meant…

Well actually, the N9's been promoted a bit around Australia, as far as I can see. I've been seeing ads for it on public transport, both in buses and at major train stations.

Makes me wonder why they'd be bothering with throwing these advertising dollars around if the N9 ecosystem is pretty much doomed anyway.

Re: Is Nokia's CEO a Microsoft mole?

#35

Post by Geee »

stevenwei wrote: post #20
kb101 wrote: post #14

It is definitely noteworthy that the N9 and the N8, both examples of excellent hardware running competitive software, have basically been sandbagged by Nokia. Contrast this with RIM, who just released a slew of stop-gap phones until QNX (BBX) is ready... but they still are promoting the hell out of those phones and are getting decent sales, keeping the company viable. And those aren't even world-beating phones. Meant…

The N8? Which didn't have a QWERTY keyboard in portrait mode until a year after release? That would randomly lock up when interacting with the UI? That OS was nowhere near the level of its competitors.

Symbian Belle. Basically, it's on Android level now. They did the whole interface from ground up using Qt and GPU acceleration. The earlier versions were really horrible though.

Re: Is Nokia's CEO a Microsoft mole?

#36

Post by 0x12 »

pohl wrote: post #32
0x12 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iirc it was the XOR patent, here is one part of that story: http://xcssa.org/pipermail/xcssa/2005-February/002587.html I'm not sure if that was all there was to it and possibly there is room in there for a 'microsoft mole' somehow, but a single mole on the board of directors would be just a way to get information out, you can't destroy a company in a straightforward way. And such a mole would have to be compensated v…

Hypothetically, would being the 8th largest individual shareholder of MSFT be large enough compensation to make a fiduciary suit an acceptable cost of doing business?

In some places breach of fiduciary duty is a criminal offense. So you may very well end up in jail.

I'm not sure there is adequate compensation for a risk like that. Being the 8th largest shareholder of MSFT might do the trick for some individuals but that's just another version of 'every man has his price'. For me I hope I'll never learn mine.

Re: Is Nokia's CEO a Microsoft mole?

#37

Post by mikeryan »

fleitz wrote: post #17
patrickgzill wrote: post #10

Shades of the incompetent Rick Belluzzo who destroyed SGI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo

Rick joined SGI in 1998, by that time Nvidia and Voodoo had put all but the final nails in the coffin of SGI.

But he was considered a "Microsoft Mole" for some things he did at both HP and SGI. Heck there's even an Urban Dictionary term "belluzzo" named for this act after him.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=belluzzo&...

Re: Is Nokia's CEO a Microsoft mole?

#38

Post by smogzer »

pavlov wrote: post #23
Geee wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about MeeGo Harmattan, which is said to be even ahead of iOS in terms of usability, performance and polish. Definitely ahead of Android. Elop stated that they couldn't get it ready until 2014, but surprisingly it's on markets before the WP phones. Nokia store is also way ahead of WP marketplace. It's just huge downplay of Nokia's products, while WP is not at all proven platform. Elop's statements were understanda…

Harmattan was supposed to ship in fall of 2010. It's a year late. Yet, even if the MeeGo mess hadn't happened and Nokia had shipped a Harmattan phone on the original Maemo schedule, would it have made any difference? It would have been hamstrung by Nokia's confusion over Symbian's direction, and steamrolled by iOS and Android just the same. It's not Elop's fault that Nokia's software is in shambles. The damage was do…

I never got to understand all that maemo, symbian, meego operating system differences. Couldn't they just use linux and get some QML frontend in front of it. It seems really a lack of direction/duplication of efforts.

Re: Is Nokia's CEO a Microsoft mole?

#39

Post by w33ble »

pavlov wrote: post #23
Geee wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about MeeGo Harmattan, which is said to be even ahead of iOS in terms of usability, performance and polish. Definitely ahead of Android. Elop stated that they couldn't get it ready until 2014, but surprisingly it's on markets before the WP phones. Nokia store is also way ahead of WP marketplace. It's just huge downplay of Nokia's products, while WP is not at all proven platform. Elop's statements were understanda…

Harmattan was supposed to ship in fall of 2010. It's a year late. Yet, even if the MeeGo mess hadn't happened and Nokia had shipped a Harmattan phone on the original Maemo schedule, would it have made any difference? It would have been hamstrung by Nokia's confusion over Symbian's direction, and steamrolled by iOS and Android just the same. It's not Elop's fault that Nokia's software is in shambles. The damage was do…

Dumping Symbian made a lot of sense. Replacing it with MeeGo seemed like a decent idea, but it was never clear if MeeGo was really ready to replace it (thought early reviews of the N9 made it look promising at least), and Nokia wasn't ready to dump Symbian. Ditching both for something else was a hard call, but probably wasn't the wrong one.

But, why announce when he did. The chosen OS wasn't out at the time, and Nokia had just gotten ready to ship their shiny new MeeGo flagship as well as a handful of new Symbian handsets. That announcement basically made all these new devices worthless. He could have at least kept the announcement silent for 6 months and see if the phones gained any traction. You can argue that they wouldn't have, but at least their sales numbers would have looked better. His timing was terrible; HP terrible.

And why WP? The OS wasn't finished and was missing some pretty basic features when it finally was launched. As countless people have said already, Android would have made a lot more sense here. They could have customized it and potentially even brought Symbian apps over and it had the added advantage of already having a solid foothold in the market.

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