Bloomberg Businessweek just published an amazingly thorough piece on Nokia, pre- and post-Elopcalypse. We’ve long wondered how MeeGo, an OS that Stephen Elop himself said ” inspires both confidence and excitement ” in October 2010, might be cast aside so quickly in favor of Windows Phone, an OS still struggling in finding traction within the heated smartphone market. Well, now we all know. Bloomberg recounts a January 3rd meeting between Nokia’s Chief Development Officer Kai Oistämö and Nokia’s freshman CEO. After Kai expressed his concern with MeeGo’s ability to effectively reply to Apple’s iOS and Android operating systems, the 2 decided to interview two dozen “influential employees” about MeeGo, starting from execs to engineers. Here’s how Bloomberg recounts the events that followed:
Before the 1st interview, Elop drew out what he knew in regards to the plans for MeeGo on a whiteboard, with yet another color marker for the goods being developed, their target date for introduction, and the present levels of bugs in each product. Soon the whiteboard was packed with color, and the inside track was not good: At its current pace, Nokia was not off course to introduce only three MeeGo-driven models before 2014-far too slow to maintain the corporate within the game. Elop tried to name Oistämö, but his phone battery was dead. “He will need to have been trying an Android phone that day,” says Elop. Once they finally spoke late on Jan. 4, “It was truly an oh-s–t moment-and very, really painful to comprehend where we were,” says Oistämö. Months later, Oistämö still struggles to carry back tears. “MeeGo were the collective hope of the corporate,” he says, “and we might come to the belief that the emperor had no clothes. It is not a pleasant thing.”
Nokia is now on target to release no less than one Windows Phone handset in 2011 with a dozen more in 2012.
NPD: Apple grabs over 1 / 4 of the mobile PC business in Q4 2011 (including iPads), HP tops with laptops
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