Thread: Nokia Plan B
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Posts: 96 | Thanked: 82 times | Joined on Dec 2009 @ New Jersey, USA
#41
Originally Posted by exo View Post
The 'Plan B' strategy reads like a wishlist, the whole thing seems to be an idea of eliminating all cost-cutting and increasing spending on new talent to bet the entire company on MeeGo. The reason Nokia is in its current situation is the board decided they don't want to bet the company on MeeGo. A plan that outlines an absolute boatload of spending with no financial plan isn't going to get anywhere.
It reads like a few of we nerds upset that we're not getting a toy we were promised and are throwing a temper tantrum. I used to sound like this sometimes... 20 years ago, when I was 18 and just entered college.
The idealistic if misguided kids who wrote this don't understand how the financial world works and they're going to have their hearts yanked out if they actually try to go through with this. A large amount of stock is owned by hedge funds, pension plans and large institutions. Their only concern is a return on investment. In many cases, they have a fiduciary responsibility to their clients to maximize ROI and could actually be sued for seeking to do otherwise. I've watched shareholders vote down proposals to not buy goods from companies that use child or prison labor, to offer equal benefits to gay and lesbian employees, etc. The first time you see a shareholders' meeting vote against protecting exploited children a little piece of your soul dies I think.
You can be sure Nokia shareholders are not people passionately committed to Linux or Qt; they want value for their investment and are going to go the way the CEO and the board (which approved the WP7 arrangement) advise to go. As exo noted, this isn't even a plan for a return to leading the smartphone market or increasing profits.

The author Dick Mitchell once wrote that when people are asked what their financial plan is, it's to make more money. He correctly wrote that that's not a plan, it's a wish or goal. If he were alive today, I'm sure he'd say the same of this statement from the cited website:

Return the company to a strategy that seeks high growth and high profit margins through innovation and overwhelmingly superior products with unrivaled user experience.
I don't think the former, and definitely, the current employees of Nokia who purportedly created this website have any idea how to do that. This makes it sound like Nokia's explicit strategy was to decrease market share and create inferior products, and all Nokia has to do is to want to make superior products again. Maybe the author of "The Secret" is one of the anonymous stockholders.
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