It also may or may not mean anything that the original Nokia press release only mentions Simonson and Ihamuotila.

Smartphones are mentioned only in passing: "Mobile Phones is one of two new entities within the Devices unit that came into operation on October 1, 2009, the other being Smartphones."

Tablets and Maemo are not mentioned at all.

Someone brew some tea on their overheating iPhone so we can read the tea leaves.

http://www.nokia.com/press/press-rel...newsid=1347929

Did bit googling with Simonson and it seems that his background is almost completly in finance/accounting/business. Now, he is moved to head the mobilephones unit. He certainly didn't get that post because of is experience in the field. Being groomed for something that requires understanding Nokia as a whole (i.e CEO position) is the only logical reason for his new post that I can come up with.

I could just not see a non-Finn CEO of Nokia...

Fair point.

Argument against that: finnish investment- and commercial banks have lost their traditional straglehold on Nokia. Large institutional investment funds hold most of the stocks now. Meanwhile, the finnish society has transformed quite a bit during the last two decades. We migt not be a multi-cultural utopia, but we certainly aren't the kind of introverted monoculture we were when I was child.

Good points Rauha, but never underestimate the sentiment aspect.

Here's my take: put the finance guy in charge of the division you're planning to sell or spin off.

I would say it's due to the fact that the average price of the mobile phones (non-smartphones) Nokia sells dropped significantly. I would expect big cost cutting moves.

Yeah, I was thinking like an American, sorry.

Still, as an old engineering type I'm more comfortable with knowledgable process people finding ways to cut cost rather than "bean counters". The latter rarely know where unnecessary cost can be removed without pain... the former are always ready with plenty of good suggestions.

IMHO Basic cell phones are more of a commodity business today and more cost driven than technology driven. Perhaps Nokia's overhead is too high to make a good margin. The business model of all functional groups for basic cells would need to change. Applying those changes to the technology oriented product lines would be detrimental so breaking the technology focused products away so they can have a different business model makes sense. Splitting Maemo and Symbian smartphones may be to better understand and measure the costs of each and to perhaps let them operate differently from each other.