Nokia

Very people-oriented, consensus-driven company.

Superb engineering, world-beating technology in so many areas: Nokia created much of what is now taken for granted in modern mobile phones.

Wonderful devices, superb design, incredible reliability.

When challenged, Nokia produces the best phones in the world.

Unfortunately, despite Nokia's incredible advantages, it has made a series of disastrous choices, in large part due to their very "human" culture.

Nokia has a very non-confrontational and consensus-oriented culture that is slow to assign responsibility or blame. Top management decisions from the late 2000s led to the drastic action over the last couple of years: dumping Symbian, MeeGo, and many thousands of employees.

While I don't agree with the current direction, at least Elop did something! Previous leadership simply rearranged deck chairs on the Titanic.

Not much to say now. The positive is that Elop has taken decisive, long-overdue action, and the market will decide how Nokia's decision to partner pathologically with Microsoft will play out.

While publicly Nokia insists there is no Plan "B", should Microsoft Windows Phone fail to gain traction, I find that hard to believe. Given enough time, perhaps the Windows Phone strategy is a winner. But there are a few problems:

• First, Nokia is totally dependent on MS, while MS has many other OEM partners – if they produce more compelling devices, Nokia will likely lose its "preferred" status.
• Secondly, if Windows fails to gain market share from Android and iOS, Nokia will be relegated to niche status.

Dumping MeeGo was premature, though lighting a fire under that team was certainly overdue – they had a multi-year lead on Android and only delivered years late with the N9.

At the low-end, Nokia will be competing with Android at every turn – current S40 (and cheaper) will get creamed. Nokia could evolve old MeeGo, or build its own Android variation, or something else – but something needs to be done.

Finally, while Elop quickly hacked fat throughout the company, the leadership remained largely intact. Too bad most of Nokia's problems were/are directly attributable to that team.