Nokia Profit Warning (again) - Here is what you need to know why it is actually far worse

Again a profit warning from Nokia! Elop inherited a company that was growing sales, growing revenues, growing profits and growing share price. In his first 5 months in charge, Elop saw Nokia's share price climb 11% with the investors liking how he took charge and pursued Nokia's stated strategies.

UPDATE - This blog runs 2,900 words. That is not long by my standards, but it may seem so to you. Why not first hop here to Phonemantra to get the total summary of this long detailed blog.. in only 5 Tweets. Honest! Must-see.

So now. Lets get the 'full version' haha.. After 5 months of growth, Elop suddenly shifted, and proceeded to conduct the controlled massacre of all of Nokia's assets including its existing smartphone platforms Symbian and MeeGo with the Elop Effect - the single most destructive management communciation of all time, in not just mobile or high tech, but in any industry, ever. In just one week of management madness, Elop's catastrophic communications caused destruction to Nokia revenues the size of Oracle, as well as profits the size of Google.

Then he presided over mismanagement that ranged from the catastrophically misguided and error-ridden 'Burning Platforms' memo to silly rebranding to selling Nokia assets to ignoring hit products like the most highly praised Nokia device ever, Nokia N9 which outsold all Lumia phones by 3 to 1 in the first quarter when both were sold at the end of last year. Yes, Moron CEO Elop has the most highly rated and loved smartphone ever to carry Nokia branding, and Elop refuses to sell it in most markets!

But its not just what Nokia produces and sells. You live and die in mobile based on the carrier relationships. Elop is now ruining Nokia carrier relationships to causing a reseller boycott against Nokia.

I warned very clearly on this blog, that while PC makers are smart to pursue tablets (like Apple and Samsung) pure handset makers would be foolish to do so (witness Motorola and RIM). The reasons are overwhelmingly negative against handset makers, no commonality of parts, of retail channel, of branding, of pricing etc etc etc. I very explicitly said many times that any Nokia CEO at this time would be suicidal to devote any resources to a tablet, yet Elop is doing exactly that. Just like RIM took a profitable smartphone growth strategy, mixed in an idiotic tablet PC strategy, and plunged into loss-making - now the same is happening with Nokia. This is a clear sign of management lunacy. Read why tablets good for Apple/Samsung/Lenovo while simultaneously suicidal for Motorola/RIM/Nokia.

Nokia's market share when Elop took charge in 2010 was 33% in smartphones, the future of the handset industry. By Q4 of 2011 that smartphone market share had fallen to 12% - that is a world record collapse of a market leader in any industry! Elop's name will go down as the most incompetent CEO ever. What a shame, for the Microsoft Muppet, to preside over Nokia setting a world record - in destroying its own market share lead!

(update: I usually don't bother to do pictures on this blog, but this is such an important point, I took the time to plot Nokia smartphone sales (blue line) before Elop and since he took over, and compared to Apple iPhone sales (pink line) and Samsung smartphone sales (yellow line) in the same period)

The above picture may be freely used
(Please include link to this blog if you do)

Note how Nokia was steadily growing sales before Elop and well into his CEO tenure, until his idiotic Burning Platforms memo. Then Nokia saw a modest return to growth with the launch and excitement of the N9, Nokia's most praised superphone ever - some analysts rate it better than the iPhone 4S - running on Nokia's brand new MeeGo operating system. Then observe what happened to Nokia smartphone sales when the Microsoft Windows Phone based smartphones running Lumia started to sell. For those wondering why the big jumps in iPhone sales, those are launch of iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S. Same for Samsung the launch of Galaxy S and Galaxy S2.

Note from the picture - Nokia had strong growth in its smartphones until Elop took charge, and was profitable in smartphones every single quarter along the way. After Elop took over, Nokia continued to grow strongly smartphone sales AND make a profit. Only after the disasterous Burning Platforms memo, Nokia sales collapsed and in just one further quarter, Nokia smartphones were plunged into loss-making. Since then Nokia has produced a loss every quarter in the smartphones. (What am I missing. Is this not a textbook case of total management incompetence)

The share keeps falling, I was correct in projecting last year February that Nokia would end with 12% by the end of the year. Based on the profit warning, I am projecting Nokia Q1 smartphone market share likely to be 7.5% for Q1.

NOKIA GLOBAL SMARTPHONE MARKET SHARE UNDER ELOP

Q4 2010 - 29% (almost twice as big as nearest rival Apple 16%)
Q1 2011 - 24% (far bigger than nearest rival Apple 18%)
Q2 2011 - 16% (smaller than new market leader rival Apple 19%)
Q3 2011 - 14% (far smaller than new market leader Samsung 21%)
Q4 2011 - 12% (half the size of new market leader Apple 24%)
Q1 2012 -   7.5%

This is an unmitigated disaster. This is the worst performance of any globally market-leading company of any industry in the economic history of mankind. There was nothing like this ever before, not with Motorola or Palm or Blackberry; not just the mobile industry, any industry! The worst problems we know of, the classic case studies of MBA courses were not this bad, not New Coke, not with Toyota's brake problems, not with Tylenol's killing medicine, not with BP's oil spill, not with British Airways Terminal 5. Nothing like this has ever been seen before in an 18 month period. Elop has presided over the wanton self-induced unnecessary demolition of Nokia's globally dominating market share!

Look at that picture one more time. Up to the peak - 5 months of Elop's leadership - Nokia was growing smartphone sales recently roughly at the same rate as the iPhone (and only slightly less fast than Samsung). And Nokia was doing this profitably - so much so, that at the peak, yes the first full quarter under Elop's leadership Nokia's smartphone unit profits jumped over 70% in just one quarter! Yes, Elop managed the biggest profitability jump in Nokia's history. Nokia was doing well, it was not dying. Nokia was suddenly improving under early Elop management! Look at that picture! Now, since the Memo, Under Elop's mis-management, Nokia has scared away literally 3 out of every 4 loyal customers it had just over a year ago!

Look at the numbers. The situation is not getting better, it is now getting far worse. If a CEO loses 39% of its main business in one year, he gets fired. Elop lost 39% of Nokia's (last loyal remaining) smartphone customers in just the past 3 months! Elop's 2011 was the the worst year of any CEO of a Fortune 500 sized company in history. Elop has now managed to out-do that dubious record with the worst single quarter of any (Global Fortune 500 sized) company ever witnessed in any industry.

For the full year, late last year, I expected Nokia to come to about 8% market share by the end of this year when most smartphones would be Lumia using Windows Phone. That was before all the facts and news came in about Lumia. That was before this profit warning! Still, its clear Nokia has fallen off 'The Cliff'

LUMIA MAKES THINGS WORSE

The Lumia smartphone series is a total comprehensive failure in design and marketing. This is no better with the Lumia 900 now launching in the USA

The transfer from Nokia's Symbian OS is so poorly executed and the new Lumia handsets are so undesirable, that even when forced to take them, consumers will not trade Symbian for Lumia 1 to 1, Nokia loses one third in that transition. The returns are so bad that retail now refuses to sell Lumia to existing Nokia owners even if they walk into the store asking for Nokia Lumia when many Nokia Lumia smartphone are in stock, not only that, but the stores feature Lumia stands as the biggest display stands of any phones sold in those stores!

The Microsoft Windows Phone based Lumia smartphone strategy might have worked, but Elop messed that up. The handsets are utterly non-competitive and now the evidence is in, that Nokia's loyal customers reject them at a rate of 92%. There were design flaws - both in hardware and in softare, admitted both on Nokia's side and on Microsoft's side - in each of the three Lumia handsets so far ! Physical design and software problems that need to be fixed after sales in the Lumia 800, in the Lumia 710 and again now in Lumia 900. This is a disaster for which there can be no recovery with Lumia. Lumia is now synonymous with failure in any smartphone customer's mind or that of a phone sales person.

Now look at this latest quarter. In Q4 Nokia sold 19.6 million smartphones (of which only 600,000 were Lumia). So there were 19 million non-Lumia customers on the market. If you think 'Christmas sales' yes, but in the handset industry globally there is no drop-off after Christmas, because of Chinese New Year gift-giving season in January-February. The industry typically grows about 3% to 5% going from December/Christmas Quarter to January Quarter. And Nokia is by far the strongest handset brand of China, so this typically is even better for Nokia. So we have 19 million customers walking into Nokia stores roughly, who would need to be converted. What happened? 12 million sales happened, of which Nokia reports now 2 million were Lumia.So there were 1.4 million 'new converts' after we remove the 600,000 level already achieved last quarter.

COMPREHENSIVE MARKET REJECTION OF LUMIA - 80% refuse to accept Lumia now

Nokia lost 5 loyal Nokia smartphone customers for every 1 it managed to convert from Symbian to Lumia. So yes, Nokia had 19.6 million smartphone customers last quarter, 600,000 of them bought Lumia. Now Nokia has 12 million smarthone customers in Q1 and 2 million bought Lumia. For the added 1.4 million 'gain' to Microsoft and Windows Phone compared to 3 months ago, Lumia added 1.4 million more Nokia smartphone owners. That came at the cost of 7 million lost sales. Adding that potential together, Nokia had 8.4 million existing loyal Nokia smartphone owners walk into a store, and only 1.4 million walked out happy with a Lumia smartphone. 7 million were so disgusted with the Lumia handsets they bought smartphones from other brands like Samsung's Android which is reporting massive record sales. (the remaining 10 million obviously bought Symbian or MeeGo based Nokia smartphones)

When you gain 1.4 million new Lumia users out of 8.4 million attempts, it means out of every 6 attempts - to convert loyal existing Nokia customers to Microsoft based Windows Phone smartphones, five failed. Yes, for every 1 successful sale, the sales guys lost 5. This is not rocket science. This is exactly what has been already reported globally that the sales channel now so hates Lumia that they refuse to sell it even when asked for by name by existing Nokia customers! If Lumia loses 4 out of every 5 sales attempts to loyal Nokia owners, this is absolute certain road to death to Nokia and the Microsoft based strategy.

LUMIA 900 ? AT&T STORES REFUSE TO SELL IT IN NEW YORK NOW !!!!!

I have been reporting on the global sales problems that have plagued all Microsoft handsets all last year. We heard that in-store sales staff were refusing to stock or reluctant to sell Microsoft Windows Phone based handsets. This problem has also been now with Lumia Nokia handsets as I showed for example in the above link. But right now, parallel to the profit warning, comes the latest news comes today 11 April from Cnet testing of New York AT&T stores that the sales reps refuse to offer Lumia 900 to customers, and are selling iPhones instead. The problem is real, it is global, it continues. If the resale channel refuses to sell your product, you die. Its that simple. Nokia had no resale problem before Elop messed it all up. Now the resale channel is in a worldwide anti-Lumia campaign. This is the path from which there is no recovery! The Microsoft Windows Phone stategy is comprehensively failed and utterly doomed.

LUMIA HAS BIGGEST RETURN RATE OF ANY NOKIA SMARTPHONES EVER

This is before we take into account the severe disappointments the customers have with their new Lumia handsets - each of the first three Lumia smartphones have had manufacturing and design errors from battery problems to SMS messaging being able to wipe out the total memory, to now the US launch of Lumia 900 having the wrong software forcing all buyers to do a total operating system re-install - which of course wipes out everything they had.

The result is, that the Lumia is hated by consumers. Lumia is being returned at catastrophic levels, such as we hear from Russia right now. When you try to convert existing users to a new type of platform and you lose 84% of those customers in that transition - that is total comprehensive rejection of your strategy. Only a certifyably lunatic CEO would contemplate 'increasing Lumia' marketing and sales, as Elop is now promising in the profit warning. If you like this profit warning and crash for Q1, the next quarter, Q2 will be far FAR worse than this!

PLEASE UNDERSTAND LUMIA SUICIDE - Will fall to 4% by end of this year!

Now we have enough evidence from every market including USA to know that Nokia will continue to lose customers all this year when attempting the Microsoft migration. It is PROVEN that Nokia loses customers as it forces them to go from Symbian (and MeeGo/Maemo) to Windows Phone. I had previously had a projection that at the end of this year Nokia's market share would be about 8%. That would be catastrophic since Nokia had 33% market share for year 2010 and 16% for the year 2011. (I am the most accurate forecaster of the mobile industry - and for the random visitor, just so you know, I am an ex-Nokia executive, the most published author of the mobile industry, my 12 books are referenced in over 120 books by my peers and Forbes just rated me the most influential expert in the mobile industry. Trust me when I say..).

Now, with this data, I am downgrading my forecast of Nokia total smartphone market share to continue to fall and be down to 4% by Q4 of this year !!! That includes all Windows Phone based Lumia smartphones, plus remaining Symbian sales and remaining MeeGo sales. (I will return with more specific analysis of that, and it may be worse, but this is the rough estimate now for Q4. And don't think 2013 will be better - it won't. Don't think the 'other Windows Phone manufacturers will do better - they sold under 0.5% of the worlds' smartphones in Q4 last year, they HATE it that Nokia is messing their little playground, so no, Windows Phone will never be the third ecosystem.)

SAMSUNG PASSES NOKIA IN TOTAL HANDSETS

Most of this blog focuses on the future of the industry, the type of mobile phone handset that ironically, Nokia invented and up to Elop taking charge, Nokia utterly dominated, selling more than its nearest 2 rival smartphone maker production.. combined! (that is the type of situation Coca Cola or Boeing or General Motors or Sony or HP would love to have!). But there is other business at Nokia too. The basic 'featurephones' or 'dumbphones'. And Nokia now tells us its Q1 unit sales of all handsets were 83 million units including smart and dumb phones. Samsung meanwhile sold 78 million total phones in Q4 of last year, and has just reported that their handset unit is having roaring success in Q1, with massive jumps in all categories. Its a safe bet to say Samsung has passed Nokia as the world's largest handset maker now. What a shame. Nokia took over the title from Motorola in 1998 with Jorma Ollila in charge. He is now the Chairman and stepping aside. What a shame it was this Microsoft Muppet who achieved Nokia's downfall, for the insult to come with Ollila still around. Shame, Elop, shame. You are a disgrace. You will go down as the notorious most evil monster CEO that any industry has ever had. The sooner we get rid of you the better. You should be fired, tarred and feathered, sued, and barred from any position of any publically held corporation. Shame! 

And Congratulations Samsung! You are about to become the biggest handset maker on the planet! Great job. I'll definitely celebrate that in a separate blog, don't worry. This is not the place or time to do that. And while my Sammy-friends in South Korea think 'balli-balli' yes, in this case, I think we can wait a few more days to do it properly, eh? The time has come! It will be a huge celebration in Seoul. I wish I could be there with you !!

THIS IS FIRE SALE

Elop has destroyed Nokia. As Nokia is bleeding cash now, Elop is resorting to selling all of Nokia's strongest assets like its ad agency and large sets of its patent portfolio and is shutting down the future growth of Nokia such as the Nokia Money project which just in India - the world's second largest handset market behind only China - Nokia had achieved 12% market share in the mobile banking business!!!

Nokia can be saved. Nokia can be returned to PROFITS in one quarter. Most experts agree! I wrote why Elop has to be fired. Please look at this blog, which examines an intelligent Nokia CEO vs a lunatic CEO.

Now we have the profit warning from Nokia. I warned that Q1 will be a disaster. It is now worse. Elop must be fired immediately! 


UPDATE 12 APRIL - I have written a proper, no Elop-bashing, 'how to' blog about what needs to be done now, if Nokia is to be saved. And the good news is, it can be saved. The hearbreaking news is, Nokia can be restored to profitability within the next 2 and a half months!!! To profitability and stabilized market share now, back to gradual sales growth towards the end of the year. Yes. It can be done. Breaks my heart... 

FOLLOW-UP on April 24, I wrote a follow-up on why now, this path has become a Certain Road to Death for Nokia.  

Comments

[zlutor]

They should push N9/N950 and N808 with full power outside of North America…
Lumias are just not received well enough to save the balance sheet - at least now...

[Prasenjit Singh Bist]

Tomi, I know u r a busy man. But i want to say a personal sorry on this blog. I too made nasty comments after wandering at various fan boyish sites turning a blind eye to the problem. But now I agree 100 % to what u write our analysis matches ur predictions.

Nokia will be gone Q3 2012. RIP NOKIA if Elop continues...

[xplt]

@Dave: What about bloated Zune, which messes up with playlists? See: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fhabrahabr.ru%2Fpost%2F141786%2F&act=url

[Dave]

@xplt I don't know about Zune (mentioned Mac). Is it worse than the people having trouble upgrading to Belle because Nokia Suite has some error creating a backup ("not ok") and the only suggestions on the Nokia forums are things like "try deleting all your mesages" or "try to delete your email settings" or "factory reset" ? :)

One of the things I dislike about WP (and iOS, Symbian is slightly better) is the dependency on a PC, something which is supposed to go away completely with WP8.

[don_afrim@twitter]

Nokia needs to abandon Windows immediately and go for Android, nothing else will save it. Too late for Meego.

Android is now for mobile what Windows is for PC's.

There will be two eco-systems in the future mobile space just like the pc market, only this time Microsoft is not part of the two :-)

If we have no change of direction from Nokia soon, Nokia will phase out and Apple or Google will buy it for 5-10billion just for the patents and shut it down. I think down the road, as tablets will be more capable they will phase out the traditional PC and Microsoft can hit the road.

[John Styles]

Presumably you saw this http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/11/noka_lumia_bug/

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Thank you everyone for the comments, I am utterly despondent today with this news, I hope to come back soon to respond to comments

Tomi Ahonen

[J]

Where is Meltemi that is supposed to replace S40? I'm personally more interested on it than Lumia.

[zlutor]

The annual meeting of shareholders getting more and more interesting in May!

There will be no result of Q2 available before it - seeing whether there is something to be aware of in the USA or not - and situation looks anything but rosy... :-(

[AtTheBottomOfTheHilton]

Everything is going well and according to plan I think. Nokia is just a tool for Microsoft in order to pump out as many models as possible. In real life Windows Phone has very little appeal which clearly shows on the sales numbers of the Asian manufacturers, Samsung and HTC. Their sales have been modest and therefore they also limit their models. If there would be high demand of WP7, then the Asian manufacturers would have produced many more models.

So, the profits of Nokia is not really important here since the goal is to pump out as many models as possible and if it breaks Nokia in the process of making WP7 popular, then it is a double win. In reality the WP7 strategy will fail and Nokia should brace for bankruptcy. After that Nokia will be on auction and partially sold, I guess Microsoft will buy with Nokia's eye stone NavTeq among other things. Then Microsoft got rid of a competitor and got the assets that were of value to Microsoft.

Tomi, Stephen Elop is not incompetent or delusional, he is a cynical corporate assassin good at his job and he knows what he is doing.

Also, I think Nokia will get more money from Lumia sales in Q2 however, the cost of marketing and under cut pricing will take its toll on Nokia so don't expect any profits about time either. Microsoft basically keeps Nokia on life support as long as they need the company, investing every last dime on getting WP7 popular. Useful idiots have the tendency to die when they are not useful anymore.

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Just mentioning to those who post comments who may be new to this blog. I remove all comments that are impolite to my readers - you may freely be critical of me haha - and I remove all that reflect the person leaving the comment did not read the blog. You have to be specific to the topic in the blog and if I was forced to answer in a comment saying 'if you had read the paragraph that..' - that is a waste of the time of my readers. Such comments are immediately removed. Also there is some spam and inappropriate comments on this blog regularly, I try to remove those too. Keep the discussion on the topic and polite, you are very welcome to participate in the discussion.

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[Ninjustin]

I'm sorry but the playbook is not the reason Blackberry is doing so poorly. Their phones just don't stand up against any of their smart phone competitors.

Nokia has shot themselves in the foot going specifically with Windows Phone OS. If they would at least do some Android phones they could turn themselves around some.

[vladkr]

So, if at the beginning, it was the platform that was burning, Elop managed to burn the whole sea, wow, that's impressive.

Will the Lumia be a success in North America ? As it's given for free (a bug on the first series makes Nokia refund $100 on a device that used to costs... $99 and costs now $49). So price will help, but a flagship for $49, isn't there a problem?

To me, Nokia cumulates several problems now:

- Bad strategy (only one OS, and a weak one)

- uncompetitive products (Samsung/HTC/LG/Whatever)

- bad timing : Lumia products sold after end of the year holidays, Lumia 900 sold after Pureview technology exhibition, and knowing that a new Windows OS will be available after 6 months.

- bad communication: what I read about the profit warning is that it's "Nokias competitors faults, they sell more dumbphones in Asia". How old is he? Why does Samsung sell more than Nokia? Any idea?

- autism: Nokia executive seem to live in a parallel world where everything is okay, where people -users, developers, resellers, love WindowsPhone. Are these guys paid millions of Euros to get stoned ?

- bad reputation... Nokia is a shade of itself. Nokian tyres and Nokian boots are more reputed than the phones.

Legends have in common that they're about a deep past. Nokia is a legend now.

All my best wishes to Finnish (Salo's) economy.

[Aleksis Chávez]

I believe most readers here would label themselves as advanced users when it comes to handsets. I just have to say that from the point of view of a bit more demanding customer the Lumias just don't offer a feeling that 'I'm gonna get things done' with this phone.

iOS phones obviously are increadibly user friendly and even though they aren't especially for geeks they get things done for you. I bought an iPhone 4S just for the financial apps like bloomberg and e-banking app from my bank. Not available for Symbian or WP.. Okay Bloomberg is available for symbian but it's unusable.

Then there is the Android with which you have the cheaper crappy phones and the samsung flagships.. I've tried midrange phones ans the new Galaxy Nexus and I gotta say it would have been an easy switch from Symbian from the users point of view..

And then theres the WP7 with the Metro UI, and Bing, and IE and that stupid XBox avatar. I don't trust my pc running Windows 7 to work properly so needles to say I dislike all the elements, that I try to avoid with my PC, appearing on my phone.. Plus no e-banking app nor Bloomberg.

Symbian well.. I think the Anna and Belle updatea just mess things up atleast for me. After Belle on my E6 no more push email for example.

Meego then? I've tried a class mates N9 and it seemd pleaasent enough for being a stillborn. How great would it be with proper and continued developement. And does it really support Android apps with minimum effort? Publishers for Android could have so easily flooded the phone with android apps and symbian apps, the usefull ones, could have been ported to Meego aswell and voíla, a huge ecosystem. I hate that trend word..

[So Vatar]

At this state Nokia can only survive if they

1) Replace Elop immediately, but also some (most) of the BOD
2) Keep WP and Symbian to generate some revenue, announce Android and deliver Androids using N9 form factor / design as fast as they can
3) Mid and long term: Bring back Qt strategy (Symbian / Maemo / Meltemi (???)).

But I am not sure if Nokia really has enough time to implement (3).

So, can Nokia survive at all? Tomi, some of the ideas you write in our other blog are outdated and cannot be done anymore as there is not enough money and not enough expertise left at Nokia. But I agree, an Asian CEO linked to carriers would give Nokia maybe a fighting chance.

[zlutor]

@So Vatar: "deliver Androids using N9 form factor" - in vast Android ICS runs on N9 (almost perfectly).
Even dual boot is working (Android and MeeGo can be selected during booting the device).

But I do not know whether it is feasible strategy. Who know what the contract between M$ and Nokia dictates... :-(

[cke]

Its possible to look at the same data and come to completely different conclusions.

You postulated that getting into tablets works for some (apple samsung lenovo) and not others (motorola rim nokia) because some are PC companies and the other handset companies. I think tablets works for some because they are on the right evolutionary path and will thrive in the future. It doesn't work for others because they are unable to evolve and will soon be dead dinosaurs. PC taking over handsets is simply evolution.

You say Lumia is utterly non-competitive because of its shortcomings. But it is a REV 1.0 version. Rev 1.0 always sucks - but it contains the essence of a new vastly better offering. Iphone rev1 sucked too: no GPS, 2G, 2M camera, no front camera, no video, no accelerometer.

Nokia says that they are losing in 3rd world markets now. This means smartphones are defeating feature phones everywhere - Symbian/Meego or anything underperforming an Android-class are not viable alternatives for Nokia. They are behaving logically and doing the only things possible for them.

[So Vatar]

@zlutor:
Yes, maybe a short term quick fix to put Android om N9 (in addition to offer MeeGo worldwide). I just fear that Android does not run well enough on current N9 hardware due to Android's higher resource needs.

But anything helps that Nokia can sell at a profit now. And if it is the N9 running Android. Or rubber boots to keep the company afloat until they find their standing again.

[Tomi T Ahonen]

For early visitors, please note, I have added several paragraphs and did some corrections to my math in the above haha.. So you may want to re-read the story now.

I will have to do plenty of thinking about Nokia and this Lumia total disaster and smartphone collapse (the Cliff and all that) but today am just devastated and can't even think straight.

Please keep the comments coming. It is at least comforting to read that there are others there who also are alarmed about this like me haha..

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[vladkr]

To survive, I think Nokia has to rethink itself completely, be a new company (like Apple in the late 90s).

Too much harm was made now... Unfortunately Nokia won't be credible if they

keep Symbian or Meego - at least with the same name - as it was killed by the memo and all the communication around it (maybe rebranding OSes could do the trick).

WP is a fail - and come on cke, it's been 10 years that Windows CE/2003/WM6/WP7 is new... it's always new because instead of updating their mobile OS like competitors, Microsoft starts all over again from a blank sheet for each new version - so shouldn't be Nokia's main target.
Android ? mmm, I think it's too late. It's like arriving late at a party you weren't invited to; no drink left, no music, and everyone asking who the hell you are.

The only way to sort up the situation (to me) is to make something completely new. It will be expensive, it will take time, but it will be the best way to rebuild Nokia's reputation.