Pay no attention to the cool phone you've seen
The Steve Elop/Nokia saga has been one of the most interesting tech stories of the year. It is the tale of a CEO who took a company with a few issues, though still profitable with a massive market share, and drove it into the ground in record breaking time. The most persistant narrative that has been imposed on this story is that it is essentially a case of Nokia versus Apple, and Nokia’s biggest failure being their inability to create a credible iPhone competitor. Frankly, the real situation is a little bit more complicated than that.
However it is a fact that Nokia has not been able to create a handset for years that has generated the kind of hype the N9 has. Nokia has a zombie phone on a platform Nokia seems obsessed with killing which is actually getting great press. And Nokia seems to be trying its best to kill it, with a lack of promotion support, confusion in the market on where it will be released, and promoting their WP7 phones well ahead of release. This is truely bizarre, and I am sure the last year of Nokia’s history will feature in business text books from now on, and the phrase, the Elop Effect, will enter common usage.
Has anyone else thought of a rational for how Nokia is handling the N9 launch that isn’t “Die Meego Die!”