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Nokia CEO Stephen Elop recalls a meeting in August 2011 in which the company’s leadership struggled to decide on the name of its new smartphone, the first using Windows Phone software.
“We almost fell into the trap that had often befallen Nokia, which was... let them work on it a bit longer because we couldn’t quite reach agreement,” Elop said. Instead, he demanded a decision that day.
“Why wait till tomorrow or next week? We could make the decision today. And we did.” Lumia was the result.
Senior Nokia employees say Elop, hired in 2010 to revive the once-undisputed leader in mobile phones, has forced them to make faster decisions, which has sped up everything from restructuring to the development of new handsets.
There is no time to waste. Nokia’s ability to compete in the global smartphone market is increasingly questioned; its market share stands at around 3%, far behind Samsung and Apple which control around 50% between them.
Second-quarter Lumia sales missed market estimates, and with cash reserves falling, some investors worry how much time Elop has left to validate his decision to adopt Microsoft’s untested Windows Phone software. The transition to Windows, which he said would take two years, is now in its third.
Nokia has picked up the pace of product launches this year, including the July 11 unveiling of its Lumia 1020 with a 41-megapixel camera.
Elop reckoned the company spent 22 months on the N8, which used the now-obsolete Symbian operating system and was launched shortly after he joined the company.
Nokia’s 1020 is the most advanced of its Lumia smartphones, and followed the 925 and 928 launches in May. In February, it introduced the more basic Lumia 520 and 521 models.
Also this year, it announced a €15 phone, its cheapest phone ever. It has also upgraded its line of feature phones with the Asha 210 and 310, as well as the more powerful 501 with built-in social media applications.
Elop said the older Nokia prioritised quality and features but was less disciplined about the time it took to deliver.
It has cut one in three jobs under Elop, and some employees say the leaner structure means things get done faster.
Samuli Hanninen, who was in charge of building the imaging software for Lumia 1020 and had returned from its launch event in New York several days earlier, said he was enjoying the same kind of buzz he felt in his early days at Nokia a decade ago.
“We had a culture where we never gave up, we were always working very late, you could call guys at any point of the day to say this needs to be fixed,” he said. “We somehow lost it. The process became more important than the product and consumer.”
Elop, a Canadian and former Microsoft executive, replaced Olli Pekka Kallasvuo, who led the company from 2006 and was criticised for being complacent about the rise of smartphones.
