Jean-Louis Gassée on the Challenges Facing Stephen Elop at Nokia

Jean-Louis Gassée:

Today, Nokia pushes devices that use older Symbian S60 stacks, newer Symbian^3 and Symbian^4 engines, as well as a mobile Linux derivative: Meego. Imagine the chuckles in the halls of Cupertino, Mountain View, and Palo Alto. Even with plenty of money and management/engineering talent, updating one software platform is a struggle. Ask Apple, Google, or HP, and the chuckles quickly become groans. Nokia thinks it can stay on the field when it’s playing the game in such a disorganized fashion?

That’s Nokia’s problem in a nut. They need a single cohesive, attractive mobile software platform.

Interesting to me is that one aspect of Elop’s career hasn’t gotten much attention: he was the CEO of Macromedia at the time they were pushing Flash Lite as a mobile software platform. So: Elop has already led a major effort to establish a mobile software platform, and it utterly failed, and left the non-Lite regular-strength Flash in a mobile platform hole that Adobe is still trying to dig itself out of.

★ Monday, 13 September 2010