Stephen Elop might be the happiest man today. He, after becoming the CEO of Nokia has made every decision to favor Microsoft and today has succeeded at finally making Nokia just a crony of his old firm, Microsoft. In fact, since the Nokia takeover costed Microsoft just $7.17 Billion, courtesy Elop, it seems he will be rewarded handsomely – by being pitched as the new CEO candidate as soon as the current CEO Steve Ballmer resigns.
Nokia in the midst of all this will be in the hands of its interim CEO – Risto Siilasmaa until the takeover ends and after that, it seems that Nokia heads of divisions will gain strategic positions in Microsoft, most of all Elop might be pitched to be the new CEO. Elop has always been attached to Microsoft , which he used to work with before coming to Nokia. When the chips were down for Nokia, he abandoned Nokia’s strategy of engineering everything itself from apps, hardware to a whole operating system and signed on with Microsoft for a brand new Windows OS in the face of a much better one – Android. Ever since, no matter what, even if it was never working for Nokia, he held on to Microsoft. Microsoft CEO terms it as a ‘win-win for everyone’ but for us as consumers, the Nokia-Microsoft partnership has always been a lose-lose enterprise.
But, who it is a ‘win-win’ for is Stephen Elop who might just be handed over the reigns of the software giant – we just hope that we do not get a repeat of his performance with Nokia.
