…but horrific corporate management has it in a place where it may be forced into a patent firesale.
Interesting article on Nokia in the Wall Street Journal last night. It starts with:
Hardware is a key element, but, as we saw with Apple’s 2002 iPad, software, marketing, ecosystem and maybe most of all timing also play important roles when determining the success of a product line. When the time was right and the opportunities presented themselves, however, Nokia failed to execute.
“Oh my God,” Mr. Nuovo says as he clicks through his old slides. “We had it completely nailed.”
Anecdotally, I have a friend who worked with Nokia in advertising. He would say the same thing: The company was gridlocked by politics and poor leadership. Different product groups treated different parts of the company as competitors and not compatriots.
And, five years after the iPhone unveiled, Nokia is in a tail spin. This is causing a cash crunch so huge that it will likely be forced to sell off a lot of those early patents that are valued around $6 billion—which is just slightly under Nokia’s current $6.5 billion market cap. That means investors have very little confidence in the firms ability to succeed. In fact, had Google waited, Nokia might have been a better patent purchase target than Motorola.
“We may decide there could be elements of it that could be sold off, turned into more immediate cash for us—which is something that is important when you’re going through a turnaround,” Mr. Elop said.
