Upheaval
These really are interesting times for Finnish handset giant Nokia. Everyone knows that its inability to produce a popular high-end smartphone and to crack the North American market remain major threats to its future success.
The appointment of a Canadian CEO - former Microsoft exec Stephen Elop - as the first non-Finn to lead the company, was in part designed to address the latter failing. The former issue had already been tackled by a fundamental reorganisation last May, which resulted in the formation of a smartphone-centric mobile solutions group, headed-up by product visionary Anssi Vanjoki.
Vanjoki would be the man to wrest the initiative back from Apple and Google, we were led to believe, and the man himself even felt moved to blog about his passion and fervour for the job at hand. "I am committed, perhaps even obsessed, with getting Nokia back to being number one in high-end devices," he said back in July.
Well, two months later, on the eve of Nokia's biggest event of the year, Nokia has announced that Vanjoki has resigned and has commenced working out his six month notice period today. Isn't it amazing how fleeting zeal can be?
"I felt the time has come to seek new opportunities in my life," Anssi Vanjoki said. "At the same time, I am one hundred per cent committed to doing my best for Nokia until my very last working day. I am also really looking forward to this year's Nokia World and sharing news about exciting new devices and solutions."
New opportunities? What happened to his obsession of only two months ago? Surely the fact that this announcement comes just three days after the appointment of Elop as CEO can be no coincidence. Did Vanjoki covet the CEO job? Has he already concluded Elop is the wrong guy regardless?
Vanjoki has been with Nokia since 1991, but his heritage seems to be commercial and administrative - as opposed to engineering and design. Among his responsibilities have been to manage Nokia's convergence strategy and oversee the N-series smartphones. Given that both of these have been relative failures, we certainly don't think his claim to the CEO post was a strong one.
The other possibility is that Elop realised from day one that a change of leadership is required on the smartphone side of things and maybe already has some kind of Jonathan Ives/Andy Rubin/Jon Rubinstein product visionary already lined up. But surely not one of his former Microsoft colleagues...
All this leaves Nokia looking somewhat rudder-less a day before its biggest event of the year, at a time when it desperately needs to generate some positive vibes about its high-end offering. We'll be at Nokia World tomorrow, at which Vanjoki is still listed as a speaker. In the unlikely event that the question has yet to arise, we'll be sure to ask him what caused his sudden change of heart.
