We knew that Nokia
Stephen Elop has been running the all-important Business division at Microsoft for a couple of years, but hardly as a resounding success. His division's sales have remained flat while the Windows segment grew by 6%. Maybe Nokia should have reached for Windows president Steven Sinofsky instead?
Be that as it may, Elop does come with a sterling pedigree. He spent nine years at Macromedia and Adobe Systems
Elop should be a much better fit for the job than outgoing CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo ever was: Elop is a technologist at heart, with extensive sales experience on the side, and he should be able to give Nokia's withering smartphone business a much-needed jolt of engineering and marketing support. Kallasvuo is a Nokia lifer, but with the training of a lawyer and an accountant. That's not the right skill set for Nokia at a time of unprecedented competition and innovation in the mobile-phone industry.
I still think Nokia would have been better off stealing Android guru Andy Rubin from Google or top technologist like Mike Lazardis from Research In Motion
Will Elop scuttle Nokia's impenetrable naming scheme? (Would you rather have an N8 or a C6? Yeah, I don't know, either.) More important, will he finally land some subsidized smartphone relationships with American carriers? I sure hope so.