I find this kind of comments very funny. If Microsoft had the ability to install their moles as CEOs, why don't they do the same thing to Samsung, Apple, Google, HTC, etc. etc.?
How exactly does one company go about installing their moles as CEOs of other companies? Bribe and blackmail the board members? You're ascribing Microsoft the powers of a comic book supervillain while they cannot even sell a few million Surface RT tablets.
For reference, this is the profile of the chairman of the board. Do you think a bribe from Microsoft is likely to influence this person's decisions?
>Jorma Jaakko Ollila (born 15 August 1950) is a Finnish businessman, since 1 June 2006, Non-Executive Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell. He was Chairman (1999–2012) and CEO (1992–2006) of Nokia Corporation. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Ford Motor Company (2000– ), UPM-Kymmene (1997– ), and Otava Books and Magazines Group Ltd. (1996–).
>For Nokia, he was credited with turning the company into the then world's largest handset maker.[1]
>As CEO of Nokia he has led the strategy that restructured the former industrial conglomerate into one of the major companies in the mobile phone and telecommunications infrastructure markets.
So you're telling me that Microsoft somehow bribed that guy, who no doubt would've made tens of millions from turning Nokia into a $100+ bilion dollar company, made him risk everything including national shame and prison time if exposed and seeing the company he built destroyed and hand over the reins to a Microsoft mole?
Or perhaps the Nokia board evaluated their options and wanted Nokia to have the bags of cash from Microsoft which Google reportedly was not willing to supply and save Nokia jobs instead of turning it into another slowly dying RIM and wanted to go Windows Phone, and hired Elop to do the transition. Now, the merits of the decision itself is subject to analysis, doubt and discussion, but the accusations of Elop being a mole derail the discussion that can be had about the Symbian and Blackberry burning platforms.
My conclusion is that a number of people who so strongly seem believe in this idea on tech forums either a) Don't know how CEOs are hired or what a Board of Directors of a company does b) Listen to the conspirational ideas on Slashdot, Groklaw, /r/Android and /r/linux and take it as gospel without thinking it through because the story fits the "Evil M$ kills a Linux OS" victim mentality narrative they want to believe in and they want a 41MP Nokia Android phone real bad c) Jump on the popular anti-MS bandwagon without any rational thought, oh hey, free and easy karma points! d) Believe in the NASA moon hoax too.
That comment says more about the writer than what it says about Elop, how can otherwise smart people succumb to such group thinking?. I haven't found one remotely plausible explanation about how Microsoft installed Elop as the CEO of Nokia. Maybe someone can help me and explain it here, but I am not holding my breath.
You're closer to the truth than the conspiracy theorists, but when Elop was hired, Meego was still actually on the table as The Nokia Future. He took it off the table because in his estimation it just wasn't ready. (I worked for Nokia at the time, saw the N9 prototype at the same point in its life he did when he made that call, and he was right. It just wasn't ready.)
And, as a fairly long article in Business Week (I think) detailed a couple years ago, Android was actually the first choice over Windows Phone, but Google and Nokia couldn't come to terms: Nokia wanted to be able to use the official Android branding and use Nokia's existing services (mostly their maps), but Google's license doesn't allow that.
Having said all that, I can understand some of the conspiracy mindset around this. Nokia wrote Elop's contract in a way which basically gave him a huge golden parachute if the handset division was sold to someone else, and that really is nuts -- I doubt the intention was to explicitly reward failure, but it's damn easy to paint it that way. But this whole "secret mole" thing? Frankly, whatever one thinks about Microsoft's business practices, I don't think it's plausible that they're really clever enough to pull this off.
> Nokia wanted to be able to use the official Android branding and use Nokia's existing services (mostly their maps), but Google's license doesn't allow that.
Can you elaborate? It's hard to understand in light of all the extra cruft the carriers put on their Android devices.
Nokia wanted to use its maps and not Google's, but still be a Google services licensee. That's a no go as far as Google is concerned. Microsoft let Nokia replace its Bing maps with Here, and in fact licensed it as a replacement for the Bing mapping data.
Third party apps on carrier devices that have the Google Play store are in addition to the Google services, not replacing them. The Google services are all there, even if they're hidden.
Would the thing have been feasible if they'd simply bundled Here and kept the Google Maps app on the menu as well? It seems like an odd thing to become a sticking point.
There have been rumours that the Nokia board chairman Ollila would have chosen someone from inside Nokia, but that largest owners of Nokia (some big American funds, who probably own a lot of Microsoft, too) told that this is not acceptable.
Hedge fund ownership for the level of influence you're talking about is public information. One can easily compile and compare lists of top hedge fund holders in Microsoft and Nokia.
Historical data should also be easy to find if someone really wants to look.
The article is in Finnish and seems to be pretty short and not even attempt some basic research for what would be a big story. Even if that were true, what has this got to do with Microsoft executives? The deal certainly didn't raise Microsoft's share price. In fact, Microsoft's share price dropped when the takeover deal was announced, so these alleged hedge funds went from a Nokia share price of $11 before they got Elop hired and ended up with $7 with a low of $1.60(!!!) after influencing the decision to go Windows Phone? Does not make much sense to me.
Again, acting in other's companies' shareholders' interests is illegal for board members, and IIRC punishable by fines and prison time.
Maybe someone from Finland can tell us if the media outlet you referenced is more like the New York Times or a tabloid trying to cash in on a controversy while peddling conspiracy theories.
So between you and me, we uncovered more than the entire Finnish press with a few minutes of web searching?
This is looking more and more like a thread in /r/conspiracy.
Anyway, I don't know what Dodge & Cox achieved if they really influenced anything, Nokia stock went from ~$11 to $1.60 to $8 after the acquisition, and whatever Microsoft share price gained during the same time, it wasn't because of the Nokia acquisition or Windows Phone.
