In 2008, Microsoft appointed Stephen Elop as the head of business division. Later on he proved his worth by introducing Microsoft Dynamics line of products. His vision and lucrative solutions made him distinct from others. Unfortunately he had to resign from Microsoft in 2010 as something substantial came up for him.
He received an offer at Nokia to be the CEO of the company. He readily accepted it and became the first non finn CEO. Nokia was glad too as they believed their $200 bn company is in great hands and under Elop the company will grow immensely. What they didn't know was that Elop had some other plans.
Symbian (Nokia) was the biggest operating system until Iphone came up in 2007. But that didn't declined the sales of symbian extensively. When Elop became the CEO, Symbian devices had 52% market share worldwide. So why Elop decided to ditch Symbian completely and brought microsoft windows operating system in Nokia devices? Another question arises that he was well aware of the potential of Nokia's another operating system called MeeGo. Many critics hailed the MeeGo. Then why Elop scrapped the MeeGo devices? One more question was frequently asked that if he knew the market for Symbian was declining then why didn't he switched to Android?, which was frankly better and an optimistic solution for Nokia, rather than he went for the unpopular windows OS for mobile devices. This decision eventually caused the company to lose a large amount of money as nobody wanted to buy a Lumia device. Why? Because it was not capable to survive in a market of iphone and android devices. Iphone already clenched its desirable market share and android was growing profoundly to become the next big thing after apple because of its user interface and applications. Lumia however struggled to compete against them and next year from a market share of 52% , Nokia's market share declined to 11%. Samsung ruled the market with its android devices and Apple was happy to acquire a certain amount of market share and became a $247bn company.
Next year it became difficult for Nokia to survive in this market and then Microsoft came to takeover Nokia. Microsoft reportedly acquired Nokia for $7.2bn and this is how a company's worth of $200bn just two years back was eventually sold for much less but a favorable amount to Microsoft.
Now out of curiosity a question arises that was it the Trojan Horse strategy executed by Microsoft to acquire Nokia, where the Trojan Horse was none other than Mr. Elop?
Several years back when greeks were on the verge to lose the battle against Trojans, they planned something machiavellian. They made a gigantic wooden horse and gifted it to the trojans. The trojans were unaware of the fact that the wooden horse was actually hollow from inside and it was filled with the greek army waiting to attack them. At that night a large greek army ambushed the astounded trojans and eventually won the long lost battle.
Does it sound similar to the story of how Microsoft acquired Nokia?
Microsoft knew that Nokia has the best hardware of mobile devices and Microsoft was struggling in the mobile department as they had the operating system but nobody was willing to run it on their devices as many mobile companies were quite pleased with the android. They knew they could not just go out and buy Nokia as at that time Nokia's worth was a whopping $200bn. So they planned something unscrupulous. They send Stephen Elop as the trojan horse to Nokia with a motive to demolish Nokia's stature so that eventually Microsoft will be in a position to buy the world's biggest smartphone company.
Stephen Elop succeeded and Microsoft as reported gave him 18.8mn euros. But Microsoft failed to fulfill its other promise. As soon as Microsoft acquired Nokia, Elop became the executive vice President of Microsoft. But later on he was one of the candidate to be the next CEO after Steve Ballmer. Many people believed and forecasted that Elop will the successor but something else happened. Elop when represented as the candidate gave his views upon if he will become the CEO he will scrap-off the X-box devices from Microsoft. Microsoft committee found it as an unpleasant idea, so eventually Satya Nadella became the next CEO, who had his vision to grow the Cloud computing industry. And on June 17, 2015 Elop retired from Microsoft.
On July 2015, Microsoft wrote-off the $7.6bn Nokia's deal.
