Stephen Elop, the ex-CEO from Nokia, will be heading the expanded devices team at Microsoft, as per reports. Previously rumoured to be in the running for the top job at Microsoft, Stephen Elop now gets to lead the newly formed team, like previously agreed upon. This is pretty obvious now, as Microsoft just announced its newest CEO, Satya Nadella, who takes over the position from Steve Ballmer. Elop stepped down from his role as the CEO of Nokia immediately after the announcement of Nokia-Microsoft acquisition, to avoid a conflict of interests.
The Microsoft CEO search went on for over six months and Stephen Elop was a prime candidate, if previous reports are to be believed. A lot of rumours circled around how Elop would want to spin off Xbox and Bing divisions if he becomes CEO and so forth, which had lent less credibility, but the fact that he was in the running was more pronounced. But finally, we have an insider CEO, and hence the previously agreed upon role of the Expanded devices head would go to Elop, who, along with Jo Harlow, Juha Putkiranta, Timo Toikkanen, and Chris Weber would transfer to Microsoft after the deal officially closes. He would still be heading Nokia’s devices and services that Microsoft bought, along with an oversight of Surface products, other Microsoft hardware and even Xbox. Julie Larson-Green, who currently heads this division would be reporting to Stephen Elop, who in turn would be directly reporting to Satya Nadella.
Why this seemingly insignificant bit of news is actually significant is because Stephen Elop will be heading the most important division at Redmond, especially after the “One Microsoft” strategy was announced. Surface is now almost a billion dollar business and Xbox One has been seeing steady sales, but they both are pitted against a competition that is stronger than ever. Will Stephen be able to make drastic changes to these division, as he did with Nokia’s device business? To an extent, probably, but not without the nods of Bill Gates or Satya Nadella. Microsoft clearly knows that their consumer facing hardware division is struggling the most, and literally non-existent in a “mobile first cloud first” world. Elop will be tasked with changing that. And lets not forget Nokia’s hardware sales, which have been taking a constant beating, but has been showing signs of recovery in the last year.
Stephen Elop has been one of the most controversial CEOs ever, without doubt. He took the world by storm with the “Burning platform” memo, which eventually led to the replacement of the Espoo company’s long standing Symbian platform with Microsoft’s nascent Windows Phone 7 OS. Sales crumbled, people were laid off, but after Windows Phone 8 happened, things were slowly beginning to look better for Nokia. Asha 501 brought a fresh lease of life to its feature phones business and the Lumia 520 went on to become a massive hit, taking overall Windows Phone shipments to about 32 million in a year, all thanks to Nokia. The Nokia N9, 808 PureView, Lumia 920, 1020 and the 1520 happened under Elop’s leadership, which are noteworthy devices that are still very much “Nokia”, so not all has been lost. The legacy of these devices might very well continue under his leadership at Microsoft, and the hardware engineers might even get to do more, along with Microsoft research, to bring more innovation to the table. Will or can he do it though? That’s the big question, and MWC might very well give us one final glimpse of what good old Nokia can do, under a Microsoft leadership.
Source Microsoft