If the pre-Elop executives had been left in charge, Nokia would most likely be in bankruptcy today. The imminent collapse in smartphones was exactly the reason why he was hired.
Under Elop, the loss-making phone business was streamlined to the point that Nokia's stockholders got $7 billion for it, rather than losing the whole company.
For a comparison point, look at BlackBerry. They're basically what Nokia would have become if they had continued on the Symbian+Meego path. Nobody's going to pay 7 billion for BlackBerry at this point.
Nokia in 2010 was Titanic just before it hit the iceberg. There wasn't any way to navigate around it; the best you could do is soften the blow and manage the salvage operation.
Elop managed to bring the ship to New York but with a gaping hole in the bow and 60% of passengers dead at sea. Somebody else might have done better, who knows -- but undoubtedly there was a very real risk of losing the entire ship.
Some day someone is going to do the HBR case study on the burning platform memo.
I think you don't understand the magnitude of Stephen's actions. The day after that memo went out, I know personally that a global operator called Nokia to return over 5 Million phones the next day. Whereas a sensible management team would've released a high-level CxO memo, Elop released a company wide travesty that burned their business to the ground.
Nokia lacked leadership, but they had market share. Their new Operating Systems were better than Symbian 60 but worse than iOS and Android, so it's true they needed to change, but Windows Mobile? There's a reason only one major company fully backed windows mobile, and there's a reason Microsoft acquired them.
Your analogy would be apt if Elop hadn't been the one to steer Nokia into the Iceberg.
Look at Nokia's share price over the last 10 years. It went from $40 down to $10 even before Elop was hired. During his reign it bottomed out at a couple of bucks before going back up to about $4 until the acquisition announcement. But by the time he started the price had already fallen 75%, and there was no sign of that decline abetting. The iceberg had already hit, and its name was Apple.
Then came the the leaked memo. That was a very costly management mistake, but you don't need a MBA case study to see that, especially after Elop himself admitted it [1]. That's like a storm hitting after the iceberg, and that's the one Elop steered into while the ship was damaged and taking on water. But scrapping Symbian was a necessity, so the storm was inevitable.
However, it's folly to think there was only one reason Nokia chose Windows Phone. Things are never that simple. It's known, for example, that they were also actively in talks with Google but could not reach an agreement, leaving Google quite disappointed, as can be surmised from the snarky tweet from Gundotra. I can think of multiple reasons why they went with Microsoft:
1. Google's "Android compatibility test" meant they would be forced to use Google Maps, making their own competing investment in maps useless and a complete write-off. Seeing how they are holding on to their mapping division, it's clear they value it greatly. Worse, we see from the SkyHook lawsuit that Google captures all location data that Android phones collect to improve their maps data. So by making Android phones, Nokia would literally be helping a competitor improve their maps data. I'm guessing this was the real deal-killer.
2. MSFT was willing to provide the billions in cash infusion to keep Nokia on life support.
3. Being the flagship Windows Phone maker, they could get more leverage over Microsoft than they could get over Google.
4. They feared (some would say rightfully) Samsung's dominance in Android, especially since Samsung has vertical integration that can compete with Apple, plus a humongous marketing budget.
The real threat to Nokia started in 2007 with the introduction of the 3G. They, like Blackberry, couldn't see the iPhones brilliance, BUT Nokia had other non-smartphone divisions that were producing cash. I'd argue that pre-Elop, Nokia was on life support but stable. The burning platform memo was the iceberg and you can see the wreckage.
Consider this: Nokia is getting whomped in the Smartphone division because they keep making phones that US consumers never get. You've still got this cash cow of a feature phone business and one day you say "screw it, let's change operating systems". If you don't publish that goddamn memo, the cash flows continue and you're still roughly stable while you figure your shit out. If you publish the memo, even the feature phones stop selling.
Pre-Elop Nokia was bad. Post-Burning Platform Nokia is dead.
Scrapping Symbian was necessary, but Nokia would hardly be the first company to transition operating systems (most of them don't burn their operating systems before the new one is almost ready). No, IMHO, Elop killed Nokia with a memo. I understand but disagree with your point.
This. Even if this was not really true, his past associations and the changes to Nokia that he implemented pushed Nokia's reputation to the place it is now.
The way to navigate around it was not to announce accidentally that you were going to stop supporting the operating system that was on the vast majority of the phones that you were currently trying to convince people to buy, in favor of an operating system that you hadn't even developed a phone for yet.
Letting Symbian die the slow natural death that it deserved while introducing Winphones on the high-end/mid-market would have been the logical way to go. Elop was the iceberg.
Nokia's Symbian sales collapsed in early 2011. The real damage occurred earlier. This delay is due to inventory levels: resellers bought lots of Nokia phones in Q4 2010 but buyers didn't want them anymore, and the shit hits the fan at Nokia only in the next quarter when those resellers don't buy any more phones.
What did Elop do in Q4 2010 that would have caused the collapse in sales? The "burning platform" memo came in Feb 2011.
Which is more likely: that millions of people didn't buy Nokia phones because they somehow disliked a new CEO who hadn't yet done anything, or because they just didn't want the phones that Nokia was selling in 2010?
Nokia's 2010 phones like N97 and C5 were simply horrible. The Symbian-based new devices in the pipeline were barely any better. One Meego phone wasn't going to save the day. Elop saw that and took drastic action.
Somebody else might have tried coasting on Symbian while developing Meego into something workable -- and that would have taken Nokia down the BlackBerry route, only with much larger expenses (Symbian and Meego R&D was ridiculously expensive; without Elop's cost slashing, Nokia would probably have been losing billions per quarter in 2012).
I said that Nokia lost here AFTER Elop, not before.
When I was creating my startup (mobile game developer) in 2012, market research showed that Symbian still had 30% of new sales (and what increased was not iPhone, it was cheap android), and 2011 they still had healthy sales here.
It was not the announcement that killed Nokia here, it was the fact that no new phones showed up here anyway, people wanted to buy it, but there was nothing to buy, lots of early Android phones here used Nokia design on Purpose, and Sony Ericsson here made their initial foothold using Symbian (when they finally switched completely to Android, the interface partly copied the one it had on Symbian... I own a Xperia Play, and my mother own a 2011 Symbian Sony phone, and they are surprisingly very similar to use).
In addition to Pavlov's comment: The Chinese knockoffs are mostly eating into Nokia's lowe-end market share. They have been doing so in India and China as well, and since before Elop took over.
Here while Nokia was dominant they had no foothold, mostly because the cost-benefit of Nokia was better (ie: buy the phone for a reasonable price, and keep it for 4, 5 years... Here phone being sturdy is a very valued feature, and Nokia was notorious for that).
Under Elop, the loss-making phone business was streamlined to the point that Nokia's stockholders got $7 billion for it, rather than losing the whole company.
For a comparison point, look at BlackBerry. They're basically what Nokia would have become if they had continued on the Symbian+Meego path. Nobody's going to pay 7 billion for BlackBerry at this point.