The Smartphone Wars: Nokia shareholders revolt!
<p>Well, <em>that</em> didn&#8217;t take long.  Just a few hours ago I was speculating in a comment thread that Stephen Elop&#8217;s cozy deal with Microsoft Microsoft might lead to a fairly near-term shareholder revolt, and lo, it has occurred.  Welcome to <a href="http://nokiaplanb.com/">Plan B</a>.</p>
<p>This is pretty dynamite stuff.  A group of Nokia shareholders is planning an attempted coup at the May 3rd general meeting.  They want to start by firing Elop and his henchmen, then reframe the Microsoft tie-up as a tactical play for the U.S. market, then put the company fully behind MeeGo as their bid for the smartphone future.</p>
<p>The question is, can it possibly work?</p>
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<p>Maybe.  I have to say that on first reading Plan B sounds a helluva lot more sober and credible than Elop&#8217;s jump into the arms of Redmond.  Well, except for the part where they don&#8217;t tell Microsoft to pound sand, that is.  The points about concentrating rather than dispersing R&#038;D will strike most open-source programmers as an odd thing to focus on (our culture is used to cross-time-zone collaboration and does it pretty well) but as a tactic for fully concentrating on a six-month sprint to get a MeeGo handset out the door it probably makes sense.</p>
<p>Why do I say six months?  Because I found a MeeGo dev who was willing to let me quiz him.  He thinks tablet MeeGO and the infrastructure for handset MeeGO is in good shape; the work that&#8217;s left to be done is specific handset applications.  When I asked him how long that would take, he considered a bit and said &#8220;6 months if it were being done entirely in house&#8221;.  He fingered the open-governance process as a drag on time to market, which I&#8217;m guessing reflects the same growing plains that led the Plan B group to put centralizing R&#038;D on their bullet list.  Sounds like the project needed that fine old open-source tradition of a benevolent dictator but didn&#8217;t have one.</p>
<p>That six-month figure is interesting because it means my source could be low in his estimate by a factor of two without making MeeGo&#8217;s time-to-market worse than WP7&#8217;s.</p>
<p>Absent from Plan B is any kind of Android story.  The Plan B backers seem to share Elop&#8217;s belief that Nokia would have its profit margins planed away to zero by Asian competition if it went that route.  And I think they&#8217;re unwise not to simply tell Microsoft to shove WP7 up its own ass.  </p>
<p>Still, even with these reservations, I think Plan B is more likely to maintain Nokia as a viable company than Elop&#8217;s.  It has the advantage that Microsoft&#8217;s ability and willingness to hold up its end <em>aren&#8217;t</em> critical to the plan.  There&#8217;s a string of dead companies, including in the cellphone space both Sendo and Danger, that could tell you how very huge an advantage that is.</p>
<p>UPDATE: Alas, the Plan B effort <a href="http://nokiaplanb.com/2011/02/16/calling-it-quits/">has folded</a>.  Institutional investors didn&#8217;t go for it.</p>
<p>UPDATE2: And don&#8217;t miss <a href="http://nokiaplans.com/">this artful mockery</a>.  Of the Elop deal, nor plan B.  I think&#8230;</p>
<p>UPDATE3: Now we learn that Plan B was a hoax.  You know what&#8217;s really sad?  That the hoax still sounds more credible than Nokia&#8217;s actual business plan <em>even when I know it&#8217;s a hoax</em>.</p>
