Finally, Nokia and Elop story reached logical end

Two and half years ago, when Stephen Elop was brought in to lead Nokia, many asked the question openly if Elop was the trojan horse for Microsoft. Though Elop publicly denied that charge at that time, Nokia's journey for last two and half years with him at the helm, has however reached the conclusion that many feared with announcement that Microsoft is buying Nokia mobile business at $7.2 billion and Stephen Elop returning to Microsoft. With Steve Ballmer's announcement of retirement, people are making simple arithmetic with Stephen Elop. We, humans, are good in drawing sweeping conclusion based on only 2-3 data points and this is also no exception to that rule. Truth, as often is found to lie somewhere in between.
The legacy of Elop in Nokia is hardly anything to be jealous about. Since he came on board, Nokia's valuation came down by 85%, the market space where Nokia was world leader, saw Nokia receding ground to Samsung and other OEMs. The smartphone space which was the key element driving Nokia to cannibalize Symbiosis and embrace Windows OS, decidedly went with Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Now did anyone know for sure that these were going to happen when Elop came on board?
Social psychologists use the term Fundamental Attribution Error to our natural bias to attribute personal disposition instead of situational artifacts as a cause of certain eventuality. We feel higher satisfaction if we can find someone to hold responsible for an event that we do not like. So we feel doubly eager to attribute Nokia's ill-fate to Elop. Psychologists also tell us that that bias changes when one is involved and is answerable for the course of event. In the scenario where the person is involved, it is often observed that he/she attributes the cause of events to the situational changes instead of his/her own decisions. That means, Stephen Elop will attribute the cause of the present state of Nokia to the changing situations!
Rational minds would ask, "Was the decision taken only by Elop? Would Nokia board agree to allow Elop to take the decision if they knew they had better alternatives [other than going windows way] two and half years back?"
 Given that the board members had access to all the information that Elop had, it is reasonable to assume that each member individually vetted all the different options in their personal capacity before agreeing to Elop's solution. What Elop most likely have done at that time is that he influenced these members in evaluating the potentials and risks that each option provided. He might have been successful in creating fear for future failure in sticking to existing course. He might have projected the value of Windows and Microsoft alliance much higher than it actually was. But ownership of the course steering lies with all the executive members of Nokia board.
Once the decision was taken, it was clear which path Nokia is heading. Mounting accumulated losses, market pressure, competition from Apple, Samsung and other Android-based smartphone OEMs took Nokia further away from its root and towards further grip of Microsoft.
But did Elop think that bringing Nokia mobile to Microsoft could make him a strong candidate for Ballmer's successor? Even if he did, how much could he bet that course of events will take the shape the way it happened when he took the plunge 2.5 years back? Nobody realistically could be sure. At most, he could do is play his cards the way he played and hope things will eventually take him to the coveted post that he might have been eying for.
Now how does this change for Microsoft? Would this bring the hardware success that eluded Microsoft and Ballmer all along? Well, fact is Nokia Lumia series with windows 8 has become a success. It is capturing market quite fast, providing a credible alternative to Android based smartphones, even at lower cost point. Merger in fact positions Lumia at stronger ground with control on both smartphone hardware and OS. It will give Lumia leverage to bring price of smartphone further down and present a credible competition to Android-based low cost phones in all emerging markets where the real smartphone battle has to be fought and won.
It will also help Microsoft to boost its advertising business where the battle with Google is being fought, by making advertisement more personalized for the users by integrating smartphone's on-device data with skydrive [Microsoft Cloud] and Outlook [Microsoft email]. But for this to work, Microsoft's existing strong culture of internal competition [and therefore wastage of creative bandwidth in political rivalry] must change and find a way to work like collaborative set of engineering/business functions. Lumia hardware engineering must be allowed to function independently of Windows software division for them to build on each other's strength. But if this strategy succeeds, Microsoft will have evolved itself for the new generation of users and move to a new position of strength.
So, good luck to Mr. Elop and RIP Nokia mobile [that's a bit hurtful for someone who always used Nokia handsets]!
The next news to watch is who is going to buy Blackberry/RIM!

New Frontier of Marketing: Leveraging your emotional vulnerability

For last two years, I have been writing about this in this blog in different posts. The web has changed the world permanently and irrevocably. A large chunk of world population literally live inside the web. New generations will never know what it used to mean to live in analogue not-always-connected world. Thanks to myriad digital contraptions that you carry all the time, your location trail is available to anyone who is interested. New tools are continuously being developed that enhance the depth and breadth of the information trail that you leave behind in the web. But you already know that! You buy more powerful, more sophisticated smartphones, tablets which provide you faster apps to post your photos and videos, chat with your friends, 'like' posts and comment on the posts in real time while on move. They make your web-presence lot more richer, more lively. You want people to know and feel the length and breadth of your persona. At both conscious and unconscious level, web is your new sense organ, it breaks the local limits of your sense experiences and makes you expressions available across the web for others to notice.. Noticed, they definitely are but probably not the way you thought. We all like to believe that each of us has his/her own unique persona with his/her own evolved way that arms him/her to deal with reality in a manner that is different from other. So, even though we know that advertisers and product marketeers are targeting us to sell their stuff, we think that we know how to manage them, how not to let them intrude into our emotional space, how not to let them influence our decision making..But do we?
  There are experiments made and being made that try to find out how far your emotional irrationality is unpredictable. And do not be alarmed. Most of the researches overwhelmingly conclude that your emotions are predictable, however irrational they are! You panic when situations are presented that unsettle you, like everyone does; You feel vulnerable when you face unfavourable situations, like others do irrespective of where you live or which language you speak. You react, when you feel violated, belittled, like others do. You believe however ludicrous the content appears to be, when the same content is fed continuously to you through all your trusted information channels.
Now to be able to reliably guess your emotional state, one needs histories of situations and your reactions to them. I am sure you would agree that those who you consider closest to you, are closest because you think they understand you i.e. they know your emotional topography; what you like, what your soft spots are, how you react in a given scenario. And they sure do, otherwise, why would you confide them in?  Why would you reach out to them when you are disturbed, when you feel emotionally vulnerable? And they know you because you have let them know the trail of emotions and situation that you have gone through. In the new scheme of things, more you lose physical human touch, more you lay bare your emotions in the social portals, in your chats. And with the power, sophistication and reach of the analytics engines that present marketing world has at its disposal, those emotional signatures of yours are computable and usable in real time. After a heated argument with your spouse, when you are feeling particularly low and probably are looking for bear to cool you off, you are likely to welcome a pop-up ad that tells you about a new waterhole at just 1 km distance. Or if a sudden change of events at the stock market has made you feel particularly shaken financially, and you have a payment date nearby, how would you react to a call from bank offering some mortgage offer specifically customized for you? These, you probably would think benign. But how would you react when you learn that your kids are also being subjected to this type of massive, focused advertising manipulations? And they will not be limited only to product marketing, these tools can and will be used for mass opinion engineering. The Extreme the views are, the more pitched and intense would be the manipulation. Who draws the ethical boundary? Who monitors whether that boundary is being respected?
        Welcome to the world of new age marketing manipulation! You just cannot run away from this new reality of personalized advertizing and campaigning. Typically, a country would have legal framework to protect its citizen from this type of manipulative assaults but in this case, technology developed faster than the laws governing the advertising Industry. Which means you have no laws to protect yourself or your kids from advertisers to use your online /on-device data in order to present you their product/solution when you cannot refuse. There is no law to stop the advertisers/online campaigners use your personal data to get the result that they want. I saw a recent study report, by M. Ryan Calo from Washington University, that highlights the incompleteness/inadequacies of existing consumer protection laws.
He observes, "Today’s firms fastidiously study consumers and, increasingly, personalize every aspect of their experience. They can also reach consumers anytime and anywhere, rather than waiting for the consumer to approach the marketplace. These and related trends mean that firms can not only take advantage of a general understanding of cognitive limitations, but can uncover and even trigger consumer frailty at an individual level.
A new theory of digital market manipulation reveals the limits of consumer protection law and exposes concrete economic and privacy harms that regulators will be hard-pressed to ignore."
I definitely would urge everyone to read his report which is available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2309703. But more importantly, we should actively participate in public discussions so that fast erosion of private space be arrested now with strengthened legal definition of digital market/campaign manipulation.