Programmers all know that for a big project, as long as the code can still run, don't make major changes to it.
Author | Gu Zi
Advertisement
Editor丨Liu Han
Image source: Nokia Mobile Weibo
In April, news of NetEase and Blizzard's high-profile reunion flooded social media, just like their high-profile breakup a year and a half ago.
All the players holding World of Warcraft urns looked confused. Some people cheered, some hesitated, and some disdained “I won't play even if I come back.”
Advertisement
The media circle is much calmer, and everyone has analyzed it from various perspectives such as finance, revenue, strategy, etc. Among them, one factor is frequently mentioned: Bob Caudick, the former CEO of Blizzard for 32 years, resigned at the end of last year.
This is a “everyone shouts and beats” level existence in the gaming circle. His misdeeds can be described as “too numerous to describe”: vacating the board of directors; squeezing out outstanding development teams; shutting down many excellent IPs; the company frequently laid off employees, but his salary kept rising… And a year and a half ago, NetEase and Blizzard broke up, and his decision-making accounted for The main reason.
Many players believe that Caudick is the biggest contributor to Blizzard's decline from a world-class gaming company to the half-dead state it is today.
Now, he's finally gone. NetEase and Blizzard have also joined hands again. But “operational-level CEOs” like him are not uncommon in business history. Sometimes, when a company faces a crisis, it is not afraid of the CEO not doing anything, but it is afraid of the CEO being too effective. The operation was as fierce as a tiger, and looking back the company was dead.
For example, here is a textbook-level case that is well known to everyone in the technology and digital circles:
Stephen Elop, and the big company he successfully sent away: Nokia.
1. Microsoft’s traitor?
“Are you a mole sent to Nokia by Microsoft?”
In February 2011, when Stephen Elop announced at the Mobile World Congress that Nokia would cooperate in depth with Microsoft, someone asked this question in person. At this, he could only smile awkwardly.
Maybe it was just a joke. But a few months later, the Globe and Mail published an interview with internal Nokia employees. The title is “Nokia employees ask: Is our CEO a Microsoft mole?” 》.
This time the cross-examination was somewhat personal. After all, Nokia used to be so glorious. According to the Finnish Economic Research Institute, Nokia accounted for a quarter of Finland's economic growth between 1998 and 2007. Just a few years ago, Nokia held 72.8% of the global mobile phone market share. This is equivalent to seven out of every ten mobile phones being produced by Nokia.
But since Elop took office as CEO, Nokia's global mobile phone market share dropped from 40% in the fourth quarter of 2010 to 31% in the first quarter of 2011. Profit fell 26% compared to the same period in 2009.
“If he is really good for the company, then why did he turn the company into this?” an employee said in an interview. Another employee said that he suspected that if the stock price continued to fall, Microsoft might acquire Nokia in the next few years.
Two years later, this prophecy was fulfilled.
In 2013, Microsoft invested 5.4 billion euros to acquire Nokia's mobile phone business. It has been just three years since Elop joined Nokia, and less than two years since Nokia fell from the top spot in global mobile phone shipments.
Since then, this “Trojan horse” meme has spread all over the world.
There is indeed reason to doubt Elop. After all, he is the first non-Finnish CEO in Nokia's century-old history. Before coming to this Nordic company, he worked as a business unit director at Microsoft for two years. After Nokia “sold out” to Microsoft, Elop returned to his old club and took away a pension of up to 18.8 million euros. The money is so much that even the Prime Minister and Finance Minister of Finland came out to express their dissatisfaction.
No matter how you look at it, it looks like a spy story in which a human being enters the game, brings down the company, becomes famous, and retires from the world.
Of course, conspiracy theories are still conspiracy theories. The fact is that Elop's CEO position was voted by Nokia's board of directors. As the acquisition progressed, many Microsoft executives, including big boss Bill Gates, strongly opposed the deal. Later facts also proved that Microsoft did not make much profit from this transaction. As a century-old giant, Nokia's decline has deeper historical reasons. It is a bit biased to blame the blame on one person.
But the term “Trojan horse” does reflect the general view of Elop from the capital circle to users: he is both good and fun-loving. After all, although Nokia had many problems at the time, if it had not been for his series of tricks, a former mobile communications giant would not have collapsed in just three years. If Nokia was a car sliding down a hill, Elop was the man sitting in the driver's seat, pressing the accelerator hard.
So, what did Elop do?
2. Three fires burned down the house
To be fair, Elop is not incompetent – at least in terms of business vision.
In 2010, the most common mobile phone in universities was Nokia's 5230 series. At that time, Xiaomi 1 had not yet come out, and Huawei was still making contract phones.iPhone It just entered the mainland market a few months ago – the price is one month's salary of a white-collar worker in Beijing.
But Elop has already seen Nokia's crisis – lack of ecology. At that time, mobile phone keyboards were gradually disappearing, and the “Symbian system” installed on Nokia's mainstream models was not designed for touch screens.Its openness and ecology are far inferior to iOS and the risingAndroid.
In 2011, Elop sent a memo within Nokia, describing Nokia's current situation as “a man standing on a burning oil drilling platform, either jumping into the sea, or staying in place and being burned to death.” He also mentioned the iPhone's redefinition of smartphones, Android's “ecosystem competition” and potential threats posed by mobile phone manufacturers in Shenzhen, China.
Looking back now, every one of them is an extremely accurate prediction. But the problem is that in the face of such a situation, Elop's countermeasures were chaotic and even confusing. Other new officials have three firepowers when they take office. Elop is one of the three firepowers who burned down his own house.
First of all, there is the operating system problem. There is nothing wrong with changing the system. The fault lies in the way Elop handles it.
In February 2011, Nokia and Microsoft officially announced their cooperation to jointly develop Windows Phone (hereinafter referred to as WP). . But it was not until the end of October that the first Lumia 800 equipped with the WP system was launched on the market. For eight months, there was a gap in Nokia's products. Users and dealers were in confusion: Will the old Symbian be updated? Is the new WP easy to use? So is it time to buy a Nokia? …
On the other hand, while switching to WP, Elop also shut down another self-developed project of Nokia: MeeGo system. This was a mobile phone system jointly developed by Nokia and Intel before and was originally planned to replace Symbian. But the problem is that this project is nearing completion and the finished product has been produced – the Nokia N9.
In September 2011, Nokia N9 was launched and unexpectedly received pretty good reviews. However, a month later, Lumia 800 was released, and Nokia completely switched to WP. N9 became the only mobile phone equipped with MeeGo system, and consumers who bought it became completely taken advantage of.
The old Symbian that didn’t know where to go, MeeGo that was “born but not raised by a mother”, WP that was still exploring… Throughout 2011, Nokia jumped back and forth between the three systems, and the performance of the data was immediate: 2011 In the second quarter of this year, Nokia's net profit plummeted to -€487 million from US$439 million in the previous quarter, directly entering a loss. Sales in Greater China plummeted 53% in the second quarter. A considerable number of Chinese users (such as the author) abandoned Nokia that summer.
Secondly, it is a wrong choice.
Many years later, the most frequently asked question about Nokia is: “Why not choose Android?” Some old fans still believe that if Elop had chosen Google instead of Microsoft in 2011, Nokia would be the second Samsung today.
In fact, in 2010, Google was interested in bringing Nokia into the Android camp, but Elop ultimately chose Microsoft. In this regard, Elop's explanation was simple and direct: Samsung had already chosen Android at that time, and Nokia needed to differentiate in order to be competitive.
The problem is, differentiation ≠ ease of use. As it turned out, the WP system was an all-around failure.
First, Microsoft started late. iOS and Android have been iterating for many years, and WP has just arrived late, and its interface, optimization and ease of use cannot catch up with its competitors. Secondly, the development model of the WP system is more complicated than that of iOS and Android, which in turn continues to worsen the ecological environment of WP. The vicious cycle of “chicken, egg, and egg” makes WP more and more stretched.
Digital blogger Watt told SlowMobile that WP still had some local apps at that time and also held a developer competition. But an important problem is that after WP7, Microsoft launched Win8, which unified the mobile phone and computer cores. However, the WP7 system did not support upgrading to WP8, which directly caused the first batch of supported users to give up.
Finally, there is the personnel arrangement.
Seeing that the company's performance was deteriorating, Elop started Nokia's “cost reduction and efficiency improvement”, but his steps were a bit too big: In 2012, Nokia officially announced the largest layoff plan in ten years: 1.1% of its employees would be laid off before 2013. Ten thousand people – that is, 19% of the employees were driven away in one go. At the same time, three R&D facilities in Germany, Canada and Finland were closed.
Such “large-scale” layoffs directly destroyed the market's confidence in Nokia: On the day the news was officially announced, Nokia's stock price fell 18%, also the largest in ten years. A large number of layoffs have even triggered social unrest in Finland: the number of alcoholics has increased and child support problems have surged. Eventually, even Finland’s economy declined.
Oh, remember that “burning oil platform” memo we mentioned at the beginning? This extremely sincere document brought Elop unexpected results: internal employees believed that he was too negative about the company's past achievements, morale plummeted, and even the board of directors expressed dissatisfaction; and after being exposed by the media, the outside world also It is generally believed that Nokia has no hope of turning around, further affecting the company's brand image.
In 2014, Elop stepped down as CEO and returned to Microsoft. Behind him, Nokia was in a mess: its stock price fell by 62%, its mobile phone market share was reduced by half, its smartphone market share fell from 33% to 3%, and the company's cumulative losses were 4.9 billion euros. He also became the “last CEO” of the old Nokia, and personally filled its grave with a shovelful of soil.
3.Food-addicted CEOs
Elop is not the only “saucy CEO”. Throughout business history, there are many CEOs who have severely damaged the vitality of their companies due to their fierce operations.
For example, Yahoo was once a well-known portal on the Internet. Under CEO Marissa Mayer's series of failed decisions, the company has been on a downward spiral. Not only did it completely withdraw from the Chinese market, it also sold itself to the American telecommunications company Verizon in 2017. For another example, the “BlackBerry”, which was once famous for its business email system and full keyboard design, ended up being completely discontinued in 2022 because the CEO ignored the development of the full touch screen market, becoming a tear of the times. Not to mention a recent example that is still developing: Twitter, which has been renamed X, and Elon Musk, who pulls it from disco to rocket ride.
There was once a joke on the Internet: “We are not afraid of the second generation living in dissipation, but we are afraid that the second generation will prove themselves.” The same applies to CEOs. Sometimes, drastic reforms may not be a good medicine to save companies, but they are likely to push them into the abyss. The strategy of “governing a big country is like cooking a small one” may be the most reliable, safest and most successful business strategy.
After all, programmers know that for a big project, as long as the code can still run, don't make major changes to it.
References:
Wang Chenhan丨Mr. Elop from Microsoft
Mou Entertainment丨Blizzard intends to reunite, but the domestic market is no longer what it used to be