The original vision is pretty clear, and a compelling reason to not screw around and get sidetracked, even if that has massive commercialisation upside.
Thankfully M$ didn't have control of the board.
A lot of his current external activities could worry the board - and if he wasn't candid about future plans I can see why they might sack him.
Really really. You have two so-frigging-stereotypical samples of management ineptitude in running a strong commercial brand AND leadership (Osbourne:’guys our phones suck’ ; ’change management 101’: burning raft is literally the most commmon and mundane turn of phraze meant to imply you need to act fast. Using this specific phraze is a clear beacon you are out of way out of your depth by paraphrazing 101 material to your company). If the phones had been a strong product, none of this would have mattered. But they weren’t and this was as clear way to signal ”emperor has no clothes” as possible.
The N9 etc demonstrated there was enough talent for a plausible pivot. Was it business wise obvious this would have been the only and right choice?
It wasn't Elop who drove Nokia to the state it was in 2009. "Burning Platform" is from 2011.
Even a lowly new grad engineer has to sign a lot of stuff when they take a job that forces essentially exclusivity to your work there. I cannot dabble in outside businesses within the same industry or adjacent industries.
CEOs argue that their job is tough and many hours and life consuming and that's why they get the pay, and yet there is a whole genre of tech CEOs who try to CEO 5 companies at a time..
Only money and profit makes the mountains move. Not moral stature. I don't believe that optimistic take for a second.
None with a moral stance to take such action stays quiet so long, without alternate motives.
The dialect of C++ was pure hell, and the wanton diversity of products meant that there was no chance to get consistent UI over a chock-full of models whose selling potential was unknown in advance. Theoretically, there were standards such as Series 60. Practically, those were full of compatibility breaks and just weird idiosyncrasies.
Screen dimensions, available APIs, everything varied as if designed by a team of competing drunk sailors, and you could always plunge a week of work into fine-tuning your app for a platform that flopped. Unlike Apple, there just wasn't any software consistency. Some of the products were great, some were terrible, and all were subtly incompatible with one another.
Meanwhile you have CEOs front running their own company or treating staff from different companies as interchangeable. It's funny governors have been thrown in prison for example taking free renovations on their home in exchange for contract work with the state.
Not in California. Only company executives can be bound by such agreements. Direct competition is of course prohibited.