NOKIA SHAREHOLDERS REBELLING AGAINST MICROSOFT DECISION

Not everyone is happy about Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop, a former Microsoft executive, teaming up with Microsoft. Workers in Finland have voiced their displeasure by walking out and now a group of young shareholders is formulating an alternate strategy called "Nokia Plan B".

The shareholders, all of whom have experience working for the company, are happy with the decision to embrace Microsoft and will challenge that decision and strategy going forward.

The group has sent an open letter to other shareholders for support. The group needs to get elected as a majority to the Board of Directors at the next annual meeting on May 3rd. The open letter goes into great detail as to what agenda and concrete actions the group intends to pursue. The details of which are summarized below:

Agenda

• Return to high growth, high profitability strategy
• Maintain ownership of the software layer on Nokia products (read: no Windows OS)
• Introduce hiring strategy that targets young software talent
• Eliminate outdated and bureaucratic R&D policies to improve efficiency
• Avoid becoming poorly differentiated OEM with low margins and commodity products

Concrete Actions

• Immediate discharge of Stephen Elop as President and CEO of Nokia
• Restructure alliance with Microsoft as tactical exercise focused on North America
• MeeGo will become Nokia’s primary smartphone platform
• Increase the lifespan of Symbian to a minimum of 5 years
• Qt development to focus on MeeGo, but support Symbian too
• End of distributed R&D
• End of R&D outsourcing
• Leadership team shakeup
• Aggressively recruit young software engineers
• Strategy for S40 and Ovi platforms going forward

Overall, this strategy would see Nokia become a leaner company focused on MeeGo from a software perspective going forward. It would also see the average age of employees fall due to the new focus on young developers.