CLE
Several years ago I was introduced to an acronym at work, not because I performed one, but because the concept came up in conversation. A CLE is a Career Limiting Event, and there are quite a few things that one could classify as such. Things such as shutting down a primary server or network device in the middle of the day without verifying that your change works, calling an executive of your company drunk and bitching them out, or deleting a very important file or database table (payroll?). Most of these are more specifically going to limit your career at a specific company. You clean up and move on. Now consider you are a the new CEO of a very public world wide company, and you decide throw away billions of dollars of work and planning (all be it very slowly implemented planning) away and partner with a company to utilize their lackluster OS[1]. What happens if you destroy that company? We've all heard about the lovely golden parachutes, but, if you were a Board of Directors for a corporation, would you hire someone that took a stumbling, but still massive company, and single handedly turned it away from possible success and ground it dust? Sadly, someone probably will. However, one has to wonder how the current board of Nokia is taking the fact that so far their stock has dropped over 15%[2] since they announced the plan this morning.
This entry was brought to you by the bi-line of an InfoWorld article:
[1] I made a point of playing with WP7 this morning at the AT&T store. Its not bad as far as an interface goes, however I could definitely see myself becoming frustrated with its responsiveness (which I'd assume is programmed in, so you can see the fancy effects). Couple that with the missing IPSEC VPN support, lack of multitasking, lack of copy&paste, and it doesn't appear to have good Notes integration yet. While the last is a show stopper for me and possible even just a select few others, the rest are things that are likely a show stopper for many. The key thing to remember is also that Symbian already has all of those features!
[2] UPDATE: just about 30 hours after the announcement their stock is on its way to becoming their 1 year low. Wednesday they were selling just over 15 points a share, today is in the 9s.