On Friday Nokia is going to have a big day, and is rumoured to be announcing all manner of strange things.
We've heard tales of Nokia chopping senior staff, analysts recommending a switch to WP7, horrible results, credit rating warnings, talks of ditching Ovi or adopting Android, and now comes the story of moving Nokia's HQ to the US.
Switching to Windows Phone 7 is surely not going to happen. I was actually a big advocate of this 6-12 months ago, as I was seeing positive reviews of the platform in development and it seemed to make sense. However the disaster of WP7 in the marketplace (selling less phones in a quarter than Apple sells in a week) and the number of OEMs already producing outstanding WP7 hardware means this would just be a race to the bottom for Nokia.
Switching to Android is hopefully not going to happen. This has never made sense. Why would Nokia exchange one user experience disaster for another, when they can polish their own platform until it shines without having to hand control to Google? It's a worse proposition than WP7: not only competing in a race to the bottom with OEMs, but also entering a software race against teams around the world who have a two year headstart on them.
Which brings us neatly to the move to the US. I think there's a lot of truth in the story, and as of yesterday the Nokia jobs website bore this out with a large number of MeeGo postings in Palo Alto and Mountain View (job site kremlinology has long been a trick used to devise Apple's plans in advance).
There's two obvious possibilities I can think of.
It could be that Stephen Elop is looking to get some fresh thinking and fresh blood into the company, and the only way to do that is to move location. With the massive numbers of redundancies being announced regularly, Nokia (as with any responsible company) is duty-bound to reemploy staff elsewhere within the organisation if possible. But what if Nokia doesn't want to keep those staff around? Simple:
LOCAL CANDIDATES PREFERRED. NO RELOCATION PROVIDED.
Move the centre of gravity for all your exciting development elsewhere, prevent existing staff from relocating.
The second reason I can think of for moving to the US is somewhat more alarming. What if this is a cargo cult move? Many people still do not understand the reason for Apple's success in the marketplace. Maybe Elop figures that moving development to the US is sufficient. By mimicking these west coast companies (and trying to poach as many staff as possible from Apple), Nokia's fortunes will somehow magically be revived.
This could be disastrous. Nokia will end up competing for talent with companies that are currently way cooler. Apple. Google and Facebook. Any number of hot startups. So Nokia would end up in an expensive fight for talent whilst trying to mimic more successful competitors without truly understanding the reason for that success.
A less obvious outside chance is the favourite rumour I heard at FOSDEM: Nokia partnering with HP to deliver WebOS phones to the US market. It's tough to see which mobile OS has sufficient wow factor to win over the Americans, though.
Whatever happens, Friday will be a very interesting day. But first we have to get through Wednesday!