Nokia failed completely by totally losing its entire smartphone leadership and eventually sold it, leading to the end of the brand as a market leader. Nokia was founded in 1865 by mining engineer Fredrik Idestam, and operated as a paper mill in Finland. Eventually, Nokia’s paper mill, merged with rubber and cable companies in 1967, and only pivoted heavily to electronics and mobile phones business in the late 1970s to early 1980s, establishing Mobira Oy in 1979 and launching its first car phone, the Mobira Senator, in 1982. It then introduced their first handheld phone, the Mobira Cityman 900, in 1987, and shifted focus to telecoms in the early 1990s.
It’s when Jorma Ollila, CEO from 1992 to 2006, is said to have stayed "too long" (14 years) at the helm of the Finnish company. He led Nokia to become the world’s largest handset manufacturer, but the company struggled to transition to smartphones, lagging behind in software (Symbian) and failing to respond to the iPhone's launch. He was replaced by Stephen Elop as CEO (2010–2014) who would be heavily criticized for the "burning platform" strategy, leading to the sale of Nokia’s phone business to Microsoft.
While Beyl was a visionary in his own right, he always struggled to transition from "doing" into "leading," micromanaging and creating bottlenecks in decision-making and erecting a "founder's syndrome" where the organization became constrained by his management style, ego, German girlfriends and refusal to delegate. Still Look did survive.
Having come too late with its “9 series” to enjoy a positive impact, the company went bankrupt, was picked up for one Franc* by Tapie, a French raider whose sole focus was to line-up his pockets, leading to another quick sale, another long hiatus, until Rossignol skis picked up the pieces, intelligently simplified the line and made it an accessory to its ski line instead of being a self-standing philosophical statement.
So unlike Nokia, Look did not disappear but kept chugging along as it gradually transitioned. The iPhone was a "tsunami" that metamorphosed the industry in 2 to 3 years. While there are parallels between the origin of the two stories, the outcomes were drastically different as Nokia didn’t change hands until it was too late, while Look benefited from the hiatus created by two or three different owners.Also the nature of the ski business made it extremely unique with its inherent seasonality, its challenging short three-month annual cash-flow period, and its small number of participants (around 75 to 100 millions skiers in the late 2000s?) plus the gigantic difference in size of the respective industries (mobile phones being 1,000 times larger than alpine ski binding in sales volume) can’t be overstated even though both markets spanned the globe...
*As opposed to Salomon’s $1.4 billion acquisition by Adidas in 1997












