Nokia Shareholders: Ditch Microsoft Alliance, Fire CEO

disgruntled Nokia shareholders published an open letter

Nokia Plan B, a group which describes itself as "nine young Nokia shareholders" that have all worked with Nokia in the past, published its letter on Facebook and promised to challenge Nokia's new strategy for Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 at the next shareholder meeting scheduled for May 3.

Last week, Nokia announced a broad alliance with Microsoft that will make Windows Phone 7 the mobile phone company's principal platform, replacing Nokia's own Symbian mobile operating system and potentially killing the new open-source platform MeeGo, jointly developed by Nokia and Intel. While Symbian is one of the most widely-used mobile platforms, the OS has suffered declining market share recently in the face of competition from Apple's iOS and Google's Android.

Nokia Plan B, however, has taken issue with the new strategy and criticized Elop's plan to embrace Windows Phone 7 over Symbian. According to the letter, the group wants to "return the company to a strategy that seeks high growth and high profit margins through innovation and overwhelmingly superior products with unrivaled user experience."

Specifically, Nokia Plan B wants to "maintain ownership and control of the software layer of the Nokia products," change the company's hiring strategy in order to acquire "top, young software talent from around the world," and "avoid at all cost becoming a poorly differentiated OEM with only low margin commodity products."

If elected to a majority on the board, the group said it plans to immediately dismiss Elop, as well as three other Nokia executives, and make MeeGo the company's primary mobile platform. The letter also pledges to drastically restructure the Microsoft alliance, limiting Windows Phone 7-based Nokia devices to only one or two models and restricting the releases to the North American market until sales and profit margins justify expanding the partnership.

Nokia Plan B isn't the only group upset with the new Nokia-Microsoft alliance; Intel expressed disappointment in Nokia's adoption of Windows Phone 7 but reaffirmed its commitment to fostering MeeGo. In addition, The Wall Street Journal reported the Finnish trade union Pro has criticized the Microsoft Alliance and demanded that Nokia pay out 100,000 Euro to each employee that the company lays off as a result of its strategy overhaul.

Elop joined Nokia as president and CEO last September after a short stint at Microsoft, where he served as president of the software giant's Business Division and also as a member of Microsoft's senior leadership team. Elop' internal memo about the future of Nokia created a stir last week when it was leaked to the media; the memo stated that the company was "years behind" competitors like Apple and Google and that a huge effort was needed to transform Nokia. Elop's memo called Symbian "non-competitive" in the North American mobile market and also cast doubt on the future of MeeGo.

"We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones," Elop wrote. "However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market."