Ada: The memo leaked around the eighth of February, 2011. And it opens with this vivid image — a man standing on a burning oil platform in the North Sea.
Theo: An oil rig on fire. Not your usual corporate memo.
Ada: The man wakes to an explosion, surrounded by flames, and he's faced with an impossible choice — stay and burn, or jump thirty metres into the freezing water below. He jumps. And Elop's line was that Nokia, too, was standing on a burning platform.
Theo: So he's telling his own staff, in writing, that the company is on fire.
Ada: Brutally honestly. And as a diagnosis, it was accurate — this is where I'd separate what the memo said from what he then did.
Theo: Go on — because those feel like two different things.
Ada: The memo, on paper, named the fire correctly. Nokia really was in crisis. But then, on February the eleventh, Elop stood next to Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, and announced the leap.
Theo: Windows Phone.
Ada: Windows Phone as the primary system. Symbian would be wound down, and MeeGo — their own homegrown future — effectively abandoned.
Theo: Hang on. He jumped off the burning platform into… a completely unproven third ecosystem? Not the safe water of Android?
Ada: That's the heart of the criticism. Apple and Android were already the two big islands. Windows Phone was a third one, barely inhabited, and Nokia was betting the company on making it thrive.
Theo: And with him coming straight from Microsoft, people must have smelled something.
Ada: They did — there's a persistent theory he was a Trojan horse, steering Nokia to Microsoft on purpose. It's never been proven; he denied it, though he did still hold Microsoft shares from his old job. The memo named the fire. Now came the leap into icy water.