When Nokia announced it was to partner with Microsoft to make Windows Phone 7 its primary operating system, some were surprised, some delighted and quite a few were outraged by the Finnish mobile phone makers intentions.
One such group of people that were outraged by Nokia’s announced were actually Nokia shareholders themselves, mobilising to form the Nokia Plan B group to protest and challenge the decision. Today, it has emerged that the group is “calling it quits” after just 36 hours.
The group first gained coverage when they issued an open letter to Nokia shareholders and institutional investors, detailing the challenge they intended to issue at Nokia’s next Annual General Meeting scheduled for May 3, 2011.
Posting an update today Nokia Plan B said that “after reviewing the feedback we’ve received from investors on our Plan B, we have decided not to carry on with it,” despite contact from hundreds of individual Nokia shareholders (which they note owned anywhere between 10 and 400,000 Nokia shares).
It was Nokia’s institutional investors and developers that put the nail in the coffin, the responses they received from them “were not encouraging”. Due to the fact that they aren’t allowed to support activities such as Nokia Plan B, they can vote with their feet by withdrawing stock from the company instead of protesting changes.
They also realised that by May 3, many of Nokia’s Symbian developers may have already left the company – campaigning for the future of Symbian would be fruitless.
The uprising lasted all of 36 hours, we can’t say we are surprised.
Update:
This, however, did come as a bit of a surprise. Apparently, the whole Plan B was a joke all along:
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