Comment by vesinisa

Elop gets lots of shit for his role in this but to be fair, he was just the front man. The real power was with the board and in particular the ex-CEO Jorma Ollila. It was the board who hired Elop and it was the board who weighted and eventually made the call to go with Windows Phone instead of Android.

In a proper public company, crucial strategic decisions like these are not CEO-level but board-level. The CEO is called chief executive officer exactly because he executes the strategy set by the shareholders, whom the board represents. And that's exactly how it went down here. You can read it all from the 2014 book "Operation Elop" by Pekka Nykänen and Merina Salminen, Teos Publishing.