Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Meet Nokia's New CEO: Elop's BoomTown Video (Plus His Vision Quest)!

Just as the chickens always come home to roost, BoomTown always has a video ferreted away of someone who makes it to the bigs.

In this case, here is a video interview I did in April of 2009 with new Nokia CEO Stephen Elop (pictured here), just a year after he had taken over as president of Microsoft’s Business Division.

I caught Elop just after he had given a speech where he talked about how the software giant had gotten the “open” religion and was becoming “the most interoperable company in the world.”

I am still not sure about Microsoft, but one thing’s for sure: Elop has turned out to be one of the most interoperable of tech execs.

Along with his stint at Microsoft (MSFT) running that powerful franchise, he has been COO of Juniper Networks (JNPR) and CEO of Macromedia, which was acquired under his tenure by Adobe (ADBE).

His new job at Finland’s telecom giant is going to be a big one, given how far Nokia’s star has fallen in the mobile market, with the fast growth of the Apple (AAPL) iPhone and the Google (GOOG) Android mobile operating system.

Elop also has five kids–including triplet 11-year-olds–so how do you say “babysitter” in Finnish?

Here’s my interview with him, as well as another video Elop ordered up while at Microsoft as part of an “Envisioning” series.

These “world of the future” videos were done by Microsoft Office Labs as part of a “Productivity Future Vision” series that sketched out a world of smartphones, touchscreens everywhere and a whole lot of innovative interacting.

It will be interesting to see if Elop can bring such a big vision to Nokia (NOK), where it is sorely needed.

Until then, enjoy Elop unplugged–as you will see, he is a very compelling dude.

(You can also watch the unembeddable–get on it, since sharing is big on phones now, Steve!–video press conference about his new job today at Nokia here.)

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