Former Nokia CEO denies working as Microsoft’s “Trojan Horse”

As tempting as it might be to believe the Grand Elop Conspiracy theory, the man at the center of it all insists that it’s not true. ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley notices that former Nokia CEO and current Microsoft exec Stephen Elop was asked during a question-and-answer session on Monday to react to accusations that he was a “Trojan Horse” at Nokia whose job was solely to bring the company’s value down enough for Microsoft to buy it on the cheap. Elop, as you might expect, was having none of it.

On the first day of his first week back at Microsoft, Stephen Elop, the former Nokia CEO and new chief of Microsoft’s Devices unit, defended the decision to bring those phones to market. During an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on April 28, Elop indicated that the Nokia X phones aren’t going to be discontinued. I had guessed Microsoft would keep, not kill off, the Nokia X phones, which are built on top of the Android Open Source Project build of Android. And increasingly it is looking like this is, indeed, the case. “Microsoft acquired the mobile phones business, inclusive of Nokia X, to help connect the next billion people to Microsoft’s services,” Elop told a questioner. “Nokia X uses the MSFT cloud, not Google’s. This is a great opportunity to connect new customers to Skype, Outlook.com and OneDrive for the first time. We’ve already seen tens of thousands of new subscribers on MSFT services.”