Silicon Valley veteran Jean Louis Gassée said that the Nokia leadership should be fired, including CEO Stephen Elop, who took over Nokia after a stint within Microsoft.

Gassée told Computing in an exclusive interview “I think that Elop will have to go, but I also think that the board also needs to be renewed with people who have an understanding and working knowledge of the mobile industry.”

Gassée worked for Hewlett Packard in the 1970's and joined Apple in 1981 working as a senior executive from 1981 to 1990. He founded the BE Inc company who developed operating system code. He is now a partner at venture capital company Allegis Capital.

He criticised Elop saying that they effectively obsoleted their new range of Windows Phone 7 devices months before the new mobile operating system will be formally released. He said “Microsoft can do that with new versions of Windows; IBM used to do that in the olden days. But I'm shocked that the board of Nokia allowed Elop to do that.”

Mobile devices using Windows Phone 7 won't be upgradeable to Windows Phone 8 and applications built for Windows Phone 8 won't be backwards compatible. The audience contemplating a new phone will wait for the new operating system before diving in with a new purchase.

Gassée was critical of Stephen Elop saying “He has zero experience in terms of what makes a smartphone maker tick. And what is his experience in supply chain management? Zero. He did a very good thing, which is to tell everyone that it is an eco-system ‘play', not a platform play. That was very insightful. But then he reveals the plans without implementing them. Everyone knew that Symbian phones were dead-enders and Nokia's partners – the carriers – ran away from Symbian in large numbers.”

You can read more in this revealing interview over here.

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