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Microsoft is cutting 1,000 jobs in Finland as it stops phone production

uk.businessinsider.com

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Re: Microsoft is cutting 1,000 jobs in Finland as it stops phone production

#41

Post by Maakuth »

anjc wrote: post #34
Maakuth wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What was the point of this whole exercise? A convoluted way of getting Nokia's masses of IP rights for mobile? Why not just leave Nokia to keep pushing WP? Nokia only sold their mobile phone arm and licensed the IP. This doesn't seem like the cheapest way to get those licenses.

As far as I'm aware they were giving exclusive licensing rights to their IP to Microsoft in perpetuity. But yeah, it doesn't seem cheap...

That is not correct. All the phone vendors need licenses to some Nokia IP as they own much of the core patents needed for GSM/UMTS/LTE radio implementations. They've licensed them to Microsoft among others. I guess MS got all the Nokia phone software copyrights to themselves, but I don't think Symbian and S40 source are worth very much at the moment.

Re: Microsoft is cutting 1,000 jobs in Finland as it stops phone production

#42

Post by dijit »

I was around when the takeover of Nokia R&D happened in Febuary 2011, I remember walking around the offices of Ruohulati in Helsinki and seeing a massive queue to the IT room, previously linux laptops were being reformatted to run windows.

I asked one of the project managers: "why, will it really change that much for us, I mean, there's hope right?"

they responded: "This is a takeover, I've seen it before, they're just not calling it that- they'll kill MeeGO in it's crib.. and for us, it's adapt or die".

By the end of the second week (Elop did an eloquent speech about the future of Meego) all the really senior technical experts were working for Intel despite Elop saying "they just want to sell chips" and being generally derogatory to Intel), all the designers and senior management went to Jolla (which tried to enter a market which is fairly dominated already as a startup), myself, I was fired.. and everyone else is still running the ghost ship, I wasn't a large fan of microsofts products going in to Nokia, which is why I liked Maemo/MeeGO for the phone and I could use Linux at work- but this move cemented them as assholes in my mind.

Nothing they do nowadays for good PR is going to change my mind of how surreptitiously they took over nokia and sent it into it's death spiral. Microsoft really loves to own and eventually destroy Nordic companies. (skype, minecraft, nokia) - lets see what they do with TeacherGaming.

Re: Microsoft is cutting 1,000 jobs in Finland as it stops phone production

#43

Post by nedsma »

There's an interesting article over at Anandtech discussing the fate of Nokia and what projects might occur under Nokia licensing contracts. http://www.anandtech.com/show/10333/foxconn-and-hmd-to-retur... I hope that some of the folks getting the boot by MS will join the Helsinki based HMD Global who got an exclusive global license to create Nokia-branded mobile phones and tablets for the next ten years.

Re: Microsoft is cutting 1,000 jobs in Finland as it stops phone production

#44

Post by BorgHunter »

dijit wrote: post #42

I was around when the takeover of Nokia R&D happened in Febuary 2011, I remember walking around the offices of Ruohulati in Helsinki and seeing a massive queue to the IT room, previously linux laptops were being reformatted to run windows. I asked one of the project managers: "why, will it really change that much for us, I mean, there's hope right?" they responded: "This is a takeover, I've seen it before, they're ju…

Nokia was doomed before Elop took over. Kallasvuo was CEO when Apple released the first iPhone, and Kallasvuo was the one who decided that Nokia's existing offerings were good enough to compete, just keep minorly refining things every generation. By the time Elop came in, the ship was already sinking (or, if you prefer, the platform was already burning). Elop's decisions did not turn that around, but realistically, could he have?

Re: Microsoft is cutting 1,000 jobs in Finland as it stops phone production

#45

Post by pjmlp »

Aoyagi wrote: post #35
pjmlp wrote: post #32

I guess it is about time I stop making my hobby coding portable between WP and Android, focusing just on Android. Sad, because WP is actually much better from tooling and architecture point of view, but the way the whole WP 7, WP 8, WP 8.1 and the yet to become stable WP 10, just drove everyone off. Personally I was kind of pissed off, when the 512 MB devices were left out of the last preview update. Also it was the…

It wasn't just 512 MB RAM devices. That was just a poor excuse they used for a pragmatic push on "Nokia veterans" to buy the 950(XL), or at least 640. And Myerson has the audacity to say "We always take care of our customers, Windows phones are no exception. [...] regardless of a person's phone choice, we want everyone to be able to experience what Microsoft has to offer them."

I own the 630 when it got released with 8.1.

For me, the appeal as hobby development was that I wanted to support a third ecosystem, have my love-hate relationship on the MS stack back to the MS-DOS 3.3 days and I love what they are doing with C++/CX (VC++ finally catches up with C++ Builder) and the whole AOT compilation for .NET (MDIL and .NET Native).

But with this scenario there isn't much value in building up WP skills specially since WP10 is still quite buggy, even as an hobby.

Re: Microsoft is cutting 1,000 jobs in Finland as it stops phone production

#46

Post by Joeri »

pjmlp wrote: post #32

I guess it is about time I stop making my hobby coding portable between WP and Android, focusing just on Android. Sad, because WP is actually much better from tooling and architecture point of view, but the way the whole WP 7, WP 8, WP 8.1 and the yet to become stable WP 10, just drove everyone off. Personally I was kind of pissed off, when the 512 MB devices were left out of the last preview update. Also it was the…

OTOH, can you name a single feature of WP10 that you wanted to upgrade for? I went from a 920 with wp8 to a 950 with wp10, and the only good new features are ones that required new hardware (continuum and hello).

I regret buying the 950. Excellent hardware, but unstable battery hog of an OS, with an app situation that's bad and getting worse. WP 8.0 was the high mark. All the changes since then made things worse.

Re: Microsoft is cutting 1,000 jobs in Finland as it stops phone production

#47

Post by felipeerias »

pavlov wrote: post #10
tim333 wrote: post #8

I wonder how it would have played out for Nokia if Microsoft had not bought them. Rather better in some ways I'd imagine.

I don't think so. Nokia got $7.2 billion from Microsoft for a loss-making device business. Nokia still exists today and swallowed Alcatel-Lucent last year. It's hard to imagine a better outcome for Nokia than Microsoft buying the phone albatross in 2013. I honestly believe that it was part of a contingency plan that had made Nokia's board approve the Windows Phone plan -- that Ballmer basically promised a buyout in c…

Nokia had far better industrial design, logistics, marketing and brand recognition than any current Android manufacturer.

If they had carried out that switch (and survived in the short term - they were on the brink of bankruptcy at the time), Nokia would be doing pretty well nowadays.

Re: Microsoft is cutting 1,000 jobs in Finland as it stops phone production

#48

Post by pjmlp »

dijit wrote: post #42

I was around when the takeover of Nokia R&D happened in Febuary 2011, I remember walking around the offices of Ruohulati in Helsinki and seeing a massive queue to the IT room, previously linux laptops were being reformatted to run windows. I asked one of the project managers: "why, will it really change that much for us, I mean, there's hope right?" they responded: "This is a takeover, I've seen it before, they're ju…

I too was there during those days, in Espoo.

But to be honest we also had our share of alienating developers, it wasn't only MS fault.

First the Symbian development was a mess with the Metrowerk tools and that Symbian C++ dialect, then came PIPS, followed by Carbide (Eclipse based).

Followed by the whole mess of open sourcing Symbian and closing it again.

Or the Symbian model moving from Symbian C++ / PIPS to Qt, also in the middle this process.

Maemo was GTK, but then everyone should move to Qt. Better not lets also move the OS into Meego.

I remember asking why the Nokia 770 didn't had a GSM modem and the team saying to me that wasn't the market they wanted to target. When they did the usual roadshow of upcoming devices.

Nokia was already quite bad in terms of relationship with app developers before Elop came into the party, due to the internal politics.

Of course, the famous burning platform memo was just the last way to alienate developers that were slowly accepting the new Qt based model for Symbian, after all the previous pain points.

Re: Microsoft is cutting 1,000 jobs in Finland as it stops phone production

#49

Post by rospaya »

BorgHunter wrote: post #44
dijit wrote: post #42

I was around when the takeover of Nokia R&D happened in Febuary 2011, I remember walking around the offices of Ruohulati in Helsinki and seeing a massive queue to the IT room, previously linux laptops were being reformatted to run windows. I asked one of the project managers: "why, will it really change that much for us, I mean, there's hope right?" they responded: "This is a takeover, I've seen it before, they're ju…

Nokia was doomed before Elop took over. Kallasvuo was CEO when Apple released the first iPhone, and Kallasvuo was the one who decided that Nokia's existing offerings were good enough to compete, just keep minorly refining things every generation. By the time Elop came in, the ship was already sinking (or, if you prefer, the platform was already burning). Elop's decisions did not turn that around, but realistically, c…

I agree that Nokia was too slow to compete, but they had massive advantages over both Apple and Google and with good guidance could've survived successfully.

Even years after the iPhone came out, Nokia outsold Apple, had a bigger R&D budget and a bigger foothold in practically every market except North America.

Smartphones outsold feature (dumb) phones only in 2013, five years after the iPhone came out. When did Nokia slip to 3rd place by number of sold devices? Q1 2015.

There was time, just no will.

Re: Microsoft is cutting 1,000 jobs in Finland as it stops phone production

#50

Post by Nokinside »

Maakuth wrote: post #41
anjc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I'm aware they were giving exclusive licensing rights to their IP to Microsoft in perpetuity. But yeah, it doesn't seem cheap...

That is not correct. All the phone vendors need licenses to some Nokia IP as they own much of the core patents needed for GSM/UMTS/LTE radio implementations. They've licensed them to Microsoft among others. I guess MS got all the Nokia phone software copyrights to themselves, but I don't think Symbian and S40 source are worth very much at the moment.

>I guess MS got all the Nokia phone software copyrights to themselves

This is incorrect. MS only bought non-exclusive, 10-year license for Nokia’s patent portfolio. Nokia has all the IP.

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