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

uk.businessinsider.com

121–130 of 166 posts

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

#121
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Elop had bet on Android instead of Windows Phone, Nokia would probably be doing well.

Almost certainly not. Have you seen the profit numbers at Samsung, Motorola, and HTC? They're getting destroyed by Android competitors like Xiaomi, Huawei, etc and Apple.

What makes you think Nokia would have ended up like Samsung/Motorola/HTC rather than Xiaomi/Huawei/etc? Nokia at least had a chance to be one of the profitable ones.

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

#122
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…

The flipside here is that Nokia was doomed anyway. Meego wasn't going to break the iOS/Android duopoly. Nokia was being destroyed by the success of the iPhone. It couldn't compete.

>Microsoft really loves to own and eventually destroy Nordic companies. (skype, minecraft, nokia)

Minecraft went from being neglected to even mismanaged to something that's alive again. Skype was originally Estonian, nor Nordic, and runs better than ever considering it doesn't rely on the charity of "supernodes" anymore. I can't remember the last time I had a dropped call or random quality drops.

I do agree MS shouldn't have picked up Nokia. It was a walking corpse and didn't help either entity in the end, but this is just business as usual. Playing up this "wild linux hackers vs The Man(TM)" is pretty out there. If you want a paycheck, the entity that pays you needs to make money. If MS didn't fire you, Nokia would have. MS is profitable. Nokia isn't.

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

#123
post #70
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Noki…

> but they had massive advantages over both Apple and Google and with good guidance could've survived successfully. I can't agree more. Few people remember the Nokia 770 was released almost 2 years ahead of the iPhone. With a bit of polish it could have grown into a fantastic product line. In fact, the N9 was pretty much a masterpiece.

>Few people remember the Nokia 770 was released almost 2 years ahead of the iPhone.

I owned one of these. It was an ugly, slow, expensive brick. I'd much rather use a Treo from that period. The iPhone was a wonderfully svelte device compared to either. I don't think you're appreciating how badly Apple beat up the Palm and Nokia competition back then. It was absolutely no contest and a disruption that was badly needed. Holding up the 770 as some under-appreciated jewel is fairly ridiculous. It was comically out of touch with consumers.

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

#124

A lesson from Palm, Nokia, Motorola, and every other small-to-midsize company in the Telco arena: Never let yourselves be acquired. It won't end well.

TwitPic had a massive offer from Twitter when it was young. They declined and years later, Twitter tried to take them down. They settled to just make Twitpic read-only.

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

#125
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if Nokia 770 also was a phone? History could have been so radically different. I will never understand...

If the 770 was also a phone, it would have been a ghastly tablet with a phone inside.

But in 2007, the n800 would have been a ghastly tablet/phone with 2.5x the pixels, expandable storage to 64GB, and several different media players that sucked, but are still better than iTunes today. I'm still using the Canola media player on an n810.

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

#126
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost certainly not. Have you seen the profit numbers at Samsung, Motorola, and HTC? They're getting destroyed by Android competitors like Xiaomi, Huawei, etc and Apple.

What makes you think Nokia would have ended up like Samsung/Motorola/HTC rather than Xiaomi/Huawei/etc? Nokia at least had a chance to be one of the profitable ones.

There are no profitable android makers.

Apple has 94% of the profits in mobile: http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/15/11/16/apple-inc-n...

We will never know for sure by Nokia shareholders might have gotten an amazing deal out of going Windows Mobile and getting acquired by Microsoft. As for the employees, this would have happened either way with how badly the company was prepared for smartphones.

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

#127
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android isn't much worse off..

To be fair, Android wasn't established when it was acquired. It was still in early stages and not released in production devices. Google took it there (by financing, management or what, I don't know, but it happened after they acquired it).

Yeah well, the GP post mentions "small to midsize telco" companies, so Android was definitely small.

(on the other hand it implies the behemoth of Nokia was "midsize", uh)

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

#128
We may never know the real story. Steve and Bill used to meet in Bill's jet flying over the ocean so that they could avoid any monitoring as they made deals to benefit each other (the whole "we're competitors" was largely fake - I was in plenty of meetings with Steve and also worked for a direct report of Bill. Their goal was to make each other rich.) It may not be a coincidence that Steve dropped Flash (at the time considered the competitor to Microsoft's CLR in the browser - their bet on the future of controlling future development platforms) and Bill took-over the biggest competitor to the iphone. There were plenty of other similar deals being made between them and the major computer vendors (and, if it isn't obvious, we paid the price by the limited competition and limited choices. Bill and Steve didn't just meet with each other. People who think "free market" is real are both naive and arrogant.)

And in a court of law I will say that I just made all this up.

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

#129
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but they had massive advantages over both Apple and Google and with good guidance could've survived successfully. I can't agree more. Few people remember the Nokia 770 was released almost 2 years ahead of the iPhone. With a bit of polish it could have grown into a fantastic product line. In fact, the N9 was pretty much a masterpiece.

>Few people remember the Nokia 770 was released almost 2 years ahead of the iPhone. I owned one of these. It was an ugly, slow, expensive brick. I'd much rather use a Treo from that period. The iPhone was a wonderfully svelte device compared to either. I don't think you're appreciating how badly Apple beat up the Palm and Nokia competition back then. It was absolutely no contest and a disruption that was badly needed…

It was just an alpha device, and a Nokia side-project. It didn't even have a phone radio. The N800 was a pre-iPhone device and quite more polished. The N900 and N9 are, in my opinion, still better than many devices we see today in the market. And they are 6 years old...

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

#130
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the second article says, it's not Nokia building them, but letting another company ("HMD global Oy") build them under the Nokia brand. This is similar to what they did with the somewhat recent Nokia N1 tablet: it was built by Foxconn.

This HMD global was founded by an ex-Nokia employee. Seems like the sleeper agents are being activated.

I long suspected something like that. Let MS purchase and restructure a sinking ship. Allow the talent to move on and do R&D on the cheap via startups. Once the restrictions of the deal end, see what's flourished and return to the consumer market. I assumed Jolla but this other entity got it.
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