Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

uk.businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 166 posts

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

#131

Post by jtrtoo »

MrTonyD wrote: post #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…

How is two individuals doing what makes sense for themselves not a free market? Free market doesn't mean altruistic

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

#132

Post by Zigurd »

joecool1029 wrote: post #93
Zigurd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the view that it would have been better without Microsoft, I'd recommend Tomi Ahonen's blog. I agree with him to the extent that, in hindsight, it would be hard to make more destructive management decisions than what actually happened. The people inside Nokia often seemed to be trapped in a nightmare. It was a sad, hollowed-out place well before it was sold to Microsoft. Stephen Elop killed several projects that…

Are you kidding me? Both BB10 and Harmattan/Meego were far ahead of iOS and Android when they were released. There's a lot of arguments you can make, but they both have created modern OS's. People think of BBOS and Symbian but they were in the roadmap to be replaced. Where they failed it was assuming their market leads at the time would allow them to take their time deploying a solid OS while the app ecosystems for i…

It's questionable whether QNX has any advantages over a Linux kernel anymore, and BB10's application APIs were unremarkable. I've used Meego, and it's a nice tablet Linux, but it has nothing like the userland innovation of Android, with a unified managed language runtime for both apps and system middleware. Both Android and iOS created new app APIs, and new UI/graphics stacks on top of open source kernels, and new multimedia stacks. They both went much farther than "a nice tablet Linux."

While Nokia had the resources to succeed in smartphones, and a unique market position with S40 that would have been even stronger but for some of Elop's decisions, I don't think one can claim Meego would have been a slam-dunk. None of the efforts to mobile-ize Linux that have been short of the kind of rethink of the userland that went into Android have gone very far. Tizen, Jolla, Meego, and Canonical's mobile products are all variations on the theme of incremental changes to Linux, all with about the same outcomes.

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

#134

Post by xiaoma »

x0x0 wrote: post #119
twblalock wrote: post #115

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.

Xiaomi and Huawei aren't Android competitors. They run Android on their phones!

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

#135

Post by fsloth »

chflags wrote: post #90

"... linux laptops were being reformatted to run windows." Microsoft/Windows is a cancer. Ballmer once said Linux was a cancer. He later retracted, after it was well-known Microsoft itself uses Linux. There's nothing more pathetic than when you see Microsoft's businesspeople or lawyers at conferences all faithfully using Windows, as if there was no other choice, and rambling on about how their products can solve any…

Is your argument that Microsoft is evil because not all people who use computers are actually interested in how they work?

It's not apparent to me why business people or lawyers should be also computer science aficionados. Should I be a telecoms engineer to use a phone or a combustion specialist to drive a car?

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

#136

Post by lvs »

jtrtoo wrote: post #131
MrTonyD wrote: post #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…

How is two individuals doing what makes sense for themselves not a free market? Free market doesn't mean altruistic

He can't say it outright. He's saying they were regularly manipulating the markets in which they operated in an anticompetitive manner. That's one of the main mechanisms by which free markets fail.

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

#137

Post by rue »

jtrtoo wrote: post #131
MrTonyD wrote: post #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…

How is two individuals doing what makes sense for themselves not a free market? Free market doesn't mean altruistic

Freedom requires transparency.

That’s what free means. Not “companies free to do whatever they please”.

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

#138

Post by fsloth »

MrTonyD wrote: post #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…

"People who think "free market" is real are both naive and arrogant."

I think in general people - for and against laissez faire economics - confuse free markets with fair.

Free market proponents make the error of asuming that all free is also fair and decent and their opponents presume everything should be first and foremost fair (rather than efficient).

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

#139

Post by Yhippa »

user11768536 wrote: post #77
pjmlp wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they don't want to loose their face? You should follow this tweeter discussion from Sinofsky https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/733699065763004416 It wasn't the difference between desktop and mobile stacks that pushed most away, rather the breaking changes between WP 7, WP 8, WP 8.1 and WP 10. As explained recently on the Ars Technica article, http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/onecor... And…

>And as a developer I cannot really get why WP 10 is still so buggy (according to the reports) versus the already stable 8.1. Microsoft eliminated QA as a job role and laid off all of its QA staff in 2014, with rather predictable consequences for both Windows 10 and WP 10. Plenty of articles about it if you Google around. If anything, it's surprising that things have turned out as well for them as they have.

This is hyperbole right?

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

#140

Post by winterswift »

xiaoma wrote: post #134
x0x0 wrote: 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.

Xiaomi and Huawei aren't Android competitors. They run Android on their phones!

Perhaps they meant that foreign (specifically Chinese) competition has done much better globally than those companies currently holding most of the US market.
Post reply on HN