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1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

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Re: 1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

#51

Post by rexf »

protomyth wrote: post #36
pclark wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than continuing with Symbian and having to lay off all the employees in a few years time.

Is Symbian really that bad or is it a case of not cool/new?

Symbian has not been doing well, and their fans won't support it forever.

Prominent Symbian enthusiasts (Symbian-Guru) on giving up the platform:

(engadget summary) http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/01/symbian-guru-shuts-down-s...

(same story summarized by TC) http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/01/self-declared-longtime-noki...

Re: 1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

#52

Post by jarek »

mfukar wrote: post #43
jarek wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am assuming the board talked about something like this happening - even directly with Elop - before hiring him. It's not like it's totally surprising.

It certainly surprised the Nokia staff. Wasn't it communicated inside the company? If so, why? I bet the answers to those questions are very interesting.

It's surprising to a degree, yes. But less surprising than if he was to announce, say, that Nokia is pivoting to become an oil company. He came from Microsoft on a rescue mission to a company where software was widely acknowledged to be the biggest problem.

Re: 1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

#53

Post by dfox »

protomyth wrote: post #36
pclark wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than continuing with Symbian and having to lay off all the employees in a few years time.

Is Symbian really that bad or is it a case of not cool/new?

It's certainly "case of not cool/new".

Re: 1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

#54

Post by kjhghjkjh »

arethuza wrote: post #10
marshray wrote: post #9

Let's see 1. Hire someone from Microsoft to run the company 2. He says "our platform is burning, we have to do something drastic" which most people interpret as "prepare to come up with a strategy and fight like hell to win". 3. Guess what, he already had something in mind! It was "throw out our current reasonably successful development efforts and become a licensee of Microsoft's failed platform instead". And piss o…

"for fear of arrest" Whether you agree with the decision or not, nothing about it sounds in the least bit criminal.

Might be if he has a bunch of MSFT options - particularly if those options were tied to the performance of the Wp7 platform.

Re: 1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

#55

Post by enjo »

halo wrote: post #45
marshray wrote: post #9

Let's see 1. Hire someone from Microsoft to run the company 2. He says "our platform is burning, we have to do something drastic" which most people interpret as "prepare to come up with a strategy and fight like hell to win". 3. Guess what, he already had something in mind! It was "throw out our current reasonably successful development efforts and become a licensee of Microsoft's failed platform instead". And piss o…

It's amazing how hyperbolic people are being about this, presumably out of blind Microsoft hatred. Pretty much everyone agreed that Nokia's Symbian/MeeGo strategy was a failure, that Nokia were quickly losing marketshare and that they needed a new OS. The only options were Android and Windows Phone 7. WebOS would have been a better fit than either, but that option had already been and gone. I think there are compelli…

I'm not sure everyone here fully appreciates just how bad things are at Nokia. It's been a LONG time coming. Their software development structure, from top-to-bottom, is just awful. You can see it in Symbian (which was developed independently but with much the same issue).

I have to tread lightly here, as I don't want to get anybody in trouble... but I can assure you that the new CEO is doing very much the right thing. Software development is not a core competency (or even a competency) at that company. It's just not. I'm not surprised that about half of tampere left, they are going to be hard hit by this. They should be.. the quality of the work just hasn't cut it.

Their best hope to survive today is to tie themselves to a much healthier eco-system. I would have thought Android to be the very logical choice... but the Microsoft move certainly makes sense.

Re: 1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

#56

Post by shareme »

marshray wrote: post #9

Let's see 1. Hire someone from Microsoft to run the company 2. He says "our platform is burning, we have to do something drastic" which most people interpret as "prepare to come up with a strategy and fight like hell to win". 3. Guess what, he already had something in mind! It was "throw out our current reasonably successful development efforts and become a licensee of Microsoft's failed platform instead". And piss o…

reasonably successful? Losing 40%points in market share is success? I am of course talking about the full Symbian time line not just currently

Re: 1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

#57

Post by Groxx »

stanleydrew wrote: post #48
bvi wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stock market isn't predicting anything. It just believes given the current information and Nokia's decision, $NOK's value deserves to be lower now than what it was prior. It's just a current snapshot - no indication of the company's future whatsoever.

Well technically a company's stock value is supposed to represent the discounted present value of all future profits. So you can interpret a reduction in stock price as an indication that the market expects profits to be lower in the future.

PR scandals do that. They also frequently have little bearing on a company's profits, unless it's sufficiently nasty to warrant significant numbers of boycotters for longer than the average consumer memory is.

Stocks are nowhere near that deterministic. When people think others will jump ship, they try to jump first, to lose the least money. When people think others will want buy, they buy first or sell higher, because they can get away with it. There's more games theory than future prediction if you ignore long-term investors, as they make up a microscopic amount of the daily trading and thus the daily prices of stocks.

Re: 1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

#58

Post by eli »

xbryanx wrote: post #21

If I understand the garbled translation, the Nokia workers took advantage of extremely flexible work time to stage a coordinated, but totally non-rule-breaking walk out. I've never heard of this sort of half-strike method, but it's interesting. Is this something that is common in Europe or Scandinavian countries where a more flexible work schedule is common?

Workers in the United States sometimes stage "sick outs" where everyone calls in sick on the same day, especially if they're in jobs where they are prohibited by law or contract from striking.

Coordinated work slow-downs are another example of a "half-strike"

Re: 1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

#59

Post by joh6nn »

adolph wrote: post #39
marshray wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An executive switches from company M to competitor N then abruptly throws much of N's development investment in the trash and signs a deal to license all of it from M instead, it smells funny. I'm not saying anything actually is wrong, I don't know enough about it to care. But what I do see is Nokia being a big employer and part of national pride for Finland. This will likely become an issue in politics there. They'd…

Doesn't that pretty well describe the reasonably successful approach Apple used in moving to Mac OS X? Sure there are differences: Jobs was at Apple before; Apple bought Next; .... There are also similarities in that the MS/Nokia partnership represents a pivot from the current course that has no migration path other than total change.

no. Apple bought Next, they didn't license tech from them. Nokia is licensing tech from MS. those are very different circumstances indeed.
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