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

Microsoft to acquire Nokia

microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 156 posts

Re: Microsoft to acquire Nokia

#131

Post by hga »

dvmmh wrote: post #130
hga wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Key graff: " The average tax rate these companies currently pay to other countries on this income is just 6.9 percent, well below lower the 35 percent statutory U.S. corporate tax rate. " As I recall we (the US) have the highest corporate income taxes in the developed world. It would be a gross dereliction of management's duty to shareholders to repatriate it unless really needed.

No corporation pays 35%. There are far too many loop holes. The US has the highest rates ON THE BOOKS if you take ZERO deductions and write-offs. http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/04/01/1804801/no-ameri...

Trivially falsified (the link):

"Total corporate federal taxes paid fell to 12.1% of profits earned from activities within the U.S. in fiscal 2011, which ended Sept. 30.... And well below the 25.6% companies paid on average from 1987 to 2008."

I wonder just what happened starting in early Federal FY 2009, which started on October 1, 2008. Perhaps this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recession?

Now, when we're talking about seriously profitable companies I don't deny there are tax breaks to be had, some easy, but does anyone think these companies are better off focusing more on financial engineering or software and electrical engineering?

You might compare the parking of cash offshore to Microsoft's buying a $100K Treasury instrument whenever they had too much cash on hand, as their first CFO was horrified, amazed and delighted to discover.

ADDED: is this double taxation? In another HN item on this, it was commented that this parked money has already been subject to local taxes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6321925

I know we do that with personal income taxes, absent a tax treaty with the other nation.

Re: Microsoft to acquire Nokia

#132

Post by rbanffy »

mpyne wrote: post #117
rbanffy wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a direct reply to your comment as well. Sorry if it looks like I am accusing you of being part of a deliberate PR attack on online communities. I still agree, however, with joe_the_user's comment: your claim looks a lot like what an astroturfer would say.

Then maybe you should recalibrate your expectation of what a comment is supposed to say a little bit, as any comment in support of some company's products is going to 'look a lot like what an astroturfer would say'. Astroturfing is only one of many possible motives for a comment being left. We should not be so quick to jump on that as an explanation for anything which doesn't agree with our notions.

> maybe you should recalibrate your expectation of what a comment is supposed to say

Please refer to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6320222 for the reasons I found kyro's comment very PR-like. I expect, and will remain expecting, HN comments to be based on reality.

Re: Microsoft to acquire Nokia

#133

Post by rbanffy »

tanzam75 wrote: post #119
rbanffy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People were saying this a decade ago about the Xbox remember. The Xbox was a failure. The Xbox 360 was better executed than the more ambitious PS3. It succeeded while the PS3 did not do so well, yet the PS3 is far from being a failure. > Microsoft only decided to compete just over two years ago You are ignoring the decade+ behind WindowsCE and Windows Mobile. Microsoft has always been a player in this market.

> You are ignoring the decade+ behind WindowsCE and Windows Mobile. Microsoft has always been a player in this market. It was a very different market that Windows Mobile competed in. A market that emphasized physical keyboards, rather than touchscreens. A market with $200 device subsidies, rather than $400 smartphone subsidies. That market disappeared, and so did Windows Mobile's chances. In fact, every major product…

> It was a very different market that Windows Mobile competed in

It seems you assume Microsoft decided not to compete then. I wonder why they made Windows Mobile then...

> Similarly, the failure of Windows Mobile 6.5 is irrelevant for the purposes of discussing Windows Phone's prospects.

Forgive my lack of faith, but a company that has, consistently and for as long as this market existed, failed to deliver a decent product, even despite the huge mountains of cash spent in developing it, seems a very unlikely competitor now.

Re: Microsoft to acquire Nokia

#134

Post by film42 »

joe_the_user wrote: post #64
kyro wrote: post #23

Great move by Microsoft. This is an acquisition that arguably puts Microsoft mobile capabilities above that of Google's, and closest to Apple's. They're getting industry veterans with great design talent. They're getting a Lumia product that has the best build quality of any non-Apple smart phone. They're acquiring proven channels to access global markets. Both Nokia and Microsoft have been floundering in the mobile…

This is an acquisition that arguably puts Microsoft mobile capabilities above that of Google's, and closest to Apple's. To have this loltastic sentence at the top of hn makes me wonder if MS or some PR has a bunch of shill accounts they roll out for occasions like this. Seriously? As the other reply said, they were already together. And losing. Badly. And hated, broadly. And the reason the windows phone sucks so badl…

Actually, I think M$ just bought themselves a lot of power. Microsoft's achilles heel was always hardware, and Nokia's was software until recently when they started pushing Windows Phone OS.

So the way I see it, M$ just bought a hardware company that already uses M$ software. No brainer.

Re: Microsoft to acquire Nokia

#135

Post by midnitewarrior »

Ives wrote: post #83
orf wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take it you have never used a Windows Phone. The Lumia's Nokia make are well designed and high quality, WP8 isn't that bad at all and will undoubtedly get better in the future. Everyone I've met with a WP device (Which is a lot, a fair percentage of my coursemates own one) is happy with it. And so to escape MS will have to back out of their deal entirely, go back to designing phones and PC OSes separately, and give…

I bought a Lumia 800 as my first smartphone and I'm not quite happy with it. - It lost at least 60% of its value in less than a year (price for a new one dropped by that much) - MS wants me to pay them if I want to build an app to use on my own phone - And after I've paid them I can only put three apps that aren't published on there. If I publish them in the app store and would like to use them myself I have to buy m…

That is to be expected from a first generation device unfortunately. Windows Phone 7 was Microsoft toe-dipping into the mobile space with the Metro UI to see if it could be viable.

While WP 7 was a huge success in this regard, the hardware / platform wasn't designed with a long roadmap set for its future, as in order to advance Windows Phone to WP8, the hardware specs of all of the WP7-generation devices was to be abandoned.

I just upgraded from my HTC WP7 device to a Nokia Lumia 1020, and the phone is amazing. I use Android on my tablet, but I prefer Windows Phone on my phone. FYI, the camera on the Lumia 1020 is as amazing as all the reviews say it is.

Re: Microsoft to acquire Nokia

#136

Post by yulaow »

Aaronontheweb wrote: post #126
cbr wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

less than Apple and Google charge What your parent wants to do, "build an app to use on my own phone", is free on Android.

It's free to build an app and deploy it on your own Windows Phone(s) too - you only have to pay if you want to distribute it through the Windows Store.

It just changed some days ago

Since there, you CAN'T deploy a personal app in your wp8 because you need to unlock it first and to do that you need to have a developer account.

Re: Microsoft to acquire Nokia

#137

Post by avemuri »

sravfeyn wrote: post #112

This news may sound exciting/disappointing to the developed countries, but it is certainly extremely disappointing for people in third-world countries, especially India. It is not at all hyperbole to say 'Nokia played a key role in India's mobile penetration'. They sell affordable, reliable and rigid phones for rough use in rural places of India. And I think it's true for most other countries like Africa. On the othe…

The low end android sets made by Micromax, Lava etc. are priced very affordably (Rs3000-5000/$50-80). And the market is still flooded with even cheaper feature phones. I don't see how the power of poor people is diminished.

Re: Microsoft to acquire Nokia

#138

Post by Steko »

tanzam75 wrote: post #127
Steko wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RIM's two selling points still seem as relevant as they did last week for MS: patents and the loyal but shrinking customer base.

How loyal would the customer base be if Blackberry switched to Windows Phone? Would they be any more loyal than Symbian users when Nokia did the transition? This is why I mention only the patents. Those are clearly valuable. The customer base is debatable.

If Blackberry goes into liquidation the customer base breaks more or less like the market and WP get's .1% market share. Otherwise if they buy BB and can hang onto half of those customers. That would almost double WP's market share. Those customers are worth more to also ran WP than anyone else.

Re: Microsoft to acquire Nokia

#139

Post by brokenparser »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #123
brokenparser wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM doesn't count because that company is almost as old as the invention of the computer itself.

IBM is actually older than the computer, it was founded in 1911. (Unless you count Babbage's machine.)

That's almost exactly what I wanted to write until I read the definition of his analytical engine on Wikipedia. Although IBM says they formed through a merger of three companies in 1911, it's origins started in the 1880s and I count that as the true beginning of IBM. Note that in 1911 the company was called CTR and they kept that name until 1924, so either way I don't think 1911 accurately reflects the founding year of IBM.
Post reply on HN