Microsoft to acquire Nokia • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft to acquire Nokia

#151

Post by gtirloni » Wed, Sep 04, 2013, 12:25 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #110

berntb wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Nothing will change as a result of this. A good guess is that the enthusiasm at e.g. Samsung for making Windows Phones have gone down quite a bit... Windows Phones seems to be an internal Microsoft thing now, Xbox style.

> the enthusiasm at e.g. Samsung for making Windows Phones have gone down quite a bit... It's probably part of their IP licensing deal about the secret patent list Android violates. They pay less per Android phone if and only if they build Windows Phone devices.

How would that make any sense? Microsoft would be essentially paying Samsung (by not collecting licensing fees) to just keep 1-2 phones that barely sell / are available in the WP8 ecosystem. For what? Just to say "the biggest smartphone vendor uses our software"? How does that help anything?

Re: Microsoft to acquire Nokia

#152

Post by gtirloni » Wed, Sep 04, 2013, 12:33 PM UTC

besquared wrote: post #56

yalogin wrote: post #45

Motorola and now Nokia, the last of the previous era big wigs have fallen. 13 years ago Lucent, Motorola, Ericsson, Sun, Nortel were huge. Now they are all gone. Even HP, Dell are no longer leading. That is a really short time span for a company to be on top of the world and disappear. Is this the expected life span of a tech company?

Specialized hardware was always kind of a stopgap. Even now you can see networking companies facing the double threat of virtualized networking in software. Software is eating the world as Andreessen famously stated. As to the life span of tech companies I think it will only get shorter. One thing I find interesting is that it's difficult for humans (including myself) to really internalize the overall effects of comp…

We might not be enjoying that much growth in the next century (or we might, who knows).

http://blog.ted.com/2013/04/23/the-future-of-work-and-innova...

Re: Microsoft to acquire Nokia

#153

Post by gtirloni » Wed, Sep 04, 2013, 12:41 PM UTC

nextw33k wrote: post #74

harrytuttle wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erm, they still are and will be in the future. they bagged the guys who designed them as well.

You might be unfamiliar with what happens after a corporate merger. Usually there is a decision to remove duplication within the corporation. If you were Elop next year running MS in Redmond, who would you lay off? The people in your building or those in the opposite side of the world in Finland? Update: On a side note, manufacturing usually stays until the machines are no longer worth using. Then they shut the place…

On the software front, that already happened when Nokia decided to use WP8 and ditch their own software.

On the hardware front, MS might actually enjoy having more hardware engineers to help with the Surface/Xbox stuff.

HR, payroll, etc might be not that safe though.

Re: Microsoft to acquire Nokia

#154

Post by gtirloni » Wed, Sep 04, 2013, 12:45 PM UTC

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…

Motorola is building featurephones until this day. Lots of them. Nokia is not going to abandon that market (India's) anytime soon while they are selling there. I would not worry about it too much.

Re: Microsoft to acquire Nokia

#155

Post by freehunter » Wed, Sep 04, 2013, 2:06 PM UTC

tomflack wrote: post #98

orf wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think WP8 is excellent, I meant that it is not as bad as he seems to think it is. Its also not all doom and gloom for WP, my employee (a large multinational company, thousands of employees) is switching all its employee phones from Blackberry to WP8. Even if its consumer market isn't that big you have to remember that a lot of the business world runs on Microsoft's software and it all ties together very nicely with…

The only way that Windows Phone ties to Microsoft's enterprise offerings better than iPhone is the name. Literally everything else can be done on iOS, often better.

Is the iPhone version of Office better than the Windows Phone version? At least the WP version doesn't require Office 365.

Re: Microsoft to acquire Nokia

#156

Post by count » Thu, Sep 05, 2013, 1:14 PM UTC

tanzam75 wrote: post #120

count wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Microsoft, like IBM and ATT before it, was permanently disallowed to do certain things? I understand that nobody is/has gone after them (yet?), but is that just prosecutorial oversight/prioritization issues, or is there actually nothing wrong?

Yes. For example, Microsoft is permanently enjoined from restricting OEM crapware preloads. OEMs are allowed to preload whatever they wish on top of Windows. However, it's perfectly fine for Microsoft to bundle an app store -- so long as an OEM is also allowed to load its own app store. (As Lenovo is doing.) As for Windows RT and Windows Phone, Microsoft can do anything it wants. When the news came out that Windows R…

Thanks for the explanation!