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Where Is Nokia Now?

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Re: Where Is Nokia Now?

#81

Post by type0 »

agumonkey wrote: post #41
hourislate wrote: post #29

Some of the most talented people I have ever met in my 30 years in IT worked at Nokia (USA and Finland). There was something about the culture there that just made it an incredible place to work for everyone. An environment where people were treated with dignity and respect and rewarded with generosity. The Fins are incredibly hard working and talented along with their US counterparts. I imagine any company that hire…

From education to business, it seems Finland is a special place.

Finland has a great math education, that matters greatly for the quality of the engineers your country can produce.

Re: Where Is Nokia Now?

#83

Post by dolson »

wolfgke wrote: post #70
5_minutes wrote: post #65

I can't help but thinking that Nokia is horribly managed. The amount of inferior products they sold to their loyal audience over and over again, until we were all so fed up with it: different proprietary cables on same-years' devices, stagnant software development and replacing durable with cheap plastics and materials. Much of the nostalgia connected with this brand is from its early phone days, it's been an utter m…

> Much of the nostalgia connected with this brand is from its early phone days, it's been an utter mess since. In the early times there were great phones by Nokia, but also among the later ones there were great ones. Just mention "Nokia N900" on HN and get detailed explanations... ;-)

I'm afraid I cannot let a mention of the N900 pass by without babbling about it. I still use my N900, from 2009, every day. It's a full pocket Linux workstation. I can't believe any company actually made such a thing; it'll never happen again.

Re: Where Is Nokia Now?

#84

Post by pyroinferno »

flyovercow wrote: post #34
hourislate wrote: post #29

Some of the most talented people I have ever met in my 30 years in IT worked at Nokia (USA and Finland). There was something about the culture there that just made it an incredible place to work for everyone. An environment where people were treated with dignity and respect and rewarded with generosity. The Fins are incredibly hard working and talented along with their US counterparts. I imagine any company that hire…

That feeling is called socialism.

OP said Finland and USA.

Also, as far as Socialist countries go, there are plenty that come short when it comes to business (Italy, Spain, Greece,etc...)

Re: Where Is Nokia Now?

#85

Post by acdha »

cakedoggie wrote: post #38
Theodores wrote: post #27

This article confused me on the reality of today's 'Nokia' phones. The recently released and 'back to basics' phones are not legitimate Nokia in my estimation, they are some generic OEM phones with a Nokia label slapped on them. I am not sure why this badge engineering bugs me, to make me think they are not real Nokia. More generally, why is it that badge engineering sometimes is seen as okay and sometimes not? To ta…

Has there been innovation in car brands? Apart from electric batteries, a lot of minor unimportant stuff. Compare that to computers which have changed dramatically in a short amount of time.

That seems like a very limited view: a lot of that “unimportant stuff “ has been massive improvements in safety, durability, fuel economy and emissions, ride quality and comfort, etc.

The other thing to remember is that you're comparing technologies at different parts of their life-cycle: automotive technology matured half a century earlier so it's unsurprising that there's less room for dramatic change, just as the computing market has had periodic plateaus where the annual changes were far less significant to users – how many normal people even know what CPU/GPU they're using?

(and, of course, for awhile they've been moving together as we're seeing manufacturers shipping cars which have things like the ability to stop when a kid jumps in front of the vehicle. That's not just a car thing or just a computer thing but it'll save tens of thousands of lives, which seems a lot more significant than most of what's in an app store)

Re: Where Is Nokia Now?

#86

Post by prions »

I currently work at Nokia/Alcatel-Lucent/Bell Labs/foo and there's a lot of restructuring going on. Lots of layoffs and org changes which is making everyone's head spin and adding a lot of uncertainty into the workplace.

A big part of the Alcatel acquisition was acquiring their customers - in a recent All Hands meeting, Nokia stated they were planning to move away from "nuts and bolts engineering". In America at least.

Re: Where Is Nokia Now?

#87

Post by 5trokerac3 »

wolfspider wrote: post #26

My paranoid brain often thought that Microsoft not only acquired their stake in Nokia for Windows phones but also to control some aspects of Qt as it was quickly unloaded from Nokia after Microsoft entered the picture. A sort of power play which we all saw later on with Xamarin without the feel-good outcome that Xamarin eventually had. Qt Creator is a joy to work with for open source software in my opinion for even j…

> I would imagine in a large enough acquisition like that Qt was probably at the bottom and wasn't even noticed much.

Qt was the UI toolkit for the _Meego_ OS, which Nokia was developing at a time where there was still very much room for a third mobile OS. wolfspider's paranoia has some truth behind it. When MS invested in Nokia and a "former" MS exec became CEO, his first action was to completely kill Meego and announce that Nokia would exclusively make Windows phones, even though Meego was gathering steam. Much of the company walked out of the address that he announced it at.

Re: Where Is Nokia Now?

#88

Post by tpeo »

zeveb wrote: post #77

> As part of the euro zone, Finland was also unable to devalue its currency to stimulate spending. I see this a lot with respect to poorer eurozone countries like Greece. I wonder if it's part of the reason why some U.S. states like West Virginia are (apparently permanently) poor. Would the U.S. economy be more dynamic and productive if each state had its own dollar?

It could be. The part of economics which deals with this stuff is the Optimum Currency Area Theory. Basically, if different regions respond differently to shocks, they might prefer to have different currencies. And apparently someone posted a link on Wikipedia to an article from the Chicago Fed that suggests that there are different response areas in the United States.

Link : http://www.chicagofed.org/digital_assets/publications/workin...

Re: Where Is Nokia Now?

#89

Post by Wildgoose »

zeveb wrote: post #77

> As part of the euro zone, Finland was also unable to devalue its currency to stimulate spending. I see this a lot with respect to poorer eurozone countries like Greece. I wonder if it's part of the reason why some U.S. states like West Virginia are (apparently permanently) poor. Would the U.S. economy be more dynamic and productive if each state had its own dollar?

Quite possibly. The idea is that there is an Optimum Currency Area, i.e. a region over which a single currency makes sense.

Larger countries (including the UK) are not necessarily Optimum Currency Areas but can mask the effects by using fiscal transfers between richer areas (or states) and poorer areas (or states).

Some smaller countries do better sharing a currency even without the fiscal transfers, (such as Switzerland and Luxembourg I believe).

The Euro is a classic example of far too large an area, encompassing widely disparate economies, and without sufficient balancing fiscal transfers - hence the considered opinion of many people that the Euro as it is currently constituted is not viable over a longer time period. To survive, the Euro requires one of: (a) Strong Political Union and Fiscal Transfers (b) The Departure of Weaker Economies (such as Greece) (c) Breakup, into for example a "Northern" Euro and a "Southern" Euro

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimum_currency_area

Re: Where Is Nokia Now?

#90

Post by tunap »

dolson wrote: post #83
wolfgke wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Much of the nostalgia connected with this brand is from its early phone days, it's been an utter mess since. In the early times there were great phones by Nokia, but also among the later ones there were great ones. Just mention "Nokia N900" on HN and get detailed explanations... ;-)

I'm afraid I cannot let a mention of the N900 pass by without babbling about it. I still use my N900, from 2009, every day. It's a full pocket Linux workstation. I can't believe any company actually made such a thing; it'll never happen again.

Am using mine ATM. It may lack "elegant design" and 4g but it makes up for it with usability, physical keyboard, swappable battery & expandable storage. It also can be reassembled and used after most falls up to 20 feet onto solid surfaces(my Nexus 4 failed after dropping from my pants pocket onto carpet). It is the only smart smartphone I have encountered since 2007.
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