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posted by chromas on Wednesday September 12 2018, @09:35AM   Printer-friendly

From The Register:

Five years have passed but the wounds left by the acquisition and dismemberment of Europe's biggest technology company at the hands of Microsoft remain open.

Nokia today is a considerable multinational, of course, booking €23.15bn in FY2017. But that's around half of what Nokia was at its peak in 2007 (€51.6bn). It's the intangibles that have been lost: Nokia was a trailblazer, the speaker of a global language that could sell electronics to every class or culture, and the pride of Finland – a nation most Americans couldn't find on a map before the 1990s. Many probably still can't.

(On arriving in San Francisco in 1999, I remember my Chinese-American buildings manager, a great technology enthusiast, telling me: "I love Nokia – I love all Japanese technology.")

Almost all of the 32,000 employees of Nokia's phone division subsequently lost their jobs, and CEO Stephen Elop was personally vilified as the agent in an elaborate conspiracy theory.

[...] The axe soon started swinging.

It was painful. Nadella had wanted to cut the fat from Microsoft even without the addition of Nokia's phone unit – which included not just the smartphones but the dumbphones that Microsoft never wanted, too, as well as manufacturing plants in South Korea, China, Hungary, India, Mexico and Vietnam.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday September 12 2018, @11:29AM (3 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 12 2018, @11:29AM (#733557)

    a nation most Americans couldn't find on a map

    Boomer confirmed. Its like when boomers and older talk unironically about "telephone books" in the current year.

    I was thinking about amateur radio and maps and how I learned a lot of geography as a kid by "talking" (well, morse, or digital, mostly) over the radio. I would suspect no one younger than gen-x has ever had the experience of looking up a location in an index, getting some weird coordinate system result like "H-6" then visually search sector H-6 of the map until you find Finland. I haven't done that in decades, so for kids younger than "decades" I suspect they've never found a location without a digital search box.

    I remember when I was in the military long before Google and us kids were not good at things like military grid square coordinates; I can't imagine how bad they must be now a days.

    Culturally its getting weird to watch old movies. I should ask my kids what they think about a movie where the plot revolves around visiting a pay phone (whats that, dad?) and ripping out a page of the phone book (whats that, dad?), then the character drives a stick shift (whats that, dad?).

    Some of the best content is pre-smartphone movies. Innovation in phone design stopped at the release of the iphone but for movies and TV previous to that its interesting how fast phone fashions varied over the years.

    Geeze when I was a kid I remember my parents had a hard cover (worldbook? nat geo?) atlas. For kids under 40, an atlas is kind of like yesterday's google map slightly obsolete, printed out and sent to you tomorrow, in the same sense of the newspaper being like a slightly obsolete physically printed out clickbait website site. Anyway it was interesting to look at the atlas maps and kinda daydream when I was a kid. One of my kids was doing the modern equivalent using google maps satellite view to look at the great pyramids of egypt. Street view mode of the pyramids is pretty wild too.

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  • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Wednesday September 12 2018, @11:59AM

    by Aiwendil (531) on Wednesday September 12 2018, @11:59AM (#733566) Journal

    The thing with grids and google maps.. Here is a fun thing, try to ask the kids to name three cities in USA or Europe that is on the same latitude as an arbitrary city in Europe or USA respective.

    The savvier kids might notice the long/lat in the urls of the google map and brute force it, but beyond that - yikes.

    Now remember how often you used to do that very same thing on the globe or in the atlas...

  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:23PM

    by Gaaark (41) on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:23PM (#733871) Journal

    Sharing music by buying an album, putting it on the record player and putting the cassette recorder microphone in between the speakers.

    AND THEN! And then we got a record player WITH a cassette player that recorded the music directly without speaker shit!

    Ah, good times!

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @10:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @10:57AM (#734134)

    One of my kids was doing the modern equivalent using google maps satellite view to look at the great pyramids of egypt. Street view mode of the pyramids is pretty wild too.

    Millennials use Google Street View to look at the Great Pyramids of Egypt when they're actually at the Great Pyramids of Egypt.