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It's Been 5 Years Already, Let's Gawp at Microsoft and Nokia's Bloodbath

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

mrpg writes:

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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Original Submission

• "Gawp"? "Gawp"? (Score: 2, Informative) by tangomargarine on Wednesday September 12 2018, @02:41PM (2 children)

  by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday September 12 2018, @02:41PM (#733614)

  https://brandonrobshaw.wordpress.com/2013/12/24/gawking-and-gawping/ [wordpress.com]

  A little-remarked difference between British and American English is that we say gawp and they say gawk, both words meaning to stare at something in a slack-jawed way. Obviously these words are variants of the same root. I have a feeling that gawp may be the original form, because it is more similar to gape (actually these words form part of one of of those alliterative groups I’ve written about before – gape, gawp, gaze). The word gawk is used much more in American English than gawp is used in British English, however. It’s not an uncommon word in the US, and there’s a well-known satirical New York blog called The Gawker. It’s fairly obvious, I think, that gawk will replace gawp in Britain in the long run.

  Damn Brits with their screwy words

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  "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"

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• Re:"Gawp"? Re:"Gawp"? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @11:01AM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @11:01AM (#734135)

  As a snaggle-toothed, emotionally repressed Brit, I would like to mention that 'gawking' seems already to have become the word of choice in England to describe a specific type of gawping - that of slowing down to look at traffic accidents (hence causing traffic congestion in both directions, including on the carriageway on which the accident didn't happen).

  Parent

  • Re:"Gawp"? (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday September 13 2018, @05:53PM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday September 13 2018, @05:53PM (#734357)

    We call that "rubbernecking" in the states (or at least the midwest).

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    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"

    Parent