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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: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:32PM (5 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:32PM (#733689) Journal

    Ballmer laughed at the iPhone. Then completely missed the mobile devices revolution.

    Suddenly realizing it was all real, and a threat to the monopoly, Microsoft needed to dominate this new market -- as any monopolist does.

    Injecting Nokia's great hardware into Windows Phone might be just the thing to make it attractive enough to both developers and customers. So convince developers that they must invest in developing for Windows Phone 7. Even though there aren't any customers, there will be! Then in Microsoft fashion, abandon Windows Phone 7 and convince developers that the new incompatible Windows Phone 8 is the great thing! Meanwhile, there are no apps for customers, and no customers for developers to want to build apps for. So Nokia's hardware isn't selling in big numbers.

    There is another place to assign some blame.

    Nokia had two internal factions, both fighting each other for resources. The traditional dumb phone folks with their successful products. But lacking an OS to compete in the new smartphone market. And Nokia's smartphone folks who could make smart phones, but didn't get resources. I remember seeing things like the Nokia 770 linux tablet long ago and thinking how great that was.

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

    by KiloByte (375) on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:12PM (#733864)

    Even without resources, Nokia's smartphone division still did a great job. N900 > *

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    Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday September 13 2018, @10:34AM (1 child)

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday September 13 2018, @10:34AM (#734119) Homepage
      I'm sure I've said this before, but thank you for expressing such opinions. It's the product I've worked on that I'm most proud of (Linux kernel dev, touch-screen and boot-time optimisation were my thangs). I still use my n900. My g/f still uses hers.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 2) by etherscythe on Friday September 14 2018, @04:34PM

        by etherscythe (937) on Friday September 14 2018, @04:34PM (#734890) Journal

        Love my N900, bought a couple upsized batteries and kept it going like 4 years until I needed modern app support for a new job. Still have it as a backup. Still missing the hardware keyboard.

        --
        "Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Thursday September 13 2018, @12:21PM (1 child)

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 13 2018, @12:21PM (#734184) Homepage Journal

    I'm still using my Nokia N800.

    • (Score: 2) by dw861 on Saturday September 15 2018, @09:36PM

      by dw861 (1561) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 15 2018, @09:36PM (#735437) Journal

      Yes, wonderful. I'm guessing that you have replaced the battery quite a few times. The phone that I carry around every day is a Nokia 3390.