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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: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:36PM (4 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:36PM (#733691) Journal

    After the sheer number of companies destroyed in the wake of Microsoft, how could Nokia have expected the same thing to happen to them? Maybe they would be the exception?

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  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by eravnrekaree on Thursday September 13 2018, @12:56AM (3 children)

    by eravnrekaree (555) on Thursday September 13 2018, @12:56AM (#733938)

    I dont think Microsoft really killed Nokia, they were already doing poorly with Meego which would have been a dead end. Maybe Microsoft even saved the company by cutting off any more waste on developing Meego.

    • (Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday September 13 2018, @04:19AM

      by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 13 2018, @04:19AM (#734011)

      I would have loved to have a Lumia 1020 with Android. Their best phones were Windows Phone 8 only and practically DOA. Certainly dead now, only 4 years later.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @05:33AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @05:33AM (#734038)

      Nokia/Microsoft announced that the n9 and n950 were unsupported phones that would never receive updates *before* they went on sale (only sold to satisfy a contractual requirement with Intel; their development partner on meego). The n950 even came without a hardware warranty. The n9 and n950 still outsold the first gen Nokia windows phones. Seems there was at least a greater demand for meego than for the trash fire that was windows on a phone.

      Though I wish they had stuck with Maemo. It was rough around the edges when released, but it was a hell of a lot less frustrating to use than Android. And, it was based on Debian which IMO is far superior to the RH base for meego. I also loved that it ran X. E.g., I could xforward the addressbook/dialer app over ssh and enter contacts with the full-size keyboard/display of my laptop. The reverse worked fine too.

    • (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Thursday September 13 2018, @06:16AM

      by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 13 2018, @06:16AM (#734049) Journal

      I dont think Microsoft really killed Nokia, ...

      Of course everyone is entitled to their own opinions, right or wrong.

      ... they were already doing poorly with Meego which would have been a dead end. Maybe Microsoft even saved the company by cutting off any more waste on developing Meego.

      However, you are not entitled to your own facts or to lie, however common it may be for M$ shills to lie. Nokia was doing great [seekingalpha.com] when Elop went out of his way to kill it for his masters in Redmond. The MeeGo was getting very positive reviews [blogs.com] and their existing Linux-based phones were also getting better reviews than the iPhone.

      If you want to place blame, place it on the board which appears to have operated illegally. They lied about Elop having a standard contract when in reality they had added a $25 million personal bonus [blogs.com] to it on the condition that he sell Nokia to M$. The only way for that to happen would be for him to bring the price down by collapsing the company. He did so and even sold off the headquarters. He did it so spectacularly that the industry even refers to the combination of the Ratner Effect and Osborne Effect as the Elop Effect [wikipedia.org].

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