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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Bill Gates has said that he thinks everyone would be using Windows Mobile right now and not Android if it weren't for his distractions and the antitrust investigation that his company got caught into.
"There's no doubt that the antitrust lawsuit was bad for Microsoft, and we would have been more focused on creating the phone operating system and so instead of using Android today you would be using Windows Mobile," Gates claimed during his speech at The New York Times' DealBook Conference.
[...] Microsoft cofounder also revealed that the company was almost launching Windows Mobile on a Motorola handset but missed out on it by a few months, giving Android an unbeatable advantage. While there were a lot of factors, Gates says it's this 3-months delay that led to Android's supremacy and the downfall of any mobile efforts by Microsoft.
"We were just three months too late on a release Motorola would have used on a phone, so yes it's a winner takes all game."
Related:
Nadella: Microsoft Isn't Killing Windows Phone and Will Go It Alone
Steve Balmer: Use Android to Save Windows Phone
Microsoft Breaks its Windows 10 Mobile Upgrade Promise
Microsoft Axes 2,850 More Windows Phone, Sales Staff
Windows Phone Dies, Aged 6
It's Been 5 Years Already, Let's Gawp at Microsoft and Nokia's Bloodbath
Microsoft is Embracing Android as the Mobile Version of Windows
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:05AM
From the Microsoft-destroyed-my-dept. dept.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:35AM (2 children)
How could anyone not find Finland? I mean, it hangs down behind Europe's wang, so it's obviously Europe's sack.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:55AM (1 child)
It does take balls to live right next to Russia and all the BS that blows out of there.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by tangomargarine on Wednesday September 12 2018, @02:49PM
It takes balls to get invaded [wikipedia.org] by Russia in WWII, put up a hell of a fight, then invade them back [wikipedia.org] afterwards.
Then when WW2 was mostly over, they had to fight a third war [wikipedia.org] because their former German ~allies wouldn't leave their northern regions.
Plus, yeah, the whole Cold War. They actually have a term for that: Finlandization [wikipedia.org]
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:56AM (5 children)
...for a dagger in the heart quite naturally ends one's life. Indeed.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:36PM (4 children)
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)
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
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.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @05:33AM
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
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].
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday September 12 2018, @11:29AM (3 children)
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.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Wednesday September 12 2018, @11:59AM
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
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
Millennials use Google Street View to look at the Great Pyramids of Egypt when they're actually at the Great Pyramids of Egypt.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @01:36PM
Nokia is done because they are Finnish.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Informative) by tangomargarine on Wednesday September 12 2018, @02:41PM (2 children)
https://brandonrobshaw.wordpress.com/2013/12/24/gawking-and-gawping/ [wordpress.com]
Damn Brits with their screwy words
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @11:01AM (1 child)
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).
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday September 13 2018, @05:53PM
We call that "rubbernecking" in the states (or at least the midwest).
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Wednesday September 12 2018, @02:43PM (1 child)
What I'd like to know is, what happened to Nokia's extensive technology patents portfolio? A lot of "mobile phone stuff" was invented by their researchers.
It was "sold" to Microsoft and then to some obscure small video message company? (I probably have this wrong)
Has it resurfaced yet, in the meantime?
(Score: 2) by slap on Thursday September 13 2018, @04:49AM
Nokia kept the patents and licensed them to Microsoft.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:32PM (5 children)
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)
Even without resources, Nokia's smartphone division still did a great job. N900 > *
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday September 13 2018, @10:34AM (1 child)
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
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)
I'm still using my Nokia N800.
(Score: 2) by dw861 on Saturday September 15 2018, @09:36PM
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.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:03PM (2 children)
If we assume that Nokia knew that the phone arm was doomed, selling out to MS and pivoting the remaining operations to other areas without being responsible for downsizing costs was a pretty canny move.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday September 12 2018, @08:10PM
Ok, that is a different thought on this. Blame shift. They certainly seem to have survived in some form, certainly in better shape than BlackBerry and lets not even discuss the sad fate of Palm. So yeah, I'll buy it.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:26PM
Yup. All attempts to compete with Android and iOS have failed or been non-starters. See Tizen, Sailfish OS, Firefox OS. And the Android manufacturers are in a crowded market with low margins and a lot of competitors. Those that aren't in the top 5 or so are competing for crumbs. And less crumbs, since the market is becoming saturated and people are using their phones longer [bloomberg.com].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:29PM (2 children)
Elop wanted Windows Phone inside Nokia and didn't want to even consider an alternative. There are multiple proofs of that. For example when the N9 he said "even if it's a success we won't sell more of them (Meego)". And I thought wtf is this guy saying? If people tell you that they want to but something you sell it to them.
(Score: 2) by eravnrekaree on Thursday September 13 2018, @12:52AM (1 child)
I doubt meego would have been a success. The days of each smartphone have its own ecosystem are gone due to the compatibility that Android brings. Windows Phone was slightly better than Meego, since it was already produced by Microsoft, and therefore didnt eat up more Nokia resources with another in house OS that would go nowhere, but not saying much because its nearly impossible to take on Android it having become so entrenched.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday September 13 2018, @10:36AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves