Microsoft is cutting 1,000 jobs in Finland as it stops phone production
uk.businessinsider.com
uk.businessinsider.com
I asked one of the project managers: "why, will it really change that much for us, I mean, there's hope right?"
they responded: "This is a takeover, I've seen it before, they're just not calling it that- they'll kill MeeGO in it's crib.. and for us, it's adapt or die".
By the end of the second week (Elop did an eloquent speech about the future of Meego) all the really senior technical experts were working for Intel despite Elop saying "they just want to sell chips" and being generally derogatory to Intel), all the designers and senior management went to Jolla (which tried to enter a market which is fairly dominated already as a startup), myself, I was fired.. and everyone else is still running the ghost ship, I wasn't a large fan of microsofts products going in to Nokia, which is why I liked Maemo/MeeGO for the phone and I could use Linux at work- but this move cemented them as assholes in my mind.
Nothing they do nowadays for good PR is going to change my mind of how surreptitiously they took over nokia and sent it into it's death spiral. Microsoft really loves to own and eventually destroy Nordic companies. (skype, minecraft, nokia) - lets see what they do with TeacherGaming.
Even years after the iPhone came out, Nokia outsold Apple, had a bigger R&D budget and a bigger foothold in practically every market except North America.
Smartphones outsold feature (dumb) phones only in 2013, five years after the iPhone came out. When did Nokia slip to 3rd place by number of sold devices? Q1 2015.
There was time, just no will.
Yes but who had higher profits? That's the real factor. Outselling by itself is meaningless if your margins are poor.
I can't agree more. Few people remember the Nokia 770 was released almost 2 years ahead of the iPhone. With a bit of polish it could have grown into a fantastic product line. In fact, the N9 was pretty much a masterpiece.
For some reason that I don't understand, they continued to push Symbian, and those phones were not good. I remember thinking, either push further on the MeeGo stuff or drop it and move to Android. They did neither and suffered for it.
Of course, as a platform for Web browsing, and particularly for app development, Symbian was not good.
But I still miss the phone functionality of my E71, or the Symbian devices I had before it.
So in other words - they were great phones, but terrible smartphones? I fully agree.
Android or iPhone could do the same technically, but my employer can no longer use it. The company would give all data about meetings to Google or Apple. It's an absolute no-no.
Thus I sometimes forget my meetings, as the phone no longer reminds me.
Also, the alarm clock of Symbian was great, and i could depend on it. Even if you turned the phone off, it would wake you up. I'm nervous about trusting any Android device to wake me up in the morning if I have to catch a plane or a train (and I understand it's the same with iPhone).
Talking is one of my least-used functions on my Android phone. I use it far, far more for texting, apps, internet, navigation, games, photos, and even visual voicemail than I do for talking. I might have a handful of calls a week on it. A phone that's great for talking and sucks for all the other things would be mostly useless to me.
I owned one of these. It was an ugly, slow, expensive brick. I'd much rather use a Treo from that period. The iPhone was a wonderfully svelte device compared to either. I don't think you're appreciating how badly Apple beat up the Palm and Nokia competition back then. It was absolutely no contest and a disruption that was badly needed. Holding up the 770 as some under-appreciated jewel is fairly ridiculous. It was comically out of touch with consumers.
Apple has 94% of the profits in mobile: http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/15/11/16/apple-inc-n...
We will never know for sure by Nokia shareholders might have gotten an amazing deal out of going Windows Mobile and getting acquired by Microsoft. As for the employees, this would have happened either way with how badly the company was prepared for smartphones.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/27/11523616/samsung-earnings-...
OTOH, nobody can copy an iphone because nobody but apple can put ios on a phone.
The other difference is quality. I have no faith Huawei can make a phone at Samsung's quality level. Where are they going to get the screen from anyway? Or the camera? Those components aren't easy to copy; those things are state-of-the-art.
Finally, even Apple can't copy Samsung. They still have crappy screens, though the next iPhone is finally supposed to be getting a superAMOLED screen. WTF took them so long? Simple: Apple isn't a hardware manufacturer, they have to contract stuff out, whereas Samsung is a hardware maker, and makes state-of-the-art screens themselves.
Updates. Updates, updates, updates.
I've come to trust Apple. Why? Because my iPad 2 still gets OS and security updates. Because my iPhone 5s still gets OS and security updates.
Apple has demonstrated that they support their tablets and phones at least 4 or 5 years. That's why I'll buy another Apple tablet. That's why I'll buy another Apple phone.
Why would I buy an Android phone or tablet that's unsupported and abandoned after less than two years in many cases? Where security updates (think Stagefright) take months and months to get patched, if they ever get patched at all on your device? Android devices simply aren't safe.
Even the Nexus devices can't compete with Apple on longevity of support.
Android manufacturers could convince me to try their products if they'd simply patch them in a reasonable time and update them for a reasonable amount of time. I would define reasonable as at least 4 full years after purchase. For that, I'd pay Apple like premiums.
Until that time comes, my only viable option is Apple.
But to be honest we also had our share of alienating developers, it wasn't only MS fault.
First the Symbian development was a mess with the Metrowerk tools and that Symbian C++ dialect, then came PIPS, followed by Carbide (Eclipse based).
Followed by the whole mess of open sourcing Symbian and closing it again.
Or the Symbian model moving from Symbian C++ / PIPS to Qt, also in the middle this process.
Maemo was GTK, but then everyone should move to Qt. Better not lets also move the OS into Meego.
I remember asking why the Nokia 770 didn't had a GSM modem and the team saying to me that wasn't the market they wanted to target. When they did the usual roadshow of upcoming devices.
Nokia was already quite bad in terms of relationship with app developers before Elop came into the party, due to the internal politics.
Of course, the famous burning platform memo was just the last way to alienate developers that were slowly accepting the new Qt based model for Symbian, after all the previous pain points.
Shame - personally I think people would have bought a Nokia Android phone. They were renowned for their hardware.
1) go all-in with their own Symbian/Qt/MeeGo strategy
2) go all-in with Google Android
3) go all-in with a Nokia fork of Google Android (a nonstarter today, but back in 2011, with Nokia's considerable heft and before Google started rolling so much of Android into non-open Google Play Services, things could have played out differently)
In terms of Nokia's performance as a phone company, it is more or less impossible for any of these options to have done any worse than Nokia did with Windows Phone.
HOWEVER, for Nokia as a company, Windows Phone "worked out" in the sense that they had a willing buyer for an asset that was long-term uncompetitive against Asian players in a commodity market. (then again that too has a counter-argument that the phone division would have been worth more than $7 billion had it not dedicated itself to the losing proposition of Windows Phone)
They were an independent company under control of a trusted general of Steve Ballmer. Nokia had a lot of goodwill in some regions, e.g. in Europe they were known for their excellent reliable and serviceable hardware. At the time the fear was that a switch to Android would reduce their margins, but I guess they'd still be around and pretty successful if they had switched to Android timely.
If you had such a bonus on your contract what would you do?
But yeah, I got myself a transfer inside Nokia after harmattan program was finished (still working on Linux stuff). Was away for few years and went back few months before Microsoft bought us, laid us off and our dept. spun off. During those times I didn't see any change on how things where handled from old Nokia days. So anyone who says that they didn't see this final layoff round coming is blind AF.
Then they brought in the son of the former Finnish president (Ahtisaari) and the guy stood in front of the entire program telling us how awesome he was and he was going to reshape the way people use mobile phones.
Good times.
Overnight Nokia turned into a cesspool of backstabbers who didn't add any real value, but managed to steal the credit from everyone else.
Steal credit for what? What has come out of Microsoft's phone business since the Nokia purchase that anyone would want to take credit for?
As an example, Lumia 1020 had a lot of people working hard on it... but a very select few went out and took all the credit.
>Microsoft really loves to own and eventually destroy Nordic companies. (skype, minecraft, nokia)
Minecraft went from being neglected to even mismanaged to something that's alive again. Skype was originally Estonian, nor Nordic, and runs better than ever considering it doesn't rely on the charity of "supernodes" anymore. I can't remember the last time I had a dropped call or random quality drops.
I do agree MS shouldn't have picked up Nokia. It was a walking corpse and didn't help either entity in the end, but this is just business as usual. Playing up this "wild linux hackers vs The Man(TM)" is pretty out there. If you want a paycheck, the entity that pays you needs to make money. If MS didn't fire you, Nokia would have. MS is profitable. Nokia isn't.
I think Sweden counts as Nordic.
http://jacquesmattheij.com/microsoft-just-bought-nokia-for-0
And I very much wished I was wrong. They'll have to pry my impossible to destroy Nokia from my hands when I'm dead. Thanks!
At the same time they throw their own stable OS in the bin and release a buggy beta version which has ruined the experience for WP users.
What was the point of this whole exercise? A convoluted way of getting Nokia's masses of IP rights for mobile? Why not just leave Nokia to keep pushing WP?
But my question is what was the corporate strategy? Did they see the success of the Lumia line and wanted control of it? If so, why did they immediately fire people and stop development of new devices?
Trying to upgrade her to a new model is basically impossible. At the time we bought it if you went to any carrier store the Windows phones were clearly second class citizens with the best models not present. Carriers like T-Mobile wouldn't even sell you a decent model because they don't carry them at all and if you buy one separately you find that carrier specific stuff (tethering) is broken.
With Windows phone it was really like they weren't even trying to move units. Sure they built the software and hardware, but actual retail presence seemed pretty broken.
They also failed at continuity. There is no Lumia 1020 successor. The lineup in general seems fragmented with no regular predictable upgrade path and iteration.
Windows Phones had a different UI that meant the sales rep had to spend time showing how it worked, and even if he/she did make the sale, he faced the high risk of a Lumia getting returned because the customer found out some key app wasn't available on Windows Phone but was easily available on iOS and Android (their bank, or airline, Snapchat, and let's not forget Instagram wasn't there for a while)
(source: I'm a former Nokia employee)
They didn't release any new phone models for something like 3 solid years. At the same time, the Nokia purchase removed HTC (who was at least somewhat enthusiastic about the OS previously) from the Windows Phone ecosystem.
So if you're a die-hard Windows Phone fan, they went 3 years with no new phones for you to buy! It's no wonder the OS is struggling. And while the Nokia 1020 is a fine phone, I loved, loved, loved my HTC WinPhone and it's a damn shame I'll never be able to buy that combination of hardware and software ever again.
Nokia only sold their mobile phone arm and licensed the IP. This doesn't seem like the cheapest way to get those licenses.
This is incorrect. MS only bought non-exclusive, 10-year license for Nokia’s patent portfolio. Nokia has all the IP.
Patents.
Microsoft make more money from the Android than Google ...
Sad, because WP is actually much better from tooling and architecture point of view, but the way the whole WP 7, WP 8, WP 8.1 and the yet to become stable WP 10, just drove everyone off.
Personally I was kind of pissed off, when the 512 MB devices were left out of the last preview update.
Also it was the only viable alternative to Android, on the countries where iOS devices are seen as too expensive, specially the ones where devices aren't subsidized.
And Myerson has the audacity to say "We always take care of our customers, Windows phones are no exception. [...] regardless of a person's phone choice, we want everyone to be able to experience what Microsoft has to offer them."
For me, the appeal as hobby development was that I wanted to support a third ecosystem, have my love-hate relationship on the MS stack back to the MS-DOS 3.3 days and I love what they are doing with C++/CX (VC++ finally catches up with C++ Builder) and the whole AOT compilation for .NET (MDIL and .NET Native).
But with this scenario there isn't much value in building up WP skills specially since WP10 is still quite buggy, even as an hobby.
I regret buying the 950. Excellent hardware, but unstable battery hog of an OS, with an app situation that's bad and getting worse. WP 8.0 was the high mark. All the changes since then made things worse.
From the user point of view probably nothing.
You should follow this tweeter discussion from Sinofsky
https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/733699065763004416
It wasn't the difference between desktop and mobile stacks that pushed most away, rather the breaking changes between WP 7, WP 8, WP 8.1 and WP 10. As explained recently on the Ars Technica article,
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/onecor...
And as a developer I cannot really get why WP 10 is still so buggy (according to the reports) versus the already stable 8.1.
Microsoft eliminated QA as a job role and laid off all of its QA staff in 2014, with rather predictable consequences for both Windows 10 and WP 10. Plenty of articles about it if you Google around.
If anything, it's surprising that things have turned out as well for them as they have.
It does make sense, though. QA teams cost a lot of money, and don't produce anything at all. They're a cost center. The only thing they do is keep your quality up so that customers don't get mad and leave.
MS doesn't have to worry about that. People weren't buying WinPhone anyway, and no one's going to abandon Windows (PC OS) because of bugginess. So using the users as beta-testers makes perfect sense for them. If you don't like it, then don't buy MS products.
Remember any of these: Pocket PC, Windows CE, Microsoft Kin, Windows Embedded Handheld, ....
MS spent $1 billion for Kin alone. When they consider market to be important to their future, they'll keep going and spending money. Setbacks destroy their partners but they just wait and try again when time is right.
MS is still mainly business and OEM sales company. Consumer-centric divisions (including XBox, Windows Phone, Bing) are irrelevant from a profit standpoint. MS is perceptually trying to get into mobile because they are fearing for their business and OEM sales if they don't have the presense in mobile.
Useless product, nobody uses it, but the fact that they kept investing in it made most competitors lose their nerve.
http://company.nokia.com/en/our-businesses/nokia-technologie...
http://company.nokia.com/en/news/press-releases/2016/05/18/n...
In an era when smartphones are increasingly commoditized, it could work well enough to carve out a sustainable business.
This is similar to what they did with the somewhat recent Nokia N1 tablet: it was built by Foxconn.
Seems like the sleeper agents are being activated.
And in a court of law I will say that I just made all this up.
That’s what free means. Not “companies free to do whatever they please”.
The fact that you used the word "free" here to tell us what "freedom" doesn't mean implies otherwise, because I believe "free to do whatever they please" is exactly what it does mean. There are no "requirements" in a free market other than serving demand and making a profit.
I think in general people - for and against laissez faire economics - confuse free markets with fair.
Free market proponents make the error of asuming that all free is also fair and decent and their opponents presume everything should be first and foremost fair (rather than efficient).
(on the other hand it implies the behemoth of Nokia was "midsize", uh)
Now Nokia got several billions, bought Alcatel and continues other business. The feature phone business ended up in new company which is using Nokia's name and IPR and pays per unit royalties to Nokia. If this venture proves succesful, Nokia could just acquire them.
Years ago there was speculation that Elop was a trojan horse, placed by Microsoft. After things turned out as they did, I have started thinking that maybe it was the other way round. Maybe somebody planned all along that hiring Elop would open the opportunity of dumping the business to Microsoft in case it would nit start generating profits.
This was talked a lot in Finland, you can easily find it if you google for it, but Microsoft haters like to ignore this little action from Nokia board.
The bigger question is maintaining a controlling interest. VCs love quick easy exits. Seems to be the default pattern these days which is sad. And we wonder why so few long-term large scale businesses get created in SV these days.
Ha. Tell that to someone who's about to make millions of dollars from an acquisition.
Those are rather nice words, I'm tempted to use plain 'ridiculous'. Feels like a child could do better. Ok it's not some scientific article, but still, you could put at least some effort in it.
It's hard to imagine a better outcome for Nokia than Microsoft buying the phone albatross in 2013. I honestly believe that it was part of a contingency plan that had made Nokia's board approve the Windows Phone plan -- that Ballmer basically promised a buyout in case WP doesn't fly. (I don't have evidence of this, but clearly Ballmer really, really wanted Nokia's phones and Nadella really, really doesn't.)
In the alternate universe where Nokia's board decided to go with Android instead of Windows, I think they would have ended up as a kind of European HTC or Sony in the Android market. And in that scenario the Nokia phone unit wouldn't have been worth $7.2 billion either.
They imagined they could speed time to market for devices by eliminating frictions inherent in being 2 companies working on 1 product (and as an employee I can say there were indeed inescapable frictions). But ultimately it couldn't get around the core problem: (almost) nobody wants a Windows Phone.
you mean Nadella?
If they had carried out that switch (and survived in the short term - they were on the brink of bankruptcy at the time), Nokia would be doing pretty well nowadays.
I think their situation is somewhat similar to Sony. Sony is also well-recognised electronics brand globally. But Sony pushes on with its 'premium' Android smartphone brand (Xperia).
Xperia is the closest you can come to a Nokia-like Android phone these days: it has a great physical build, good camera and excellent battery life. The pre-installed apps seem like they were carefully selected unlike with Samsung phones.
Sony's mobile division is not doing super-well, but it's not a disaster either. I'm myself a proud owner of a Xperia Z3 device and will likely also buy my next smartphone from Sony. I keep wondering, is the existence of a 'premium' Android manufacturer really an oxymoron, like Nokia's management in 2013 predicted?
PS. Nokia is doing pretty well nowadays, though not as a handset manufacturer.
I say this as an unfortunate shareholder.
The interesting question is, what would have happened if Nokia had gone the Android route in 2011 instead of Windows Phone.
I agree with him to the extent that, in hindsight, it would be hard to make more destructive management decisions than what actually happened. The people inside Nokia often seemed to be trapped in a nightmare. It was a sad, hollowed-out place well before it was sold to Microsoft. Stephen Elop killed several projects that would have provided alternatives to Windows Phone. Nothing was allowed to encroach on that failing product.
All that said, Nokia had missed the boat in modern smartphone OSs, much in the way Blackberry had done. There is no guarantee they would have found a good answer on their own.
Where they failed it was assuming their market leads at the time would allow them to take their time deploying a solid OS while the app ecosystems for iOS and android blew up. By the time they shipped it became a question of where they fit in the world anymore.
While Nokia had the resources to succeed in smartphones, and a unique market position with S40 that would have been even stronger but for some of Elop's decisions, I don't think one can claim Meego would have been a slam-dunk. None of the efforts to mobile-ize Linux that have been short of the kind of rethink of the userland that went into Android have gone very far. Tizen, Jolla, Meego, and Canonical's mobile products are all variations on the theme of incremental changes to Linux, all with about the same outcomes.
Namely that MS wanted to bring back some of the billions they have offshore without it getting heavily taxed. Taking this into consideration the acquisition of NOKIA and eventual write down as a loss is not that bad. Especially considering it has kept it windows phone alive, and most likely moved any essential expertise to their other departments
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2016/05/so-the-...
Get over it.
Microsoft/Windows is a cancer. Ballmer once said Linux was a cancer. He later retracted, after it was well-known Microsoft itself uses Linux.
There's nothing more pathetic than when you see Microsoft's businesspeople or lawyers at conferences all faithfully using Windows, as if there was no other choice, and rambling on about how their products can solve any problem. These are not stupid people, but they are blinded to independent reasoning about computer software.
And then there are the people at Microsoft Research. What a waste (not for them -- they probably get paid handsomely). It is like MS is keeping these minds locked away, so the zombie-like adherence to Windows can persist. Keep the monopoly going.
Microsoft is a cancer on the brain. It creates a zombie-like, tunnel vision of computing. Everything must pass through Redmond.
Microsoft continues to remain dangerous to the future of computing, because they continue to work dilgently to effectively quell all independent thought from being implemented and made accessible to users.
Intent, malice, etc. is irrelevant. Regardless of why they do it, the end result is suppression of non-Microsoft software.
And now hardware.
I recently saw a Microsoft Research paper about a memory mapping prototype the authors implemented in Linux. I now realize they must have been personally executed by Satya "Kim Jong Un" Nadella when he learned of their non-Windows treachery.
We can only pray that one day these minds will be set free, and we can finally enter the golden age of AI that would surely have arrived 30 years ago if not for the scourge of Microsoft.
It's not apparent to me why business people or lawyers should be also computer science aficionados. Should I be a telecoms engineer to use a phone or a combustion specialist to drive a car?
Best tool for the job, and all that. Now arguably, Windows is indeed the best tool for business type people working at MS, due to the application software, the network environment they're in, etc.. However, for researchers doing heavy computing, I would say it's definitely not, it's quite inferior. There's a reason most of the supercomputers, render farms, etc. now run Linux, and it's not just license cost.
Yet there is NOTHING more pathetic than a gamer using Windows. This is a cancer on his game-brain, nothing more that a zombie-like tunnel-vision of gaming. The gamers are not stupid people yet Microsoft keeps their capable mouse-hands LOCKED away so their skills will never develop beyond what Redmond envisions. Everything MUST BE CONTROLLED through One Microsoft Way, and so Microsoft continues to remain dangerous to the FUTURE of gaming! Lo and behold, the end result is SUPPRESSION OF ALL non-Windows games.
And now - hardware.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11770051 and marked it off-topic.
That's "name-calling".
But I understand the need to detach the silly hyperbolic responses my comment triggered. I was not expecting those.
Please accept my apologies for any incomvenience I may have caused.