1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)
translate.googleusercontent.com
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- Total domination of their own field
- Resting on laurels while others snatch the market from under them
- Panic
- Get a CEO from Microsoft
- CEO quickly decides that the O/S developed in house is not worth maintaining. And that the right O/S is no other than Microsoft's offering
- Company continues dive to irrelevance, albeit at a much faster rate than before
Well, the last one hasn't happened to Nokia. yet.
Goodbye old Nokia. You will be missed.
Haha, at least Nokia isn't claiming that they and Microsoft are going to develop technology "jointly".
In the press conferences, they stressed that they're going to contribute to WP7 ecosystem (by bringing OVI maps, and their expertise with developing for range hw range, or something along those lines).
By whom? The old Nokia was a terrible software company, with so many abject failures at creating platforms (Symbian, N-Gage, Ovi, etc.) that I don't think anyone else in this business can compare.
It's a good thing that they're getting out of software and concentrating on stuff they're actually good at.
If you put out android phones, you're just another fish in a sea of commodity handsets, no matter how you differentiate your product.
IIRC, Samsung, HTC and Dell are offering WP7 phones.
This is a mistake many Microsoft partners make. Nobody but Microsoft is at the top of the WP7 hierarchy. If WP7 is a success, Nokia's efforts will be rewarded by lots of competition with more money (because they are already riding the other hit, Android), not relevance.
As a platform, surely not. The wheels came off by the end of 2008 when S60 5th Edition went touch-only, leaving keyboard devices still shipping with the hopelessly outdated 3rd Edition. Symbian touch devices never gained any platform traction.
Was it a success as a software foundation upon which handset makers could innovate, as had been the original idea behind Symbian? No. Everyone that used Symbian abandoned it for more flexible alternatives. The lack of a unified UI development track didn't lead to the hoped innovation, but merely fragmentation that ultimately doomed Symbian. (It didn't help that the most popular UI layer, Nokia's S60, was so poorly designed and thoroughly mismanaged.)
I actually use a Symbian^3 device, the Nokia N8. It's not bad at all. I love the physical design, and the software works fine for what I do (although the browser is a turd, it's replaceable by the fine Opera).
Still, I can't escape the feeling that this is the OS that Nokia should have had over two years ago. Also, it's a development dead end. Symbian^4 was supposed to be a UI rewrite, but it failed. The promised improvements to S^3 have been slow in coming. (Still no Qt 4.7...!)
How is Symbian a success at this point? What reason would Elop -- or anyone else -- have to believe that the existing software development structure at Nokia could substantially improve this situation?
how about global market share?
2008: 52.4% of smartphones (RIM 17%, Apple 10%) [1]
2009: 47.2% of smartphones (RIM 21%, Apple 15%) [1]
Android came in at 0.5% and 5% for those two years.
Gartner forecasts that Symbian will remain in the number one smartphone OS position until 2014 when it is contested by Android [2]
Sure, it's in decline now, but it's been a phenomenal success.
Symbian OS has several version. The version that ships in volume powers devices like Nokia C1-01 http://store.nokia.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/productdeta... or worse. It's not the same product as iPhone or Android or even the old Palm OS shipped on Treo.
The share of Symbian OS devices shipping a version comparable to iPhone or Android is a blip on the radar. A drop in the ocean. And a peasant among Kings.
Most of Nokia's cheap phones are on the Series 40 platform, which is a closed "non-smart" OS (that has nevertheless grown some fairly smart features recently, like QWERTY keyboards and a HTML browser).
Symbian by Nokia comes in three flavours:
- Symbian^3, the latest and greatest -- e.g. the E7: http://www.forum.nokia.com/Devices/Device_specifications/E7-...
- Symbian^1, the previous touchscreen Symbian version (a.k.a. S60 5th Edition): http://www.forum.nokia.com/Devices/Device_specifications/C5-...
- Symbian S60 3rd Edition, still used on keyboard devices: http://www.forum.nokia.com/Devices/Device_specifications/E72
sign of the first derivative.
The sign of the first derivative only gives you the present rate of adoption/abandonment of the platform, while integrating gives you a measure of success over the platform's entire existence.
Pretty much since the time it was called EPOC. It failed to grow and support more resources, as phones became more powerful than the desktop computers of the time it was designed in, and it's no longer suited for current smartphones. It still excels on the low end, where neither Android nor WP7 reach.
I agree that Nokia is better at hardware than software, but I wouldn't go so far as to call Symbian a complete failure. It served its purpose at its time and did it well. [My old N70 with S60 from years ago ran a python interpreter on it. Can iOS do that? :) ]
It's biggest issue was probably fragmentation. There were too many releases - Symbian 3, 1st Edition, Symbian 2, 3rd Edition etc... That made it difficult to write software that could target more than a handful of the latest models. And with so many models available, the audience you reached was significantly less.
It had real time I/O. It had the best user interface at the time, with super fast scalable vector graphics for everything in '94. (Modern desktops have caught up some 13 years later). It had usable 64 bits everything before anyone else - R10000 was generally available in '95.
They were insanely fast compared to the Sun and Digital stations of the time - the only competitor was Digital Alpha, and IRIX beat Ultrix to the ground and mopped the floor with it.
These were the days of multiculture, where my employer insisted on having several Alphas, Suns, SGIs, RS/6000 and more to make sure we're not locked to any specific vendor.
And it's even better when you factor in that in each case there is a viable and much better suited free and open option available. Linux would have made a much better choice as a transitional platform from IRIX.
It's nepotism on the corporate level & just like nepotism will destroy the morale of a department, this kind of nepotism will destroy the morale of an entire company.
It would have, but this was 1998, so very few of us knew this at the time. I don't know if you remember the tech zeitgeist in 1998, but Linux was still a pretty hardcore geek alternative at the time, maybe like Vim today. NT had things like journaled filesystems.
You can delve into history to see what the Linux community was talking about at the time:
http://old.lwn.net/archives/ http://old.lwn.net/1998/1001/
"Intel and Netscape are now officially investors in Red Hat Software. A year ago such a thing would have been almost unthinkable. But times have changed."
"With this release, the GNOME desktop is reaching a usable state."
"Expect that, with the introduction of pre-installed Linux systems from vendors like Gateway, IBM, Dell or others, the number of people searching out a Linux VAR in order to get a pre-installed Linux system will rapidly dwindle."
"Oracle has announced that it will ship and support a Linux distribution."
http://old.lwn.net/1998/1022/press.php3
"Like sex in high school, everyone's talking about Linux, but is anyone doing it?"
"140,000 Mexican school labs to be outfitted with Linux and GNOME." (That was the "Red Escolar" or "Scholar Net" project. Its failure is described in http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2001/08/45737: "RedEscolar, or "Scholar Net," has put computers in 4,500 schools, but fewer than 20 are equipped with GNU/Linux machines. The rest are running Windows 95 or 98.".)
So, from the standpoint of 2011, it's easy to see that committing head-on to Linux could have saved SGI. But, at the time, it was a risky decision.
They did actually start to hitch their wagon to Linux a year later: Scott Bekker "SGI Backs Away from Windows NT - Silicon Graphics - Company Business and Marketing". ENT. FindArticles.com. 11 Feb, 2011. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FOX/is_15_4/ai_55675...
Rick Belluzzo was the CEO who made the NT decision. WP says had been working at HP for the last 23 years, not Microsoft, but he did take a job at Microsoft after being deposed at SGI. WP also says his only degree is a BS in accounting from Golden Gate University, a vocational school, so he's probably not very smart.
Here's what he said about working with Bill Gates: "I was always surprised how much Bill knew. I wonder how you find time in the day to be on top of how many things Bill seemed to be on top of. Bill is so passionate about technology, and he really is in the right role to focus the vast majority of his time."
To me, that sounds like typical non-hacker cluelessness. So maybe it's not that surprising that Rick was blind to the finer points of technical risk, compatibility, portability, and how the free-software community worked. (He was also largely responsible for committing HP to Itanic, effectively killing PA-RISC.)
The the historic state of Linux at the time makes all the difference. I should have been more general and said "Open Platform." Because at the time BSD was a much less risky choice -- it was more mature & didn't have the GPL license stigma being pushed so hard.
The outcome of the SGI WinNT decision is even more interesting when juxtaposed with Apple's decisions during the same time period.
The adoption & use of FreeBSD as the base of OS X's Posix layer shows how SGI could have gained all the benefit of a set of core tools that they needed to stop spending money on maintaining while still retaining control of the best parts of IRIX.
In 1998 both Apple and SGI were on the ropes. Apple embraced and integrated open source, SGI turned to a closed platform. Apple immediately got geeks like me on-board (still have my OS X 10.0.x disk around here somewhere). The difference between the two companies & where they stand now is the ultimate example of how open source can help a corporation succeed.
Apple was pushing very hard at the time to get geeks on. They actually flew their evangelist and lead dev for OS 7 out to my undergrad CompSci program in '99. They really wanted to get a foothold with a dev community & integrating FreeBSD not only allowed them to save on the cost of developing a whole new posix layer, but also was a great way to get a new community of developers interested in the platform.
But at that point Apple was already on an upward trajectory thanks to the iMac and iBook, with the iPod to come the following year. Granted OS 9 was a dog that has long since seen its day, and the technology in OS X was necessary to create a modern operating system that would enable the kind of UX that Jobs sought. But I question how much of it can really be credited to open source or the geek early adopters per se; certainly it helped, but was it pivotal?
I don't think it was open source itself that saved Apple, but the decision -- as revolutionary as it was at the time -- proved to be an excellent business decision. They added value to their product (hardware sales) by integrating Open Source. And as a bonus, they appealed to a specific audience without having to invest significant resources in selling to that audience.
It was a brilliant business decision because it not only opened a new channel of potential customers, it opened up a whole new set of possibilities for integrating Open Source software; they could leverage the movement. And that's really the significance of the decision in this context.
Apple, Nokia and SGI all focused on their core business -- making hardware -- but only Apple saw the value of leveraging a movement to add value to their hardware/brand. All three were in desperate positions, but only Apple saw the merit of leveraging the Open Source movement for the good of the business.
Where Nokia could have built on the goodwill of their brand by adopting an open and vibrant platform -- one where they could have as much control as they desired -- they have chosen to chain their fortune to a third party that has relatively little vested in their success.
The biggest irony here (other than Apple's role in Nokia's demise) is that choosing Android comes with very little risk compared to the risk that Apple took: there's ongoing development underwritten by a single organization; there's no licensing or quality stigma about the platform; there's a worldwide consortium of companies already using the platform; and there's already a significant and growing market share.
They have missed the opportunity to leverage the movement.
1. Hire someone from Microsoft to run the company
2. He says "our platform is burning, we have to do something drastic" which most people interpret as "prepare to come up with a strategy and fight like hell to win".
3. Guess what, he already had something in mind! It was "throw out our current reasonably successful development efforts and become a licensee of Microsoft's failed platform instead". And piss off all our QT-based app developers at the same time.
What could possibly go wrong?
I seriously wonder if this guy might not end up having to leave and not set foot in Finland (or the EU) again for fear of arrest. I have a feeling some Finland business regulators will be going through his emails with a fine-toothed comb.
Whether you agree with the decision or not, nothing about it sounds in the least bit criminal.
There are places he could be arrested if there are any hints this value destruction is on purpose.
Developers aren't dumb. Hedging one's bets often makes for a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I'm not saying anything actually is wrong, I don't know enough about it to care. But what I do see is Nokia being a big employer and part of national pride for Finland. This will likely become an issue in politics there.
They'd be wise not to lay off a single soul due to this deal at this point. Ironically, if Nokia really did need to trim R&D expenses, they may have more trouble doing it now.
Keep in mind the EU is still active in MS antitrust and users are offered the choice of Firefox when they install Windows. I would not want to be the guy who's name was attached to the sinking of Nokia at the advantage of Microsoft.
Does this suggest that the board wanted to do a deal with Microsoft all along? If so, why would they need to hire him to do it?
Or that they didn't know what they wanted and this guy seized the initiative?
Edit: answering my own question. I think the board probably brought this guy in to take the heat in case this deal goes really bad from a PR and legal perspective.
But less surprising than if he was to announce, say, that Nokia is pivoting to become an oil company.
Any company that comprises a measurable percentage of a country's GDP and a big share of its exports had better take into account some political considerations.
It's like he took the playbook from ObjectShare (Smalltalk vendor) when the CEO announced, "Hey gang, let's go Java!" then was surprised when the personnel situation started to go pear shaped.
Someone is out of touch with his employees here.
I think the move to WP7 may well be a savvy one (though I too would like to have seen a demo of it running), but can completely understand the employees concern.
Perhaps it would have made more sense to be more specific about what is going to happen with their employees, and done it internally - before rushing to tell the world about their new partnership. The resultant leaks wouldn't have been much bigger than what we already had this week.
So was ObjectShare's move to Java. That's not the issue. The issue is management being so out of touch with the employees. It's like a car with a loose steering linkage. Lots of things can go wrong, but a mechanism by which you'd even feel those things is also compromised.
I've read the same script before. The way this move was presented to the employees had bad results. I doubt the bad parts were really necessary.
It's a complicated situation. I doubt there was a binary choice whether or not to knife the baby.
Except, he was only at Microsoft a year and a half and before that he was with Juniper Networks and before that with Adobe Systems.
What I mean is, he knows more about Microsoft and how their offerings might fit in at Nokia (than say an OS by a company he's not familiar with), but it's a stretch to couch it as if he was an old time Microsoft employee who is going to force Microsoft on Nokia.
Pretty much everyone agreed that Nokia's Symbian/MeeGo strategy was a failure, that Nokia were quickly losing marketshare and that they needed a new OS.
The only options were Android and Windows Phone 7. WebOS would have been a better fit than either, but that option had already been and gone.
I think there are compelling reasons why Nokia would choose WP7 over Android.
There is a competitive advantage in being the flagship manufacturer of a platform, they won't have to play catchup against much more established competitors, or have to directly compete with cheap Chinese phones from companies like ZTE in the low-end. That's without going into the favourable terms that Microsoft no doubt offered.
I have to tread lightly here, as I don't want to get anybody in trouble... but I can assure you that the new CEO is doing very much the right thing. Software development is not a core competency (or even a competency) at that company. It's just not. I'm not surprised that about half of tampere left, they are going to be hard hit by this. They should be.. the quality of the work just hasn't cut it.
Their best hope to survive today is to tie themselves to a much healthier eco-system. I would have thought Android to be the very logical choice... but the Microsoft move certainly makes sense.
That's the honest truth. When Nokia opened the Symbian code three years ago, it offered a peek into their software development process... And it wasn't a pretty sight.
I used to spend a fair bit of idle time browsing through the Symbian Foundation wikis and forums (all now offline). It seemed that there were basically two kinds of people working on the operating system. The guys in England, who used to work for Symbian Ltd, were pretty smart but arrogant; in old-school programmer style, they were only concerned with managing some extremely narrow domain and couldn't take any criticism.
Then there were the Finns at Nokia, who were either completely uninterested and oblivious to the world around them, or just obviously incompetent at the job they'd been given. An example of the latter was the "Direct UI" proposal in 2009. It was supposed to outline a completely new touch UI paradigm to ship in Symbian^4. All there was was a few pages in broken English that essentially said "it should be like iPhone because touching stuff is cool".
Unsurprisingly, Symbian^4 was canned last October after years of development. I'd like to know who had made the decision to put the same people who had mismanaged the previous S60 user interface in charge of creating the replacement... But that's how it went at Nokia. No one ever lost their job for screwing up the software -- until now.
This is not going to go over well in Finland's politics is what I was saying. If this move costs thousands of white-collar jobs, this guy may end up being as popular in Finland as Julian Assange is in Washington DC.
People are also saying that the deal is only beneficial to Microsoft. The two real choices Nokia had were Android and WP7. WP7 seems like a more sensible choice to me. Sure they will have to sacrifice things, but they might gain overall. I think Microsoft and Nokia together make a killer combination that is going to help both these companies to bounce back in the mobile arena.
But if a person is leading a company, they might perhaps consider the psychological impact of their decisions along side with technical and market factors. I mean, his job is to make money - not to make decisions that "would have worked if it hadn't been for those pesky workers" (unless the intent was to gut the company from the get-go - though I doubt that would leave more money in the end either).
Desperate measures were needed. But I don't think I'm alone in feeling depressed that the desperate measures seem involve a move back toward proprietary systems (even if my only involvement with Nokia has been using the excellent QT library).
If, assuming, your aim to get some value out of a company - get some value out of the technical teams that exist in the company, one assumes that one needs to keep the morale of that company at a certain level. And giving the impression that you're gutting everything the company stood-for seems like a not-terribly-effective approach here even if Nokia's internal process was broken.
If you're the underdog, being able to claim you are "fighting for good" is psychologically useful. If Nokia had gone with android, one might be able to believe they'd bring some open source "chops" to the table.
Again, my experience is programmers are willing to work to fix a broken - if they feel like the company if offering them loyalty. Obviously, today's announcement didn't make Nokia's workers feel that was happening.
Nokia's stock dropped a bit after this, btw.
Better link to the story also: http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Microsoft-is-the-p...
I guess my question is maybe a little different, if Nokia is in that much trouble, then isn't WP7 a gamble? Its not just flying off the shelf where Android on the other hand is. Two losers don't usually make a winner. I don't know, seems like Google is all in with Android, they've got a pipeline, they've established themselves and proven themselves and they are legitimately competing with iPhone.
Now if they think WP7 is the future and it's going to take the market away from iPhone and Android then it makes sense, but I don't know that anyone really thinks that, it might carve out a niche but it's not going to beat the other guys. There are now iPhone, Android, RIM, WebOS and WP7 in the smart phone market, seems like a lot to me.
Do you have a source handy? It would be interesting to see how Nokia's market penetration (however declining it may be) compared to Microsoft's.
But Nokia dropped far less (47.6% -> 37.9%), proportionally, than Microsoft (8.7% -> 4.2%).
No question that Microsoft is the winner here.
Reasonably successful? I dare you to name one single Nokia-phone made the last half decade which you would consider relevant.
The truth is that platform-wise and software-wise, the bits you interact with, they've been stagnant since around 2000 and no amount of megapixels or Carl Zeiss optics will be able to compensate for that. They seriously need to throw their old stuff away and start going on something new. Like Microsoft did with Windows Mobile prior to Windows Phone 7.
I'm honestly surprised they didn't do it years ago. Now they've finally gotten a CEO which actually understands this and is willing to act on it. About time! While Microsoft is a risky bet, this move may actually save Nokia from complete annihilation and is certainly better than doing nothing at all.
And so far, Windows Phone 7 looks pretty good. Care to elaborate on how it is a failed platform already? Not disputing it if you have numbers, just that so far I've actually seen more enthusiasm for it than I expected to see.
Well "dare" is a pretty big word, as if you're making some kind of threat of retaliation if I do.
So let's just ask Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=nokia+market+penetration
Second link: http://gigaom.com/2010/03/18/the-mobile-os-market/
Check that out. According to that data, in the 2007-2009 time frame they shipped more cell phone operating systems than everyone else combined. That probably translates into a lot of physical Nokia phones, too.
The point that it may be stagnant is well taken, which is why I said "reasonably successful" instead of "stomping everyone else into the ground".
But irrelevant it is not.
Fair enough. But if you look at how quickly Windows Mobile went from being the de-facto Smartphone OS to completely irrelevant and take into account (as Nokia's CEO acknowledged) that they are being taken on and losing market-share at every point which they've usually excelled at, it's clear that while they may not be irrelevant now, the way there is not very long.
The need to do something drastic was IMO very real. If going for Microsoft and Windows Phone 7 as opposed to other options like Android was the best choice can clearly be debated, but something had to be done. Staying with the "reasonable successful" platform they had would not have been a viable long term strategy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_pho...
But I have a lot of sympathy for developers who have good reason to think their employer is steering their job into the trashcan, especially if they're in a city where there aren't a lot of other places to work.
Apparently the market isn't too keen on this either http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:NOK
1. Board isn't impressed with current inhouse developements, and wants a "modern" mobile OS. There aren't really many alternatives to WP7.
2. Old CEO doesn't want to bend over to MS
3. Kick old CEO out and get a guy from MS to do negotiations with MS to license WP7
Can you say it with a straight face? Without laughing?
Should be interesting to see how this is handled in Finland. Stock is down, layoffs, and some "arrogant foreigner" in charge would be a recipe for even more change in some places.
I agree porting Qt to WP7 shouldn't be much of a problem too, or a much larger one.
But I suspect that Nokia's plan may prove hard to follow because it will be very hard to convince people to use WP7 phones.
In short: I'd say it probably _is_ hard and I'd even go so far as to say that MeeGo moving into Android would be pointless.
For code and effort sharing maemo/MeeGo was the better stack.
This is a very radical departure from their previous path.
I hoped for a cool N900 successor with a cap. touch screen and a little more power but ... well ... I guess Nokia will make something half assed.
Meego phones (which run a real linux - not closed bullshit like android) would have been an awesome alternative to iOS and Android. At least for the more geeky consumer. :/
Good bye, Nokia.
I was starting to read the Qt docs, Gnome/Mac user and all. :-(
THAT might have been part of the problem. 1000+ people for a mobile OS? And people wonder why Nokia can't innovate fast enough to keep up with iOS or Android?
This is not an indication of mismanagement. This is mismanagement (of employee expectations, culture, and perception) plainly visible in public.
Nokia needs to figure this out right now, or they are going to bleed intellectual and technical assets.
If a company of that size were to lay off 100's of technical people here in the Netherlands, that'd be a large supply to absorb for the industry, and especially those with 10-15 years of highly specialized skills (antenna design, phone chipset design etc).
If their jobs were based in something technical and had significant value, they'll be able to find employment elsewhere. This was also true of former employees of the Smalltalk vendor.
The thing to remember here, is that your most valuable employees are also the ones that can find new jobs fastest.
Re: the last sentence, yes that's exactly their problem and why I said 'under 80th percentile'. The best employees know the fat days are over and are moving out asap, leaving the hanger-ons to run the place. The rest can't get other employment so will just sit there hoping for a miracle.
But yeah, bottom line: Nokia is still screwed.
Think about it though, what do they have to lose. The company was dying rapidly, There are relatively few WP7 products on the market, so they can stand out in the crowd, Microsoft have absolutely 0 to lose and everything to gain as Nokia may just pull this off.
But then again, I actually thought that Paul Thurrot had a good idea when he suggested that Microsoft and Nokia merge. Its not quite a merger but if this move actually works I think a merger is in the future.
While not nearly as effective as a day-long strike or other such, it has the advantage of not being covered by certain laws (so a ballot of the union is not required) meaning it can be implemented quickly to send a very visible message if enough people agree strongly enough with the message.
Coordinated work slow-downs are another example of a "half-strike"
I very much prefer a threesome! Every mobil user will benefit from this. And this is not like Desktop. Everybody will have to bring their A-Game.
1) "Windows Phone is cool":
Think of all the people that like the tech (.Net) or the visuals (Remember the recent "No chrome in the UI" thread). That want this platform to succeed. I guess if you're in this camp the news are great: WP7 gains a very experienced hardware vendor. You can expect a couple of good/decent handsets soonish, pushing WP7 (with a lot of marketing and money) and thereby solving the chicken and egg problem (platform <-> apps) with cash.
2) "I liked Nokias history", "I'm a QT/maemo/MeeGo fan"
In this case the news are bad: Nokia changes direction. How much only time will tell, but the company that over the last couple of years slowly started to adopt open source is now going for a closed platform. QT and MeeGo are more or less declassed in the press release (research..? N770, N800, N810.. They did that in the past, the devices were unusable for non-hackers. I know, I own one). In this case you don't care much about WP7, you basically moan about the loss of plans that YOU had for that company/platform. That's what I see alot around now.
I understand both points, but the latter seems both easier to understand (I've got a bunch of maemo shirts, the N810 hardware etc..) and at the same time completely irrelevant (Seriously.. While mom and dad might have heard about Windows Mobile and that a new version is coming, who around you cared about MeeGo to succeed?). I'm quite sure this is the death sentence for MeeGo handsets. But we haven't even seen one of those yet. How do we know that we lost something of value? Please - no ideology (while I'd probably be with you, that's not something a company of that size should care about in a self-crisis) based answers about being open etc..
My career path has me working at or consulting with huge companies who are typically entrenched with Outlook & MS Office and if Microsoft can provide a better integration experience than Android with a piece of hardware that rivals Android handsets I will definitely check them out when it comes time to upgrade. I'm hoping the Nokia alliance works out and starts providing some competitive hardware.
Btw, NOK is down 15%
Oh, and there go our tax euros. Symbian has been given EU tax money to develop a "European localized mobile operating system"
The company will be in both public and private turmoil until it either emerges as a turned around company, or a dead one.
Stocks are nowhere near that deterministic. When people think others will jump ship, they try to jump first, to lose the least money. When people think others will want buy, they buy first or sell higher, because they can get away with it. There's more games theory than future prediction if you ignore long-term investors, as they make up a microscopic amount of the daily trading and thus the daily prices of stocks.
Prominent Symbian enthusiasts (Symbian-Guru) on giving up the platform:
(engadget summary) http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/01/symbian-guru-shuts-down-s...
(same story summarized by TC) http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/01/self-declared-longtime-noki...
On the other hand, Symbian has some generally good design assumptions (for example client-server division of almost anything) that are hard for programmers that come from other platforms/just don't care and thus it's architecture is often hacked around, which sadly includes many applications written by Nokia itself.
Ten billion dollars!
I live in Canada. We get a lot of snow over here. Last winter, I lost my Nokia phone. I remember it was a night we had a huge snowstorm, and I stayed in drinking hot chocolate by the fireplace only to wake up the next day stressing out because I couldn't find my phone. After an hour of searching, I came to terms that I must have lost it in the mall the day before.
I end up leaving later that day, and find it on my driveway buried in snow. Snow plows came twice and cleaned my driveway and they must have driven over it with the plow part of the truck. Not only that, it was completely submerged in snow for over 12 hours. I picked it up, brushed off as much snow as I could, and tried using it.
It still worked. It didn't even have any scratches (1 minor one). I've owned many phones in my life, and most of them break in the stupidest ways. Nokia is the rambo of phones.
Isn't it amazing how "at will" seems to apply to both employees and management, but somehow management's version of "at will" is considerably lower risk than the employees, even though the manager has considerably more influence over their future.
Time to speculate?
Here's the original article URL: http://www.hs.fi/talous/artikkeli/Nokian+ty%C3%B6ntekij%C3%A...
And - they even did it on their own free time (using flexible working time), not 'stealing' paid time for their protest.
I like that move a lot.
You can bet he's working on his on the clock.