Nokia to cut up to 14,000 jobs as US demand shrinks, growth uncertain

I wonder what would drive that market down. Cell network equipment is an infrastructure investment, right? It seems they are predicting a pretty long-term demand drop in that case…

My (limited) understanding of heavy network hardware is that it is the way it is because of compatibility.

No one running backbone or DC gear wants to be bitten by edge-case-bug-of-the-month, and so they stick to approved configurations, which are usually vendor-specific for specialized functionality. Because that's what you need to run in order to trigger your "Have a vendor engineer here in 20 minutes" support clause.

There's always a tug between the market (wants vendors to support standards) vs vendors (want market locked into their solutions). As a result, inter-vendor qualification is limited to the minimum they can get away with.

Someone tell me if I'm wrong, though!

Networking is a combination of hyper-specific hardware solutions "this ASIC targets the mid sized enterprise core and has features specialized to doing that role best, the lower tier version from even the same manufacturer and family however has these limitations... and this carrier focused L2 switch seems similar at a glance but actually has a nearly non-overlapping choice of hardware features baked in" and few (outside of the hyperscaler-like crowd) who actually want to manage that themselves despite knowing no generalized solution is really ready to manage it well either. This results in a massive amount of NOS customization and backwards compatibility that changes horizontally, vertically, and each generation in time. In the meantime, anyone who thinks they can optimize a specific use case better can introduce a new weird device and become popular because it achieves that use case at a great price.

That said, things have been moving in the right direction. E.g. the newer "Nokia Router OS" SR Linux is "just" bog standard Linux with a microservices based service layer which implements industry standard APIs for configuration and telemetry streaming. It still has a lot of legacy stuff, and even a replica of the classic CLI built on top of these APIs, but there is a bit more convergence in that I've been able to deploy Nokia gear and Arista gear in the same DC and manage them as one EVPN fabric with mostly identical API management to get there.

The short version of the above is there are still so many disparate weirdo systems precisely because the use cases of networking are well fit for wildly differentiated hardware every iteration which then drives having specialized software to go with it. Until that advantage goes away I don't see the networking space consolidating all that much.

> they are fundamentally laundering free innovations done by a very small number of people, like Linux Kernel developer. They will not stick around

There's a big difference between inventing something (Linus Torvalds as the "genius big picture guy" who gets paid in fame) and turning it into a viable business that customers can depend on (the boring "execution guy" who gets paid in money).

It's like how research labs in universities often develop some new technology, and a for-profit firm takes it to market. People get all up in arms about this laundering of free innovations without realizing that the two take very different skill-sets and require very different incentive structures.

> At the end of the day none of those differentiators are protectible, and they are fundamentally laundering free innovations done by a very small number of people, like Linux Kernel developer.

What does this use of laundering mean? The financial application of laundering does not make sense to me here (to make something procured illegally look like it was procured legally).

Networking equipment used by ISPs (which is Nokia's main revenue source) is not really comparable to consumer level stuff.

That said I left telecom (used to work for Huawei btw) in 2018, people were talking about hyper convergence and running network functions in K8s and shit. Not sure how much of that materialized.

Agreed, happy KaiOS user here, but this is probably not 'that' Nokia (the different divisions got sold to various buyers who all license the name).

And if I ever get my claws into them they'll eventually be able to compete on price, too. Just a matter of time.

I think that's a fair assessment, considering that one could have connections with everything from LinkedIn to trading platforms such as Robinhood, this wouldn't be an "end-all" solution.

It is up to the individual in assessing what their immediate needs are and what is considered a "luxury" that can be dropped or accessed another way.

Generally I found that I can live out the need to look at my portfolio, and delicate other needs to my laptop, which is a better tool in handling those tasks anyhow.

Thanks for the clarification. I had forgotten that they spun off their cellular division after the Microsoft shakeup.