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Microsoft Lays Off Nokia Employees, Exits Consumer Phone Business
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Possible user error then?
My Office is rock solid... vs the quick sand all 4 of my macs seemed to be sat on. YMMV.
I thought the acquisition was an odd move-- trying to sell your OS while also making an in house device is just a huge conflict of interest.
Apple makes an integrated product. Google made the mistake of trying to do both, but has since learned and has gone software only. MS has now learned the same lesson.
I don't know why this wasn't obvious to these companies from the get go... If I had to guess, it was somebody thinking that the reason Windows Phone wasn't selling was because of the hardware makers, so they needed to show the market how to do it right.
I think there's room for three options in the market-- integrated (Apple), proprietary/interoperable (MS, or whoever), and open/interoperable (Google). To really make that middle option work though, it has to be rock solid and enterprise friendly.
Google is doing a good job of making the proprietary solution unnecessary...
Apple makes an integrated product. Google made the mistake of trying to do both, but has since learned and has gone software only. MS has now learned the same lesson.
I don't know why this wasn't obvious to these companies from the get go... If I had to guess, it was somebody thinking that the reason Windows Phone wasn't selling was because of the hardware makers, so they needed to show the market how to do it right.
I think there's room for three options in the market-- integrated (Apple), proprietary/interoperable (MS, or whoever), and open/interoperable (Google). To really make that middle option work though, it has to be rock solid and enterprise friendly.
Google is doing a good job of making the proprietary solution unnecessary...
I found my View Sonic V37 the other day, its still working.well they could have started AHEAD in the race, as there was iPAQs and the like running windows CE like in... 2002? They were not much bigger than a todays smartphone just bulkier
I still own two, running linux. batteries are probably dead tough. back in the day they were da bomb.
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Same here, no problems with Office either, running 365 2016.
Wow Nokia used to be such a big player back in the days then Microsoft just ruined it like they do with just about everything else. I wonder if this means they are also going to get rid of their windows mobile crap phones that nobody wants or just let Google put Android on them so they can hang on to a string.
-Mike
-Mike
Ballmer was correct when he said that few would pay $500 upfront for the iPhone. Sure enough, the price dropped like a rock within two months.
He was wrong when he said businesses wouldn't use it without a real keyboard, although he might have been thinking more of enterprise apps.
Yep, Google dropped the keyboard model and went straight to the touchscreen one that was due later.
He should've also quickly put out their touchscreen table to homes, not just businesses.
And finished the Courier tablet project, which blew everything away as far as a cool organizational device.
Even Blackberry might still be around if they hadn't dropped all support for their Java based OS. Many, many companies had big investments in BB software and infrastructure.
Nokia is doing fine at the moment. They have more than 114,000 employees world-wide. They bought Siemens Networks and with Microsofts' money, Alcatel - Lucent and Bell Labs. Nokia didn't sell its patents to MS, they just licensed them for ten years. Nokia is still the biggest patent applicant in Finland and 18th biggest in Europe. Sure they're not in the sexy mobile devices market, but a key player in the industry on the networking and cell tower side.
The deal with Microsoft saved Nokia, imo. Microsofts' greatest error was Nokias' saving grace.
The deal with Microsoft saved Nokia, imo. Microsofts' greatest error was Nokias' saving grace.
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Leaving aside my misgivings about trying to sell an OS and then competing with your customers by selling your own hardware, I wonder if Blackberry would have been a better acquisition target for MS. As you say, they both had an enterprise focus.
It would have forced some compromises while MS swallowed their pride and continued shipping the BB OS for a while until they could hybridize it, but at least the two companies feel better aligned.
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Still, this all caused a lot of displacement for some really talented people. I'm sure the MS deal didn't accelerate that, and may have given them a softer landing, but 25,000 displaced tech employees and the loss of exports in an economy the size of Finland's has to hurt.
Gaming industry has been growing same time as Nokia has lessen... Angry Birds, Clash of Clans, Cities: Skylines... it's around USD 3billion industry in Finland at the moment, and growing +10% annually. Former Nokia employees have found hundreds of start-up companies.. in areas of helth-care, clean-tech, energy... sure it's not fun to get fired, but Finnish social security is kind of a backup so it's easier to continue innovating.. and not to be overly worried which is brain energy consuming.
Bigger hit than Nokia for Finland has been the EU - Russian import ban, it took trade from Finland far more than Nokia did.
Bigger hit than Nokia for Finland has been the EU - Russian import ban, it took trade from Finland far more than Nokia did.
Windows phone had so much potential. The problem with Microsoft has and will always be its own success. They never had to develop their leaders and leadership skills while under fire. Hence, they keep putting out crap decades at a time. Unfortunately, I think Apple has contracted the same disease ... again.
One of Ballmer's first acts as CEO was to kill the Stinger smart phone project. Back then MSFT was using HP to do the hardware but the software was total crap. IIRC they shut everything down and bulldozed tens of millions of dollars of brand new phones in a landfill. Maybe the memory and expense of that total, abject failure was what soured Ballmer's attitude toward smart phones.well they could have started AHEAD in the race, as there was iPAQs and the like running windows CE like in... 2002? They were not much bigger than a todays smartphone just bulkier
I still own two, running linux. batteries are probably dead tough. back in the day they were da bomb.
That's pretty well my experience too. It used to be that Windows was a very unreliable OS, but with the latest version, Microsoft have really upped their game. OS X, by comparison has got WORSE, a lot worse. It's got to the point now where I get a better and more reliable experience running Windows 10 under Bootcamp on my Mac, than OS X. That's just ridiculous in my mind. It's making me review our entire tech strategy. Apple need to get their act together, and they need to do it FAST. I didn't pay 3 times the price of an equivalently specked computer to get an iMac, only to run Windows on it as my primary OS.
Are you American? The best Nokias never made it over here. They were extraordinarily good but we only saw the mid-market ones.
The OS is less and less the platform. More and more is it "The Cloud". One can see the decrease in investment apple has been making in it's operating systems. They have had an increased rate and severity of bugs since 2006. Their latest iOS patch release bricks one of their most recent devices.
In contrast, Apple's focus on consumer cloud applications has drastically increased. OS X and iOS are just the best client for these services and so they live on.
Comparably Microsoft's Office 365 subscriptions and Azure Cloud services gave their stock good boost yesterday. And the best client for these services, yep Windows. It's here to stay.
People still need an OS to access the cloud. Microsoft is giving up on Windows for consumers and is putting its money into building client applications for the platforms that matter - iOS and Android (Office 365 is part of the same strategy). Microsoft are still hoping business users will keep Windows alive to some degree, but as more of these customers migrate to mobile technology the writing is on the wall for Windows as a platform.
1. Nokia company exists in a licensed name and new products will come out under the Nokia branding from the licensee.
2. Yes
3. Windows phone is essentially dead. They have given a courtesy nod to supporting the platform of other OEMs release handsets, but I imagine many of those OEMs will now not bother releasing fully or cut their losses altogether. Surface phone 'may' still happen, but with mobile development of Windows essentially in limbo, staff and Windows phone projects have been culled going on for a while now it is hard to see how a single phone will garner support commercially and given the state of the software currently of Windows 10 mobile, I strongly suspect 'surface phone' will never see commercial retail release.
On the contrary, Foxconn and a partner bought the feature phone unit for $350 million.
They plan to design and sell new feature phones under the Nokia brand name.
They also separately bought rights to use the Nokia name for smartphones and tablets.
MS didn't want to sell the Android based phones that Nokia had made.
They're reportedly working on a Surface phone instead.
I'm not sure what the deal is with Windows phone, perhaps someone else can chime in on that part.
Oh man, I saw that this was a bad decision the day it was announced, similar to how Windows RT was an atrocious decision and that was immediately apparent. I predict continuum is also a bad decision, at least how it's implemented today. Sigh, sometimes it's tough to be a Microsoft fanboy.
Truth be told, and I said this years ago in this very forum, you are taking a huge risk buying Microsoft consumer products. Why? In the past, Microsoft has never had a clear vision or roadmap on what they were trying to accomplish. This ended up in products being abandoned after a short period of time or products trying to do everything else outside of their primary function of existence and failing miserably (X Box One). Think about that for a second. Remember Internet Explorer and NetScape Navigator? Microsoft copied the hell out of it and embedded it into the OS which basically won the battle for them. What happened next? IE stagnated and it actually hurt the developers and the internet due to the proprietary design and lack of security focus. Needless to say, Microsoft will never rule the web browser wars again no matter how many times they try and reboot. This activity pretty much sums up most of their consumer products.
Universal Apps sound good in theory but when you really look at it, it's not a good direction to go. Cookie cutter one app design fits all devices isn't smart and there is a reason why Apple hasn't gone down that path. It's not a good place to be in. I would prefer an app built from the ground up to utilize any particular device not generic APIs and stretched UIs that give me a half assed user experience just to check the "we have the app" box. We have seen it on PC games, to a small degree, for quite some time. Console ports over to the PC leaves controls, mods and dedicated servers left out to dry. Gamers complain and the user experience is less than desirable.
Microsoft is now shifting their full focus to the cloud which is smart as they want to create an ecosystem similar to Apple and have services everyone pays for. They are also doing their best to imitate Apple as much as possible by creating a line up of their products to fill up their carbon copy stores. I think this too will fail as Microsoft's best days are behind it.
Universal Apps sound good in theory but when you really look at it, it's not a good direction to go. Cookie cutter one app design fits all devices isn't smart and there is a reason why Apple hasn't gone down that path. It's not a good place to be in. I would prefer an app built from the ground up to utilize any particular device not generic APIs and stretched UIs that give me a half assed user experience just to check the "we have the app" box. We have seen it on PC games, to a small degree, for quite some time. Console ports over to the PC leaves controls, mods and dedicated servers left out to dry. Gamers complain and the user experience is less than desirable.
Microsoft is now shifting their full focus to the cloud which is smart as they want to create an ecosystem similar to Apple and have services everyone pays for. They are also doing their best to imitate Apple as much as possible by creating a line up of their products to fill up their carbon copy stores. I think this too will fail as Microsoft's best days are behind it.
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Nokia sold its mobile and devices dept. to Microsoft and licenced Lumia brand and some patentes too. Nokia itself was never sold to MS. It's up and running, being still in Finland and employing more that 114,000 people worldwide.
Nokia has been in talks with Foxconn to start to produce a Nokia branded Android phones maybe during this year already. In a similar manner as Apple does not manufacture their phones themselves, but has outsourced it. Nokia used to have its own factories, but those were sold to MS, and now MS gave them a bullet.
No. First, MS didn't buy Nokia as mentioned before. The $350m included some of the old Nokia factories designing and making 'dumb' phones. That was sold. I suppose the buyer has to license a bunch of patents from Nokia before they can continue...
Big part of the $7.6B included a license fees of Nokias' patent portfolio for ten years. The rest of the total sum included factories and its employees, phone designers... Steve Ballmer had a vision for Nokias' mobile device unit, but then he was ousted and the new CEO hated the whole phone dept. and killed it.
Now this is a good question. If I've understood everything correctly, these layouts will happen during 2017. There're some products in the pipeline, they might come out before the end. After that MS will focus on Business mobile devices and exit the consumer market - for now.
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Their big dream is that their phone can be turned into a portable computer that they can hook up to a big screen but the problem with that vision is that it is very much dependent on not only moving their platform in the direction of UWP but also moving their own operating system from being dependent on win32 to UWP which will require their complete UI components to be re-written using UWP. Their vision sounds great on stage when they did their presentation but I think it is largely unrealistic to the point that even Google realises that if they really want to move ChromeOS forward then it actually requires catering for the legacy applications or in the case of Google it involves finding a way to get Android applications running on ChromeOS.
When it comes to Apple I personally think they've made the better choice and that is to harmonise between the platforms rather than trying to smoosh everything into a single platform that some how tries to change its UI layout based on the 'role' which the device takes on at that particular moment time. When ever you try to be 'everything to everyone' you ultimately end up making no one happy in the process because what ever decisions that are made are ultimately riddled with compromises.
Microsoft don't seem to have any vision or plan of where they are going. How can you buy a company for $7b and close it down just years later. there are so many of these companies nowadays that have so much money they can buy up great firms and just play around with them. Bloody disgrace that so many people have been made redundant and a great firm with tons of history has gone to the wall. Can the collective greats of Microsoft, Nokia, Motorola, Blackberry, Erikson, etc, etc really not produce a product range the can compete with Samsung and Apple. When ever I use a Samsung product I always think it is just such a terrible product. The hardware is ok but the OS, usability is just terrible. The main issue I can see is not only the iPhones desirability over others but that Apple kind of locks you in to their ecosystem and it is a rawly hassle to change. So all y family and in laws al have iPhone or iPads and FaceTime all the time. So if I more away from apple then suddenly this make life much harder.
I'd say a combination of changing priorities and the faulire of the prior CEO. This was Ballmer's idea in how to turn things around as I believe he was looking to emulate apple, and so if Apple makes phones, MS should. Nadella's vision of Microsoft was a service based organization and so the Nokia purchase just didn't fit into that scheme. He basically was marginalizing the windows phone as soon as he became CEO
Microsoft is not the only company with too much money.
- HP bought WebOS for $1.2B, designs and manufacture the HP Touchpad tablet, kills it 49 days later before the first shipped batch reaches the shore. Sold to the highest bidder, LG because they offered two peanuts instead of the other interested party which offered just one peanut, and made it open source.
- Myspace, bought by News Corp for $580M, valuated $12B, sold fo $35M
I remember 2 but there's probably plenty more of them.