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nokia-st09.jpg

I guess this may never happen now. LOL! :)
 
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So they finally get that having an install base of like 10% will never get them any where. They are just not made to have first party hardware like apple and it hurts them. They tried to buy the talent and that seemly failed. The idea of selling license it out like android will get them no where when google gives the whole apple cart away. So they need to go back to the drawing board and just stay out of the mobile OS and focus on there core which is office and exchange the things that makes them money

So i assume you think apple should get out of the Mac/OSX business since they have a 10% market share ...up from 6% .
 
So basically Elop and Microsoft destroyed an independent Nokia which strengthened Samsung and was basically neutral for Apple. And I'm sure Elop left both Nokia and Microsoft a very rich man while tens of thousands were laid off. Nice job Ballmer. o_O

Destroyed Nokia (and on its way to destroying MS) is true.
Strengthened Samsung and neutral to Apple is completely false.
Remember those good old days when Apple received 75% of mobile profits and Samsung 26% (-1% to everyone else)? Well the latest numbers are Apple now receives 89% of mobile profits, all of Android receives 11%, and everyone else gets 0%. Samsung is just not doing well these days --- the Galaxy S6 numbers were released yesterday, and they were as disappointing as the Galaxy S5 numbers before them.
 
Don't worry Windows 10 is coming....unifinished but its coming i should better stick with windows 7 for another 5 years.
 
That's a real shame, I actually quite like the windows phone interface, it makes apples icons all aver the screen interface look positively dated.
 
Windows 10 won't save Windows Phone. The Windows phone business is dead. As much as they try to go against this eventually you have to realize that there's nothing you can do about it but to accept it and move on. The average person doesn't even know what a Windows phone is.
 
Sad since WP8.1 runs so much faster on similar hardware than Android. The whole system has a ton more polish than Android.
 
No kidding. Those poor people. It's the thing I hate most about working for "The Man". You're not even human anymore. You're a 'resource' and if the money isn't there, you can go starve in a ditch for all anyone at your company gives a rat's ass.

That's why I refused to work for cooperations for the rest of my career. Been in a few big cooperations and they're all have the same mindless bosses and their numbers, no human element in there anymore.
 
Microsoft is on shaky ground when you start looking long term. Up to this point, Microsoft products have been mostly half ass and a me-too approach. Look at their Antivirus solution. It's in last place for detection and security which begs to question of why have an offering at all? Why waste resources on half ass implementations? Microsoft needs to trim down to a small product and service offering then dedicate resources into making them top notch.

When you look at the current generation, everyone is now growing up on Apple and Google products and services. These folks will be the next CIOs and CTOs which means there is a good chance they won't choose Microsoft at all for their tech needs.
 
So i assume you think apple should get out of the Mac/OSX business since they have a 10% market share ...up from 6% .

The difference is that while Apple may have 10% of the PC business, they have around, 50% of the PC profits.
MS had 0% of the mobile profits.
 
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Microsoft is on shaky ground when you start looking long term. Up to this point, Microsoft products have been mostly half ass and a me-too approach. Look at their Antivirus solution. It's in last place for detection and security which begs to question of why have an offering at all? Why waste resources on half ass implementations? Microsoft needs to trim down to a small product and service offering then dedicate resources into making them top notch.

When you look at the current generation, everyone is now growing up on Apple and Google products and services. These folks will be the next CIOs and CTOs which means there is a good chance they won't choose Microsoft at all for their tech needs.

MS suffers from the fatal flaw of inability to focus. You see it in their software ("do we concentrate on the modern UI or the classic UI? We'll do both! Do we concentrate on PCs or tablets? Both! Do we support the new .NET APIs or the old Win32 APIs? Both! C++ or C#? Both? etc etc")
Compare with Apple who, once they make a decision they are all in. Apple last year says "Swift is our new programming language", and this year every WWDC slide has Swift as the examples, no Objective C. When they realize they've made a mistake (eg offering GC for Objective C) they immediately admit it and deprecate the mistake.)

The biggest version of this MS inability to focus is that they can't decide if they want the reliable profitability of enterprise, or the mass market of consumers. And so, in usual MS fashion, they refuse to choose. But you CANNOT refuse to choose. Enterprise wants endless backward compatibility and very slow change. Consumers want rapid change when that makes sense (as it has over the past few years in how we want PCs to interact with mobile). You can't simultaneously change everything and change nothing. MS tried that with Win8, to universal hatred, and I don't see that they've actually SOLVED the issue with Win10. All they've done is add on YET ANOTHER layer of "we'll do it the old way AND we'll do it the new way, and you choose".

Instead of this One Windows nonsense, they should have gone in the exact opposite direction. Split Windows into a consumer version and an enterprise version; with much the same internal guts (like iOS and OSX) but different UIs, a rapidly changing UI for consumers, a stable one for enterprise. And of course with different names, to prevent confusion ("how come this 'Windows" app doesn't run on my work Windows? --- no-one complains that an iOS app doesn't run on their Mac).
 
You really don't know what a monopoly is do you?

OK then, if it's strict technical accuracy you want, then it's a duopoly. My main point was about the lack of competition not being good for consumers, which is still valid.
 
So basically Elop and Microsoft destroyed an independent Nokia which strengthened Samsung and was basically neutral for Apple. And I'm sure Elop left both Nokia and Microsoft a very rich man while tens of thousands were laid off. Nice job Ballmer. o_O
An independent Nokia didn't have much time left, they started struggling years before they got accquired by MS.
 
Here's where we see the tension of wanting to be more like Apple while having a fundamentally different business model tear a division apart.

iPhone has the distinct advantage of having its hardware and software developed by the same company. Both Google and Microsoft have tried to buy hardware companies to allow them to better integrate, but they've tried to maintain their OEM partners at the same time. Both companies seem to have realized that they can't serve two masters: direct customers and OEMs. They're competing with their own customers, which is just bad for everybody.

From that letter, it's not clear what's changing. Focusing on three areas: business, low cost devices, and flagship models doesn't seem to narrow the scope much. I get that they want to have devices out there that spur their partners to innovate, but it seems to me this is just more of the asymmetric competition model. MS has an inside track to the technology and will always have a leg up in the market.

I expect there will either be a further shrinking of their hardware business in the future, or they'll pretty much give up on OEMing Windows Phone.
 
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Well, I guess they'll have an opportunity to see what it's like to manage a product line with well under 10% of the market share. But Microsoft shouldn't be counted out quite yet.

I remember buying a Power Mac 9600 in '97 I think it was and telling my wife that would be our last Mac...because the company would be bankrupt and out of business before I was ready to replace it.

She wanted me to sell our (relatively small amount of) stock in the company but I resisted, figuring Apple needed every dollar to try to stay afloat.

The rest as they say is history....the iMac came out a year later followed by all the other ground-breaking products and Apple became the world's most valuable company.

And that Apple stock I hung on to put three kids through Ivy League schools.

So I wouldn't put a nail in Microsoft's phone coffin quite yet. But they'll need competent senior management and that seems to have been in very short supply for years at Microsoft. Then again, we can point to some similar periods at Apple.

Windows Phones are now much lower than Apple share ever was. Only the tablet space could possibly save them in mobile; the 2 year will tell.
 
I don't know where you live but here in UK you see plenty of Lumia devices in the wild. Lot more than you can see Apple watches that Apple supposedly sold millions of.

A mass market device sold for 5 years and people keep out vs a device sold in UK for a few months, which is seen for mere seconds at a time... and which otherwise could be hidden. Hmmm... If you actually had seen more watches that would be extremely weird. So, your whole argument is totally non sequitur.
 
Well, I'll guess I have to go all in on my BQ Ubuntu then, as there'll be no more development on the Windows Phone I guess.
Got my first iPhone more or less on launch day 2007, but when I saw WP7 in 2012 there was no going back. iOS was feeling stale already in 2010-11 and every time I start my iPad I'm baffled that people still consider the patchwork that is iOS8 as something good? o_O
WP was a new take on the UI not like the iOS rip-off Android but something genuinely new. Can't believe that MS is actually moving away from the tile UI in W10, I always though that they would get rid of that stone age desktop analogy that has crippled GUIs for years instead!
 
The Nokia patent portfolio is worth billions. I wonder if Nadella is thinking about auctioning this IP? Apple, Google, Samsung, etc., would certainly be interested. It would recoup some of Ballmer's mal investments.
 
No kidding. Those poor people. It's the thing I hate most about working for "The Man". You're not even human anymore. You're a 'resource' and if the money isn't there, you can go starve in a ditch for all anyone at your company gives a rat's ass.
Welcome to the future where we return to feudalism, serving at the pleasure of the 1%. Or you could just start start your own multinational corporation I suppose.
 
I wonder how this will affect the downtown Sunnyvale office, or the Mountain View office where (by my understanding) a lot of hardware is developed....

I think they moved the Sunnyvale office to Mountain View already..
 
Well, I'm a minion, not the ruler, and always have been, so I'm possibly the wrong one to ask seeing as how I lack the knowledge. Truthfully, I get that you can't keep paying people if the cash isn't there. I get that circumstances sometimes result in crappy outcomes. That's just life.

However, I think that, in a broad-reaching way, companies have become far more skewed and heartless in recent decades. I think that in a company the size of Microsoft, there's probably a little leeway when it comes to reassignment of talented people. I don't think that laying of 7K+ people is necessary. I've seen it time and again where a company has layoffs one month, and hires the next. They don't hire as many as were laid off, but they do find roles for people. Why not invest some energy into minimizing that turnaround? Further to that, why not give the employees some say? Maybe some would leave willingly to pursue other things leaving roles open for those who want to stay or would be hurt by leaving.

My dad once told me that back in the 50s when the factory he worked at had to let people go, they would often let go the youngest and most talented, the reason being that those people could far more easily bounce back from a setback and handle it than an older guy with a family to feed. Companies do not consider that at all anymore. People stopped being people and became numbers on a spreadsheet.

I don't believe that layoffs or job losses are avoidable and we can somehow all live in utopia, but I do think there's a space between that and showing up for work and being told you can just leave and we don't care where you go. And at the same time the bigwigs are writing politically correct canned statements about "our former colleagues" going through "transitions" about people whose names they never bothered to learn.

Honestly, I think they can do better.
Bravo on having some actual good ideas and a well thought out response.

Who knows if the initial number was 12,000 and MS did use some of those tactics to whittle it down to 8,000 or if they just did as you inferred and flat out laid them off. If they did not at least try, then I 100% agree with you. It's tough when a company is publicly held. It's not always up to the CEO or the company, they have to answer to the shareholders, which are average joe's like you and I with 401k's. If they don't make the tough decisions to improve the bottom line, our retirement portfolios don't increase as we would like them.

At the end of the day, I think all companies should strive to find a balance. Not like what Bob Nardelli did to Home Depot. That used to be a helluva place for a minion, as you called it :) to work. Now they can only attract inexperienced college-aged kids.
 
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