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Microsoft is cutting 1,000 jobs in Finland as it stops phone production
- steeleduncan 10y ago"The Californian search giant" - typo, or am I missing something?
- ensiferum 10y agoI'm just surprised how long this took. I was expecting this to happen for the past few years already. Thanks and goodbye.
- pasiaj 10y agoIt has been already happening for the past few years. The first round was handled by Nokia. Last year MS announced layoffs of 2300 people in Finland. After this there is pretty much nobody left.
- tommeader 10y agoThe table graphic in this article really eschews clarity. The most recent figures on the left and a giant emoji slapped over it? Seems like a graph would've been better suited. The source even has the table in text format for easy processing.
- stinos 10y agoeschews clarity 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.
- feintruled 10y agoI had an image of Businessinsider as something staid like FT, but on clicking through some of those links it appears to be more like a non-ironic version of Clickhole.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tim333 10y agoI wonder how it would have played out for Nokia if Microsoft had not bought them. Rather better in some ways I'd imagine.
- pavlov 10y agoI don't think so. Nokia got $7.2 billion from Microsoft for a loss-making device business. Nokia still exists today and swallowed Alcatel-Lucent last year. 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.
- vesinisa 10y agoEither way, how was the unit worth $7.2 billion in 2013 to anyone? Why did Microsoft pay such ridiculous money for a loss-making business, only to essentially burn it down over the next two years? From April 2014, when the deal was finalized, to May 2016, when the last employees are being laid off, the damage Microsoft incurred from this deal amount to about $1.8 million per HOUR of business. Did they really think they could pull off some magic trick to make Windows Phone fly, or were they bound by some backroom deal to buy the phone business at set price in case it started to weight down on Nokia?
- aembleton 10y agoMaybe, as Pavlov suggested, this was part of the deal - that MS would have to pay at least $7.2bn for the phone business if Windows on Nokia didn't work out.
- sirkneeland 10y agoIt was driven by Ballmer's ego more than a rational plan. 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.
- jongalloway2 10y agoA much better writeup here: http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-cuts-another-1850-jobs-takes-950-million-charge-in-phone-hardware-business/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-cuts-another-1850-job...
- anjc 10y agoHard to understand. They buy the one company division in the world who was pushing the Windows Phone brand, a company who was innovating in terms of design and cameras and who had finally cracked their own decent brand and product line etc, and they immediately start winding them down. And they're going to work on their own hardware now anyway. 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?
- stevehiehn 10y agoSeems clear to me. They executed on a strategy and consumers weren't interested.
- anjc 10y agoWell penetration of WP is down yeah, but that only makes sense when Nokia Lumias immediately disappeared from shops upon announcement of the MS Lumia devices, and when MS did not market or promote those new devices very much. The 950 range was also largely unavailable due to stock levels. So for about two years there you couldn't buy a Lumia even if you wanted to. So it's not surprise that usage went down and that consumers weren't interested. 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?
- bazqux2 10y agoIt's so when they kill it there are fewer people to complain
- arielweisberg 10y agoMy wife really likes Windows Phone and wanted a Lumia 1020 for the camera. I offered her my 6+ and she refused. 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.
- stevehiehn 10y agoMakes sense. The sooner they cut their losses and focus on cloud/productivity apps the better off they'll be. IMHO
- sickbeard 10y agoCan we start saying Ballmer was a better CEO than Nadella?
- seanmcdirmid 10y agoThis is all happening because of a decision made by Ballmer. Disclosure: MS employee whose wife was a Nokia employee.
- sickbeard 10y agoEverything was in place for UWP to take over the world, but they failed to produce a good phone OS, or produced one that was worse that what it was supposed to replace.
- gulpahum 10y agoJust few weeks ago, Nokia announced that Nokia branded smart phones and tablets will be entering market soon. This time they are based on Android OS. It'll be interesting to see how well they'll sell (compared to Windows Phone). http://company.nokia.com/en/our-businesses/nokia-technologies/hello-again http://company.nokia.com/en/our-businesses/nokia-technologie... http://company.nokia.com/en/news/press-releases/2016/05/18/nokia-signs-strategic-brand-and-intellectual-property-licensing-agreement-enabling-hmd-global-to-create-new-generation-of-nokia-branded-mobile-phones-and-tablets http://company.nokia.com/en/news/press-releases/2016/05/18/n...
- criddell 10y agoOther than the Nokia brand name (which is still pretty valuable), I wonder how they will differentiate themselves from other Android handset makers?
- sirkneeland 10y agoNokia brand, Nokia design. And an outlet for whatever cool tech Foxconn has stumbled upon in Shenzhen? In an era when smartphones are increasingly commoditized, it could work well enough to carve out a sustainable business.
- unlinker 10y agoAs the second article says, it's not Nokia building them, but letting another company ("HMD global Oy") build them under the Nokia brand. This is similar to what they did with the somewhat recent Nokia N1 tablet: it was built by Foxconn.
- Ezhik 10y agoThis HMD global was founded by an ex-Nokia employee. Seems like the sleeper agents are being activated.
- greatnorthz 10y agoI long suspected something like that. Let MS purchase and restructure a sinking ship. Allow the talent to move on and do R&D on the cheap via startups. Once the restrictions of the deal end, see what's flourished and return to the consumer market. I assumed Jolla but this other entity got it.
- pjmlp 10y agoI guess it is about time I stop making my hobby coding portable between WP and Android, focusing just on Android. 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.
- Aoyagi 10y agoIt wasn't just 512 MB RAM devices. That was just a poor excuse they used for a pragmatic push on "Nokia veterans" to buy the 950(XL), or at least 640. 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."
- pjmlp 10y agoI own the 630 when it got released with 8.1. 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.
- Joeri 10y agoOTOH, can you name a single feature of WP10 that you wanted to upgrade for? I went from a 920 with wp8 to a 950 with wp10, and the only good new features are ones that required new hardware (continuum and hello). 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.
- 10y ago
- AdmiralAsshat 10y agoA lesson from Palm, Nokia, Motorola, and every other small-to-midsize company in the Telco arena: Never let yourselves be acquired. It won't end well.
- Aoyagi 10y agoI don't think this is telco-specific...
- manojlds 10y agoFirebase, WhatsApp and Instagram have been good.
- varjag 10y agoAndroid isn't much worse off..
- Jtsummers 10y agoTo be fair, Android wasn't established when it was acquired. It was still in early stages and not released in production devices. Google took it there (by financing, management or what, I don't know, but it happened after they acquired it).
- varjag 10y agoYeah well, the GP post mentions "small to midsize telco" companies, so Android was definitely small. (on the other hand it implies the behemoth of Nokia was "midsize", uh)
- slavik81 10y agoNokia was a disaster for years before Microsoft bought them. Given that the alternative appears to have been a steady decline into bankruptcy, I think Nokia did pretty well for themselves in that deal. They sold the company for a lot more than it was worth.
- dijit 10y agoI was around when the takeover of Nokia R&D happened in Febuary 2011, I remember walking around the offices of Ruohulati in Helsinki and seeing a massive queue to the IT room, previously linux laptops were being reformatted to run windows. 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.
- BorgHunter 10y agoNokia was doomed before Elop took over. Kallasvuo was CEO when Apple released the first iPhone, and Kallasvuo was the one who decided that Nokia's existing offerings were good enough to compete, just keep minorly refining things every generation. By the time Elop came in, the ship was already sinking (or, if you prefer, the platform was already burning). Elop's decisions did not turn that around, but realistically, could he have?
- rospaya 10y agoI agree that Nokia was too slow to compete, but they had massive advantages over both Apple and Google and with good guidance could've survived successfully. 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.
- nedsma 10y agoThere's an interesting article over at Anandtech discussing the fate of Nokia and what projects might occur under Nokia licensing contracts. http://www.anandtech.com/show/10333/foxconn-and-hmd-to-return-nokia-smartphones-and-tablets-to-market http://www.anandtech.com/show/10333/foxconn-and-hmd-to-retur... I hope that some of the folks getting the boot by MS will join the Helsinki based HMD Global who got an exclusive global license to create Nokia-branded mobile phones and tablets for the next ten years.
- reiichiroh 10y agoI wonder what Tomi Ahonen thinks of these latest developments.
- Nokinside 10y agoMay 20, 2016 So the Nokia brand returns.. with a Vengeance http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2016/05/so-the-nokia-brand-returns-with-a-vengeance.html http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2016/05/so-the-...
- shmerl 10y agoThe best thing that happened after MS essentially killed mobile division of Nokia is that Jolla was created. I hope Jolla will succeed. Their latest troubles and tablet project failure were unfortunate (I was a backer and won't be getting the tablet).
- chflags 10y ago"... linux laptops were being reformatted to run windows." 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.
- hellbanner 10y agoThey are simply following incentives set by the economic environment they operate in.
- burkaman 10y agoWhat do you make of all the Windows-unrelated stuff that comes out of Microsoft Research? Seems like a lot of money and effort they're spending to cover their real mission of infecting the world with their zombie cancer. 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.
- rifung 10y agoI'm surprised at the negative attitude you have of MSR. People at MSR seem to have it pretty good and are free to publish their results to the open, so I don't see anything wrong with what they do. It actually seems nice that Microsoft is willing to fund researchers on things that are not directly related to products like Theoretical CS.
- patkai 10y agoI see it as Nokia was a very good hardware company that couldn't turn itself around into a software company. Before iPhone you needed many moving parts, good supply chains, great hardware variety, spare part production and who knows what. Now you need good software. Nokia was less likely to turn itself around than IBM.
- znpy 10y agoNokia is dead. Get over it.
- MrTonyD 10y agoWe may never know the real story. Steve and Bill used to meet in Bill's jet flying over the ocean so that they could avoid any monitoring as they made deals to benefit each other (the whole "we're competitors" was largely fake - I was in plenty of meetings with Steve and also worked for a direct report of Bill. Their goal was to make each other rich.) It may not be a coincidence that Steve dropped Flash (at the time considered the competitor to Microsoft's CLR in the browser - their bet on the future of controlling future development platforms) and Bill took-over the biggest competitor to the iphone. There were plenty of other similar deals being made between them and the major computer vendors (and, if it isn't obvious, we paid the price by the limited competition and limited choices. Bill and Steve didn't just meet with each other. People who think "free market" is real are both naive and arrogant.) And in a court of law I will say that I just made all this up.
- jtrtoo 10y agoHow is two individuals doing what makes sense for themselves not a free market? Free market doesn't mean altruistic
- lvs 10y agoHe can't say it outright. He's saying they were regularly manipulating the markets in which they operated in an anticompetitive manner. That's one of the main mechanisms by which free markets fail.
- rue 10y agoFreedom requires transparency. That’s what free means. Not “companies free to do whatever they please”.
- krapp 10y ago>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.
- censhin 10y agohttps://youtu.be/2e_YBgh9O48 https://youtu.be/2e_YBgh9O48
- greenstonekid 10y agoI remember reading an article which explained the pragmatic reasons for the MS purchase of NOKIA. 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