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Microsoft (Elop and Ballmer) ruined Nokia's cell phone line that led to massive layoffs. Let's see if this investment leads to the final elimination of an EU t
by bgwalter 1y ago
Microsoft (Elop and Ballmer) ruined Nokia's cell phone line that led to massive layoffs.
Let's see if this investment leads to the final elimination of an EU tech company. Why does Finland permit this?
- iberator 1y agoNOKIA IS NOT PHONE COMPANY. Never have been. They produce ayt of telecom stuff. Nokia was never ruined.
- bgwalter 1y agoYou are probably trolling, but if you cannot read Wikipedia yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia "In 1998 alone, the company had sales revenue of $20 billion, making $2.6 billion profit. By 2000, Nokia employed over 55,000 people and had a market share of 30% in the mobile phone market, almost twice as large as its nearest competitor, Motorola." The mobile phone business was ruined (perhaps they should have used Android), therefore caution about new foreign influence is warranted.
- iberator 1y agoYou don't understand: phones were just small part of their business. They are stull tier 1 teleco stuff provider worldwide (gsm, umts, ltr, 5g, core, rrus and bbus etc.)
- linhns 1y agoNokia has been teetering on the edge for a period, so they would welcome such an investment.
- foobarian 1y agoNokia has been at the edge of the abyss for a period, and then they made a giant leap forward /s
- phatfish 1y agoNokia never executed on a touch screen OS. If i remember their final attempt with a Linux based OS was considered "good", but it was too little, too late. It was already over when they were scooped up by Microsoft, who were desperate themselves. Pretty sure Nokia was glad to offload the handset business so they could feed money into markets they were still competitive in.
- pjmlp 1y agoYes they did, a few Symbian models used touch, as did original Maemo device that only did wlan initially. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet
- ptx 1y agoAll the Symbian devices used resistive touch screens, though, didn't they? E.g. the Sony Ericsson Vivaz. So the user experience was not quite the same as with capacitive touch.
- ZuLuuuuuu 1y agoNo, there were quite a few Symbian models which used capacitive touch, combined with a modern Qt based Symbian OS. Check out "Symbian Belle" and the phone models released with that OS version. I loved my Nokia 603 :) But I think they only released such models with Symbian for a couple of years, before switching to Meego and then later Windows Mobile OS.
- pjmlp 1y agoThey were in parallel, due to the whole Symbian vs Linux politics at Nokia between teams, both platforms got ramped down to Windows Phone 7 introduction and burning platforms memo. The N900 was released more for a question of honour than anything.
- pjmlp 1y ago
- triceratops 1y agoTo be fair Nokia, like Blackberry, was effed the moment iPhone launched. Elop hastened the decline but it was coming regardless.
- Insanity 1y agoIt's not quite the same, BlackBerry was mostly a 'phone' company and not a 'full telecom' company, in terms of hardware the produced. Nokia has other products that are more b2b than b2c.
- triceratops 1y agoNokia has existed for over a hundred years. The success of its phones made it a major name and a ton of money in the early 2000s. Its other lines of business have continued to operate quietly. But it's no longer the force it was.
- distances 1y agoIt wasn't iPhone that doomed Nokia, it was Android. All of the sudden all Nokia's competitors could ship fairly good touch screen phones, while previously Nokia had a virtual monopoly on advanced mobile operating systems (barring BlackBerry in the US). Granted, it was going to happen anyway, probably through Microsoft if Google hadn't commoditized that market first.
- jampekka 1y agoNokia's market cap is over $40B, so $1B is not really Microsoft level coup. At least yet.
- chollida1 1y agoMicrosoft did no such thing. Nokia is very directly responsible for its own cell phone failings. This line of thought really needs to die. The Nokia board hired Elop from Microsoft because they wanted to bet the company on the Microsoft phone, full stop. If you want to assign blame, then its on Nokia for wanting to pursue that strategy.
- nsonha 1y agoyes Nokia had years to come up with a better OS and they didn't. Even Samsung failed at this endeavor years later.
- nicce 1y agoThey had MeeGo (Qt/Linux). For some reason they thought that not worth it to continue. Let's take Windows!
- nsonha 1y agoI've always asumed it wasn't a good enough OS just from the consumer news articles I read, was a freshman at the time. What was technically remarkable about it?
- nicce 1y agoIt was a direct competitor for Android at that time. GUI was really nice. I don't think it was essentially worse than Android. There was the potential. https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/31z13e/is_the_old_maemomeego_closer_to_pure_linux_than/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/31z13e/is_... http://www.eedailynews.com/2010/05/android-vs-meego-two-approaches-to.html http://www.eedailynews.com/2010/05/android-vs-meego-two-appr...
- pjmlp 1y agoAs someone that was an employee at the time, I am also fed up with the anti-Microsoft narrative. Also there are some errors there, Windows Phone only became an alternative after the burning platform memo, that wasn't at all well received neither internally, nor by the 3rd party devs that had just started to migrate their Symbian tooling yet again, this time to Qt + PIPS + Carbide. The biggest blame with the board, as revealed on the Finish press, was the bonus clause on Elop contract to sell Nokia Mobile business.
- rhetocj23 1y agoMSFT accelerated the invetiable. There was just no way Nokia could match Apple on the OS who spent years prior to the idea of a smartphone making it a good match for the hardware of the time. And MSFT deservedly got punished for not investing in creating a better OS and Apple deservedly rewarded for doing so.
- tgma 1y agoThey may never have had the chance to beat Apple but they could certainly have bet on Android instead of Windows Phone and today they probably would have been in a different place like Samsung.