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It's what you get when you have no phone manufacturing supply chains anymore because you shipped them all to China 20+ years ago then lost the OS wars to Apple

It's what you get when you have no phone manufacturing supply chains anymore because you shipped them all to China 20+ years ago then lost the OS wars to Apple and Google leaving you with no local phone industry. Then it's gonna cost you through the nose when you're making, what are now to your industry, niche low volume items. Remember when you could buy EU made Nokias, Siemens and Ericssons? Even the chargers were made in Finland back then.

actionfromafar 8mo ago
I think of those two, the OS wars is the much more substantial EU/US difference. It's not like Apple is making much hardware in the US, yet they wade in pools of cash.
pjmlp 8mo ago
As ex-Nokia, I can tell quite a few stories about the rampdown in Germany, of factories and R&D sites, merge with Siemens and what not. For those that care, search the news for strikes or layoffs, around the time iOS/Android were taking off.
- dddw 8mo ago
  Another good reason to dislike M$
  - joe_mamba 8mo ago
    What does MS have to do with this? The Nokia factory shuffling and strikes GP was mentioning happened before MS took over. And people love to blame MS but Nokia was a sinking ship already by that point. MS was just a new captain added to steer the Titanic but the same fate was inevitable, as its home grown MeeGo/Maemo platform arrived too late and to too little adoption to stand a chance against the already established iOS and Android platforms who were throwing infinity money on becoming the undisputed mobile duopoly platforms, selling 10x as many devices as Nokia was selling Maemo N900s. It was already over for Nokia by that point same as it was for Blackberry. Nokia's own engineers admitted this the moment they got to play with the first iPhone at their Espoo HQ. That's like blaming a drunk driver for hitting a guy that previously shot himself in the head. Nothing MS could have done would have changed that fate for the better. WHat did people expect MS to have done?
    - actionfromafar 8mo ago
      Sure, but still, the driver was very intoxicated and ran over the guy, then put the car in reverse and ran over the guy again.
      - joe_mamba 8mo ago
        What does the driver matter if the guy was already dead?
        pjmlp 8mo ago
        I bet a judge would disagree on the inocence of the driver in such scenario.
        joe_mamba 8mo ago
        You're missing the point to argue in bad faith. The point was the even if a drunk driver hadn't run over Nokia, they'd still be dead from the Android and iOS onslaught, doesn't matter who ran over their corpse after that. A judge won't make you a murderer for running over a corpse, just a drunk driver, this is such a weird hill to die on. BTW, we're still waiting on the Nokia insider details you were mentioning before.
        pjmlp 8mo ago
        I won't spill any beans, some stuff is easy to find online, the other I usually keep my NDAs. Nokia is still pretty much around, and owns where UNIX was born in case you missed that part of history. While we had issues, the burning memo platform was the killer for the third party developer ecosystem, just coming around the hill to move from classical Symbian into Qt/PIPS, in a UNIX culture, to be told to go Windows.
        joe_mamba 8mo ago
        Hold on a second, let's backtrack. First you say you can "tell stories about the factory rampdowns", then when pressed to tell those stories you say you can't "because of NDAs" .... from 20 years ago on a business that's now defunct ... not sure how any of that would be enforceable today, leading me to believe you're either chasing clout for upvotes, or bs-ing. But OK, sure, let's ignore all that for now and move to the next point. Secondly, you keep bringing up Stephen Elop's "burning memo" several times in this thread as the root cause of Nokia's failure, but when i use my google-fu to go back to the world of 2011, I see that Symbian had fallen to 31% market share from 44% the previous year and Maemo/Meego had a <1% market share, so it's clear to anyone with two brain cells to rub together than Symbian was in freefall and irredeemable against iOS and Android, and loosing them money, and Maemo/Meego was far too late to the party with an insignificant market share to rise up against iOS and Android, also loosing them money. So given this obvious loose-money loose-money situation Nokia was in, why wasn't the "burning memo" to stop the bleed, the right choice at the time? People say this was the wrong solution, but nobody ever says what the right solution was. Maybe because they don't have a better solution, and burning it was the only right one. So you're probably looking at the unsalvageable past through rose tinted glasses.
  - pjmlp 8mo ago
    I dislike the board that brought Elop in, and promised him a bonus if he managed to sell Nokia Mobiles business unit, and they were also the ones that decided to off-shore factories and R&D into Eastern Europe and India.
    - mytailorisrich 8mo ago
      Unfortunately Nokia was doomed because it was too slow and bureaucratic and could not adapt to the iPhone... Contrast with Samsung that managed to quickly churn out iphone "clones" and to iterate quickly.
      - pjmlp 8mo ago
        Sure, if you miss the whole Bada OS failure, and Tizen for that matter.
- joe_mamba 8mo ago
  >As ex-Nokia, I can tell quite a few stories about the rampdown in Germany, of factories and R&D sites, merge with Siemens and what not. Well please go on, spill the tea, don't leave us hanging. This would be very interesting to hear. >For those that care, search the news for strikes or layoffs, around the time iOS/Android were taking off. Well, according to my google-fu, the factory closures from Finland and germany were relocated to Hungary and Romania, so still EU, therefore the EU could have maintained a domestic phone manufacturing sector in its lowest cost countries as well, if they had kept those fabs and not close them down as well to move everything to china. Everything about this screams of corporate greed and mismanagement on Nokia's part, way before Microsoft entered the picture.

actionfromafar 8mo ago

I think of those two, the OS wars is the much more substantial EU/US difference. It's not like Apple is making much hardware in the US, yet they wade in pools of cash.

pjmlp 8mo ago

As ex-Nokia, I can tell quite a few stories about the rampdown in Germany, of factories and R&D sites, merge with Siemens and what not. For those that care, search the news for strikes or layoffs, around the time iOS/Android were taking off.

dddw 8mo ago
Another good reason to dislike M$
- joe_mamba 8mo ago
  What does MS have to do with this? The Nokia factory shuffling and strikes GP was mentioning happened before MS took over. And people love to blame MS but Nokia was a sinking ship already by that point. MS was just a new captain added to steer the Titanic but the same fate was inevitable, as its home grown MeeGo/Maemo platform arrived too late and to too little adoption to stand a chance against the already established iOS and Android platforms who were throwing infinity money on becoming the undisputed mobile duopoly platforms, selling 10x as many devices as Nokia was selling Maemo N900s. It was already over for Nokia by that point same as it was for Blackberry. Nokia's own engineers admitted this the moment they got to play with the first iPhone at their Espoo HQ. That's like blaming a drunk driver for hitting a guy that previously shot himself in the head. Nothing MS could have done would have changed that fate for the better. WHat did people expect MS to have done?
  - actionfromafar 8mo ago
    Sure, but still, the driver was very intoxicated and ran over the guy, then put the car in reverse and ran over the guy again.
    - joe_mamba 8mo ago
      What does the driver matter if the guy was already dead?
      - pjmlp 8mo ago
        I bet a judge would disagree on the inocence of the driver in such scenario.
        joe_mamba 8mo ago
        You're missing the point to argue in bad faith. The point was the even if a drunk driver hadn't run over Nokia, they'd still be dead from the Android and iOS onslaught, doesn't matter who ran over their corpse after that. A judge won't make you a murderer for running over a corpse, just a drunk driver, this is such a weird hill to die on. BTW, we're still waiting on the Nokia insider details you were mentioning before.
        pjmlp 8mo ago
        I won't spill any beans, some stuff is easy to find online, the other I usually keep my NDAs. Nokia is still pretty much around, and owns where UNIX was born in case you missed that part of history. While we had issues, the burning memo platform was the killer for the third party developer ecosystem, just coming around the hill to move from classical Symbian into Qt/PIPS, in a UNIX culture, to be told to go Windows.
        joe_mamba 8mo ago
        Hold on a second, let's backtrack. First you say you can "tell stories about the factory rampdowns", then when pressed to tell those stories you say you can't "because of NDAs" .... from 20 years ago on a business that's now defunct ... not sure how any of that would be enforceable today, leading me to believe you're either chasing clout for upvotes, or bs-ing. But OK, sure, let's ignore all that for now and move to the next point. Secondly, you keep bringing up Stephen Elop's "burning memo" several times in this thread as the root cause of Nokia's failure, but when i use my google-fu to go back to the world of 2011, I see that Symbian had fallen to 31% market share from 44% the previous year and Maemo/Meego had a <1% market share, so it's clear to anyone with two brain cells to rub together than Symbian was in freefall and irredeemable against iOS and Android, and loosing them money, and Maemo/Meego was far too late to the party with an insignificant market share to rise up against iOS and Android, also loosing them money. So given this obvious loose-money loose-money situation Nokia was in, why wasn't the "burning memo" to stop the bleed, the right choice at the time? People say this was the wrong solution, but nobody ever says what the right solution was. Maybe because they don't have a better solution, and burning it was the only right one. So you're probably looking at the unsalvageable past through rose tinted glasses.
- pjmlp 8mo ago
  I dislike the board that brought Elop in, and promised him a bonus if he managed to sell Nokia Mobiles business unit, and they were also the ones that decided to off-shore factories and R&D into Eastern Europe and India.
  - mytailorisrich 8mo ago
    Unfortunately Nokia was doomed because it was too slow and bureaucratic and could not adapt to the iPhone... Contrast with Samsung that managed to quickly churn out iphone "clones" and to iterate quickly.
    - pjmlp 8mo ago
      Sure, if you miss the whole Bada OS failure, and Tizen for that matter.
joe_mamba 8mo ago
>As ex-Nokia, I can tell quite a few stories about the rampdown in Germany, of factories and R&D sites, merge with Siemens and what not. Well please go on, spill the tea, don't leave us hanging. This would be very interesting to hear. >For those that care, search the news for strikes or layoffs, around the time iOS/Android were taking off. Well, according to my google-fu, the factory closures from Finland and germany were relocated to Hungary and Romania, so still EU, therefore the EU could have maintained a domestic phone manufacturing sector in its lowest cost countries as well, if they had kept those fabs and not close them down as well to move everything to china. Everything about this screams of corporate greed and mismanagement on Nokia's part, way before Microsoft entered the picture.