A Timely Revision of Elop's "Burning Platform" Memo 144
Nerval's Lobster writes "Microsoft's purchase of Finnish phone-maker Nokia will enrich the latter's CEO, Stephen Elop, to the tune of roughly $25.4 million. That's a generous number, considering Nokia's much-publicized travails over the past few years — generous enough, certainly, to prod angry reactions from the Finnish media. As Elop came aboard Nokia in 2011, he wrote the infamous 'burning platform' memo, in which he suggested that radical moves would be necessary to halt the company's market-share declines. In light of these latest revelations, however, I offer an updated version of Elop's memo: ''
It shoud have suprised no one (Score:5, Insightful)
everyone know this was his goal from the beginning. You don't become CEO, and make a statement like that without the intention of selling.
Re: It shoud have suprised no one (Score:2)
Well duh. elop took a good brand. Stole and/or sold all the cash, good will and intelligence out. Shot it in the head and then raped the corpse a couple of times and sold the sloppy seconds to Ballmer who gobbled it up greedily.
I think someone needs to revoke my metaphor license for a while.
Re: It shoud have suprised no one (Score:4, Insightful)
Looks like what microsoft did to a number of other companies in the 90s, like SGI for instance.
Cripple your competition to get a leg up.
Seriously how anyone would be stupid enough to hire a microsoft manager for ANY critical strategic position in their company after the past two decades of activities show that most companies aren't paying attention to history and thus dooming themselves to repeat it.
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Which begs the question, why exactly did they hire Elop. What influence with the board of Nokia did M$ already have, what did it cost to get the Nokia board to basically set up Nokia for sale to M$ at a substantive discount, what commissions did the board receive. Now that Nokia has been crippled, has M$ shot itself in the foot because there will be no real recovery from collapse and continuing down the same path will simply result in greater loss of value.
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You missed a key fact: Elop took a good brand that now had only unwanted, aging products that could no longer compete, executed the most expensive failures, and sold the rest before the marketplace killed them completely.
Had he pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Symbian, and tried to make a go of it based on an existing loyal fan base and lots of marketing, he would have ended up EXACTLY like Blackberry -- warehouses filled with unsold phones, flat broke, and completely irrelevant in the marketplac
Re: It shoud have suprised no one (Score:5, Interesting)
Maemo could easily have been adapted to run android apps as well and the capability was even commercially available before Elop took over. An android track at Nokia could have had a decent chance competing with Samsung. Having an OS that there are actually people who want would have put Nokia at least in a better position.
Considering Nokia was selling 10 times as many phones as Apple in 2010 they certainly were utterly crushing iphones.
So, Nokia certainly had a future and Elop certainly ran one of the greatest destructions of value in history. Hopefully he'll go on doing the same and finish what Ballmer's started at Microsoft.
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Maemo could easily have been adapted to run android apps as well and the capability was even commercially available before Elop took over. An android track at Nokia could have had a decent chance competing with Samsung. Having an OS that there are actually people who want would have put Nokia at least in a better position.
Why go with Maemo when they could have just used Android itself? It would have been much faster to market.
Also, if Maemo ran Android apps, then nobody would have developed natively for Maemo. They would have developed for Android and their apps would have been available to a much larger market.
Nokia went with Windows Phone because Android is an extremely competitive market and Nokia wanted to stand apart. Laugh at the marketshare of Windows Phone all you want, but Nokia sells more Windows Phones than mos
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Why go with Maemo when they could have just used Android itself? It would have been much faster to market.
Err, Nokia already had Maemo/Meego devices on the shelves. The decision to withhold their flagship device, the N9, from all major markets came directly from Elop.
Also, if Maemo ran Android apps, then nobody would have developed natively for Maemo. They would have developed for Android and their apps would have been available to a much larger market.
Ah, the good old OS/2 argument. I'm not convinced that it holds here. Technically speaking, Android is inferior to Meego as the latter provides a full-blown POSIX environment, for which many software packages and libraries are already available. Take LibreOffice, for instance. No usable Android port in sight, but packages for Maemo/Meego have been
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jesus humping stupid christ, listen POSIX fanbois.....here is something important for you to listen to:
nobody in the real world cares whether your phones operating system is POSIX compliant, apart from some developers, nobody else....my mother doesn't care, neither do I and I am a developer.
what I want is a system that works, I couldnt care less whether it's POSIX compliant or not, I just want it to be usable and useful. If I got that from a system which was not POSIX compliant, I would still be happy beca
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what you don't understand is that the "POSIX compliant" is just a way to say "we can run almost any software that already exists in linux and other *nix"... so instead of a several hundred or android apps, people could run thousand of *nix apps, for whatever they wanted to do (be IRC and other chats, games, office, web, movies, etc). Porting from a "POSIX compliant" to another "POSIX compliant" is easy than rebuilding on a totally new stack. Most of the apps than run on Meego where almost just tuned to use
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Really, care to share some numbers? Seems like the Lumia sold so well they discontinued it 2 months after release.
I'm trying to find which Lumia you're talking about and I can't. The closest I can get is the 810, which was discontinued after about 6 months (still pretty short), presumably to make way for the 1020.
Say what you want about the phones, everyone I know who's purchased a Windows Phone has liked it and most of those are Lumias. Admittedly, there's not a lot of people I know who have WinPhones.
Considering that every phone I've purchased for myself has been a Nokia (still on an old N8), I'm seriously considerin
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Maemo could easily have been adapted to run android apps
It may be a little late, but this is exactly what Jolla has done. Perhaps Nokia will buy them back as the real smartphone division now that the crud has eloped to Redmond.
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I'm a bit suspicious about that. Almost every smartphone upstart these days claims ability to run Android apps, and in the end it comes to very little.
Please realize it's not just Dalvik emulation that you need to do to make an Android application work. There is a whole lot of services and intent handlers that an app may rely upon, many of them digging into system internals, most of them are not under AOSP. These need to be implemented compatibly on an alien platform, basically from scratch. So, it's a majo
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Maemo could easily have been adapted to run android apps as well and the capability was even commercially available before Elop took over.
The problem with that is the OHA, they were working on a non-Android operating system with Android compatibility and we saw from the fiasco with Aliyun OS that even supporting such an OS can get you booted from the OHA so most certainly Nokia wouldn't be involved in the Android development process which means they would have to wait until the source code was actually released in order to even start updating their Android compatibility system. They would always be behind with that methodology.
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Re: It shoud have suprised no one (Score:4, Insightful)
Meego wasn't even released back in 2010. It was released in 2011, AFTER everybody knew that it had no future, Nokia made all they could to stop people from knowing about it, and still the only Meego phone (the N9) sold better than the Lumia 800 (which was exactly the same phone, but with Windows Phone 7).
Re: It shoud have suprised no one (Score:5, Insightful)
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Did you miss a sarcasm tag?
http://g.foolcdn.com/editorial/images/59202/moto-loss-labels_large.png [foolcdn.com]
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Expect it does not say what you think it says – this is it says:
Motorola made sub-par phones and lost money.
Motorola continued to make sub-par phones and switched to android and still loses money.
Nowhere do we find proof that switching to android affected profits. (and personally I doubt you ever will.)
What I find telling is the reference to HTC and it’s 98% loss of profits. If you pick android system you will be competing w
Re: It shoud have suprised no one (Score:5, Informative)
Huh? The problem is, he killed Symbian at a time when is was still highly profitable and had increasing sales (but not market share). Don't spread the myth that Nokia was already failing when he took over. This is not true and the numbers speak a clear language. And yes, the had a replacement for Symbian already working: Meego. Switching to windows phone - a system already failing on the market - was the least sensible thing to do. And guys, please don't rate things insightful just because it sounds sensible. Actual numbers cleary disagree. Nokia smartohone sales:
http://www.asymco.com/2013/04/18/lumia-is-the-light-visible/ [asymco.com]
Quartely earnings reports:
http://www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/investors/financials/reports/results---reports/ [nokia.com]
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Symbian sales numbers were up, but that was because Nokia was rolling it down to their low end handsets. Meanwhile their high end phones were just not selling. They were making a lot less profit per phone, and their financials were absolutely in the toilet as a result.
Re: It shoud have suprised no one (Score:5, Interesting)
Everybody here wasn't interested in Symbian. Everybody knew at the time it was a dead end, even with their plethora of existing apps. S60 sucked as a smartphone OS, even to the developers who wrote for it.
Meego was the way forward. It was built using Qt on top of Linux. It wasn't as popular as Android outside of Nokia and Intel, but it had a future. Just before the first Meego phone (N900) launched, Elop took over. It was killed without even given a chance. To answer your question, that is why Meego never competed with Android and the iOS.
Right as Elop took over, Nokia took a 180 turn away from Meego. They spent 3, 4 years completely redeveloping their processes, completely revamping their developers, wasting countless resources that were Meego-based, just so they could put Windows Phone on their hardware. And to boot, they produced some less-than spectacular phones for an OS (Windows Phone 7) that was going to die before it hit the shelves.
All those wasted resources could have gone to Meego, and polishing what was already a fairly good OS. They had an OS in-house that was close to being ready. Elop threw it out and spent a fortune bringing in a third-party OS which suffered from the same flaws as Meego (namely not having a large app base) and had no advantages over it whatsoever.
I'll skip the uglier parts of the analogy, but if Meego was Nokia's baby, created to ensure the survival of the company, it was forcibly aborted by Microsoft two weeks before a full term. Then Nokia took in Microsoft's then-newborn, inbred child, despite having been told beforehand that it was born with severe genetic problems and whom the doctors had already said would not live for more than a few months. This child drained all of Nokia's resources in the process, the excuse being that this had to happen to prepare for Microsoft's next child. Microsoft's next child turned into, well, nothing too special. And you wonder why Nokia's now broke and ultimately had to sell itself to Microsoft.
What? Corporations are people, no?
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Just before the first Meego phone (N900) launched, Elop took over. It was killed without even given a chance. To answer your question, that is why Meego never competed with Android and the iOS.
Huh? The N900 was released in 2009. The N9 program was launched some time before that, and the device was released, after all, in late 2011.
Right as Elop took over, Nokia took a 180 turn away from Meego. They spent 3, 4 years completely redeveloping their processes, completely revamping their developers, wasting countless resources that were Meego-based, just so they could put Windows Phone on their hardware.
What alternative timeline you live in? The turn was announced on February 2011. The first Lumia was released in November the same year.
Re: It shoud have suprised no one (Score:4, Informative)
Just before the first Meego phone (N900) launched, Elop took over. It was killed without even given a chance. To answer your question, that is why Meego never competed with Android and the iOS.
Huh? The N900 was released in 2009. The N9 program was launched some time before that, and the device was released, after all, in late 2011.
Also, the N900 runs Maemo which has nothing to do with Intel. Nokia had a line of Maemo tablets since 2005, and N900 was the last of these, finally allowed to include full phone capabilities.
Meego was intended as a merger of Maemo and Intel's Moblin, but it never really appeared anywhere (N9 is pretty much Maemo), and I'm not sure how exactly it was supposed to improve on Maemo. The name is not important, though, it's the idea of a regular GNU/Linux distro running on your phone. Which is why you can pry my N900 from my cold, dead hands, as long as you avoid stepping on my lawn.
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Nah, it's still alternative history.
The problem with MeeGo (Score:2)
MeeGo had a core problem. It was designed to fulfill two contradictory roles:
a) Be a modern phone OS
b) Be a smooth migration path for Symbian applications.
During development of MeeGo (a) and (b) constantly conflicted. The N9 reflects that had Nokia picked path (a) and mostly ignored (b) they might very well have had an OS better than Android. But that was not the MeeGo project as it existed in Nokia at the time Elop killed it.
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I don't know why everyone on slashdot has remained so deluded about Nokia's potential future had Elop not taken those actions. They were not competitive, and their prospects were poor.
Their prospects are really great now.
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They paid off Nokia's restructuring costs generated an extra two in cash beyond that and then another $7b. Yeah that was successful.
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Rather, look at the share price during Elop's tenure. And remember that the share price at the day he took over the helm already reflected everything that was known about their future prospects as of that moment. Anything that has changed since then has been under his watch. There is no doubt he would have been even more richly rewarded had he pulled off the improb
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The share price when he took over reflected a successful MeeGo project about to go live which would convert a large chunk of the Symbian userbase. By the time Elop arrived that was known not to be true. Arguably the reason Elop was hired was because the board knew that wasn't true.
Re: It shoud have suprised no one (Score:5, Informative)
You missed a key fact: Elop took a good brand that now had only unwanted, aging products that could no longer compete, executed the most expensive failures, and sold the rest before the marketplace killed them completely.
Funny how they were still selling quite a lot of them until Elop came around.
Had he pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Symbian, and tried to make a go of it based on an existing loyal fan base and lots of marketing, he would have ended up EXACTLY like Blackberry -- warehouses filled with unsold phones, flat broke, and completely irrelevant in the marketplace.
FYI - All those Symbian devs and their Symbian apps had a migration path from Symbian to Maemo/MeeGo.
Also Nokia didn't have the same issue BB had in having a central network that was essential to the platform and have a major crash that took weeks to fix and caused headaches for their customers. That is really why BB fell in market share - everyone was looking for something more reliable. BB10 is a great little platform, but they have a reputation they have to fix - something that takes a long time to do and they may not be able to recover from.
At least with Microsoft owning them, they're not broke. I don't know why everyone on slashdot has remained so deluded about Nokia's potential future had Elop not taken those actions. They were not competitive, and their prospects were poor. If Symbian and Meego were as great as everyone here imagines, why weren't they crushing iPhones back in 2010?
In 2010 MeeGo wasn't out. It was just about to be released when Elop wrote the "burning platform" memo; and during the presentation to the press he stood up on stage and said "We're not doing this; look I have another one running Windows Phone and that is our future" - intentially sabotaging it before it even hit market. Yet, as others have pointed out, with no marketing the MeeGo Phone outsold the Lumias wherever they were both sold in the same markets - and not by small margins - by 3:1 ratios. Every review of the MeeGo phones compared it to the iPhone; it would have been a killer - and at the very least a very strong third, leaving everyone else to fight for fourth - had it not been for Elop.
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Funny how they were still selling quite a lot of them until Elop came around.
And RIM were selling quite a lot of Blackberries until it was too late.
FYI - All those Symbian devs and their Symbian apps had a migration path from Symbian to Maemo/MeeGo.
That's what the powerpoint said. In practice, there were... issues.
Also Nokia didn't have the same issue BB had in having a central network that was essential to the platform and have a major crash that took weeks to fix and caused headaches for their customers.
Nokia had another issue: being the company that allowed the N97 to be released. That was in 2009, years after iPhone was on the market. All that happened after was, in essence, karmic justice.
In 2010 MeeGo wasn't out. It was just about to be released when Elop wrote the "burning platform" memo; and during the presentation to the press he stood up on stage and said "We're not doing this; look I have another one running Windows Phone and that is our future" - intentially sabotaging it before it even hit market.
Your time window for "just about to be released" must stretch for half a year.
And, I'm afraid, your description of a presentation has no basis in documented reality. It was known sin
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Funny how they were still selling quite a lot of them until Elop came around.
And RIM were selling quite a lot of Blackberries until it was too late.
My point was that comparing RIM/BB and Nokia is not valid - its an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Nokia is where it is today because of Elop and numerous things he did as CEO - from declaring symbian/meego/maemo dead and their move to WP. Prior to all of that Nokia was relatively healthy and in a good position to make a transition; after those things they were not. Please take off your revisionist history glasses.
RIM/BB is where they are because they had a technical failure in their network that severel
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(Sigh) Please read this [taskumuro.com]. Keep close attention to the dates and how each device is named. I hope it will help to remove a lot of confusion from your postings. As someone who was in on the events described, I can attest that the article is mostly correct.
What myth? It's in numerous sources backed up by financials and information from Nokia itself.
Continuation of this discussion would require you to provide the sources.
Re:It shoud have suprised no one (Score:5, Interesting)
everyone know this was his goal from the beginning. You don't become CEO, and make a statement like that without the intention of selling.
I would submit that it didn't surprise *anyone*. The people who insisted that this outcome was not planned from the start are the same people who benefit from the results. (In other words, they were lying. Everyone knows it, so they don't have to feign surprise.) The people who were hoping against hope that this was not the case, really had to know in their heart of hearts that this was the intended end game. And the rest of us could see this coming from 4100 miles away.
This should be yet another lesson to companies across the planet. Your CEO may not be working for you. If what any executive says doesn't make sense, INVESTIGATE. Don't just take their word for it. Their goals may be entirely different from the company's goals.
Re:It shoud have suprised no one (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, ask these guys why they sold out.
http://www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/governance/board/board-of-directors/ [nokia.com]
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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How often does that happen with such a multinational situation? Can you find one example?
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How To Accomplish The "Elop Effect" (Score:5, Insightful)
Tomi Ahonen [blogs.com] has the formula down perfectly, with explanations:
ELOP EFFECT = RATNER EFFECT + OSBORNE EFFECT
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/09/the-do-it-yourself-elop-analysis.html [blogs.com]
Re:How To Accomplish The "Elop Effect" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but Tomi Ahonen is a moron. This is the same guy who claimed that Symbian was clearly the best mobile smartphone OS and would crush iOS & Android if only given a chance. Riiight....
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2013/02/nokia-misery-in-single-pictures-today-part-8-in-series-the-elop-strategy-to-go-windows-from-feb-11-2.html
Re:How To Accomplish The "Elop Effect" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but Tomi Ahonen is a moron.
Ah yes, good 'ol character assassination is alive and well here. Never mind the accolades Ahonen has received over the years, nor his lectures at Oxford, nor his authoritative books, nor his amazingly accurate record of predictions in the Mobile Phone industry, year after year, nor his personal network of staffers at almost every Mobile Phone company and provider in the world... nor how many times he made other supposed expert analysts look like fools (ZDnet, Howard Forums, etc. etc.)
Re:How To Accomplish The "Elop Effect" (Score:4, Insightful)
Never mind the accolades Ahonen has received over the years, nor his lectures at Oxford, nor his authoritative books, nor his amazingly accurate record of predictions in the Mobile Phone industry, year after year, nor his personal network of staffers at almost every Mobile Phone company and provider in the world... nor how many times he made other supposed expert analysts look like fools (ZDnet, Howard Forums, etc. etc.)
Never mind that, because very little of it is actually true.
For the record of his predictions, here's one [daringfireball.net].
Sorry, but Tomi is really a tedious moron who passes himself off as an expert to gullible people.
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Rrrrrriiiiiiiiiight. You can claim that Tomi Ahonen is a moron all you like, but it doesn't reflect well upon your discernment.
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Even a broken clock is right once a day...
Ah. So you're saying that if we take the time to check what time it is BEFORE consulting the broken clock AND if the broken clock is checked during the time when the 1/1440 odds of it being correct match up (okay, 1/770 for a 12-hour clock), we should give all credit to the broken clock and trust it implicitly from now own, no matter how many times it was wrong in the past?
I always took that saying to mean "If you disagree with everything a moron says because he's a moron, you're gonna look goofy in the unlikely event he turns out to be speaking the truth." This gives the moron interesting leverage; he can cause you to be discredited by speaking an obviously true thing and watching you automatically contest it.
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That was an interesting read, thanks.
Also, the comments are insightful. True, the whole thing did have one other effect that is barely noticed: It killed the last big smartphone OS that was not developed by a US company.
"Burning Platform" (Score:2)
Anyone else think it was going to be a revision for where they are today? On the burning platform that is Windows Phone...
Seriously, I think they are a recoverable company. They gave Elop three years to destroy them... Why not give me three years?
Re:"Burning Platform" (Score:5, Funny)
Because you don't have the money to buy the company, nor are you friends with their friends.
I would have driven their company into the ground for a mere fraction of what Elop was paid or squandered. Yet, they never called me.
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Shit, if they'd offered me 250k a year to sit on my butt and do nothing I'd have gladly accepted.
Having said that, there's a chance that without my expert oversight they might have got their act together by either their own ability or pure dumb luck.
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I would have driven their company into the ground for a mere fraction of what Elop was paid or squandered. Yet, they never called me.
100000000000000000000000000000000000000000/1 is a fraction. $\forall x \in \N: x \in \Q$
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> Anyone else think it was going to be a revision for where they are today? On the burning platform that is Windows Phone...
Well, yeah, but for that they wouldn't have to change the presentation hardly at all, and it wouldn't have been as funny.
fun right back (Score:5, Interesting)
What would be funny is if....
shareholders launched a court battle to prevent the takeover, and claim compensation and/or charges against Elop and while that dragged through the courts for years (as they do) the new CEO decided that actually, Windows phone isn't the profit thing he wants and changes the OS platform to Android across the board of Lumia phones, dropping Windows Phone completely.
Years later when the courts finally decide that "meh" is the answer to the charges, Microsoft can go ahead with the purchase for the manufacturing arm, if they still wanted to, and Elop could then find a new job - as I doubt even Microsoft would appoint him as CEO whilst he was fighting an active court case.
Could happen? hehehe. and you never know, Nokia could turn things around like Samsung did with Android.
(and yes, they could do Meego, but frankly this isn't about making a success of the company for Microsoft's benefit..)
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Elop is already back at Microsoft employed in his new job.
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You say that like it's a bad thing.
It will just mean that there are more existing apps that can be easily ported.
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They've sold off MeeGo's crown jewels, Qt. Now Qt is powering the direct competition, from Jolla to Android, iOS and even WP.
Sure they could. They don't have to control Qt to do MeeGo - they could just buy back Jolla and what MeeGo became - SailfishOS.
Nobody in the business cares (Score:2)
Damn it people, so much emotional attachment to a company because it once had the distinction to cock up an OSS-based project.
Please get it through your heads: Nokia shareholders' objectives do not include supporting the cause of Linux, or Qt, or whatever. It is, plainly, to make money. They are fucking happy to see something sellworthy made out of the dysfunctional wreck that Nokia was in 2010.
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Damn it people, so much emotional attachment to a company because it once had the distinction to cock up an OSS-based project.
That has nothing to do with my statement. My statement was purely that they could in fact go back to MeeGo/Maemo if they wanted. There's nothing preventing that.
Please get it through your heads: Nokia shareholders' objectives do not include supporting the cause of Linux, or Qt, or whatever. It is, plainly, to make money. They are fucking happy to see something sellworthy made out of the dysfunctional wreck that Nokia was in 2010.
The objective of any business is to make money. Whether or not that includes Linux or Qt or whatever - even Microsoft Windows - is different matter based on what products and features the company thinks they can sell to others (corporate or not) to make money. Often the case is more aligning to Linux now than it is to Microsoft Windows; but as I not
Nokia were about to switch to Android (Score:4, Informative)
On a related note there is a rumour that Nokia were about to switch to Android just before the buyout.
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/nokia-reportedly-considered-switching-to-android-before-microsoft-deal/421972-11.html [in.com]
This leads some analysts to speculate that Microsoft bought Nokia to save Windows phone:
http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/09/microsoft-bought-nokia-to-save-windows-phone/ [valuewalk.com]
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If that's true, then Elop certainly earned his money.
Selling a failing cell phone company purely on a bluff...Like another Android phone company would matter. One less windows phone company on the other hand, is kind of a big deal.
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More like Nokia was out of steam and looking for a buyer. If Microsoft didn't buy it they could have ended up being bought by somebody less sympathetic to Windows Phone leaving MS in a seriously bad spot on the mobile market.
No need for rumor. It was either buy Nokia and keep some chance of fighting against Apple, Samsung, Google or quit the mobile market.
How do we fix this? (Score:1)
This is just situation normal: Disaster capital in the shape of corporate raiders sees something with value, figures, "How can I use this to make ME rich?" and comes up with a scheme to slash and burn a maximum payday in the shortest amount of time they can manage it.
The real question is how do you find, reward and control management so that it isn't looking for the opportunity to perform slash and burn treasure-hunting in the carcass of your dying company? Is there a way? Can a co-operative business stru
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You want perpetually dying 'zombie' companies? Brains...er...breakeven...must...fund...retirements.
Better to put them out of their misery then leave them as millstones around an economies neck. Look at England in the '60s and 70s. Perpetual breakeven...nationalization...misery.
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What exactly is your motivation in rewriting history to the opposite of reality?
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The biggest seller of obsolete phones.
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Of course you know all this but are playing some silly mass debate game where reality doesn't matter and you just want to get a reaction out of pe
Why did this make the front page? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd expected something funny or at least insightful.
Sadly it seems neither.
But then neither is the actual situation. It is sad to see Nokia essentially go (yes, the corporation lives on, but without what had become the heart). And it is hard to see how there is an upside for Microsoft in this. A lose-lose, with bad actors taking home lots of cash.
Oh well, perhaps someday someone will turn it into a great play. It has all the seeds of a classic Greek tragedy (Hubris, fate, etc.)
Re:Why did this make the front page? (Score:5, Insightful)
it's a free market (Score:3)
Elop took over, Nokia stock fell, and anybody with half a brain didn't lose too much. Any reasonably smart Nokia employee would also have seen the writing on the wall and left the sinking ship. Microsoft can now acquire a mostly useless shell of a company at a low price, and they are getting their money's worth. The capital that Nokia lost went to other companies that can make better use of it. That's the way markets work. I don't think it's a big deal either way.
Incidentally, switching to Android "after late 2014" would have been too late for Nokia anyway.
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Any reasonably smart Nokia employee would also have seen the writing on the wall and left the sinking ship.
Given the fact that Nokia's revenue used to be more than 10% of Finland's GDP, it might not have been so easy for a large number of Nokia's engineers to move to different jobs at about the same time ...
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Finland is part of the EU; they can move anywhere freely.
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And the board just let it happen.
Huh, Nokia's shareholder benefit from patent licensing, why would the board be against that?
This should not be a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know why anyone is upset about this. It shouldn't be a surprise. Tech history is littered with the remains of corporate entities who once partnered with Microsoft. What part of "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" did Nokia think did not apply to them?
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Or perhaps, the mobile business is a very stinky place to be in right now, if you're not Apple, Samsung or a cheap Chinese OEM.
Between iPhone at the high end and Chinese OEMs at the low end, and Samsung in the middle, every other company is suffering.
Motorola switched to Android and is increasing it's losses bringing down Google's earnings.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/07/19/google-earnings-ad-rates-motorola-losses/ [dailyfinance.com]
HTC's profit is down 98% and is barely ekeing out a profit.
http://www.theguardian.com/tech [theguardian.com]
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I don't know why anyone is upset about this. It shouldn't be a surprise. Tech history is littered with the remains of corporate entities who once partnered with Microsoft. What part of "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" did Nokia think did not apply to them?
At least the embrace and extend parts, perhaps all three.
"Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" refers to Microsoft adopting an externally developed cross platform technology (Embrace), adding proprietary features incompatible with the original (Extend), moving their own efforts and inciting/pressuring third parties to use the Microsoft extensions therefore wiping out the cross platform utility of the technology and any interest in the original form (Extinguish)
How does this apply to Nokia? As far as I can see,
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Well, there's some discussion that Microsoft planned every step of this. Hubris aside, Microsoft must realize Windows Phone wouldn't do better than low single digits, which means that any independently operating supplier would eventually either drop them or go under. Planting their own shill, or corrupting an existing shill in a major supplier, causing that suppler to be artificially devalued to a fraction of its former value, and then acquiring same, is the only reasonable way Microsoft can remain a play
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I don't know why anyone is upset about this. It shouldn't be a surprise. Tech history is littered with the remains of corporate entities who once partnered with Microsoft. What part of "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" did Nokia think did not apply to them?
Not sure what Nokia thought, but this time it looks like Microsoft skipped the "Extend" step.
Well, the EXTEND bit is sure as hell missing (Score:2)
When did MS exactly extend Nokia? The Windows Phone adventure has been a complete disaster, even Steve Ballmer has to admit recently their market share went from very small to very small. And they been trying for over a decade. HTC only survived by escaping the stigma off making Windows phones.
Burning platform indeed (Score:1)
Elop seemed to hint in his memo that Nokia needed to save their burning platform to survive. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that he was actually foreshadowing a desperate panicked jump into icy unknown depths for Nokia—abandoning the platform for questionable benefit.
Elop didn't bother to mention what such a jump would mean for him personally for he had secured a secret golden parachute to kick in should the company happen to change hands. And Nokia would only change hands if that pla
So many comments and nobody pointed out.. (Score:1)
So many comments and nobody pointed out that the summary is completely wrong. Nokia wasn't sold. The D&S division of Nokia was sold. Nokia is still a huge networks solutions developer and provider. More than that, they run the largest or the second largest mapping business. And then finally, the still hold the largest patent portfolio in wireless communications from infrastructure to devices and protocols, etc. In this year's Nokia World invitation there's a dinghy, which is "Jolla" in Finnish, so there
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I thought that was all sold for an apple and an egg to some unknown American company called "Vringo"? We'll see where those patents (or rather patent lawsuits) surface again..
Read the original (Score:2)
The original burning platform memo is worth a read. It was an acute analysis of Nokia's problems. http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/02/09/full-text-nokia-ceo-stephen-elops-burning-platform-memo/ [wsj.com] All Elop did was state the obvious, that Nokia was in serious trouble.
As for moving away from Symbian... Nokia is a business. Business exist to make money. Anyone who takes about share and not profits is in lala land.
They were on a burning platform (Score:2)
TFA (Score:2)
TFA is crap, horrible blog-level amateur writing.
It does, however, have a point. If this wasn't a hostile takeover from the start then it sure looks a lot like one. In other words: If MS had planned to acquire Nokia on the cheap long ago, something like what happened would've been a good plan to come up with.
And it should really teach people to not get into bed with MS. But then again, so should've the last dozen or so victims they left behind.
Elop burned the platform, MS provided the means. (Score:2)
What Elop won't tell you is that Microsoft provided the accelerant and the orders to use it. It's quite hard to make Nokia a Windows Phone company if you have viable platforms that compete with it
Counter Argument - RIM/BlackBerry (Score:3)
RIM stuck to their guns with BlackBerry, didn't save it and are circling the drain ever faster.
The Nokia stuff was old, Meego was not remotely close to ready (I worked in a shared office with someone contracted to help fix it and from his description a lot was still left when they shelved the product) so they had to make a change. Many of us questioned the exclusive WP choice but we'll never know if they'd chosen a split model or exclusively Android whether they could have convinced carriers to sell their phones. (For all we know discussions happened and carriers rejected them and MS tossed some cash around).
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Um, lots of people liked Nokia phones and platforms before they switched to Windows Phone. Similarly, people liked Blackberry devices and would have continued buying them had RIM not stalled out for a few years letting iOS and Android devices eclipse them.
We might as well have a laugh at failed tech companies to soothe our sadness. (I'm still sad about Oracle swallowing Sun.)
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(I'm still sad about Oracle swallowing Sun.)
At least IBM didn't get their filthy hands on them.
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Re:Looks like you were had (Score:4, Informative)
There's more to be sour about than bad investments in this case. The whole nokia board and elop included should be dragged out into the street and shot for their extreme mismanagement of the company.
Re:Looks like you were had (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole nokia board and elop included should be dragged out into the street and shot for their extreme mismanagement of the company.
Did you read TFA (yeah, I know)? It says there was a clause in his contract awarding him a bonus for making the company "saleable." It was sold to Microsoft. Success!
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That's the "Miracle of the Market Place" in action.
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You seem to confusing hindsight and foresight. Everyone knew what Elop and Microsoft were doing from the very beginning. This is definitely not a case of everyone figuring it out after the fall.
So, since it was so obvious. What should Nokia done? Stick with their internal OSes that weren't competitive? Move to Android and be a me too? Started from scratch, again? Everyone seems to want to pretend Nokia was in a good place and THEN Elop came along. His memo was stupid (in that he should have known it would get out and would have horrible side effects). But it wasn't wrong. They were in a bad place and the projected trend numbers seemed likely at the time. So what did they do so wrong at the time
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