After MS-Nokia Pact, Many Nokia Workers Walk Out In Protest

Mr. McGibby writes "After the announcement of the partnership between Nokia and Microsoft this morning workers voiced their concern with the deal by walking out of Nokia facilities. It is believed that as many as a thousand workers marched out today (or took the day off using flex time) so that the company would know that they don't believe the partnership is in their best interest, even after CEO' Stephen Elop's startlingly frank 'burning platform' memo earlier this week."
Looks like many investors felt the same way.

Missing information

[03Cobra]

The summary is a tad misleading. It states that most who protested this work on the Symbian OS. So they are protesting because lots will probably lose their jobs. Not because they hold in their belief that the partnership is bad.

Remember Microsoft's earlier smartphone partner.

[ron_ivi]

Already covered well in these slashdot stories from '06.

http://slashdot.org/story/03/01/06/1159207/Sendo-vs-Microsoft-The-Truth-Comes-Out [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/story/02/12/26/1423247/Sendo-Accuses-MS-of-Stealing-Smartphone-IP [slashdot.org]

I suspect the same happens to Nokia.

Nokia may be hosed

[plopez]

MS has a history of hosing it's "partners". Sybase, threats to cutoff Intel's air supply, and the "Stinger" phone OS are some examples. As the saying goes, "If the lamb lies down with the lion, it better not fall asleep."

Re:Looking for Job

[Anonymous Coward]

I quit Nokia in December!

The writing was on the wall as soon as the MS droid came on board.

For those too lazy to google

[Dunbal]

TFSummary makes reference to the "burning platform". Here is the "burning platform" spiel from Stephen Elop (Nokia CEO) in its entirety. Blame the lack of paragraphs on slashdot's new, stupid lack of formatting. I'm too lazy to do it myself paragraph by paragraph.

“There is a pertinent story about a man who was working on an oil platform in the North Sea. He woke up one night from a loud explosion, which suddenly set his entire oil platform on fire. In mere moments, he was surrounded by flames. Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform’s edge. When he looked down over the edge, all he could see were the dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic waters. As the fire approached him, the man had mere seconds to react. He could stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames. Or, he could plunge 30 meters in to the freezing waters. The man was standing upon a “burning platform,” and he needed to make a choice. He decided to jump. It was unexpected. In ordinary circumstances, the man would never consider plunging into icy waters. But these were not ordinary times - his platform was on fire. The man survived the fall and the waters. After he was rescued, he noted that a “burning platform” caused a radical change in his behaviour. We too, are standing on a “burning platform,” and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour. Over the past few months, I’ve shared with you what I’ve heard from our shareholders, operators, developers, suppliers and from you. Today, I’m going to share what I’ve learned and what I have come to believe. I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform. And, we have more than one explosion - we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us. For example, there is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected. Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone and attracting developers to a closed, but very powerful ecosystem. In 2008, Apple’s market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent. They are enjoying a tremendous growth trajectory with a 78 percent earnings growth year over year in Q4 2010. Apple demonstrated that if designed well, consumers would buy a high-priced phone with a great experience and developers would build applications. They changed the game, and today, Apple owns the high-end range. And then, there is Android. In about two years, Android created a platform that attracts application developers, service providers and hardware manufacturers. Android came in at the high-end, they are now winning the mid-range, and quickly they are going downstream to phones under €100. Google has become a gravitational force, drawing much of the industry’s innovation to its core. Let’s not forget about the low-end price range. In 2008, MediaTek supplied complete reference designs for phone chipsets, which enabled manufacturers in the Shenzhen region of China to produce phones at an unbelievable pace. By some accounts, this ecosystem now produces more than one third of the phones sold globally - taking share from us in emerging markets. While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time, we thought we were making the right decisions; but, with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind. The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable. We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, b

Asymco has a nice detailed list

[rsborg]

Here [asymco.com]. My favorite one:

And finally,

Nokia. No, not this OS deal, but in August 2009 ”The worldwide leader in software and the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer have entered into an alliance that is set to deliver a groundbreaking, enterprise-grade solution for mobile productivity. Today, Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop and Nokia’s Executive Vice President for Devices Kai Öistämö announced the agreement, outlining a shared vision for the future of mobile productivity. This is the first time that either company has embarked on an alliance of this scope and nature.”

The plan was to bring “Microsoft Office Mobile and Microsoft business communications, collaboration and device management software to Nokia’s Symbian devices.”

What happened? One and a half years later the same Stephen Elop announced that Symbian will be deprecated.

Re:Missing information

[PotatoFiend]

And they deserve to lose their jobs if they put ideology ahead of making products people will spend money to have.

Sorry to deflate your rant against developers, but if you look at the marketshare for Windows 7 mobile devices [electronista.com], it seems clear that platform is something consumers won't spend money to have.

Re:Right, and 10 years ago I had a 15lb laptop...

[Anonymous Coward]

In 5 years we'll have batteries that cost 10% of the price with components that draw 5% of the power and work off environmental factors (super efficient solar panels).

It's bad enough to look at a graph and just extend the last bit forward in time, but you're not even basing that next-five-years prediction on the last five years.

Battery tech takes more than five years to develop, and there's nothing on the map now that'd cause 90% of the price to go away. Capacity is going up, but not THAT fast.

Components that draw power in a smartphone are primarily, in no particular order: the transmitter, the screen, and the CPU. There's nothing on the map now that'd cause any of those to drop 95% of their power needs in the next five years. The cell tower network certainly isn't going to change that fast, so the transmitter power is pretty much constant. The CPU is generally already a very efficient ARM piece drawing maybe a whole watt at full load, and ARM's policies (historically and for the near future) are to keep doing what they can at just under a watt, so that's not going to change either. I could see passive color screens eventually happening (like some bookreaders, no backlight), if they can get the resolution and refresh rates acceptably good, but for a screen as small as a smartphone's, the power savings won't be as dramatic as you'd think.

Partnering with Microsoft is a good way to not survive the five years anyway.

Re:Missing information

[Anonymous Coward]

Loads of people working on Meego walked out, as well. And not only in Finland.

Posting as AC to pretect the ballsy.

Re:Looking for Job

[shutdown -p now]

As a matter of fact, Bing Maps are already powered by Navteq maps (licensed from Nokia).

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

The HDI is an average measure of basic human development achievements in a country. Like all averages, the HDI masks inequality in the distribution of human development across the population at the country level. This year’s report introduces the ‘inequality adjusted HDI (IHDI)’, a new measure for a large number of countries which takes into account inequality in all three dimensions of the HDI by ‘discounting’ each dimension’s average value according to its level of inequality. The IHDI is thus a measure of the average level of human development that a country has achieved in the three HDI dimensions, given the existing inequality in distribution of achievements and the level of aversion to inequality which is set this year to a low level of 1. When there is no inequality in the HDI dimensions or no aversion to inequality, the average level of human development is reflected in the HDI. In this sense, the HDI can be viewed as an index of 'potential' human development and IHDI as an index of actual human development. (from http://hdr.undp.org/en/ [undp.org])

So in the actual HDI USA trails Germany much more badly. Basically the small rich minority makes your country look good on such indices. (2010 HDI and IHDI) [wikipedia.org]

Re:Looking for Job

[symbolset]

It hasn't "paid off" until the money they got from the business is more than the money they put into building it. Otherwise, it's just money spent to ruin other people's good businesses, which isn't the achievement shareholders are looking for. ETA for XBox to unlock that achievement: never.

Re:Missing information

[symbolset]

This is misleading. This isn't a US labor work-action style of walkout, which is about influencing management. These folks knew they were likely losing their jobs and went home to consider their options and grasp the thing emotionally. Their work contract includes the flexibility to do this, which is a responsible and compassionate way to manage people.

Re:Looking for Job

[pieterh]

The big difference is that Nokia has always made outstanding hardware, and lousy, terrible software. Apple, on the other hand, makes a near-perfect software experience and uses that to sell upmarket, beautifully designed hardware. It would be insane for Apple to use Android, but equally it was insane for Nokia to try to compete with Android. They should, two years ago, have embraced Android and thrown out as many slabs running it as they could, putting those Symbian and Meego talents onto Android, or just focusing on the beautiful hardware people expect these days. Instead they left this space to HTC, while complaining about Chinese manufacturers eating their low-end market.

Microsoft need Nokia desperately since they've lost HTC, but Nokia is committing suicide with this "partnership". It's like hitching your wagon to the Titanic.

Re:Remember Microsoft's earlier smartphone partner

[iserlohn]

HTC was never particularly successful in the mass market before Android. In the WinMo days, HTC phone targeted the poweruser that could live with WinMo's faults while it perfected the in-house hardware design and software customization skills. Basically, MS gave it a launching pad, but you have to give credit to HTC for their initiative, most Taiwanese WinMo partners wasn't able to see pass the fact that WinMo was a dead end. HTC saw this and tactically positioned itself in the Android camp, while paying lip service to Microsoft. The HD2 was the ultimate exercise in the futile attempt of polishing a turd.

In GSM markets, since the release of the Desire, things have been up and up for HTC. The Desire is the first real iPhone alternative for the casual smartphone user. It's easy to use, looks good, and can load apps from the Market fuss-free. Push email works well and you get to sync all of your important PIM details such as contacts and calendars for free. Navigation via Google Maps is not only free but ever improving.

Re:Missing information

[Threni]

> Talking with friends that deal with handsets in retail they are starting to see "Android burnout" as customers have
> been warned away from Android by the glut of CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) running Android and frankly barely
> functional

That's not something the current amazing sales of Android devices suggests is happening elsewhere; perhaps your friends need to learn how to sell phones more effectively? No-one's going to turn down a HTC Desire just because some other company has produced an inferior phone.