Nokia Issues Profit Warning 158
jones_supa submitted an article in the Guardian. From the article "Shares in the Finnish phone maker Nokia plunged by 15% on Tuesday as the company warned that it may make no profit on phone sales in the quarter to the end of June, and that overall phone sales will be 'substantially below' its earlier forecast of €6.1bn to €6.6bn. Carolina Milanesi, mobile phones analyst for the research company Gartner, said Tuesday's warnings could mark the low point for Nokia, which has not made a loss in its handset division for more than a decade."
Well duh (Score:2, Insightful)
It's been that way for decades.
Re:Kicking themselves yet? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Kicking themselves yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, this is why they signed a deal with the devil. Everybody has been taking a crack at Nokia lately and they haven't been able to deal a single decent blow in return, iPhone and Android have been eating the aging Symbian for lunch and the Maemo/Meego replacements haven't been ready. They could of course become the latecomer to Android, but so many companies now make good Android phones they'd be sure to disappoint. So they went to bed with Microsoft, the market already then realized it was a mark of desperation sinking their stock price. Now we learn it's actually worse. I figure the layoffs are about to begin and who do you think that will be, the Microsoft Phone developers or the Qt developers?
Announcing your platform is dead, not good for biz (Score:4, Insightful)
How is the lagging Symbian business, which has been rotting for years, remotely related to Microsoft?
When you tell the world you are jumping ship, you can expect many potential customers will as well. Similar to the Osbourne effect.
Re:Kicking themselves yet? (Score:4, Insightful)
When Nokia made their deal with Microsoft, they basically told the world "Don't buy any of our current phones because we're orphaning them."
More importantly perhaps, they told developers considering one of their many mobile platforms not to bother with any of them, and to focus on offerings from other companies instead. For their smartphones and plans for an ovi store that will be the kiss of death.
Nokia will coast for another few years as they have a huge install base and dominate the low-end, but when higher end phones start moving down, they will have a real problem, and being in hock to Microsoft is going to be part of that problem.
As for Qt, I think Microsoft will be hostile to it from the start, and encourage Nokia to burn their boats (and they have a place man at the head of Nokia to implement this). So the outlook for Qt is not good - it will probably be starved of cash and developers and left slowly to die. Best case would be if Nokia spins it off again right now, before they are taken over by MS or go into a death spiral.