Nokia Shareholders Approve Sale To Microsoft 182
mrspoonsi writes "Nokia shareholders met today at an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) to vote on whether or not to accept the terms of the company's proposed sale of its devices and services business to Microsoft. The deal, which was first announced in September, is worth €5.44bn EUR ($7.35bn USD / £4.57bn GBP), and also includes provisions for Microsoft to license patents from the Finnish company. 78% of those eligible to vote had already voted before the EGM. Of those early votes, a staggering 99% had voted in favour of the sale to Microsoft."
Re: Microsoft just wants the patents (Score:2, Informative)
Microsoft is only licensing Nokias patents. Nokia is only selling the mobile phone business, while it keeps it's mapping, patents and mobile network infrastructure business. So Microsoft cannot sue anybody with what it is buying.
Re:Increasingly irrelevant tech dinosaur.. (Score:5, Informative)
Fuck, these days they probably aren't even 50%
250 million smartphones sold in Q3 2013.
Re:You really have to admire Microsoft... (Score:5, Informative)
Maemo and Meego were Nokia's "skunk works" projects, kept far away from their mainstream consumer phone business. Trust me, Microsoft didn't have to kill off that area. It was dead even while S60 was riding high.
I'm kind of amazed... (Score:2, Informative)
That people reference Nokia as a failure due to Elop, as if it was doing so well in the smartphone arena before he took over? Have a sense of reality folks. Nokia was dying fast, and while the MS integration may or not have been a great idea, something had to be done. I will let history judge the actions, but in many parts of Europe, Nokia is overtaking the iPhone in sales... so there is that.
"Computers" (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing says" irrelevant" like running on 95% of the world's computers!
...for a very specific subset of "computers":
i.e.: big desktop machines, in homes and offices.
Absolutely every other device with similar computing specs that is interracted directly with, or that is relied behind-the-scene on, runs something else.
(Tablets, Smartphones, home wifi router/modem, home micro-NAS for backups, the set-top box or media under the TV and/or the TV itself, the infotainment system in the Car: i.e. everything at home beside the laptop [the single device running Windows] and the Microwave Oven [still powered by a micro-controller, not enough power for a full-blown OS])
mostly shared between Linux (either GNU or Android), *BSD, and specialised OSes like QNX.
(and at work, as long as it's not a SOHO who is dependant on Microsoft Directory Service and Sharepoint, you can bet that pretty much everything behind the scene run some flavour of Unix)
In short, the "year of Linux on everything except the desktop" has come since long time.