Behind the Microsoft Write-Off of Nokia 200
UnknowingFool writes: Previously Microsoft announced they had written off the Nokia purchase for $7.6B in the last quarter. In doing so, Microsoft would create only the third unprofitable quarter in the company's history. Released on July 31, new financial documents detail some of the reasoning and financials behind this decision. At the core of the problem was that the Phone Hardware business was only worth $116M, after adjusting for costs and market factors. One of those factors was poor sales of Nokia handhelds in 2015. Financially it made more sense to write it all off.
Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)
Where phone companies go to die.
Re:Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Nokia was dying even before being bought by Microsoft. What killed them is Symbian, and their refusal to switch to Android when it was the time (2008/2009). When they decided to switch to Windows Phone, it was already too late.
Re:Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
What killed them is Symbian, and their refusal to switch to Android when it was the time
It actually was their refusal to open up Symbian at the right time and create a dev community around it . Had that been done, Nokia would have had the opportunity to leverage its dominant market share in the smart phone segment .
Re:Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
A more sensible company would have moved to Android but kept the devs sweet by providing their handsets with a Symbian / QT framework so that there was a migration path.
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They went to Windows Phone after Elop took over, which means they were essentially under the control of Microsoft at that point. This was not the decision of any real Nokia workers or original management. Moving to Windows Phone was the first major torpedo out of Redmond to destroy Nokia.
Re:Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
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Not really. Symbian was pretty open back then. Sony Ericsson manufactured phones with it as well.
Re:Microsoft (Score:4, Interesting)
Nokia was dying even before being bought by Microsoft. What killed them is Symbian, and their refusal to switch to Android when it was the time (2008/2009). When they decided to switch to Windows Phone, it was already too late.
Jolla seems to be doing fine with MeeGo/Sailfish and it runs Android apps... believe it or not there is life beyond Android.
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Yes, it's called Android compatibility. The only successful handsets with any significant market share that don't run Android are iOS devices. In fact, what that tells me is that if you aren't Apple, you pretty much need to be Android. Even BlackBerry, though two or three years too late, has figured that out.
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Yes, it's called Android compatibility.
Oh, I thought it was called 'Having a Java VM'.
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And you know what, nobody cares. I don't mean to sound rude, but whatever BB's benefits as an Android device, even BB doesn't believe them anymore as it plans to release actual Android devices. And really, it's irrelevant, as the company is basically running on fumes now. Chen's keeping it afloat by selling off assets and firing people. No wonder they have to build an Android phone, their R&D department probably isn't capable of keeping the QNX-based OS going.
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It turns out that rumor wasn't true. Just wishful thinking from a fanboy without any technical competence.
Re:Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
And there are those who believe Elop was paid by Microsoft to do exactly that.
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Partner with Microsoft? Sure. Burn it to the ground so Microsoft had to buy Nokia, then make a massive write-off just so they'd have a phone in the market? Probably not the plan. He executed the "We have to get off our current platform NOW NOW NOW and go Microsoft" so well people only heard the first part. But I assume they were hoping for quite a few more converts.
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Actually what killed them was the CEO they hired to fix the company. Elop laid off most of the staff, bet the farm on using a phone OS that nobody wanted, ran the company into the ground and lost so much money that it had to sell the family silver to Microsoft.
Elop was obviously a Microsoft operative all along.
Re:Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
Whatever it was, his tenure was an unmitigated disaster. Not just for Nokia as it turns out but for Microsoft too.
Re:Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Any significant level of incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Re:Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
According to Wikipedia, Elop was in a "major leadership position" as the head of the Business Division at Microsoft prior to becoming Nokia's CEO, after the acquisition he returned to Microsoft as a VP.
I can't for the life of me imagine why someone could imagine him as a sucking tendril, deployed from the creeping horror that is Microsoft to latch onto some poor victim, injecting acid into it and dissolving it from within and sucking the guts out of the rapidly dessicating corpse before being withdrawn back into the writhing mass of flesh it calls home. No sirree, can't even fathom it.
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The only real difference, is intentions. The results are the same.
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sure thing ...*Brave Guy*
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Elop announced a shuttering of all existing platforms used (Meego, Maemo, Symbian) and talked about switching to an unused & untried platform instead (Windows Phone) - I'm surprised that people can actually think he's incompetent; to me just reading about that speech was very convincing evidence that he was a brilliant Microsoft operative.
There was iirc some talk in the articles at the time, of how Nokia & Microsoft had some common shareholders who wanted to use Nokia to prop up the MS share prices
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Re:Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
It was more about screwing Symbian developers (incompatible OS versions/ multiple APIs, then sudden abandonment of the platform after there was assurance to devs etc) and also the abandoning the one phone OS that was better than Android & iOS (I am talking about the Maemo/Meego as seen on the N9 of course) in favor of being a "me too" Windows Phone manufacturer, that killed-off Nokia in the end.
Re:Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
Symbian EKA2 was a great kernel design for mobile (and still does security and power management better than Linux), but a lot of the Symbian userspace APIs were designed at a time where 1MB of RAM was a lot, 4MB was huge. When 64MB was entry level, they were really showing their age: saving 1MB at the cost of a big increase in developer effort wasn't worth it. Nokia needed to provide a modern API and a clean migration path. They provided neither and they set up groups within the company competing to provide both and actively sabotaging each other. Maemo/Meego is an example of this: Switching from GTK to Qt shortly after launching the product doesn't instil developer confidence.
Windows Phone actually made sense for Nokia: they needed a software stack that let them differentiate themselves (and no one else seemed to be using WP) and they had managed to set up their corporate structure in such a way that it was impossible for them to develop it themselves. Some of their apps were really nice (their maps app, which was just bought by a consortium of German car makers was a lot better than the Apple or Google offerings, for example).
Re:Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows Phone actually made sense for Nokia: they needed a software stack that let them differentiate themselves (and no one else seemed to be using WP)
There's no point in 'differentiating yourself' by trying to sell something no-one wants to buy. You won't make your new burger store a great success by using turds in your burgers instead of beef, but you'd certainly differentiate yourself by doing so.
Re:Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows Phone is pretty nice. It's main drawback is the lack of apps (which is hard to fix, as no one wants to develop for a platform with few users and no one wants to buy a phone with no software). It's main problem selling is that people associate it with Windows on the desktop, which is a usability disaster that somehow manages to get worse each version, in spite of having passed the point where people thought it couldn't get any worse some time ago.
Agreed re: Windows Phone (Score:2)
There are elements of Windows Phone that are actually very nice and that I miss on Android - I actually like the tiled interface on a phone screen where I loathed it on a PC. The ability to have variable-size tiles showing information means that I can fit everything nicely onto a single non-scrolling screen with easy access to all of it.
Apps. (Score:2)
It's main drawback is the lack of apps (which is hard to fix, as no one wants to develop for a platform with few users and no one wants to buy a phone with no software).
Luckily, the former Linux (Maemo/Meego) developer inside Nokia that got sacked and by that time had founded Jolla, have been aware of this problem.
And they fixed it easily, by providing an Android compatibility layer for Sailfish OS.
This way, you can have a new OS with lots new feature (nice UI based around Qt), but still can leverage the huge anroid ecosystem for any app that isn't ported to QML.
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I recall reading that there was a migration path from Symbian to MeeGo, so when they moved to Windows Phone, all app developers who were counting on it were enraged and moved to Android.
Differenciate (Score:2)
Windows Phone actually made sense for Nokia: they needed a software stack that let them differentiate themselves (and no one else seemed to be using WP) and they had managed to set up their corporate structure in such a way that it was impossible for them to develop it themselves.
Which by itself is - in the current state of affair - a pretty dumb move. Part of the attraction of iOS and Android is the huge amount of apps that do exist for them. There are tons of apps for either platform, and tons of users. By trying "something different that no one else seems to use already", you're mainly, trying to gain success with zero apps, when you competitors have millions.
By trying "something as different as possible", Nokia cut themselves from huge ecosystems of apps. It's hard to convince m
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Re:Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
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When the Windows Phone decision was done, the smart phone unit was worth much more than what they later got from Microsoft. So no, this explanation does not make any sense.
Nokia clearly had some problems, but it was nowhere that bad. First, Symbian was not as bad as people claim. Second, when Elop announced the switch and accidentally killed Symbian at the same time (by declaring it obsolete), the smartphone unit was still highly profitable and selling more phones than everybody else and even growing faste
Re:Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
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Symbian was on a quick decline, just like Blackberry OS. It was already too late when they were bought. Symbian was already dead, and Nokia already switched to Windows Phone, an OS which never took off.
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The guy who started the decline, Nokia CEO Elop, was a transplant from Microsoft. Microsoft knifed Nokia. Simple as that.
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Yes because switching to Android has led to nothing but riches for HTC, Motorola, LG, Sony, etc.
The only Android company making any money is Samsung and their profit is declining.
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Yes because switching to Android has led to nothing but riches for HTC, Motorola, LG, Sony, etc.
Whereas Windows phone manufacturers are just raking in the cash.
Oh, wait...
If Windows ever gets a significant market share on smartphones, it will be because Google doesn't fix Android's security and lack of updates.
Re: Microsoft (Score:2)
There is no money in making commodity hardware when everyone is competing on price. The PC market is the same way. The Chinese Android manufacturers are making money on services. The
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Symbian was pretty good for it's time. I loved my S60 phone. So long as we are talking about what they could have done hypothetically in the past I don't think switching to Android at some point in the past was the best answer.
Had Symbian been modrenized years before it became necessary to switch (which we know they failed to do on time), given a marketplace, devices with full keyboards, etc... maybe we would be living in a 3-player smartphone world today.
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They did not decide to switch to Windows Phone, Microsoft decided that. Nokia was working on smartphones at the time, had some just coming out of beta when those projects were cancelled. They weren't Android, or iOS, or Symbian, or even Windows.
What hurt Nokia even more than smartphones were the "dumb" phones, the bottom was being cut out of their market by low quality phones that were cheaper. Sure in the first world hipster view, only smartphones matter but there was and still is a huge market for basi
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No what killed them was the switch to Windows Phone.
"Nokia was dying already" is bullshit and lying with statistics. When Elop took over Nokia, even at the time of his Burning Platforms memo, Nokia was still the de facto leader in "smartphones". The only way you can say it wasn't is to ignore their Symbian marketshare with devices like the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and their ilk.
Symbian had limitations but they had plenty of time to develop their own OS if they wanted to. Or switch to Android. Or whatever.
Wind
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Windows Phone was too little to late. Most analysts expected strong sales of WP devices by 2015 and it didn't happen. It's not that Windows Phone was bad, only that it didn't bring any advantage for the consumer over what already existed (Android/iOS).
Microsoft did everything to attract developers, with good development tools. They didn't come because the users were not there.
Re:Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
As someone who was stuck using a windows phone for two years. I disagree with your assessment of "It's not that Windows Phone was bad" It was crap!
The company I worked for decided to buy and use them because
A) It's windows so it should be easy
B) They got a great price on them.
First question from the user is "How do I set my background image?" Which you could not do.
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Anything back on Windows Mobile 6.x and earlier? Yeah, that may have been crap, but you're talking about something that was around the same time frame as pre-Cupcake Android.
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Steve? Did you throw a chair? Did it go far? At what point did you throw the chair?
They had a lot of developers (Score:2)
Microsoft had a pretty large number of developers on board, in part to incentives they were handing out left and right...
The problem is even with that support, it did not matter because people were just not buying the phones.
Between the giants of Google and Apple, already well established, it's pretty hard to make other people know you exist much less buy your phone... even if you are Microsoft (or Blackberry).
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If Microsoft could have gotten more DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! on board. The Windows Phone would have been a huge hit.
FTFY
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And yet, Germany's economy is kicking ass while the US sinks further and further into third-world status. Socialism works, the proof is there. Discuss infrastructure, quality of products, unionization, health care, health care costs vs outcomes, education, education costs, social welfare, incarceration rates, child poverty, child welfare...
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Worst economy in the Eurozone? Have you been to Greece lately?
As Sen Dirksen said... (Score:2)
The fact that Microsoft not only could write this off, but did write this off shows how little they care about anything but the bottom line. They took a good company with a generally excellent history and reputation, and, after beating it half to death, threw it away like a crumpled Dixie cup.
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Nokia was already on the way out. They failed to adapt to the new phone market as defined by the iPhone. Perhaps if they had immediately switched to the Android OS and stuck to hardware only they could have kept pace and stayed relevant. Most people (myself included) have never even seen a Nokia phone without a physical keyboard. That shows the era in which they peaked and stagnated. Microsoft would have had to have saved Nokia, as opposed to just letting the Nokia status quo alone and Nokia magically be
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really? i'm using a lumia 510 as we speak. granted it's a prepaid $60 dollar phone from target -- but for what i use it for (texting,light browsing,email) it's pretty much perfect.
I can't be the only person in the US who purchased said phone, can I? (though the app selection makes me wonder...)
The solution nobody asked for (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't be the only person in the US who purchased said phone, can I?
No but you aren't in a large crowd. I know I can count the number of Windows Phones I've seen in the wild on my fingers. Windows Phone was pretty much a solution nobody asked for several years later than anyone cared. Android and iOS already were large and dominant and developers weren't really looking to support a third platform. Technically it's probably fine but it offers nothing that people care about that the competition doesn't already have.
Furthermore Google is basically giving Android away so the handset makers have no incentive to care about Windows. Why would Samsung want to pay Microsoft for a product nobody wants anyway? Microsoft lacks the design culture and brand to compete with Apple on the high end (through vertical integration) and Google is undercutting them on price on the low end. Frankly I think Microsoft is screwed in the mobile phone market. I just don't see a path to profitability for them.
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Furthermore Google is basically giving Android away
Half true. If you want to ship Android, it's free: go to AOSP, download, tweak to your device, ship. If, on the other hand, you want the Google Play store, then you have to pay Google, agree to ship other Google apps in the default firmware install, and agree not to ship competing apps in a few categories in the default install.
Microsoft lacks the design culture and brand to compete with Apple on the high end
A lot of that is marketing. It's far more a brand problem than a design culture. In terms of usability, I'd place Windows Phone a little bit ahead of iOS at the moment (which sur
A rock and a hard place for Microsoft (Score:3)
If, on the other hand, you want the Google Play store, then you have to pay Google, agree to ship other Google apps in the default firmware install, and agree not to ship competing apps in a few categories in the default install.
The amount of money Google makes from this is almost negligible. Something north of 95% of Google's revenue comes from advertising so whatever they are charging to access Google Play it doesn't amount to much in the grand scheme of things. Microsoft on the other hand basically makes all their revenue from software sales so they pretty much have to charge something for it since they lack a supporting revenue stream. (unless you want to count desktop software sales but that would be kind of dumb of them)
A lot of that is marketing. It's far more a brand problem than a design culture.
Ma
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I recently picked up a Nokia N9. I love that phone.
The big problem with it is that many apps don't work because they make references to web sites and services that no longer exist. Not even the Twitter and Facebook apps can talk to home. You can't even put it into developer mode because it needs to download packages from now-non-existant servers. Plus, it is really slow on Wifi networks.
Now that I have used the N9 and Meego, I think that it is a big shame that Elop and MS killed it off. Makes me a bit
Sailfish OS (Score:2)
Now that I have used the N9 and Meego, I think that it is a big shame that Elop and MS killed it off. Makes me a bit angry.
Luckily he hasn't completely managed to kill them. He just let them go. They founded Jolla and continued the work producing Sailfish OS which is quite a decent smartphone OS.
(And also doesn't suffer from the same app problems. If something doesn't exist as a Qt app for sailfish, you can luckily run the android version on a compatibility layer that comes with your phone).
The big problem with it is that many apps don't work because they make references to web sites and services that no longer exist. Not even the Twitter and Facebook apps can talk to home. You can't even put it into developer mode because it needs to download packages from now-non-existant servers. Plus, it is really slow on Wifi networks.
{...}
At least I was able to get the terminal app onto the N9, so I have a shell prompt. The package files are out there and there is a Sailfish OS port, so I can play with things and try to get it working better.
I think too that the Sailfish port could a nice solution to salvage your old N9.
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The Bottom Line (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that Microsoft not only could write this off, but did write this off shows how little they care about anything but the bottom line.
Umm, writing this off does not in anyway improve their bottom line. Quite the opposite in fact. It's an admission that they bought something for a lot of money that is now worthless. What it shows is that they are not doing a very good job of maintaining the bottom line because the company is throwing money at bad investments. It's also a strong indicator that management at the time (read Balmer) was of questionable competence.
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Actually, this is pretty common trick to improve the bottom line. It doesn't improve the bottom line in that quarter, of course, but the single huge writeoff concentrates all the losses in the one quarter, making all the other quarters look better. Management then passes off the one bad quarter as an anomaly.
The Big Bath (Score:3)
Actually, this is pretty common trick to improve the bottom line.
It does not improve the bottom line at all. That is an accounting fact. It has other effects but improving the bottom line isn't one of them.
It doesn't improve the bottom line in that quarter, of course, but the single huge writeoff concentrates all the losses in the one quarter, making all the other quarters look better. Management then passes off the one bad quarter as an anomaly.
You are talking about the Big Bath [wikipedia.org] tactic. That is an earning management tactic to try to prop up the stock price by showing artificial profits in other financial periods. It is a fairly transparent and rather shady technique used to try to take advantage of the short memory of investors but make no mistake that it does nothing to improve the bottom line. Whether
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Book value (Score:3)
Oh bull shit. Value of the company? Please we are talking about perception to investors.
No we are talking about the book value [wikipedia.org] of the company and to some degree the intrinsic value [wikipedia.org]. The secondary market value of the company is a separate concern.
The only thing a write-off decreases is the profits of the company at the time the write-off is booked.
Wrong. It decreases the assets of the company and increases expenses. It also affects the equity of the company because assets decreased and so equity must decrease also if you aren't adding liabilities. The write off also means that the expected future earnings from the asset are reduced which reduces the net present value of the enterprise. The
Just accounting anyway (Score:2)
Bingo. This "writeoff" is goodwill, which it just a way of accounting for why you're paying more for a company than appeared on its balance sheets. That includes a lot of things like "the experience of the employees", which is often what you're really buying when you purchase a company, and "expected future growth". Microsoft itself has only $61B in assets, but $380B in market cap. If you could buy it, the extra $320B would all be "goodwill".
You have to put it on your balance sheet to make the books balance
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They took a good company with a generally excellent history and reputation, and, after beating it half to death
Actually, they hired Elop when shit was hitting the fan HARD. See the graph which shows the clear picture. Elop didn't help the company but it's not his decision making that sunk it.
http://blog.gsmarena.com/a/sho... [gsmarena.com]
Re:As Sen Dirksen said... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's almost as if companies exist to earn as much money as possible
How on earth does a $7.6 billion loss fit into the narrative of making as much money as possible?
Re:As Sen Dirksen said... (Score:5, Interesting)
"When the first U.S. public corporations were created in the early 1800s, corporate charters were granted by the state legislatures for very specific purposes. The charters specified that the corporations met what was considered to be a worthy public purpose and contained strict restrictions, such as the length of time the charter lasted and what, specifically, the corporation could manufacture. In the mid-nineteenth century, it wasn't unheard of for states like Ohio, Michigan, New York and Nebraska to revoke corporate charters when corporations no longer fulfilled their purpose."
We should return to enforcing and revoking corporate charters when they fail to serve the public interest.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ralph-nader/corporate-charters_b_2759596.html [huffingtonpost.com]
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The worst corporations in history have been as you describe (e.g The Dutch East India Company, etc).
With the government hanging over them they just become extensions of it. Do you like Fascism? Because that is what you propose. Exactly what I'd expect from Nader.
Mussolini's oft quoted line about corporations is actually about these types of corporations.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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You may not see a line item price for the OS when you buy a machine from Dell, HP, or Lenovo, but they are paying Microsoft for the license that comes on almost every machine sold. It's a lower price then what regular consumers would pay if they built their own computer, but the is still a very large amount of money coming into Microsoft from all those PCs, laptops, and tablets being sold with Windows preinstalled.
Personally, I really like what they've done with Windows 10. And I really like their Phone OS
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Re:other market factors to adjust for (Score:4, Informative)
Its only ever been effective during the browser wars
Lest we forget, the others including: [www.ecis.eu]
- Novell Netware
- Wordperfect
- PC/DR DOS & OS / 2
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Microsoft dev tools are either free or really cheap, the real problem is lockin into the ecosystem, sure the same is true for android and iOS, but they have established user-bases already
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That's pretty much an established business strategy, to buy or subsidize your entry into a new market with profits from your existing cash cows. Google did it wih Youtube and Android, Apple did it with everything except the iPod and so on. It's certainly a gain for customers if profits, instead of being disbursed to stockholders, and invested in new products and increased competition.
What set Microsoft aside was it's complete ruthlessness in leveraging it's OS monopoly to crush competitors using anti-compet
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7. DOS (vs CP/M)
8. Doublespace (vs Stacker)
9. Windows (vs GEM)
10. XBox (vs Nintendo / Sega / Sony)
It's actually hard to think of a successful Microsoft product that hasn't followed this pattern.
These Big Companies Just Write it Off (Score:3, Funny)
Kramer : It's just a write off for them .
Jerry : How is it a write off ?
Kramer : They just write it off .
Jerry : Write it off what ?
Kramer : Jerry all these big companies they write off everything
Jerry : You don't even know what a write off is .
Kramer : Do you ?
Jerry : No . I don't .
Kramer : But they do -- and they're the ones writing it off!
It worked (Score:5, Funny)
So, everything was fine until Microsoft somehow (the article doesn't say) determined that goodwill was worth only $116 million instead of $5.4 billion. That's huge. This is the crucial piece that makes it all "make sense".
Microsoft bought their rival and destroyed them. It's all done now, Nokia isn't coming back. Microsoft can rest easy now, the threat to Windows Phone has been eliminated. It cost billions, but that's OK. Plenty more where that came from. What's the point of being a huge corporation if you can't do things like this from time to time? It's time to stroke a Persian cat and sip a snifter of brandy. The Company has been saved.
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Except no one is buying Windows Phones. They want iPhones and Androids. One has to wonder how many billions of dollars MS has blown trying to become a big smart device player. How long will their shareholders tolerate them dumping vast sums into dubious projects?
For chrissakes, has the Xbox division actually paid off the huge investments MS threw into that division? I don't mean have the last seven or eight quarters been in the black, I mean has it actually paid for itself?
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Dunno if you are being serious or not, assuming you are for the sake of discussion.
Nokia isn't coming back
I wouldn't be so sure about that.
MS did not buy Nokia (despite headlines from people who thought the most publicaly visible part of a company was the only part), they bought Nokia's handset division, the lumia brand, some time limited rights to use the Nokia brand, and some time-limited no-compete clauses preventing Nokia from using their own brand on handsets for a while. In the not too distant future Nokia will be free to
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The market has changed, even small Chinese companies can develop phones. And there is a large pool of experienced people in Finland that can be hired again.
Microsoft and the Nokia patents .. (Score:2)
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Which is great if Microsoft wants to manufacture phones. However, it seems unlikely that they can make $7.6B from being an Android patent troll.
Maemo was Good (Score:5, Insightful)
I owned a N800 and N900. Maemo was good and would have allowed Nokia to maintain the control and distinctiveness they had with Symbian. With support for Android apps, it was a win-win. They needed united support for Maemo internally, but instead got Elop. Elop decided to throw out Maemo and Sybian and throw everything behind Windows Phone. The rest is history.
Going Android would have been a bad move also, because they would have no edge over the other Android players. Having their own OS with support for Android apps was a better solution.
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AFAIK, the Maemo/Linux division was always just a side project compared to their Symbian mainstream. They had Linux tablets with a cloud infrastructure 10 years ago, but it just wasn't Symbian. So Elop wasn't the sole reason that line of development died, but it's interesting how he got onboard just around the time Maemo/Meego was breaking out with the N9.
I still own and use my N800 and N900; it's been hard to find another real phone-computer when everything new is a "smart"phone with plenty of CPU and R
And Sailfish is still good. (Score:2)
Maemo was good and would have allowed Nokia to maintain the control and distinctiveness they had with Symbian. With support for Android apps, it was a win-win. {...} Having their own OS with support for Android apps was a better solution.
Luckily, the former Maemo/MeeGo guys didn't throw the ball, but formed Jolla and produced Sailfish OS for their phone, which is a very nice OS.
And has the desirable Android compatibility layer.
Lumia, the most expensive trademark buy in history (Score:2)
(NT)
Waste of money (Score:2)
Couldn't every man and his dog see that this was always a total waste of money? If Microsoft wanted to make their own phones they always had the wherewithal to do it themselves. Besides which, Nokia was happily making their phones without them buying them. They should have just allowed that while secretly designing their own. Saved 8 billion or whatever. I don't know what these CEOs are thinking.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Depending on how you look at it, Elop did a great job.
1) The comapny was already dead
2) He managed to get a lot of money for the company
He did a horrible job. HTC made Windows phones too, but they were smart enough to also make Androids. Same thing with Samsung. Only Nokia was braindead enough to only make Windows Phones. Big mistake.
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Please don't spread this myth. The company wasn't already dead. It was at that time - by far - the biggest smartphone vendor, which was growing faster in absolute numbers than anybody else, and the smartphone unit was highly profitable.
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Same old story, pilot damages plane until it can't fly, jumps to safety with his golden parachute. Passengers and flight attendants left to go down with the plane.
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ah, so you designed the unprofitable crap that drove Nokia to near death, instead of the smartphones people wanted. well done, are you a systemd developer now?