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Nokia Outsources Symbian OS Work 179

angry tapir writes "Nokia will outsource its Symbian software activities to Accenture, transferring 3,000 employees to the company in the process, as it moves its focus to making phones running on Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system. The Finnish phone manufacturer will also close some of its research and development sites and eliminate a further 4,000 jobs by the end of next year. Last week Nokia announced the signing of a definitive agreement regarding their global mobile ecosystem partnership."
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Nokia Outsources Symbian OS Work

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  • We're sorry (Score:5, Insightful)

    by b100dian ( 771163 ) on Friday April 29, 2011 @05:21AM (#35972744) Homepage Journal
    We're sorry Nokia, we don't know of anyone surviving Microsoft deals.
    • We're sorry Nokia, we don't know of anyone surviving Microsoft deals.

      Sybase and Citrix are the only ones that spring to mind. I'd say this one is going to play out more like Sendo, though.

      • by biglig2 ( 89374 )

        Man, I loved my Sendo X. Lovely phone.

        Unusable broken radio, of course, and the delay of getting the OS updates through the carrier meant Microsoft had bankrupted them before they fixed it, but still...

      • by h4rr4r ( 612664 )

        Sybase got screwed hard on that deal. Sure they survived but they lost huge future markets for their server.

      • by guruevi ( 827432 )

        Sybase lost a lot of business when they were duped by Microsoft to sharing the code after they didn't get any revenue sharing from Microsoft and Microsoft later undercut them for the EXACT SAME PRODUCT. They were actually going down the crapper until recently when they expanded their business into the mobile space.

        Citrix is one of the few that survived because they held their ground and held true to their products and customers. Microsoft was never able to make inroads into Citrix's business because they bu

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      HTC?
    • by am 2k ( 217885 )

      Apple [wikipedia.org] comes to mind, although that deal ended pretty quickly, since it was meant as a psychological statement, not as a real business agreement.

    • We're sorry Nokia, we don't know of anyone surviving Microsoft deals.

      You mean like Ford and Toyota? Microsoft and Toyota form new telematics company [consumerreports.org]

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Mikkeles ( 698461 )

      When a company starts shedding employees (Our Most Valuable Resource (TM)) like a Labrador Retriever sheds hair, it's pretty well the start of the end.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by faichai ( 166763 )

        So having worked for Nokia previously (actually Symbian and then we got bought) I think the basic problem that they are trying to resolve is the sheer amount of dead weight the have in the organisaiton. There is a reason they have the most expensive and least productive R&D operation on the planet and that is because they get so little out of each employee. Most employees are jobsworths simply doing the minimum they can get away with without being fired.

        Think about it, all those employees, and they coul

    • Nokia may really not survive this caliber of a corporate psychopath [boingboing.net]

      But it'll be good for him! As always.

    • I think Nokia is Finnished.

  • Really sad to see that Nokia didn't have the confidence in their hardware design and manufacture skill to give Android a chance. They never were in a position to build a proper platform for the current generation of smartphones, so instead they sold their soul to MicroSoft for scraps.

    Seriously, if you dismiss the future due to low margin of commodity platforms you better have something amazing to sell, like Apple does.

    • by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      a lot of the problem is that a large number of the work force had nothing good to do, symbian surviving or not, so if you looked at the past 3 years and then what software product the huge machine produced, you'd be transferring the so called workforce to accenture too.

      like, they've been holding yearly coop(layoff) talks for a decade. but still churning profit.

    • Really sad to see that Nokia didn't have the confidence in their hardware design and manufacture skill to give Android a chance.

      You know, lack of confidence can be a realistic assesment.

      Nokia's has been notorious for their lack of precision in gap dimensions (i'm not sure if that is the correct term as english is not my first language, and I'm not a mechanical engineer). As a result, stuff can get in front of your display and ambient humidity can get to the electronics.

      It's been this way for ages.

      That was maybe acceptable 10 years ago. But today, as you can buy superbly assembled phones from chinese and korean manufacturers,

      • by Lumpy ( 12016 )

        If you make your phone easy to disassemble for repair you have gap problems. if you seal the damn thing up tight so it's throwaway, you can do what apple, motorola and HTC are doing now. NONE of them are making a proper sealed phone that should be able to handle use in the rain.

        And yes I love my otterbox case on my phone.. I can use my phone in the rain without tripping moisture sensors.

        • by h4rr4r ( 612664 )

          If you make your phone easy to disassemble for repair you have gap problems.

          I am no phone designer, but it seems we could use the tech many other industries use to solve this. That tech is of course the rubber gasket and screws.

  • What if they would for once slightly innovate and put one or two Kinects in a smartphone? Could this save Nokia of a sure oblivion?

  • The fine print: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by korgitser ( 1809018 ) on Friday April 29, 2011 @05:44AM (#35972808)

    Nokia outsources the elimination of 3000 jobs and the killing of Symbian.

  • by nzac ( 1822298 ) on Friday April 29, 2011 @05:52AM (#35972830)

    I thought they still dominated this sector?

    How can the shareholders think this is profitable? While is good for the short term without Symbian continuing they will potentially faid to being irrelevant killing the share price.

  • by slashbart ( 316113 ) on Friday April 29, 2011 @06:04AM (#35972864) Homepage
    I'm afraid for the Qt future. It's a great toolkit, but it's very much cross-platform, so Microsoft will kill it.
    • here [piacentini.blog.br] is the complete scenario of what will happen, told by a guy who has seen the same happen to his small company when it was bought by Adobe, via the same guy that's now running Nokia.
      Qt needs to be forked asap.
    • Indeed. Many C++ Windows devs have managed to avoid MFC by using Qt. Without Qt, cross-platform Windows apps are nearly impossible.

      • There are many cross-platform widget toolkits out there - wxWidgets is another well-known one. Qt is much better than all of them, and it'd be a pity to lose it, but it won't kill cross-platform development.

  • Nokia, through Accenture, has made the code for the Symbian smartphone OS a "community project", putting several aging geeks in raptures of delight [newstechnica.com].

    "The Symbian OS will delight those of us who fondly remember EPOC on the Psion NetBook," said Larry Berkin, Symbian's head of global alliances. "God, that was an OS. Best PDA ever. Finest of British engineering. Sixteen whole kilobytes! You could run a truck over them. I bet an open source Symbian OS will let you run a truck over your phone."

    The Foundation hopes

  • Ass-Enter a.k.a. Andersen Consulting.

  • by bl8n8r ( 649187 ) on Friday April 29, 2011 @07:37AM (#35973158)
    Sounds to me like 3000 employees just finished their last TPS report.

    "Hi Mike, yeah.. remeber that TPS report? Yeah.. that one I asked you to yeah.. fill out before the end of April? Yeah, we won't be needing that here anymore, yeah... so if you would just put all your stuff in this box and yeah... head over to Accenture that would be great."
    • by shuz ( 706678 )
      This is a fact of Business. The 3000 employees that are strong individual performers have nothing to fear. Accenture is not that scary of a company and they certainly are not the axemen that you are making them out to be.
  • a wholly controlled subsidiary of Microsoft.

    It's board and officers are now redundant rubber stamps.

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