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."
We're sorry (Score:5, Insightful)
The fine print: (Score:5, Insightful)
Nokia outsources the elimination of 3000 jobs and the killing of Symbian.
Re:Nokia? (Score:5, Insightful)
It has a good kernel and a very comprehensive API and Qt made the "bitch to program" thing considerably less of a problem but it was still a bitch to progam for the people working on the middleware and non-Qt user code. and consumer electronics companies tend not to see why they need to make their engineers more productive and how it requires that they produce different types of products (e.g. ones with enough RAM).
It was all the fault of Symbian Ltd for determinedly ignoring the programming problems years ago and of Nokia for being a bad customer and trying to push all the things that lead to the disaster and to both of them for ignoring the fact that higher performance hardware was coming and tha tpeople actualy would pay for it. Their entire focus was on trying to move down ro cheaper hardware and they dug themselves deeply into a hole before admitting the need for a 180 degree turn.
It's just a classic case of people "optimizing" something and of time making their optimisations first irrelevant and then a terrible burden.
Nokia could have fixed their problems at many points and didn't because the short term pain would have been high. Now it's much higher.
Re:We're sorry (Score:3, Insightful)
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.