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Microsoft Businesses Cellphones Handhelds

Microsoft's Nokia Plans Come Into Better Focus 149

Posted by timothy from the ringtones-baby-the-future-is-ringtones dept.
Forbes has an update on what sort of future Nokia faces, as Microsoft reveals a strategy for making sense of the acquisition: [Microsoft EVP of devices Stephen] Elop laid out a framework for cost cuts in a memo to employees on July 17. Devices would focus on high and low cost Windows smartphones, suggesting a phasing out of feature phones and Android smartphones. Two business units, smart devices and mobile phones, would become one, thereby cutting overlap and overhead. Microsoft would reduce engineering in Beijing and San Diego and unwind engineering in Oulu, Finland. It would exit manufacturing in Komarom, Hungary; shift to lower cost areas like Manaus, Brazil and Reynosa, Mexico; and reduce manufacturing in Beijing and Dongguan, China. Also, CEO Satya Nadella gave hints about how Microsoft will make money on Nokia during Tuesday' conference call. Devices, he said, "go beyond" hardware and are about productivity. "I can take my Office Lens App, use the camera on the phone, take a picture of anything, and have it automatically OCR recognized and into OneNote in searchable fashion. There is a lot we can do with phones by broadly thinking about productivity." In other words, the sale of a smartphone is a means to other sales.
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Microsoft's Nokia Plans Come Into Better Focus More

Microsoft's Nokia Plans Come Into Better Focus

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  • It's a funny world (Score:2, Interesting)

    by drolli ( 522659 )

    I am a Unix/Linux user since 1995. I used Symbian and i liked it, and i have several android devices (first was the galazy tab). Now Microsoft killed Nokia. Nokia killed Symbian.

    I am looking for a new tablet/PC currently. I tested some Windows 8.1 Tablets (Lenovo and others), and i have to say (besides the colored rectangles on the start screen): Well done
    by leaving many things unchanged. For the first time in about 20 years i consider buying a microsoft OS on an new computer (for personal use).

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I am a Unix/Linux user since 1995. I used Symbian and i liked it, and i have several android devices (first was the galazy tab). Now Microsoft killed Nokia. Nokia killed Symbian.

      I am looking for a new tablet/PC currently. I tested some Windows 8.1 Tablets (Lenovo and others), and i have to say (besides the colored rectangles on the start screen): Well done
      by leaving many things unchanged. For the first time in about 20 years i consider buying a microsoft OS on an new computer (for personal use).

      Ironically, Windows 8.1 was also the first time in 20 years they decided to remove the Start menu from the "unchanged" OS...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by drolli ( 522659 )

        Ironically this disturbed me very much in the beginning. But the desktop still is there.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Ironically, Windows 8.1 was also the first time in 20 years they decided to remove the Start menu from the "unchanged" OS...

        When Microsoft introduced the start menu they got no end of ridicule about how non-intuitive it was to press start to shut down. Now in 8.1 you have a big power-button right beside your account picture right on the main start screen, and people can't find it... sigh..

        • Ironically, Windows 8.1 was also the first time in 20 years they decided to remove the Start menu from the "unchanged" OS...

          When Microsoft introduced the start menu they got no end of ridicule about how non-intuitive it was to press start to shut down. Now in 8.1 you have a big power-button right beside your account picture right on the main start screen, and people can't find it... sigh..

          Start Screen? Never used it.

          If I get a Win8/WinServe2012 system, first thing I do is install ClamShell. Never see the Start Screen after that, but it brings a lot of saneness to the UI; fortunately I don't have to go the Control Panel much as that would still be a foo bar with some settings only in the "Classic" Control Panel and others only in the settings wizard available through the Start Screen. In the end, no matter what I do it's a PITA to use.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      20 years? It's 2014. So that means since 1994.
      So you've rejected Windows 95,
      and you've rejected Windows 98,
      and you've rejected Windows XP,
      and you've rejected Windows 7,
      but now, after all this time, you're embracing Windows 8.1?

      I reject you. You've got the worse decision-making that I've seen in the last 20 years.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Nokia/Microsoft have a long tradition of running away from their platforms, leaving the developers and users in the lurch. They counted on their big names to overcome any trust issues this might cause, again and again.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by drolli ( 522659 )

        What? I mean, Nokia announced the death of symbian well in advance (5 years before i stopped using symbian). And remind me - how long could you execute binaries built for Windows 3.1 on the current windows? Oh - allright if it is a 32 bit version of Windows 7/8 then it still may work....

        • Windows 7 Pro (64 bit) supports Windows 3.1 applications because the version of Windows XP included with its XP Mode virtual machine is 32-bit. Failing that, you could buy a copy of Windows 3.1 and install in DOSBox.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by drolli ( 522659 )

            yes.the point is: ms supports running windows 3.1 apps by providing the virtual machine in a standard os of ms.

            that's a devotion to a platform (the previous post complained about ms letting developers stand in the rain).

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by rvw ( 755107 )

      I am a Unix/Linux user since 1995. I used Symbian and i liked it, and i have several android devices (first was the galazy tab). Now Microsoft killed Nokia. Nokia killed Symbian.

      I am looking for a new tablet/PC currently. I tested some Windows 8.1 Tablets (Lenovo and others), and i have to say (besides the colored rectangles on the start screen): Well done
      by leaving many things unchanged. For the first time in about 20 years i consider buying a microsoft OS on an new computer (for personal use).

      I bought a laptop with Windows 8.1. I wanted to install Ubuntu on it, but still haven't got the boot process working. I use a Mac for 15 years now, OS X since 10, Ubuntu at work since five years. Although I help several people with Windows computers, I haven't used it for myself in years. In two or three days it became totally clear that Windows is not for me anymore. The same annoyances are still there. I won't say Ubuntu is perfect, not even OS X, but Windows 8.1... I can't believe how inconsequent the se

    • It's not killing Symbian that angers me (although the timing was horrible and hurt Nokia immensely as well). It's killing MeeGo. It had a better chance of being a successful "third ecosystem" than Windows Phone.

  • Sigh, that's another waste of time then. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Was rather hoping Nokia would come back with the Android smartphones, into the EU. Unfortunately that seems to not be the case and they inside on flogging that dead horse of their own operating system. They used to make nice hardware designs.

    I tried their OS, and much preferred Android/Blackberry/iOS to it. It might work for enterprise users (I'm sure that's a /really/ big market!!) but lack of decent apps, or even popularly used apps is the nail in the coffin for me as far as their mobile Windows OS is c

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by maligor ( 100107 )

      Was rather hoping Nokia would come back with the Android smartphones, into the EU. Unfortunately that seems to not be the case and they inside on flogging that dead horse of their own operating system. They used to make nice hardware designs.

      Nokia doesn't make cellphones anymore, the cellphone division was what was sold off to Microsoft and I don't see why Nokia would re-enter the cellphone market anymore, it's pretty saturated.

    • Re:Sigh, that's another waste of time then. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by joh ( 27088 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @06:22AM (#47548395)

      It might work for enterprise users (I'm sure that's a /really/ big market!!) but lack of decent apps, or even popularly used apps is the nail in the coffin for me as far as their mobile Windows OS is concerned. The phone hardware was good, the OS completely lacked.

      Such a shame.

      Why does the OS lack when there's just a lack of apps? Seriously? The OS is fine.

      It's just that a THIRD platform (after Android and iOS) has very little hope of getting a foot into the door. MS obviously hopes that it can change that in the long run by fusing Windows and WP as a platform. I think the gap is too large to make this work, but it's really neither the hardware nor the OS that is the actual problem here. Still, MS has more than once proven that it has the patience to turn things around (they all but missed the Internet once and a few years later IE was moving towards a monopoly) and they surely hope they can pull something like this off again.

      I'm not very optimistic here, but the OS wars aren't over yet.

      • Re:Sigh, that's another waste of time then. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by greg1104 ( 461138 ) <gsmith@gregsmith.com> on Monday July 28, 2014 @07:15AM (#47548569) Homepage

        Whether Symbian is a good platform or not involves more than just if the code is functional. Sometimes a lack of applications is driven by a more fundamental weakness in a platform. One of the reasons the iPhone and iPad have done so well courting application developers is that Apple tries to keep everyone marching in formation, moving the platform forward without leaving current customers too far behind. (Their formation, of course, but they are Apple)

        A good example is the "pixel doubing" that went into the early iPad design. That intentionally structured the design of the platform so that applications written for lower resolutions would continue working against the higher pixel counts. That's the sort of subtle thing you do to keep developers happy and application development flourishing.

        Faced with the same sort of devices with multiple resolutions problem, Android leaves the whole mess in the lap of application developers. And Nokia has just abandoned the old stuff. If you're a phone developer, how would you feel about that? A lot of things like that influence whether applications are built for a platform or not.

        And, yes, Microsoft has bullied their way into a winning position using their operating system monopoly for a long time, with IE being a good example of that. I don't think it's safe to assume that tactic will keep working anymore though. I don't know anyone who feels Windows compatibility is an important thing on their phone or tablet today. At best, I might want something that opens Word or Powerpoint documents someone sends me in an e-mail. You don't need Microsoft for that on your phone though. Their software is only needed if you expect to edit the documents with low risk of corruption, and that still happens on desktops.

        • One of the reasons the iPhone and iPad have done so well courting application developers is that Apple tries to keep everyone marching in formation, moving the platform forward without leaving current customers too far behind.

          Well, that's easy to do if you control both the hardware and the OS. That's not an option for anyone else.

          • Microsoft now controls the hardware and OS (like in Surface, the devices part of Nokia they acquired not too long ago). Nokia had both Symbian and a hardware unit. Samsung has Bada (I think it's called), Tizen. Blackberry also had hardware and software. There was also Palm, Inc. Which was also part of HP...

            • No, they don't control the hardware and OS. Merely putting out a reference system of sorts does not mean the total control Apple has over their devices.

              If you can't see the difference then I can't really help you because it's such a basic and plain difference that a first-grader would recognize it.

        • No man. The thing is Android had a resolution independent UI while iOS did not at the time. That was a technological handicap Apple had so they had little choice but to solve it that way.

      • Re:Sigh, that's another waste of time then. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @10:21AM (#47549645)

        Why does the OS lack when there's just a lack of apps? Seriously? The OS is fine.

        No, it's not. If it were just a lack of apps being ported to it, that's one thing, but that isn't it.

        The point of a smartphone (to some people such as myself) is to have a swiss army knife for information gathering. As a network admin, one of my things is being able to troubleshoot network problems. Android (and iOS as well, though I don't own an iPhone) allow for these kinds of features really well, and I can use apps like Fing and WiFi Analyzer. However the underlying OS code for those two apps cannot be done on either Windows RT or Windows Phone.

        The same story can be said for a lot of things. There quite a number of WP apps where if you read where users are complaining about why the WP version of X app doesn't support Y feature that it also does on Android, and they blame the developer for being "lazy" but the truth is that WP doesn't support the underlying feature in most cases.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Yunzil ( 181064 )

          No, it's not.

          Yes, it is. The fact that you as a niche user can't do something doesn't mean the OS is bad.

          • The fact that you as a niche user can't do something doesn't mean the OS is bad.

            This is very wrong. It very much does. The whole purpose of an app ecosystem these days is to be able to provide services and functions that the OS itself cannot. Otherwise why even have an app ecosystem? Let's just place a web browser in it and be done with it.

            And that's another problem I have with both Windows Phone and Windows RT: The apps they run can't seem to be able to do anything that you can't already do with a web browser. Just look at games for example -- Chrome has a bigger selection than RT and

    • Symbian was great when it came out. 32-bit OS with memory protection and multitasking. The APIs are horrible and I hear its a mess to program for but at the time it was probably the best cellphone OS. It is really dated now.

  • Hit: When your business fail: set a new plan... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jcdr ( 178250 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @06:15AM (#47548365)

    This will make the failure looking like a thing of the past and make hope for a successful new future.
    But this don't grant that this will work as expected. Especially after you use the same plan almost each 6 months for more than 3 years now !

  • OCR (Score:1)

    by Nyder ( 754090 )

    I like the part where they are magically going to make OCR work via the camera on a cellphone.

    • I like the part where they are magically going to make OCR work via the camera on a cellphone.

      Windows Phone already does that though, you hit the search button, choose eye, point it at something, choose scan text, it highlights all the text at which point you can either choose copy, search, or translate. If you translate it will overlay the translated text on the image in your chosen language.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Nyder ( 754090 )

        I like the part where they are magically going to make OCR work via the camera on a cellphone.

        Windows Phone already does that though, you hit the search button, choose eye, point it at something, choose scan text, it highlights all the text at which point you can either choose copy, search, or translate. If you translate it will overlay the translated text on the image in your chosen language.

        What about errors? We are talking OCR here, which never worked great on scanners, so how is it going to work better via cameras?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mwvdlee ( 775178 )

          I don't use OCR on a scanner all that often, but last time I did (atleast 5 years ago, probably more), it had no problem recognizing the pages full of text.
          As far as I've tested it myself, OCR works great on scanners, so why wouldn't it work as well with cameras?

          • Recognizing pages full of text is one thing. Getting a useful conversion rate is another. Even an 96% success rate means several hand-corrections per page. And if you have to manually confirm and correct each page, it's not worth it in most cases.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by darylb ( 10898 )

          The OCR in Adobe Acrobat (Standard and Professional) is excellent. If the input copy is of usable quality, the OCR results are superb. I've scanned and OCR'd an entire file cabinet's worth of journal articles from a departed professor's library using a six or seven year old ScanSnap scanner on the "Better" setting. Both Spotlight and Windows Search get correct hits in the documents, and cutting/pasting works like a champ.

          Maybe you're using something inferior?

    • Re:OCR (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @06:52AM (#47548483)

      > I like the part where they are magically going to make OCR work

      I'm afraid you could have left it right there, with no mention of cell phones or their cameras. OCR, much like speech-to-text software, has plateaued and not noticeably improved in the last 10 years. It's became more available as software has become more powerful. But the underlying technologies have been quite stable. Despite flurries of new patents with every update to such software, the fundamental algorithms remain unchanged and have been stable for roughly 20 years.

  • Its dead Jim! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by miffo.swe ( 547642 ) <daniel@hedblom.gmail@com> on Monday July 28, 2014 @06:41AM (#47548455) Homepage Journal

    Windows mobile phone forays are dead, done, finito, kaputt and out of steam.

    Windows Phone 7 has been out for almost 4 years and still barely holds 3% market share. Thats pretty awful by any measure, especially since the platform before it had much larger market share. They lost customers with current platform without gaining any new ones.

    Windows Mobile was out 7 years and failed, and before that Microsoft failed with Pocket PC.

    I am amazed they still happily beat the dead horse instead of putting effort into supporting the winning platforms. Android will be succeeded by something in the long run and until then i fail to see the business perspective of dragging a dead horse round the racetrack with a lawn mower trying to catch up with a Jumbojet. Why not just book a seat in the Jumbojet instead?

    Personally im sure Nadella would like nothing better than to put a fork in Windows Phone, but entrenched forces inside Microsoft makes this very hard. It has to fail on its own dying a long agonizing death instead.

    • Re:Its dead Jim! (Score:5, Funny)

      by nine-times ( 778537 ) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Monday July 28, 2014 @09:15AM (#47549113) Homepage

      But you haven't seen Windows Phone 9! They're going to overhaul the interface to make it work like a traditional desktop UI, requiring a full-size keyboard and mouse to operate it!

      Microsoft! What'll they think of next?!

    • Re:Its dead Jim! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ILongForDarkness ( 1134931 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @10:43AM (#47549837)

      It's funny it is kind of the Mac v PC battle of the late 80's-90's. Platform wins. I have a Lumina 920 and it is a great phone. Win phone is fun to use. But ...: not a lot of apps for it. Not that I care much. I'm not into social media crap or a dozen other things. What it does really well right out of the box: hotmail, gmail, facebook contacts all automatically merged (after logging into the relevent apps of course) and shown in one place. It doesn't matter if someone's hotmail has their phone number but their mailing address is only saved on there FB page: it all shows up in the same contact. Dido: things like birthday's and holidays: automatically figured out and notified.

      That is pretty much all I needed from a phone: contacts in one place and access to FB for the 1-2 times a month I actually check it. But: I am not the typical smartphone user. MS missed the cool factor boat by a couple years and now have to bribe people (sometimes literally by supplying in house devs to help support a big name app get ported to the platform) to develop for it. Since people aren't sure if they can find the app they want on WinPhone they just go for an Android or iPhone. Them giving out WinPhone for free now will maybe get them a better market share in the low end phones for the developing world but: if you are giving away the software what is the point being in the business? (If you are hoping on making money on selling apps you don't want the entry level 3rd world population as your customer base either).

  • What does unwind mean?? (Score:3)

    by will_die ( 586523 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @06:42AM (#47548457) Homepage
    In this context what does unwind mean?
    You already have "exiting" and "reducing" so it may not be a negative usage.

    • Seems to involve Elop burning another platform. I wouldn't let that man develop a "framework" to do my laundry.

    • Re:What does unwind mean?? (Score:4, Funny)

      by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @07:39AM (#47548657) Homepage

      Microsoft would reduce engineering in Beijing and San Diego and unwind engineering in Oulu, Finland.

      I'd guess someone confused "unwind" with "wind-down," as in slow down (possibly to an eventual halt).

      Then again, they might have meant "wind-up," as a business synonym for closing down/ceasing operations (with the implication that this is being done in a tidy manner, rather than abruptly being forced out of business).

      Or perhaps they're winding-down before they wind-up.

      I'm not winding you up here.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by havana9 ( 101033 )
      They aren't intereste to sell Wind [www.wind.it] branded phones. Even if the Italian phone company now sell Lumia phones. Maybe they had some disaagrement, I don't know.

  • I think the strategy should be obvious (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @07:00AM (#47548517)
    Hollow out Nokia until its just a shell valuable only for its IP, transfer everything else worth keeping into Microsoft proper and discard the rest. Wouldn't be surprised if the "Nokia" brand gets sold onto to some Asian / Indian outfit in a few years hence.

    • Re:I think the strategy should be obvious (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Xest ( 935314 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @07:29AM (#47548623)

      Yep, they've already announced most the staff are going, all of it's factories sound like they're going to be replaced with Microsoft's own, and it's Finnish engineering premise is being "unwound" aka shutdown too it seems.

      What is left other than IP? It seems like Microsoft just took a competitor out of the market and took all their IP - a competitor because they were still doing better than Windows Phone before Microsoft took them over even if they were falling in the face of Android and iPhone.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        IP did not move in the deal. It was licensed for multiple years. "Old Nokia" still has the IP.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Xest ( 935314 )

          So was this done entirely to just destroy competition? I just can't see what else is being retained here.

          • No, it was done because they wanted to keep Windows Phone alive.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Xest ( 935314 )

              How does blowing billions on a company you're just going to dismantle do that other than by killing off competition? Wouldn't it have been better to spend billions simply subsidising Windows Phones to make them ridiculously cheap for the power you get relative to Android/iOS to actually get some market penetration that's worthwhile?

              • Nokia historically had fantastic hardware, and in Europe they had huge mindshare. I've been to a Vodafone store, and the young lady in Customer Service (very young) knew about the Nokia 6310 and said many people coming to the store were nostalgic about that model. If the 6310 would have been still selling, I would have bought one without a second thought - in many ways they are better than current smartphones (HUGE effective battery life in standby, on the order of a couple of weeks. Great signal in most ci

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Xest ( 935314 )

                  I agree Nokia has always had great hardware but they're getting rid of the people behind that which is kind of my point - they don't seem to be keeping anything of any actual value, so they might as well have spent the money bribing Samsung or whoever to make them a premium phone instead.

                  For what it's worth I was always a fan of Nokia, I had an N95 and couldn't understand the fuss about the first gen iPhone because it couldn't even do a 10th of the userful things my Nokia phone could (like GPS, installable

    • Hollow out Nokia until its just a shell valuable only for its IP, transfer everything else worth keeping into Microsoft proper and discard the rest. Wouldn't be surprised if the "Nokia" brand gets sold onto to some Asian / Indian outfit in a few years hence.

      They only bought the phone business, not the name and not the IP. They have a licence for them for a while, but certainly not something they can actually sell.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by havana9 ( 101033 )
      I think the Noka brand will be used for tyres for consumer products and for consulting and business products. Microsoft likes that the phones will be branded "Microsoft", because Apple phones are branded "Apple".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ecki ( 115356 )

      Well, I'd say the opposite happened: Nokia kept the profitable businesses (IP, network equiment, navigation) and transferred everything not worth keeping to Microsoft. And even got money in return. Pretty smart move.

  • Mini-Nokia still thriving (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jones_supa ( 887896 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @07:22AM (#47548591)
    Interestingly, the Finnish stub of Nokia that was left, is doing fine [yle.fi]. They still have a feasible telecommunication networks business.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It doesn't matter.

      The Nokia which the whole world came to know and love, is dead. The handset business.

      The writing was on the wall when Trojan Horse Elop was hired as Microsoft CEO. Microsoft apologists had insisted that the naysayers were overly negative, Nokia would see a new dawn, a turnaround in fortunes blah blah.

      Microsoft used Nokia as a footstool to piggyback on, an instrument from which to peddle Microsoft's dogshit ecosystem (Bing, IE, Sky/Onedrive, Outlook, Skype, Office, Xbox Live). Once that fai

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @07:40AM (#47548659)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • So in the future most businesses will opt for blackberry in the field

      Wait... people are still buying Blackberry devices?

      • Vodafone Romania has them in store, so I'd assume they are selling enough of them. If you have specific software that runs on them, it's cheaper to buy new Blackberry phones than to rewrite the software ("traveling" salesmen, on field insurance agents maybe - even though the later seems to be replaced by netbooks). Maybe if security restrictions don't allow yet other phones?

  • staying the corse with fewer people.

    I'm sure that'll work out well, like the current corse is.

    I'd be nice if MS had just fragmented out so we could get VC and .net on other platforms, along with Office. But as it stands now, all the kids are doing Ruby and anything else that isn't MS so the languages division (MSDN) folks are going down, and with Linux owning the 'cloud' space, now they screwed up consumer windows, so the tables and phones are taking over.

    Looking back from 1999 it's amazing that MS could f

    • staying the corse with fewer people.

      I'm sure that'll work out well, like the current corse is.

      Agreed. The article is MBA-speak, with no vision, ideas, or anticipation. You hear this kind of shit, irrelevance is coming.

      I'm sad to see it come to this, but the rumors have been persistent that MS had become more and more of an un-fun drudgery politics look-over-your-shoulder shit-hole to work at, and that can only lead to brain-drain, loss of morale, and a black-hole sucking away product ideas that might make the company worthwhile again, leaving only the suits and bean-counters steering the ship.

  • Did you just say 'focus', how did it come to this that a cutting edge technology site is reduced to spouting free slasterverts for the MICROS~1 organization ..
    --

    Insert marketing buzz words: focus, framework, opportunities, phones, productivity, puck, rightsizing, skating, sunset, unify, unwind ...

  • That in any organization of sufficient size, the ass kissing retards always float to the top.

  • Elop (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 28, 2014 @08:28AM (#47548851)

    Can someone explain to me how there hasn't been a class action lawsuit against Elop and Microsoft for his blatantly obvious tanking of Nokia intended to reduce the purchase price? How have shareholders not sued? Why aren't Nokia employees, who are about to get laid off en-masse, not contacted lawyers and sued? Seriously, this is something that was insanely obvious as soon as Elop joined Nokia - we were talking about it extensively on Slashdot - and it played out EXACTLY how we all predicted it would.

    Where are the lawsuits?

    • You have cited a lot of things to hate over, which you obviously do, but you have yet to cite anything that can actually be sued for.

    • Lets not forget that Nokia was floundering before Elop went in.

      AIUI corporate officers are given wide lattitude to do what they belive is in the best interests of the company. Otherwise you'd get a flood of lawsuits whenever a descision turned out badly. So you would basically have to prove that Elop did not belive that going the MS route was in the best interests of the community.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Uecker ( 1842596 )

        That depends on your definition of "floundering". The handset unit was highly profitable and smartphone sales were much higher than any competitor and also increasing at a higher rate in absolute numbers. On the other hand, market share in smartphones was falling (no, this is not a contradiction in a growing market) and Symbian was perceived to be outdated. Nevertheless, I don't think there was any need for desperate decisions. Their old strategy was sound: Meego and Qt to create a joint ecosystem with Symb

  • Succinct summary for the masses (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Miss Nokia was tricked into marriage with Mr Microsoft. Now she's abused, deprived of food, and soon she'll die and be hastily buried in an unmarked grave. Of course Mr Microsoft gets to inherit her assets.

  • ...before Google or Apple buy Microsoft. Perfect symmetry.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Nah, neither would want MS. Apple doesn't care all that much about industry...although they are changing that a bit recently. They still don't want the desktop ball and chain. Google doesn't either, they just want all communications in their cloud so that it be squeezed for information on everyone's grandmother and what she eats for breakfast (A hint, Google, think "prunes").

  • Same as usual, then (Score:3)

    by Sarten-X ( 1102295 ) on Monday July 28, 2014 @10:40AM (#47549821) Homepage

    In other words, the sale of a smartphone is a means to other sales.

    Naturally.

    Sales of Office lead to sales of Windows which leads to sales of Windows Server which leads to sales of Exchange which leads to sales of Office... Vendor lock-in has been Microsoft's core business model for decades. Why should it be different with phones?

  • "I can take my Office Lens App, use the camera on the phone, take a picture of anything, and have it automatically OCR recognized and into OneNote in searchable fashion"

    OneNote is/was actually a reasonable product - but does anybody use it?
    I think that Microsoft's problem is that it has always been a (fragmented) product company, not able to look at things from a user point of view.

    What I would like (and pay for) would be seamless integration of all my information, securely, between my devices and optionall

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