MS's Nokia acquisition

mubs

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Nobody cares about this? Granted Nokia is nobody in the US, but they still are pretty big everywhere else in the feature phone market. They used to be big in business phones as well.

IMHO, last gasp of Nokia and MS' mobile business.
 

P5-133XL

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It didn't surprise me. It seemed that Nokia took an extreme risk a couple of years ago, when Nokia decided to go entirely Windows phones to collect the Microsoft payments. Windows phones have never sold well but especially back then. My assumption, at the time, was that there had to be an closed door arrangement to deal with the likelihood of of total failure in the Windows phone market. Otherwise, why would Nokia risk the entire company on Microsoft.

P.S. I thought it was totally stupid of Nokia at the time and Microsoft just proved it. Microsoft just bought into the hardware side of the phone market really cheap.
 
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Chewy509

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I remember getting my first Nokia phone (Nokia 1630 in '96), and had quite a few Nokia's since then... but they came out with a few really, really bad products which distracted from some of the good phones they had, so people looked elsewhere (Samsung, SE, etc), then they missed the smart phone boat by not either getting Symbian feature parity with iOS/Android or moving to another platform, and then signing up with MS was never going to end well. (But hey, Elop, an ex-MS employee knew what he was doing).
 

Mercutio

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I'm fairly certain Microsoft will be picking up Blackberry, too. And all of that is to get it back to a level of credibility it never should have lost in the smartphone marketplace.

Based on my limited interactions with current Windows Mobile products, they're a better choice for "simple" smartphones than ithings are and the Lumia products seem to be quality hardware. I don't really think that this is a bad thing, except insofar as it probably represents the end result of a lot of poor management from both companies.
 

CougTek

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What's incredibly ironic is that Microsoft's board strongly considers Elop, the guy who's believe to be largely responsible for Nokia's debacle, as their next CEO, a man who's supposed to raise Microsoft from its current stagnation. IMO, we'll have yet another analogy to "failure", next to Georges Bush.
 

Chewy509

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Re: Elop,

What's to say that Elop wasn't hired by Nokia due to insistence of MS, in which the plan was for Elop to drop the share price of Nokia to a point that MS could take over, (similar to Google taking over Ericsson). The reward, Elop becomes the new CEO for handing Microsoft Nokia on a very cheap silver platter. (The prize isn't Nokia, but it's patent portfolio - in which MS can make more money on patent licensing that it does on selling WinMo licenses to OEMs).

If true (even partially), then who's really running MS and Nokia?
 

Chewy509

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sd, thanks for the info/clarification...

So if Microsoft is only getting the hardware side of things, that only leaves the Nokia Solutions and Networks division... Does this mean Nokia will simply become a R&D firm which will develop and license communications technology?
 

sechs

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Microsoft tried this before with Danger, and look how well that went.

This kind of feels like trying to save a sinking boat by putting another sinking boat in it.
 

Tannin

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Over in another place, in response to this post:


But Nokia is still a good corporate brand. If the combination of MS and Nokia can produce the kind of handsets and tablets that enterprises want and have them seamlessly integrated with windows apps, domains, group policy, and that kind of stuff, they could quite easily become the default choice for enterprises if not consumers.

... and rather to my surprise, I amassed 17 upvotes and not a single downvote for this thing below:


Tim 11 says "If the combination of MS and Nokia can produce the kind of handsets and tablets that enterprises want and have them seamlessly integrated with windows apps, domains, group policy, and that kind of stuff ....". It's an interesting view. The trouble with it is that Microsoft just went to a vast amount of trouble and expense to right royally bork the enterprise desktop by sticking it with the slow motion trainwreck sometimes called "Windows 8" but mostly called things I can't repeat here,

And - here comes the key point - and the whole driving force behind this suicidally wrong-headed bet-the-company product is the Microsoft *phone* people. Yes, that's right, the very same people who are going to "seamlessly integrate" the phone with all the long-established enterprise infrastructure. Yes, you know the stuff I mean., the useful practical stuff all of us here use every day and get at from the old desktop ('coz Metro is too dumb have hooks into any of the techo stuff) or even from the command line ('coz the MS development schedule is schizophrenic and stuff gets neglected for years at a time, so you just do what works).

Why would we think that the team and the mindset which just produced the worst Windows business interface ever made (yes, worse than ME or Vista) could suddenly turn around and start kicking goals on the enterprise integration front?

Making all this even less likely, the Windows that runs on phones and tablets does NOT run Windows software. It only runs toy software from the Metro store, and even that has to be specially recompiled to run on a phone or a slab instead of an X86 computer.

But thumbs up for Tim 11 just the same, 'coz he wrote "Compared to recent MS screw-ups, this one looks eminently sensible for both organizations". Just so. Nokia was on the way out anyway - that particular war was lost when they got into bed with Microsoft instead of going Android - so no harm done, and at least the shareholders get to salvage some value. And as for Microsoft, they've just wasted some tens of billions. So what? It's only money and they have plenty of money. Compared to what they did with Vista and the Office UI and especially the Windows 8 debacle, this is barely a flesh wound.

/rant

---------------------------------

One imagines that the good denizens of Storage Forum will not be so kind. :(
 

time

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Maybe you didn't get any downvotes because it's a brilliant post?

Welcome back, fellow sufferer in the land of insanity/inanity.
 

LunarMist

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Nobody cares about this? Granted Nokia is nobody in the US, but they still are pretty big everywhere else in the feature phone market. They used to be big in business phones as well.

IMHO, last gasp of Nokia and MS' mobile business.
It doesn't mean anything to me, but presumably it might to the Norwegians.
 

LunarMist

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What do the Norwegians have to do with it? Nokia is a Finnish company?

Also Nokia was huge here in Australia, until the smart phones became cheaper...

Well, I knew it was not from Sweden - should have looked it up. :DOH:
 

time

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Some people just don't get sarcasm. Which means they don't get 90% of Stereodude's posts. ;)

Never mind, I'm still a fan. :thumbleft:
 
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