Nokia Shareholders Fight Back

MohammedSameer writes "A group of nine young Nokia shareholders are fighting back. They posted an open letter for Nokia shareholders and investors asking to be elected in order to bring sanity back. They are also planning to challenge the company's strategy and partnership with Microsoft."

Just trade in the Nokia for an Android

[Anonymous Coward]

Sell NOK

Buy GOOG

Good luck with that

[LucidBeast]

I think the big guys have enough chips to keep this plan going. No matter what the plans merits are.

wow 9 people!?

[Megor1]

Why is this even being posted, it's 9 people who let me guess own 0.0000000% of the company? Next up 9 apple share holders want Steve Jobs to stop wearing turtlenecks.

Re:almost tempted to buy some shares

[timeOday]

But if they're successful in thwarting the Microsoft takeover, then what? Arrive late at the Android party? Sell dumbphones for $14.99 at Target? Everybody criticises companies like Silicon Graphics for sticking with the old strategy too long, but also for jumping on the bandwagon (such as SGI taking a stab on NT).

Being outmoded is an extremely difficult position to be in.

Re:almost tempted to buy some shares

[Desler]

Windows mobile in the past was absolute garbage

Said by someone who most likely never used a WinMo OS. Unlike other phone OS during the formative years of WinMo it was always open for you to install any apps that you like, you could develop apps in C, C++, C#, etc of your choice and you could use frameworks like Qt, you could leverage existing code written against the Win32 API for use in WinMo apps (with some caveats of course) and was very customizable in comparison to almost any other OS for the times. If anything, the OSes running on other smartphones of the time were far more garbage than WinMo was.

Re:The nine are wrong.

[Zelgadiss]

amazing how much hate MS gets just for being Microsoft

It's a reputation they have earned over the decades.

You reap what you sow.

Re:almost tempted to buy some shares

[Znork]

Meego is easily capable of running a Dalvik vm, and Alien Dalvik demonstrates the capability quite throughly. As that would leverage and extend the Android ecosystem, I can't quite see how it would be behind in any way. Essentially it would be the andoid+unlocked+rootable that you're looking for.

One can see why Microsoft wants Nokia, but for Nokia, going with WP is utter folly; they're dumping their whole current workable and fairly easily fixable lineup for something that nobody wants.

One can wonder what their plan is if WP gets canned with Ballmer in a not so far away future.

Re:wow 9 people!?

[QuincyDurant]

Even one share is enough to make some noise about it at the shareholder's meeting. They may not own much, but they speak for quite a crowd, methinks.

Re:almost tempted to buy some shares

[Desler]

And to add further, on any WinMo phone I ever owned you could do all this without ever needing to "root" the device. So basically even in comparison to the new golden boy "Android" WinMo was in many ways still superior. I'm not sure why a platform that requires any sort of "rooting" and has less application language choices is considered great but one that offers far more freedom of use and development is called "garbage".

Re:almost tempted to buy some shares

[Nexus7]

Indeed. I was impressed with the lack of silly metaphors, such as "burning oil platforms."

Re:Arrogant Finns

[duranaki]

I don't agree at all. I worked for Nokia for 10 years and worked with many Finns. I think the groups point is not "Finland is so great" but rather Nokia's distributed R&D efforts are horribly inefficient. Having experienced it from the inside, I can see their point. And they do have a very large talented asset base in Finland, so it makes sense to keep that as a focal point. That said, they have absolutely no hope of getting "top talent" to go work in Finland.

Re:almost tempted to buy some shares

[commodore6502]

>>>The 'old' strategy was aimless development of so many different handsets it was nuts.

Apple circa 1995, when they were on the verge of bankruptcy. Commodore circa 1993 and they did go bankrupt. Too many models can confuse customers - better to focus on just a few.

Their CEO is right

[eyrieowl]

that they have a bad hand, and that they're playing a desperate game for the life of the company. Yes, they could do a bunch of other things...and none of them would be great for them. At this point, they do not have a winning hand. There is no winning move for them. The choice he made is a pragmatic one, to stay in the game. It doesn't mean it has to be their 50 year strategy, but it keeps them in the game for the next 3-5 years at least and that's crucial. They screwed up, and it's not the recent decision that was the big mistake. They missed the boat...arguing about why doesn't really change the basic fact that they missed the boat...and they are left in a precarious position. No, the MS way isn't going to get them to #1, or #2. But they can be #3. They can't run iOS...so they're cut off from apps on that platform. They can't be RIM...so they're cut off from that. They could do Android, and probably do it well...but he's right, that they would be subject to severe price pressure and that it would be brutally competitive, low margin. It would gut the company. Any of the other options, save MS, would consign them to the Nokia ghetto, with few apps, no significant community. Going with MS at this point is the only option which helps them to keep profit margins more than razor thin and also gets them access to a larger community, as well as a built in market, that they otherwise wouldn't have. IN THE MEANTIME...if they don't bust their butts on R&D and get out ahead of the next game changer, they will eventually fade away, but at least this buys them time to do that.

Sometimes, the best move is just staying in the game, and they've done that. Yeah, I know, there's lots of risk, and lots of people would want anything but to be wedded to Microsoft, but...sorry guys, too little too late.

Re:Just trade in the Nokia for an Android

[CptPicard]

This idea fails at the fact that Symbian is actually a far superior embedded OS than anything MS has to offer, and that, uh, they've been making phones that do other things than "just make calls" for the past decade or so.

It's just that they failed to read the customer in the shininess department, that's all.

Re:Just trade in the Nokia for an Android

[h4rm0ny]

If you read these people's manifesto, you'll see that one of their pledges is to make Meego the focus of Nokia's future phone O/S's. That's not bad. They also have the pledge to extend the lifespan of Symbian by five years. *shrug* But they also have one of their main pledges to focus their hiring strategy on young people! And it's hard to find any actual names of these nine shareholders and whether they actually have significant shares or whether they are nine people who bought a few yesterday so that they could make this statement. I can't even see why this is on Slashdot except for the opportunity to troll us commenters in the hopes of a nice post-count boosting MS-bashing fest.

Re:almost tempted to buy some shares

[downhole]

You're saying there's no reason they can't be on top again? I can think of plenty of reasons. To have a successful modern smartphone OS, you need an application ecosystem. Apple has one. Android has one. Microsoft has a decent shot at building one. Nokia has had phone OSes for many years and has shown no ability to build an app ecosystem on the level that Apple and Android have. I think it's virtually certain that by the time they get anything new out the door, the overall ecosystem will be crowded enough that they won't have a chance, no matter how good the software is. Thus their future is to either get squeezed to death between better smartphones on top from Apple, HTC, Motorola, Samsung, LG, etc and cheaper Chinese phones on bottom, or to adopt either Android or WinPhone 7. I can easily see WinPhone7 being a better deal right now.