Nokia Shareholders Fight Back 424
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."
almost tempted to buy some shares (Score:5, Interesting)
Just to join int, try to stop the company that made the best, most reliable phones for the longest time from being sold down the river by an MS plant.
They might be on to something (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:almost tempted to buy some shares (Score:4, Interesting)
The battle is on for the third tier phone OS. iOS and Android are the top two, everything else is an "also ran". This includes Palm's offering, Meego, Symbian, and WP7. You have four legitimate third tier phone OSes, two are offerings of Nokia.
As for the other two, Microsoft would have to pay me to make a phone WP7(radioactive), and Palm's WebOS will only come on HP products (yawn). This leave Nokia with two viable third tier products, one Open source and similar enough to Android, and too far behind it to really matter, and Symbian, the $14.99 walmart phone.
Nokia has lost the Smartphone market. UNLESS they do Android, and make a phone that is unlocked, easily rootable and with a "we support users not telcos" attitude.
Someone please tell me... (Score:5, Interesting)
... how posting a Facebook page is "fighting back?"
Re:almost tempted to buy some shares (Score:5, Interesting)
Eerie coincidence:
Amiga: at the time of its market debut, vastly superior in technology to its market competitors. Marketed like crap. Fell behind competitors as their technologies advanced past Commodore's anemic R&D.
Meego: at the time of its market debut, vastly superior in technology to its market competitors. Marketed like crap. Fell behind competitors as their technologies advanced past Nokia's (soon-to-be) anemic R&D.
Also, the names are disturbingly similar. As I said, eerie coincidence. Maybe.
Why, yes, I was an Amiga warrior in the platform flamewars of the mid-80s. Why do you ask?
Re:almost tempted to buy some shares (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing is that there are two problems for Nokia with that:
1) The low end is slowly being eroded by cheaper offerings from China and India. Their top end is being squeezed out by iOS and Android. In the long run there will be no space between those for Nokia to exist.
2) Margins. The cheaper less capable phones have very thin margins. Not enough to support any sizeable R&D effort. So that's another reason it's a dead end for Nokia.
Nokia needs to be in the high end phone market and doing well there to survive in the long run as a mobile device maker.
Re:almost tempted to buy some shares (Score:4, Interesting)
Not sure about the 5800, but the one feature I actually care about in my current phone (four-and-a-bit-year-old N90) is that it has a built-in SIP client that integrates with the normal calling stuff, so when I'm near WiFi I can make cheaper calls. And the address book and calendar sync via bluetooth (seriously Apple, a cable for sync? What is this, 1995?). Oh, and tethering as a standard feature (you know, like it has been on every cheap phone I've bought since about 2002).
None of these are really 'smartphone' features, they're just basic functionality that I've expected in every phone that I've bought (except SIP, which was only standard in my most recent purchase, in 2006), but which seem to be badly integrated optional extras on a lot of newer ones.