Microsoft To License Nokia Brand To Foxconn, Says Report (techtimes.com) 139
SmartAboutThings quotes a report from Windows Report: It's no secret that Microsoft's phone business isn't going according to plan. Last quarter alone saw a 46% drop in phone revenue, slightly better than the 49% drop the quarter before that. And now it seems that Microsoft is finally realizing this: according to rumors, the tech giant is considering licensing 50% of its mobile business to Foxconn -- in other words, the Nokia brand it had purchased for 10 years, until 2024. It appears that negotiations have reached very advanced stages, with Microsoft and Foxconn currently deliberating the final clauses of the deal. Some of the implications of such a deal could mean about 50 percent of the Microsoft Mobile members would be looking for new jobs. The rest of the team is said to join the Microsoft Surface team, and may be tasked with working on an upcoming Surface Phone which has been rumored for some time now.
Microsoft's reverse Midas-touch (Score:1)
happens again.
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Nokia is already dead, it's just a logo that gets passed around to make zombies.
Re:Microsoft's reverse Midas-touch (Score:4, Informative)
Depends which Nokia. Nokia, as in the one that makes phones, is history. The networking side of Nokia just slurped up Alcatel-Lucent [1], and seems to be doing solidly.
[1]: Alcatel-Lucent makes telco grade stuff. It is expensive... but there is a big difference between a telco-tier, NEBS compliant appliance than even enterprise-tier fabric.
Re: Microsoft's reverse Midas-touch (Score:2)
Even the network side is challenged. Many telcos are today abandoning analog lines and go VoIP.
And there are challengers out there to the classic telcos that runs Asterisk and similar cheaper solutions. Even Skype is a considerable factor.
Next evolution would be the mobile networks where challengers will appear. The telecom industry is changing fast now. In two decades the classic phones may be extinct.
Re: Microsoft's reverse Midas-touch (Score:5, Insightful)
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I thought I'd read that the real (non-Microsoft) Nokia was about to start having Foxconn manufacture Android phones under the Nokia name - which the terms of the original sale of the phone division to Microsoft allowed to start happening around now.
So are we going to get Nokia Android phones manufactured by Foxconn for the Finnish Nokia as well as 'Nokia' Android phones manufactured by Foxconn for Foxconn? Or has the real Nokia telecom company dropped its Android consumer plans once again?
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Just another pathetic Slashdot Libertarian type trying to explain away what are clearly intrinsic factors for their lack of success. Bigots develop these scripts to preserve their tender egos from the realization that they are worthless lumps of flesh. There was a time when there were enough of them that they could rig the system, but now that they are quickly fading minority, they just flail about, impotent and useless, pathetic little men who won't be missed when they pass on.
Re: Microsoft's reverse Midas-touch (Score:5, Insightful)
Well I'm another "Slashdot Libertarian Type", and I think most people would define being in the top 20% of income earners in the US as successful.
That said, I think pushing minority groups towards a particular career path is kind of dumb really, and forcing companies to hire more of them is even more dumb.
Suppose we have 100 people:
50 are white
20 are black
20 are latino
10 are asian
Now, suppose there is an economic demand of 25 IT workers. Of this population of 100 people, 15 of the white guys are into IT, 8 of the asians are, 2 of the blacks are, and 1 latino is. Now, suppose all of these people have exactly the job that they want, and all of them are very good at it because they really like doing it.
Well, to social justice types, this is a HUGE problem in need of correction. Why? Because whites are 50% of the population and represent 60% of the IT work force, while asias are 10% of the population and represent 32% of the IT work force, meanwhile blacks and latinos are 20% of the population with 8% of the workforce and 4%, respectively. This obviously must be because of discrimination. People should be working in a given industry to represent their population numbers, and they aren't. So the solution is to tell the whites and asians to either not get hired or get different jobs so that they represent less numbers, and we have to convince more blacks and latinos that they need to work in IT, even if they really don't care for technology, and thus do a worse job than those who do care about it. And if that doesn't work, we just need to make more minorities in IT and have programs that exclude some groups while being exclusive to others (for example, lots of programs out there for IT education are exclusive to girls; meaning, no boys allowed.)
However here's what reality looks like: I don't know about today's k-12, but when I was in high school and younger, peer pressure was AGAINST going into a technology career. Other kids would often poke fun at you if you were into computers at all, hell, I remember being bullied quite a few times for that fact alone. I'm part of what is called the millennial generation, by the way, so I'm not sure how much has changed since the 16 years I've been out of the k-12 system. But, the present grown ups that are in IT, which is supposedly racially biased, were mostly in that generation. It sure as shit didn't require somebody encouraging me to go into IT to make me go into IT; it's just inherent in who I am.
That said, you're going to have a very difficult time convincing me that the solution is to push more minorities and girls into IT and expect to have more of them employed in IT. It's well known that people tend to associate more with other people that look like themselves, which is part of our biology. That said, different races and indeed different genders are going to have their own co-cultures that will differ remarkably from people who don't look like themselves (For example, think about how many black country singers you've heard of, and how many white rap singers you've heard of. Notice anything?) Given that they'll have different cultural values, it's inevitable that they'll be interested in different things as well, which includes career choices. Which means that if you want to change their career choices because you've taken it upon yourself to tell them that the things they value are inherently wrong, you're going to have to forcibly change their cultural values.
And if you want to do that, then I'll have no choice but to ask: What are you doing calling other people a bigot?
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Yes, if that is the case then it should be addressed. But like your parent poster said, the aversities did not stop him. Why do you have reason to believe that the aversities minorities face are so much worse for them that the same concept cannot apply to them?
Also what are you going to do about other minority members? A common theme in rap songs is how the homies peer pressured them into being gansta rather than scholars. When your peers actually and actively try to herd you away from legal careers, how do
Re: Microsoft's reverse Midas-touch (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to suggest that if your ideas about how black people actually live are derived from rap lyrics, then this is probably not a subject you should feel confident discussing.
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Trying to talk reason to the Retard social justice types....
You have a better chance of convincing a rock it is actually a water mist and watch it float away.
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Your strawman rarely exists beyond the first year of college.
Big house of cards you built on it though - why bother? Are you feeling so left out that you feel the need to yell at a bunch of angry kids?
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Now, suppose there is an economic demand of 25 IT workers. Of this population of 100 people, 15 of the white guys are into IT, 8 of the asians are, 2 of the blacks are, and 1 latino is. Now, suppose all of these people have exactly the job that they want, and all of them are very good at it because they really like doing it.
Bolded for emphasis.
This is the problem with your logic. You are supposing an ideal condition of inherent worker satisfaction, that is not evident from the real world, or even likely. And in fact, the real world, has a lot more than 25 people, or 100 people, and it's full of a lot of different things.
Here's a hint: Discrimination can and does exist, even just in terms of what schools are around and what they offer.
That said, you're going to have a very difficult time convincing me that the solution is to push more minorities and girls into IT and expect to have more of them employed in IT.
Unless you have money, or a vote, it's unlikely anybody is going to care about convincing y
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This is the problem with your logic. You are supposing an ideal condition of inherent worker satisfaction, that is not evident from the real world, or even likely. And in fact, the real world, has a lot more than 25 people, or 100 people, and it's full of a lot of different things.
It's called a thought experiment.
It's funny that your example is based on the music industry, professional performers at that, a very small subset of individuals. But it's also an industry FULL of problems, and questions.
The whole point of bringing up that industry is that it's highly reflective of the cultural values of its listeners, and I didn't use it for any other purpose.
Anyways, you're nothing more than a douche, so get over yourself already.
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So? I'm not sure that was unrecognized, I'm really quite perplexed at what you are trying to assert. Are you saying that your thought experiment can't be examined or challenged?
No. You specifically complained that it's not reflective of the real world. A thought experiment isn't supposed to be a real world situation, otherwise it would just be a survey.
Honestly you're a bit on the retarded side dude, I don't think any rational thought will ever make any sense to you. Have a nice...existence.
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Again, I'm a bit perplexed since I can't imagine why you would think saying something to make a point about the real world is not supposed to reflect the real world.
Because the point isn't to create an alternate reality, like you seem to think I'm attempting. The point is to show the weakness in the argument in favor of suggesting that we need to create exclusionary educational programs that cater only to minorities and females, which I did pretty effectively I might add.
Look, you want to write a work of fiction, go ahead, but at least add the standard disclaimer.
So in other words, you're saying that you thought the numbers I posted earlier were real, and I had to explicitly tell you otherwise? ....Oh....
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Note where I also mention age. A lot of
Foxconn... (Score:2)
Don't they build iPhones?
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Yes that Foxconn, the one with the suicide nets around the factory.
And they don't just build phones, they have their own brand as well and sell monitors and mainboards under it.
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I thought that you shouldn't prevent suicide by restricting access to the suicide methods. The NRA says that if you make suicide hard, it won't affect suicide rates.
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Yes that Foxconn, the one with the suicide nets around the factory.
It is popular to bring this up. I would like to point out that the total number of suicide attempts (18) at Foxconn is relatively low. There are buildings in the US with a higher suicide count where no discussion about building suicide nets is taking place.
Are people jumping off them because they're easy to jump off if that's the way the wanna go or because they work long shifts in the building, eat shit food in the building and live in cramped dorms in the building all for a pittance?
Re:Foxconn... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Foxconn... (Score:5, Insightful)
Until we start talking about abuse towards their employees, then Apple is Foxconn's only client.
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Until we start talking about abuse towards their employees, then Apple is Foxconn's only client.
Oh, I'd love to see your email moderation notifications - there has to be a nasty war between "Insightful" and "Troll" mods going on right now. Looks like the insigthful is winning out so far.
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Nokia licenses Nokia to Foxconn (Score:1)
Ha ha. It's even worse than that. Nokia, the real company, not the phone business sold to Microsoft. Licensed the 'Nokia' brand to Foxconn to make Android tablets the day after Microsoft bought the phone business:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia
"On November 17, 2014, Nokia technologies head Ramzi Haidamus disclosed that the company planned to re-enter the consumer electronics business by licensing in-house hardware designs and technologies to third-party manufacturers. Haidamus stated that the Nokia bran
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Yeah it was an awesome deal for Nokia and a really shitty one for Microsoft. But microsoft doesn't really care, they have craploads of money, as long as some of their super expensive purchases work out for them they stay relevant in some way.
Re:Nokia licenses Nokia to Foxconn (Score:4, Insightful)
So all those games Microsoft played with Elop to get Nokia (the top selling smartphone at the time), and its ends up with nothing. Not even the name.
It's even worse, when you think about it.
MeeGo was very likely to be hugely successful. It could be the dominant platform now, or going head to head with Android. It would be a more divided market, with room for smaller platforms, possibly WP among them. But, with MeeGo stillborn and WP widely rejected, the market quickly consolidated around Android, with iOS alone retaining its luxury niche. To the point that there is no room left for a "third ecosystem" now.
Stephen Elop fucked up in the exact right ways to make Android unstoppable. Google really should write him a check.
Odds of success are never high (Score:5, Insightful)
MeeGo was very likely to be hugely successful. It could be the dominant platform now, or going head to head with Android
And what evidence do you base this hypothesis on? Is it possible that it could have been successful? Sure. It's conceivable it might have been a player. "Highly likely"? I don't see any reason to believe that. Nokia (the major backer along with Intel) was already on shaky ground by the point MeeGo became a viable product. It was always more likely to fail than to succeed just like most projects. That's not a critique of the technology or it's merits or the efforts of its backers but rather the fact that it's really frickin hard to develop a commercially successful OS that captures substantial market share. Even Microsoft with all it's billions of dollars has struggled to capture even a fraction of the market share they have on the desktop in mobile.
I agree that Elop really screwed Nokia in a big way but he really just hastened the demise that was already underway. Nokia didn't realize until too late who their real customer was. They thought it was the telecom companies and they developed phones with that in mind. Apple proved that the customer was really the person holding the phone. By the time Nokia figured that out, handset buyers were already heading for the exits and it was too late to stop them. Nokia's hardware was (mostly) great but their software was terrible. Symbian wasn't good enough and MeeGo was too late to the market. They gave Apple and Android a 3 year head start in the market before MeeGo was introduced (2007 vs 2010) which is an eternity. While MeeGo had a lot of positives, it simply was too late to be likely to capture substantial market share. Obviously we can never know for sure but it seems hard to envision a scenario where MeeGo really turned into a game changer in the face of Apple and Google.
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The N900 sold all available units on little more than word of mouth and the newer device with MeeGo was an incremental improvement - thus a fair assumption.
Putting a manager from a rival in as his first ever attempt at being a CEO did that. Before Elop turned up Nokia was selling more mobile telephones than any other company in the world. It's actu
No objective evidence of customer interest (Score:3)
The N900 sold all available units on little more than word of mouth and the newer device with MeeGo was an incremental improvement - thus a fair assumption.
First, the N900 [wikipedia.org] sold with Maemo, not MeeGo. MeeGo was made for the never sold to the public N950 and the well received but dead on arrival N9 [wikipedia.org]. Second, one product selling a handful of units to some core fans is hardly sufficient evidence to believe that MeeGo would have been "highly likely" to succeed. The N900 sold less than 100,000 units in it's first 5 months which on the market. That's a rounding error. The iPhone sold somewhere close to 16 million units during the same period. And you think suc
No objective evidence of reading comprehension (Score:2)
Hence the words, which you even quoted "the newer device with MeeGo was an incremental improvement".
Why bother replying if you have got things that messed up?
Goalpost shift detected. I wrote "more mobile telephones than any other company in the world" which is correct. Changing goalposts to a subset just so you have something to argue about would normally be considered utterly pathe
Weak arguments (Score:2)
Hence the words, which you even quoted "the newer device with MeeGo was an incremental improvement". Why bother replying if you have got things that messed up?
Oh I understood you just fine. However you were conflating two operating systems and implying that sales of the N900 somehow were evidence that there was widespread demand for MeeGo. I obviously disagree and the evidence seems to back me up. If you can show me a logical narrative backed by evidence of how a few thousand N900 sales somehow implied MeeGo would be a game changer I'd be impressed but so far I'm not buying that argument at all.
Goalpost shift detected.
Only if you fail to understand my point completely. Nokia's probl
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Then why are you wasting so much time with revisionism?
Weak playing the man not the argument (Score:2)
I was addressing a potential and not an actual thing as you are very well aware so please stop acting like an idiot. I this some sort of stupid high school debate tactic to try to get me angry? It's not the place for that, this is no debate, it is a situation where on person is aware of an issue and another is a fanboy needlessly filling the site with noise to attempt to justify the actions of Microsoft vs Noki
Another thing (Score:2)
There was never a public release of a MeeGo device. I wanted one - Nokia would not sell me one of the limited number of developer units. Pretty obvious from that why "nobody gave a shit about MeeGo in 2010 aside from some fanboys" - nobody else had even heard of that unreleased product!
Nokia N9 my friend (Score:2)
There was never a public release of a MeeGo device.
Not true. The Nokia N9 [wikipedia.org] was released to the public and was the only device from Nokia with MeeGo on it sold to the public. You can get them on eBay today. It was not released in the US and much of Europe but it was sold for a time.
Pretty obvious from that why "nobody gave a shit about MeeGo in 2010 aside from some fanboys" - nobody else had even heard of that unreleased product!
Oh there was a fair bit of press about the N9 and MeeGo but it was met with a huge yawn by most and puzzlement by anyone with a brain. Why would anyone buy a phone with an OS that would be dead and unsupported by the maker of the product? Why they even bothered to actually bri
Nokia N9 limited release to developers (Score:2)
Re:No objective evidence of customer interest (Score:4, Informative)
If people were really excited about MeeGo (which they weren't) then it makes little sense that Nokia would have seen continued market share erosion after its release and before Elop killed the platform in February 2011.
Because Elop the Saboteur had already declared that the N9 would be Nokia's only MeeGo device, and they were going with WP no matter what. The reviews at the time were all: "this phone is fantastic, the operating system is the best, too bad it's a dead man walking."
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I recall reading that Nokia had a huge contract for MeeGo devices with a major Chinese carrier. They were going to make it big there.
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I think he's assuming decent management. The assertion is not without plausibility. The reason that MeeGo never amounted to anything was clearly managerial. Whether it would ever have been good enough to challenge Android is not clear. (And remember, it would only need to be challenging the first version of Android.)
Being plausible doesn't make it true, of course.
Is there anything here for Foxconn? (Score:3)
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Nokia used to be the king of cell phones essentially everywhere but North America. So yes, the brand is still powerful, because of some great stuff they did before the disastrous WP move.
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That would be the disastrous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] move, now he is going to Australia and Telstra, meh, company sucks balls, so they deserve him. Although based upon past evidence it would seem likely that M$ is now demonstrating a clear interest in Telsta, likely they want to grab the NBN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] to keep Google out.
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Do you Americans think that just because we have crocs, snakes, stingrays, crocs, spiders, crocs and sharks that your worst vermin should be sent to Australia?
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Oh fuck no! First Sol Trujillo and now that prick. Do you Americans think that just because we have crocs, snakes, stingrays, crocs, spiders, crocs and sharks that your worst vermin should be sent to Australia?
You're supposed to be feeding them to the crocs (because you could do with some more, right), but somehow they keep getting jobs instead. Come on Australia, sort it out.
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Give the Europeans something. "We designed better cellphones, up until nine years ago" is just so precious.
It wasn't Windows that killed them - it just failed to revive their fortunes. Elop came in because the company had fallen apart under the previous CEO.
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The only time I hear about Nokia is when folks from Europe talk about how much better the Lumina was than it's competition.
The Lumia's are great phones, I have a 950. They're just hampered by shit software. I doubt ms will continue with it for too long and nokia are making a great move getting their hardware designs out with android on it. I used to have an n7 on their propriety OS which I can't remember what it was called but suffered one of the same major problems as there being a fraction of the apps available and even the best just on par with average to good android apps. Even the xbox smartglass app is better on droid tha
My N900 is getting long in the tooth. (Score:1)
It is going on 7 years old now, but I keep hanging on to it because I have yet to see anyone come up with a hand held computer that makes phone calls that has all of its features. Number one in my book would be the requirement that it the ability to run whatever software the devices owner to choose to run. Number two would be the ability of the devices owner to create whatever software that he choices to run on the device. Oh, and above all, a good hardware keyboard.
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I've looked at it and it appears to just be a big scam to me. Might buy when it is backed by Amazon or NewEgg though.
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Number one in my book would be the requirement that it the ability to run whatever software the devices owner to choose to run.
Android is actually pretty good in that regard. If you pick out a phone that already runs Cyanogenmod and has a good kernel, which I admit is more research than you should really have to do, it will do a good job of running software. You can install a full Linux in a chroot...
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Number one in my book would be the requirement that it the ability to run whatever software the devices owner to choose to run.
Android is actually pretty good in that regard. If you pick out a phone that already runs Cyanogenmod and has a good kernel, whichdmit is more research than you should really have to do, it will do a good job of running software. You can install a full Linux in a chroot...
Number one in my book would be the requirement that it the ability to run whatever software the devices owner to choose to run.
Android is actually pretty good in that regard. If you pick out a phone that already runs Cyanogenmod and has a good kernel, which I admit is more research than you should really have to do, it will do a good job of running software. You can install a full Linux in a chroot...
I tried to look for what supports AOSP 6.0 and it's a pain in the ass. Did find one result, Galaxy S3 I think with some hardware not supported yet ; maybe what's needed is to know a list of 50 phone models or so and make a dozen canned searches or so on each (and how to select the likely models?).
You find forum posts with no information and empty github pages. I believe we would have had it better in the era of web 1.0 - when there were even faq's in txt format still.
You can find all kind of crazy stuff abo
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I tried to look for what supports AOSP 6.0 and it's a pain in the ass. Did find one result, Galaxy S3 I think with some hardware not supported yet ; maybe what's needed is to know a list of 50 phone models or so and make a dozen canned searches or so on each (and how to select the likely models?).
I would go to XDA-Developers or perhaps even Reddit and ask the community. You're likely to get several responses, so you have some choice.
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The Dragonbox Pyra will.
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Oh, and above all, a good hardware keyboard.
Try Swype. Even Nokia had it since PR1.1 on the N9, and it made hardware keyboards redundant.
However, if you are still not convinced, you can buy a phone-case with slideout bluetooth keyboard.
It makes a modern Android or IOS phone almost as thick as the N900.
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I can feel your pain, mine died the USB-Port-Death years ago and I still havn't found anything that came close to that experience.
What I still miss most, that calls (and to some extent your chats, text messages) all went through the same telephone app and had just different icons there, not this i need telephone app, skype app, lync app, SIP app......
I went with Jolla and the phone didnt let me down so far, but the tablet disaster is still hard to swallow ( I got mine though).
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I've been using mine daily since they were first released, and it doesn't crash or hang.
It's slow to start apps, and due to lack of updates the browser is no longer compatible with some current sites, annoyingly including some that used to work fine.
I'm in the market for something more modern to replace it, but like the GP, still haven't found an appealing replacement.
Android makes me uncomfortable due to the Google-mothership thing, or any other proprietary service for that matter,
I know you don't have to,
Funny Flashback (Score:5, Funny)
When I think of the term "Surface Phone" I can't help having visions of someone leading over to put their ear against a table to talk...
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That's something "Get Smart" missed.
MS is missing the obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
I still can't believe that MS blew it so badly.
ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS THIS:
1. Make a phone that could be fully integrated/managed with Active Directory and Group Policy, as if it were a normal PC. Including AppLocker functionality.
2. Put a fully-functional Exchange client on it. FULLY functional. Hell, throw Skype for Business on there, too.
That's pretty much it. Corporations would buy one for every employee. Managing Android and iPhones is a colossal pain-in-the-ass, and MS could completely take over the "business smartphone" market if they made a phone that could be easily managed. But...no.
Could have been worse (Score:2)
They could have been bought by HP.
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3. Do it in a way, that made PC-Windows great... Open it completly to sideloading and puplish the specs, so that other IDEs would work as well.
WIth DA/Exchange Integration and not three incompatible Overhauls that left older users completly in the dust, it would have been an instant buy....
On the other Hand it seems they are trying to replicate the whole "experience" with W10, so Microsoft might not be that long around to create a PC-OS anymore after they tried to swallow HP or Lenovo ...
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No, some MS-junks at the support desk would probably advocate that, but the employees would not go for it. I've seen it happen, the (MS-only) IT department wants WP but the higher managers won't have it.
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THANK YOU. Been saying this for years. My organization, after getting tired of managing Blackberries just this month, started moving to iPhones.
Windows Phone has been around for five or six years -- you'd think MS would've tried to get into the business world with their phones by now, but nope. We would've loved buying a bunch of phones that just integrated with everything we're already using, but now we're having to get it working on iPhones.
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Because Microsoft, true to form, wanted to copy and co-opt Apple's and Google's business models. So they needed to have an app store that they could collect a percentage of all app sales from, and they needed an advertising-funded search engine - presented front and center in their OS. I guess they decided that WIN32 was not appropriate for this, so they threw their biggest asset to the street (i.e., the sheer number of existing Windows apps that could've been relatively easily ported to a mobile platform
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Nope. Those things are so blatant that if he was in charge of implementing them, he must have been doing what higher management wanted.
He's merely an accomplice before the fact.
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So...
Are you asserting that Nadella didn't want these developments?
And Nadella also has higher management, the BOD. I'll grant that oversight tends to get a bit diffuse, but the changes in MSWindows 10 have receives loud and numerous quite public complaints. If either Nadella or the Board of Directors had disagreed with the policies, changes would have happened. This hasn't been anything quiet or secretive.
Make ruggedized phones (Score:3)
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Casio already does.
So does Milwaukee (the company known for their tradesman-oriented power tools), IIRC.
Marketing is not so simple, or you yourself would've already known these two things.
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Re: Make ruggedized phones (Score:2)
Your meme is 15 years late.
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Report is complete FAIL (Score:1)
> the Nokia brand it had purchased for 10 years, until 2024
My understanding is that Microsoft has a licence to use 'Nokia' for dumbphones and feature phones for 10 years, but for smartphones it was only 2 years. 'Lumia' they have for ever (unless Panasonic dispute the use of this because it is too close to 'Lumix'.
Foxcon has already licensed 'Nokia' from real Nokia for the N1. Why would they care about Microsoft?
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That struck me as odd too. If you purchase something it's not time limited. If it's time limited it's more like a lease or - as you said - a license.
Good'ol Stephen Elop (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I think that Stephen Elop should be in prison for what he did. From every action he took it was clear that he was a plant from MS to devalue the Nokia brand as much as possible so that MS could purchase it for pennies on the dollar.
I do not think that MS was ever too serious about producing phones, but they were very serious about acquiring Nokia's patent portfolio.
To think about 1000's of jobs lost and lives ruined because of that ass hat. That, to me, is criminal.
Would Nokia have turned things around eventually? Personally, I think they would have. At the time, I was in a position to see many of the models Nokia had in the pipeline. I thought they looked fantastic. Then the came Elop and Windows phone. Then came the speedy end.
Now, I am not saying that I would condone such actions, but it has always surprised me guys like him don't get murdered by some former employees. I mean, looks at the amount of lives these guys screw up. Like Chris Galvan at Motorola in the early 2000's. This guy fired 10's of thousands of people and made one ridiculous decision after another. The year he kicked out 40k employees, he saw fit to give himself an 8 million dollar bonus. I was a lower level manager at the time as send him an email asking how much he would get when he fires the rest of the workers. I got an email back from his secretary saying his bonus was inline with the industry, to which I responded that other CEO's don't lose half their market value in 2 years.
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Agree, my wife had a nokia n9, I had an n900, both great phones, that would have sold much better if allowed to. Why they didn't hedge their bets with an android model is beyond me. The n9 met its end with the washing machine, but allowed its data to be backed up one more time after it dried out. The n900 still lives but is no longer in use. These models even had an active open source community and could run java se. I used to log in to servers using ssh from an xterm and could even run x apps remotely
Why Nokia didn't go Android (Score:3)
Why they didn't hedge their bets with an android model is beyond me.
That's really easy to explain. Profits. The profits on smartphones aren't in the hardware but in the software. Hardware-wise there is basically no real difference between an iPhone and a similarly equipped Android smartphone. All the real difference is in the software. If Apple were to put Android on their phones their profit margins would evaporate faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit". There would be nothing really different about it and thus no real reason to pay more. Nokia would have
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Samsung hasn't beaten Apple profits over time (Score:2)
Actually, Samsung beat Apple in profits a few years ago.
Samsung has beat Apple for short periods from time to time but over longer periods Apple has substantially out performed Samsung in profits from smartphones. With some slightly odd mathematics last year Apple had 92% [wsj.com] of all profits from smartphones. Samsung had about 15%. Together they actually have more than 100% of the profits because other smartphone makers actually lost money. Nobody else made any meaningful profits. You are correct that Samsung has taken the low margin high volume route and they h
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Except that they weren't adopting a platform they could control at all. Unless the plan from the start was eventual sale to Microsoft, Nokia would have, even if Windows Mobile had been a huge success, been just another manufacturer of Windows phones - no different than if they were just another manufacturer of Android phones - but with a 2 year lag to market. If Windows phones sold, then Samsung and the rest would've started making them too. They were never going to have Apple-level profit margins. Hell
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Well, then Elop failed because Microsoft did not acquire Nokia's patent portfolio (fully). They received about 8500 design patents related to phones, but the crown jewels (technology patents) are firmly still in Nokia's hands. Microsoft received a 10-year license as part of the deal, with right to renew (for more money).
For shareholders who bought Nokia for 60 € / share of course Elop was a disaster (although Nokia was already going downhill, and nobody can say for sure if they could have recovered wit
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Personally, I think that Stephen Elop should be in prison for what he did. From every action he took it was clear that he was a plant from MS to devalue the Nokia brand as much as possible so that MS could purchase it for pennies on the dollar. I do not think that MS was ever too serious about producing phones
Huh what? Elop took over in 2010, three years after the iPhone. Everyone that wasn't blind and deaf knew smartphones would be absolutely huge by then. Even if we assume he was a plant, his job would have been to aggressively convert people to Windows Phone at the expense of Nokia's other platforms and total market share, not burn the house down over a bunch of patents Microsoft hardly needs if they get wiped out of the mobile market altogether. And if the plan was just to sink Nokia, why would Microsoft tie
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Microsoft didn't 'tie Windows Phone to the mast of Nokia's ship'. They tried to get the main Android OEM's to build Windows phones - even by giving it away for free while charging patent royalties for Android. Nobody was able to sell them - including Nokia. Nokia was just the only OEM that was willing to tie their business to Microsoft's mast.
Early versions of Windows Phones had some severe limitations, as I recall, so nobody built Windows flagships. Even the early Nokia models were low end - capitalizi
Didn't know! (Score:2)
I mentioned this to my wife and she said, "Microsoft is in the phone business?"
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hm... (Score:2)
46% drop in phone revenue, slightly better than the 49% drop the quarter before that
So that's a 72% loss in two years. That's not a drop, it's much faster than freefall could accomplish.
The rest of the team is said to join the Microsoft Surface team, and may be tasked with working on an upcoming Surface Phone
from the we-created-a-total-disaster-one-time-lets-try-again department ?
Look, Mickeysoft: You just can't produce phones. You've been trying for 20 long years, and produced nothing but total failures. When the market says no to you so clearly, loudly and consistently, maybe it's time to give up and do something else?
License 'Nokia' to Nokia (Score:1)
What about Elop ?!? (Score:4, Funny)
A 46% drop? (Score:2)
I could see a 50% drop - they went from selling two phones per year to just one single phone. But 46%? They must have raised the price on the phone they sold.
Re: Missed opportunities (Score:2)
As someone who did develop an app for 6.1 I would say that it did suck big time because a lot of the functions in the api weren't implemented. So the app compiled but many things didn't work. Light is on but nobody home.
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FTFY