Former CEO of Angry Birds-Maker Rovio Hired To Revive Nokia's Phone Business (techcrunch.com) 88
An anonymous reader writes: Nokia really started to go downhill after it agreed to sell itself to Microsoft at the end of 2013, going all in with Windows Mobile. When that faltered, "Microsoft folded Nokia into its mobile business, maintaining the Finnish company's brand on feature phones, while offering up smartphones under the newly integrated Microsoft Lumia line," reports TechCrunch. In May of this year, Microsoft sold its feature phone business to Foxconn for $350 million. At around the same time, Nokia essentially licensed its brand to Finnish company HMD global Oy to create phones under the Nokia name, "which would be manufactured and distributed by Foxconn." Now, TechCrunch is reporting that Nokia has hired Pikka Rantala, the once CEO of Angry Birds creator Rovio, who stepped down in 2015 after a rough year with the mobile gaming company. He will be joining the company as Chief Marketing Officer.
Doesn't sound too promising (Score:5, Interesting)
OTOH it could've been a lot worse. They could've hired Stephen Elop.
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Re:Doesn't sound too promising (Score:4, Interesting)
if you get in bed with Microsoft, you're going to get fucked!
Many people did that, but in exchange of a huge amount of money...
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LMFTFY
He's been chosen for his ability to milk a trademark. Milking a trademark is under-estimated nowadays.
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Mismoderation Alert: Should be +1, Funny, as no-one linking to something like that instead of an actual website could possibly be serious.
BRING BACK SYMBIAN!!! (Score:3, Funny)
BRING BACK SYMBIAN!!!
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Symbian may actually be the worst code base humanity had ever seen.
Symbian = What happens when you try to implement all the features of an operating system without actually writing a kernel or develop development tools... or even have a debugger.
Then there was the infamous clean-up stack which was Symbian's famous "revolutionary" method of implementing crash handling without actually implementing exceptions.
I have to agree that Series 60 UI wasn't too awful, and Nokia did implement some of the
Common it's /. here: Think Linux! (Score:3)
Oh, common, you forgot to jump on the (full GNU-) Linux bandwagon:
BRING BACK MEEGO/MEAMO/SAILFISH OS.
Nokia has already spent tons of money to finance the R&D behing the platform, back when it was called Meego/Maemo.
They spent money on severance package when they let said R&D team go, that helped them to bootstrap Jolla and rebrand the platform as Sailfish OS.
Nokia has already financed a good successor for their Symbian platform.
Jolla is good at making a nice OS (their Sailfish OS interface rocks, an
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Nokia was going downhill well before that (Score:4, Insightful)
I've friends that worked for Nokia and from what I've heard they were in a death spiral well before Microsoft bought them out. Nasty internal politics, software development drama, no real plan for the smartphone revolution, etc.
I loved Nokia phones back in the day, but I'm not sure what they would bring to the table now. They can compete with all of the "Me-too!" Android vendors in East Asia, try to push out a new OS (good luck), or keep beating the Windows Mobile dead horse. Personally, I would *like* to see another mobile OS have some success, but that's a mind-blowingly difficult and expensive pursuit right now.
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no real plan for the smartphone revolution
Even if they had doubled down on simplicity, they'd have a marketshare and a chance.
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They had one (Score:5, Informative)
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You've got it backwards, it was called Maemo initially, then renamed to Meego. Jolla [jolla.com], a Finnish company started by ex Nokia engineers, developed Meego further into their own Sailfish OS, which uses a gesture based UI and can run Android apps.
Now they've partnered with Indian electronics company Intex to launch the Intex Aqua Fish [trustedreviews.com], running Sailfish OS 2.0. I bought it recently for the local equivalent of about $75, and it's a pretty slick device.
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In the same way that the captain of the Titanic "did a great job"?
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While this is true, it almost wasn't the case. I happen to know that the R&D side of Nokia had a plan/prototype for a touch-screen operated phone at around the turn of the millenium. They however deemed it to be too expensive to be marketable as the touchscreen tech of the time was expensive and unreliable. Their only mistake was to scrap the project entirely, which left them permanently behind in the smart-phone race when it soon began.
Nokia was essentially lea
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no real plan for the smartphone revolution
Still more of a plan than what Microsoft (or Elop) had, probably.
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Instead they pissed off the devs, pissed off the users, demoralised their workforce and chose to bet
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I disagree. They should just have executed their previous plan which was excellent: Push Meego and keep Symbian alive. Transition Symbian developer to Qt and then to Meego with Qt. Meego was very good and obviously ready (they released the N9 in the same year after anouncing the switch to Windows phone). I still consider the N9 a much better phone than my current Android phone. And people tend to forget: Android wasn't nearly as big as today. At that time Nokias was still the biggest smartphone vendor and h
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The N9 came with a nice initial set of third party apps and Meego had a lot of developer interest. And the QT-strategy of moving developers from Symbian to Meego could have worked. At this time the competition (iPhone and Android) wasn't nearly as big.
nokia already going downhill before M$ (Score:2)
"Nokia really started to go downhill after it agreed to sell itself to Microsoft at the end of 2013, ..."
while there is no doubt that being owned by microsoft worsened the problems, nokia was well downhill when it sold itself. in fact it had few other options left at that point.
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Are we still trying to pretend Elop wasn't a trojan horse from Microsoft?
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/07/the-sun-tzu-of-nokisoftian-microkia-mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-whose-the-baddest-of-them-all-waterloo.html
He did this:
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/.a/6a00e0097e337c8833017743174241970d-pi
He did this by claiming the TOP SELLING, FASTEST GROWING phone OS was dying, and that it would be dead ended, and switched to Microsoft's OS. And that was the effect. The Microsoft phone OS h
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He caught a cold, so I had to shoot him.
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Nokia was the largest smartphone vendor with with faster growing sales than everybody else. Not saying they didn't have trouble: There was competition entering the market, and they were in an internal state of disarray, but they had lots of options: The best one would have been to just bring a few Meego phones to market just as planned and transition Symbian developers to Meego via QT. I owned a N9 and it was really good and Android still wasn't really big at that time (and even today is still not as good
Makes sense (Score:2)
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Usually, Satan is like this: "you know you want it. it won't hurt. you can have it. it'll be okay. why not enjoy yourself??"
I find it curious that a religion would define its characterization of evil as a guy trying to get you to enjoy yourself.
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To quote a movie: [imdb.com]
Angry Birds' exCEO? (Score:2)
There is an misunderstand they wanted Angry Ballmer exCEO. from they beloved MS.
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Then USE ANOTHER FUCKING DISTRO already. There's more than one, you know.
Geeeeeez.
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Nobody's exposed anything, other than the fact that you're a raving nutbag.
Nokia doesn't(didn't) just make phones (Score:2, Informative)
When did everyone decide that Nokia=Phone. It's a massive company with tens of thousands of employees, making LTE, optical networks, etc.. etc...
The company didn't sell itself to Microsoft, it sold it's handset business.
Re: Nokia doesn't(didn't) just make phones (Score:1)
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"Devices" can mean lots of things.
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How about routers, switches, 4G and now 5G wireless base stations, FTTH network and customer prem equipment, optical transport and switching equipment, DSL and POTS equipment, and software to manage all of the above. There is also revenue from professional services installing and maintaining all of the above. Nokia also earns quite a bit of royalties on patents they have accumulated over the years.
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Do you still sell forestry equipment? Because that was some badass stuff.
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The networks division branched off and joined with Siemens networks division to become Nokia-Siemens. The main Nokia at that point was phones and research, though it's a bit confusing since they had gone with a grid based org chart.
Oh yea, Nokian tires, but they branched off a long time ago.
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Angry Lumia (Score:1)
That's embarrassing (Score:2)
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Also, his middle name is Chu. Not many people know that.
Pikka Chu Rantala.
At least get his name right! (Score:2)
Angry Birds and Nokia (Score:5, Funny)
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Now they just need to develop a phone that splits into 5 lesser phones, a homing phone, and a phone that drops lesser bomb phones. Someone said wars will b
Bring 1100 back (Score:1)
Just bring 1100 back.
Only upgrades required
1) Compatibility with newer SIM cards and current networks.
2) Increase memory capacity.
And we will blow your minds with the sales figures.
And the n900 (Score:2)
Also bring back the N900, Just upgrade specs to current standards
Re: And the n900 (Score:1)
For the love of God yes!
I will buy a phone if it has
- physical keyboard
- root access to underlying os (not just a chroot)
- FULL linux, as in access to the init system and an open package manager
Bonus:
- the "phone" is actually just installed packages
- the radio driver has a published api for custom dialing apps
Best of luck (Score:3)
I wish him the best of luck. Nokia got the royal shaft during their "partnership" with Microsoft, and it would be really nice to see them succeed again.
Lenovo and Motorola (Score:2)
Right now the Motorola phones that Lenovo is selling were designed before Lenovo took over and are pretty damn good phones for the price:
Moto X Pure Editoin
Moto G Third Edition
Moto E
I'm sure that will change eventually but the current line-up provides pretty good bang for the buck.
Angry birds eh? (Score:2)
So they'll make the phones as frustrating to use as possible so you can then make them usable by buying level skips from their store?