Not saying that this was not personally significant for sirkneeland, and it's a nicely written piece. For myself, for the past few years, Nokia has ceased to exist a little bit more every day. This is just one more of those days.
Somehow, I feel this is appropriate here:
The computer center is empty,
Silent except for the whine of the cooling fans.
I walk the rows of CPUs,
My skin prickling with magnetic flux.
I open a door, cold and hard,
And watch the lights dancing on the panels.
A machine without soul, men call it,
But its soul is the sweat of my comrades,
Within it lie the years of our lives,
Disappointment, friendship, sadness, joy,
The algorithmic exultations,
The long nights filled with thankless toil,
I hear the echoes of sighs and laughter,
And in the darkened offices
The terminals shine like stars.
It is really surprising, and awesome to see that they built their products to last, not for a year like most companies today.
Playing Snake until the death.
While some create ringtones.
It was an unbreakable phone.
I'll remember 'til my last breath.> From the cross-linked article, on "what could not be done"
Amazing...
I wonder how its going to play out from here. Given the MS culture, are things going to get slow and bureaucratic?
Whatever happens Nokia is always going to hold a special place in my heart especially the 3310 [1], my first phone. :)
[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Nokia_331...
Nokia the company still exists. It owns the Nokia brand and has massive mobile patent portfolio (only licensed to Microsoft). Nokia is made of NSN (Nokia Solutions and Networks), maps and The Nokia Research Center.
Nokia is prohibited from using the brand to sell mobile phones for few years (ending 2018). It's completely possible that they come up with new gadgets or even phones with Nokia name.
[1] - http://www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/about-us/the-nokia-s...
Connecting people, is somewhat like the Microsoft vision of giving everyone a personal computer. And while there are people in certain parts of the 3rd world that doesn't have mobile phones, I would say Nokia did an amazing job to get a mobile phone into everyone's hands.
My dad worked for Ericsson, so I've never owned a Nokia phone, you were the "evil rivals" after all, but I bow my head to Nokia for what they did, for how many people they connected with mobile phones.
Nokia might not have been the company that profited from SmartPhones, but they were the company that created the market for SmartPhones.
Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
And, as was often the case, Steve Jobs was right.
We will do more great things at Nokia.
I live in an area of poor mobile coverage [known as "the UK" ;)] and Nokia phones were amazing at operating reliably in marginal signal conditions.
The last Nokia I had was an N95 which was a pretty good phone. The 6310i was probably the best of them all (up till quite recently there were people in the UK, usually travelling salespeople, who were hoarding these and buying them up on eBay for when theirs broke).
Although the phones I've had since are smarter and shinier, none of them have a radio of quality remotely close to the Nokias. They won't operate in places I know the Nokias worked fine. And they often seem to lose mobile signal completely, requiring a restart (or switch to flight mode and back).
Many things get better over time, and I love the features of my Android phones, but I do miss that quality RF design. RF is hard ... just look how long it took Apple to get it right! [1]
[1] Although that did mean that the first iPhones had amazing engineering debug screens for the mobile network side as a side effect of the problems they had.
* Stephen Elop the former Microsoft employee (head of the Business Division) and later Nokia CEO with his infamous "Burning Platform" memo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#CEO_of_Nokia
* Some former Nokia employees called it "Elop = hostile takeover of a company for a minimum price through CEO infiltration": http://gizmodo.com/how-nokia-employees-are-reacting-to-the-m...
Who'd have thought Microsoft would some day produce an integrated mobile product that you could prefer over an Apple product without being made out a fool?
http://www.nokiantyres.com/ http://www.nokiantires.com/
http://nokianjalkineet.fi/en/ http://www.nokianfootwear.com/
Nokia Cable is now http://www.nkcommunications.com
Jolla http://jolla.com/ was founded soon afterwards by people who left Nokia. The name Jolla means dinghy, skiff or lifeboat in Finnish.
This is my worry. Nokia moves so quick on everything, and delivers great products. While Microsoft is always slow, and the the products are always missing features.
Hopefully all those Nokia employees will have an effect on Microsoft's culture.
Microsoft makes products I like. Nokia make products I love.
> During Elop's tenure, Nokia annual revenues fell 40% from 41.7 Billion Euros per year to 25.3 Billion Euros per year. Nokia profits fell 92% from 2.4 Billion Euros per year to 188 Million Euros per year. Nokia handset sales fell 40% from 456 million units per year to 274 million units per year. Nokia share price which was at 7.12 Euros on the day Elop was hired, had fallen to 81% to a bottom level of 1.44 Euros two years later, after which it began trading at 4.14 Euros, up 36% on the day. Elop's success in negotiating the sale of Nokia's struggling mobile device business to Microsoft has been described by many securities analysts as a significant victory for NOK shareholders, particularly when viewed in context of failed efforts by Blackberry or HP to secure value for handset business owned by those companies.
I had to reread it 5 times. I am still not convinced. Yes, that last sentence gives me the impression it has the words "significant victory" and "success", but my brain is simply unwilling to accept that as a valid conclusion.
Maybe I should start working in business ...
Hostile takeovers may be brutal, but at least they are relatively "clean" compared to what Microsoft did. The takeover is not the remarkable part of this story, that was just the endgame.
I'm still surprised this was actually legal. I'm also surprised that the Finnish authorities just let this happen without at least a legal investigation or parliament hearings.
But I doubt they ever wanted to give up the brand, based on the details I read these days about the deal with Microsoft (only sold the mobile division, licensed the Nokia brand for several years, banned from producing mobiles only until 2018, etc).
The people will mostly stay the same, even though ownership has changed. I'd still work there if I wasn't tied geographically to where I am now.
Sometimes I think
we could have gone on.
All of us. Trying. Forever.
But they didn't fill
the desert with pyramids.
They just built some. Some.
They're not still out there,
building them now. Everyone,
everywhere, gets up, and goes home.
Yet we must not
diabolize time. Right?
We must not curse the passage of time.
I mean MS has a track record of screwing up mergers, on par with Yahoo's.
If you absolutely must use a Japanese term, go with Zaibatsu.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaibatsu
compare http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=MSFT and http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=NOK
I can smell the Pointy-Haired Boss from here.
- Arthur C. Clarke in "The Nine Billion Names of God"
If your employees would rather have your competitors product then you need to get to work rather than to forbid them to use it you need to make it so they would prefer to use their own.
Nokia was mostly in the SYP camp. SYP owned directly 20% of Nokia and even more trough it's insurance companies and other investors.
Maybe they would have had more sales with an Android phone, but I'm not sure it would have made a bit enough difference to prevent this buyout. Elop set Nokia up to be bought out by being a major windows phone maker. It may have been a better long-term bet than Android.
Americans often act and think as if the rest of the world don't exist, but the Japanese are far, far worse. Navel-gazing = size x ethnocentricity. What Japan lacks in size compared to the US, it more than makes up for in ethnocentricity.
I remember seeing an XKCD comic which featured a fact about "there only being [x amount] of [x type] lighthouses in the nation". "In the nation". So typical.
Having said that, I agree with your final point. If you view the whole thing as a setup to extract maximum value via an acquisition, it might make sense. They may have been worth more as a MS acquisition target selling Windows phones than they would have been had they gone down the Android path.
It's entirely possible that neither path would have led to sustainability as a standalone entity.
I'm envious of people who can work a job. My wife, for example, has been at the same place for almost 10 years. My father has worked the same place for over 30. They have their complaints, but they get up every morning and they go.
The longest I ever lasted anywhere was 2 and a half years. It was my second job out of college. I've had 5 jobs over the course of 7 years. One of those jobs only lasted 3 months. One was only 10 months. Both were a race to see if I would quit or get fired first. I won on the 3-month job, I lost on the 10-month one. They never gave an official reason, but I think they would say it was because I wouldn't show up on time. Really, it's because I had no respect for management.
I've been freelancing for the last 2.5 years. Excuse me, let me correct that, I was unemployed for 6 months after the 10-month deal. I thought I hated programming. After getting fired, I didn't want to do it again.
A friend got me an interview at the place he worked, a small manufacturing firm. We started as a 3 month contract-to-hire, they wanted to hire me after the first month, and I stuck to wanting to contract. It scared the crap out of me. We were doing good work and being hired as an employee just felt like trying to ruin it. We worked out a consulting arrangement that, honestly, by most accounts is consulting in name only. I work so much for them that I don't have time to pick up other projects. After 6 months, told them I was going to primarily work from home. After another 6 months, I moved to a completely different city and just kept working. They didn't even know I wasn't in the area anymore for 3 months until we did a video chat session and they saw my new apartment.
I don't know what any of it means. If my client doesn't add any new tasks and I finish out the list I have, I'll have worked for them longer than I've worked for anyone. Them not adding any new tasks is highly unlikely. At the same time, I would see working for them for another 1 to be encroaching on "failure" and another 2 years to definitely be "bad". Not in the sense that I wouldn't be making good money (I'm making more now than any two previous years combined), but in that I have this emotional snag that sees staying in one place to be stagnating.
I don't think I hate programming anymore, especially now that I've gotten back into running my own side projects. But I certainly hate common corporate organizational structure. I just can't stand going into an office when I'm told, wearing what I'm told, thinking what I'm told (which seems to be the point of most employee handbooks). Every Joe Shmo with an MBA thinks he can start a consulting firm and hire a bunch of cheap programmers and turn it into a printing press for money. And they bring with them this cargo cult of Fortune 500 practices that ultimately feel dehumanizing. It turns my stomach even thinking about going to work as an employee.
But none of my family gets that about me. They just think I'm being difficult. Maybe I am, but I make more than all of them, so what is their problem? Just because I'm not clean shaven or put on pants most days means I can't support a family? That's probably an aspect of why I want to stick to not being an employee, out of spite for all of the people who have told me, "just get a job already, just get out of bed on time and go to work already."
It's very stressful. I'm constantly thinking about work and wanting to do something else. I don't get to just turn work off at the end of the day and play a video game. And that's not because I'm freelancing--as I said, my current client isn't going anywhere. That's my itchy feet, my knowledge of my past, and this haunting specter of some compulsion to find a new job.
Just like it's hard to make the new Facebook, it was hard to beat Nokia. Remember, back then, everyone was using Nokia 3310. It didn't just take a better product to become the thing everyone wanted to have, because everyone didn't want a mobile phone. They wanted a Nokia mobile phone.
Can you believe that the mighty was once reached the highest market value of any European company: 203 Billion Euros ($281 Billion as of today's exchange rate)?
I'm sure many have learned more than one lesson already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorma_Ollila
I believe he genuinely thought it was a good deal for Nokia and MS didn't really do anything but give better terms than Google was willing to give.
Do what makes you happy. There's only one go around.
edit: now I have to hop on the poem bandwagon! here's my ode to Nokia:
Star pupil of texts in cyberspace, taking his time, with each
Pound of the keys pushing farther towards hidden powers.
Seven days a week, fascinations with secret menus
Seven times more interesting than COCOTs and DATUs.
Eight friends, huddled around the brightly lit screen,
Zero in on the hidden treasures of information obscured.
Pounded into their brains, codes impregnate future hackers.
One, two, three, four, five digits bring them into an obscure and secret world.In my alternate fantasy timeline, I'm currently using an amazingly efficient Meego device which gives me as powerful an environment like Android, in a neat and simple user-interface [1]
For any practical purpose, Nokia was dead around 2005-2006 at the latest and dwindling at least couple of years before that.
Sure they sold lots of phones of good quality even after those years, but they weren't riding the first wave anymore during those years. They were riding on a dead horse, unwilling to notice it's not the 90's anymore.
> Nokia was crushing rivals everywhere.
Would they have done better with Android,hard to say,I think they would.Nokia is a famous ,in Europe for instance, Nokia means robust and quality phones.But we'll never know.
Nokia has never needed a software edge to crush its rivals. They just needed to keep making phones that wouldn't break if you dropped them.
When you already have a massive competitive advantage (Nokia's reputation for making reliable hardware), you don't dive into a niche.
I've never worked at a place that just gave me free health insurance. Early on, it wasn't a lot of money, maybe $30/mo or so, but near the end, it had gotten bad, more like $250/mo. Everyone I know with employer-provided health insurance (with the exception of my wife, who works for the government) has gotten their premiums jacked up on them. So from my perspective it's kind of a fallacy that obtaining your own health insurance as a freelancer is "more expensive" than what you receive as an employee, because what you receive as an employee just ain't that great anymore. In my wife's case, they don't charge her an arm and a leg for health insurance, but they do pay her severally under the market rate for her experience and credentials.
And I definitely go on a lot more vacations now than I ever did before. Most of my "vacation" time before I would spend on being sick, as I never had separate sick leave. Now, because I don't have to go anywhere, if I get a cold, I just work through it.
I'll even accompany my wife on her business trips, work from her hotel room while she is working, and then we can have dinner together in whatever port city she's stuck in that night. I'll go visit my parents on occasion, or friends in other states. I just setup shop during the day in a coffee shop, library, hotel or something and then spend the evenings with them. I still visit with some of my friends about as often as when we lived in the same city together, and depending on the city, I can take the train and work while I'm riding.
Plus, I make a decent amount of interest on the money I put into savings for paying my taxes (being self-employed, I don't have tax withholding, I pay quarterly estimates instead). It's enough I can afford an accountant (well, not that the accountant is that expensive) to file my taxes at the end of the year. For me, it's a significant stress reliever.
And I eat and sleep much better when I'm home and not having to drive back and forth to offices.
In short, not only am I making more, my free cash is still more, and my quality of life is significantly better in every aspect. I don't even really have that high of a consulting rate, as I'm really bad/lazy about marketing myself.
But that's not what makes this a friendly takeover, because shareholders also have to approve hostile takeovers. This acquisition is a friendly takeover because the Board is in favor.
Then the market changed to "[Android] phones that are like the iPhone" and Nokia refused to compete in that market, going for the "[Windows] phones that are not like the iPhone"-market instead. And totally dominated it with a 90%+ market share.
But that market was tiny. And Nokia was size-wise geared to compete with Samsung and Apple. Cue massive collapse of business when expenses overtook sales.
http://followingjolla.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-small-print-t...
I wonder if that could work out like the weird 'sold Skype but not the key technology' clause of the Skype-eBay deal...
As a former employee at the end of it's heyday it continues to be the best company I have worked for. They paid fairly and treated us fairly when it was time to part ways.
It sucks that the management could never grasp what the Iphone was. There were no shortage people trying to tell them.
The specs could be weak, as long as it would be easy, durable and fast for regular users.
Nokia 3310 was phone for regular users. Phone that could drop, had few games, allowed you to download some ringtones. Strong battery, good screen, water/shock proof. Put 8GB memory plus one SD slot, some ok-ish processor and 2GB ram (so it wont age after 1 year) + make put really good battery. No ridiculous screen resolutions, fingerprint readers etc - just durable smartphone for regular user.
With specs like that they might break even - but for sure they would steal european and growing APAC regions easy. Once they would get back they would release business versions that would help them to correct their profitability. Its not difficult for such a strong brand like Nokia. I was amazed how Scandinavian way of thinking (simplicity) vanished from the company.
If Nokia could deliver mentioned phone - I would use it for sure.
Perhaps W8 will do some wonders; I guess its nostalgia :-(
I don't think I've been downvoted on this one, just sunk below the upvoted ones ;)