Nokia axes 300 IT bods, outsources 820 to Tata, HCL Nokia will outsource 820 IT staff and make 300 more redundant, leaving a skeleton IT operation at the troubled phone maker. Up to 560 staff will transfer to Tata Consultancy Services and 260 to HCL Technologies, both of which are headquartered in India. Nokia says it has a relationship with the pair. Only small teams will …
For those living under a rock for the last 30 years, this is known as "The Microsoft Effect".
What follows is job losses, shit products, loss of market share and previously loyal customers suddenly hating you before inevitably you go bust and history records you forever as just another of Microsofts bitches. Mysteriously, however, the top brass who's palm was greased with silver over the original deal always seem to do very well out of it..
I don't know why you're on about MS over this.
It happens with any OS, including the mainframe IBM OSes that were around when Bill Gates was a lad in shorts and Unix.
But you're right about the bribes, er uh, "fishing trips, free meals, conventions in Bahamas, etc. that are an integral part of doing business". I didn't mention them in my earlier post.
And if the bribes aren't enough, chances are your executive quits and gets hired on at a huge salary by the new outsourcer.
There is a huge difference, a mammoth difference, between doing an MS (or IBM) and opening an office in India and hiring staff loyal to you there, and outsourcing to staff loyal to another company.
Switching to an outsourcer, means having staff dedicated to transferring as much wealth as possible from your company to their company.
It matters not if the outsources is in India, the USA or UK -- look at the NHS e-health contracting. Look at other government contracting to domestic body shops.
It is the change in IT staff allegiance that kills your business. They go from being loyal leaches trying to cost their company as little as possible to leaches loyal to an external blood sucking enterprise that is trying to drain your company of as much wealth as possible.
Nokia just returned from losses to profitability though (in no small part due to high sales of the Lumia Windows Phone limited only by supply) so clearly what they are doing is working...
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/01/18/a-smart-move-for-nokia.aspx
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jan/10/nokia-lumia-record-demand
"Good to hear this now as I'd been thinking of getting one of their phones."
Unfortunately that 808 PV is their only real smartphone around. All that WP-stuff is more like a featurephone with more apps than the regular featurephones. A superfeaturephone like the iPhone. Way to restricted to be really usefull but great to show off for 5 minutes at a party.
Besides I need 2-way call recording. My 2005 SE K750i had it, my 2008 WM 6.1 Samsung Omnia had it and since then all my Symbian devices had it (improved with automatic call recording even). I can't go back to pre-2005 era crapphones. Especially since these days calling while driving is prohibited in most o/t western world not to mention that automatic call-recording saves me over 20000 UKP a year (for not hiring a secretary to handle my calls).
I was hoping that RIM's new offering might provide call-recording but I doubt it. Which means i have no choice. The only phone available to handle call-recording out of the box is a symbian device.
And NO I'm NOT interested in tampering/rooting/jailbreakin nor custom firmware etc.. That's way too much hassle for a device that should JUST WORK!
A look at the recent Nokia financial results and the improvement in the past few months of their share price points to this hardly being the beginning of the end, but rather the start of a fantastic new chapter of rebirth and growth in the company. Their Windows Phone 8 range was sold out for weeks you couldn't buy one anywhere. People are starting to realise there is now a viable alternative to Android and Apple backed by two companies who know a thing or two about computers and mobile phones. What better partnership for your smartphone?
Google didn't exist until 1998, Nokia were producing smartphones a year after in 1999 (Nokia 9100). We all know about Microsoft, much of the early home computer revolution was powered with Microsoft BASIC, being the first thing you saw when you switched on a Commodore PET.
Google haven't developed much from scratch, a few "me too" web services and some search engine technology. Android was developed by Android Inc who Google purchased. The core of the OS is Linux based, again not developed by Google.
Windows Phone 8 is developed by Microsoft, with some contributions from Nokia. I'd call that a lot more of an achievement than using some free OS, a hacked up version of Java started by Apache and some iPhone insired UI designs.
> powered with Microsoft BASIC,
MS Basic may well have been used on several early computers but it wasn't written from scratch. It was based on an open source BASIC interpreter for DEC machines, such as the one that BillG programmed at Harvard. Development for Intel 8080 was done using compilers on DEC so the Altair BASIC was developed on DEC at a university (which BillG never paid for the time used) and transferred to Altair on paper tape.
MS-DOS was developed by SCP and initially licenced and then bought outright by MS.
MS-SQL server was bought from Sybase. FrontPage was developed by Vermeer Technologies Inc. The original MS C was bought from Lattice.
In fact most of Microsoft was 'me too' either copying what was already on the market or just buying in a product.
Me, I jumped from SC/MP assembler to 6809 assembler/Forth to C on 68K and the x86 C under Linux. I have used a MS 6502 ROM basic but it had a huge bug in its garbage collector.
Today all 6 current machines run Linux.
I suppose you don't believe any of this either, but I must admit I don't really care.
okay i said it. when the guy interviewing you is indian, and all his staff are indians, and he says you can do the job but he gives the job to another indian because you are white - that is racism. and ive seen it so many times.
I think they'ŗe trying it on with contracts in Europe as well. The clue is they never phone you back, even though you might be the only candidate that speaks the relevant local language and has the right skills and certs... I think they are routinely lying to the customer who needs the staff, too.
Presumable they just keep searching and searching and then lose the contract. Do their bosses in UK know, or the press?
Any elections coming up soon? Maybe some big fines to the agencies for violating EU and UK employment and discrimination regs or a couple of weeks porridge would wake them up.
Could be ever so easily tested by a couple of journalists or an EU researcher, just make up a name for a suitable CV ;)
There is a huge difference, a mammoth difference, between opening an office in India and hiring staff loyal to you there, and outsourcing where you're getting staff loyal to another company.
Opening an office in India, or other comparatively low wage area, like Ireland or Canada, that cuts payroll expenses.
Switching to an outsourcer, means having staff dedicated to transferring as much wealth as possible from your company to their company.
Can all the prophets, oracles and technology visionaries on here who have all posted to say that Nokia is heading for the wall please back up their claims with facts, figures & URLs where applicable?
It just seems to be a bunch of Android fandroids spouting doom and gloom because they are concerned about an OS that isn't tied to one specific hardware manufacturer that could eat at Androids marketshare in 2/3 years time.
> http://wmpoweruser.com/the-us-windows-phone-market-share-grew-50-between-q2-and-q3-2012/
According to that:
"""This would mean Windows Phone added around 1 million users from Q2-Q3 2012, while iOS added 4.3 million users, and [Android] 5.8 million users."""
It doesn't seem that WP is gaining ground.
> And apple market share to be overtaken by 2016 - http://www.dazeinfo.com/2013/01/16/sales-of-windows-phone-smartphones-in-q4-2012/
There are always going to be crap predictions by companies that sell these to the highest bidder. For example previous predictions were that WP would have 9% share in 2012 and would overtake Apple by 2015.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/isuppli-agrees-with-idc-gartner-windows-phone-to-surpass-ios-by-2015/
Her's an earlier prediction that had WP at 3.9% by 2014 (and Symbian at 30%). They just make stuff up.
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1434613
I am thinking you are an accountant, because you can't look at a change in systems and see what it means unless you have links and spreadsheets.
Imagine we outsourced the British Army to Pakistan. Less cost. Guys can shoot just as good. What would the change be to the effectiveness of Britain's national defense?
Do you need links and spread sheets to tell me that?
It has nothing to do with Windows for phones, Android or iOS. It has everything to do with outsourcing key parts of the business.
It is not that Windows means no need for programmers, it is hiring programmers whose loyalty is to boosting their billings to Nokia.
Or you could just actually read the whole article and follow the links -
Here's a URL - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/11/nokia_q4_2012_preliminary/
Go read the facts and figures.
If this article is still writable on the 24th I'll add a link to their woeful financials (That's prophecy!)
...and they're not very good. Polite, yes. Very good? no.
For companies that are a good four hours ahead of us, they never emailed or replied or did any work on the system, before I got in UK time, even if I tasked them with work the evening before.
Like a lot of Indian outsourcers, some gifted staff, mostly dross though.
In general, the problem with outsourcing IT is that other people's staff have different objectives than your own staff.
Rather than boosting your own company's profits, the outsourced IT staff now want to boost the bodyshop's profits.
That means hazy project objectives, specification creep, hard coding variables, hard to maintain code, reduced documentation, failure to streamline procedures, not passing on savings from when procedures are streamlined.
All the wasteful stuff your own IT department tried to fight are highly desirable billing opportunities for your newly outsourced IT department.
...soundly connected by WatAWorld.
The bottom line is that at a time when Nokia needs every employee to give 110% or more in order to survive they will now get what they contracted for and nothing more (unless it's additionally billed). The survival of Nokia is now only of secondary concern to a large group of people.
As promised -
Well, nearly good news in fact, $270M profit. The bad news, all made by cuts to production facilities, research facilities and 20,000 jobs.
In terms of real business - "...revenue dropped to €8 billion ($10.6 billion) from €10 billion as smartphone sales plunged 55 percent..." and when they made that €10 Billion revenue the previous year, they made a $1 Billion loss with twice as much sales, so this is clearly a 'good' report driven by cuts.
http://blogs.computerworld.com/windows-phone/21683/nokia-earnings-show-some-hope-windows-phone-lumias-lag-us-get-killed-china
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