''Engineers were locked out of their source code management systems and wikis before the announcements were made this morning.''
That must have been panic inducing, heart sinkingly shitty
Nokia took an axe to much of its non-Windows software capacity today, leaving all but a core team working on S40, company insiders say. Among the 10,000 casualties officially announced are teams working on Meltemi, Qt and QML. The team imported via the Smarterphone acquisition will work on S40, we understand. Engineers were …
Maybe, but it's pretty standard procedure: I've worked in a couple of large companies where they've done this because - as they have to announce to the stock market before it opens, reporters had turned up and were asking questions outside the office of people going in, usually giving mis-information.
In other news, there's also a article on slashdot about some ridiculously high percentage of IT guys freely admitting to the fact that they would take as much data as the could with them, were they sacked.
The most valuable data that us engineers have that makes us desirable employees is taken with us everywhere we go - its our brains.
OTOH, I've known salesdrones to walk off with client lists and contract details (and digitally tracked their activities, so we can sue the pants of them after they've left and gone to $competitor).
Good time to pick up some QT developers on the cheap.
In other news, there's also a article on slashdot about some ridiculously high percentage of IT guys freely admitting to the fact that they would take as much data as the could with them, were they sacked.
Well, in this case the last laugh would be mine, as I take home a backup of my employers source code repostitory every day.
I was thinking the same
I feel bad for the sys admin who had to lock all his co-workers out of the servers :/
Nokia is finished, *TWO* years ago they could have brought at least ONE android handset to the market in a short time frame, they had a chance.
Best scenario now is a consortium of google and android handset manufacturers to buy the patents to assure patent protection for android.
I was sysadmin at a co that was laying off 10% of its workforce every year or so. Ended up writing a perl script called 'sackomatic' to do the donkeywork; csv list went in with usernames, users went out the door (assuming the electronic door entry system still let them of course!) Horrible job, especially when you are given the list and told to sit on it until the end of the week.
The 6310i was discontinued in 2005, you know? It still works perfectly as a phone, and is far better made than today's offerings (of pure phones). Probably because it was made in Germany, not China.
The N900 may not have been a proper commercial offering but its the closest thing to an open source phone you'll get. Its a shame Meego/Harmattan was binned.
I can't offer any opinion on Symbian.
I loved using Symbian. The OS is stable and responsive. My last Nokia was an N8 and it has four different bugs with SMSs one for sending and three for receiving. I have had the lot. Nokia will not acknowlege the issues which happen globally or show any desire to fix it. When I contacted Nokia care about it I was basically told to go away.
So I have. I now use an iPhone. It is still being customised to work the way I want but I can at least receive SMSs and use CalDAV. Neither the N8 or the new windows phones can use CalDAV. I was hoping to use a new windows phone.
It is sad times for a Nokia fan, sad to see them go. I suspect the end is near.
Pretty much everyone I know, including myself, loved Nokias then eventually came to the same conclusion that they wouldn't buy another one, ever.
For me it was the N97, promising to be as good as the iPhone but from Nokia and turned out to be a pile of cow dung which I ditched after 6 months of a 12 month contract.
It's certain now that Nokia will be sold, probably to Microsoft, and will end up just as a brand name, how the mighty have fallen.
I had an N900, and loved it. Sadly my phone provider wasn't providing, and in the process of giving them the flick i had to either pay ~$200 to keep the phone, or post it back to them. Now while i like my new android phone (G-Note), i can't practice Python on it, or fire up Kismet, or anything like that. It's not the same!
I, too, won't buy another Nokia phone. Even if they survive long enough for my current contract to expire.
To be fair their phones were buggy, poorly supported, the OS was tired and clunky, usability was appalling and their previous management was rubbish for failing to develop anything competitive to replace Symbian.
Classic example of a company who did well when the market was small and there was little competitive.
It's a shame really as they could have spent more time and effort develiping the communicator range into the smartphones we all know and love today.
Same goes for Microsoft and Windows Mobile. They did about 4 or more releases of that with hardly any changes.
Their phones were not appalling and buggy a decade ago, when the market was small(ish) - I don't believe there was less competition then at all.
They made some fantastic, well thought out, functionally excellent and solidly built phones back then... it is indeed a shame to see how things turned out but they've been producing rubbish for years and the Microsoft-only plan was clearly suicidal.
Pity that QT got mixed up in it all, but hopefully it'll continue to exist and develop without a corporate millstone^w backer.
"They made some fantastic, well thought out, functionally excellent and solidly built phones back then..."
Indeed. I had a Nokia 6110 from 1998 until it died circa 2005. It had a really imtuitive text based menu where you could address items via their number within successive menu levels (e.g. you could bash in 4.2.3), and there was a section in the manual detailing the combinations.
Then on a course a couple of years ago there were two of us working together, both with more modern Nokias, and we couldn't find the calculator function on the wretched things (it had been buried inside the Organizer menu). The sad thing was that we had both bought Nokia the second time around because we had been so impressed with their earlier models.
I read a couple of years ago that Nokia had something daft like 80 models in their line up. That was enough to tell me not to hope to much for their future.
A sad day indeed, but somehow inevitable.
You can still do the menu number combination on my budget year-old Nokia C1, though if you use one of the softkeys for a "Go to" menu you hardly ever need it.
I would agree on the excessive number of phones in their product line-up, it's too confusing for users and the support suffers.
I'm sad to see Nokia self-destruct. I'm loyal to their brand having exclusively owned Nokias for the last 8 years but doubt I'll get another one. I'm happy with the C1 though, with Opera Mini and Google Maps it's pretty powerful for a cheap phone, despite the lack of processing power and a few software bugs (but what phone hasn't?).
Most symbian fans were inexplicably committed, in a way some Blackberry fans are. There was only one thing Nokia could do to drive those customers away. And they did it. And now Nokia sells fewer smart phones than that committed installed base of loyal fans would have bought even if they didn't update Symbian at all.
I think if you were to capture the essence of what people liked about Symbian it could have been replicated fairly accurately over Android. There was no reason to drive them away except for the fact that what they chose to replace it with bore absolutely no resemblance and Microsoft were not to permit them to customize it in any substantial way either.
Nokia has always been a textbook case of mismanagement with different divisions almost in perpetual war with each other. It needed an overhaul. But Nokia's current course is less overhaul and more corporate suicide, shedding jobs, knowledge and identity and sucking up to Microsoft as their sole benefactors.
I would not be surprised if the company is up on the auction block soon enough. All this job reduction is not a long term move, it's to make the books look more balanced for a quick sale.
"little of value left for any potential suitor"
They have a lot of value left: their patent portfolio. Elop just has to bring the price down a bit more, then they'll get snapped up by MS before you can say "embrace, extend, extinguish".
They didn't even need the "extend" phase this time...
Every business project sets out how it's going to pay for itself: usually by enabling the company to make X more money or make X savings. Savings is a nice way of saying less people, which means sackings. Like it or hate it, the biggest cost Nokia has/had was it's engineers and software budget. That's now going to be a whole lot smaller now they're buying in the OS.
In fairness, I'd have thought anyone who wasn't working on WP7 at Nokia would have known the writing was on the wall...
You're right. A friend of mine who was a developer for s60, left over a year back. Almost everyone in his team was worried and on the lookout. The sad thing is that not everyone can get another job, for a myriad of reasons. Then there are those who although qualified cling to their jobs because of a comfort level and a sense of inertia.
You obviously missed the news about Samsung now being the largest phone (not just smart-) manufacturer in the world then. Samsung are selling something like double the numbers of Smartphones that Nokia are (or, if you like to discount all the Symbian devices as smartphones, then 10 times the number of smartphones that Nokia are selling).
In other news Nokia have also cut all inovative development for the follow-up to S40, so you can expect their dumb/feature phone sales to also head down the toilet rapidly. Mind you that division is losing money by the bucket as well, so they might as well off that too.
It's instructive to think that 18 months ago Nokia were selling as many Symbian devices as all iPhones and all Androids added together. This year, in a growing market, they will likely sell 10-20% of the total number of Smartphones that they sold in 2010.
Looks like a winning strategy to me, Mr Elop!
"they will likely sell 10-20% of the total number of Smartphones that they sold in 2010."
Actually even less. In 2010 Nokia sold 134 million smartphone, a 34 million increase over 2009. WP as a whole will see around 10 million sold and that is across all manufacturers. So Nokia won't even see 10% of where they were, even if they were 100% of the WP sales.
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Nokia stopped being relevant when they missed the smartphone shift and yet they managed to dig even lower with Elop, so I won't really miss them.
But what about Qt now? This platform is terrific, it'd be a shame to sell it to another clueless company that will probably ruin it. Let's hope someone forks it soon, it shouldn't be a problem as long as the forkers keep it open source (dual (L)GPL license) and don't fiddle with commercial licenses.
Qt became this far without Nokia at first place. All Nokia did was hurting its well deserved prestige by trying to fit it into incapable devices, trying to convince developers "it is Nokia future" and slowing down its progress into things really matter (tablets).
Nokia have really hurt the project enough but as it already have established base& trust in both commercial and free software, nothing serious happened. It could be worse.
Well you're right of course, it was bad management but from my point of view it's far from being catastrophic. I mean, they might have seriously crippled it (the Oracle way) but fortunately they didn't.
And there's at least one thing we can thank Nokia for: they allowed it to be used under LGPL terms. For me and probably for numerous other freelance developers, it meant that I could reuse my FOSS-acquired Qt skills without needing to buy a commercial license which I couldn't have afforded anyway.
All in all, I guess it could have been a lot worse.
When Stephen Elop became CEO of Nokia, he was Microsofts 8th largest individual shareholder.
He was a dodgy bastard even before Blamer sent him to rape Nokia - the right man for the job, then.
We really need law and finance geeks here. Lets say company board got some promises (or plain bribe) to hand a public company, country running size company to the freaking shareholder of a rival, actually nemesis (read wince history) company.
How come that countries market authority, police and even intelligence doesn't look into it?
I wish they'd spin Trolltech back out to being an independent company again - it would make me a whole lot more comfortable about Qt.
It is not in The Puppetmasters Behind The Scenes best interest for there to be a cross-platform, well engineered UI toolkit that could target Android, *nix, MacOS, and Windows with one code base.
(and Qt could work on IOS as well, again but for the decisions of Apple management).
If Nokia didn't bug the project, a huge amount of Android software was using qt right now.
Can you believe port of qt to the most important mobile operating system (as ios not possible) is done by a single person who doesn't even work for Nokia? It was, for a period. Don't know the current situation.
As trolltech was a very successful and seriously managed company, we forget their size. Nobody in today's environment would leave them to Nokia's hands and they are easy to buy.
I just wish some really big and mature company like IBM buys it so commercial software guys feel safe.
So why didn't that http://embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder become a proper link then? It's not like I don't know the "a href..." syntax, and people have linked to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_6110 , http://nokiareviewz.com/2011/02/stephen-elop-8th-largest-individual-stock-holder-of-microsoft/ , and http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/14/nokias-radical-ceo-h.html in previous comments in this thread...?
Ah, I see, a hundred posts... Well, give it a while. Copy my URLs into your address bar manually in the mean time.
This is not his doing. They would be in an even worse state had they not jumped away from their own platforms. Try to imagine a world in which Nokia was relying on Symbian and MeeGo. It is a Nokia with no plan at all. At least with Windows there is something to clasp on to that will sell the world over.
Fact: Microsoft have lots of money. They are not a rock but a really watertight boat.
Fact: Microsoft NEED Windows Phone to succeed. They know that a lot of general computing is going to be on smartphones now and in the future.
Fact: If Nokia die, Microsoft know that success will be a lot more difficult. Samsung and HTC are focussed on Android.
Fact: Nokia do not have the resources to sufficiently market and subsidise a new platform in the marketplace when they are up against iPhone and Android.
Elop just wants Nokia as a provider of mobile phone hardware platform for Microsoft software. He is lowering Nokia value to take it over and make it part of Microsoft. As the 8th largest individual shareholder of Microsoft, he does not really want MS to spend loads of (his) money to buy Nokia.
Microsoft has no hardware for it's shitty Phone OS, they're existence on the market is shrinking. The system is lousy as a phone system, always was . This is about ergonomics or trying to look too much like desktop OS... hard to tell, the system just does not fit in. This is not about hate for MS, the MS smartphone system is quite long on the market and was succesfully oversold by Symbian, iOS, Blackberry OS, Android during that time.
MS has nowhere to go because the non-iOS market is shifting to (semi-)open source Android. They need hardware and they will probably have to make their own to survive on the market. The Android to Windows Phone ratio is smashing for MS. Look at HTC: the HTC has build it's brand on Windows based phones and now they have ~8 different Android phones and only 2 Windows based.
Next thing to happen is flood of Chinese (every day better quality) phones with Android - because the system is for their manufacturers a pass to the western world - this is no longer closed, in house developed, esoteric system. This will even more marginalize the MS system.
Indeed, Nokia missed the smartphone shift but they could lift up with the MeeGo plaftorm, which is visible in N9 sales (though the Elop killed the platform just before release of the handy.)
> Elop just wants Nokia as a provider of mobile phone hardware platform for Microsoft software.
The current Lumia range is single core and 800x480. These will all be obsolete because Apollo/WP8 will not run on them, it will require more hardware. The market has also moved on and even the latest Lumias look like last year's models.
So Nokia currently does not fulfill the requirements for being MS's hardware maker for Windows RT or WP8.
> the HTC has build it's brand on Windows based phones
Other makers of WP7 have had their sales slashed by Nokia taking their share of the WP7 market. Nokia get millions from MS, gets MS paying sales staff direct commissions and pay for Nokia advertising. Nokia can also make differences to WP. Why would anyone else bother to make WP7 phones unless they get the same deal ?
My next mobile phone won't be Nokia. But it is going to be something that can handle at least 3G 850/900/1700/1900/2100 and GSM 850/900/1800/1900. I might just buy a other Nokia N8 when my current phone dies of old age (going to happen in the end), or just move to a different brand. I am not yet sure about Android. But maybe it has developed a bit since I last version that I used (v1.5).
But I won't be buying any of Nokia Windows phones.
It looks like Microsoft have taken over via the back door thanks to shareholder negligence. What could
possibly go wrong?
From the Guardian:
"The marketing department will now report directly to Elop, and a management reshuffle has seen key staff replaced and US executive Chris Weber – who, like Elop, previously worked for Microsoft – promoted to run sales and marketing."
I've had my N8 for a year if it does die i'd probably buy another one unless the Pureview drops a lot in price.
But its still sad to see Nokia in this sorry state, Windows Phone wasnt a good move, its lacking in features and even if it does eventually catch up with those other phones its going to be a couple of years before it gets any real traction if at all.
The silence of the lambs being led to the slaughter is but a cacophony to the silence of the board, who are watching this debacle before their eyes.
The have(had) the power to stop this madness.
Later, in the annals of historical papers this debacle will be a mandatory case study' for an MBA
It all rests on Windows 8 then. I think the unified phone/slate/desktop/xbox/kinect/skype experience could be a great package, certainly appeals to me more than the Apple ecosystem. I'm very happy with my Lumia 800, top phone, just a few gripes to be sorted next patch (tethering and skype, get on with it ffs)
We shall see.
i could never fathom the fascination with apple products in spite of their reliance on an obsolete os like unix and a desktop stolen from windows 95. the popularity of windows in the market demonstrates microsoft's technical superiority. and windows 8 with its revolutionary metro interface tied to all the wonderful microsoft services will inevitably become the true technical leader in computing for the second decade of this millennium. the nokia board is right to be grateful to elop and other microsoftians for rescuing them from certain doom.
Well, yes... It looks to me as if everything is going to plan, except (perhaps) for the slower-than-expected uptake of Lumias in the market. But the rapid decline in Nokia's share price is undoubtedly intentional, and can only be good news for Microsoft. Since Microsoft's real plan for Nokia is to produce Windows Phone 8 devices, sluggish sales of the current devices isn't terribly important to their longer-term strategy.
I can't help but wonder if all this is just so that Gates can either own (more likely pwn) Nokia or destroy them totally.
He was rightly furious when Nokia refused his advances back in 97/98... Perhaps there is no happy ending for Nokia, it gets gutted, stripped of anything of worth, then discarded. Meanwhile, on the shores of Lake Washington, Gates can smugly stroke his white cat, and laugh like some sort of Dr Evil?
> What's the betting Google outbid MS
Elop has been adept enough in driving the Nokia share price down. I'm sure he'll be able to find reason to reject any offer from anyone but MS.
No point in spending all this effort to meekly hand the prize to their rivals.
My God this is like reading the comments from some teenage xbox versus ps3 pointless argument.
Why is it when it comes to technology everyone is suddenly an Apple / Google / Microsoft Internet warrior? Why do people cry foul for Symbian when it's been fucking shit for at least 4 years. I know I had phones running on it. Loved it at first - then started to get a little dissapointed with it when I was on my 4th new contract and phone and the shit looked the same.
It appears there are far to many internet armchair CEO wannabes that think they know better than some of the Corporate masterminds that run these evil corps - yes, Google, Apple and Microsoft. In fact out of those 3 i'd say in the last 2-3 years Microsoft is actually the one that appears less evil than the other two. Microsoft actually donates more money to charity and good causes than Google and Apple combined.
If you want to change the world and believe your comments on here are gospel get out of your IT job and become someone that can make a difference? Just remember that there's people out there that may have a different opinion than you and may just like another tablet/phone/OS than the one you salivate over.
Why we act like this over fucking phone/tablet tech yet don't over cars, tv sets sets, boats, CPU and GPU tech I have absolutely no fucking idea.
Grow the fuck up.
Perhaps it's because people just like Symbian/Meego phones and don't want to see them go down the toilet. In Symbian's case maybe in spite of a kludgy S60 UI they liked relative openness and hardware it ran on and with the Belle update most of the UI problems have been addressed. In Meego's case it was real competition for Android that wasn't given a chance.
Unfortunately years of legendary Nokia indecision making meant that Symbian 3, Meego, QT, and the transition strategy came out very late, just in time for Elop to stick them in a sack and drawn them at birth. What could have been has been replaced by a hollowed-out shell of a company which is now little more than a name just used for churning out Redmond's latest failed attempt at a mobile phone OS.
… all that go to waste. What will we be left with? The pretty closed garden where you are told what to do, the slightly retarded closed garden where nobody knows what to do, and the open but ugly garden that goes obsolete every six months. Yay.
It pains me to see a brand of this caliber tearing itself to pieces like that. It pains me to see so many people being laid off after they contributed so much. It pains me to see a company that is able to turn out such outstanding products as the N9 or 808 will be reduced to making decives with an OS for dummies.
I dare not judge whether this new course is a good decision or not. It will certainly help to clear up the mess but will there be anybody left to enjoy that? All I see at the moment is loss of jobs for Nokians and loss of choice for the rest of us.
You registered only recently (15 June) so you could type out that tirade? That's lovely.
The outrage is from Microsoft and its cronies systematically destroying Nokia from inside out. Many of us had grown up with Nokia products you know? Nokia's like an old friend, a good friend despite its imperfections.
How would you feel if your good friend had been screwed over by a notorious big bully, right before your very eyes?
Copy-Pasting your post, just in case you decide to delete it:
------------------
Posted Friday 15th June 2012 12:08 GMT by o_0
My God this is like reading the comments from some teenage xbox versus ps3 pointless argument.
Why is it when it comes to technology everyone is suddenly an Apple / Google / Microsoft Internet warrior? Why do people cry foul for Symbian when it's been fucking shit for at least 4 years. I know I had phones running on it. Loved it at first - then started to get a little dissapointed with it when I was on my 4th new contract and phone and the shit looked the same.
It appears there are far to many internet armchair CEO wannabes that think they know better than some of the Corporate masterminds that run these evil corps - yes, Google, Apple and Microsoft. In fact out of those 3 i'd say in the last 2-3 years Microsoft is actually the one that appears less evil than the other two. Microsoft actually donates more money to charity and good causes than Google and Apple combined.
If you want to change the world and believe your comments on here are gospel get out of your IT job and become someone that can make a difference? Just remember that there's people out there that may have a different opinion than you and may just like another tablet/phone/OS than the one you salivate over.
Why we act like this over fucking phone/tablet tech yet don't over cars, tv sets sets, boats, CPU and GPU tech I have absolutely no fucking idea.
Grow the fuck up.
--------
Usually, a massive layoff causes share price to go UP (lower costs, better quarterly figures, investor confidence... yada yada).
This is enough proof that Nokia is suffering from a systemic mismanagement, resulting in poor investor confidence and dumping of shares. It's just like a vote of no-confidence for a politician.
The longer Nokia refuses to eradicate the cancer of Elop/Microsoft, the worse it'll get.
Of course, if the plan was to reduce Nokia to a penny stock before Microsoft buys Nokia at a bargain bin price, then everything is according to plan.