Posts by gryff

EU charges Corning with antitrust violations over Gorilla Glass dominance

Interesting...

There is a competitor to Corning in Europe - Schott AG. I wonder if they have attempted to break into the market, hit Corning's barriers and had a quiet word?

The behaviours cited in the EU press release read like possible anti-competitive and or monopolistic behaviours.

For example:

- lock out the competition through exclusivity deals, which restricts competition and potentially limits the market.

- get any competitive offer passed on, so such offers can be undermined and or any new entrants hindered from market participation

==>Covered by TFEU Art. 102 (a + b + d)?

"Such abuse may, in particular, consist in:

(a) directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices or other unfair trading conditions;

(b) limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers;"

[...]

(d) making the conclusion of contracts subject to acceptance by the other parties of supplementary obligations which, by their nature or according to commercial usage, have no connection with the subject of such contracts."

- tie any deal to an agreement not to challenge Corning's patents

==> this is odd. Are Corning licensing patents? Are some perhaps non-essential, lacking originality and uniqueness, unnecessary, or threatened by prior art? So they wish to protect their patent portfolio and prevent others with industry expertise from challenging them or developing alternates? Covered by 102 (b + d)?

I look forward to the investigation and findings to see what is actually happening.

Scumbag puts 'stolen' Nokia source code, SSH and RSA keys, more up for sale

Theft is wrong, but was sometimes audacious..

15 or so years ago, someone stole the secret code signing keys to the Nokia smartphone o/s. Got away with €720,000 in €50 notes.

The key was stored in three separate pieces to prevent theft. The thief had Nokia make a charitable donation to prove their sincerity in negotiating. Then set up a dead drop for the cash handover.

I've always wondered who it was and why €720,000? Why not €750,000 or €700,000? What happened to them and how do you launder and spend €720,000 of marked bank notes with recorded, flagged serial numbers?

That was audacious crime.

This? Copy paste from a git repo?

One source:

https://www.csoonline.com/article/547520/symbian-signing-key-reportedly-stolen-from-nokia-could-have-enabled-powerful-malware.html

Boom Supersonic takes baby steps toward breaking the sound barrier

Re: rose tinted glasses

> "Now there is a more developed global travel market for buying new door knobs."

Reference to the Absolutely Fabulous Series 3 episode 1 - where they jetted to New York to get a door knob, one presumes?

Lego's Concorde is the only supersonic jet you can build for the price of a fancy dinner

Re: What is the max skin temperature?

No, they knew that the limit should be set between 120° and 130° and picked 127° for the ease of working before massive computerisation everywhere.

127+273 = 400° K.

Square 400 ==> 160 000

Square Root 400 ==> 20

All of which can be memorised and used easiily throughout the remaining design.

This was all discussed in a documentary some years back, the same question was asked and the original designers flagged the value as chosen for ease of work.

A tremendous amount of concorde design was drafted and calculated on paper, by hand.

Intel to deliver fix for Raptor Lake CPUs made 'unstable' by voltage snafu

Re: Too much complexity

Hmmm...all of this reminds me of a small probably (best) forgotten project at ICL in the 1990s called ...Goldrush Megaserver..?

The h/w side was massively parallel "first of a kind."

One reason it didn't go far was the need to re-write your code, coupled with an absence of deep, advanced tools to facilitate such a developements.

QUOTE:

"Because, when you get down to it, parallel computing is hard to achieve in hardware, much more difficult to program, understand and debug, slower than other methods, and requires far-greater interconnects, memory speeds, etc. to get close to matching the performance of just lobbing it at a dedicated processor, or even chopping it up logistically and lobbing it at ten processors via software."

Elon Musk to destroy the International Space Station – with NASA's approval, for a fee

Re: Can't help wondering

Not all of the lunar ascent modules are lost

Apollo 11 ascent module could still be in orbit :

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/part-apollo-11-may-still-be-orbiting-moon-180978352/

or

https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10088

Impact sites for most of the rest:

https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo_impact.html

or

https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apolloloc.html

Apollo 16 ascent module is missing an impact location because of loss of control after undocking.

Apollo 10 ascent stage is in heliocentric orbit - recently observed: https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/astronomers-might-have-found-apollo-10-snoopy-module/

Post Office threatened to sue Fujitsu over missing audit data

Re: Somewhat elementary?

I doubt that 2900 series mainframes would have been used - they dated from the 1970s and were long out of production and support.

Might have been a similarly named UNIX server from the Bracknell end of the ICL "empire, but they were all DRS +number..e.g. DRS3000, DRS6000 and also five years off the cutting edge.

But given the state of Horizon...anything could be true...

CEO Satya Nadella thinks Microsoft hung up on Windows Phone too soon

Dumping staff didn't help...

Setting software, feature and UI love/hate aside...

Micro$oft fired all the Nokia Mobile/Smartphone Sales & Marketing staff shortly after their acquisition of the phone business. These were the people who moved the needle on Windows Phone volumes from negligible to noticeable and from miniscule to measurable in several worthwhile markets.. This is known as "growth" for those who graduated business school..

If you dump your sales force and those who know how to envision, target and market products, it should be no surprise if your revenues and volumes tank.

Also, without the staff who understand the phone market, your development roadmap will lose connection to reality. Meaning no products worth buying get developed.

Therefore, dear managers, if you can't sell and you can't develop...where is your business?

Nokia to erase up to 14,000 employees from payroll

Re: Because, not despite

".but such a business supports maybe 20k employees max, long term"

Indeed. This *was* the rough size of Nokia Networks about 23 years ago. At that time they had just withdrawn from digital switching equipment for telephone exchanges (remember those?), because everything was going towards TCP/IP. So the business then was roughly equivalent to today's business even with all the "add ons".

Nokia total staff back then was about 60,000 and included IT (NBI hadn't been outsourced yet), Phones, ventures organisation, research, corporate/HQ functions, phone manufacturing and the vitally important PowerPoint factory..

Why they need 86,000 today to do what was a 20,000-30,000 employee business during the boom of 2G/3G rollouts...?

It is very personal for everyone affected by the cuts. I wish them every success finding new oocupations.

Re: add cost

Everybody's equipment has access for law enforcement. Why? Because law courts can issue an order or sub poena for access. I haven't read the latest specifications, but it used to be even specified.

"Back in the day" there would be a "legal interception gateway" installed on the network which could be used by legally authorised personnel to legally intercept traffic of the person or persons under investigation.

In short "tl;dr." Nothing to see here.

Dyson moans about state of UK science and tech, forgets to suck up his own mess

Re: Really?

My experience and that of my friends, family and colleagues is different from that which the media publishes in their news agenda.

Of course there are notable exceptions, like Berlin Brandenburg Airport and the military only possessing two days ammunition + two working helicopters..feel free to complete the list..

Re: Really?

Germany going downhill ---Really? (Looks out of window)

Doesn't seem to be going downhill where I am. And I haven't seen any equivalent German youtube channel like "Turd Towns", which covers how bad it is getting in Britain.

Germany is doing OK. UK plc scares me.

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

Dyson bought two properties in Singapore, sold the penthosue at a loss. That's a skill in a rising property market.

Source:

https://www.straitstimes.com/business/property/dysons-sell-3-storey-penthouse-at-wallich-residence-in-singapore-for-62-million

I've got a Numatic hoover - it has a bag and almost sucks the slippers off my feet whilst hoovering.

Palliative care for Windows 10 Mobile like a Crimean field hospital, but with even less effort

Kong Ming

Once upon a time, in a corner of China, there was a mythical group of phone testers called KONG MING.

Software teams would send their software to Kong Ming and Kong Ming would find timing errors and functional errors and feature errors and stability errors and generally test the sh*t out of your mobile phone software. You could even send them software and ask them to reproduce issues. By return you'd get a comprehensive bug report and the choice of improving your product quality.

(Not all teams improved their software..)

Then Nokia sold the whole lot to Microsoft, who fired them. The End.

How many times can Microsoft kill Mobile?

Whilst I'm on my high horse..

...I remember a video from MS to Nokia about how great WinPho 7 was, starring Joe Belfiore if I recall..

My reaction was: "They know nothing about phones. Based on internal lessons learned there are serious use case failures throughout that video."

(e.g. camera key always active = battery drain + lots of black photos from inside pockets, bags...)

Here we are seven years and €$6billion+ later and Microsoft still knows nothing about mobiles and phone UIs.

How we laughed...time for a beer.

Cue Python sketch

dead, polly gone, snuffed it...

More seriously, the Nokia UI team added some improvements to WinPho 8, then got fired after the takeover and WinMob10 sucks. (NIH syndrome)

In the past 5 years I've tried Symbian Belle -> WinPho 8 -> Blackberry -> Apple -> WinMob10 -> Android

AND I HATE ALL OF THEM

Where is the UI innovation? Where is the decent phone at a decent price that does what I need?

Apple pricing and UI suck. Android just sucks ... at any price.

Microsoft's foray into phones was a bumbling, half-hearted fiasco, and Nadella always knew it

Slow news day?

I thought we'd hashed this out to death already?

Initial paragraphs suggest Microsoft bought Nokia. They didn't, they bought the mobile phone unit only. Maps and Networks weren't part of the transaction. Nokia still exists (minus Here maps plus Alca-Lu).

Flogging a dying business for €$5 billion-ish suggests the Finns know a thing or two about playing an American for a sucker. LOL.

Satnad's first step was to fire the ex-Nokia Sales and Marketing people who built the marketshare from negligible to noticeable, miniscule to measurable. That was "game over." Product and platform decisions weren't ever going to compensate for that mistake.

Bad news! Astroboffins find the stuff of life in space for the first time

To find life throughout the universe...

...Just follow the trail of fish+chip papers, kebab wrappers...

Dyson to build electric car that doesn't suck

What about Dyson Bagpipes?

Never mind the car, when will he finish the Dyson Bagpipes?

Or the Dyson P*nis Pump? --> Useful for pumping up political interviewees

'All-screen display'? But surely every display is all-screen... or is a screen not a display?

Re: XKCD

Saw a demo of a on phone projector in ...2011. The test device was a fully functional phone with a projector inside. Not much larger than mobile phone now (i.e. h/w/d all equiv to a five inch screen phone today)

You could drive it via the display or shine it at the wall. Next phase was putting a camera next to the beamer to watch for gesture controls. Not done in proto because..how do you stop someone else waving their hands in the image and texting your boss/mother in law/etc..!?

Still waiting for it to reach the market..

I say, BING DONG! Microsoft's search engine literally cocks up on front page for hours

Delighted!

to brighten up my tedious work desktop I download bing wallpapers

(yes I am the only user)

and I have the dick version!

I am gonna have such fun with HR...

"you're seeing things...you're obviously projecting / fixated...that's quite a problem...I don't see anything (etc)"

Nokia's comeback is on: The flagship 8 emerges

I wish I could be bothered to care

Dogs bark, the caravan moves on.

Developing world hits 98.7 per cent mobile phone adoption

Re: I've never carried more than one cell phone

When I worked in mobile phone quality, I always carried two phones, with different hardware and O/S.

You could never be too careful. :oD

Microsoft: Get in, IT nerds, you're now using Insider builds and twice-annual Windows rollouts

Re: Has my browser broken?

>Is it a nod to the sad farewell of windows mobile? OK, just for its remaining user:

> There is a lo

> making it har

> can't see the

> width of the

> poor layout

anks!

uch app

iated

Funnily enough, charging ££££s for trashy bling-phones wasn't a great idea

"wasn't a great idea?"

Sooo.....this idea worked great from 1998 to pretty recently...and wasn't a good idea?

Hmmm...or is this an example of people knowing nothing about the business they are in, screwing things up? For example, BHS ?

MH370 researchers refine their prediction of the place nobody looked

Re: What can be learned of the crash at this late stage?

"perhaps caused by a cargo fire, which seems the most likely scenario to me."

"Um. How would a cargo fire make the plane go off course, mere minutes after the last and entirely unremarkable contact, then fly on for several hours with more course changes (and non-erratic legs between them) during the time it was still tracked by radar?

Fires are funny things. Imagine one burning through cabling in the fuselage. As individual cables melt through in different locations the pilots progressively lose the ability to control the plane because the cabling from cockpit to avionics is gone...

The procedure during suspected electrical fire used to be and may still be switch between power buses to try and isolate the bus which has the fire. Doing so may produce sparks in damaged cabling, making the situation worse. This was a topic discussed when Swissair 111 went down in 1998.

So...fire, then loss of some avionics. Decision: "Let's turn back to Malaysia, we know local airfields there, they speak our language." More fire. Decision: "Let's go up high and try to starve fire of oxygen and heat." *

Now remove the links to the avionics including to the engine computers, inside the engines. They obey the last instruction given - maintain the power setting. The aircraft flies blindly on until fuel exhaustion. Meanwhile the fire also burns to exhaustion and stops.

Rremember United Airlines flight 93 during 9/11 ? I hypothesise pilot mischief would have resulted in a bashed in cockpit door during the hours preceeding the final ocean impact. The cabin crew and passengers had many more hours to do this than the poor beggers on Germanwings 9525 over the Alps..

* Fire needs all three of fuel, oxygen/oxidising agent and heat.

Fancy fixing your own mobile devices? Just take the display off carefu...CRUNCH !£$%!

Re: Green lobby failure

-->"Gluing is also used to reduce thickness, and to make things more reliable.."

Yes, true. My R&D teams often wanted glue when I needed "repairability".

You can keep "repairability" by not gluing the entire area (use cut outs in your gluing foil: make it look like a window frame not a sheet of glass) and also by using different gluing strengths on each side of the foil, so that it is possible to remove a component without further breakage // the need to clean off too much residue.

--> " Repairability is only a factor after it has been multiplied by the fraction of people who would actually repair it, multiplied by the chance of it actually going wrong, multiplied by this failure not occuring within the warranty period. "

If the cost of repair is lower than new and the component to be repaired is expensive.. you fail Design for Serviceability, increase warranty costs and repair time.... for example, if the only way to repair a €1 audio part is to destroy the glued €5 display at the same time :o(

Pre-ramp up you have no idea what will fail en-masse, and once you introduce new suppliers as part of your cost erosion plan ...and they in turn fiddle with their production to lower their costs....all bets are off.

Design for Serviceablity and Reliability because reality often bites you in the a*se post ramp-up.

Please do not scare the pigeons – they'll crash the network

Flashback Friday

"“in the days of 10BASE2 cheapernet cabling that was hung around the office like a string of Christmas lights. For those not old enough to remember, the major disadvantage of this type of cabling is that a single break anywhere would bring down the entire network."

Suddenly I'm back in my first job working at REA21A, for ICL with cables strung around the wall, hearing the admonition from my colleagues "Don't ever touch anything." The cable lengths were all to hell, too short to one desk, waaay too long elsewhere.

A peculiarity of that office, I've never seen it anywhere else.

US spook-sat buzzed the International Space Station

Re: Space shuttle was photographed by Keyhole spy satellite

The history of the Shuttle with the description of KH sat squared photography was probably "Into The Black"

Similar imagery was taken of Skylab, which allowed NASA to appropriately tool and equip the Skylab 2 rescus mission. I don't recall where I read that..

There was ground based IR photography of Columbia's last re-entry which was released in a very blocky, pixelated form showing that the shuttle was damaged and no longer symmetrical. The original imagery was no doubt better, but not de-classfiable.

Ubuntu UNITY is GNOME-MORE: 'One Linux' dream of phone, slab, desktop UI axed

Qt?

How is this different from the dream of Qt?

One UI on all devices?

Gift cards or the iPhone gets it: Hackers threaten Apple with millions of remote wipes

Unless Apple don't have that many accounts

If the number of *active* Apple accounts < Turk family claim

...then Apple say "Fuq-U"

Let's assume anything older than 5 years is gone (upgrade, migrated away)

Rough production is 200 million iphones a year ==> 1 billion devices

Slice some off for the three year replacement cycle and add some on for ipads etc. but ignore desktops.

Probably no more than 800 million accounts, perhaps as few as 600 million.

Apple can now take a massive backup (thanks for the warning!) and rate limit any wipe requests to slow up a bulk delete in order to combat it.

Thank goodness I still use my filofax and a hardwired landline.

Pains us to run an Apple article without the words 'fined', 'guilty' or 'on fire' in it, but here we are

Re: Apple's history of bravery

Don't waterproof the jack, waterproof the chamber the jack sits in....separate that from the rest of the electronics.

(Doesn't anyone do teardowns of competitor products anymore??)

How about a 2.5 mm jack?

<Sarcasm>

There was a company ...some time ago...from Finland, flogged loads of phones with 2.5 mm jacks instead of 3.5 mm jacks. That would allow you to make thinner phones.

</Sarcasm>

UK tops European charts ... for carder fraud

Knowlege of the payments industry would help.

You can skip non CVV / 3D Secure sites as much as you like, that won't stop someone commiting fraudulent transactions with your card details. The third party fraud is independant of your card usage.

Yes, CVV/CVC, cip+pin and 3D Secure are all about liability shift. Previously the banks were liable for fraud, now the assumption is if fraud happened, it's your fault. If you read the fine print very carefully you can figure this out. If you are a merchant, you'll want to watch for liability shift towards you, and away from you, to see who is currently liable. If you're liable, then a shift away from CVV, chip+pin, 3D Secure probably just occured at your payments processor, or worse your traffic has been directed to a different processor.

Suggesting in the headline that Brexit will change any of this, just shows a lack of knowledge of the payments industry. The EU has fsck -all to do with how Mastercard, VISA etc. set-up and run their card schemes, and how transactions are processed. The two largest contributions to the payments industry out of Brussels? The IBAN, and a competition case against Mastercard regarding fees and pricing.

Best thing you can do to avoid fraud? When travelling overseas, pay only your hotel bill + hire car with a card, use cash for everything else. Best cash machine to use? At the airport when you arrive, especially if its inside luggage claim areas - less chance of it being fitted with a skimmer. Those two precautions reduce your risks appreciably.

Microsoft buries the bad Windows Phone news: Mobile sales collapse

Terribly poor stewards

Microsft have been terribly poor stewards of the business, and I feel for the few remaining ex-colleagues who have seen it through to the end of the road and lost their jobs.

In roughly two years MS took a world class business (14 years number 1) and completely destroyed it.

Yes, yes, market share was low for WinPho, but pre-acquisition Nokia had dragged it to a *measurable* market share. Properly lead and managed, that could have been built up.

MS first decision post purchase was to get rid of the sales and marketing people - after that it was game over.

With hindsight this whole transaction looks like Nokia saying, "give us $5 billlion and we'll leave the market for a two year holiday."

(New Nokia Androids available in about six months...)

Microsoft's 3D Jedi phone explored

Looks like a Nokia innovation, the way they used to be done....

This is *exactly* the sort of innovation that used to happen all the time at Nokia.

Some of it would see the market, some would go through several iterations before getting to market. We were always trying and testing out ideas.

The point wasn't to capture massive market share, but to capture "mindshare" - spark interest, see where it goes, use the halo to flog other things, see if the market caught up or if it was a niche curiousity.

Today, we are still waiting for a new, true innovation to hit the market. There's been nothing new for years. The iDroid duopoly just serves up warmed over ideas from the past two decades and not very well warmed either. Neither duopolist is striking out into unexplored territory, which McLaren clearly is. No one is pushing new paradigms into the market.

I think the concept was already being experimented with in 2012, so this would have been the first productised version.

Satnad probably asked how many would be sold. Answer: "Doesn't matter - its a flaming torch in the dark wilderness, lighting the way for future stuff."

Linux command line mistake 'nukes web boss'S biz'

Ansible ? So that's how...

..a network admin at my last company deleted all Linux instances in the entire company one Friday afternoon.

The prime and backup site were adminstered from the same environment, so the kill <INSTANCE> command propagated across all instances in the load balanced and linked setup they had.

They were an online service company, so the entire company went offline INSTANTLY (prime *and* backup) and it tooks days of backup restoration, rebuild and recover to get back online.

So much for virtualisation and redundancy.

Fresh underpants moment...

Moral of the story: Thou shalt not allow mirrored, redundant sites to be administered from the same environment by the same person at the same time.

(I'm not amazed it happened, I'm amazed they survived the near death experience..)

Thanks for the missing puzzle piece...I work in hardware now :0)

Names witheld to protect the innocent.

Former Nokia boss Stephen Elop scores gig as chief innovator for Australia's top telco

Re: Makes sense

Indeed. I wasn't aware we still transported people to Australia, but am happy to see a one-off revival of the tradition.

Microsoft patent filing confirms existence of 3D Jedi gesture phone

same same?

There were already prototype apps which used the selfie camera to drive user interaction four to five years ago, before MS bought the Nokia Mobile Phones business. This is perhaps the next iteration.

Bah humbug. It's Andrew's Phones of the Year

After trying them all, I still don't know which to choose

Thanks to some jobs changes my 2015 was

Symbian-> Blackberry->Android->WinPho 8.1->Apple Iphone

Blackberry - nice, but deserved to die, the UI needs work. Simple things that were solved years ago on other UIs were a PITA on BB10. Solid hardware, nice keyboard.

Samsung Android - UI "excellent in parts" and *really sucky* elsewhere. Too much Google/manufacturer/operator fluff everywhere. Too many stories about security holes that don't get patched.

WinPhone : Usable, I don't miss any apps. But where is the future? Win10 doesn't have HERE maps? Or does it have the integrated MS version? Why are so many "base features" only available via apps? Better radio and call performance than the previous two.

Iphone : overpriced, overvalued. What is that mess of settings..? So there are a gazillion apps. So what? Its too hard to do basic things. Why are obvious use cases crippled - sharing via bluetooth, setting up my own ringtone without a 15 minute detour through itunes? Why not standard USB? Underwhelming compared to the hype.

At the end of that odyssey, I don't know who to trust for an Android; hate Apple for its walled kindergarten approach and pricing; won't miss Blackberry and wish there was any credible alternative.

Nokia, ARM, Enea craft new TCP/IP stack for the cloud

Based on Nokia IPSO? From the Firewall business?

The references to "fastpath" and Freebsd remind me of the implementations of firewall flows and fastpath as done in the former Nokia IPSO software used on the Firewall router business (1998-2007 ish, then sold to Check Point)

If yes then the offloading of the kernel and port to ARM is well rooted in that heritage. The code base was tried and tested in high load and critical infrastructure situations for many years and achieved at one point 40% market share in Check Point customer base, I guess Nokia retained the IPR when the business was disposed of. Nokia Networks also used that code at one point for mobile network backbone infrastructure.

Perhaps we`ll also see the return of Network Alchemy's patented high resilience VPN cluster technology that Nokia launched and pulled from the market before it could really get established.

ahh...old dreams...old wars...

Nokia Networks is going to make zer Vaterland's trains run on time

a photo of a mamod steam engine-COOL!!!!

Had one when I was a kid, fond memories...

Microsoft SLASHES 7,800 bods, BURNS $7.6bn off books in Nokia adjustment

Re: And the geography?

" is it the USA or Finland"

The US is long gone. As is all Europe outside Finland.

China, Finland and the remaining production site(s) and whatever scraps of local Sales/Marketing remained are pretty much all that is/was left to cut.

Will the last Nokian standing please remember to let the cat out and turn off the lights?

Ditching political Elop makes for a more Nadella Microsoft

On the one hand, this article does provide some much needed balance.

On the other hand it trots out the same tired "truths" -

Such as 'the Nokia was screwed before Elop arrived' argument. No, it wasn't. Volumes were still growing. Profits were declining and everyone was focused on turning that around by getting the hell away from Symbian and later S40. We knew software engineering was an issue, that's why we got a software guy (Macromedia, ...Microsoft) to sort that out. Except he decided the problems were products and costs.

There were actually well formed plans and visions on the table when he arrived. For example, that is where the initial 800 firings in the Symbian organisation came from. (The Multimedia unit had overbuilt its R&D organisation. What they needed 4 R&D sites to achieve, Mobile Phones did with one and typically quicker + cheaper. Shutting Bochum, Vancouver, Jyväsylä and Tokyo was the start of a long needed rationalisation that probably would have ended with Southwood and some tweaks in Oulu in an alternate universe.)

Then there are these two gems: "Elop's strength is in executing the ideas of others, not in driving through his own" "Give Elop a well-defined and properly scoped mission and he is a fire-and-forget missile"

-->Asked and answered. It was "get off Symbian and into a Qt/Linux world ASAP" Qt had already been run on Symbian, S40 and Linux (Maemo/meego) when he arrived. This would have allowed a very different path. Stephen thought different. He decided North America was the key, ignoring that Nokia had made vast amounts of cash with nearly no market share there.

"Elop will tell you that everything he did was known to the Nokia board of directors and with their support."

--> That's his story, other sources disagree.

"[once] Nokia's mobile ambitions had been mortally wounded Elop was tasked with selling off that arm of the company. Given concise marching orders he did just that."

-->I wasn't in the room for the negotiations but the sources I do have indicate Stephen wasn't that close to the deal. Post summer 2012, Elop seems very much to have been put back in his box whilst the Finns sorted out the mess and extracated Nokia with dignity. Which they did rather well: "This is broken beyond repair, but you can have it for €5.4 billion and a free Stephen Elop?"

Farewell then, Mr Elop: It wasn't actually your fault

Seriously...?

"This really is a bit of chauvinistic nonsense, which seeks to transfer blame away from years of complacency and mismanagement at Nokia"

Nope, year long complacency was not the culture at the time. I was there. Mismanagement? Nope. The major issue was software engineering. Getting the stuff out the door fast enough in a good enough shape. For example, The N97 omnishambles was Nokia's software engineering at its *worst*.

"What Elop’s critics forget is that he had an impossible choice in front of him when he arrived in late 2010."

No. he didn't. He could have fixed the organisational issues and software engineering and snoozed on for another five years. Instead he decided it was product range and cost. After his MS alliance media event, Symbian volumes dropped off a cliff. The closures in 2012 took the guts out of the mid range €50-€125 business where the volumes and profit still were after the destruction of the smartphone business in 2011. Little known fact, the N9 outsold the windows phones.

Seriously, read the quarterly reports about volumes and profits from 2007 to 2013. It's all there. Volumes were rising until Stephen started speaking. The more he spoke, the worse things got, in my opinion.

"Elop’s choice was really to go with Android or risk going with the brand new Windows Phone platform. ... The Android option would also have been too much of a culture shock for Nokia"

No. We were gagging for it. Android was seen as a way to jump forward. "You have the software, Google, but we have the brand." was one line of thought. The Nokia X series with Android was done later and regrettably strangled at birth, several projects were cancelled close to ramp-up as Nokia sold the business to MS.

"by choosing to retain more independence than he would have under Android, Elop ran into two problems, as David Wood’s epic insider account of the smartphone wars reminds us, and armchair pundits forget"

I'm not an armchair pundit. I worked in and with all parts of Nokia except Venture Fund and Research Centre for well over a decade.

"Talking to dozens of former Nokians, I'm struck by how well-respected Elop was amongst his colleagues."

This is a joke, right? Ten of thousands of former Nokia employees think differently. I guess we skipped the Kool-Aid.

"Elop chose the right technologies to promote"

No. He picked one camera project.

He ignored the UI design skills that produced S40 refresh, two Symbian UI refreshs (Anna and Belle), Meego, Meltemi to name but 4 that happened in the first two years of his tenure. (I've tried Android, iOS, BB10, WinPho... too often they represent a step backwards from what Nokia learnt and implemented with respect to UI design) He trod an already trodden path in audio. He didn't focus on materials technology or mechanical design....for example. He didn't understand the Qt path - which would have enabled Nokia to bin all the discussions about which OS to take with, "Who cares? The UI and apps are on Qt, use whatever works best underneath."

He dumped Meego because "LTE wouldn't be there quick enough for the North American market." Nokia was always best when it was second to market: Watch everyone else, do it as well or better. His push into North America reduced Nokia's already miniscule volumes there and destroyed the rest of the business too.

"Elop was actually a pretty good CEO"

No. He. Was. Not.

He focused on the North America market and getting LTE smartphones to the US. His assumption that this route was the future, laid waste to everything else.

He didn't fix NSN - that was largely some smart and ruthless finance guys in Munich and Finland. He didn't fix Smartphones. He didn't need to fix Mobile Phones, but decided to. In his "farewell" speech at a Nokia launch event, he seemed to say he'd fixed HERE and the patents business, forgetting that (a) FRAND and other patent licensing had been occuring for years, (b) HERE was a re-branding, the business numbers went from very poor to poor.

End Of.

BOOM! Stephen Elop shuffled out of Microsoft door

Best.News.Ever.

Don't let the door hit you, Stephen.

Microsoft swings axe at 18,000 bods in its largest ever round of layoffs

Re: Epic Failure = Increased share price.

"- If you -don't- agree with the strategy being offered by 'the management', why would you want to work there any more anyway?"

..because like most people I've got bills to pay..

a company isn't just strategy, it is also culture, people, working environment, terms and conditions.

the end of the road.

Looks like all low end development is gone (Beijing and Oulu cuts)

All European sites outside Finland are gone (except Lund which was a recent acquisition).

San Diego cut back down to "just certify everyone else's R&D"

MS would have probably cut more in China except for the Chinese government.

So now its making showcases for WinPho and Microsoft's "digital offerings"...in which case why not shutdown the whole Nokia acquisition and outsource it to Foxconn? Because MS isn't going for market share or profit on the basis of these announcements...

X marks the chop: Microsoft takes axe to Nokia's Android venture

Re: re: simply a ruse

Well...

Elop killed Symbian and Meego because Nokia "needed LTE support and North America market share."

The North America market share is still poor..so much so that (Nokia) San Diego is being cut back down. So they are pretty much back where they were 3-4 years ago -> take everyone else's products and certify them for the US market. Poor guys.

LTE would have been there in an adequate timeframe just like 3G -> be second and be better. How many customers have noticed that LTE is actually data and most voice traffic is still on 3G or even 2G??

MS and/or Elop has just killed X. Not Nokia.

Windows 7 wasn't killed by Nokia - that was Microsoft's sole decision. Arguably Elop should have kept his mouth shut and .. well actually just kept his mouth shut, because it seems like every time he speaks market share declines in my opinion...and waited until WinPho 8 was available and then the market with 3-4 great devices like the 500/600/900/1000 series.

S40 was approaching a critical turning point in 2011 and Nokia knew that a new platform was needed, hence the "Meltemi that we don't talk about", the Smarterphone acquisition and finally the "X platform which looks like what the Finns wanted before Elop started .."

Frankly the best example of Finnish "Sisu" (guts/courage) I've seen recently is selling the Phones business to MS for several €$billion. They isolated Elop from the negotiations, pursued a Plan B with the X range, cut the layoffs from tens of thousands to ...430 according to my notes, successfully stroked Ballmer's ego and offloaded a management cabal to a bunch of ??? with low experience of how to succeed in the mobile phone market or how to manage a mobile hardware business.

...all my opinion, of course...I welcome corrections, criticism.

Stephen Elop: 'Hello there' (and goodbye to 12,500 of you)

Re: How many people have lost their jobs due to Flop?

answer: tens of thousands.

which means tens of thousands of families affected.

He fired more people than both his Nokia predecessors combined and OPK wasn't trigger shy.

(@Elop's lawyers - I read all the press releases 2000-2013 to compile this data as part of a thesis)

Just more evidence of a lack of understanding of the mobile market. Nokia knew in the 90s that 15% market share is the threshold for critical mass for cost efficiency in supply chain and manufacturing. Microsoft sees mobile as a showcase for their "stuff".