I love it when ancient proverbs come to life. If you can’t compete, litigate. Right, Nokia? It’s suing HTC, RIM, and Viewsonic in the US and Germany over 45 FRAND patents. The world is so predictable, and the technology world even more so. Ever since Microsoft got its claws on this company, its morals and values have been going downhill.
Didn’t Nokia see what happened when SGI hired an ex-MS executive? He sold off all the good patents and rolled out uber expensive Windows NT machines before bolting the company for MS once more.
The same fate awaits Nokia.
Until we have a way more severe accountability for publicly traded companies nothing will stop the top executives to pursue their own goals, i.e. make money in a short time period irrespectively of what would be the best interest for small shareholder and employees.
In a time when most of us have our retirement fund on shares from companies we work on, even as part of income, the top executives should be the first to have all their money on front line to honor any loss their decision would trigger.
I am not advocating government supervision, they are already bad enough trying to provide public services, only more severe laws to discourage some selfish business man to walk on lines they should not.
I remember him. He also killed PA-RISC and HP-UX when working at HP in favor of Windows on Intel.
Guess who got the patents from SGI btw?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/01/16/sgi_transfers_3d_graphics_p…
http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/2/2993520/nokia-sues-htc-rim-and-vie…
“The patents in question makes these cases slightly different than Nokia’s now-settled litigation with Apple, which involved several standards-related patents that were required to be licensed under so-called FRAND guidelines; filing lawsuits over FRAND patents has become a hot-button issue under serious international scrutiny. At the same time, Nokia has a slightly harder road to proving that HTC, RIM, and Viewsonic are infringing these patents, and it’s possible they can easily be designed around — HTC has been able to design around several of Apple’s patents as that case progresses.”
Looks like a mix of hardware and software patents. I won’t comment on hardware patents claims, but using software ones is definitely a sign of Nokia’s degradation. Not a surprising sign though. Partnership with MS was a much bigger sign.
I’d almost liken nokia now to SCO which was used to front end legal attacks against MS’s competitors.
It doesn’t seem like Nokia’s core business matters to them anymore. Samsung, LG, HTC, etc. seem to all be constantly making changes and releasing and exploring multiple products to keep a feel of the market, allowing them to change direction quickly if need be.
Nokia seems to have put on blinders and have gone full steam ahead, market be damned. Elop pretty much doubly harpooned Nokia’s own core business making huge announcements showing zero flexibility. And what they have to show for it is a plummeting share of one of the the fastest growth markets worldwide.
HTC aren’t MS’s competition. They make a few Windows phones and pay loads of extortion money for MS patents.
But they are virtually Nokia’s only competition within the wPhone niche. Between the two of them they have something like 92% of all sales since so-called “7.5”, actually 7.10, was released. And Elop’s announced strategy is to take sales from the other handset makers in that niche with the goal of increasing product margins after capturing market share.
LG is volunteering to go on hiatus. It would appear that HTC is being encouraged to compete less.
This makes me so very sad. I was all Nokia for a very, very long time, only stopped using my N80 because of a hardware defect. Some in my family still use Nokia phones.
So yeah, very sad to see how far they have fallen.
It’s not very clear from this what exactly those software patents relate to. Android or not for example?
Nokia has become a disgrace for all of us.
…no one cared, because Apple “deserved” it.
Now they come for HTC, and…