As expected, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella has just announced an absolutely massive amount of layoffs.
With this in mind, we will begin to reduce the size of our overall workforce by up to 18,000 jobs in the next year. Of that total, our work toward synergies and strategic alignment on Nokia Devices and Services is expected to account for about 12,500 jobs, comprising both professional and factory workers.
It’s clear where the focus of the layoffs lies: Nokia Devices and Services. When Lumia sales couldn’t keep up with the rest of the market or Nokia’s collapsing Symbian sales, people stated “Nokia is fine!”. When Microsoft had to bail out Nokia’s devices division to make sure it wouldn’t die or be sold off to a competitor, these same people maintained that “Nokia is fine!”. Now that Microsoft will layoff half of the Nokia staff it acquired, I’m sure people will still maintain that “Nokia is just fine!”.
Sarcasm aside, the fact that 66% of the layoffs will consist of former Nokia staff further confirms what I have been saying all along: Microsoft purchased Nokia’s devices division to make sure that Nokia wouldn’t go Android (Nokia X!), that Nokia wouldn’t sell its troublesome devices division to a competitor, or, worse yet, that Nokia would eventually be forced to shut it down altogether. In short, Microsoft acquired Nokia’s devices division to save Windows Phone. The evidence is out there for all to see, and denying this at this point borders on the pathetic.
Anywho, this is terrible news for all the people involved, but with this industry doing relatively well, I hope they will be able to find new jobs easily. There are quite a number of companies who would love to get their hands on Nokia talent, so let’s all wish them the best of luck in the weeks and months ahead.
Not unsurprisingly, Nadella specifically announced the end of the Nokia X Android endeavour.
In addition, we plan to shift select Nokia X product designs to become Lumia products running Windows. This builds on our success in the affordable smartphone space and aligns with our focus on Windows Universal Apps.
Microsoft plans to continue selling and supporting existing Nokia X products, so if you’ve bought one you’ll at least continue to get support. If you were thinking about buying one – I really, really wouldn’t.
First: Truly terrible news to all those affected, and I wish them the best.
Now, these kind of things happen after large acquisitions. Microsoft absorbed 30,000 employees. That’s a staggering number.
Google took on 20,000 when they purchased Motorola. They shed around 5000 total, with Lenovo expected to do another round post-acquisition.
The problem lies in the fact that acquisitions create a lot of redundancy in a company. You don’t need two HR departments, two IT departments, etc. That, plus Nokia probably was plagued by the same middle management bloat that Microsoft has.
So while extremely unfortunate for those involved, these cuts are to be expected, and in fact it would be worrying (purely from a profit motivated standpoint) had Microsoft not moved to achieve the very same cost savings they pledged at the deal’s announcement.
While Microsoft didn’t shed too much light on who exactly is getting laid off, I can imagine it being a lot of marketing positions, middle level management, manufacturing personnel across the various plants.
Apparently about 1,000 job cuts will come from Finland. The rest will come from elsewhere (Europe and most definitely a lot of the developer evangelists from North America if I had to take a guess).
Something to consider as well, is the fact that core Microsoft employees are also being laid off. If this is directly tied to the Nokia purchase, it could signal that Nokia employees are replacing redundant Microsoft ones as well. So it’s not all coming from Nokia.
Again, terrible news, but unfortunately inevitable.
Edited 2014-07-17 13:28 UTC
I think you only got modded down because you’re Nelson posting in a Microsoft thread. Everything you said makes perfect sense. It is terrible news, and it is an inevitable consequence of a large merger between two bloated companies. I fully expect to see a similar downsizing when the T-Mobile/Sprint merger goes through, likewise the pending Comcast/TWC merger. It sucks, but it’s business as usual.
But typical in a craptastic economy that’s been in the tank for now many years and hit recession again earlier this year. I don’t have a serious problem with these trends as long as new markets with new players are emerging. That’s what’s supposed to happen in a healthy economy…just need to get back to a healthy US economy and that requires dismantling the vast government regulation, taxation and intervention.
Sorry state and federal government, business isn’t meant to be a candy jar you can stick you hands into whenever you want to steal more money!
He often seems to get downvoted just because he’s Nelson (just as you were for defending him – your post was at least at 3) …to the point that I often upvote him “just because” to restore some balance.
Nokia isn’t working and that’s why Microsoft are having to do this. As Thom said, that’s crystal clear. I said a few months ago you would see massive cost slashes and/or write-downs of phones at Nokia because Windows Phone simply isn’t working.
Despite all the nonsense figures, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and this is it. You are a trier and a source of entertainment though, I’ll give you that. When are you on the redundancy list? 😉
You said months ago? So did Microsoft, when the acquisition was announced. They pledged to save $600 million in annual costs over 18 months.
Given that, I don’t see how your bold, shocking, and impressive prediction (lol) is relevant.
You basically said what everyone else was saying? Congratulations.
> Microsoft acquired Nokia’s devices division to save Windows Phone
Congratulations to Mr. Eflop. I welcome him to do another burning platform speech. This time. Windows!
Microsoft can give him another bonus once they stop making useless Windows Phones.
Nokia news is sad, but expected; I’m more interested in where the rest of the layoffs came from
I assume there’d be some people out at XBox – unbundling Kinect means lower Kinect sales, which presumably means fewer Kinect engineers. There could also be people who were hired to design the console who now aren’t needed since it’s done. Such people could have been layed off earlier, but maybe they saved it to avoid too many layoff stories in the press.
But where did the rest come from?
Unbundling Kinect will lead to higher sales, as hardly any games used it effectively. More people can afford 399 than 599.
But lower sales of Kinect units, which is what I think he was trying to say.
Correct- it makes no sense to double down on Kinect when the market has rejected it, so I wouldn’t be surprised to hear a chunk of layoffs affected people who would have been adding Kinect features going forward. I’m sure it won’t be abandoned completely, but should get a funding cut.
Possibly the other commenter was confused by my talk about XBox designers – I meant they needed engineers to build the console, but presumably some of those people are not needed now since there will be no major hardware changes in the foreseeable future.
You’re not going to hear news of big Kinect-related layoffs because the group that deals with Kinect isn’t that big to begin with.
Hardware improvements & revisions are common-place, Microsoft develops long-term, and any engineers who might not be needed on the Xbox team anymore would just be moved to another group. Microsoft has tons of stuff in the works – some leaks, some doesn’t. And then there’s always the groups who develop military technology/applications. In other words, there’s no shortage of places & projects for a good engineer to be assigned to at Microsoft.
in that case, it’s not correct either..
unbundling kinect either doesnt make a difference (you buy a kinect iff you have at least one game using it – otoh is there really anyone buying the console + kinect bundle without even one kinect game? just for the kinect to stare at the player unusefully? hard to believe.. anyway) or, can actually increase kinect sales
why? because there’s quite a lot of applications (medical, research, animation, …) where you don’t need a gaming console, but a 3d input device such as it can be very valuable (and actually much cheaper than solution from specialized niche manufacturers)
(like the wii balance board is used, for instance, in some healthcare facilities in place of more expensive but equivalent gear and in conjunction with a custom PC sw)
in the end it it depends on the hackability of the device – whether indipendent programmers can access the device from a PC with more or less “standard” tools..
if it isnt, it will lose to something which is, such as the oculus rift..
Don’t really understand the first part. If people buy the xbox without a kinect, they lose the sale of a kinect. There aren’t many games that actually require or even make use of it.
The other uses of kinect? Well, maybe. I doubt its life as a re-purposed solution would really be enough to offset a mandatory purchase for Black Ops buying xbox users.
Holy shit. Microsoft is also dropping Asha and Series 40.
Craziness today out of Redmond.
May be, they finally woke up for the fact that they can´t win on lower end. I think MS should concentrate on well integrated business phone and grow from there. It is on their DNA and they should strive to make a phone “perfect” to be used on companies environments of all sizes and give independent developers the tools to build on top of it and fill the gaps.
It worked wonders for them before and I see no reasons this strategy should not be pursued again. Perhaps, they already have the tools but are preaching to the wrong audience or using the wrong discourse?
Competing on lower end is just a waste of resources for them.
In my experience, Enterprise customers are much more tolerant of what they will accept. The software can be buggy, hard to use, and hard to configure, but if you can eventually get it to do what you want, it will sell, and it doesn’t have to get a new UI or stupid marketing tick-list features every year for people to keep using it.
In other words, dinosaur customers for a dinosaur company.
Targeting business didn’t work out too well for Blackberry, being “that boring crap were forced to use at work” isn’t good.
And yes, enterprise users will often accept all kinds of antiquated and buggy software, mostly because the people forced to use it aren’t the people who decided to buy it.
It isn’t. My first phones were Nokia so when I bought my first smartphone it was a Nokia. It is a natural progression.
Or… their usual solution: ignore the lowend until the new lowend is the old highend.
Well no… They close Oulu site (that was resposible basic phones), and move engineering to Tampere and Salo.
At least that was my understanding.
No, there’s an internal memo which clearly states they are putting S40/Asha into maintenance mode and shuttering services after 18 months.
I take it back… yep they kill asha too…
More like sense. Asha and Series 40 are totally obsolete.
Asha aka Smarterphone acquisition were quite nice…
I have to admit this is probably the right move for MS. I originally wrote a rant about how terrible this move was, but I couldn’t make my own points stick…
MS is between a rock and a hard place with mobile; if they go Android they essentially give up on Metro developers and sacrifice the long game for short profit. But by sticking with WinPho they’re very likely doomed to sub-5% market-share for at least a decade – assuming they ever get critical mass to carve a slice of the market.
Another hard pill to swallow is that MS was depending on the tabletization of PCs to drive developers to make Metro apps which would build a competitive store to butt-heads with Apple and Play – but they’re losing that by back-pedalling to avoid haemorrhaging more sales to Chrome and Apple.The trend of PCs influencing mobile has completely reversed and MS is stuck trying to push rope. Just… Ouch. MS can’t even “kill” Android as it’s used to in these situations, because it’s not wholly owned by one company which MS can specifically crush.
Microsoft needs Nokia to be a life-raft, but that’s a lot of weight to put on such a small boat.
So they kind of *have* to go all-in now; They have this rickety buck of sticks propping each-other up; if they let one drop they all fall down. If they don’t, every other company in the race to harmonized ecosystems will eat the behemoth alive.
I definitely feel sorry for the people who are being laid off, especially Nokia, but let’s face it, this has been a long time coming.
Microsoft is still in the mode of thinking that all they have to do is show up and they will dominate the market. Windows 8 is a testament to the fact that they think they can force-feed people anything and they’ll just accept it because Office.
This is simply no longer true. Android and Apple are eating Microsoft’s lunch in the mobile world, and for good reason. Apple, for all the reasons that Apple has succeeded in the past 10+ years, and Android because Google decided to appeal to the 75% of the market that isn’t willing to pay a 100% markup for what Apple has to offer.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is so bedazzled with visions of 30% off the top of every app sold that they basically removed every single reason to actually use Windows by creating Metro. It brought absolutely nothing to the table that Apple and Google/Samsung/etc. already have, minus a several year head start. Sure, Surface looked pretty good after the obligatory three tries to get it right, but again, too little, too late.
I have no sympathy for a company that is that arrogant and that hostile to its own customers, and I have yet to talk to anyone who doesn’t think Windows 8 is crap. (I know some people do, and that’s fine for them, but they are not the majority in my experience.) While there may be some under-the-hood improvements, I don’t see any advantage to using it over Windows 7, and almost nothing to recommend it over XP. Everyone who says it’s faster must have a short memory, because it runs like ass on anything but high-end hardware. Yeah, it boots faster, but you can install a whole Linux distro plus 100 apps in the time it takes to do the Patch Tuesday updates. I still have to regularly reboot to get wireless to work. I still don’t understand why they got rid of “Repair”, and don’t get me started on the lack of a Start Menu. Fortunately, Classic Start Menu can give you the XP functionality, because I never liked Windows 7 version either. Yeah, I’m an old fart who’s been using MS software since DOS 1.
You know Microsoft is setting their sights low when the big selling point of Windows 9 is trying to get people to upgrade from Windows 7. Microsoft needs to suffer and fail… but definitely not go away… because someone needs to keep Google from becoming the next evil empire, and they are well on the way to that.
Maybe they should try turning some of that whiz-bang cool tech that the boffins over at Microsoft Research are always coming up with into real products, because MS is years behind the curve in every way. They are a dinosaur, still trying to live off of the monopoly they created in the early 90s. Microsoft has lots of smart people working for them. I’ve met a few and they always impressed me, but the company as a whole is like a big tar pit.
I don’t know how AOL is doing these days, but after the major decimation they suffered a few years ago, they took the attitude of going back to the startup mentality and trying to actually create something. MS needs to do the same thing. They are richer than Croesus. They should have higher expectations than trying to put a few more pointless pieces of Chrome on Windows or putting another coat of lipstick on that 25-year-old turd called Office and do something amazing. They’ve got the talent and brains for it, just not the management.
/flame off
High on emotion short on facts. WP8 is actually the fastest growing phone OS worldwide*.
Apple is now a minor player in the phone world and rapidly losing control of the tablet market. The problem is that phones and tablets have now become very cheap commodity products. Within a few years a ‘flagship’ Android or Lumia model will probably cost <$200 with $50 ‘entry level’ products being as capable as today’s iPhone 5s.
* http://www.cnet.com/au/news/windows-phone-to-be-fastest-growing-mob…
“Fastest growing” is meaningless.
See also: http://xkcd.com/1102/
Thom reflects too much hatred for MS in his opinion piece without looking at the logistics of absorbing 30,000 additional employees doing the same thing. There is no objectivity in your analysis. The IT industry is one of consolidation, it happens everyday: Beats, SUN, Nokia, Corel purchasing WordPerfect, Macromedia, Peoplesoft, Motorola, Lenovo purchasing IBMs PC and Server business. It is the reality of this business and if you Thom can’t get that in your head after so many years of writing about IT, I think you need give the opinion pieces over to someone more capable.
The Jolla team picks up all rest of the their old talented buddies that where too afraid to run off and join their risky new venture before so that they can resurrect the greatness that was Nokia.
And after 2016 nokia buys them…
I really think that will happen if both companies are doing reasonably well. It makes too much sense not to.
See, what MS truly fear is not losing a game they already lost. They don’t care that much for end user consumers buying products for themselves and their homes. How many MS products do a common consumer “own”? Windows (a cheap OEM license) and Office, usually. And perhaps a Xbox (far from a monopoly). Nothing more.
Microsoft’s main workhorse is in business/corporate space.
The question that really makes MS high management have shivers is: and if Android became really useful as a corporate tool and began replacing workstations for office productivity?
MS business division is Windows Division and Entertainment and Devices Division summed! (if not larger)
In short: MS can survive if it lose his monopoly on home desktops. But if it looses his foothold on corporations, it will have a really dark future.
This “Windows Phone” quest is not only about market share, is about MS trying to mature a tool that can be useful on corporate spaces, so to stop a Android incursion on that arena.
A single large corporate customer spend on MS products and services far more than just the OS license bundled on their workstations.
Few people realize the real magnitude of Windows in a business environment: it is a massive ecosystem encompassing almost all usage scenarios. From compilers, IDEs, web servers, user management, ERPs, productivity tools, network administration of all scales, a multitude of exclusive programming languages, tech support in all countries on earth… and the list goes on, all closed source and done by a single company. And all highly dependent of MS monopoly on work spaces and vertical integration.
Edited 2014-07-17 16:57 UTC
That is exactly my take on all this drama.
One of my co-workers has a large Android tablet that he uses for everything and he loves it. I have a Google Nexus 7 myself, but I use my Windows laptop for my work and that won’t be changing any time soon… but then again I’m a developer and some of the software I work on is Windows software. I’m happy with my environment and it does what I need. If I didn’t have the Visual Studio stuff to do, I would happy using Linux, but Android wouldn’t cut it.
But I can see people migrating to Android when all they need is web/e-mail/basic word processing/media consumption. I’m sure the TCO could be a lot lower too.
You shouldn’t be so quick to discard the hundreds of millions of end users running Windows and other Microsoft products. While their other divisions make up the lions share, they still make a ton of money from average users and contrary to your take on that, they do care about maintaining that revenue.
And military, and education.
Yes, it could survive losing the desktop market. But it completely dominates there and is not at-risk of losing it. As far as business and other divisions, nobody is just going to barge in and dislodge Microsoft in the blink of an eye. Not to mention Microsoft isn’t going to go down without a fight. Because of what’s at risk (and more) that you’ve listed below, Microsoft will give up its position when it’s pulled out of its cold dead hands.
The desktop market for end users exists primarily because people wanted to do things for which a general purpose computer was poorly suited, but just happened to be the only option.
For the vast majority of people, tablets, phones and even chromebooks are a significantly better option.
The idea of a complicated system which requires regular maintenance may appeal to geeks, but giving such systems to average users has been an unmitigated disaster resulting in years of security problems, organised crime and huge botnets.
Desktop computers will return to the niches where they belong – geeks who know how to use them properly, and business use where the device is managed by an IT department. For everyone else, a device managed by apple or google is much better for them.
When it comes to corporate use, the only thing keeping microsoft there is inertia… They are a poor choice from both financial and technical perspectives, and once the lock-in is broken companies will look to save money by ditching microsoft.
We’ve seen this rhetoric before. The problem is hundreds of millions of desktops are still being sold every year, and that fact flatlines the idea that the desktop is dead. The peak of the desktop may be in the rear view mirror, but by no means is it in a free-fall decline. There’s still plenty of meat on the bone whether you like it or not.
Further, to claim the desktop will become a niche thing is silly. People mistakenly think that because desktops, cell phones, and tablets all share a set of basic functions, that they’re interchangeable. Wrong. They’re different devices with different areas of strength & weakness. Cell phones and tablets are not game-changers that obsoleted the desktop, or anything else at this point. They’re simply additions to the array of technology tools people have accessible to them.
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-biggest-problem-in-one-ch…
And that was a year ago. Today Android has over 80% and still raising while the PC market is still in decline and mobile devices accelerate up to the point even Microsoft says now: “mobile first!”
You didn’t got the memo?
Edited 2014-07-20 19:31 UTC
Of course Microsoft wants in on the mobile market — it’s seeing tremendous growth right now and people are getting rich. They want a cut of that pie too.
HOWEVER, you simply can not escape the fact that hundreds of millions of desktops continue to sell each year. Yes, that’s a decline but pretending like those kind of numbers don’t mean anything is foolish. Posting numbers where all devices and platforms are lumped together simply as “computing” doesn’t help you make any real point other than you thinking comparing apples to oranges to potatoes to whatever else is more relevant than actually comparing apples to apples. If you have to strip away all the important details to make your case, you have no case.
Nope, I didn’t because in reality the desktop is FAR from dead. I also never got the memo that cellphones are a replacement for desktops because my needs extend beyond checking email and wasting time using social networking.
Here’s a useful tip… The desktop will be dead when people stop making them, people stop buying them, and people stop using them. We’re a long way from that day so don’t hold your breath.
The question that really makes MS high management have shivers is: and if Android became really useful as a corporate tool and began replacing workstations for office productivity?
It ain’t gonna happen. There is way too much legal liability and risk to data integrity – especially for non-US corporations.
I’d be very surprised if Google is still around in 10-15 years time. Profits are already falling rapidly despite growing revenue.
BS. There is no legal liability or risk to data integrity. The only problem is the fact that Android sucks as a desktop OS.
Other platforms certainly could fill the role and there’s no real risk involved other than buying a new software stack for each user which most people want to avoid.
In fact, and I have 17 years of IT experience to back this up, WINDOWS is a far bigger risk to data integrity and compromised systems can open you up to legal liability. And Windows’ security track record is less than stellar.
MacOS X or Linux could certainly be used. There’s even a native version of MS Office for OSX. In fact, MS Office apps existed on the Mac FIRST.
Where is it that you buy your drugs? Because it *HAS* to be far better than anything available around here. What an astute armchair business analyst you are.
Even if the entire Android ecosystem imploded…. Google would be just fine.
Now that IBM and Apple have proclaimed they are going to work together to build stuff for the enterprise it might not only be Google/Android they need to fear.
With Bring Your Own Device and the current economy, I wouldn’t be surprised if losing the home users is actually by default also losing the corporate users.
I’m currently seeing a lot of people that want to use a desktop as a service/VDI/whatever. Why ? It might just be the only way BYOD and the Windows platform can merge.
And it is probably going to be painful to use will only be used for legacy applications.
This can not last.
Edited 2014-07-18 08:47 UTC
Big acquisitions like this never work for anyone, and Microsoft may be the king of gory executions. Elop himself may genuinely be the devil.
PS: I was right http://www.osnews.com/permalink?590938
You made a prediction in 2014 that Nokia would fail. That would have been a bold prediction in 2000, a possible prediction in 2007 but 2014… Really?
you’ve made an error
Microsoft can make whatever they want. I’m done buying their shit. Completely, and utterly over it. I have both an Android and an iPhone 5, I have a HP Linux machine and a MacBook Pro. I don’t need Windows, or Like it, I don’t use Microsoft Products and frankly they can go suck a dick. Microsoft is one of the few vendors that actively goes out of their way to break support for their own products, and I’m frankly over it. I refuse to buy Microsoft Products outside of Xbox, and I prefer to buy those at end of life to minimise the cash that Microsoft gets. I will stick to giving real money to Microsoft’s competitors and companies who will support Linux.
If you are an engineer, architect, scientist, accountant, lawyer, doctor, dentist or hairdresser you probably have no choice because virtually all business, professional and technical software runs on Windows.
MS doesn’t give a shit about you when they can easily sell 25,000 Windows/Office licences with a five year support contract to a single large corporation.
Edited 2014-07-18 06:35 UTC
Really ? Try combining that with a BYOD policy at work and see how far that gets you.
Hmm, let’s see. Brought my own Windows XP/Slackware laptop to work a couple of years ago, boss gave me permission to use company-purchased Windows 7 and Office volume licenses on it.
Got me pretty far.
I don’t know where people get that idea from but it’s ridiculous. While not the biggest piece of their pie, Microsoft makes a ton of money selling products and services to end-users. They have groups whose sole purpose is to evaluate the Windows desktop end-user experience and submit proposals on how to better improve and integrate. Why go to such lengths for users & revenue you think they don’t care about? That would be a huge waste of resources & investment.
Those 25,000 Windows/Office licenses they sold to Company X… When the people who use those at work go home at the end of their work day and become end-users, what do you think they use? The vast majority use Windows. But who cares about them, they only matter when they’re at work….right?
Let’s not forget, Microsoft wants very badly to own your living room too. You know, the living room that belongs to all those insignificant hundreds of millions of end-users.
Edited 2014-07-19 17:19 UTC
You might give them more money at the end of cycle, when production costs are low
I remember meeting a former Microsoft employee in my local Unemployment Office. He looked pretty down. He had had a fairly significant job on the Office team, but his positioned was phased out. I think he wound out working at Staples. His name was Clippy.
The “Microsoft bought Nokia to save Windows Phone” assertion is plain wrong. Microsoft bought Nokia because all major players today need to become hardware vendors. And hardware vendors need to become software vendors.
So for years hardware manufacturers tried to buy software houses because they needed to create an eco-system. They all failed, including Nokia. Meanwhile, software companies like Google and Microsoft turned into hardware manufacturers while others like Apple basically were always working on both hardware and software.
Of all hardware manufacturers, Samsung is the only one which experienced success by pushing hardware specs to the limits. However, Samsung is desperately trying to do reverse path and build or acquire a software stack running an in-house OS. So far, it has failed.
Failing to understand that process only leads to gossip blog posts like “Windows Phone has to be saved”.
Like Nelson correctly pointed out, merging MS and Nokia of course creates lots of redundant positions. Also consider that during Gates/Ballmer era, both of them opposed to major layoffs as Microsoft has always been considered a place where employees had a very important role, to the point that many people -inside- MS itself were complaining about lots of people being paid to “do nothing”.
So-called market is calling for massive layoffs since at least 6/7 years and Microsoft always tried to avoid that. Now Sadella is bowing to market. Sad for people who will lose their jobs because they are victims of failed capitalist system. But that’s another story.
funny. Bill, Warren, and Adelson just wrote a NYT piece advocating the removal of the cap on H1-B visas for college graduates who have at least a MS. Maybe they ought to put current engineers to work before we import more.
Of course, immigrants work far cheaper than experienced citizens.
Edited 2014-07-20 04:41 UTC
Last time I checked there where very less non-immigrants, natives, working at US tech companies. Did that change?
Edited 2014-07-20 19:44 UTC
That doesn’t mean that the companies aren’t trying to get as many H1-B visas as they can. Why would MS be applying for any if they are laying people off? Cause they can pay them less.
I knew Nokia was going to tank the minute I saw them pushing the Lumia and becoming MS’s lapdog. MS had them bet the company on a losing proposition. Had Nokia killed Symbian earlier and just started building Android phones, it wouldn’t have been near as bleak. Maemo should have seen the light of day too.
MS basically had them drive the company into the dirt to lower the acquisition price.
Microsoft KILLED Nokia. The End.