Nokia has announced plans that will see the Nokia brand return to the mobile phone and tablet markets on a global basis. Under a strategic agreement covering branding rights and intellectual property licensing, Nokia Technologies will grant HMD global Oy (HMD), a newly founded company based in Finland, an exclusive global license [1] to create Nokia-branded mobile phones and tablets for the next ten years. Under the agreement, Nokia Technologies will receive royalty payments from HMD for sales of Nokia-branded mobile products, covering both brand and intellectual property rights.
All these devices will run Android.
With the news that Microsoft is selling the feature phone branch it bought from Nokia, and the additional news that Microsoft is hinting at killing its Lumia line and brand, can we all finally agree what many smart people – including myself – said from the very beginning, namely that Microsoft acquiring Nokia was nothing more but yet another disaster in a long line of Microsoft/Windows Phone disasters? One that cost thousands and thousands of people their jobs?
I still feel the circumstances around the Microsoft/Nokia deal needs to be investigated for… Shenanigans.
Thom, for once we agree on something relating to businesses. That has to be one of the most obvious, under-handed takeovers in business history. A top 10 stockholder on one business (Microsoft) gets himself voted in as CEO of someone else, then increases his worth by destroying the other company (Nokia) from the inside so that his first company can buy it. I don’t see how it could be more obvious if he stood out in front of Nokia’s headquarters with his middle finger aimed at them!
Apparently people keep forgetting that little clause where Elop was entitled an hefty sum of cash if he managed to sell Nokia.
On his work contract, provided by the Nokia board themselves!!!
This issue has been discussed multiple times in Finland, but the rest of the geek world keeps conveniently forgetting to mention it, as it diminishes the Microsoft hate value.
Hardly diminishes it. I wonder how that clause got there, and furthermore, how he even got to be CEO without their being a massive outcry of conflict of interest. Mind you, I’m not saying that Elop’s the only crook in this mix. I’m sure he had collaborators inside.
There was, you just couldn’t hear it from behind the walls of Nokia offices…
Yes. The board that hired him, who collectively decided they wanted to sell their company and got Elop to help them do so – and he did.
I think it sucks too, don’t get me wrong. But this wasn’t, as Thom puts it, “shenanigans”. The board intentionally went down this path, no one tricked them, no one pulled the wool over their eyes. What actually happened is the board pulled the wool over everyone else’s eyes…
I’m just saying, if you want to blame someone, blame Nokia. I get that everyone wants to portray Elop as “the villian”, but come on – enough is enough.
http://bgr.com/2013/09/24/nokia-ceo-elop-contract-details/
The whole “mole” theory is obviously hogwash in light of this… He was hired to play Darth Vader and it worked, everyone hates him. All the while it’s Emperor Palpatine you should be pissed at.
Who hired him under those terms? It wasn’t Microsoft…
I’m afraid that hardly diminishes anything. The Microsoft love-in was nothing short of a ridiculous farce of a disaster, and that’s being incredibly polite. He was so well paid and so tied to Microsoft, in what was effectively a coup, he didn’t care.
It demonstrates the problem with oligarchy – and any publicly traded private company with a board of directors is run like an oligarchy.
This would have been harder for a board to pull off if the board themselves had to answer to the thousands of employees that are affected by its decisions. But that’s not how most businesses work in capitalism.
To me the strange part about all the hate, is so few are pointing their shaming fingers at the economic system which allows and encourages this behavior – capitalism.
Edited 2016-05-20 20:35 UTC
As opposed to… what, exactly? Most everything else has been tried, too. Capitalism may not be perfect, but it does seem to have worked the best so far for progress. Socialism might be well and good for dealing with social problems, but have a look at what came out of the late Soviet Union to get an idea what it does for new ideas and progress in the sciences.
BS. Elop, as CEO, was legally required to maximise the returns to shareholders. That legal obligation included selling Nokia if a suitable offer was made.
It is not the question that selling Nokia was a good deal, but that the road there was in the interest of the shareholders.
Which means absolutely nothing, in practice.
Nokia was simply the best. Are we going to get the same quality again?
Probably not, unless the Nokia employees went to this new company and they’re not dead on arrival because of horrible management.
FTA:
“Microsoft is selling its feature phone business to FIH Mobile, a subsidiary of Foxconn, for $350 million. The deal will see 4,500 employees transfer over to Foxconn’s subsidiary, and Microsoft handing over the rights to use the Nokia brand, feature phone software, services, and other contracts and supply agreements.”
The cynic in me would like to point out that Jolla was exactly this. Which resulted in the whole tablet kickstarter fiasco.
protip: don’t support any kickstarters coming from this group.
Well, I was going for irony. Didn’t really work though.
Ah, Its tough to judge on this topic. There are still many true Nokia believers out there.
The Nokia that was is now gone really.
That old Nokia was designing and *manufacturing* its stuff in Europe (and even then you could see quality difference from the stuff made in Finland versus Hungary).
Licensing everything to China will result in the same quality as the other products manufactured in China, so expect something average.
I think Lumias werent so bad ? Atleast the original Nokias were quality. My dad uses a 3330 still 🙂
Though if the new stuff will be Chinese clone material they might as well not bother .. Not that Chinese cant make quality, its just that I fear the implied low cost will mean .. Low Quality ..
Edited 2016-05-21 02:35 UTC
Are you excited about the potential output of this new Nokia-not-Nokia-but-really-Nokia? A Nokia-designed Android phone that is true to Nokia’s design excellence of the past, along with vanilla Android that receives updates within a reasonable period of time would definitely get me excited.
As long as you learn that the phone does not contain a single Google app (including Play) and Nokia must build up its ow app ecosystem.
I said many years ago that Nokia should drop Symbian and make Android their own, but no, many wanted to tell me that Symbian was miles ahead in the market, there was nothing to worry. A solid piece of Nokia hardware with a well put together Android system would have been a killer.
Nokia’s market then evaporated and they then got themselves involved in an utterly ridiculous and ruinous relationship with Microsoft.
You certainly weren’t alone. The MeeGo-based N9 was received with high praise by reviewers, leading to my own armchair quarterbacking:
* Hold a “Symbian Forever” conference where the Qt-based Symbian is heralded as a long term strategic focus. (Yeah, it’s not, but that’s not the point. Keeping Symbian fans loyal to Nokia is the point. Precedent: It worked for the Apple // to Mac transition.)
* Announce Android phones and tablets with a Qt app subsystem. Runs Android and Qt apps! When a Symbian fan wants a higher end Android phone, one that runs their existing stable of Qt apps is the natural choice. (Hint: One reason I bought my beloved Nokia N800 was its ability to run my old Palm apps via just such a subsystem.)
* Push ahead with high-end only MeeGo phones with a (then) Dalvik subsystem. Again, it runs Qt and Android apps, and is the natural choice for those who don’t want to use the Android shell itself but prefer a more Gnu-ish experience. If MeeGo used the Android Linux kernel, the same base hardware could share drivers between Android or MeeGo, so that only one set of electronics need be developed for each pair of phones released. Just differentiate with a few cosmetic changes to the case.
Well executed, this wouldn’t be a hugely expensive strategy. The down sides would be maintaining a separate ecosystem for the Qt apps. However, it could not possibly have worked worse than the Windows disaster that many of us predicted with horrified expressions.
I miss Nokia…
Yer, they really didn’t do anything at all with Qt. They’re not alone in that all of these companies, including Samsung, just don’t get developers and development.
There was a certain amount of resistance to Qt within Nokia though. The development fees for Symbian were very considerable and it seems like they’d got used to them. It ended up killing the company though.
Because so many OEM’s are making money out of android handsets …
Nokia would rather have Sailfish as the basis for their phone and negotiate with Jolla (former Nokia employees).
No, you would rather have that. It makes zero sense from a business standpoint however. Sailfish is a flop, and Jolla has repeatedly over-promised and under-delivered, and that’s being polite.
Business-wise Sailfish did not deliver as expected, that is separate to Jolla’s actual success.
What was a success was that a very small rag-tag group of ex-Nokia employees could bring a new mostly open source phone to market (against all odds and lots of people saying it could not be done) with a stunning new interface and slightly used OS, by having a mostly employee driven flat organization.
The problem here is apps and development. No apps, no mobile operating system.
The new company will shop for cellphones from china, stamp nokia logo on them and sell them and pay nokia for royalties.
Yes, that is basically it although the guy seems to be generally interested in the hardware and Nokia it will eventually come down to that.
Just 2 years ago Nokia was worth 8 billion.
1 year later those 8 billion were basically entirely evaporated and written off.
And now a mere 350 million is all that is left.
I would say that Nokia did incredibly well getting that 8 billion and surviving. I would call that 1 for Nokia, 0 for Microsoft
The disaster was to stick to and release the N900 with Maemo alone when others co-operated with Android (though not that many had released their product back then but if Nokia wasn’t so occupied with trying to have it all themselves they would had been an Android player.)
Edited 2016-05-18 20:48 UTC
and that simply because they had some of the best phones for more than a decade.
There was still time to establish a 3rd big mobile OS, and Microsoft wasn’t needed at all to accomplish that job.
It would’ve been smart for them to completely open source it like Android, and then to add their own proprietary apps on top (like Google does), giving them control and an edge over competitors, while making the ecosystem popular.
Qt was a good choice as the base technology. Obviously Linux would’ve made a lot of sense as well. Then they could’ve allowed popular scripting languages as first rate citizens (like Javscript, Python, …), which would’ve allowed for very easy development with Qt bindings.
Their hardware quality was never disputed, and their customers were loyal.
They could’ve played the long game, instead they sold out in one of the stupidest business decisions I have ever seen (at least from the view point of destroyed capital value and lost jobs).
Microsoft willingly or unwillingly extinguished Nokia by installing a CEO with an obvious agenda (transition Nokia from an independent phone maker to a Microsoft based phone maker), who was also highly incompetent (and greedy) on top of it all.
I agree with Thom completely, this whole thing tasted like a hit job from the beginning.
They did all that with Maemo / Meego. But Elop killed it inside Nokia since it wasn’t aligned with MS interests. And by doing that he killed Nokia in general.
Edited 2016-05-19 02:53 UTC
I still occasionally power up my N900 and N9 and weep at how much more usable they are over Android (even after Marshmallow). Makes me sad that Nokia sold out….
I’m using Sailfish on Nexus 5. I won’t touch Android
Ha, I wanted to do that as well, but I want a phone that has an SDcard slot. I also have decided I want a phone with a stylus, so I’ve been using the Note line as my main phone since the Note 3, but then I got my Note 4 and haven’t gotten the Note 5 because… no SDcard. If I could put sailfish on it, it’d sweet, though who knows how much stylus style software there’d be. On the other hand, Maemo….
Why you’re not using your Nokias on daily basis then?
Why would Microsoft willingly extinguish Nokia? Windows Phone was a big thing for them and they were basically in the hands of Nokia because other OEMS didn’t pick up the OS. Nokia provided the best hardware AND the best software and was a great name to have in their marketing.
If you ever saw Elop presenting anything at Nokia you would know that he knew about every little detail of the hardware and software and genuinely seemed to care about the platform.
There just doesn’t seem to be any room for anything except Android (and iOS, for now?) in the market. Nokia seems to have gotten everything out of it that they could and have reinvented themselves.
Microsoft has made horrible losses on Windows Phone but they cannot give up on such an important market. They are trying to reposition themselves as well, but that will be a very hard task that only becomes more difficult if they take longer and lose the final bit of developer mindshare that they have (on mobile!)
The vast majority of people associate Nokia with old fashioned feature phones. That is a marketing liability not a bonus.
The Nokia hardware and software (Symbian) were totally outdated by the time Microsoft took over.
The current Windows phones use the same generic ARM hardware as low/mid-range Android phones.
Edited 2016-05-20 00:10 UTC