With another wave of restructuring underway, which would see Nokia lay off tens of thousands of employees over the next few years, conversations like these and the close but remote relationship that the two had established might soon come to an end.
What they and their fellow Nokians needed was a way to stay in touch. And so, with little fuss or fanfare, Rentrop and Parumog set up the ‘Beyond Nokia’ Facebook group.
[…]
“It’s a love story,” says Sotiris Makrygiannis, who was previously director of applications and site manager of Nokia’s Helsinki R&D center. “I’ve never seen such a large group of people adoring a company. It’s remarkable. All these tens of thousands of people lost their jobs and instead of hating the company, actually admiring the company”.
To understand why, Rentrop points me to Nokia’s old company slogan: Connecting People. “It was not just a marketing phrase,” she says, “for many members Nokia became a family”. That sentiment is echoed in the hundreds of messages and photos currently being posted to the group every hour.
To this day, the demise of so much of Nokia is a black page in the EU’s history. The deal with Microsoft should have never been allowed to go through, and there’s definitely grounds for more thorough investigation into the history and circumstances of the deal. Of course, it’s impossible to say if Nokia’s smartphone arm would’ve survived with Android, but I’m quite confident the company would’ve faced far better odds.
As I said from the very beginning: the moment Nokia decided to share the bed with Microsoft, was the moment Nokia signed its own death warrant.
They don’t need to hate Nokia. Any person with an employment history like that will have no trouble finding a job. The real hatred for layoffs and the companies who do them generally comes, in my experience, with companies who employ a lot of so-called unskilled labor. When a tech company lays off a software engineer, it’s a pain in the ass but they’ll usually get back on their feet. When a telephone company lays off a line-stringer though, that person will have a much harder time finding work again, let alone work that will pay well. That’s where the real hatred comes in.
I would agree in the US, especially in Silicon Valley but Nokia was based in Finland. A large group of talent flooded the market there in a short amount of time after Nokia folded/floundered/etc. Finland is not a large country, I think around 5.5 million. Nokia was a juggernaut in terms of Finland’s economy.
tony,
Even in the US these layoffs by the thousands hurt. But you are right, in Finland it must have a much bigger impact to supply & demand.
There were cases of senior engineers being offered a salary equal to a junior without substantial work experience.
One damaging factor was also Nokia’s focus on its Symbian platform, which was built using technologies that have pretty much become obsolete outside Symbian.
Then there’s the usual bloat of middle-management, whose services are really not needed anywhere.
There should be EU laws against this kind of predatory no-value capitalism.
The kind that kills competition by buying it out. The kind that simply asset-strips a company and leaves it for dead.
This wasn’t a predatory no-value capitalism deal. Microsoft didn’t want this to fail. They really thought (foolishly) that they could make this work.
Microsoft didn’t asset strip Nokia. There were no assets to strip.
In many ways, Microsoft did Nokia’s shareholders a huge favour. Nokia should have seen the writing on the wall earlier and jumped onto Android. I am sure Google would have loved to accommodate them. Instead, Nokia ceded ground to their biggest competitor, Samsung.
Nokia had tons of assets, mainly manufacturing and patents, and what was the first thing that was done after Microsoft bought them? All the manufacturing plants were kicked.
I think Nokia still holds most of the patents, right?
Microsoft (or their plant at Nokia) stripped Nokia of some of its assets before it was sold: MeeGo and Symbian.
Asset stripping involves breaking a company and selling off parts for a profit.
I hardly think Microsoft was salivating at the prospect of being able to sell off Symbian and MeeGo to the point where they coughed up $7bn for the privilege.
Microsoft made a bad business decision. There was no malice involved. Just incompetence.
I was being sarcastic.
Whooooosh indeed. I need a better sarcasm detector! 🙂
Still surprising how easily one gets downvoted here for suggesting that the Nokia thing was just a bad business deal.
Some people want to believe everything is good vs evil. Good Nokia being bought out by evil predatory Microsoft.
Well, the way Nokia was mismanaged under Microsoft’s Stephen Elop until the sale to his former employers, made the whole thing seem like on purpose. Especially when he, after having proven his incompetence, initially kept his job.
Then again, he soon got a top job at some other company, so it’s not as if big corporations have much sense when hiring top management. They probably see failure as valuable experience.
Nokia was dead long before MS was involved. Their hardware and software was totally outdated and their new software stack was going nowhere.
1) Nokia had most loyal fan base. Beating Apple.
2) Nokia had sales increasing well into iPhone craze.
3) Nokia had MeeGo well before Android become popular.
4) Nokia had MeeGo handset getting better reviews then iPhone.
But for the most part Nokia had genius CEO who got 20 milions $ for ruining Nokia smartphones business.
All he needed to do was to weaken Nokia and force MS to buy it outright. As selling smartphone division would net him those 20 milions $ regardless of any conditions of the actual sale.
Moral of the story: Never allow Your CEO to get into deals that if failing would force other side to buy part of Your company if You have a clause that give generous bonus for such transaction to Your CEO.
He have no incentive to succeed then….
przemo_li,
That deal was just incomprehensible for shareholders and customers alike. The architects of the MS buyout destroyed the company from the inside out. They may have believed partnering with MS would pay off, but people never learn that MS are just wolves seeking to exploit others. And it’s just abhorrent that the CEO in charge of watching out for the company was in a position to gain from it’s demise.
I just don’t understand how the board could have allowed this to happen, but hell, we just did the same thing with the US presidency, so who am I to point fingers.
1. Balckberry had the most loyal fan base of all.
2. A low margin business with very little future.
3. Meego was going nowhere.
4. Meego was going nowhere.
Edited 2016-11-23 09:30 UTC
I was 1 until Elop came. When I had to change my phone I didn’t consider any other brand.
2. There was a migration path from the lower end to the high end. I began with basic phones, then I had a 5800 and my final Nokia was a N900.
3. I was willing to buy it even if it had fewer apps than Android and iPhone. I even considered to buy a N9 but then Elop came and said “Even if it is a success we won’t make more”.
> Meego was going nowhere.
Seems you are not aware but the N9 was delivered and did well in the 2-3 markets Elop allowed to sell them in.
Geez. There is absolutely no need for government intervention in cases like this. And most certainly not wannabe-supranational undemocratic regimes like EU.
Government intervention is good and proper in relation to combat serious crimes like child pornography or sex traficking. But there is no valid reason to interfere in something as irrelevant as two tech-companies merging. You have an unhealthy love of strong, centralised government, Thom.
Btw: As a Dane I can tell you EU is neither a state nor a country – and certainly not a federal union. And it has no bright spots in its history.
That said, Nokias demise was sad (used Nokia exclusively for 11 years, 3310 first), but that’s the market. You may not like it, but that does not justify draconian governmental regulation.
Oddly the US Gov stepped in to stop the purchase of T-Mobile by AT&T a few years back.
I don’t really see that as a bad thing, since Monopolies are already terrible, and AT&T had already previously been split up due to it anyhow.
You are making an apples vs oranges comparison here.
Mobile network providers are a true monopoly – the government essentially gives 4 or so companies a complete monopoly on mobile network service provision. Therefore, governments are right to prevent monopolies forming in this market.
Nokia is, or was, a gadget maker. There is no monopoly here, and Nokia being bought by Microsoft, a company with hardly any presence in the gadget market, wasn’t a competition issue. Samsung buying Nokia at that point may have raised competition issues.
https://www.turkticaret.net/whois/
https://www.domainsorgulama.com/whois/
Edited 2016-11-23 09:04 UTC
I still boot mine up occasionally and look at it and think “I should switch back to using that, I really despise Android…” but then I think “Damn, I wouldn’t be able to get my corporate email, and there are a few other apps that I’d miss… and I need to control my Gear S2 somehow…”
The OS and a lot of the apps and functionality on the N9 was superb, if Nokia had continued down that road, we could have seen some real competition coming from them. But instead we had MS sweep in and kill MeeGo and Samsung then split off with Intel to make Tizen (running on previously mentioned Gear S2). It’s sad that now we’re basically stuck with Android (only really awesome for those who have known nothing besides iOS and Android, but want more freedom than iOS) or iPhone.
It’s a shame SailfishOS hasn’t been installed / available on more devices… sadly, I never got my tablet.
And This.
By the time of acquisition, Microsoft simply wasn’t ready with its mobile OS to compete as a third platform, and Nokia suffered from that too. Pretty badly, indeed.
But by the time Nokia had decided to do something, it was already too late – had it gone the Android way, it would have just become another “me-too” vendor.
Bottom line: conspiracy theories aren’t always the only possible answer. Sometimes it just simply boils down to unfortunate choices, ineptitude, and all that.
That simply isn’t true. They had the brand, they had the recognition, they had the capacity to produce great phones HW-wise (aside from some other cool stuff, such as Here). In terms of “me-too” vendors, they would have become a Samsung, not an Alcatel/HTC/…
False. Nokia had problems but it was mainly a management problem not a technological one. In many areas it was far ahead of the competition. It had a strategy that could have worked before Elop savotaged it.
Yes, I can’t see Elop doing the major damage, but Elop was adding insult to the injury, I do not know if intentional or being honestly mistaken for doing the MS decision.
It is due to Nokia’s blurred vision of what maybe the future of phones is heading, maybe because of internal issues or competition of what projects to be used in their flag-ship products.
I read somewhere a testimony from a Nokia executive. The executive bought the iPhone and he use it in his home maybe for demonstration purposes, seeing what the iPhone from Apple, their new competitor in the market is up to. When they go to bed, his daughter ask him for that magic thing to be in her bed. That Nokia executive now realized that his company is in big trouble, and the rest is history.
But I would argue, that if they go with Android, Nokia’s Mobile division would have not been bought by MS or entered in a partnership in the first place. Nokia would be naturally be a competitor of Samsung and Apple but still ahead, because around that time 2007-2008 we are still die hard Nokia users.
And even more, if Nokia would have release a smartphone with their own OS in it,maybe in the form of Meego, that would compete head to head with Apple’s iOS and Android and release it around 2008, then we would have three major players in the smartphone market = Nokia, Google’s Android and iPhone.
Edited 2016-11-23 02:46 UTC
This would have been a practical scenario, where Nokia would have really had real opportunities in the smartphone era IMHO. But timing should have been very different from what has actually been – I highlighted the dates in the post above, and they signal that by the time of the Windows Phone switch (2010?), Nokia was about two-to-three years late – which in computing time, compares to centuries…
Not sure what you mean with “if”.
They did release a smartphone with their own OS on it, one unit is right here on my desk.
Still the best smartphone I’ve ever used!
Lasts 4 days to a week on a single charge despite being a half a decade old, while permanently displaying time and status (a feature no other handset seems to be capable of)
It sold extremely well in all markets that it was available to, even caused lots of private imports into markets it was not sold to because Nokia’s management needed it to fail.
It’s funny to hear about Sotiris again… He was the main guy managing my company’s work on Meego. Maybe a bit ruthless, but very driven. Great to work with.
I remember being in Helsinki the week before Christmas for a sprint working on the Meego Documents application, which was based on our open-source KOffice/Calligra project. Elop had already taken over the reins, and Sotiris gave us a short speech, thanking us for all the work we’d done, praising us for having deliverd such a complex application with so few people and then, weirdly we thought at the time, reassuring us that whatever might happen in the future, we should still be proud of what we had done.
The writing was on the wall.
Some time earlier, I was in the office in Ruohlahti working with my Nokia colleages (I was a contractor) when the N8 was released. They were eagerly following the internal news channel. The first Nokia phone with Qt! I was flabbergasted when they were struck dumb with surprise when it turned out to be Qt on Symbian, not a Meego phone. These were the people inside Nokia, working on Meego (or maybe it was still called Maemo back then), and they didn’t know that this was a Symbian phone until the release!
It was a weird company, that way…
Nokia was doomed. There was nothing the EU, or anyone else, could do.
Nokia was expert at making phones smaller than anybody else, in an era when smaller phones were considered better. The arrival of the iPhone signalled the end of that era. By the time Nokia had adapted to this change, it had lost its cherished position as market leader, and was just one smartphone manufacturer among many.
I still have my “peak Nokia” phone. It is much smaller than my smartphone, far cheaper to run (on a 2G PAYG tariff in which credits never expire), has a much longer battery life, and is usable in areas with no 3G/4G coverage. It is the ideal mobile phone with SMS.
The legendary build quality of Nokias was a big selling point for Nokia, that and good cameras. So Im sure they could have done well with Android !