Slashdot Mirror
Nokia & Siemens To Merge Network Business
An anonymous reader writes "Nokia and Siemens are joining forces in fixed and mobile network businesses to create a new global player, Nokia Siemens Networks. Based in Finland, the new company will have a revenue of 15.8 billion euros, and a workforce of 60.000 (before the projected "synergy benefits", that will cut costs 1,5 billions euros, and make 10-15 per cent of employees redundant, that is). More info in their press release." There's been other information released in the media as well.
I enjoy Nokia products. I have never used Siemens phones. This merger is meant to combat the come-back of Motorola with their RAZR line (they were featured in Fortune magazine last week as a great team who pulled the sinking company back to the top).
Personally, I find Nokia phones more user friendly, with less convoluted menu paths.
This is the inevitable result of the series of failed technologies that hang round the necks of all those involved in mobile telephone business like the large stinking albatross it is.
The whole industry is a series of calamatous errors, and before you start telling me about the huge amounts of money they make I wan't you to consider the difference between doing something "good" and making money. Drug barons make money - but their industry is hardly what you would call good. Similarly, the mobile phone companies have sytematically fought between themselves, with network operators killing off fledgling technologies like WAP by charging prohibitive access costs; to handset vendors packing so much unused technology into the handsets the network operators struggle to recoup their costs. Hardly good business practice, and let's face it the handsets are short lived unreliable pieces of junk that are pratically unuseable. I'm a geek and I can't even be arsed to use the calendar on my phone for fuxsake.
3G has been the biggest farce since the Noel Coward left the party. The technology is dreadful, truly awful to use. It is expensive, unreliable, impractical and worthless. Who in their right mind is going to hold a very expensive handset at arms length and shout at the 1" square image for the sake of making a video call? (inside obviously because you cannot see the screen in daylight and not on a train because the signal is too unreliable, nor where there are people around because you would hardly want to be seen making a prat of yourself and only to someone that has a compatible handset). Those poor network operators have had to write off the costs of the 3G license that they paid for e.g. Vodaphone's massive loss recently, and they still cannot find any way to make money off the connection. Sure, they make a few bucks/quid from laptop access but 802.11 is guzzling up paying customers faster than a $20 whore.
So, where do they go? More new technology? Like the Sony i-mode stuff? I seriously doubt that will ever be more than a passing fad for a few technophiles. No, that is not the answer. I don't know what is, and neither do the manufaturers, so in the meantime they will consolidate their costs, buy up companies like LG, Siemens & SAGEM and sell cheap handsets, that only barely work, until they find a more lucrative solution.
Cynical, perhaps, but that has been the history of this industry since the 80's. The only trick that really worked was SMS texting - and they did not catch onto that for about a year after it was popular.