After MS-Nokia Pact, Many Nokia Workers Walk Out In Protest

Mr. McGibby writes "After the announcement of the partnership between Nokia and Microsoft this morning workers voiced their concern with the deal by walking out of Nokia facilities. It is believed that as many as a thousand workers marched out today (or took the day off using flex time) so that the company would know that they don't believe the partnership is in their best interest, even after CEO' Stephen Elop's startlingly frank 'burning platform' memo earlier this week."
Looks like many investors felt the same way.

Comments

There is no "low end" in the future

[Zenin]

The Nokia execs and some tech writers make the case that Nokia thrives by selling very low end, but very robust phones in the hundreds of millions to the 3rd world where a modern smart phone wouldn't survive a day. They make the case that the Internet will be brought to developing nations via cell phones...low end cell phones, not high end smart phones.

It's a failed vision.

It is the vision of yesterday and today, but not of tomorrow. The "low end" of today won't exist tomorrow. Smart phones are advancing at such a pace that in the very near future none of the drawbacks they have today for developing nations (not rugged, very low battery life, high cost, etc) will still hold true. The market for low end voice/text-only cell phones will get taken over by low end smart phones....and chances are they'll be running Android, not Windows 7.

Nokia will be dead in ten years, quite possibly five.

Re:They have only themselves to blame

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously have never used Qt. If you had then you would understand the potential that it has. Check out Qt and QtQuick. You can do amazing things in a few lines of code in QtQuick. There are lots of youtube examples, check it out. One example was a complete graphically rich game, samegame, which is one of the QtQuick examples. Length of source code: 300 lines. Runs on mobiles, windows, linux, not sure about mac. This was an early example, recent stuff is more jaw dropping.

coming from someone living in Finland...

[Anonymous Coward]

... serves them right (posting as AC to not get into trouble).

The 1000 people who staged a walkout in Tampere, Finland were mostly Symbian developers who are protesting/scared for their jobs. As someone who lives in Finland and works with mobile devices for a living, this makes me plain angry. Nokia has 1500+ Symbian developers in Tampere and 500+ in Salo, that's over 2000 developers working on Symbian. What the fuck have you people been doing for all these years? Where are the results? And now that finally the new CEO decided to shake things up before Nokia goes completely tits up, you are protesting? Gee, the bubble you've been living in bursting must've hurt - think of it, Symbian wasn't a good, user- and developer-friendly environment you've brainwashed yourself into thinking it was.

It really was/is cringe-worthy, how out of touch you people were. Not 3 months ago, I was talking to some Nokia developers and they were keeping a straight face while touting the N8 as some kind of an amazing device and downplaying the Apple and Android ecosystem and talking how "Symbian added value to the user-expience". I kid you not!

Re:coming from someone living in Finland...

[68kmac]

Nokia didn't invent Symbian, but it was their decision to use it. Back in the late 1990's, I was involved in a "top secret" project between Nokia and Psion, to bring Psion's EPOC operating system to a Nokia phone which was going to be the successor of the 9110 Communicator. The announcement of Symbian a few months later came as a complete surprise to us: "Oh, that's what we've been working on all the time?"

I still think it made a lot of sense back then. They just lost contact with the market (or maybe reality in general, as you and the GP implied) in the mid-2000's.

Re:Remember Microsoft's earlier smartphone partner

[phantomfive]

HTC was a nothing company that got lucky making a deal with a big partner. They had nowhere to go but up, and nothing Microsoft could take from them.

Nokia is a huge company that is selling its soul to the devil. I'm not talking about Microsoft: they've chosen the route of dying tech giants. They've refused Android because of their patent portfolio. It is one thing for a company to use patents while they continue to innovate, but when they give up innovation to focus on extortion, that's a death deal.

They could have chosen differently: they could have decided to make both Android and WP7 phones, and even continue with Symbian (although Symbian is dying). Samsung makes beautiful Android and WP7 phones. If anything, this deal most resembles SGI, giving up on their own excellent OS to run (what was then pathetic) WindowsNT on their machines. Not long after SGI became a shell of a company, with nothing but a large patent portfolio. RIP SGI. RIP Nokia.