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Nokia Plan B Was Just a Hoax
suraj.sun writes "There's been a lot of chatter about a 'Nokia Plan B' over the past 48 hours — the site was put up by nine young investors who outlined an audacious plan to rally shareholders, get themselves elected onto Nokia's board, and radically change the company's direction by firing Stephen Elop and committing massive resources to MeeGo. There's just one problem, though: the nine young investors don't really exist — according to the last tweet on the @NokiaPlanB Twitter account, it was all a hoax perpetuated by 'one very bored engineer who really likes his iPhone.' Ouch. That explains why the now-defunct site abruptly gave up the cause this morning after just 36 hours of existence."
It was well-informed and humorless. Very Nokia.
Elop described this partnership as making the smartphone market a three horse race. It is starting to be more like a three legged horse race.
With the first Nokia/WP phones slated for 2012, there is ample time for one (if not two) updates for iOS phones and a boat load of Android (especially low cost) devices to hit the market. With no meaningful transition (for both customers and developers) from Symbian to WP, why would anybody buy a high end Symbian device today ?
There has been a lot of chatter about a cheaper iPhone being able to penetrate emerging markets. I suspect unless that device can work without requiring a computer, this will be a non-starter. Android devices have the edge in this regard.
It got around the tech sites cause it was so obviously a much better idea than Nokia Plan A...
Doesn't matter if it was a hoax or not, they would do well to heed it.
- These characters were randomly selected.
Of course. -> http://NokiaPlanA.com
http://www.object404.com
oh, and Nokia Plan S:
Do:
Nokia Plan A, Nokia Plan B, Nokia Plan C, Nokia Plan D, Nokia Plan E, Nokia Plan ES, Nokia Plan ET, Nokia Plan F, Nokia Plan G, Nokia Plan H, Nokia Plan I, Nokia Plan J, Nokia Plan K, Nokia Plan L, Nokia Plan M, Nokia Plan O, Nokia Plan P, Nokia Plan Q, Nokia Plan R, Nokia Plan S, Nokia Plan T, Nokia Plan V, Nokia Plan W, Nokia Plan X, Nokia Plan XP, Nokia Plan Y, Nokia Plan Z, Nokia Plan 0, Nokia Plan 2, Nokia Plan 5, Nokia Plan 9, Nokia Plan 10
Profit!
http://www.object404.com
Get them all from http://NokiaPlanS.com
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
Fake or not, this plan wouldn't even have been feasible in the US were the SEC has completely dismantled shareholder rights. According to the SEC, shareholders have 0 say in what the CEO and board gets paid or even who is on it.
When Obama actually tried to introduce an SEC that would allow shareholders to have a NON-BINDING vote on CEO pay the Republicans screamed bloody murder. Apparently according to Republican philosophy you only have to work hard and actually earn your keep if you aren't already rich. The people who have gotten to the top(often times not even on their own merit) are allowed to plunder the company as they see fit. CEO pay is increasing 2x as fast as the S&P 500 and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it. At least it seems in Finland shareholders have SOME power.
Monstar L
'one very bored engineer who really likes his iPhone.'
An engineer who is
1. bored
2. likes iPhones?
Does not sound like much of an engineer.
The plan is working as intended. Elop doesn't hold a single Nokia share, but is one of biggest shareholders of Microsoft -- trashing the company will make him lose nothing and get a nice severance payout once the investors finally get rid of him. All of his efforts go towards increasing Microsoft's stock.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Why did they have to spend much at all?
Microsoft: "Put Windows Phone on your handsets."
Nokia: "We'd rather not..."
Microsoft: "Sudo put Windows on your handsets."
Nokia: "Okay."
Costs:
License rights to XKCD
Buying Randall Munroe lunch and a free phone
Replacing Ballmer's Chair
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Feasibility in Finland would be more interesting, I think.
Max.
And what EXACTLY were they supposed to do otherwise, hmmm? For all the big talk here nobody seems to want to accept reality. Nokia is bleeding to death, dumb phones are going the way of 8-tracks (even the third world is starting to have home grown smartphones which all predict will kill the dumb phone), android is beyond saturated, MeeGo is a turd, and Apple and HP won't sell iOS and WebOS respectively.
So where EXACTLY does that leave them an alternative? They need a product RIGHT NOW this very minute, they don't have time losing share as quickly as they are to dick around for who knows how long to get MeeGo up to snuff, and NOBODY like Symbian for anything other than dumb phones.
so lets hear it...where were they supposed to go? I'm sure the militants here would have rather they simply close their doors rather than make a deal with "teh evil M$!! ZOMG!" but where EXACTLY could they go? Nobody wants another android, hell there is so many droids on the market now it is frankly saturated. MSFT was willing to spend BILLIONS with a capital B to have Nokia be their hardware division and frees up Nokia to concentrate on hardware, so where EXACTLY is the bad here, other than the usual fanboy "teh evil M$!! ZOMG!!@" bullshit?
It wasn't like the company was hearts and flowers and then MSFT came along, the whole reason they got a new CEO was the company was bleeding out. You know, once upon a time /. was actually NEWS FOR NERDS not conspiracy theorists, and we had long discussions on the merits and disadvantages BASED ON THE TECH. Now the site is becoming Boycott Novell where everything is one giant conspiracy by Gates secretly running Redmond from a large tower that looks suspiciously like Mordor. More and more I'm starting to think the tech guys have been run out of here and been replaced by thousands of these guys.
Disliking WinPhone 7 because of the tech is one thing, from what I've read they still have several niggling bugs to iron out and app switching is hit or miss, but the ZOMG M$!!! ZOMG!" bullshit really is getting old. Is this /. or Boycott Novell?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Port the Android UI over the Symbian kernel. Much as I like Linux as a kernel for a phone it sucks.
That kinda thing is always expensive. They're laying a lot of people off, that saves money in the long run but has huge upfront costs. Especially in a labor friendly jurisdiction like Finland. Figure every person they layoff gets a month of two of severance pay. Probably more in a place like Finland, but at least that. Gotta pay out everyone's accrued vacation (in a country where 6 weeks vacation a year is the norm). With large scale layoffs like this they probably provide a lot of job search assistance and such. In the US, layoffs for a reasonably experienced worker often cost around 3 to 4 months worth of that person's typical monthly cost. I wouldn't be surprised if in Finland it's more like 6 months.
They're probably breaking a lot of contracts with dev shops that were working on MeeGo for them, that costs penalties. They're going to have to replace infrastructure. Ripping out your Linux dev environment and replacing it with a Windows dev environment isn't cheap, even if MS eats most of the software costs. The people they aren't laying off they're going to have retrain. They may have to scrap some hardware designs and start over depending on how similar MeeGo and WP7 are in UI, and hardware support.
Turning it around now, they'd have to undo all the changes they made (incurring all the same costs again), break a contract with Microsoft (sure to be expensive), plus pay a whole new set of realignment costs, becasue "Plan B" didn't call for just backing out of the MS deal but a completely different set of changes.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
And how does a panic switch to WP7 help them now? Since it's a totally new platform to Nokia you can count on it taking them at least 12 months to get their first Windows phone out the door.
And with Symbian oficially declared dead you can count on their smart-phone market share dwindling even faster reaching exactly 0 in the mean time. Talk about loosing market traction, getting any market for their WP7 phone is going to be a uphill battle.
With MeeGo they have the device in the works ready within short, who knows it might even be ready as promised since November last year and Elop delayed it for tactical reasons to make his switch to WP7 seem even more justified.
/greger
Nokia is a world market leader in mobile phones. They were doing not so well, but bleeding to death is quite far from it.
Certainly they were not doing badly enough to warrant outsourcing whole software development out of coutry to Microsoft. By this Nokia has reduced itself to mere commodity hardware manufacturer, no different from LG, RIM and others.
And how to you think that WP7 helps Nokia to keep their domination of low end markets? It doesn't. a) WP7 won't run on such hardware. b) licencing fees are too expensice when every dollar counts. Android however without licencing fees is a viable option to Chinese manufacturers of cheap feature phones and will slowly begin conquering low end markets from s40. Symbian could have been possible contender at low end, but now it is dumped alltogether.
Nokia had a smartphone OS of it's own in Maemo, but they dumped it when it was almost ready and after releasing only one phone on it! Then about a year ago they went on to develop MeeGo instead. Either of these would have been far better choice than WP7.
When publishing the Microsoft deal Elop said that the reason for switching WP7 is that MeeGo is not ready and Symbian is not competitive. How does WP7 remedy this, with no new phones in 2011? Atleast (and with limited resources allocated to it) there is supposedly one MeeGo phone coming out from Nokia this year. Instead of giving up software R&D and laying off thousands of software engineers (and hurting Finnish society in progress) they could have put all these resources to MeeGo and Qt. I think after two years they would have been far better off. Think about it. WP7 is still missing basic features like multitasking and cut & paste, while Google and Apple are actually pushing new concepts to the market. In 2012 when first Nokia phones with WP7 are out WP7 is still playing catch up. How do you think Nokia is going to maintain it's position or even stay as healthy company as their sales crash during in 2011? Afterall who on earth will buy Symbian phones when it's future is doomed and the new Nokia CEO is calling it junk openly.
IMHO this MS deal is almost as good as suicide for Nokia.
As opposed to the previous CEO who presumably owned an awful lot of Nokia stock, but at the same time seemed to spend his entire time on the job increasing the share price of Apple.
Let's get this straight, the iPhone wouldn't be half the success it is if there had been any real competition. It would still have done well because it was a good phone but it did so fantastically well because there was not a single smart phone on the market which didn't suck. Nokia should have had that market, they had the brand reputation, they had the facilities and the talent to do it. Unfortunately every single thing they've made that's in any way complex has sucked, Symbian sucks, MeeGo sucks and is pretty much dead now that Android is on the scene. The big seller of open source for commercial enterprise is free developers. How many people do you think are going to be doing unpaid development on MeeGo rather than Android?
Microsoft needs someone to make hardware for them, and Nokia has the facilities to produce it, and if they haven't all already quit or been sacked they have the expertise to design it to. Yes, in the end Nokia will probably just end up as an independent division of Microsoft who can make hardware without pissing off the regulators, but the alternative is far worse.
then their not overpaid. If they can retain employees, have decent growth, and still pay exorbitant salaries for CEOs then it's okay, QED. Whether my personal opinions follow this concept, or investors are allowed to become aware of breaches of common sense due fraud is a something else, but the logic is clear.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
In related news, HP plans to release a special "Facebook Edition" of the WebOS phone, to be called "Face Palm".
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The source of the stockholders is actually inaccurate. He's not a top holder (only worth a million or so, MS worth billions).
-]Phreak Out[-
Nokia Plan 9
Is this the one from outer space?