Nokia Outsources Symbian OS Work

angry tapir writes "Nokia will outsource its Symbian software activities to Accenture, transferring 3,000 employees to the company in the process, as it moves its focus to making phones running on Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system. The Finnish phone manufacturer will also close some of its research and development sites and eliminate a further 4,000 jobs by the end of next year. Last week Nokia announced the signing of a definitive agreement regarding their global mobile ecosystem partnership."

Comments

We're sorry

[b100dian]

We're sorry Nokia, we don't know of anyone surviving Microsoft deals.

Re:We're sorry

[Tapewolf]

We're sorry Nokia, we don't know of anyone surviving Microsoft deals.

Sybase and Citrix are the only ones that spring to mind. I'd say this one is going to play out more like Sendo, though.

Re:We're sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

HTC?

Re:We're sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

I still cannot understand the deal. What Nokia gains?

The benefit is clear for Microsoft: they get exclusivity with one of the biggest phone makers of the world.

But... what is the real benefit for Nokia?

The CEO argues that they didn't want to be a "me too" Android developer. But, guess what? Microsoft doesn't allow companies to customize their user interface. That means that Nokia's Win7 phones will be exactly the same as HTC's and Motorola's Win7 phones. With Android, at least, Nokia could customize it.

Or perhaps I missed the part where Microsoft would also offer exclusivity to Nokia?

Re:We're sorry

[am 2k]

Apple comes to mind, although that deal ended pretty quickly, since it was meant as a psychological statement, not as a real business agreement.

Re:We're sorry

[daem0n1x]

I don't think there's any benefit for Nokia. Looks like Microsoft and Accenture planted Trojan horses inside the Nokia board to help them bleed it dry. It's not like it never happened before, specially in government.

Re:We're sorry

[Owy]

Only the 1 billion $ they received from Micro$oft for the deal...

Re:We're sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Intel?

Re:We're sorry

[westlake]

We're sorry Nokia, we don't know of anyone surviving Microsoft deals.

You mean like Ford and Toyota? Microsoft and Toyota form new telematics company

Re:We're sorry

[Mikkeles]

When a company starts shedding employees (Our Most Valuable Resource (TM)) like a Labrador Retriever sheds hair, it's pretty well the start of the end.

Re:We're sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

I still cannot understand the deal. What Nokia gains?

The benefit is clear for Microsoft: they get exclusivity with one of the biggest phone makers of the world.

But... what is the real benefit for Nokia?

The CEO argues that they didn't want to be a "me too" Android developer. But, guess what? Microsoft doesn't allow companies to customize their user interface. That means that Nokia's Win7 phones will be exactly the same as HTC's and Motorola's Win7 phones. With Android, at least, Nokia could customize it.

Or perhaps I missed the part where Microsoft would also offer exclusivity to Nokia?

Though damn good hardware, Nokia had the by far most expensive and least successful software R&D. They get to rid themselves an extremely costly and at the same time dying (even if big, the trend was extremely negative) platform and ecosystem.

As reported Google did try hard to win this deal too, all up to the end, the reasons Nokia have given for their choice was that they saw greater opportunity to differentiate with the Microsoft partnership, and saw a greater value and role for Nokia than in the Android ecosystem. Only time will tell what that means, nobody here knows. But we do know it has been said that allthough not exclusivity, Nokia will get very special privileges on customizing Phone7, contributing their own services to be included in the platform, and influence on future development of the OS.

Some people make a big deal of the billion dollar figure. That is not very insightful, it is not really a significant figure for any of these companies in this context. Microsoft spent half of that on their Phone7 launch campaign for crying. This is decided by how they see the long term value, and though we do have a lot of armchair analyst here at Slashdots with deep insights and modelling of that, I would say it's impossible to say if this is a smart move by Nokia or not before we see the results.

Re:We're sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Nokia gains the front seat in bitch slapping iPhone into yesterdays news. Don't underestimate Nokia, they are for the lack of a better word, the IE6's of the phone market.

Re:We're sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Or the takeover of US business practices....
I am pretty sure the current CEO will get the golden parachute in about three years and Nokia is in the gutters.

Re:We're sorry

[FaxeTheCat]

Like Dell?

Re:We're sorry

[GNious]

But... what is the real benefit for Nokia?

4 Billion Finmark

Re:We're sorry

[TheRaven64]

I still cannot understand the deal. What Nokia gains?

First, they gain a billion dollars. Then they get to concentrate on what they're good at (hardware development) and outsource the software to a company with a proven track record of developing software that people buy. Remember that Nokia has never been very strong on the software side[1]. They bought Symbian and Qt, they didn't create either in house, and both projects ended up with a mess due to poor management.

[1] Actually, that's not quite fair. They're very good on the embedded software side, where they have very strict hardware constraints and simpler requirements. They are not very good at taking advantage of the better hardware.

Re:We're sorry

[postmortem]

That means that Nokia's Win7 phones will be exactly the same as HTC's and Motorola's Win7 phones.

Maybe not - everybody but Nokia soon will jump off Win7 phone disaster train. Nokia might very well be only company using Win7 phone.

Re:We're sorry

[erroneus]

The "they" you speak of does not include the majority of employees and their families that are having their lives changed for the worse. That's the real tragedy and the people we are saying "we're sorry" to. Those with golden parachutes who helped to make it all happen will, of course benefit from all of this and will be celebrated as brilliant business men by their peers.

It's just a huge shame that in order for those few to benefit, so many others have to suffer. It must be quite a burden on those few to know what they are doing to so many in exchange for personal gain. Oh wait, there I go thinking like myself instead of remembering that these are the actions of sociopaths by definition. They simply don't care who they hurt along the way.

Re:We're sorry

[Jeppe Salvesen]

Nokia gains nothing. But Nokia started to lose a few years ago when they simply refused to realize how the iPhone was going to change everything. They should in fact have been the one developing the iPhone- they have been distributing phones capable of running apps since .. I dunno, 2004-2005? Somewhere in the S60-series. Of course, they were too inept to realize how apps must be distributed: Easily installable.

It is not accidental that Nokia created something great but failed to capitalize upon what they created: Nokia is an engineering-oriented company with a poor understanding of business and usability. They created a good start, but failed to realize what they had created. Allegedly the Symbian development kit was also rather complex, unfriendly and complex. So, a complete lack of imagination and focus has ensured Google and Apple has killed Nokia's dominance by extending Nokia's ideas with a solid development kit and usability improvements. Solid engineering alone is not enough when you interact with "real" people.

Re:We're sorry

[erroneus]

iPhone will wither way on its own. The iPhone has lost its shiny-newness already. When the white phones came out, I saw no lines outside of the Apple store where I live. Many iPhone users I know have given up their iPhone in favor of android.... admittedly, some because of AT&T and their tactics, but they didn't move to Verizon so they could keep using iPhone either. The iPhone "surge" is over. People know what it is, what it can do, and more importantly, what it can't or "won't be allowed" to do.

Nokia Windows phones aren't going to bitch slap anyone. Microsoft is too late to the party and too slow to adapt. Of the 250 people where I work, exactly one person I know had ever bought a Windows phone and she kept it for about a week. That's not a large enough sampling to suggest that is what we can expect all over, but as it is now, it doesn't paint a nice picture. (The rest of the people are using iPhone, various androids and blackberries where iPhone is a close second to Androids and Blackberries not far behind that... the ratios are all very close.)

Re:We're sorry

[biglig2]

Man, I loved my Sendo X. Lovely phone.

Unusable broken radio, of course, and the delay of getting the OS updates through the carrier meant Microsoft had bankrupted them before they fixed it, but still...

Re:We're sorry

[Lumpy]

"The CEO argues that they didn't want to be a "me too" Android developer."

So the "EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!" mantra of Microsoft is a better choice? That is a load of BS.

The CEO wants Microsoft because of the large amount of money he will be getting out of making sure the deal happens. Anything else he claims is simply hogwash.

Re:We're sorry

[blind biker]

Nokia may really not survive this caliber of a corporate psychopath

But it'll be good for him! As always.

Re:We're sorry

[LordLucless]

with a proven track record of developing software that people buy

How many people do you know with a WinCE (or whatever their last name was) phone? If they wanted proven track record, they would have gone with Android, which is the only option with a significant market share atm (I doubt Apple's going to licence them iOS). Windows mobile platform is essentially non-existent at the moment.

Re:We're sorry

[faichai]

So having worked for Nokia previously (actually Symbian and then we got bought) I think the basic problem that they are trying to resolve is the sheer amount of dead weight the have in the organisaiton. There is a reason they have the most expensive and least productive R&D operation on the planet and that is because they get so little out of each employee. Most employees are jobsworths simply doing the minimum they can get away with without being fired.

Think about it, all those employees, and they couldn't be co-ordinated to create a winning platform. Whilst there is definitely a degree of management failure, there is also a severe lack of personal responsibility and accountability at the lowest levels of the organisation. Moreover, with the long running drip feed of redundancies over the last few years, most of the talented, motivated engineers have left.

The net result is that this has left a big soup of shit, that they call an R&D operation. I think that Elop has done the right thing by clearing the decks. Obviously a shame for some of the people, but life moves on. Once most of the existing people have gone, and legal obligations with regards to re-hiring roles you've made redundant have passed, I think Nokia will start re-building their R&D from the ground up to be more dynamic and more responsive to the market.

Jury is still out on weather the MS deal is the right thing, and it certainly has the smell of Elop being exposed to a single ecosystem for so long that he wasn't really able to properly evaluate alternatives, but it is probably worth a try in the face of Android genericism. Although given Microsoft's double-take on Silverlight recently it's already starting to look a bit wonky.

Interesting times.

Re:We're sorry

[tripleevenfall]

The flip side of that is that it's been sadly obvious for a long time that Symbian was going to be the next casualty in the marketplace. At some point people are contributing to these life issues themselves by choosing to place their hopes on the future of Symbian. Not a good bet.

Re:We're sorry

[tripleevenfall]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Windows Phone is never going to eclipse iOS in the mobile space.

Sorry to have to put on my Captain Obvious cape.

Re:We're sorry

[tripleevenfall]

Not just WinCE but the prior Windows Phone systems were just dire.

WP7 is years late and several dollars short at imitating Apple.

Re:We're sorry

[tripleevenfall]

Nokia can't sell phones in the United States anymore because they don't have a mobile OS that anyone wants. Selling their soul to Ballmer gets them back into the US market. They'll be in the major carriers' stores, and sell phones because of it. Not that hard to fathom...

Re:We're sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. It amazes me the hubris of companies that think they can actually "partner" with MS and somehow come out better for it. Despite many many outcries from the community and people who knew better, RIP Novell.

Re:We're sorry

[Hognoxious]

Nokia might very well be only company using Win7 phone.

No doubt they'll spin that as having exclusivity.

"We're not surrounded, we're operating on interior lines."
    --
    GW Custer.

Re:We're sorry

[SerpentMage]

Thank-you... Somebody actually has some business understanding!

Look at the fine details of the deal. Nokia gets to customize the OS. It's THEIR'S! Nobody got such a sweet deal with Window Phones. Microsoft in this deal forced vendors to manufacture to certain specs, Nokia has a "got out of jail card".

What people also fail to realize is that Nokia software SUCKS! Not just a little bit, but a whole lot! They had oodles of good software and what did they do with it? Nothing, nada, zip! Of course many argue it was the strong Symbian contingent within Nokia that killed things. I could buy that as the Windows enterprise within Microsoft is very very very strong.

I actually think that with this deal Nokia will do very very well. Nokia builds GOOD hardware! And they know how to build stylish hardware. With this deal they get to focus on that, and only that! Go figure do what you are strong in...

Re:We're sorry

[Hognoxious]

outsource the software to a company with a proven track record of developing software that people buy.

But not out of choice. The only times when it wasn't difficult to buy a PC without it preinstalled were when it was impossible.

Also, their record on low power devices.like phones & PDAs is patchy to say the least.

I'm not sure what problem they're trying to fix, but made-up-word-with-a-greater-than-sign-on-top aren't the solution.

If you have one doubt do the needful and revert.

Re:We're sorry

[Desler]

Yeah, I mean how many people remember that long dead chipmaker called "Intel". It's almost impossible to find any PC in this day-and-age with that uses a CPU from that long-dead company.

Re:We're sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Sifting through the mountain of corpses, you're bound to find a few that got away.

Microsoft knows the value of friends and real friends. Friends: they use once then throw away. Real friends: they can use over and over again. For the time being, Intel is in the second camp. That will change.

Re:We're sorry

[Desler]

Yes, Windows 8 runs on ARM as well as x86. So what? Microsoft has had versions of Windows running on ARM now for 15 years (WinMo and WinCE) and yet clearly Intel is still alive.

Re:We're sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope more than one person is posting with your account. I can't imagine that much stupidity coming from one individual.

Re:We're sorry

[oakgrove]

Microsoft has had versions of Windows running on ARM now for 15 years

Yeah, I know! I love running Windows on my phone. I was just about to edit some photos with Photoshop on my HTC HD2 running Windows Mobi... wait

Re:We're sorry

[tibit]

I think it's all in how you play your cards. I know of one company that came out extremely well by innovating on MS platforms. It's all in the value you provide. Namely Beckhoff Automation. I have nothing to do with them, just a happy user. It's perhaps an unknown name in the software development world, but they are nevertheless top-notch innovators in the automation business. Their main claim to fame is in deciding about 2 decades ago that industrial controllers and PLCs must be built on the PC platform to stay competitive. So, while mostly everyone else was thinking there was value in doing stuff on custom hardware that was outdated pretty much the day it was released, they chose to go with a PC. These days they offer a line of 100% in-house designed Industrial PCs (IPC) -- and I mean they design their own motherboards, control the BIOS, assemble the darn things locally and not in China, etc. Their PLC software platform, called TwinCAT, runs side-by-side with bog-standard Windows and Windows CE, and offers hard-realtime performance (think of a 62.5us input-processing-output cycle on contemporary hardware). They ship their hardware with XP Embedded or CE preinstalled.

It's an interesting experience, to say the least, when you simply install TwinCAT (a practically unlimited trial is available -- try it out!) on a bog-standard clunker Dell with Windows XP and you can easily run a 500us PLC cycle, just like that.

Their newest push is to standardize their development environment. TwinCAT 2, the current shipping version, has one of those me-too IDEs for IEC 61131-3 programming languages. For TwinCAT 3 (entering a closed beta AFAIK), they went ahead with basing it on the Vistual Studio shell, and in addition to 61131-3 languages you can run C and C++ code in the realtime environment. They have pretty much leveraged the hell out of MS technology and they now ride the gravy train. I can't help but think that they must be doing it right, and everyone else who got burned by MS just didn't have a clue to begin with.

Re:We're sorry

[oakgrove]

There is a difference between writing a plugin for VS and partnering with Microsoft. If you are thinking the former is what we are talking about then the conversation loses all meaning as you could make the argument that simply using Office is "partnering". I'm happy for Beckhoff Automation but comparing their experiences with Novell, Nokia, Sendo, et al is a bit of a reach.

Re:We're sorry

[h4rr4r]

Sybase got screwed hard on that deal. Sure they survived but they lost huge future markets for their server.

Re:We're sorry

[operator_error]

Mostly, you are referring to Finland, or at least a huge chunk of the Finnish economy.

Re:We're sorry

[h4rr4r]

Until MS wants into that market. There is no reason to use windows for such a thing. Sure standard PC hardware was a good idea, and maybe fi they started out in the 3.1 days it was a good idea. Today that is just foolishness.

Re:We're sorry

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I've seen things go the other way for the iPhone.

My tech friends who can't do what they did before on their android phones jailbroke. My nontech friends just don't care. Plus they have the excuse of wasting more time with Angry Birds.

The reality is, they're doing rather well for themselves.

Re:We're sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

The "they" you speak of does not include the majority of employees and their families that are having their lives changed for the worse. That's the real tragedy and the people we are saying "we're sorry" to. Those with golden parachutes who helped to make it all happen will, of course benefit from all of this and will be celebrated as brilliant business men by their peers.

It's just a huge shame that in order for those few to benefit, so many others have to suffer. It must be quite a burden on those few to know what they are doing to so many in exchange for personal gain. Oh wait, there I go thinking like myself instead of remembering that these are the actions of sociopaths by definition. They simply don't care who they hurt along the way.

What would your alternative be? Nokia had as many people working on its phone software as Apple have to develop all Apple products! That is crazy, and it was in no way sustainable and would ultimately have led to Nokia having to close the door on all their employees.

Re:We're sorry

[tibit]

Um, Beckhoff is a gold microsoft partner, and they are completely dependent on Microsoft technology: with leverage comes dependence and even vulnerability.

Again, it's all in how you play your cards. Beckhoff has bet big time on the PC platform and the Microsoft OS technology as a key component to that, and they came out on the top. Nokia is making pretty much an identical bet. If they come out on the bottom, I'd tend to think it's their own doing. Of course Elop at the helm makes things somewhat shaky: Beckhoff is a privately owned company, and I think their success is mainly because they owe nothing to nobody. I think that Trolltech's success was due to the same reason (private ownership), as soon as it became part of a publicly traded company things got somewhat uncertain.

Re:We're sorry

[guruevi]

Sybase lost a lot of business when they were duped by Microsoft to sharing the code after they didn't get any revenue sharing from Microsoft and Microsoft later undercut them for the EXACT SAME PRODUCT. They were actually going down the crapper until recently when they expanded their business into the mobile space.

Citrix is one of the few that survived because they held their ground and held true to their products and customers. Microsoft was never able to make inroads into Citrix's business because they built their own Terminal Services instead of buying/licensing it from Citrix and it was (and still is) way inferior to Citrix's solution.

Re:We're sorry

[donaldm]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Windows Phone is never going to eclipse iOS in the mobile space.

Sorry to have to put on my Captain Obvious cape.

My family, that is wife and two sons all have iPhones while I have the HTC Desire HD which suits me file since it is just like working on a Linux system. Copying and setting up Music is a snap since I just mount the phone as a USB device and copy files from my PC which is Linux however MS Windows or a Mac would work just as easily as well. As for the iPhone you really need the iTunes program which does not run under Linux (surprise, surprise.) to transfer and maintain files (unless you unlock it) and it annoys me having to bring up my virtual machine to maintain my wife's phone even though it only takes about 30 seconds to do so. Setting up a non standard ring tone IMHO is a real pain on an iPhone while it is simplicity itself to do this on an Android phone. As for the Win 7 phone I have not played with one so I cannot comment.

looking at the interfaces of the Android and iPhones there is allot of similarities so it is very easy to to switch between them since IMHO the both have really nice and intuitive interfaces even though they are different. Looking at the Win 7 phone (ie HTC desire) interface I am not impresses since it appears Microsoft thinks we all should have twitter, Xbox and Facebook accounts which is great for those that do but totally useless to people like myself who don't need or want that. In addition IMHO the interface appears childish however I am sure many people (at least those that would buy a phone with Win 7) will disagree with me.

Could not agree more on the Captain Obvious cape ;)

Re:We're sorry

[oakgrove]

Um, Beckhoff is a gold microsoft partner,

Looking at this company and then looking at Nokia and saying they're relationships map 1:1 vis a vis Microsoft because they're both "partners" is laughable.

tl;dr
"gold microsoft partner" = pure marketing spiel.

Re:We're sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe maybe not. Consider price point as being a big issue. iPhone like most of Apples products doesn't hit the bottom end of the market or the top, it's snuggled in between and the price points on their low end versions to high end versions are not too dissimilar.

Nokia pretty much owns the cheapo phone market with LG and Motorola. If they can package a phone that has the feature set of an iPhone but not worry about application support it's a no brainer. You need to see the LG GT540, for it's price it's got Android 2.4, a 3mpx camera, sd card slot. Granted the iPhone is a much jazzier but with cheap hardware and good application support it doesn't take much to make the iPhone obsolete.

Nokia held 43% of the phone market in 2009 it had the best distribution agreements in place, telcos will have no problem to welcome them back with open arms if they can provide the same infrastructure and support Apple has. I hate to say it but MS branded software gives them that and then some.

Re:We're sorry

[tibit]

It's not foolishness. Everybody who does it otherwise (using linux, other realtime OSes, custom hardware) shows over and over that Beckhoff did the right thing. They are leveraging the virtually infinite OS R&D budget of Microsoft, and similarly huge R&D budgets of PC platform designers (CPU and chipset makers).

If you buy almost any other PLC platform, you're constrained by the hardware offered by the vendor. It used to be 8051 derivatives, and some still are offered like that, others went the DSP or ARM route. Yet, if you want a system that can talk to literally tens of thousands of I/O points and still offer stupidly fast cycle times, you just get a high-end PC, slap TwinCAT on it, and off you go. You don't even have to worry about partitioning the system. Due to the way Beckhoff designed their realtime Ethernet-based communication bus (EtherCAT), you can trivially have full redundancy at the network and PLC level. If you have a machine where all you need is a PLC and an operator panel, the cost proposition of going with a bog-standard OS that anyone can develop an HMI app for, then adding a software component to turn it into a PLC, cannot be beat.

As for MS "wanting" into that market: remember that a PLC still has to talk to the I/O, and that's where Beckhoff is also a leader. If MS released their own PLC software platform even today, they'd be at the mercy of everyone else as far as I/O goes. Beckhoff is vertically integrated in that respect: they offer their own IPCs, their own PLC platform, their own I/O that's based on standards and interfaces with almost every other legacy industrial bus out there, their own servo drives and actuators, and they are constantly expanding. Vertical integration has worked very well for them for the same reason it works very well for SpaceX. MS has a huge barrier to entry to become a vertically integrated PLC vendor, and it'd need to become one to really compete in this business. It's not like Boeing or Grumman can magically outdo SpaceX: in fact, they can't, because they lack integration.

Re:We're sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not foolishness.

Yes, actually it is. Grow big enough for MS to give a shit and see what happens.

Re:We're sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

"I feel happy!"

Re:We're sorry

[gbjbaanb]

not so, Nokia software was very, very good indeed. But you're obviously comparing everything to a single bar when you need to differentiate between what an OS that requires a very fast CPU and lots of RAM and an OS that requires a slow CPU and tiny amount of RAM can do.

So Nokia had good software, they also had good hardware. The trouble is that they became to big and reliant on their old ways - the incredibly successful Symbian software and phones and simply failed to transition to the newer opportunities - probably because they were too big by then to deal with any different markets. A smaller Nokia *could* have released Maemo, and marketed it properly and become possibly the #3 smartphone manufacturer in the world if not the #2.

but they didn't, their management couldn't do it, and so now they're just another phone reseller for MS. However, there is 1 interesting thing here - if Nokia gets a special customise WinPho7 card to play, where does that leave all the other manufacturers? It'll probably leave Nokia as the *only* Windows phone manufacturer. Chances are the entire windows phone development group could end up 'outsourced' to Nokia entirely - why not, if they are building OSes designed only for Nokia hardware. I can't see the OS group going in one direction and the hardware group going in another in different companies to be a very efficient or successful synergy.

Re:We're sorry

[IICV]

As reported Google did try hard to win this deal too, all up to the end, the reasons Nokia have given for their choice was that they saw greater opportunity to differentiate with the Microsoft partnership, and saw a greater value and role for Nokia than in the Android ecosystem. Only time will tell what that means, nobody here knows.

From Wikipedia:

A Canadian citizen, Elop is the first non-Finn to be named CEO of Nokia. He replaced Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo in this position on September 21, 2010. ...

Before starting at Nokia, Elop worked for Microsoft from January 2008 to September 2010 as the head of the Business Division, responsible for the Microsoft Office line of products, and as a member of the company's senior leadership team.

From Wikipedia:

On 11 February 2011, Nokia announced a partnership with Microsoft which will mean most future Nokia smart phones will be powered by the Windows Phone 7 operating system.

I'm pretty sure that even if Google had offered free blowjobs and an all-you-can-eat heroin buffet, they would not have been able to win this deal.

Re:We're sorry

[gbjbaanb]

and I can point you at many Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese manufacturers that have built businesses around SoCs running Linux. I was just explaining media streaming boxes to my friend yesterday - I think they *all* run linux, even my TV runs Linux (as it has a big GPL notice in the menu).

So 1 manufacturer standardised on Windows PCs, they could so easily have gone with mass-produced ARM or MiPS based solutions and produced the same quality of product, but without any per-item licencing fees to worry about. I feel they would have done just as well going this route instead as they sound sensible company. The fact they went with Microsoft products is just a coincidence, not a contributory factor.

Re:We're sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly! and the software support that Windows will offer means they can compete directly with iPhone.

Android lacks the support capability just like its father OS Linux. Android will go down the same vien as Linux distros each handset with their own distro and forked code. Windows keeps things simple, plus its native to MS server technology, sharepoint, exchange, dynmaics, windows network, so on and so fourth.

Windows will let them take on the RIM and also sell to the teenie boppers that want the facebook crap.

Nokia focuses on bundling it. Carriers will love them for it. iPhone simply replaced Nokia as the preferred device It's not going to be all that hard for Nokia to reclaim a podium they occupied for a very long time.

Re:We're sorry

[losfromla]

I'm not entirely sure that phone cost is a big issue. I hesitate to buy a smart phone for myself because I don't want the $40/mo outlay that I'd have to put out on verizon. The cheapo phones are still ~$100 subsidized price and the android mid-ranges ~$200, so, I think that for most people who can afford a data plan, the cost of the phone hardware itself is not much of a driver.

Re:We're sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Or about 945,580,000 in Canadian dollars.

Re:We're sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Give it time.

Re:We're sorry

[udoschuermann]

I think Nokia is Finnished.

Re:We're sorry

[bingoUV]

if Nokia gets a special customise WinPho7 card to play, where does that leave all the other manufacturers? It'll probably leave Nokia as the *only* Windows phone manufacturer

Why is that? HTC (and everyone else) can customize Android, but still there is a market for un-customized Android, as shown by appreciation of Nexus series (though lack of sales channels caused it to not have many users).

Why do you think Nokia customization of Microsoft's OS, without many internal details shared by Microsoft (as MS does to all its desktop/laptop software partners) will undoubtedly be better than stock Windows phone 7? When has Nokia, let alone a Nokia minus thousands of employees, ever shown great expertise to customize a closed OS blob?

Re:We're sorry

[tibit]

Sigh. IPCs themselves are a big part of Beckhoff's business, and with few and between exceptions every single one they sell has a copy of Windows installed on it. MS could terminate OEM licensing agreements if they wanted to cut ties.

Pretty much their entire PLC business hinges on TwinCAT, and that's 100% dependent on Windows. If MS wanted to cut the ties or somehow curtail their access to the Windows platform, Beckhoff would be bankrupt in short order. Of course Beckhoff is no Nokia size wise -- with a USD 0.5E9 turnaround, about 1% of that of Nokia's.

Yet it's the same kind of dependence that Nokia will have with MS: a make-or-break type of a deal. If MS wanted to sink Nokia or Beckhoff, they could do so quite easily.

Re:We're sorry

[tibit]

The deal is that for Beckhoff, like for many other PC vendors, Windows is a way to sell their hardware (IPCs, I/O, drives, etc). I don't see MS taking over PC manufacturers, yet that's precisely what you imply here. It'd make just as much sense for MS to take over Beckhoff.

Now it's true that Beckhoff does sell their TwinCAT software, but if you get it with their IPC you get it for a 90% discount over a license for a "random" PC that you happen to have. So I don't think that for Beckhoff their own software sales are a huge part of the business. The software is a key enabler, but financially there's not all that much there directly. When you buy a low-end IPC from Beckhoff, about 10% of its price would ordinarily be TwinCAT, and likely no more than about 2.5% the Windows XP or CE OEM license. It's significantly less for higher-end IPCs (say 4% total). If MS wanted to get more money out of this market, they could simply increase the license fee they charge for their OEM licenses, and they have not much headroom there either. There's only so much that this market will bear.

Re:We're sorry

[tibit]

Nobody cares that a streaming box or a Sony TV in my living room runs linux. It's a closed-box system. The end users and OEMs don't touch it and don't develop for it. At most they have access to a factory setup menu to tweak things. With PLCs, either your end user or the OEM needs to develop on your platform. And, due to legacy requirements, you need to support way more hardware than just a network card. There are various bus interface cards (for sercos II, profibus, canopen, etc), various HMI elements on the HMI itself (lcd displays, panels, buttons), etc.

The issue is that the industry is pretty much Windows centric. Nobody gets fired over buying MS and all that jazz -- this is especially true in the automation industry, where all the tools run on Windows (you're lucky if they run well) and nothing else. A typical "small" machine builder may get a control panel IPC from Beckhoff, run TwinCAT as the PLC platform, and do their own HMI in Visual Basic or .net. Whatever you say about it, it's only very recently that you have any sort of a semi-decent native, eat-my-own-dogfood development environment that runs on Linux: namely Qt creator. The only other alternative I can think of is to develop for JVM using Eclipse and use SWT for the GUI, but this comes with its own bag of problems.

I do of course agree that it'd be very nice if Beckhoff maintained their own realtime extension of the linux kernel, but they'd either have to keep it a binary blob and face deployment woes (compiled kernel-specific shims, separate distribution since it's non GPL-compliant) or, if they'd open-source it, they'd lose a lot of competitive advantage. Everyone and their dog is looking for a simple and cheap way to reliably develop and run IEC-61131 on standard PC hardware. There would be red ink flowing on their balance sheet if someone suddenly had an open-source replacement for TwinCAT (including support for all of the PC-attached hardware like bus interface cards etc).

Re:We're sorry

[gbjbaanb]

you're wrong there - they may be closed-box systems for the end user, but they are supplied to the 3rd party with the OS and toolchain ready to be customised.

These base manufacturers provide the base platform which is taken by these companies (eg Western Digital, Raidsonic, Asus, Syabas etc) who add their own interfaces and customisations to differentiate themselves in the market. Once you look under the hood of these things, you find they all have the same video processor and chipset. (well, there's about 2 or 3 different base manufacturers for these devices).

That's just those for an example, all the others are the same - base platform SoC purchased in bulk and customised by a company who then sells them to consumers. The same applies to a lot of other stuff that are built into closed boxes - they're still built into that by a 'higher level' manufacturer.

Linux has had a lot of GUI tools for a very long time, you're showing your ignorance if you don't even know about Athena widgets! (used for Unix GUIs since 1988 or so) but then don't forget a lot of GUI devices in this area might not even have a traditional screen so a VB GUI isn't really going to be of any use.

See, in the world of embedded devices, usually those put together as cheaply as possible (ie everything nowadays :( ) then Linux is the de-facto standard. After all, who'd want to build a brand new door lock control system themselves when they can just buy a Freescale microcontroller and modify its software using the supplied tools (in this case Codewarrior IDE)

I think you need to find out a lot more of this area, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at what is out there. The world only runs Windows in a relatively small marketplace.

Re:We're sorry

[gbjbaanb]

I think its plain that if Nokia gets to customise the OS for their needs (either by themselves or by setting requirements to Microsoft devs) then the other manufacturers will be at a huge competitive disadvantage. I think they'll look at their current sales figures for WP7 and just get out of it. Microsoft has said that they will share the internal details with Nokia so they can develop better features than they'd otherwise be allowed to have.

Nokia undoubtedly had some very good coders - they make Symbian back in the day (even if it has certain ... quirks that made sense back when phones were really resource constrained that don't make as much sense today) and they made Maemo which by all accounts is an absolutely stunning OS. If they can get rid of their management and become a lot more 'agile' then I think they will be able to do really good work with WP7. though, that does depend if political issues don't come between them and the original devs back in Redmond. What's the chances that the 'NIH' syndrome will kill off a lot of the useful collaboration they might otherwise have had?

Re:We're sorry

[tibit]

I don't even know where to begin. If I buy a Sony TV, even if I were to built it in, I don't know, into a yacht (I'm an OEM, not end user), you think I'll be provided by Sony with any sort of an SDK? Or if I buy some music streaming box, will anyone give me an SDK for it? Haven't you been reading about the Roku brouhaha?

When I get a PC-based PLC I'm not getting any sort of a base platform in the sense of a SoC -- I'm getting something that has pretty much everything but my value added already on it. It's something that can talk to thousands (I kid you not) different pieces of hardware from a hundred vendors or so, communicating on up to a dozen incompatible network technologies, out-of-the-box. That is very different from what you get with a SoC + generic SDK.

As for Linux GUI: don't get me started about Athena. Of course I know about those legacy technologies. And truth be told, I'd much rather program to a bare winapi or to VCL from the times of Delphi 1 than to, say, XT or any other low-level C APIs from the X11 heyday. If you expect that machine builders would be keen on embracing Athena, OpenMotif or any such thing: they'd laugh you out of the room. It's too much work for too little benefit. It'd be almost easier to code the UI from scratch, given that machines have rather fixed-format UI where you don't often need movable windows and similar desktop commodities.

I am fully aware of various uses of Linux. Yet in the PLC, automation and even non-massive (forget LHC for a moment) research data acquisition/processing world, the only widely deployed non-proprietary OS that runs on ARM and ia32 platforms comes from Redmond. There's no way for a company like Beckhoff (or even National Instruments for that matter) to just dump everything and switch everyone to Linux -- it makes no economic sense for them. They and their customers have made huge investments in the Windows-based technology. And I just can't see what difference would it make if the underlying platform was Linux -- given that, at the end of the day, a kernel is a kernel -- assuming that somehow, by magic, Mono would reach parity with current .Net runtime.

Guess what, people don't develop on a bare kernel, and even high-level toolkits like Qt may not be enough. The customers would face big steps when they'd have to interoperate with any software not bundled with the PLC: if you buy a piece of a machine that requires custom software for maintenance/setup, that software runs (if poorly) on Windows and there the story ends. It may be a sad state of affairs, but there's nothing wrong with Beckhoff sticking with what's common in their market, and -- given their financial situation -- one can hardly disagree with them. Future-prospects-wise they are in a much better shape than Nokia.

Re:We're sorry

[tibit]

The OS licensing fees are noise when it comes to machine building, so I wouldn't worry about that. What counts is the functionality that you get with your OS, and there Windows is pretty much a winner. Beckhoff has leveraged the fact that the PC platform generally runs on Redmond-originating OSes. They were targeting the PC platform, and the mainstream OS was part of the platform, and pretty much stays so. The fact that they embraced the whole platform, not just its hardware, is the primary contributor to their success.

The fact that you can get a bog-standard, boring office PC and within a couple of minutes start prototyping a PLC program that can control a bunch of servo drives with shorter than 1ms update cycles, communicating via a bog-standard Intel network card, is not to be dismissed. Maybe you should try it one day for yourself.

Re:We're sorry

[jawahar]

Nokia feared Google

Google = Android + Nexus + Cell phone carrier

Re:We're sorry

[bingoUV]

Your first paragraph seems a re-iteration of your earlier points, second one seems to be trying to give a reason for it. Correct me if I am wrong in this.

1. Nokia never made Symbian.
2. It can be argued that as long as Symbian was relatively independent (48% owned by Nokia, rest by Samsung, SonyEricsson etc), Symbian was doing well. Once under Nokia, not so well. That is when Symbian marketshare started decelerating and then plummeting.
3. "Microsoft has said that they will share the internal details" is completely different from them actually sharing. If a company bases its business model on good faith in Microsoft, God help it.
4. The good coders may not be in Nokia any more after the huge layoffs. Note that blanket layoffs shows enormous disrespect to employees, so even high-performance employees are likely to quit.
5. Nokia has never yet demonstrated their expertise in customizing closed blobs of OS like MS win phone 7 is likely to be.
6. Even if Nokia had demonstrated any such expertise, this is a completely new Nokia from top to bottom. So a repetition of similar success is far from guaranteed.
7. Competitive landscape is a lot different now from "back in the day". Nokia has never demonstrated an ability to survive in a marketplace like today's.
8. Creating a stunning mobile OS is no guarantee of (at least immediate) success as demonstrated by Maemo, HP WebOS, RIM QNX etc. All these OSes got excellent expert reviews, today having negligible market share. Android and iOS, with all their defects, are ruling.

After all these, Nokia's success from "customizing" Win Phone 7 is at best suspect. Far from the certainty you make it out to be.

Re:We're sorry

[gbjbaanb]

fair enough - but my comment is really to answer the parent's post that basically said Nokia was useless and couldn't do anything right.

Yes, I think it is quite possible that the new Nokia under Mr Elop's rule will be a completely different thing to what it was - Microsoft's new bitch may just turn into a reseller and then get dropped when WP7 still fails to sell enough.

Don't forget WP7 has had great reviews too, yet has negligible market share.

Re:We're sorry

[gbjbaanb]

when you get a PC-based PLC you are getting a base kit, just like the Linux-based SoCs or microcontrollers I gave you a link to. These have pretty much everything but your value added on to it. They even give you compilers and IDEs for free - unlike your PC-based stuff, so I guess you don't get as much as you say. Nearly all embedded stuff talks its own protocols anyway, so I'm sure that you can get IPX support on your PC isn't a big deal anyway - and guess what, Linux based stuff gets to talk a lot more protocols than you think - all that stuff Windows didn't want to support anymore still gets supported in Linux.

I don't care about Beckhoff, I was just educating you that there are more companies out there doing better things with Linux based embedded stuff than you know. These guys do more with them, cheaper and more cost-effectively than any Windows-based system. That's all. You should try them sometime 'cos you'll be surprised how effective they are.

Re:We're sorry

[tibit]

When you're getting a PC-based PLC you're not getting "a base kit". You're getting, by my guesstimate, a software package that cost about $100M to develop over the years. That's where the difference is. I don't care about a C/C++ IDE, that's a commodity these days. When all you get is a bare Windows or Linux development platform, there's no way to have it talk to industrial hardware out of the box, and that's where the buck stops. You need a software development platform that can actually get your code to talk to hardware over various protocols and interfaces. Heck, you need various APIs just to have your code not end up an unmaintainable mess (read some of Miro Samek's articles to know why "the way it's typically done" is not the right way).

I've looked around and none of that functionality is available for Linux as an integrated, out-of-the-box package that I can just take and use. Moreover, you have to interoperate with available software that you don't really want to buy a separate piece of hardware to run on -- that's all the stuff that comes from third parties and runs on nothing but Windows. And that's where the real value of Windows is: it lets you leverage plenty of 3rd party software that doesn't exist for anything but Windows.

I am familiar with what is being done with embedded Linux, and I do use it in my projects, but only for HMI and as long as the platform the HMI runs on doesn't have to control any hardware but "merely" talk to other parts of the system via a network connection. For a cost-effective machine, you'll often run the HMI and control platform on the same PC, there's nothing wrong with that. But if you want to do so, it has to be Windows. Or else you'd have to potentially implement $10k+ worth of ISO/IEC standards -- I'm not talking about software development cost, just about how much it would cost to get the PDFs with the standards that you have to develop for. Probably another $1k would be spent on books that tech you how to navigate the standards. As for the development expense -- got a well-maintained jet somewhere and a buyer for it? Because that's the cash you'd need.

Now there are some commercial libraries that implement various standard industrial protocols, but there's no way you'd get anywhere near the functionality of even TwinCAT I/O for the same price. TwinCAT I/O is just the input/output part of the PLC -- it doesn't run any code, but gives you APIs to read and write to the process image. The process image is the memory that is automagically exchanged with various hardware of your machine (I/Os and drives). To get this costs about $200. That's a fucking bargain if you'd ask me -- it gives you access to pretty much every industrial bus out there (+ cost of the interface cards, if needed). For about $1.5k more you get the PLC functionality, so that you can run code that processes the process image in the real time. That's if you want to deploy on your own PC. If you get Beckhoff's hardware, you get a "discount" (read: the PLC comes pretty much for free).

What I'm saying here is that for a typical industrial application, a hardware platform with a C/C++/.net dev environment is pretty much useless if it's just by itself. It's other software that makes it useful, and -- as an end user or OEM -- you must get this software (the soft PLC) from a 3rd party, you're not going to reimplement it because it'd take ages and it's already been done and is available relatively cheap. At that point, if your supplier *and* the industry has standardized on Windows, there's no point going against that.

Of course there are machine control applications where you can roll-your-own, but you either pay to redo a lot of the stuff that's been done and is available for reuse in a soft-PLC, or you get software that has a lot of noob mistakes built-in. Once you're experienced enough to properly implement industrial-grade software, you realize that it costs so much to do properly that everything that you can reuse is almost always a financial win.

In the end, the cost of the

Nokia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't that the mobile phone company that used to develop great cell phone operating systems before it was bought by Microsoft? Are they still around?

Re:Nokia?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're mostly reinventing history. Symbian never was a good OS; it was a bitch to program. Its only redeeming quality was that it was phone centric with OKish PDA functionality in a world where Windows CE was the only competition, a desktop centric OS ported to PDAs with horrible phone functionality.
Nokia was good because of the flawless hardware; I'd kill to have an updated N95 running Android.

Re:Nokia?

[Ndymium]

Great? Are you really calling Symbian OS great? For dumbphones perhaps, but... Or maybe you referred to Maemo. Wait, that wasn't so great either. Maybe if they had given it time to mature. Alas, towards yet another OS we go, let's hope this one goes a little better.

Re:Nokia?

[cowboy76Spain]

Wasn't that the mobile phone company that used to develop great cell phone operating systems before it was bought by Microsoft? Are they still around?

Maybe the issue is that phone companies should not try to develop operating systems and leave that to software companies with expertise in operating systems.

Do not know how great Symbian was (some people here disagrees with you), but what I know from the news was that Nokia did not end in a great position using this strategy...

Re:Nokia?

[thaig]

It has a good kernel and a very comprehensive API and Qt made the "bitch to program" thing considerably less of a problem but it was still a bitch to progam for the people working on the middleware and non-Qt user code. and consumer electronics companies tend not to see why they need to make their engineers more productive and how it requires that they produce different types of products (e.g. ones with enough RAM).

It was all the fault of Symbian Ltd for determinedly ignoring the programming problems years ago and of Nokia for being a bad customer and trying to push all the things that lead to the disaster and to both of them for ignoring the fact that higher performance hardware was coming and tha tpeople actualy would pay for it. Their entire focus was on trying to move down ro cheaper hardware and they dug themselves deeply into a hole before admitting the need for a 180 degree turn.

It's just a classic case of people "optimizing" something and of time making their optimisations first irrelevant and then a terrible burden.

Nokia could have fixed their problems at many points and didn't because the short term pain would have been high. Now it's much higher.

Re:Nokia?

[Anonymous Coward]

It might not be great in terms of apps. But from my experience Symbian OS requires much less hardware and gives you way more battery time than most of the comptetors. I haven't seen a single Android/iOS device that's had a similar battery lifetime to a symbian device.

And... it's stable. Where I've been able to crash Android and iOS devices quite often, I only rarely succeed in doing so with Symbian.

Re:Nokia?

[TheRaven64]

It was all the fault of Symbian Ltd for determinedly ignoring the programming problems years ago

Years ago, they weren't problems. When phones had 4MB of RAM or less, they were useful features. Being able to save a few bytes in common data structures by increasing the programmer's workload was the correct thing to do, because it was the only way to squeeze complex programs into that small a space. When RAM was expensive, being able to get a similar user experience from a machine with 2MB of RAM as your competitors got from a machine with 8MB was a huge competitive advantage for hardware makers. It's only in the last few years that phones have started having 64MB or more of RAM and the waste of a couple of megabytes per application doesn't seem so bad.

Re:Nokia?

[Lumpy]

REally? then why are there far more Symbian apps out there than the Android apps and iphone apps combined?

Re:Nokia?

[thaig]

That's like saying that its failure was inevitable because you couldn't be a working OS in the past and a powerful one in the present. I agree that their choices were not wrong for everything but they did not prepare for a different future - where's the equivalent for Symbian of Android's Dalvik or Windows mobile's Silverlight? I'm not really so familiar with iOS but at least Objective-C is "all virtual" afaik and there is quite a powerful and mature framework for desktop-sized applications..

The only clearly stupid idea was to write in C++ wih exceptions etc before any of the compilers supported it properly. Oh, and platsec was also stupid - simply killed all interest and prevented an ecosystem from happening (never seen suich a case of own foot shooting). Death before insecurity - death it is then.

A less clear but still stupid thing was to believe that code would be ported to Symbian. iOS and Android benefit from being able to use POSIX code defeloped for Linux, FreeBSD, solaris etc etc. With Symbian every conversion is a terrifying effort and once done, hard to maintain. By choosing to go the "odd C++" route, Symbian cut itself off from the industry. Symbian people seemed to imagine that it would become its own standard and that such things wouldn't matter. Oops.

A final thing that was silly was the idea of "binary compatibility forever" - something that didn't work all that well in practise and doesn't matter at all now that Symbian isn't going to be here anymore.

Re:Nokia?

[edxwelch]

I worked on Symbian for a while and say it was an awful OS and no amount of patches, or tacked on frameworks would ever save it. It was an OS flawed from birth, designed by early optimisers.
I have a theory that the real reason why the n-gage platform failed, was because of the unwieldness of the Symbian OS. In the 4 years of development they were never able to get OpenGL working on N-gage.

Re:Nokia?

[WarlockD]

What I thought was best anecdote was when I was working on a Nokia's engineers computer. He was showing me his N97 and his simple picture slideshow app. He showed it off to some other engineers and they convinced him to go to mangement to see about using it as the default picture viewer. They said no because it was to flashy and they didn't want to support two picture managers for their high end line and cheap phone line. It never made it out of the building. With no app store and it being "Nokia IP" there was never a way for him to even post a free app or even a process for engineers to do it.

What's sad was that when I looked at the smooth movement from one image to another vs the point and click standard, I thought "Man, all they need was to make their phones work like this app and maybe they will sell more." I think allot of the engineers thought the same way.

Re:Nokia?

[bingoUV]

In 2005, Nokia released (and open-sourced) python for S60. All that Android gains by Dalvik and iOS gains by virtualized objective-C could be gained by python. Software of some respectability could be written in python, and it was trivial to write trivial software right on the phone itself - so much can't be said for Android.

Nokia failed to make it work, that is all.

Re:Nokia?

[dunkelfalke]

Last few years? My Windows Mobile phone from 2003 has got 64 megabytes of RAM (actually 128, but half of it is used by the operating system and as a RAM drive)

Fear of commoditization ruined Nokia

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Really sad to see that Nokia didn't have the confidence in their hardware design and manufacture skill to give Android a chance. They never were in a position to build a proper platform for the current generation of smartphones, so instead they sold their soul to MicroSoft for scraps.

Seriously, if you dismiss the future due to low margin of commodity platforms you better have something amazing to sell, like Apple does.

Re:Fear of commoditization ruined Nokia

[umghhh]

It must be said though that albeit amazing for general public iPhones and other gadgets from Apple are not so much of an amazement for an average engineer that cares about good tools s/he uses. It is indeed interesting to observe that diminishing margins mean for an established company with a lot of legacy software a problem because of costs of this legacy. Attempts to produce things on the cheap mean they look for shortcuts which only decrease quality not costs. My company goes the same path Nokia (and Nokia-Simens, I am sure there are other examples) went: lay-offs, scrum introduction and oblivion. It is really fun to observe how managers this sort of exercise announce success and depart before company collapses.

I guess the way for such companies is really what I think some other vendors do: produce radio platform that is then sold to others that cannot do it on their own (Apple???) of course that works only if these others are ready to pay for it and not hire lawyers to bypass expensive development stages and just steal the radio part with impunity (Apple???). Of course that is a drastic reduction in production volumes in existing areas. Steel industry workers did have to go trough this I guess Nokia is no better then?

Re:Fear of commoditization ruined Nokia

[Anonymous Coward]

If the problem was "fear of commoditization", why did Nokia chose the platform that can't be freely customized?

If Nokia adopted Android, they could still customize the interface, like HTC does. But, no, they chose Win Phone 7, a closed-source product that can't be customized.

I don't think you can do anything "amazing" with a smartphone unless you modify the operating system. Will Microsoft allow Nokia to do that?

If not, Nokia's Win7 phones will look exactly like HTC's Win7 phones.

Microsoft wins a huge vendor, Nokia looses any possibility of differentiation.

What did they expect to win, again?

Re:Fear of commoditization ruined Nokia

[gl4ss]

a lot of the problem is that a large number of the work force had nothing good to do, symbian surviving or not, so if you looked at the past 3 years and then what software product the huge machine produced, you'd be transferring the so called workforce to accenture too.

like, they've been holding yearly coop(layoff) talks for a decade. but still churning profit.

Re:Fear of commoditization ruined Nokia

[doomsday_device]

Really sad to see that Nokia didn't have the confidence in their hardware design and manufacture skill to give Android a chance.

You know, lack of confidence can be a realistic assesment.

Nokia's has been notorious for their lack of precision in gap dimensions (i'm not sure if that is the correct term as english is not my first language, and I'm not a mechanical engineer). As a result, stuff can get in front of your display and ambient humidity can get to the electronics.

It's been this way for ages.

That was maybe acceptable 10 years ago. But today, as you can buy superbly assembled phones from chinese and korean manufacturers, I think they won't be able to differentiate themselves from other android phones.

In a positive sense, at least.

Re:Fear of commoditization ruined Nokia

[Hognoxious]

If Nokia adopted Android, they could still customize the interface, like HTC does. But, no, they chose Win Phone 7, a closed-source product that can't be customized.

Perhaps that will change. I guess we don't know all the details of the deal.

Having said that, if Nokia fiddle around with it they'll probably make it worse.

Re:Fear of commoditization ruined Nokia

[Lumpy]

If you make your phone easy to disassemble for repair you have gap problems. if you seal the damn thing up tight so it's throwaway, you can do what apple, motorola and HTC are doing now. NONE of them are making a proper sealed phone that should be able to handle use in the rain.

And yes I love my otterbox case on my phone.. I can use my phone in the rain without tripping moisture sensors.

Re:Fear of commoditization ruined Nokia

[Desler]

Really sad to see that Nokia didn't have the confidence in their hardware design and manufacture skill to give Android a chance.

Why would they want to compete for less profits in the already low-margin Android camp? Not being another "me too" Android company actually gives them a chance to set themselves apart and not be caught in the HTC/Samsung/Motorola race to the bottom.

Re:Fear of commoditization ruined Nokia

[h4rr4r]

If you make your phone easy to disassemble for repair you have gap problems.

I am no phone designer, but it seems we could use the tech many other industries use to solve this. That tech is of course the rubber gasket and screws.

Re:Fear of commoditization ruined Nokia

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's bid was lower. Accenture will surely kill of Symbian though.

Re:Fear of commoditization ruined Nokia

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nokia didn't have the confidence in their hardware design"

What part of the Nokia CEO is ex-Microsoft do you not understand?

An idea

[Framboise]

What if they would for once slightly innovate and put one or two Kinects in a smartphone? Could this save Nokia of a sure oblivion?

Re:An idea

[Anonymous Coward]

They would need to use at lest four or five Kinects per phone to create a compelling product.

Re:An idea

[Hognoxious]

Don't know about kinects, but I say 'kin 'ell pretty much every time I pick up my E71.

They were our best hope..

[Anonymous Coward]

.. for a truly free and open smartphone. One where no personal data was collected and sent to the maker or third party without explicit consent. One where you wouldn't need to wonder about "what else" the app you were using was doing. One where you could freely decide for yourself which OS to run. One where you were free to recompile any app for performance or security reasons. One that gave anybody the freedom to code an app in any language they saw fit.

Now the only other big player supporting a free OS for handsets is Intel, but they understandably are more focused on netbooks and tablets. Well, let's hope it's not too late for us true geeks and tinkerers, who prefer freedom over nicely packaged, bite-sized pieces of fudge served in a golden cage.

Re:They were our best hope..

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that things look dim, but in addition to Intel — LG maybe able to throw its hat into the Meego ring.

My N900 is great and I'd hate to move off that platform.

Re:They were our best hope..

[dafing]

My N900 is great and I'd hate to move off that platform.

Wait, Meego was a "platform"? You mean there was more than just the N900? :-)

But seriously, try Android or iOS, both are great, anything else is utter crap in 2011.

Re:They were our best hope..

[Anonymous Coward]

.. for a truly free and open smartphone. One where no personal data was collected and sent to the maker or third party without explicit consent. One where you wouldn't need to wonder about "what else" the app you were using was doing. One where you could freely decide for yourself which OS to run. One where you were free to recompile any app for performance or security reasons. One that gave anybody the freedom to code an app in any language they saw fit.

Now the only other big player supporting a free OS for handsets is Intel, but they understandably are more focused on netbooks and tablets. Well, let's hope it's not too late for us true geeks and tinkerers, who prefer freedom over nicely packaged, bite-sized pieces of fudge served in a golden cage.

Jesu Christos on a tostada, man. Your kind has been bragging for decades that you could go down to the local parts store and whip up a computer which beat the hell out of anything sold retail. Do the same thing with a phone, now.

Re:They were our best hope..

[David Gerard]

.. for a truly free and open smartphone. One where no personal data was collected and sent to the maker or third party without explicit consent. One where you wouldn't need to wonder about "what else" the app you were using was doing. One where you could freely decide for yourself which OS to run. One where you were free to recompile any app for performance or security reasons. One that gave anybody the freedom to code an app in any language they saw fit.

The Free Software Foundation (NASDAQ: RMS) has announced the Free Software alternative to the evil, DRM-infested, locked-down, defective-by-design iPhone: the GNUPhone.

The key technical innovation of the GNUPhone is that it is completely operated from the command line. "What could be more intuitive than a bash prompt?" said seventeen-year-old Debian developer Hiram Nerdboy. "The ultimate one-dimensional desktop! Just type dial voice +1-555-1212 --ntwk verizon --prot cdma2000 --ssh-version 2 -a -l -q -9 -b -k -K 14 -x and away you go! Simple and obvious!"

The phone will also serve as a versatile personal media player. "I can play any .au file or H.120 video with a single shell command! The iPod could never measure up to this powerful ease of use." Video is rendered into ASCII art with aalib. "If blocky ASCII teletype softcore pinups were good enough for 1970s minicomputer operators, they're good enough for you. Respect your elders."

The KDE project will be bringing its next-generation KDE 4 desktop to the GNUPhone. "you can flip, twirl, dice, blend, fold, spindle and mutilate your terminal windows to your heart's content," said developer Aaron Seigo. "look at that cool effect! any complaint that basic functions don't actually work is ignorant of the intrinsic beauty of the plasma api and is just more fud spread by haters like stevie ray vaughan-nichols and novell corporation."

Actual successful voice calls are expected by 2013 to 2014. Regulatory approval is proving problematic in the corrupt, corporate-captured US environment. "The FCC said that if we dared switch on this, uh, 'piece of shit' in a built-up area in its present form, they'd break all our fingers with a fourteen-pound cluebat," said Nerdboy. "They're obviously shilling for Apple, Nokia and Microsoft."

The second version of the GNUPhone will run EMACS on the HURD kernel and be operated by writing eLisp macros on the fly. "It's the clearest, most elegant and natural operating environment anyone could conceive of," said Nerdboy. "Really, we're not out to destroy Apple; that will just be a completely unintentional side effect."

Re:They were our best hope..

[DrXym]

.. for a truly free and open smartphone. One where no personal data was collected and sent to the maker or third party without explicit consent.

So what's wrong with running CyanogenMod Android without any of the Google apps if that's your definition of a smart phone? Why would Nokia's phone (be it based on Symbian or Meego) be any less likely to engage in the kinds of other things smart phones do?

Re:They were our best hope..

[Gaygirlie]

Wait, Meego was a "platform"? You mean there was more than just the N900? :-)

It is still a platform even if it never really catches on. I still think both Maemo and Meego could've been real hits if Nokia had had the courage to see things through and management didn't try to screw everything up twice a month, but...

But seriously, try Android or iOS, both are great, anything else is utter crap in 2011.

I personally enjoy my Maemo thoroughly and I see both Android and iOS as inferior. Sooner or later I will have to get a newer phone but that won't be for a long time still, and it'll likely be Android because I really dislike anything Apple and I don't think Win7 Phone will ever truly catch on.

Re:They were our best hope..

[Teun]

You know Maemo is solidly based on Debian?

Had they spend the past 18 months further developing the system they would judging by the N900 (from Q4-2009) have had a winner.

Re:They were our best hope..

[JCWDenton]

There's no need to move off it (hopefully) - based on this 2 month article there will be a follow up (aptly named the N950) running meego http://www.newsden.net/meego-powered-nokia-n9-will-be-replaced-by-n950-6982/ There's hope! Personally, I'm about to purchase the n900 to encourage development of any Meego platform.

Re:They were our best hope..

[marsu_k]

I personally enjoy my Maemo thoroughly and I see both Android and iOS as inferior. Sooner or later I will have to get a newer phone but that won't be for a long time still, and it'll likely be Android because I really dislike anything Apple and I don't think Win7 Phone will ever truly catch on.

I'm almost with you, but I don't want to go Android either. The N900, with all its flaws (and yes, there are several) is still a wonderful phone. I mean, what other phone allows you to ssh to your Linux desktop, with X forwarding, and run applications from your desktop on your phone? Or the general "do whatever you wish with it"-attitude, no jailbreaking, no custom firmwares, root access a mere package away? Programming in virtually any language you desire? As of yet, it's unique.

And that's the problem, really. Supposedly, Nokia will introduce "at least one" handset running Meego. The thing is, I don't want another N900. I don't mind not having an app store with n+1 fart apps, but I do want some continuity. If some other handset manufacturer decides to support Meego, or rather, commit to Meego to at least some extent, I'll jump ship. And this comes from someone who's been using Nokia for the past 15 years.

Re:They were our best hope..

[dafing]

Whatever I say is going to be mean, I'll try and be nice! :-)

Oh, its built on Debian is it? Because Linux is soooo successful for consumers, right? It took off on the Desktop after all ;-)

However would Google and Apple competed, what with a product "solidly based on Debian" out there! :-)

I agree it seemed half baked on release. Sorry for my snarkiness, enjoy the weekend, its Saturday here in New Zealand, so that might mean its Fryyyyyyy daaaaaay, frrrrrrrrrrrryyyyyyy daaaaaaaaay.... in America?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD2LRROpph0

The fine print:

[korgitser]

Nokia outsources the elimination of 3000 jobs and the killing of Symbian.

Re:The fine print:

[Anonymous Coward]

More like Nokia just found a way to not have to pay uneployment and benfits for 3,000 workers. My work is pulling this BS with their IT department right now.

Re:The fine print:

[Anonymous Coward]

Better headline: Nokia announces continuing plans for implosion and self-destruction

Re:The fine print:

[erroneus]

Tadah!!! You nailed it.

I have seen this scenario play out more than once. The first time, I got a job with this agency who put me to work at Texas Instruments. Then I found out what happened and that I was "a scab." They promised T.I. that they could do the same job for less money using their same people. T.I. bought it, things did not go well for T.I. or the company or the people whose lives they screwed over. In time, I couldn't stomach it and simply left. It really disgusted me that much and disgusts me every time I see it happen.

Re:The fine print:

[Hognoxious]

Accenture? Could they have chosen anyone worse?

Re:The fine print:

[Anonymous Coward]

Jepp thats the idea behind it, sell off the department, so that you can get rid of the pesky contracts and then accidenture will slowly kill it off and keep some of them for other tasks.

Re:The fine print:

[Anonymous Coward]

There is still a lot of money in cheap Nokia phones for the third world, and you can be sure those phones aren't going to be spec'd to run Windows

They're messing up the dumb phones now?

[nzac]

I thought they still dominated this sector?

How can the shareholders think this is profitable? While is good for the short term without Symbian continuing they will potentially faid to being irrelevant killing the share price.

Re:They're messing up the dumb phones now?

[Jeek Elemental]

they had unprotected relations with ms and contracted a ceo

Re:They're messing up the dumb phones now?

[Anonymous Coward]

What shareholders? They are running away in droves! (At least those who get whatâ(TM)s going on. The rest deserves the losses.)

To us developers, Nokia is already dead.

Re:They're messing up the dumb phones now?

[inglorion_on_the_net]

How can the shareholders think this is profitable?

Shareholders? I am happy I am not one of them. If I had been, I would have sold my shares by now.

Only time will tell if the new course for Nokia will be successful. As for me, I am still enjoying my N900, but that now seems to be the Road Not Taken. Too bad; I will have to find a different platform to support and develop for.

These articles are hilarious...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently Nokia has been really innovative over the past few years coming up with loads of great products and not losing market share at all! Also they are not some giant evil corporation that mostly sells over priced locked down phones and they are committed to an open source Symbian OS which is making them lots of money and is a great OS!

But now they have decided to throw that all away and get in bed with Microsoft - what is the world coming too?

Afraid for Qt

[slashbart]

I'm afraid for the Qt future. It's a great toolkit, but it's very much cross-platform, so Microsoft will kill it.

Re:Afraid for Qt

[UngodAus]

Don't be afraid, Qt's future is secured.

Re:Afraid for Qt

[slashbart]

you are kidding

Re:Afraid for Qt

[slashbart]

here is the complete scenario of what will happen, told by a guy who has seen the same happen to his small company when it was bought by Adobe, via the same guy that's now running Nokia.
Qt needs to be forked asap.

Re:Afraid for Qt

[Anonymous Coward]

Commercial aspects of QT were sold to Digia in march already, so I'd say it's safe for now.

Re:Afraid for Qt

[dido]

The GP's correct. There's a poison pill clause from Nokia's purchase of Trolltech. Basically it says that if Qt ever stops getting released as open source, the KDE Free Qt Foundation gets to release the last version of Qt under the BSD license. I don't think we need to be worried about Qt if such a contingency exists.

Re:Afraid for Qt

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. The fear for Qt isn't if Nokia will release it under a closed source license. Even without the Self Destruct, from what we have seen, I doubt Nokia wants to develop software closed or open.
The problem mainly lies in keeping the project under the Nokia banner and slowly downsizing the number of developers, making it not so easy for outside/new developers to participate etc... Think OpenOffice style before the fork. OpenOffice was a pretty difficult project to work on and was rather stagnant, initiatives like Go-OO tried to solve that without forking and succeeded a little, but no one wanted to fork because the project was on the line between people wanting to fork and people just trying to tough it out. The Oracle deal was good in a way as it forced a proper fork and a real opening up of the project.

There are currently not many outside developers working on Qt, if the number of developers in Nokia working on Qt were halved (or quartered (sp?) ) projects like Kde will most definitely feel it. And you might not know about the downsizing for quite a while (how many Nokia employees are working now on Qt? Really hard to say)

Re:Afraid for Qt

[Anonymous Coward]

But what if Qt just gets developer cuts and ends up stagnating (i.e. without development for years)?
Qt was great because it was developed by a lot of paid developers.

Re:Afraid for Qt

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand what this is supposed to achieve. Qt is already available under the LGPL. Releasing it under BSD would simply guarantee that no commercial entity would contribute to the LGPL version ever again.

Re:Afraid for Qt

[master_p]

Indeed. Many C++ Windows devs have managed to avoid MFC by using Qt. Without Qt, cross-platform Windows apps are nearly impossible.

Re:Afraid for Qt

[gmueckl]

Well, for what reason would they downsize Qt development? There are quite a lot important commercial customers left for Qt (e.g. Autodesk using Qt in 2 of it's products, a large one ported over only recently) and there's a commercial user community as well, so I fail to see how shutting down Qt development would make any sense economically. My current assumption is that Qt development is actually profitable for Nokia.

Thus, even if Nokia would want to rid itself of the Qt developers they wouldn't shut them down. There's still good money to be made in selling all that to a party that is more interested or in spinning it off into a separate company and get a share of the profits.

Qt is not going down, not by a long way.

Re:Afraid for Qt

[lehphyro]

Java+SWT is miles better.

Re:Afraid for Qt

[gbjbaanb]

you don't understand how a corporate psycopath can take a profitable part of a business, decide that it is 'not key' or that it doesn't provide enough profits and that the money spent keeping it running could be better invested elsewhere ("maximising profitability", IIRC, a business bullshit approach to scrapping useful stuff in favour of a bigger personal bonus).

So Elop could easily stop Qt development group entirely, regardless of how good, profitable, or socially useful it is. I would hope they'd sell it to someone else though - Intel or IBM or Canonical for a pittance. That'd probably be the best outcome here.

Re:Afraid for Qt

[Anonymous Coward]

Qt doesn't need to be forked anymore. It is LGPL and there is a 3rd party commercial support provider (Digia).

So you can fork Qt anytime. But currently Nokia is the Qt dev hub. All bugs are public. All source is publicly available. Nokia is accepting Qt patches all the time.

Re:Afraid for Qt

[slashbart]

Try make a SMOOTH scrolling ticker tape text, and then come back with your fanboy nonsense.

Re:Afraid for Qt

[lehphyro]

I think you didn't read what I posted, SWT (http://eclipse.org/swt/) delegates to the Operating System all drawing operations. You may be confusing it with Swing which draws everything on its own. So yes, it can do SMOOTH animations and anything else the OS can draw. People who call java devs fanboys simply doesn't know Java technically enough to criticize it and believe any BS people keep spreading about it, it's the most used platform in the world for reason.

Re:Afraid for Qt

[slashbart]

The one big problem of Java is its unpredictable latency, mostly due to the caching status of the JIT compiler. If the bit of code you need for smooth scrolling is already in the cache, its fast and otherwise it's slower. There's also the occasional garbage collect which really locks the whole thing.There are some attempts to make Java interpreters more predictable but to me they feel like an awful hack, trying to force Java into something it was never meant for.
I have actually tried extremely simple programs using swing, awt, swt and qt-jambi, and all of them jitter when showing a tickertape. The same qt program in C++ does not jitter. So I stand by my point of view. Don't believe me; try it yourself.
As for fanboyism; you asked for it with you 'miles better'. It's not, it's just different and far less integrated and not as fast as Qt. And it's Java, so it doesn't start quick, and is not really quick (compare Eclipse with Qt-Creator for instance). Have you even worked in Qt? I have, and in Java + AWT, Swing, Swt and even Qt. Oh and about two dozen other languages.

Re:Afraid for Qt

[lehphyro]

GC is run concurrently, unless your program is using all available memory, there is not lockup, I've only experienced it when the application is on the verge to throw an OutOfMemoryError. If the OS is drawing the UI there is no sense in saying Qt is faster than SWT. I've never worked on Qt but the fact it's implemented in C++ is enough to dismiss it.

Re:Afraid for Qt

[njahnke]

nokia no longer owns qt. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/03/07/1337211/Nokia-Sells-Qt

Re:Afraid for Qt

[shutdown -p now]

Well, for what reason would they downsize Qt development? There are quite a lot important commercial customers left for Qt (e.g. Autodesk using Qt in 2 of it's products, a large one ported over only recently) and there's a commercial user community as well, so I fail to see how shutting down Qt development would make any sense economically. My current assumption is that Qt development is actually profitable for Nokia.

I can't find the link to that post, but I do recall reading a statement from one of Qt devs, shortly after the original Nokia announcement, that they were actually in the red as far as commercial Qt licenses go by the time they were acquired by Nokia, and that it is unlikely that situation had improved much.

The problem with frameworks is that they're not cheap to develop, but profits with this licensing model depend directly on the number of paying users - and there aren't all that many paying users, unfortunately. It's sad because Qt is awesome, but market is a strange thing.

Re:Afraid for Qt

[shutdown -p now]

There are many cross-platform widget toolkits out there - wxWidgets is another well-known one. Qt is much better than all of them, and it'd be a pity to lose it, but it won't kill cross-platform development.

Re:Afraid for Qt

[slashbart]

So you ARE fanboying; you say something is 'miles better' than something else, even though you have never worked with it. If the shoe fits or something....
And you also do not address the caching issue in the JIT compiler, because that's the real problem with anything approaching realtime in Java.

Re:Afraid for Qt

[lehphyro]

These days, I'm pretty sure the JIT will do a much better job of cache optimization than any C programmer on a real world application. Anyway, real time JVMs are not about raw performance, they are about predictability and are used in very specific domains so I don't think it applies to smooth animations in desktop programs, as long as the OS and hardware is taking care of these, I couldn't care less which language will call them. But yeah, I'm saying Java is better than something I've never worked with, but I know it's implemented and used from C++, so I'll continue to stand against it because that's not the language I'd choose/recommend to develop desktop programs.

& when accenture was named Arthur Anderson

[Anonymous Coward]

they had to change their name due to legal issues like fraud accounting. so it's good that the same guys have returned to being able to purchase stellarity to prop up their chosen ones' pr & 'accounting' practices that we paid their legal bills with our investments in the free felon foundation..

Re:& when accenture was named Arthur Anderson

[terjeber]

they had to change their name due to legal issues like fraud accounting

Not entirely accurate. What is now Accenture was not part of the fraudulent practices that sank Arthur Anderson, but it shared the name. Distancing them selves from the people in blue suits that made a living out of stealing was a good thing. Why is it, btw, that that one business sector, the blue suits always steal, get caught and get away with it?

Symbian is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

They couldn't have picked a worse company to give it to. Accenture were behind a failed withdrawn system at the London stock exchange based on Windows and .NET.

So if you want to give some Windows project to a company they would be a good choice, but Symbian? RIP Symbian is all I can say.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_abandon_failed_windows_platform

Re:Symbian is dead

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The cynical observer might argue that, if the real goal is to have an outside hatchetman, rather than the home office, handle 3,000 layoffs, Accenture is very much an acceptable choice...

Necessary moves.

[UngodAus]

Seriously, how can this be seen as anything but a clearing of work-area? 7000 engineers that couldn't build a killer product?! Even meego was more pipe-dream than real product. People seem to forget that nokia has a multi-pronged strategy going on. It's not just the microsoft deal going on, there's also the Next Billion project, and Rich Green's Disruptive Technologies. I think this move has been nothing but necessary.

Re:Necessary moves.

[Anonymous Coward]

Completely agree. Nokia have correctly realised that they cannot compete with Apple, Microsoft and Google when it comes to building operating systems. Their business model must move on, just as it has in the past.

Nokia releases Symbian code, 3 or 4 overjoyed

[David Gerard]

Nokia, through Accenture, has made the code for the Symbian smartphone OS a "community project", putting several aging geeks in raptures of delight.

"The Symbian OS will delight those of us who fondly remember EPOC on the Psion NetBook," said Larry Berkin, Symbian's head of global alliances. "God, that was an OS. Best PDA ever. Finest of British engineering. Sixteen whole kilobytes! You could run a truck over them. I bet an open source Symbian OS will let you run a truck over your phone."

The Foundation hopes to pit Symbian against Windows Mobile, which Nokia has replaced Symbian with. "There's no way it can compete against our superior features, like WAP browsing, infrared connect to your laptop and, of course, the serial port." It also hopes to set the stage for a march on the USA. "The Americans will fall before our superior engineering! Psion worked on the ZX81, you know."

There are currently about 330 million Symbian devices in the world, at least fifteen of whose owners can actually use the web browser without wanting to throw the phone through a window and just get an iPhone. "Just think," said Berkin, "now anyone can improve their phone! Well, they could if Nokia made phones the user could flash. But still!"

Accenture issued a press release about how Symbian was welcomed by free software advocates and other aging hippies. "Developers everywhere will want to study Symbian," said Eben Moglen, "to hack on it, and to write applications for it. This could be even bigger than the Amiga."

Re:Nokia releases Symbian code, 3 or 4 overjoyed

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I like that you prefer the golden cage. Iâ(TM)m already building a platinum cage for you. All you have to do to get it, is sign here below where it says "HUMANCENTiPAD".

Also: FALSE DICHOTOMY.

You may think you're funny. But you're of course actually just spreading FUD and supporting Microsoft. And I think you're not even aware of it. Which makes it even more of a failure.

PROTIP: I flashed my Nokia just recently. I can put anything I want on it. And I run Opera, PuTTY, a WinAMP-like media player and a great file manager on it. Plus my own Java PIM tool. Something that would never be possible on a faggy retard cattle iPhone appliance (NOT a computer because not user-programmable!)

And Symbian was pretty shitty for *current* needs.
It really was awesome back in the Psion days. My dad had such a device, and it was nearly a small Laptop, with everything you need for your Business. That's what Symbian was designed for, and it was really good at it.
It doesn't make sense to adapt it to current needs though.

April fools

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Guys, Look at the date, it is not 1st April....

Oh wait, Is this real? If so this is a nuclear bomb, eliminating the Symbian guys so you have to program for Windows is the final nail in the coffin of Nokia credibility.

Everything they said in now confirmed false. This is really really bad karma, it does not smell well for Nokia, but is very good for Microsoft.

Ass-Enter

[Alex Belits]

Ass-Enter a.k.a. Andersen Consulting.

Re:Ass-Enter

[shuz]

Accenture split from Andersen Consulting in 1989. Accenture is a global software and IT outsourcing company and is not an Financial outsourcing company. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture#Splitting_from_Arthur_Andersen

Re:Ass-Enter

[Anonymous Coward]

Andersen Consulting split from Arthur Andersen in 1989. Andersen Consulting rebranded themselves Accenture in 2001. In late 2011 they will fall to increasing public pressure and re-name themselves Ass-Enter.

Re:Ass-Enter

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually as someone who knows a lot of people who worked for AA: what became Accenture was the part of AA that put pressure on the rest of AA ( the part that started out as a respectable accounting company ) to become as sleasy as the IT people ( by IT people I mean the PHBs not the grunts ) were.

Core business

[Anonymous Coward]

Oddly enough, I would expect that one of the core competencies of a phone manufacturer would be phone operating systems. It's, ahem, unusual to see a phone company decide to outsource its operating systems to companies with little experience or success in phone operating systems. Admittedly these are the high end OS's, and there is still a lot of money to be made in the low end, but ceding a whole segment odd.

I can imagine two possibilities: either that Nokia really is in terminal decline, or that they have a hugely promising skunkworks OS under development, and are preparing the ground.

I would like to believe the latter, but given their performance in recent years, I suspect the former.

Smug wanker much?

[Hognoxious]

Maybe the issue is that phone companies should not try to develop operating systems and leave that to software companies with expertise in operating systems.

Well aren't you the business guru! Because that's pretty much how it happened. Symbian was developed by a separate organization of which Nokia were just one partner. And it was based on EPOC, a very fine OS developed by Psion for their PDAs. You won't have heard of them, but they were a bloody good software company in their day.

The problem wasn't the OS itself, it's that Nokia couldn't develop decent user-facing apps if their immortal souls depended on it.

Re: Smug wanker much?

[saihung]

Yep. Nokia sat on what was a cutting-edge mobile OS at the time of its introduction, and just murdered it through neglect. Remember, EPOC ran a full web browser on a mobile device in 2000. Opera for EOPC did everything my desktop browser did within 16mb of RAM and multitasked properly besides. Symbian did multitasking from the beginning, something that iOS took years to get together. All of those developers, and that huge head start, and they couldn't clean up the OS after nearly a decade? Seriously? And the Nokia software for desktop computers has always been a huge steaming pile of junk. Still is.

Symbian^3 looks nice. But Nokia just took too damned long getting it out the door, had too many false starts and dead ends along the way, and in the process application developers lost interest and moved on.

FFF; social services for the spiritually bankrupt

[Anonymous Coward]

even though it's written that none of us is completely beyond jesiacal redemption, some of us just get beyond the pale, or somehow just don't care about anyone else. for that, & so much more, there's the Free Felon Foundation. formed to meet the needs of the proven to be wrongly unchosen psychotic neogod bigwigs, who just seem to get too much attention sometimes. the thinking remains; black hole soul murderous crooks need support too, & what would would all the so-called good guys do without them?

Death by a thousand prongs.

[Colin Smith]

People seem to forget that nokia has a multi-pronged strategy going on.

Not just multi... Thousand pronged!

4 software platforms, 130 different phones. You can just SMELL the success!

Poor Apple on the other hand have, just 1 phone, 1 tablet. The losers!
 

Transferring employees

[bl8n8r]

Sounds to me like 3000 employees just finished their last TPS report.

"Hi Mike, yeah.. remeber that TPS report? Yeah.. that one I asked you to yeah.. fill out before the end of April? Yeah, we won't be needing that here anymore, yeah... so if you would just put all your stuff in this box and yeah... head over to Accenture that would be great."

Re:Transferring employees

[shuz]

This is a fact of Business. The 3000 employees that are strong individual performers have nothing to fear. Accenture is not that scary of a company and they certainly are not the axemen that you are making them out to be.

Re:Transferring employees

[Anonymous Coward]

> Accenture is not that scary of a company and they certainly are not the axemen that you are making them out to be.

Have you ever worked with Accenture? My former managers used to work there, and I had a few classmates that interned there.

Accenture's business model is based on hiring tons of interns and recent college graduates, assigning them to projects they have no prior knowledge of and having them work 12 hours a day. This results in huge turnovers, but this is built into the model since the clients are billed at $100+/hour.

For this reason, Accenture is notorious for completely screwing up major projects. Since they're consultants, they can just produce half-baked solutions and leave after the contract is over, leaving their clients with a huge bill and mediocre products.

Accenture makes big bucks because they're hired by high profile executives who are friends with Accenture management. They all get big bonuses when signing the contracts. Accenture is marketed as a company of highly trained experts (which charges accordingly), and anyone who hasn't worked with them will actually believe this sales pitch.

I used to think the Nokia/Microsoft deal was better than Nokia's previous strategy. I've lost a lot of confidence now that Accenture joined the team.

Re:Transferring employees

[shuz]

I work for Accenture, yes.

The company is large and far reaching. That said with any statistical group of people you will have many different skill sets. I assure you that there are very highly qualified and knowledgeable people here. There are also different cultures and the ability to develop new cultures. Each operating group is for the most part independently managed and could fail, yes. However with any business there are failures and successes. From my experience by and large most projects are successes.

I would encourage everyone to not to write off the possibilities for Symbian and her developers yet. This was a business decision but ultimately if the developers continue to ensure their product is of high quality then there is a future. Trends such that Apple claim to innovate come and go. At the end of the day when people need a phone to be a phone, Symbian will be there.

Disclaimer - My comments are my own and do aim to reflect or speak for the opinions of Accenture LLC.

Re:Transferring employees

[Jerry]

That model you describe explains why Microsoft & Accenture's work on the London Stock Exchange resulted in its BILLION dollar collapse over two years ago.

Re:projects like Kde will most definitely feel it

[TaoPhoenix]

Hmm, some good comments by AC's among the trolls.

Someone help me connect some dots.

If "projects like Kde will most definitely feel it", is that at all related to why Ubuntu wanted a third UI being thrashed out, even if this iteration isn't so good? Does anyone think this will tip the scales and lead to a KDE decline across the regular linux distros?

Sybase has been dead

[Anonymous Coward]

for a while now....they're just moving on momentum.

That's it

[symbolset]

Let the hate flow through you.

Trasnslation: Nokia is now ...

[Jerry]

a wholly controlled subsidiary of Microsoft.

It's board and officers are now redundant rubber stamps.

Accenture...

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, Accenture! What could possible go wrong

downward spiral

[Anonymous Coward]

Having had the pleasure of working with Accenture (and nothing more needs to be said about m$) I can't see this ending well for fans of Nokia.

Doesn't anybody look at Accenture's resume?

[Anonymous Coward]

Accenture, formerly known as Arthur Anderson...the people who did the due diligence on Enron...'nuff said

Opinion about Nokia.

[paladinsama]

There are different opinions about Symbian here, some people want it to die, others feel sorry for its future, however my opinion is that Nokia had more issues that their operating system.

After using an N-Gage QD for several years, when it was announced the service was going to be replaced by a new platform, I looked into their new N-Series phones to replace mine.

Originally it was told that the N93 was going to support the N-Gage platform, but in the end, it didn't, I feel sorry for those who chose that model.
1) Nokia for years was unable to make their own software to work on their own phone.

I chose to buy an N95 8GB, I bought the American version because it used the same 3G band that it is used in my country, however the N-Gage software wasn't 100% compatible with the firmware of my phone and some buttons didn't worked well. It took several months for Nokia to release a new firmware yet the European version of the phone had its own version of the firmware with those bugs fixed long before. Something similar happened with the silver N95.
2) Even though all the phones were very similar, Nokia was alienating its customers by providing updates only to a certain group of people.

After that firmware update, Nokia forgot about my phone, all software updates were for the newer N96 and then the N97
3) Nokia was unable to keep old and new customers satisfied by providing them an improved experience every year, regardless of how old was their phone.

Two years later, the new N-Gage platform failed just like the original, and was replaced by the OVI store that included more software than just games. I used it too and once after purchasing one game it failed to install, I tried several times and then I got the message that I exceeded the number of installations and that I had to contact support. They took like 4 months to answer my ticket. I even wrote to The Consumerist, but they didn't care either.
4) Worst support ever.

Eventually they announced that the N-Gage service was gone for good, making it impossible to re-activate purchased games after reformatting the phone (or a firmware reload/upgrade) which I had to, so I have lost forever the 21 games I bought.
5) DRM at its worst, yet nobody anywhere talk about what Nokia did.

I don't know how Nokia can do worse with their services, the Microsoft deal looks like an improvement.

(PD: I was never able to use a N900, because they didn't release the phone with a 3G band I could use.)