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

[Anonymous Coward]

HTC?

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

[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

[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

[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

[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]

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...

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

[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.

The fine print:

[korgitser]

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

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.

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 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.

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

[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

[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: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.

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.

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: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.