Slashdot Mirror
Nokia Consolidating Locations, Laying Off 3500 More Employees
angry tapir writes with an excerpt from a Techworld article: "Nokia is planning to lay off an additional 3,500 employees, as the company continues to restructure after announcing its decision to focus on Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system. The affected employees work in manufacturing, location and commerce, and supporting functions."
Nokia
I love my N900, but the writing has been on the wall for Nokia for a long time now. They don't seem able to compete with the likes of Apple and Google, and the world is transitioning to smartphones. Their former market is disappearing, and they haven't managed to break into the smartphone space. They had a VERY promising platform in Maemo, but they really dropped the ball there.
Sad to watch such mismanagement. It isn't the engineers that are the problem, it's mismanagement.
after announcing its decision to focus on Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system.
In other words, they're throwing themselves off a cliff with an anvil around their neck.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The affected employees work in manufacturing, location and commerce, and supporting functions, Nokia said on Thursday.
Unfortunately, it seems like the typical cut for a company in troubled straits.
I really hope they make an awesome comeback on Windows Mobile. I loved their phones and would love to go back. Still wish they went Android, though.
I just lost my job today...
They made best handsets. the voice quality, both incoming and outgoing, are still spectacular. not found in any other device. sad that stuff peripheral to actual phone call quality is determining the fate of a handset maker.
Read radical news here
I get the manufacturing and support layoffs. Microsoft's core business is marketing. Switching over to Windows Phone means Nokia seeks to switch from manufacturing phones to marketing non-existing ones. Much cheaper per unsold phone. And stopping the production of actual phones makes Nokia the most environment friendly phone company on the planet. Does wonders for the brand name. No phones also don't require support.
Not sure about the location and commerce though. Maybe that's part of the secret plan.
after announcing its decision to focus on Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system.
In other words, they're throwing themselves off a cliff with an anvil around their neck.
No, they threw themselves off the cliff when they ignored the iPhone, didn't take up Android early, and fiddled with MeeGo while the market burned.
Windows Mobile 7 is the only hope they have of not making a hard landing, while still remaining a distinct company with a leg up on other mobile makers. That would not have happened with Android where they would have just been one of the pack.
It's a distant chance but people should not mistake the reason for Nokia's plummet, which began well before Windows Mobile (or the Microsoft mole leading Nokia) entered the picture.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There could very well be a couple of awesome Linux-on-phones-friendly start-ups coming our way! :)
How I see it, the 3500 employees are not the part going to the trash. The Nokia part is the one.
Nokia is planning to lay off an additional 3,500 employees, as the company continues to restructure after announcing its decision to focus on Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system.
So they are preemptively firing people based on their expectations of how well the Windows Phones are going to sell?
#DeleteChrome
what about this? vaporware? Nokia preps Linux-based Meltemi OS for feature phones, says report http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Nokia-Meltemi-plus-Tizen-update/
Right,
What DO 3500 ex-employees do with themselves in each of these layoffs? Surely they can reband together and do ... something cool?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
What a shame, since they were right on the money with the N900, and would have been on the N950. The new Nokia slogan might as well be "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish non WP7 products".
Given that the N9 is crippled through deliberate exclusion from the US/UK/Germany markets, the only thing Nokia is becoming is an also-ran Windows Phone manufacturer. That product was designed to fail at sales so that Elop can point at it with some numbers and justify killing it.
Given that Nokia has gone this direction, is there anything that has the N900's featureset/openness?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Nokia has over 130,000 employees. Generally, layoffs are not a good sign for a company, however in this case they were expected since they are making major changes to their product line. Is there really a story here? Honest question.
Nice trying to shift the blame, but they took the Manchurian CEO and he's quite quickly doing them in. In Europe they just ditched their established disty partners, burning their bridge to retail outlets that give them any sort of hope. That bridge is going to take a year to rebuild that they just don't have, and Europe was their only market with margins in it.
This one was over the day American investors called up the Chairman of Nokia and told him to take Elop or be fired and Elop would take over anyway. It's an inside job, the deliberate burning down of an established company. And it's an evil thing to do. It's crushing the economy of Finland, many retirement funds are going bust. Competent engineers with families thrown out of work. And the goal seems to be to get Nokia down to a size Microsoft can swallow, for the patents.
After he's done, where is Elop going to go? Where else? He'll come back to Redmond dragging the corpse of Nokia behind him, and it'll be stored in a filing cabinet next to Sendo's IP - and that will be the end of it.
Now who were those American investors? We don't know yet, but I bet it will come out one day in the shareholder lawsuit.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I am one of the affected employees.
Of the 3,500 people, 2,200 is the factory in Romania; the production there will be moved closer to the market in Asia. The rest 1,300 is mostly Location & Commerce, which is basically Navteq and the former ex-Services/Solutions/Software division joined.
This change has relatively little to do with the decision to go with WP7, much as people here like to bash that (and I love MeeGo myself). Even if the choice had been MeeGo instead of WP7, I suspect these layoffs would've been done anyway, because they're part of the streamlining strategy announced in April 2011. At the same time as people are getting laid of, some of the mentioned big sites are actually hiring a little (mostly internal transfers of course, I could probably find a position if I was willing to move to another country).
And yes, it's a painful result of mis-management, but the underlying reasons are far older than the 1 year the current CEO has been around... Not that I didn't wish and hope there was another way found to fix things (maybe there was, but it was not chosen, because it would've been less effective and more expensive - this is just me speculating). At least in Finland and Germany the job situation is not that bad, in Romania I can't imagine how it will be when one town suddenly gets that many unemployed people at once.
It's toxic.
Presumably they could start another phone manufacturer. In a few months Finland will need one.
Windoze Fone 7 really means "kiss of death". So long Nokia, it were nice knowin' ya.
Maemo 6 inside. So you've got a relatively standard Linux box there.
Of course they have decided not to sell the thing in their main markets... Like the USA, Germany, UK so you probably couldn't even buy one if it was an apple killer. Genius...
With that kind of decision making within the company, we have an explanation of the stock price drop from $40 to $5.
Deleted
Quality of hardware and user experience mattered to Apple, that's why they aren't bankrupt 10 years ago and a subject of pub trivia. A lot of companies that tried that didn't pull it off. Nokia appear to be trusting Microsoft to manage their fortunes ... considering how many of Microsoft's killer products are only very obscure trivia now, I think this is a very risky move
It's not as risky as it seems - quality of experience is I think why they went with Windows Mobile 7 and not Android. They realized they couldn't handle the software side of a really polished product, but Microsoft could. If WP7 and Nokia have any chance, it is this very combination that could carry them forward pretty well.
And despite what they say about apps not mattering, they have a decent number with decent quality.
The only thing that MIGHT have been a better fit was Palm, but I think at the time they were deciding to switch that was not an option - plus again they would have had to buy and manage it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I agree Microsoft basically rode them over, but it was not to burn down the company. Nokia is Microsoft's only real hope of rising to a decent position in the mobile marketspace again. They need Nokia not to burn, but to shine... They also needed Android not to have Nokia either, that is true, but it is not sufficient for WP7 success.
Nokia though in my mind is totally to blame for being in a position where Microsoft could do what they have done. Had Nokia probably understood what happened when the IPhone entered the market they could have salvaged things then, but they kept going forward with outdated solutions for a mobile OS. If only Nokia and Palm had somehow got together way back then, like Nokia becoming a Palm exclusive provider in the same way they are working with Microsoft now... Nokia would have really held the whip in that relationship.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It has Windows Phone 7, the No Donuts revision. Why would I be talking about Windows Mobile 6? Ah- don't answer that. A little Googling shows that folks with WM6.5 LOB apps have found a way to flash their HD7s with that decrepit ware. That's really sad. Kind of indicative of a serious disconnect between the OS vendor and the user base. That's really an odd corner case question. Is there somebody selling the HD7 with 6.5? That might explain why 6.5 is still selling better than 7.*. Forgive me - I was never into the Windows Mobile thing.
The Mango update will come along shortly for us I suppose. Not that it will change anything about my assessment, as it's got nothing to do with the OS. Multitasking, the ability to customize your device, choose backgrounds and ringtones, to do copy and paste, these are all essential features that make up the bare minimum of what a phone must do to even exist now. But even if Windows Phone hits all of our mandatory minimums it still doesn't have the apps we like and it isn't going to because between them iPhones and Android phones sell more units in a week than Windows Phone has ever. Maybe in two or three days even. Developers are not going to be motivated to make apps for this platform if they want to make money or have fame, which are the two primary motivators for app development. We have 10" Android tablets for our app needs now, and that's even better than having an Android phone because of the huge beautiful screens. The problem with our Android tablets is with 3G connectivity when you're away from wifi hotspots because our Android tablets don't have 3G or 4G, and we wouldn't pay the premium for that if it were available. We're not willing to pay an extra wireless contract for that. That's just crazy when you can activate Wifi tethering on a real phone or buy a MiWi and tether all your gear to it - your camera, your phone, your tablet, your laptop, and everybody else at the table too.
We can't even wifi tether to the thing with Mango when we get the update because that feature won't be enabled on legacy Windows Phones in Mango - and that might have extended its useful life. Something about the wifi chipset, or they didn't want to code around it, or maybe their traditional move-along strategy. Otherwise it would make a decent 3G hotspot at least. My Samsung Epic with Android is nearly a year old and it has 4G wifi hotspot tethering, which is nice for me on the odd occasion I'm away from open wifi, but now and again my wife is out & about with her Android tablet away from a hotspot and would like to browse the 'net. Doctor waiting rooms and whatnot. She's got a data-able HD7 WP7 phone, and it can't even give her that little thing. So in that rare corner case she can't browse the Internet except on the tiny phone screen - but she can catch up on her movies and TV episodes, she can move forward on the books she's working on. And at this point she'd rather do that than wrestle with IE over 3G on her HD7 with Windows Phone.
It'll make a nice toy when I put Android on it. Frankly I doubt we'll wait for the contract to expire. My wife's fallen in love with Android now that she's got the tablet and she's likely to go with an Android phone long before the contract expires in 18 months. She's downstairs right now refreshing her ancient Java skills to build Android apps. She doesn't care if the contract is up because it's my job to go get the money and if she wants a new phone she can stress me until I get it for her, even if it's every six months. Maybe I can convince her to let me have a go at Android mods for her HD7 first, if they have the phone part working. I haven't checked that yet. It's not bad hardware, like I said. Even if phone and data is a no-go, it'll make a nice Android test device and maybe I can talk her into a feature phone and a MiWi type thing so she can get her Android tablet online when she's out and about.
We're an odd bunch. We do tech from WAY back. Our kids get their own PC on their first birthday, and build their own in second grade, and we start coding in third. Their kindergarden teachers are surprised to get kids who know their alphabet. They don't know what to do with kids who can type short stories.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"Other than flash" well that deals out something like 90% of web apps. My Android phone doesn't do Silverlight-light, like her phone does, which cuts me out of just about nuthin. Her Windows phone can't even do Zombo.com. And everything is possible at Zombo.com. (Sorry iFans, you don't get zombocom.)
Apparently in iOS and Android a weather widget or flight planner is one app no matter where you might be, but Microsoft is spiffing per app to get their app count up so in Windows phone each of those is thousands of apps depending on where you might be and they have to rate-limit app submissions to hundreds per day per developer.
There are darned few Android apps that can't be had on iOS. Due to the relative market share however, 95% of Android apps can't be had on Windows phone, and the percentage is higher on iOS. But not even 5% of Android apps can be had on Windows Phone, and a lot of those are damned good. iOS has two apps that are awesome that Android can't have: GarageBand and iMovie. That's it.
My wife's a bright girl. 130+ IQ, classically educated with a 4 year degree in programming (best marks), and considerable self-study beyond that. She can discuss at length the moral implications of exobiology, argue both for and against life-extension without emotion, consider the implications of FTL muons with the best of us, and still get the kids to school in relativistic time. If it weren't so I'd find her impossibly boring. She's working on Android apps now as an author. Yes, she knows how to work her phone and find the few apps it does have. She bought it to spite me, and has realized her mistake. It doesn't have the apps my Android phone has, and it's not gonna. She's stubborn, not stupid.
Thanks for playing. If you got paid for that, they didn't get their money's worth.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You're talking now about stuff that happened way back when Microsoft had a 20% share of mobile, and was fighting for a fraction of a point. Nokia had huge share then, and could have counted coup, but they didn't. Much like Microsoft could have innovated in the space and didn't. A lot of water has gone under that bridge.
Now Nokia seems to be trying to shed points as fast as they can, and Microsoft is looking up at one single point of share as an aspirational goal they hope they might achieve but don't know how to get there.
Nokia though in my mind is totally to blame for being in a position where Microsoft could do what they have done.
I'm going to be a total ass and suggest that this is equivalent to saying "She dressed like a slut, implying she wanted to be raped." It's harsh, but do you see what I'm getting at?
Nokia had some great stuff, some middling stuff, and some bad stuff. It had a heirarchy that didn't know or care which was which as long as it moved units, which worked for longer than it should have. But that day is done. We want new stuff.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yes, yes - Longhorn++ with sugar on top but even if everything is as advertised or better it is still something years away from being on people's handsets. Nokia can't put that on their phones until it exists and they way they are going they might not exist by the time people see MS Windows 8 as a feature worth buying a phone for.
I'll go tinfoil hat here and ask:
If Nokia crashes and burns then Microsoft buy what is left for almost nothing and turn it into the Microsoft phone division does anyone go to jail?
P.S. I would like to see MS produce a wonderful system because I could then tell any relative with a current MS system full of crapware to just upgrade.
Well, one can't blame NOKIA (or at least the sane management/engineers still left) blame for not trying: Say hello to "Meltemi" - NOKIA's new LInux-based OS for feature phones: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/09/is-nokias-s40-replacement-os-a-defense-against-android-feature-phones.ars
Is like not having Christmas! Merry Lutheran Christmas!
What DO 3500 ex-employees do with themselves in each of these layoffs? Surely they can reband together and do ... something cool?
If Nokia were a co-op then they could, because they would own company assets, and they could take some with them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I still don't understand why they didn't choose Android. Nokia is known as a phone maker, not as an OS maker, so using a third-party commoditized OS wouldn't have hurt their brand. A Nokia phone would still have been a Nokia phone.
MS needs nothing. It could use Nokia to helps WP7 to become a success but if it doesn't, it will just try again with WP8. Something it is ALREADY doing right now. What happens to Nokia in the meantime isn't any concern of MS. If it dies, MS will just get another victim, if it survives... well ask HTC why it makes Android phones.
And of course, if Nokia fails then MS has one less competitor, a competitor that with Symbian and its phones was a major reason MS wasn't sellings its own phone OS for years on end.
Nokia itself probably never considered Apple, they thought the enemy was MS and that they had won the battle... and then iOS happened and changed the game and then Android happened and finished them off.
And of course, they finished themselves off as well. MeeGo had a change of being something different and it could have sold Linux phones at a premium to guys like me who wants a real OS with free applications. 1000 euro's for a phone like that? NP. The N900 sold well enough and people were looking forward to its replacement. But Nokia itself lost interest in the high end market and for that matter in the low end market. What can you say of the fortunes of a company that refuses to release a successor to a phone into areas it did very well in? "Oh I see you bought our previous phone?!? Well, no new phone for you, that should teach you to buy our stuff". (See N9)
Nokia will probably "learn" if it is still capable of it, that in certain relationships, one partner tends to be the taker. And MS is the biggest taker that ever existed. Bye bye Nokia.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
A bit of background info: Nokia once thought to have Maemo/MeeGo (Linux) as its OS for its highend phones (replacing symbian), keep Symbian for the midrange feature phones (not quite smart phones) and S40 for the low end.
The N900 was that high end phone and it sold out. Whether that means it did well is hard to say, after all if you produce one unit and you sell it, you are sold out, but still, there was a demand. The N900 was however a trial phone, it was deliberately made to be a developers phone to test the market. The market liked it.
So there was going to be a successor that would be slicker. First it was supposed to have a physical keyboard but eventually it became the N9.
So... where to launch that phone? In the west where the N900 sold out and where people have the money for a high end phone? Nah... I don't know where it sells but so far it seems to be nowhere.
You produce a phone, have units of it created and then just don't sell it in the west at all. That is a strategy that can't be explained by just being a but stupid or misguided. NOT selling a major highend phone in the places it could do well cannot be anything but deliberate move to have it fail. "See Linux don't sell on phones? We put them on the market at 900 dollars in a refuge camp in Somalia and not a single one sold. PROOF!"
Companies are ultimately run by people who are perfectly capable of making really stupid decissions. But somehow when it comes to malice we presume companies to be machines. I think only someone with a clear agenda could make such a dumb decission. The N9 isn't going to the company any more, its costs have already been made. Even if you are not convinced of its success, a normal person would just sell it and see what happens. To deliberately sabotage it needs an agenda. Can anyone think of anyone who recently started at Nokia who might have an agenda?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Not gonna fly. All these guys want their branding everywhere, and they're not going to participate if users aren't constantly made aware of who is serving them. Besides, each of these services have different options and functionality, and one generic "photos" function won't do 'em all.
Twinstiq, game news