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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."
> In other words, they're throwing themselves off a cliff with an anvil around their neck
An anvil which very soon will have both cut AND paste functionality.
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.
It's either malaise from being on top for so long or their decision makers are severely lacking in vision and vastly overpaid. They can perhaps wave to Kodak as they worth through Chapter 11.
They should have just hopped on the Android bandwagon and thrown in completely with Google.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
From the article:
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.
Damning words:
Nokia‘s new superphones will offer a superior user interface and a better, cloud-enabled experience than its chief competitors, the company’s top U.S executive told VentureBeat.
The reliance by Apple and Android phones on the “app” as the central metaphor is “outdated,” he said.
The rest of what he said
He doesn't get it. The board should sack him now and save time.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
Psst! It's in the CLOUDs. Codename: Snow
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Serially incompetent management that will not pull it's head out of it's ass. Right after they laid off a friend who was working on an infrastructure project they announced going with Microsoft and their stock tanked dropping to it's lowest in 13 years, which has been a steady slide downward. It's meteoric plunge to mediocrity is befitting such ineptitude their management has been displaying of late.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
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
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.
If you've used Windows Phone 7 you would understand what he means by the "app as the central metaphor" being outdated.
I don't need a flickr app, a facebook app and a photo gallery app... I just want to look at my photos regardless of source.
And I want that everywhere. If I email someone a photo I want to be able to email them from my local storage, SkyDrive, Facebook or whatever. The Hub model is far superior to the fragmented app model.
This stuff just doesn't matter. You guys are always here, bringing up this stuff that doesn't matter. [...] You would think by now you would be willing to admit the thing has been rejected by the market and move on.
Whenever anybody brings up "the market," I always think:
EAT SHIT: 10,000,000 flies can't be wrong.
As always, remember that McDonalds makes the most popular hamburgers. Britney Spears was, at one point, the most popular singer. Does this mean that "the market" has rejected other hamburger joints or other singers?
There are lots of reasons for something to become popular.
Now, I've never used a Windows Phone 7. I have an iPhone 3GS and will probably get the next generation iPhone when it comes out. But to say that the current interface model used in iOS and Android is the best because "the market has accepted it" is ridiculous. What Microsoft is doing is definitely interesting and is more focused around information than it is around brands--which is essentially what apps are. Yelp, Facebook, Flickr, GetGlue--they're all brands. The home screen of my iPhone ends up looking like a NASCAR competitor, rather than actually having information that might be useful to me like whether or not the weather will be decent tomorrow or if my friend has gotten back to me about dinner tonight.
As a Mac user, I can tell you that just because something is overwhelmingly accepted by "the market" doesn't mean it's the best, nor that something that is ignored by "the market" doesn't necessarily have benefits.
You are assuming that Microsoft is doing this for logical short term business reasons. In fact the point is that Nokia became one of the companies which started challenging Microsoft seriously. They refused to take on board Windows Mobile and basically Microsoft's fight against Sony and Nokia was what distracted Microsoft and allowed Apple to get ahead. I think Microsoft is out for simple revenge and humiliation. If you assume that Microsoft will survive and be dominant then in terms of long term business logic this is sensible. They will be able to say "look at Nokia; they tried to stand up to us, the realised the futility of this now they are dead; don't make the same mistake".
I think Microsoft is now in the same state as IBM during the 80's. They can't imagine that computing could continue without them. They are trying to control the Mini-computer market and meanwhile their competitors are coming up elsewhere.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
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.
If you're talking about being the last one to the market instead of going with Windows Phone, maybe.
Wouldn't have mattered, I think. Android is established, but none of the existing Android vendors have a lock on it. Anyway, if e.g. HTC can sell Windows and Android phones, why couldn't Nokia have gone the same route? They don't have a lock on Windows phones either, they are just the only vendor totally depending on Windows.