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Nokia Faces Class-Action Suit Over Windows Phone Deal
nk497 writes "Nokia has been hit with a class-action suit, with the claimant accusing the company of making 'false and misleading' statements about the ability of its deal with Microsoft to revive the struggling mobile maker. 'The complaint alleges that during the Class Period, defendants told investors that Nokia's conversion to a Windows platform would halt its deteriorating position in the smartphone market,' read a statement (PDF) from the law firm Robbins Geller Rudman and Dowd. 'It did not.'"
Whose platform is burning now, E-flop?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'm going to sue for every stock I have that has lost value.
And when I'm done, I'm going to sue all the companies who didn't go up as much as I would've liked!
I'll be rich!
Historically speaking, entering any kind of business deal with Microsoft usually ends badly.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
...claims another victim.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Filed in New York by a single complainant, the class-action suit....
Surely if there is a single complainant then this should not be a class action suit?
It just proves that in America, you can sue anybody for anything.
Uh...yeah? That's the way the system works. Anyone can bring an action against anyone else and the court must hear it.
I could file paperwork with my local court saying you are a douche and that somehow harmed me. They would read through the documents and (probably pretty easily) come to the conclusion that I haven't made a case that you broke the law and/or harmed me and throw it out.
Some cases aren't as clear-cut as my example and require a judge and jury to decide.
Could you imagine if we used your model? You can't sue anybody for anything--only stuff I think is legit. That would put you in a fairly powerful position....something like 'dictator' or whatever.
The single claimant believes that there are other people that have the identical claim and it would be in Nokia and the courts interest if there was one lawsuit instead of many lawsuits.
The problem for Nokia share holders is that it appears that their CEO is getting more compensation from Microsoft than Nokia, furthering this appearance of impropriety is his decisions that appear to favor Microsoft over Nokia.
Work bio at MMWD
Eh, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.
If you look at various SEC mandated, or voluntary, disclosures from publicly traded companies, you'll almost always see something like this example from Time Warner.
Legally, distinguishing between statements of fact and 'forward looking statements' makes a difference. It's like the securities equivalent of the “These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.” tag you always see on 'dietary supplements'.
So, if some optimist was given information that constituted a forward looking statement, with the usual boilerplate, about what Nokia hoped their strategy would do, they can go shove it. If Nokia outright claimed that this move would have a specific, definite effect, on their market position or stock price, Nokia may well have shoved their foot in their mouth, good and hard...
The rough edges of the N9 were minor. It came with real multitasking and copy/paste from the first version. It's a great phone, and despite its rough edges it would have worked out well. There are a few gaps though, not the least bit applications. Nokia makes up for th at by including support for many things right out of the box.
The biggest flaw with the N9 was that the OS was NOT a major OS. The decision to move to WP7, while lamentable was sensible. However I wonder if at the rate of innovation if the N9 would have been where it needs to be today.
The deal that was not struck that should have, was to get Samsung on board and using MeeGo. That would have brought enough attention to get MeeGo established in the mobile marketplace.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Wait, what? Nokia just released their first Windows Phones in November 2011, neither were released in the United States. At some point they released the Lumia 710 in the United States, and it sold pretty well, but it was on the smallest of the big carriers: T-Mobile. Now, Nokia has added the Lumia 900 to AT&T and it is supposedly selling pretty well (I live near a Microsoft Store, and I can honestly say that the store itself has been recently more popular than the Apple Store in the mall, but that mostly has to do with location within the mall; I have also seen a lot of people walking out with new Lumia 900 phones).
Anyway, all of this is to say that you have no idea what you are talking about when you are talking about financial reporting. Two phones are not going to save a company, and at least two bad quarters were expected. Nokia is just now getting back into the swing of things, and people looking for instant success are both naive and represent what is wrong with investors in general these days.
Otherwise, Motorola Mobility going with that "Android" platform is really proving to be a sinking ship, right? Because they've had two bad quarters too.
Learn a thing or two about corporate financial reporting.
Except that Nokia intentionally and dramatically increased this risk by killing MeeGo, which is a production quality OS which kicks the shit out of Android and Windows Phone 7.
I believe it's highly likely that Elop is acting in bad faith. However, unless a high ranking Nokia exec leaks information, I don't think there will be any tangible evidence against him.
It didn't.
Nokia's entire argument in 1 word: Yet.
Whether they are right or not who knows, but their plan to save the company with Windows phones is still in its early phases. Which is a commentary on their poor execution, but it's still a plan in motion. The guy filing the suit is either a moron, or is in trouble with his own investors and is trying to get himself press for looking like he's doing something.
Microsoft had a great reason to fear, and to conquer, Nokia: the Nokia N900. The N900 was arguably the best device ever: a full computer in a mobile form factor. It just needed some polishing of the user interface. Had the polishing been done, Nokia could have been on top of the smartphone market.
With the planned successors to the N900, people would no longer need separate phones and computers. They would just have their Nokia N900-successor, carrying that with them all the time. At home, or in the office, they would attach a keyboard wirelessly and plug in a screen--and there is their computer. This would have led to a revolution in the way both computers and phones are considered.
The N900 ran Linux. So the N900 was a vector for getting rid of Windows. Microsoft saw the threat, presumably, and moved to destroy it.
If I was still a Nokia shareholder I would be stupid.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
This is the cancer that is killing slashdot....
Not that I like borrowing phraseology from /b/, but it seems to be true. Half of slashdot these days is people yelling 'shill' at each other, and that's because people like those you mention are on here, being paid shills.
Marketers, brand managers, social networking managers, image managers, whatever you want to call them, can and will insert themselves into every aspect of human communication, exploit it for their own short term gain, and ruin it.
Bill Hicks came right out and told them to kill themselves. I would ask that first they look inside and ask themselves if being a professional liar is what they wanted to be when they grew up, you know, a complete scumbag that undermines faith in humanity. Because that's what they are, make no mistake, a drain on society and a waste of human flesh.
And if that doesn't wake them from their behaviour then, well, go watch some Bill Hicks.
The difficulty with the N900 was that they introduced one phone.
Now I can think of a certain company that did quite well on just a single model phone. Just one model, their very first model, and it was a big hit. Every year or so an update on that one model, maybe selling the older model in tandem for a while, but basically their whole phone line-up is just one model.
This issue was discussed extensively on talk.maemo.org, but you are mostly correct. I had an N900 for a very long time, and not only did it have an awkward form factor due to its bulk and resistive screen (some UI elements were only accessible with the stylus), the hardware also had an enormous defect. The USB port would fall out even without being abused. At first Nokia denied the issue outright, but then started replacing the damaged phones. Which phone you'd get would be anyone's guess, ranging from the N900, N8 or E7.
I still loved it though, and with care and a couple of mods my USB survived. I loved the fully customizable interface (for instance one thing that just pisses me off about Android is the desktop grid that insists on spacing icons miles away from each other unless you run alternative launchers). I loved the true Linux repositories and apps that did not have ads. Yes, developers should be able to make money, but on the N900 people developed apps like they do on Linux, because it's fun and interesting. And I never found myself missing any features because some random Android app did not have an N900 equivalent.
The N900 was not without other problems. In Canada on my carrier I could only get Edge, not 3G. The hardware, while high end when the phone was released, is really old now and you could feel it. But most importantly, Nokia gave up on it only a year after its release. Ditching a high end, $700 phone so quickly is inexcusable. Their infrequent software updates, left bugs that were never fixed until the CSSU took over.
And you simply can't maintain a community around a single device. Eventually my N900 broke down when I crashed my bike, and when faced with replacing it I opted for a much faster Android. Many lead developers for the N900 went the same route, and I can't blame them.
So yes, Nokia should have released several devices running Maemo 5, and should have continued development of that platform. Jumping to Maemo 6, then Meego, then Windows only made them waste time and resources. I disagree with the need to always have a bleeding edge platform, which is why Maemo 5 was abandoned. Take the Samsung Galaxy Note for instance, which shipped with Android 2.3.5, a year and a half old OS and is extremely popular.
So they gave up control over half their product to a company that is known to release crappy OSes. Development and support may no longer be Nokia's responsibility, but it definitely affects its bottom line.
I'm ok with fanboy comments. For whatever reasons, people frequently become fans of things they like, and like to talk about these things to other people. Back in the old days, it was Ford fanboys versus Chevy fanboys. Sure, fanboy comments can be annoying when they're dumb, but at least they're honest comments from people who actually like the thing they're defending (even if they're morons :-)
Shills, however, are not the same. These are people who are professional liars, paid to act like a fanboy and talk about (or rather, generate hype or "buzz") something like they're really a satisfied customer, when they're not, they're just a plant. It's totally dishonest and despicable, and steps should be taken to keep these scum out. I like your idea about the new-account cooling off period, though I'm not sure it'll help that much because a professional shill will have the patience to wait out that cooling off period and then start making posts.
The dropping of ACs, however, can be problematic. Many people make use of AC posting when they want to write something that could get them in trouble if it were linked to their real identity, and even though we use handles here, you can figure out a lot about people from their posting history and quite possibly figure out their real identity (and some people make no attempt to hide it and actually post their homepage). Being able to post sensitive stuff as AC helps keep it anonymous and lets such people speak their mind without much fear of their employer or whoever finding out. This would be a bad thing to lose, though on the other hand it would be nice to get rid of the many full-time ACs who just post trollish and assholish comments. However, I don't think this would help much with the shills; they seem to actually go to the trouble usually of getting a real account, so that they can appear more legitimate.