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Why Intel Should Buy Nokia
An opinion piece at ZDNet makes the case that Intel is the best match for struggling handset-maker Nokia, arguing that Intel needs help breaking into the smartphone market and Nokia isn't tied as tightly to Qualcomm/ARM hardware as other vendors. From the article:
"Another factor in favor of a union is Nokia and Intel's shared history — albeit not the most successful — of working together in mobile, thanks to their collaboration on the Linux-based MeeGo mobile OS. What's more, Intel has a long relationship with Microsoft, handy given the impending release of Windows Phone 8 and Nokia's new-found commitment to Microsoft's platform. The fact that Intel is currently using Android, as seen with Orange's San Diego smartphone, isn't much of a hindrance; Intel has already said it hasn't written off the idea of using Windows Phone 8 in future, and due to the x86 architecture, Android phones that use Intel's Atom processor won't even run all of the apps on Google Play, suggesting the relationship between Android and Intel isn't all it could be."
I think microsoft should beat the shit of nokia and burn them alive. enough with the crap. getting angry for waiting a decent windows phone available on all countries.
They could drop a lot of money into a Nokia buy and lose a lot of money.
Wasn't Nokia supposed to launch Meego handsets featuring Intel chips? Wasn't that the whole reason behind the joint Meego project?
Nokia is wedded to MS. Intel needs to be more flexible than that, especially since WinPhone is in freefall, and Nokia isn't even trying at tablets.
Dell or HP should buy Nokia, it's their last chance to make it in the mobile space.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
...to the vet in order to put your favorite pet out of its misery. As I watch Nokia suffering incredible pain every day my heart goes out -- can someone please finally put it to sleep so it can find peace?
Nokia is in imminent danger of leaving the mobile phone industry in favour of becoming an outsourced excrement distributor. This could be their last chance of avoiding that and giving their customers what they really want, thereby surviving: Nokia Android handsets/tablets.
that would be cool!
linux+qt nice!
Intel is already hiring those Nokia employees it needs. No need to get the whole thing.
Since we're speculating wildly, what about this scenario: Intel buying RIM and Qt. Nokia isn't using Qt anymore for new development and is looking for a buyer. RIM is switching to Qt and Intel has Qt experience from MeeGo. RIM is looking for a niche market rather than compete head-on with iOS and Android (see the recent interview with the CEO), so an Intel-owned RIM would be less of a direct competitor to Apple and Android manufacturers, which would increase the chances of them adopting Intel CPU's in the future. After all, getting into the mobile market would not be a goal in itself, just a way to sell more CPU's.
It's very similar to the early days of electrical distribution; when it became very clear that AC had won, you wouldn't go out and invest lots of money into companies producing DC generating equipment.
The article suggests that they step away from a Qualcomm Snapdragon based phone and move to Intel processors; but if they did so, they'd still need an ARM-based system to run the SDR on to get network connectivity, and they'd still pay the $35/device Qualcomm tax in any event to get CDMA connectivity for the U.S. Verizon/Sprint market. So a move to Intel does nothing but raise their price and their power consumption.
On the other side of the coin, Intel pretty much shot itself in the head when it comes to the mobile phone market when they sold StrongARM off to Marvell in 2006, before they had anything that could compete with it in terms of power consumption/performance ratio. Buying back into ARM now isn't going to help them in this regard.
All in all, it'd probably be a match made in hell for both companies.
Nobody is going to buy Nokia. Intel isn't a good fit. They're trimming the company down to where it can fit in a filing cabinet managed by a couple paralegals.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You seem to have posted in the wrong topic. Are you by any chance using Chrome and haven't got used to it? ;-)
Go ask these guys: http://www.macrumors.com/
Why should I care. This has some business implications but will neither revolutionize the handset or PDA market nor bring us closer to Mars!!
Seems like a slow day on SD
Intel have never had any success in mobile...
Nokia are falling fast...
And MS are somewhere between, never had much success and also seem to be falling, albeit from a much lower height than Nokia.
Why would 3 failures of the mobile market want to get together?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I wish technology journalists would cover actual events instead of playing "If I were CEO" games.
All I care about is that QT ends up surviving and being independent again. As for Nokia they can rot back in the 90s where they seem to be stuck.
If Nokia had had half a brain they would have made QT for iPhone and then Android so that people could port their iPhone apps quickly to Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, Window Mobile, and oh yes the Nokia phones. Nokia would have then become the center of the app universe while their own app library would have grown somewhat. I reluctantly learned Objective-C and have little desire to relearn Java so that I can port my iPhone apps to android. So with a C++ code once and tweak a bunch of times portability I would have been very happy.
My worry is that they will pull the rug on QT and then sell the carcass off to some group one step away from being a patent troll.
Quite simply if you aren't selling a phone with an ecosystem like google play, itunes, etc...I dont think you have a valid product. Intel doesn't have an ecosystem. Nokia doesn't have an ecosystem. And who the hell would spend billions to knock out a 'me too' android phone. Who would want it?
Further, nobody in management at Intel has an inkling about cell phone level customer service, needs, interests...errr....or much of anything. About the closest they come to that is selling cpu's, motherboards and SSD's through a distribution/reseller channel. Not quite the same thing.
However, these sorts of issues haven't stopped Intel from buying companies with no fit, or bad companies and for too much money.
Even if they're competitive with the last generation of ARM on energy-efficiency, they aren't competitive in cost-efficiency.
Secondly, you don't get the flexibility of being in charge of the fabrication process.
The only real advantage of Intel is running Windows proper which means the netbook market or possibly the tablet market.
In other news, it's not the first nor the last time zdnet publishes idiotic opinion pieces
http://www.google.com/search?q=claim+chowder+site:daringfireball.net+link:zdnet.com
What's to buy at Nokia? Like RIM, they laughed out loud when the iPhone came out, all the way to their current situation, and likely into bankruptcy. Where I feel sorry for the employees (I couldn't bother shedding a tear for the shareholders) is that they won't manage to pull out a Motorola, meaning they'll be bought at the vilest possible price.
Nokia has been a huge supporter of Windows for mobile phones. Microsoft has tried harder than anybody has without making any progress with their own phones. Remember the "Kin"? If Microsoft intends to continue trying, they'll have to keep Nokia's patent portfolio away from the other mobile phone manufacturers. Microsoft needs to buy Nokia for this very purpose.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
First of all the Nokia-windows partnership makes sense i know you want to see another version of an android phone on an already flooded market and dressed up feature phone OS but then again your an idiot. Secondly intel is the poster child of flexibility, i dare you to find a more flexible chip. Thirdly, Nokia wouldn't be a very good take over target if they were doing really well would they (no one could afford them)? fourthly Dell or HP aren't big enough to buy Nokia, besides they would only screw it up like web os. I would love to see an x86 dual boot linux windows, fully hackable phone with a kinect built in, so shutup.
Another disastrous relationship in the wings. Get out the popcorn, this should be fun to watch!
(as history has shown, Intel and mobile (anything aside from traditional laptops) don't mix)
setemberish same time as windows 8.
Epic win! For those who want to get rid of current or once great monopolists. (Not sure if Nokia was ever a monopoly.)
outside of its core strength, it will mismanage and the kill the already ailing acquisition.
I'm still steamed at Intel for that modem of theirs that I bought back in 1993 and they didn't support and then killed not long after that.
Intel is where companies go to be bought to die...
Apple seemed to do a fairly good job of doing it more or less on their own. Why buy one of these old dinosaurs who have (unfortunately from them) all their really critical IP available under FRAND terms?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Wasn't Nokia supposed to launch Meego handsets featuring Intel chips? Wasn't that the whole reason behind the joint Meego project?
Maybe if they had called it Yugo.
There are three types of people who are left at nokia:
a) people who can't find a job anywhere else and were not sacked yet (generally not your thought leaders, lets put it kindly)
b) people who could go elsewhere, but remain because there is stuff to gain in the melee
c) nutters who actually believe windows can be a platform that can make Nokia successful again
Manufacturing is closed down with few exceptions. Brand is in tatters.
The management structure put in place by S Elop has been systematically stripping value from the moment he walked through the door. Presumably plan was to run down the company then - tadaa - Microsoft comes in a chews up what's left. But Elop has done so destructive a job I don't think Microsoft is interested anymore. For his efforts, Elop is winning praise from all over.
Seriously, there is nothing left to buy.
Nokia did a fantastic job of reinventing itself after realizing the lumber industry was no longer a viable business for them. The kind of culture that Nokia has is more likely to succeed by reinventing itself if the wireless phone industry is no longer a viable business for them. The purchase of Scandinavian companies (think Saab and Volvo) have not been good for the companies or their employees.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Is that even possible? Is there a VM layer like Android's Dalvik or is software written directly to a particular arch? If not, I don't see Intel biting.
This takes going through a bit of a chain of events, but it's pretty clear that it was Intel's management of the people and the engineering constraints under which they operated, rather than the inability of the engineers themselves not being up to the task:
StrongARM was sold by DEC to Intel:
PP3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM#History
Former StrongARM engineers quit Intel for SiByte:
PP4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM#History
Broadcom acquires SiByte December 2000:
Row 17: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom#Acquisitions
Founder of SiByte leaves Broadcomm to found P.A. Semi:
PP6: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_W._Dobberpuhl
P.A. Semi makes fast, power efficient Power Architecture processors (PWRficient):
PP1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi#History
P.A. Semi acquired by Apple in April 2008:
PP1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi#Acquisition_by_Apple
P.A. Semi team at Apple tasked with creation of fast, power efficient ARM processors: ...as I said: before, it's probably be a match made in hell for both companies. Intel demonstrably does not currently have the necessary management skills to deal with the problem of power consumption/performance ratio, and has little incentive to actually chase that market down, since it would cannibalize their high end performance market, given that electrical power costs continue to Enron upward.
PP2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi#Acquisition_by_Apple
It might be possible for Intel to incorporate a wholly owned subsidiary to try and keep things at arms length, but it's pretty clear that the tablet market and smart phone market are driving adoption of low power consumption/performance ratio processors pretty strongly, and things like the Motorola Atrix and ASUS Transformer are starting to target the desktop market, as well.
It's only a matter of time before Broadcom documents the GPU in the chip used in the Raspberry Pi, or someone else does something similar, and the desktop stranglehold on GPU accelerated graphics will be blown away to the point that Intel putting under-powered GPUs in their low end chips to avoid caniibalizing the market for their high end chips will completely blow them out of the low end of the market altogether.
The only reason Intel might be able to make some (short term) inroads into the smart phone market would be carrier subsidy of the handset price. This is something that's not happening in the tablet space, and so they won't get the same foothold there. As the tablet market continues to heat up with a slope much steeper than the smart phone adoption rate of anyone other than the earlier iPhone models, they aren't going to be able to rely on subsidy.
Intel could perhaps launch a "game changer" by cutting out the cellular service providers entirely, and killing the monthly billing that permits the handset subsidy in the first place (a quick way would be to deploy mesh networking with last-hop access to WiFi to undercut 3G/4G), but that is unlike Intel to be that forward thinking (e.g. you can still boot DOS 1.0 on their most recent processors, and that's limited their technology vector considerably). And doing so would vastly undercut the market for carrier subsidized handsets, which is precisely Nokia's market.
And then we are back to it being a match made in hell for both companies.
There's no longer any point in buying Nokia except for the patents. Eventually they'll be bought by Apple or Google, and everything except the legal department will be shut down.
It's very sad to see this happen to Nokia - I've worked with them a lot and they used to have some top-notch engineers (and a lot of incompetant management too, which is how they got into this mess). The most talented engineers fled as soon as the Windows announcement was made, and the Elop has been systematically stamping out the remaining pockets of talent since then. Qt and Meltemi were the last hope for turning the company around.
Worst thing is that it was totally predictable, and was predicted by everybody close to Nokia as soon as the Microsoft alliance was announced.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
The premise is flawed. If Nokia were the holy grail of getting your foot in the door to the mobile arena, MS would have fared better by now.
Nokia did exceptionally well and clearly 'got' one generation of phone devices right. That success has not translated to the current state of affairs. If it had, then there wouldn't be so many opportunities for other vendors to exploit Nokia desperation to use their name to advance their agenda.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"arguing that Intel needs help breaking into the smartphone market and Nokia isn't tied as tightly to Qualcomm/ARM hardware as other vendors. "
Not ture!
Since Intel bought the mobile branch from Infineon, they are probably one of the biggest manufacturer of mobile chips.
User interface or they eont get in at all. A micro projector is a new start, with smart camera.
why are all these "analysts" who can't analyze the caps lock key always pushing for some outfit with money to buy a stone loser out?
hint: RIM, Nokia, Palm are all STONE LOSERS! they are black holes. they are crashing in the market because nobody wants their stuff. they have gone over the cliff hanging on to their precious nickel's worth of knowledge that multiple competitors have leapfrogged past for several years now.
this is socialized capitalism being urged to protect the losers. if the government were doing this, there would the riots in the streets.
do NOT buy losers. patents are cheaper in Chapter 7.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
HTC would be a better buy for intel. Two companies that make excellent products working together would be a great thing.
Nokia is a shit company that makes mediocre products. All they have going for them is a cool sounding name. They were a leader way back in the day of cell phones but for the past decade they just crank out generic hardware that is pretty much just very generic and not very cool or exciting. Nokia doesnt make anything that anyother number of companies make far superior versions of at the same price.
Only reason I could see them buying them is because they hold a patent for something they want, or they want their facility resources.
> You seem to have posted in the wrong topic. Are you by any chance using Chrome and haven't got used to it? ;-)
I got interrupted by the phone ... &^!`1###
AccountKiller
...because Microsoft wants to buy it. They put Elop there to burn all the ships (Qt, MeeGo, Symbian) behind their back, so Nokia will have nowhere else to go than accept a 'generous offer' by Microsoft.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Seriously, Nokia is a handset maker, they have free choice of everything, processors, software the lot. Their problems began when they tied their own hands behind their backs, hired Elop and restricted themselves to making only Microsoft phones.
Samsung on the other hand, made Android, Bada, Microsoft, everything under the sun, and found what worked in what markets.
So I don't see how tying themselves to Intel and using the LESS popular CPU with the not so great power consumption would somehow be a good thing.
At this point they need to eject Elop, get a pragmatic COMPETENT boss in place, and start making phones that sell instead of phones they already know don't sell.
Elop is the problem here, not Nokia.
Jolla Ltd. Press Release July 7, 2012
Helsinki, Finland
Jolla Ltd.
Hiilikatu 3 | FI-00180 Helsinki, Finland
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MeeGo Smartphones and Operating System Find a New Life in Jolla Ltd.
Jolla Ltd. is an independent Finland based smartphone product company which
continues the excellent work that Nokia started with MeeGo. The Jolla team is
formed by directors and core professionals from Nokia’s MeeGo N9 organisation,
together with some of the best minds working on MeeGo in the communities.
Jussi Hurmola, CEO Jolla Ltd.: “Nokia created something wonderful – the world’s
best smartphone product. It deserves to be continued, and we will do that together
with all the bright and gifted people contributing to the MeeGo success story.”
Jolla Ltd. will design, develop and sell new MeeGo based smartphones. Together
with international private investors and partners, a new smartphone using this
MeeGo based OS will be revealed later this year.
Jolla Ltd. has been developing a new smartphone product and the OS since the end
of 2011. The OS has evolved from MeeGo OS using Mer Core and Qt with Jolla
technology including its own brand new UI.
The Jolla team consists of a substantial number of MeeGo’s core engineers and
directors, and is aggressively hiring the top MeeGo and Linux talent to contribute to
the next generation smartphone production. Company is headquartered in Helsinki,
Finland and has an R&D office in Tampere, Finland.
Sincerely,
Jolla Ltd.
Dr. Antti Saarnio – Chairman & Finance
Mr. Jussi Hurmola – CEO
Mr. Sami Pienimäki – VP, Sales & Business Development
Mr. Stefano Mosconi – CIO
Mr. Marc Dillon – COO
Further inquiries:
press@jollamobile.com
--- http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=1233581&postcount=105
Who are these people?
Dr. Antti Saarnio – Finland Investor / Financier
Mr. Jussi Hurmola – in past: Director of MeeGo Computers Releases and Integration at Nokia
Mr. Sami Pienimäki – working in product management/marketing, telephone communications
Mr. Stefano Mosconi – in past: MeeGo IT Manager at Nokia
Maemo IT Team Leader at Nokia
Infrastructure Engineer at Nokia
Mr. Marc Dillon – in past: MeeGo (was Maemo, OSSO) Principal Engineer, Configuration Management at Nokia
S40 CoreSW Integrator at Nokia
Symbian Build Manager / Team Leader at Nokia
Configuration Management Administrator at Nokia
--- http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=1233636&postcount=121
Exactly. No trace whatsoever of architects, designers, developers.
Infineon was sold to Intel because it wasn't doing well and was bleeding money like crazy. Infineon is not a mobile power house (never was). They were a semiconductor company trying to get into the mobile market while trailing very far behind Qualcomm, MediaTek and ST-Ericsson.
(Successful company A) should buy (failing company B)! It would be great! Yeah, that's the ticket!
What they leave out is the fact that in nearly all cases, the successful company can get anything it wants that the failing company might have, for far less than the cost to buy the failing company (plus the costs of integrating the acquired company into the parent.)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Yes windows phone 7 is growing, while windows mobile is dropping fast (faster than wp7 is rising by all accounts), giving microsoft a net loss.
Ah, that's what you mean by "Microsoft is falling": you take shipments of two platforms with very different market dynamics, one of them aging, unpopular, and effectively discontinued, and lump them together to arrive at a trend that is utterly meaningless for the long term.
So when Windows Mobile dies its long-deserved death and provided Windows Phone is still growing, can we get back to your comment and agree that you were wrong?
Also it's easy to have high percentage point increases when your market share is trivially low, in absolute market share or shipment numbers they are still laughably far behind ios and android.
I had a 500% increase in phone sales this year... Last year i sold 1 used handset to a friend, this year i sold 5 old handsets that i found in a drawer on ebay and at a junk sale.
We are already talking about some millions of new users, but I'll bite: at what percentage figure it becomes a real deal?
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
This has been marked as redundant, but it isn't. If you look at the 101 things wrong with Windows Phone list you will see that most of these things are not wrong with the iPhone. Most current Nokia customers will find transferring to an iPhone or Android phone easier than transferring to a Nokia Windows Phone. To a large extent this is because Windows Phone is lots worse than other systems (who ever heard of an alarm which doesn't work when you turn the phone off since the 1990s?) but it's also because Windows Phone is designed to match with the rest of Windows at the expense of the normal smartphone experience. This is the crucial thing which is killing Nokia; any knowledgable/experienced customer will be unhappy with Windows phone and Nokia's most valuable customers are the ones who have been buying a new Nokia phone at least once a year every year for the last ten or more years.
Even if Nokia does make a several million sales now, and that seems unlikely when you exclude phones stored in warehouses, the customers they are getting are the ones who just choose the "smartphone" with the lowest price. As these customers become more discriminating they will want to move to one of the more advanced smartphone platforms such as iOS.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
You want to be looking at Linkedin not the list of people signing the press releases.
and employee I'd want to know why we should spend money buying Nokia (read QT) - when Nokia is clearly a dead duck.
We design and manufacture silicon - buying a mobile company means what ... we tell them how to run a phone company - and they embed Atom + windows ?
Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
Better to spend the cash engineering low-power x86 based chips to compete with ARM/Qualcomm on their own turf - and let actual handset manufacturers you know - choose what to base their embedded products on.
Ultimately Intel's lead in fab processes should allow us engineer a pretty competitive chip watt-for-watt. We should just use the lead in process to shove micro-x86 down the throat of qualcomm... basically. /aside: Adios Nokia
Intel should not buy Nokia. Nokia has made several missteps and the investment a company like Intel would make could help Nokia survive but in this case it would not be a best case return on investment for Intel. I admit it could be a good return for the public, but when Nokia goes bust their technology will be free for everyone anyway so why should anyone save them?
Nokia is a bad investment for ANYONE.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I recently bought my two kids Windows Phones, the HTC Titan. It really has come a long way. There are still some issues, but frankly, Windows 8 Phone (which I intend to finally trade my iPhone in for when I can get a Windows 8 x86 phone) looks really nice. There isn't enough app support yet, but I see Metro solving that.
Windows 8 Phone is just very nice to use... it's much snappier than iOS (on slower CPUs) and it feels more like my desktop Windows 8 systems. Oh, I can write software for Windows desktop and it runs almost unchanged on Windows phone.... and don't forget Visual Studio.
No body should buy Nokia.
First of all, what makes the OP think Intel really needs to be in the mobile market?
Apple, HTE, Huawei, Panasonic, Sharp, Hitachi, Samsung, etc., etc. aren't enough?
And Windows phone? Hello, I want there to be more phone OSs (and more OSs in general, since diversity is good), but Windows 8 mobile? Let it die a quick death, like it should - and we'll pretend we never heard of it, just like previous editions of whatever it was called the year it was released. I'd rather see WebOS resurrected or see Blackberry do better.
Android is probably the most overall good system, and it runs on a VM, so everything using the official API should work on x86. Some people prefer to write native code, so a few apps won't work on x86 now, but that's because those authors think "nobody has an x86 phone". Which is true. If you are really a tech geek, then if you stop and think about it, x86 sucks ass in almost all ways. It's single strength is that it's compatible with past x86 chips, which are compatible with a lot of software. Otherwise it sucks in most ways compared to Sparc, MIPS, PowerPC, ARM, etc. Power is one of the ways in which is ha sucked. When a lower clock speed chip is much faster and draws less power (and is more secure), why would anyone want to use an Intel chip on a phone? Just because? To run Windows? Again, the only real advantage of Windows is that it can run a lot of applications. Blue Screen of Death on the phone? DONOTWANT.
iPhone 5 rumored announcement date is September 12, with sales about ten days later. But that's just rumor until it's not, and these things have slipped before. The iPhone has lots of catching up to do. And it'll be interesting if, again, Apple's main hardware focus is on gaming, or whether they offer more general advances, like all those Android devices have been doing.
-Dave Haynie