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The Case That Apple Should Buy Nokia
Hugh Pickens writes "Nokia has seen better days. The Finnish phone maker continues to struggle to gain traction in a marketplace dominated by Apple and Android, and its new flagship device, the Windows-powered Lumia 920, failed to impress investors when it was announced last month, subsequently causing the company's stock to dive. Now Tristan Louis argues that there are four good reasons Apple should dig into its deep pockets and buy Nokia. First Nokia has really powerful mapping technology. Apple Maps isn't very good, and Apple has been feeling the heat from a critical tech press but Nokia has been doing maps 'for a long time now, and they a have access to even more data than Google.' Next, Nokia has a treasure chest of patents and as Apple's recent smackdown of Samsung proves, the future of the mobile space 'will be dictated by the availability and ownership of patents.' Nokia's exhaustive portfolio of patents might be worth as much as $6 billion to $10 billion, a drop in the bucket from Apple's $100 billion war chest. Nokia could also help with TV. If Apple truly wants to dominate the TV arena, it'll have to beam shows and movies to iPhones or iPads in real time, and that's a field Nokia has some expertise in. Finally Microsoft has a lot riding on the release of Windows Phone 8, and Nokia is its primary launch partner. Buying Nokia would 'knock Microsoft on its heels,' says Forbes' Upbin."
Besides, isn't Nokia Microsoft's bitch?
Apple: it must look good, work out of the box, and be very simple so that even a hipster in skinny jeans and Ray-Bans can do it.
Nokia: it must be solid as a rock, work for 10,000 years, and the interface must exist. If it is convenient, that is a bonus, but not important.
These companies are opposites. Merging them together will just get us stylized Nokias that lack the legendary bulletproof Nokia quality.
I foresee trouble in that area.
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10% of their cash isn't a drop in the bucket, and that's just for the patents - the rest of the company wouldn't be free.
Knocking out WIndows Mobile through a buyout would make Apple even more hated and even more like MS of the 1990s, as would beginning a whole new range of lawsuits based on Nokia's patents.
Bad idea.
"Maps will get better with time"
Customer's tempers won't.
I know I am being picayune, but 10% is not a drop in the bucket. Not even in the colloquial sense. Unless it is a teeny tiny bucket that only holds 10 drops.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Not in the US, and especially not in the EU.
Too many anti-trust issues.
Nokia's patents may be purchasable, but buying the entire company would be a huge investment for Apple, one which would provide hardly any value outside of the patent portfolio - Nokia's products, philosophy, almost everything are completely orthogonal to Apple's. This is a terrible idea.
buying your 4th (or 5th) largest competitor so that your 3rd largest competitor can't survive in the market could be called "anti-trust". Something MSFT knows all about...
Microsoft is *already* on it's heels. Apple is worth far more than Microsoft and appears to have a better strategy going forward. Taking any opportunity to knock Microsoft down makes no business sense and distracts from their mission.
Tristan Louis is an Internet veteran, having worked in the Internet industry since 1993. Throughout the years, Mr. Louis has been known as the founder of Internet.com, a co-founder of Earthweb's developer.com, the interim CTO for Boo.com, and has held many other roles at start-ups during the first dotcom boom.
And this guy is commenting on why Apple should buy Nokia? Really? That's "news" to us? It's basically a list of half baked points. I know how this works, I've seen it in my uncle. He used to play sports in high school and when we watch a Vikings game he is just exasperated at how terrible the coaches are. Why, if he was in that game, he'd know exactly what plays to call and he could probably even be the quarterback and throw this football clear over them mountains.
The piece fails to explain why Apple shouldn't merely license Nokia's map services instead of kicking $10 billion out for it (oh, by the way, 10% of your total liquid assets is not a "drop in the bucket"). It fails to analyze many of the other assets of Nokia (oh, come on, like Apple would continue making Nokia's candy bar phones) and just assumes Apple would like to pay for all that stuff. It doesn't consider all the EU approvals that Apple would need and he ends this list with Apple doing "a double-reverse with a flip" which sounds a lot like the plays my uncle would call in a professional football game.
In short, build your own $100 billion dollar empire and then you can throw it away yourself. Until then, I don't think this shallow "analysis" of two phone makers was ever worth my time. It could at least be comprehensive and delve into the financials of the deal and possible repercussions (like yet another little guy dying and the market becoming more inbred with less options).
My work here is dung.
No one has yet mentioned one other important thing if Apple bought Nokia. Nokia is Microsoft's flagship handset manufacturer for it's Winphones. If Apple did nothing more than announce they were considering buying Nokia, that would generate a tremendous amount of FUD that could decimate Microsoft's mobile plans.
Apple is in a distant second place in the smartphone market, acquiring Nokia wouldn't involve antitrust at all. Hell, even google could acquire Nokia without problems (because the Android industry is already very diverse).
I support Apple buying Nokia, only because it would fuck Microsoft over.
And fucking Microsoft over can only be a good thing for everyone.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Lately, we have been seeing a LOT of attention on the problem of patents. Not just software patents, but patents in general. If Apple bought Nokia now, they will either have to exploit those patents now or face losing all of their value.
When I start hearing lay people discuss the problems of patents, (and I have heard this recently) I know it's not just geek interest any longer. Now it's getting in the way of their next gadget purchase and they are taking notice.
The only case Apple should buy for Nokia is a basket.
The best patents from Nokia are in Mosaid, a Canadian patent troll they created to try to extract money from Android handset makers without ever having to face a challenge from Google, (and helping them avoid litigation from Google via the shell company) and Sisvel a similar troll.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57445061-75/google-blasts-microsoft-nokia-for-hiding-behind-patent-trolls/
This was part of the $2 billion Elop got for going with the Windows 7 phone.
They don't really have much else left, Windows phone isn't selling, so Apple doesn't need to buy them to kill it. The patents are gone, the maps? Again they were signed over to Windows Phone as part of the $2 billion. Microsoft cherry picked it all, the core is left, but Elop will quickly turn that into a rotting carcass. Presumably that will be sold to Microsoft at a knockdown price, and Elop will emerge somehow as richer than before.
In short, Apple doesn't need Nokia. Nokia has reinvented itself many times since it made shoes and tires, and it's WELL OVERDUE to do that again. The problem is cell phones are effectively all it does, and it's tragically lacking innovation there (FWIW, I worked for Nokia, and made detailed suggestions over ten years ago about more storage, touch screens, and more battery life, and there was repeated immediate dismissal over how impossible it would be). The sad part is Nokia went to Microsoft rather than it's dedicated developers to find that innovation. Microsoft will even help kill Nokia partly because Nokia doesn't seem to know what to do, and mostly because they forgot Balmer doesn't care about Nokia any more than it can work as a stepping stone for Microsoft to "get back on top." Yes, buying Nokia would give Microsoft one less out for Windows, but sadly for Nokia (and to be fair, IMNSHO) Microsoft's overwhelming priority is to do its own work for Windows 8 after getting Nokia to abandoning [small] teams of [highly] devoted Symbian developers as part of the fallout in committing to The Balmer; proof.
Agreed...Apple has absolutely nothing to fear from Microsoft. Microsoft is destroying themselves from the inside. For Apple to buy Nokia, that might cause Microsoft to wake the fuck up and start building their own phones, like Apple does.
If Apple really wants to see Microsoft fail, the best option is to let them continue down the path they are currently on.
I think I agree with the commentor on the Forbes site who put this squarely in the realm of fantasyland. Microsoft has already given Nokia $2 billion and Elop seems committed to Microsoft's camp. Aren't there other Maps providers on the internet that Apple could potentially partner with? Mapquest? Somebody?
Nokia's exhaustive portfolio of patents might be worth as much as $6 billion to $10 billion, a drop in the bucket from Apple's $100 billion war chest.
However, Nokia the company would cost significantly more, perhaps more than Apple would be willing to spend. Currently their assets+equity comes in at about $48 billion and they have an annual revenue of $38 billion. Nokia wouldn't sell their patent portfolio as it'd leave them crippled.
Finally Microsoft has a lot riding on the release of Windows Phone 8, and Nokia is its primary launch partner. Buying Nokia would 'knock Microsoft on its heels,'
If Apple bought Nokia, then Nokia the legal entity would still exist. All their existing contracts would still be valid. So they'd be contractually be obliged to continue with the Windows 8 launch. Further in the future you could block new deals sure, but that wouldn't help at all with the current competition.
This is never happening.
Nokia is a sinking ship; they can't do things well when handed them on a silver platter (look at all that Qt phone stuff; absolutely beautiful, but they did nothing with their alliance with Intel, letting Intel do all the dev work on MeeGo et al). Why would Apple want to buy Nokia except to gut it and use it as a manufacturing arm and discard everything else save Navteq? Is Navteq really worth burning pretty much ALL of their money to buy? IIRC, Samsung produces some of the iPhone's parts and Foxcon is on strike, so a change in manufacturing may be wise, but it still seems far too pricey to pull off, especially given all the anti-trust trouble it would create.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
No comments. Fix it.
[...] doing maps 'for a long time now, and they a href="http://www.cultofmac.com/194130/why-apple-should-buy-nokia-to-fix-their-mapping-disaster/">have access to even more data than Google." Next, Nokia has a treasure [...]
I'd rather have microsofts revenue than apples, even if apples is larger. Reason? Apples revenue comes from consumer electronics. That can change overnight if Apple just blows it once with a new release. Microsoft has a huge corporate revenue stream as well as a lot more lock-in from software. To put it another way: microsoft can release vista fiv times over without losing much revenue to e.g. Mac OS. If the iPhone6 is crap and samsung's offering is brilliant then Apple is in trouble. Apple have to deliver continuously, MS not so much.
Never get past EU regulators.
why-apple-should-buy-nokia-to-fix-their-mapping-disaster
Maps is a disaster. But what about the other iOS6 problems (some here). What about the recent Apple lack of innovation, and the reported lack of staff motivation? As a owner of 2 Macs, 2 iPhones and an iPad, I'm just worrying. During the past year, new devices are mere incremental updates, and nothing revolutionary came from the software dept (OSes and applications). And the general update trend slowed down, compared to 2 years ago. This appears to me as a management problem.
To be fair, Tim Cook has to be vigilant - Apple sells a lot thanks to the nice and innovative ergonomics and design inertia coming from the iPhone 3~4 era. Taking a different direction would definitely mark that new era as the real beginning of the Cook epoch - and at the same time end the Jobs one forever. And who knows what would be the outcome of that.
In my opinion, Tim Cook will keep sticking to the Jobs background for a while - maybe 2 years - while Apple staff will feel more and more the gap between what image Cook wants to show to the world (ie Jobs-like) and the day-to-day internal management. Updates slowness, substantial mistakes and bugs will increase over time, while disheartened (and good) people will leave the company. It will be a hard time for Cook, having to choose between working (hard) to maintain that fading image from the past, or cope with a dramatically different management requirement.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Maps? The installer for it can't possibly get any worse.
Currently it opens up a browser button with two buttons, both of which do nothing.
Nokia just can't do software.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
These "insights" keep popping up every few months. A little while ago, everybody was telling Apple and MS to buy RIM. Following the herd is for sheep
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
1)Microsoft would almost without question fight any buyout offer for Nokia by Apple tooth and nail and Microsoft has a war chest big enough to buy Nokia themselves. There is no way Apple would be able to buy the company for a reasonable price. Microsoft needs Nokia worse than Apple does right now.
2)Nokia has committed to the Microsoft platform and changing direction at this point would be tremendously costly. In fact it would probably kill the Nokia to try at this point.
3)Nokia does a lot of business with low margin products that are definitely not in Apple's wheelhouse. Apple already makes most of the profit in the cell phone industry. They would have to take on a lot of products in markets that they don't know well that make essentially no profit if they bought Nokia.
4)There would be huge company culture issues. Apple has a very unique company culture and a big acquisition would bring a lot of problems.
5) If Nokia goes under, Apple can probably buy assets it needs without the extra baggage of the rest of a troubled company
6)Apple's problems with their Maps is a fixable problem without involving Nokia. Yeah, they dropped the ball but they have the resources to make it work so long as they don't screw a lot of other things up at the same time.
Let's say Apple buy Nokia for those reasons (Maps, patents and Fuck Microsoft). Apple now has to fire 95% of the company (they only keep the IP lawyers and the mapheads). Nokia has 122,000 employees, many of them in Europe were they cannot be fired easily. That's 116,000 pink slips. A $100000 redundancy payment per person seems about right ("Apple is loaded"). That's about $12 billions. Combine that with Nokia's market cap (about $10bn) and the price rises to $22bn. I guess Apple could technically afford it, but the damage to their image could cost them even more.
Nobox: Only simple products.
Sounds like somebody is trying to offload their Nokia stock.
Nokia: it must be solid as a rock, work for 10,000 years, and the interface must exist. If it is convenient, that is a bonus, but not important.
Maybe you are talking about their hardware from WAY back when. Nokia's software absolutely sucks. It's not solid, barely interfaces with anything, it is not well designed and certainly isn't convenient to use. I used Nokia phones for about 10 years before finally getting fed up. The hardware was ok, not great (and not rock solid) but acceptable at the time. Their software was horrendous.
I'd rather have revenue that comes from hardware than software. Software is sort of like a bubble because once free alternatives crop up that are of sufficient quality, the bubble pops. In the long term Microsoft has to change their business strategy because they won't be able to maintain that Office lock-in forever. And once they lose the Office lock-in (which LibreOffice and Google Docs are already working on doing), they put Windows in vulnerable situation to lose its lock-in to a Linux variant.
There was a time when the FOSS naysayers claimed that OOo would never match the quality/usability/compatibility of MS Office but every year since the LibreOffice fork that gap has narrowed more and more. LibreOffice, being free, doesn't have to close that gap completely, it just has to close it enough for the gap to be irrelevant.
Linux is the same way. It's sort of a mess right now, but it does continuously improve and remains free. Just look at Android. It's too bad that Google hasn't thrown its weight behind a serious Linux variant rather than Chrome OS, or the year of the Linux desktop might have already been. Remember, Microsoft is jumping into the hardware space for a reason: they know that consumer software isn't sustainable in the long term. Software has a $0 replication and distribution cost, thus driving the price to $0 dollars. Hardware will never have this issue.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
I can't believe I'm seeing a piece on slashdot that's seriously saying that thinning out the marketplace is a good thing.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
I'd rather have microsofts revenue than apples, even if apples is larger. Reason? Apples revenue comes from consumer electronics. That can change overnight if Apple just blows it once with a new release. Microsoft has a huge corporate revenue stream as well as a lot more lock-in from software. To put it another way: microsoft can release vista fiv times over without losing much revenue to e.g. Mac OS. If the iPhone6 is crap and samsung's offering is brilliant then Apple is in trouble. Apple have to deliver continuously, MS not so much.
Worse, Apple's value is entirely coupled to the close association of a narrow set of consumer hardware to a walled garden set of media. Loss of market in either will start to very quickly erode the other because they, effectively, have all their eggs in one big basket. Microsoft has several *thousand* products. (Half of which, I'd hazard a guess, virtually no one outside of a fairly narrow space has ever even heard of.)
As someone with a fairly large investment in both companies, I think you're absolutely right. Apple is a high yield, high risk stock. Microsoft's stock is rock stable in price specifically because investors know its not going anywhere. Its a long term investment that pays good dividends and is a safe place to put it. Apple's stock is best to day-trade, because it rides 10% swings constantly. Microsoft's value doesn't concern me at all... it'll slowly rise, it'll slowly fall but its too diversified to do either quickly. Apple's a constant game of worry -- hoping it doesn't implode before some particular block of stock in my portfolio ticks over to a long-term cap gain rather than short term, and wondering if its best to take the short term cap gain hit and get out before it implodes.
Consumers, to your point, are fickle. Sony was the Apple of the 90's, and it didn't last. Apple likely won't either... and their "innovation" (or complete lack thereof) since Jobs' death should (and does) significantly worry investors.
The stock didn't "dive" after the 920 announcement (Sept 5th) and it didn't go down because of any disappointment. If that was the case, explain the bullish stock run from the 7th to the 16th. If investors were so disappointment with the announcement, why would people be buying the stock?
Most tech stock exhibit a similar pattern right after a product announcement. One of the sayings in the stock market today is "Buy the Rumor, Sell the News". Rumors and expectations create buzz that influences stock prices. In this case, the people selling Nokia after the announcement were the speculators who understand that they can make a quick buck from the buzz. It had nothing to do with the reception of the product itself.
While Windows phones have not been selling well in the US, they have been increasing market share in the rest of the world. Some people seem to forget that there are billions of people outside of the US who also buy cell phones.
My prediction is that Nokia will continue to plod along, gradually increasing their market share as they continue to introduce additional products to their line-up. They have the cash to ride out the storm and come back as a #3 or #4 phone maker. Unlike RIMM, they do know how to make phones with features that people want.
Actually it does if 3rd party phones don't work as well with Android as Motorola phones or feature sets suddenly become better with Motorola. Vertical integration only benefits the business NOT consumers.
Nokia is not the only maker of Windows 8 phones.
Keeping trying troll boy.
Not really. Apple has a large portfolio of software patents on functional elements of the smart phone and UI, but most of these will eventually be proved worthless because of prior art, obviousness or lack of originality. They also have design patents covering the look and feel, but I suspect most of these will eventually be either invalidated or narrowed to the point where they are worthless.
The core IP that makes a smartphone a smartphone is held by companies such as Motorolla, Bell Labs, Nokia, Eriksson, Samsung and others. Fortunately, as these patents are required for interoperability and standards purposes they must be licensed under FRAND terms, but in the end, these portfolios will prove far more important than the UI, Mobile OS or look and feel patents.
If you aren't part of the solution, then there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
I have been waiting for a long time for my next phone - Nokia running on Android ..
The day a company starts to innovate thru buying other corporations instead of creating stuff itself is the day it starts to die.
I'd rather have microsofts revenue than apples, even if apples is larger. Reason? Apples revenue comes from consumer electronics.
That's misleading though, since Apple's revenue comes from electronics in multiple distinct fields:
1) mobile connected devices (iPhone)
1.5) tablets/iPad
2) Laptops
3) Desktops
4) iPod class devices (iPod, iPod Touch)
5) AppleTV (weak by growing).
I grouped them that way because even if one of those areas suffered a severe blow to sales, the other aspects would remain untouched without completely separate efforts of attack by different companies.
All of that is also discounting Apple having major software inroads in lots of ways, mobile application sales and music and movies and so on.
Far from Apple being weak because they are mostly hardware, Apple has built a giant platform of stability that insures success unless a LOT of things in a LOT of markets goes wrong for them. Only one leg (item 1, possibly 1.5) is an aspect that mere fashion trends can really impact and honestly I would argue even that is not the case.
When you consider that every leg on which the Apple platform is built is growing, it's hard to really find enough weakness in Apple currently to claim it's a less stable company than Microsoft.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What a crappy post. Nokia would be an extremely poor fit for Apple culturally, technologically, logistically, and managerially. Chalk me up with the other posters who suspect the author of wanting to cash out their Nokia stock.
1. the level of detail isn't as nice
I find it nicer, I think the maps are more readable. The detail is generally there if you zoom in a bit more. Also if you change the map font to "small" the map will show more details on screen.
2. the GIS database appears to have a higher rate of error
I know this is true for some, but I have not found this to be the case in my area. I have been using Apple Maps steadily for navigation since the later betas, and it's been working pretty well for things you actually look for day to day - hotels, restaurants, so on. The Apple Maps turn-by-turn also works really well, even when you are going through areas with zero data access (as long as you load up the instructions before you lose data).
5. satellite data isn't as complete as google maps
Varies by region. Again where I live, Apple's satellite data is more recent.
3. the 3D fly over is a gimmic and not new.
It totally replaces Street View for the only thing I ever used Street View for - to check out the area I plan to visit, and to look at what a storefront looks like. There is enough resolution for that in an area where 3D maps are supported...
Even where 3D data is not present, the terrain deformation alone also makes the 3D mode useful. I can now use Apple Maps for a lot of the things I used to use Google Earth for in trip planning, to see what terrain is like and how steep a road really is. For seeing where you might want to bike around a city it is great.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Software has a $0 replication and distribution cost, thus driving the price to $0 dollars. Hardware will never have this issue.
Following that line of economic thought, all prices are driven towards marginal cost. You don't make any more money selling $100 hardware units at $100 each than you do selling $0 copies of software at $0 each.
Apple has been making huge money in the other end of the market, high-end smartphones. That is a much higher margin business and still growing. Nokia has been losing market share, to Samsung among others. Also, as others have noted, they are deep in bed with Microsoft already, so that is another reason for Apple to pass.
You are dead on target here.
The last time Apple collapsed, it was because they were arrogant and hostile towards third party application developers and sought to control every aspect of the software channel. Steve Jobs, the genius who push Apple to its dominant position in the early 80's also, as the control freak he was, laid the foundation for the collapse. They also sought to squash third party peripherals providers by tightly controlling the hardware interfaces and BIOS. You could not expand the RAM or, in most cases, add third party peripherals to a Macintosh. I tried to help a friend with a third party RAM expansion on one of those lunch box shaped Macs with the teeny tiny screen. What an abortion - DIP clips clamped onto address latches, extract one of the very few socketed EPROMS to plug in the daughter board, then secure it with a cable tie and som RTV Silcone to an electrolytic capacitor. Apple Fanboys accepted that all of these limitations were usability features - a built in display, no RAM upgrades, limited hard drive upgrades, a one button mouse, etc. Steve Jobs lost a power struggle with the Apple Board and left Apple shortly before it's market share collapsed. Scully is blamed (much of it deservedly) for the collapse and none of the business model failure stick to Jobs.
Fast forward 20 years - in 2008, Apple dominated the smartphone market with the iPhone. iPhone has a very tightly controlled third party app channel, and "features" no Micro SD card, no Micro USB slot and a non-replaceable battery. Their competitor has all of these things, plus a customizable UI, no limitations of 3rd party in-app content and a wider variety of free (or ad supported) apps. Once again, the company has show arrogance and often anti-competitiveness with third party application and content developers. Now Jobs has left the company again - unavoidable this time, but the company has lost none of its arrogance or hostility to third party innovators for the platform. Lets see who gets blamed for the next collapse.
If you aren't part of the solution, then there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Well, if you are actually going to back those "prior art, obviousness or lack of originality" claims up (assuming they are anything more than just pissanting), you have your work cut out for you since they churning out more of them all the time.
Are you smoking crack? Practically all hardware is proprietary. And every yearly update improves on the last, a strategy that has served the car industry for decades. Phones with ethernet? You really are smoking something (and plenty of smartphones are without memory card slots). Also: Marketshare is not money.
Why do you think all Mac owners have MS Office? I sure don't. Plus, LibreOffice looks more like "good old" MS Office anyway.
all prices are driven towards marginal cost
Yes, that is the promise of the theoretical construct called the "free market".
Hardware will always have a cost, whereas software doesn't necessarily.
If hardware costs $100, and you're willing to pay $100, then it is also probable that you'll be willing to part with $101 (and the company will make a profit).
If software costs $0, and you're only willing to pay $0, it's very difficult to convince you to even pay $1.
a) Apple wouldn't do this b) Microsoft wouldn't allow Apple to do this While Apple is a "larger" company (per the equities market) Microsoft still has tons and tons and tons...and TONS of cash laying around. Microsoft would never allow Apple to do this...and Apple and Microsoft are in cahoots in some ways, so it's not like Apple really wants to antagonize Microsoft at this point. It's clear they both have a shared goal of taking out Google.
I think it would be far cheaper and more effective for Apple to "contract" their map data (and services?) from Nokia than to buy Nokia outright. I could see Nokia liking such a "buy" for the cash-flow it would bring them while they try to figure out how to survive the lambasting they've been getting for their Windows 8 phone series.
I'm sure Apple would like to acquire Nokia's patents, but buying the whole company to get them when they could lease the map data would be crazy, not to mention it would be rife with anti-trust issues around the world.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Great idea! Apple could use those Nokia Hakapelitta snow tires as shockproof cases for iPhones.
Power iUsers could stick studded Hakapelitta cases down their pockets.
Why is it that the words of analyst and journalists who have no clue about technology are considered important?
Apple buys Nokia. Great. Then what. They are stuck with a multi-year exclusive contract to sell phones based on a Microsoft OS, yup Apple would love that. Buy them for maps? Why? If Apple want Nokia maps, they can license them. What on earth do they get out of owning them that they don't get from licensing?
Just because they have a hundred billion dollars in cash doesn't mean they have to buy companies just because the cost seems relatively insignificant. This is more of someone wondering 'hey if I had hundred billion dollars, what would I do?' Well, you don't. And you never will. And if Apple were as stupid as that, they would never have either. They got there by being a lot smarter than some two bit journalist.
Apple made that kind of money by doing precisely the opposite of what this guy suggests. They have the most limited product line of any such company. They are never afraid of killing off products, like the Macbook pro 17". They are extremely selective about which segments they get into, and then take their time planning it. The companies they acquire are companies that will let Apple make their products and services better, like Siri.
... the tech press, or just about anyone else, because of the quality of the product but because it didn't reveal anything. No carrier information was given, no price points stated and the folks who got a look at the phone couldn't do anything with it. They couldn't phone, text, surf the Web, or do anything else with the phone. MS and Nokia would have been better off waiting until the the phone was finished. How could anyone know the quality of what they were looking at? Much like MS's reveal of their tablets. They couldn't even be touched! The presentation was obviously hurried to beat the expected release of the Apple iPhone 5.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
It's trivial to port Android to Nokia platforms, hobbyists do it all the time:
Great, so now Nokia has ported Android over and they have an undifferentiated Android phone. If I'm interested in using Android I can get one from dozens of vendors. Nokia has nothing special to bring to the Android party that isn't already there AND they would be well behind their competitors who are already using Android. While Nokia COULD go to Android, it isn't obvious that doing so would be a good idea from a business perspective. Nokia would do much better in the long run if their Microsoft strategy were to pay off. If Microsoft were to pull the plug on Nokia, Android might be their only option left but it isn't really a path Nokia would be eager to go down.
Nokia's experiment with Microsoft isn't over yet (though it isn't looking good thus far) and it does have the advantage of being able to use Microsoft's pile of cash to their advantage. Windows on mobile devices is critical for Microsoft and through Nokia they are able to have a path to market. If Nokia falls, Microsoft really doesn't have anyone to make and market phones with their software so in all likelihood Microsoft would buy out Nokia if needed. Right now Nokia would be expensive but if things keep going the way they are, Nokia could get really cheap.
The new WP 7.5 phones are quite decent to look at, and very nice to use. They are quite stable too, so I'm not sure what you're up about... I'm sure WP 8 phones won't lose any ground here.
repeat after me... "Why should good companies dump billions into the crapper buying junk companies they've already whipped?"
repeat 10,000 times.
and now re-examine your faulty analysis.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I like that the summary thinks $6 to $10 billion is a "drop in the bucket" compared to $100 billion. How big a drop fills up 6 to 10% of a bucket?
Glass will shatter,
Sorry, I must have been on Nokia phones for too long. So you drop your phone and the glass is supposed to shatter? It never does for me.
All materials come with a tradeoff.
It must be scratch resistance for my Lumia phone. Its glass front has got one fairly pronounced scratch (an ideal arc, must have pivoted on something) and a few small ones. It doesn't bother me much, but it may be unbearable for some iPhone users.
I think the material debate is kind of absurd anyway, since hardly anyone goes caseless.
Here we go again. You have to use a case with your phone?
Oh, I dropped my phone again while writing this. Big freaking deal.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
it won't happen because that would bring Apple too close to being a real monopoly force in the industry, and that would bring on more regulation by Governments etc. Just as MS needed Apple in the old days to be able to say that MS didn't have a monopoly in the PC industry.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
I don't agree with this analysis:
Maps: I can't say how badly Apple needs more mapping data, but I doubt they need to buy all of Nokia to fill the gaps. In my short experience, the Apple maps are actually a lot better than Googles in some places.
Patents: Again, I can't say the value of them, but if Apple has survived up till now without them, I doubt this is a very compelling reason.
TV: As if Apple needs technical know how in this area.
Hurting Microsoft: Hard to put a value on, but since the rumour is that MS is planning their own hardware launch, I doubt its worth the price of admission.
One of the cool things about Apple is that they don't feel the need to make major acquisitions to get their job done. Sometimes they make smaller ones, but I'd argue that even these ones mostly weren't really necessary. If Apple bought everything that the pundits said they should, they would have blown through all their war-chest already.
but most of those are FRAND anyway.
It wouldn't knock MSFT out, MSFT already has a phone in development. Apple doesn't need some lead weight to drag it down. If you look at Apple's acquisition history, it's very frugal in that they only buy companies on the cheap. Apple doesn't really need maps, there's TeleAtlas so that they can buy from TomTom.
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And as Apple's maps database tech gets better so will Googles.
If Apple is serious about mapping they need to get an army of people doing the same things as Googles army of people working on their maps are doing (7000 people by some accounts.)
This is also a search engine issue in some respects... First you need the actual map data, then POI's, then the ability to search for some random thing and if possibly get an address that can then be displayed by the actual app on the phone.
The TomTom map data seems to be less goodly than Googles. The POI database (TomTom and probably lots of other sources) also seems to suck by comparison. If you are not searching via Googles search engine then probably the results there are not as complete as could be...
If Apple really wants to compete they have to solve all of the above issues. Its not just the map database, not just the POI database, you also need to tie it together with a kick ass search capability. Google has all of that and their end product improves daily. It will take a boatload of cash over years before Apple can seriously compare services.
That said the actual iOS app is pretty! Unfortunately Google's app when it is released will probably have a similar look and feel but be plugged into a much better search engine, a much better POI database, and better map database (and don't forget streetview!)
One of the interesting tidbits about streetview, Google apparently does pattern recognition to pull out data from signs, house addresses etc... So even if you don't actually use streetview you are benefiting from it when you do searches.
Apple's stock is best to day-trade, because it rides 10% swings constantly.
As someone who has actually invested in Apple for a few years, this didn't sound right to me. So I checked. The last time AAPL had a daily change larger than 10% was on 11/24/2008, when it jumped 12.55% from 82.23 to 92.55.
$700 for Appell Pete Corp?
Try AAPL.
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Slashdot is full of blowhards these days.
"I learned it from watching you!"
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
What encrypted database? What does the "closed API program" - I assume you mean iTunes - matter? The files are on the file system, only the star ratings you give are unavailable to any other program. The "mass storage" just means you increase the skill required to know where things have to go in order to be found - I remember that from the PSP. Also, they made a design decision to isolate apps from each other making the platform more secure - a bit like having non-root users on a Linux system, which most people agree is a smart idea. Now this design decision is different from what Android Inc. decided, but apparently you are not allowed to make different design decisions...
Again: Leave the crack pipe alone before posting. Then try to start a business where you sell goods to the consumers just for the cost of materials... you will soon see there are plenty of other expenses you need to cover.
The last thing the mobile industry needs is Apple buying out its competitors as this would create less choice. Nokia does indeed have an agreement in place with MS for them to provide Windows mobile for their smartphone devices so I don't see how a buyout of Nokia could go ahead with that in place. Nokia really shot themselves in the foot by not adapting to change in the mobile market. They have made stupid decisons like killing off their Meego line of devices and not adopting Android.
What encrypted database? What does the "closed API program" - I assume you mean iTunes - matter? The files are on the file system, only the star ratings you give are unavailable to any other program. The "mass storage" just means you increase the skill required to know where things have to go in order to be found - I remember that from the PSP. Also, they made a design decision to isolate apps from each other making the platform more secure - a bit like having non-root users on a Linux system, which most people agree is a smart idea. Now this design decision is different from what Android Inc. decided, but apparently you are not allowed to make different design decisions...
Again: Leave the crack pipe alone before posting. Then try to start a business where you sell goods to the consumers just for the cost of materials... you will soon see there are plenty of other expenses you need to cover.
My original post was Microsoft can't be Apple. Having had time to reflect on your posts. I enjoy your fanaticism. I personally will enjoy better value; more open; standard following; competitor like the majority do. I think Microsoft chasing Apples shrinking market share of people who pay more for less is a poor choice.
Personally though I love the idea of you calling my a crack addict!? I think its screen envy ;)
No I fucking don't, you presumptuous donkey-licker. Their stuff has been shit since long before Elop's reign.
You mean in the days when it was called EPOC, and made by Psion?
The keyword is "still". Nokia didn't develop it and they haven't got round to fucking it up yet.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."