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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?
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.
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Not in the US, and especially not in the EU.
Too many anti-trust issues.
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.
The back of their phones is made out of glass, I repeat, the back of their phones is made out of glass.
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.
This was the old way; you are now out of date. Nokia has sold all of it's old factories (e.g Salo) where quality ruled. It is no longer using the Finnish design guys who were insisting on Scandinavian quality. It's now designed in the US and built in China by Foxconn (and that's the top end phones).
There is remarkably little of Nokia which is worth salvaging. You might sell off their Telecomms division to a big IT company. Apple would then get the mapping and the patents. The low end phones are still high quality and would go off well to Tata or some equivalent. After that there's nothing left. This wouldn't be a "merger"; much more a purchase followed by a total break up. A case like that is going to have no influence whatsoever on Apple's internal culture.
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...
since hardly anyone goes caseless.
How do you figure that? I very rarely see phones of any type in cases.