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Nokia Selling Its Headquarters To Raise Funds
PolygamousRanchKid writes with news the Nokia is looking to generate some cash by selling its headquarters and leasing it back from the new owner. The sale price for the 48,000 sq. meter building is €170 million.
"The struggling mobile phone company has operated in the glass and steel building in Espoo near Helsinki, known as Nokia House, since 1997. The sale is another step towards reducing costs and concentrating on its core business. Nokia has spent almost a third of its cash reserves in 12 months, and in October had about €3.6bn left in the bank to turn itself into a smartphone manufacturer capable of competing with Apple and Samsung."
I was one of a series of consultants they did not listen to with regard to Open Sourcing Symbian and what was, and was not, still of value in Symbian at that late date. Much of what they really valued - like the Symbian kernel - wasn't really business-differentiating in the eyes of the customer and nobody wanted it any longer, but yet they spent Billions on it.
Their destiny is to become a patent troll or to have their assets bought by one. What a shame.
Bruce Perens.
3) Monetary reasons. They actually need the cash right now to stay in business. They're betting on a recovery and future sales covering the cost of money. (Speaking as having worked for a failing company that tried this. It probably helped them stay in business for a few more months.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
This is SLASHDOT. We are BIAS.
You mean the company that single handedly set the web back at least five years and has been criminally convicted for anti competitive behavior and the company that is being run into the ground by the 8th largest shareholder of the previously mentioned company?
Gee, I wonder why anyone would hate them.
This is SLASHDOT. We are BIAS.
Its not bias of slashdot!? that has made Microsoft Windows Phone and that Nokia Strategy as popular Marmite covered spiders. Nokia twinning themselves *exclusively* with an OS that late; with less features and incompatible with its predecessors, with no viable upgrade path, with proprietary software...on hardware made in china; with less features than its predecessors or the competition at the cost to real peoples jobs, its market value, revenues; market share; brand value....only for it being replace with the latest suitor HTC [with the pattern repeated as Microsoft become their own OEM]. Has become a patent troll with Microsoft...while devaluing those patents to anyone who would have bought them.
I'm just barely touching the surface of what is perhaps a decline of company on an unrepresented scale. I find it insulting to an nth degree that anyone would try to pass anything, anyone saying anything against this is, as emotional, although I suspect the thousands of newly unemployed probably aren't loving them right now.
Seen how much money Microsoft is making out of Android?
More than they make from Windows Phone.
A Microsoft asked a Nokia to carry him across a river. The Nokia refused because it was afraid of getting stung by the Microsoft. But the clever Microsoft argued that if it stings the Nokia then they would both drown. So the Nokia agrees and carries the Microsoft into the river. Halfway across the Microsoft stings the Nokia dooming them both. In its dying breath the Nokia asks the Microsoft why it did such a thing. The Microsoft replies "it is my nature".
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Side note, does Microsoft actually need Nokia's factories or talent? Once Microsoft owns the IP, can't they simply close everything down and move the business to the US, and the manufacturing to China? If Microsoft is only concerned with (essentially) one product (the Windows 8 phone), why would they need Nokia's talent at all?
Side side note, I wonder if this will have an appreciable effect on the economy of Finland? (Probably not, but I don't have the numbers in front of me.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Exactly how did MS set the web back 5 years?
Oh.. that 5 year span when NOTHING improved on IE? That piece of time between the death of Netscape and the advent of tabbed browsing (and RSS feeds) on Firefox? The lack of innovation certainly WAS Microsoft's fault. Not only that, it was their plan - eliminate everything else so they didn't have to spend money on competition.
People used IE in the early 2000s because it came with the computer. Microsoft had won the desktop wars and with it, everything else. The era of being cross platform was gone. Everyone clicked the Big Blue E to get on the Internet and nobody was going to PAY for Netscape. IE was the logical choice as most people thought Microsoft was the only source for computer software. Under threat of never seeing your precious Word and Excel documents again, they were right.
The ability to stifle innovation (including their own) came from two things; Microsoft Server Extensions and tolerance to really bad code, both of which were a good thing in a way. The big problem with Netscape at the time is they were trying really hard to be W3C standards compliant and, except for the addition of Java to Netscape, things moved very slowly. Microsoft grew impatient with the W3C and leapt out way ahead with Server Extensions, those little addons which made the browser much more like a client-server relationship instead of the stateless relationship originally intended with browsers. Front Page made it easy to activate complex tasks by moving the heavy lifting to the server and calling it with a simple trigger in HTML.
Of course, Server Extensions brought many new capabilities never before seen on a browser, something the W3C couldn't keep up with and it was never Microsoft's intention to standardize them (as in go through a standards committee to define and publish the technology). The problem was that all these sites were "IE Only". Microsoft was VERY close to ensuring anyone not using a totally Microsoft technology chain on the Internet saw a blank screen. In other words, they nearly owned the Internet.
IE's tolerance for bad coding was good for IE users as it rendered pages with broken code pretty well. Microsoft handed out a lot of free copies of Front Page to create this broken code which would render with unexpected results on other browsers. Front Page (and plain bad hand coding) made anything other than IE look illiterate. That's the price of sitting around on your hands. Microsoft was there to take it all away in a long series of brilliant chess moves... and then everything went thud for a while.
It actually functioned rather well when it was novel, but nothing moved in terms of real technical advances unless Microsoft was threatened by some shred of competition which was quickly squashed. The next software patch would allow IE to do the same thing for free but for Windows only. Otherwise, Microsoft pretty much sat on their asses and took their sweet old time releasing anything new. Innovation was dead as long as nobody dared try to use anything else.
Most of the stuff on
It really is painful to see such a fantastic nerd friendly company hit bottom like this. I really would like them become a phoenix and raise from their ashes, but I'm not seeing it in the cards. But you know, if they would only ship an updated version of their famed N900 I'd certainly be willing to send another $600 their way, and I'd be willing to wager so would a few other million people as well. Hope those 170 million Euros will keep Nokia alive long enough to come to its senses.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
It wasn't a "M$ Mole" that fucked Nokia, it was 5 long years of having its thumb up its ass and no direction that killed Nokia.
I mean look at the situation elop had handed to him, they had not one, not two, but THREE different OSes, all of them fighting internally for resources, none of them were up to the task of taking Android and iOS head on, the only thing they had in their favor was dumbphones and anybody with eyes could see dumbphones are going the way of the 8 track. They didn't have the money to compete with HP for WebOS, Apple sure as fuck isn't gonna license them iOS, the MeeGo team was quoted as saying it would "be a year to a year and a half" before it was able to match iOS and Android and of course neither would be standing still during that year and a half, and with Android they would be an also-ran because frankly Samsung and HTC just do Android better than anybody else.
So I honestly don't see what call everyone think Elop should have done, did you want him to get the company curbstomped by putting out a half baked MeeGo? Jump into the race to the bottom that is Android? FYI look at the numbers, Samsung is making a profit but barely, nobody else is looking good right now thanks to all the competition and cheap prices, so what? What could he have done? I mean we all know the best move would have been to get WebOS but that was off the table by the time he got there, so their choices were 1.-Get slaughtered for a year and a half and hope the MeeGo team could pull a miracle out their ass, or 2.- Take a finished product from MSFT and have them foot the bill for advertising it as well.
Hindsight is always 20/20 folks, and if he would have chosen MeeGo or Android they'd be just as fucked as they are now, Android prices are in a freefall and MeeGo simply wasn't done. So he made a call, a call that didn't pan out but frankly other than closing the doors and giving the money back to the stockholders i don't know what other call the guy could have made. maybe if they would have brought somebody in 5 years earlier, maybe if they wouldn't have let their resources get so fragmented, maybe things would have come out differently. But Elop didn't have a time machine, he had to work with what he had which by that point was a sinking ship.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.