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Official: Microsoft To Acquire Nokia Devices and Services Business
Many submitted, and symbolset emailed me to wake up, sending this bit of interesting news out of Redmond: "Microsoft Corporation and Nokia Corporation today announced that the Boards of Directors for both companies have decided to enter into a transaction whereby Microsoft will purchase substantially all of Nokia's Devices & Services business, license Nokia's patents, and license and use Nokia's mapping services. Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will pay EUR 3.79 billion to purchase substantially all of Nokia's Devices & Services business, and EUR 1.65 billion to license Nokia's patents, for a total transaction price of EUR 5.44 billion in cash. Microsoft will draw upon its overseas cash resources to fund the transaction. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2014, subject to approval by Nokia's shareholders, regulatory approvals and other closing conditions."
And, yep, Elop is part of the deal (quoting Ballmer): "Stephen Elop will be coming back to Microsoft, and he will lead an expanded Devices team, which includes all of our current Devices and Studios work and most of the teams coming over from Nokia, reporting to me."
A classic Trojan horse manouver pulled off in style by Steven Elop. Now he can go back to Redmond, where they'll hold a Triumph in his honor.
Microsoft CEO's email to staff on Nokia acquisition
Help stamp out iliturcy.
So Elop left Microsoft to head up Nokia, where he made supposedly very idiotic changes that had the effect of destroying Nokia's share price. Microsoft then buys Nokia at a fraction of the cost it would otherwise have been, and Elop returns to a prestigious role at Microsoft, where he's in with a shot at the CEO role.
That doesn't look the slightest bit dodgy at all.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Suddenly, the big money is being earned from hardware (a reversal of the PC industry, where hardware companies slugged it out for razor thin margins and software makers raked in billions). Both Google and Microsoft recently purchased established phone hardware manufacturers. While many hypothesized that they did it to compete with Apple, I think they did it to combat the threat from companies like Samsung, LG and HTC. If you look at Apple's sales figures, the reason is crystal clear: the iPhone is both their highest margin and most profitable product. There is no point in Google and Microsoft doing all the hard work to build and maintain a mobile operating system only to have companies like Samsung walk away with tens of billions of dollars in profit from premium handset sales each quarter. Google, Apple and Microsoft want to dominate the flagship handset market with a handful of must-have devices each year, forcing Korean and Taiwanese companies into the low end.
Microsoft succeeded in its strategy to take-down and take-over a major phone rival. First plant a CEO to destroy the company and lower its shares.... wait... and take over the company. What is left of Nokia is not likely to survive as they all had synergies with the devices unit, which will be taken-over by Microsoft.
Clearly, Nokia had problems when Elop took over... but he destroyed any potential Nokia had left (think N9/MeeGo). And now he gutted the company even further and will take the devices unit with him as a rejoins the Microsoft family he was clearly so fond of. The poor must have really missed his family.
Microsoft has been paying Nokia $1B/year. As part of a much larger organization, it will be much easier to hide how much money Microsoft is dumping into Windows Phone, including support for marketing and selling handsets below cost.
Nokia handsets, meet XBox!
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Shoe! The other shoe drops. Yeesh.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I worked at Nokia from 2011-2012. Everyone was saying then that the reason for Elop (who was otherwise so useless) was to devalue Nokia enough that it would be a good deal for Microsoft. And here we are... the other shoe drops. But there will be a third shoe when he becomes CEO of Microsoft. They deserve each other.
I am certainly glad they sold off Qt first. If Microsoft got their hands on it the writing would be on the wall even in the face of pledges to KDE.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
No. What we need is not more Android but more choice. Nokia has been the only ones that has been serious about Windows 8 Phone Series for Handsets Professional Touch Edition 2013. In a world where everyone is moving toward Android we need something to balance that, and that's where Microsoft + Nokia makes sense. We should not live in a world where Google is the only choice.
How I read the open letter:
"Nokia has an identity spanning 150 years of heritage, innovation, excellence, and change. That ends today. By this evening those 150 years will be a rumor. They never happened. Think about that. Today is history. Today will be remembered. Years from now, the young will ask with wonder about this day. Today is history, and you are part of it..."
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
If you want "more choice", Nokia had that before. It was called MeeGo, and Elop killed it.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Do you find it peculiar the Elop never sold his house in Redmond and his family didn't move to Finland though Stephen said hey would ? Can you avoid thinking of a conspiracy ?
Given that Microsoft all but ensured that it would be an acquisition, Elop was the person who burnt the platform.
Shame that they took over Nokia and bastardized it to be an unremarkable Windows Phone platform.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
As Quoted from: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2010/sep10/09-09statement.aspx: (Archive mirror)
Microsoft Business Division Transition
Sept. 09, 2010
E-mail to Microsoft full-time employees from Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer.
Sept. 9, 2010
I am writing to let you know that Stephen Elop has been offered and has accepted the job as CEO of Nokia and will be leaving Microsoft, effective immediately. Stephen leaves in place a strong business and technical leadership team, including Chris Capossela, Kurt DelBene, Amy Hood and Kirill Tatarinov, all of whom will report to me for the interim.
The MBD business continues to grow and thrive, with 15 percent growth in the last quarter. It has been good to see the great response to Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, the growth of our Dynamics business and the way we have been successful in extending all our MBD products and services to the cloud. I appreciate the way that Stephen has been a good steward of the brand and business in his time here, and look forward to continuing to work with him in his new role at Nokia.
Please join me in wishing Stephen well.
Steve
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
You break it, you buy it...
Microsoft is buying the nav/maps too.
Not according to the press release:
Following the transaction, Nokia plans to focus on its three established businesses, each of which is a leader in enabling mobility in its respective market segment: NSN, a leader in network infrastructure and services; HERE, a leader in mapping and location services; and Advanced Technologies, a leader in technology development and licensing.
Any alternate headlines? Here are some:
"Headless software company buys brainless phone company"
"Rumours of Dinosaur extinction greatly exaggerated (And their mating habits haven't changed)"
I'm sure there's more ...
Rubbish, not insightful. Nokia were a world leader and I loved their gear until Elop threw away their technology and embraced Windows phone crap. Look at Nokia most successful products, not based on Windows phone. He deserved to be sacked, quoted as being the worst CEO ever.
MeeGo was another WebOS: late, buggy, and basically going nowhere with the organization they had and the cannon ball of Intel shackled to their leg.
Nokia would have made a glorious last stand with it, open source geeks would support them (never mind an occasional grumble about the bugs, wanton platform changes, and closed components, what's this between friends), but in the end it wouldn't bring bread to the table without substantial cultural changes and a lot of development. Yes, I'm familiar with The Legend of Spectacular N9 Sales.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Yeah, everybody could see it coming, but it doesn't make sense from the POV of Microsoft shareholders.
Nokia Mobile built its success on two things: excellent relationships with its channels, the telcos; and a superb market segmentation model. (Its designs were robust, reliable, and well-liked by their users, but conservative; and its manufacturing division ... did tolerably well, considering the tens of models and hundreds of variants. Not brilliantly, but tolerably; perhaps less so in the year before Elop was brought on board.)
Nokia's value resided in these two things: channel relationships, and a deep understanding of all market segments: a willingness and ability to make phones for every demographic and national market, and sell them via the established channels. Those were Nokia's core competencies, the places it created value, the things it did better than its competitors. Not manufacturing. Not design innovation. Marketing, market research, selling a large range, nearly everywhere. (The one geographical market in which Nokia didn't have good telco relationships was the USA. So it didn't sell many phones, except to the discriminating.)
That was before Elop and the "only Winpho, only North America, Apple me-too" strategy. Elop has admitted to channel resistance to selling Windows Phone, and he has pruned Nokia's tree of products down to a stump, pretty much. He's ignored (at best) nearly all markets outside North America.
Nokia's value is gone. Sacrificed to the belief that Nokia could out-innovate companies which excel at that.
Microsoft's buying Nokia in the hope of obtaining massively successful product innovation is ... misguided? Optimistic? An interesting idea? Unlikely to be in the shareholders' best interests? What the hell is a suitable euphemism for "deranged lunacy"?
Depressing Inevitability
This was the only likely scenario once Elop tied Nokia to the MS mast and cut away the lifeboats. It was always going to be we sail together and we sink together.
In many ways Nokia has fulfilled their side of the bargain by generating some hardware which is as good as any phone out there. What has held them back is the OS, which despite having some good features is always lagging behind the iphone and android, and seems incapable of introducing the needed changes at the rate required in a consumer device.
In a perfect world, Nokia would take over responsibility of the MS mobile division and it would be left alone to force the changes that the engineers of Nokia know are required. However what is more likely is that Microsoft will smother the innovative culture in Nokia to make it more like itself, so that we will get a company more concerned about how Office runs on the phone than offering the best consumer experience. I also can't wait to see how the trolls of Helsinki react to their first stack ranking session.
What is confusing about this is the timing. Is this Ballmer's last hurrah or Elop's last desperate grab for power. If your CEO had just announced he would be leaving so would not be taking long term responsibility for such a decision, as a board wouldn't you say Whoa, maybe we will get the next guy in to look at this? Lets face it with Baller's acquisition track record it may be more profitable to take the billions of dollars, pile it the middle of Oulu and set fire to it....
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
Oh, right: it's a Ballmerism.
Yes, I'm familiar with The Legend of Spectacular N9 Sales.
Spectacular reviews, and terrible sales because Elop sabotaged it.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Nokia isn't going to enter the phone business anytime soon, but Nokia's former employees have already launched a new company called Jolla, and their phone (with Sailfish OS) is being produced as we speak.
This should be a high profile case for investigation by the EU commissioner for industry. In the end Nokia was a EU company which was the victim of a hostile takeover from a US company. We should al send a formal complaint to this guy http://ec.europa.eu/commission_2010-2014/tajani/contact/commissioner/index_en.htm
Perhaps he will replace Ballmer. He does appear to have the desired 'consumers should just shut the fsck up and buy what we tell them to' attitude to consumer relations and seems as adept at handling employees and morale to make the shift in leadership seamless.
Somehow I suspect the problem at Microsoft is the board. They aquired the stock while liking the mindset of the management and having kept Ballmer for so long they obviously want that. They'll keep running it the same way, all the way into the eventual crash into the ground.
This ^^ Like you, am I the only one that remembers the Nokia Basket Case before Elop came aboard? Their phones were crap, all 300 of them in the catalogue, the N9 couldn't be bought anywhere it was supposedly available, networks were no longer foisting them on unsuspecting members of the public ("You can't afford an iPhone so here's the Next Best Thing!" *hands them a shitty Nokia 500*). Sheesh. I'm Glad no more phones will bear the Nokia name - I never forgave them from killing off the last good cellphone in the Nokia 6310i and for creating the Abomination N95 and every other Symbian/S60 POS. Nokia were the architects of their own demise, not Elop. Their arrogance and rank incompetence caused their downfall. I would cite the article where old or former Nokia employees berate the culture and organisation of the old company but can't find them. They appeared around the time Elop wrote his "Burning Platforms" memo.
Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
Meh, replying to my own post. Found this:
http://www.telecoms.com/22503/nokia%E2%80%99s-problem
The N97 was the phone I was thinking of although ALL of their Nxx devices were crap.
And there were so MANY of them! Why have 5 SKUs where 500 will do? Always doing the networks' bidding...
Yes, I have also discovered HTML formatting too - sorry about original post.
Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
Meego was another Maemo, not WebOS, it have its own lineage as example. Was sabotaged by Symbian fans inside Nokia first, then the days before it was released Elop said that it had no future, cut all future hopes for development for the platform, and released just one phone with it, just because already made it. Is even against that that sold pretty well. And yes, sold better than the Windows 7.x phones that Microsoft killed before they come out to the market saying that they will have no future neither (but most people that buys windows phone only hears windows phone, not version, so even with that had sales).
Anyway, wasn't the end of the road, there is hope on Qt-based cellphones still. From it derived Sailfish that is about to come out (the first batch already sold out), and Tizen, that Samsung could start making phones with it.
I know some people that have (or had) a N9. Everybody, including non-geeks, says it's the best phone ever. It's ok if you don't believe me, go check the reviews.
And, hey, It was launched even before the Windows Phone 7.5 (which actually "late, buggy"). Microsoft only made a competitive OS with WP 8, 2 years after the Meego was ALREADY in the market.
I really don't understand how so many people buys the official MS-NOKIA-ELOP version of the history, where everything points the contrary.
Bollocks to it.
We just can't let this happen, it's almost a full blown disaster, the one ray of sunshine is the patent deal.
We need to find a way to buy Nokia out before this deal goes through.
Seriously?!
Microsoft gets a free pass for all the damage they did and gets a licence to all the Nokia patents that they know they cannot survive in mobile without?
For the price of the Nokia-Siemens buyout?
So Nokia shareholders are to sell their entire mobile business to the scumbags that ruined it for just enough money to own the rump end of their own business free and clear?
Screw that.
I'll offer the Nokia board $7.5B for 51% of the whole company, less any long term investors that want to assign their proxies to me, and I'll re-organize the whole company, turf out all the losers that have managed the company into the ground and spank the living crap out of the company that did this to them. The company that deliberately did this to them.
If Microsoft thinks those patents are worth so much, stick 'em under a GPL-like licence that lets anybody play in mobile so long as they share and tell Microsoft and Apple to go screw themselves.
I posted the following on Groklaw the day it died, in the desperate hope of getting some reasoned help. I was too late.
Looks like I might be too late again.
Stuff that for a game of soldiers, Slashdot might be full of loonies and Trolls but there are still some sane voices hidden amongst the noise.
Have at it.
----------
I've been working up to posting this for weeks.
I don't really want to post it now but I may never get another chance.
I'm not ready so the link will be to nowhere till at least tomorrow.
Apologies in advance for any offence but I won't take the chance that I miss the opportunity to reach members of the Groklaw community that I may never be in contact with again.
------
I'm hoping you guys will be able to help me out.
I've been silently standing on the sidelines here almost since the very beginning. I, like you, feel very deeply that what we have been watching happen here is an outrage.
Watching monopolies desperately trying to destroy the open-source world like a bunch of petulant toddlers makes me want to bang my fists and smash things with rage. (Yes I do see the irony there.)
I have, for a long time, felt powerless to do anything about it but I have come to a decision to make a stand.
The real problem is that we lack the sort of wealth and influence that the corporate elite possess. We are forced to contend with them on a battlefield of their choosing with little or no resources.
I think it is about time we stopped putting up with that and started fighting fire with fire.
If we want to win this war we need to acquire more money and influence than our opponents and, ludicrous as that idea seems on the surface, I don't think it's something that is beyond the realm of possibility.
You see the thing is that the businesses that we face here are either monopolists or practising outmoded models, they are desperately trying to hang on to a way of doing business that has been out-evolved. They look on the surface like the 800lb Gorillas but in reality they are more like Giant Pandas. They are tottering on the edge of extinction because they are too myopic to realize that their ecological niche has gone or that they are in the process of destroying it with their own stupid greed.
So here's what I plan to do and what I think I can achieve given a bit of help.
I plan to buy Nokia.
I think Nokia could easily be re-organized into a vastly profitable enterprise and its enormous collection of patents could be used to beat the snot out of the trolls and proprietary monopolists. I think a licensing scheme similar to the GPL could be created that forced everyone in the mobile space to 'share and share alike' and to compete on merit rather than in litigation.
I want to create something that is inherently, by
Trust The Computer, The Computer is your friend.
Yep but Microsoft products certainly is not it. I would rather and Open Source platform dominate than ANY proprietary platform.
I think that needs just a little more cowbell:
Windows 8 Phone Select Series for Handsets Executive Platinum Professional Touch Diamond Edition 2013
There. Done. Ship it.
--frank[at]unternet.org
Indeed, that is exactly what I said would happen at the time, too... that he made a deal to return and be Ballmer's successor once he was done doing to Nokia what Belluzo did to SGI. The similarities are strong too; remember, Microsoft then needed Belluzo to take down a unix workstation vendor to help establish market presense for it's own crappy new proprietary workstation OS that nobody would want then either; it was called NT. Thugs rarely change their MO, unless or until they are finally imprisoned for it.
"Only Samsung and Apple make money from phones."
You missed the two mainland Chinese companies. Too lazy to Google for them right now but that would be two of the following: Lenovo, Huawei or ZTE. LG is probably still porfitable until they get steamrolled by yet another rising Chinese company.
This is a classical Microsoft move, a Microsoftie join a company ruins it and then rejoins the mothership, resistance *is* futile ..
BBC failed Digital Project Cancelled
Project Kangaroo Cancelled
Highfield joins Microsoft after just four months at Project Kangaroo
BBC appoints Microsoft man to control future media
Actually the Android game is very very tight on margin.
Samsung makes money only because the basically build the entire supply chain from essentially raw materials. HTC is loosing money badly. LG I don't know. Motorola well they are now google so those books will be cooked.
I love Android it's just a game that Nokia would never have been able to profit. I thought they should have gone with Android myself back a few years ago. But clearly that was a bad idea in hind sight.
Nokia was caught with their pants down. The worst thing was they didn't even know it for 3 more years. By then they lost the market they owned. They simply could not grasp touch screens. The N95 was a phone that should have opened the eyes at Nokia. Here was a popular device that did pretty much every thing. It had a huge screen for the day. Did it really have a successor. Did they try to innovate after it? Nope. They just rehashed the same format a few more times.
The next device needed to be touch. And it needed to be good. They didn't even try. They put out what was it 4 rev's of the same format? Then they basically collapsed, living off the life support of a HUGE cash balance. Which is now long gone.
In the end the only option was sell to MS.
The CEO has a fiduciary duty to his company and its shareholders. Elop pretty obviously violated that duty by acting in the best interests of MS, not Nokia. It seems to me that there would be strong grounds for a Nokia shareholder lawsuit against Elop personally, and possibly against MS as well. Discovery proceedings could be quite interesting – civil attorneys can demand just about any relevant documents, emails, and so forth. Unless everything was done verbally with no record, there ought to be some evidence of Elop's malfeasance.