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Nokia Shareholders Approve Sale To Microsoft
mrspoonsi writes "Nokia shareholders met today at an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) to vote on whether or not to accept the terms of the company's proposed sale of its devices and services business to Microsoft. The deal, which was first announced in September, is worth €5.44bn EUR ($7.35bn USD / £4.57bn GBP), and also includes provisions for Microsoft to license patents from the Finnish company. 78% of those eligible to vote had already voted before the EGM. Of those early votes, a staggering 99% had voted in favour of the sale to Microsoft."
.. buys other increasingly irrelevant tech dinosaur for lots of money.
News at 11
which is totally what she said
Elop has succeeded in destroying Nokia. Hopefully, it will take Microsoft with it!
The two choices:
A) sell out to Microsoft and get some cash for the shareholders;
B) go bankrupt and lose everything.
Yeah, I'd choose A too. Interesting that Blackberry, in pretty much the same position, chose B.
No, but there's something fishy when a former Microsoft exec came in, gutted the company, made them entirely beholden to Microsoft, and then watched their market share collapse.
You couldn't construct a better tin-foil hat scenario than a corporate executive making the company ripe to be bought by his former employer.
To me, either Nokia was incompetently managed, leading to the eventual purchase by Microsoft -- or this was all part of someone's master plan to make this happen.
And if that person who either incompetently managed Nokia (or masterminded their demise) is a candidate to become the CEO of Microsoft ... you have to ask why someone who is either incompetent or dishonest is being considered.
CEOs and executives don't seem to get selected for actually being able to do something, but who they know that can make back room deals. To me, Elop was an abysmal failure at the helm of Nokia, so WTF qualifies him to be at the helm of another?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The staggering newsworthy thing in this case is that it was the company with a perceived strong market position that engineered the other company into a struggling position in the first place.
Or in other words, this was one of the most blatant planned corporate sabotages and subsequent buyouts of recent history.
Elop has abysmally failed as a CEO and yet Microsoft are treating him like a hero, even with suggestions he's the frontrunner to run Microsoft itself now. Normally in an acquisition like this he'd be first out the door for creating arguably one of the biggest corporate failures in history (the speed at which Nokia lost assets and fell into a loss making company was staggering). The rest of his family never even left America which strongly implies they knew he was coming back. If that doesn't make it clear that what many people suspect went on isn't just theory then I don't know what would.
So the news is that what many people theorised was the plan all along actually was. Maybe given that many of us theorised it from the outset means we shouldn't be surprised, but I think the shock that we were right, that Microsoft would be so blatant and open about the game they were playing and so utterly lacking in subtlety is shocking. Most of us are in disbelief that we were right, that the biggest and most succesful phone manufacturer on the planet and that had a strong anti-Microsoft culture could be turned round into a Microsoft takeover victim in just a few short years.
Maemo and Meego were Nokia's "skunk works" projects, kept far away from their mainstream consumer phone business. Trust me, Microsoft didn't have to kill off that area. It was dead even while S60 was riding high.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Nothing says" irrelevant" like running on 95% of the world's computers!
...for a very specific subset of "computers":
i.e.: big desktop machines, in homes and offices.
Absolutely every other device with similar computing specs that is interracted directly with, or that is relied behind-the-scene on, runs something else.
(Tablets, Smartphones, home wifi router/modem, home micro-NAS for backups, the set-top box or media under the TV and/or the TV itself, the infotainment system in the Car: i.e. everything at home beside the laptop [the single device running Windows] and the Microwave Oven [still powered by a micro-controller, not enough power for a full-blown OS])
mostly shared between Linux (either GNU or Android), *BSD, and specialised OSes like QNX.
(and at work, as long as it's not a SOHO who is dependant on Microsoft Directory Service and Sharepoint, you can bet that pretty much everything behind the scene run some flavour of Unix)
In short, the "year of Linux on everything except the desktop" has come since long time.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]