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Microsoft's Nokia Plans Come Into Better Focus
Forbes has an update on what sort of future Nokia faces, as Microsoft reveals a strategy for making sense of the acquisition:
[Microsoft EVP of devices Stephen] Elop laid out a framework for cost cuts in a memo to employees on July 17. Devices would focus on high and low cost Windows smartphones, suggesting a phasing out of feature phones and Android smartphones. Two business units, smart devices and mobile phones, would become one, thereby cutting overlap and overhead. Microsoft would reduce engineering in Beijing and San Diego and unwind engineering in Oulu, Finland. It would exit manufacturing in Komarom, Hungary; shift to lower cost areas like Manaus, Brazil and Reynosa, Mexico; and reduce manufacturing in Beijing and Dongguan, China. Also, CEO Satya Nadella gave hints about how Microsoft will make money on Nokia during Tuesday' conference call. Devices, he said, "go beyond" hardware and are about productivity. "I can take my Office Lens App, use the camera on the phone, take a picture of anything, and have it automatically OCR recognized and into OneNote in searchable fashion. There is a lot we can do with phones by broadly thinking about productivity."
In other words, the sale of a smartphone is a means to other sales.
It's like when I haven't achieved checkmate yet, so I come up with an unguaranteed plan for accomplishing a goal that I desire.
"Microsoft reveals a strategy for making sense of the acquisition:"
So, reading the summary, it looks like Microsoft hasn't yet made sense of the acquisition...
All they've managed to do is to share a strategy for making sense of the acquisition.
We'll see how well that strategy turns out. I'm rather doubtful.
I am a Unix/Linux user since 1995. I used Symbian and i liked it, and i have several android devices (first was the galazy tab). Now Microsoft killed Nokia. Nokia killed Symbian.
I am looking for a new tablet/PC currently. I tested some Windows 8.1 Tablets (Lenovo and others), and i have to say (besides the colored rectangles on the start screen): Well done
by leaving many things unchanged. For the first time in about 20 years i consider buying a microsoft OS on an new computer (for personal use).
Was rather hoping Nokia would come back with the Android smartphones, into the EU. Unfortunately that seems to not be the case and they inside on flogging that dead horse of their own operating system. They used to make nice hardware designs.
I tried their OS, and much preferred Android/Blackberry/iOS to it. It might work for enterprise users (I'm sure that's a /really/ big market!!) but lack of decent apps, or even popularly used apps is the nail in the coffin for me as far as their mobile Windows OS is concerned. The phone hardware was good, the OS completely lacked.
Such a shame.
The talk always turns into integration. We can put these products/services together, call it something and go to market, in essence, become a services company with its own product portfolio. Good luck, MS, hope it works out for you.
This will make the failure looking like a thing of the past and make hope for a successful new future.
But this don't grant that this will work as expected. Especially after you use the same plan almost each 6 months for more than 3 years now !
I like the part where they are magically going to make OCR work via the camera on a cellphone.
Be seeing you...
Satya Nadella. Spell the man's name for fuck's sake.
Windows mobile phone forays are dead, done, finito, kaputt and out of steam.
Windows Phone 7 has been out for almost 4 years and still barely holds 3% market share. Thats pretty awful by any measure, especially since the platform before it had much larger market share. They lost customers with current platform without gaining any new ones.
Windows Mobile was out 7 years and failed, and before that Microsoft failed with Pocket PC.
I am amazed they still happily beat the dead horse instead of putting effort into supporting the winning platforms. Android will be succeeded by something in the long run and until then i fail to see the business perspective of dragging a dead horse round the racetrack with a lawn mower trying to catch up with a Jumbojet. Why not just book a seat in the Jumbojet instead?
Personally im sure Nadella would like nothing better than to put a fork in Windows Phone, but entrenched forces inside Microsoft makes this very hard. It has to fail on its own dying a long agonizing death instead.
HTTP/1.1 400
In this context what does unwind mean?
You already have "exiting" and "reducing" so it may not be a negative usage.
You can use the "Office Lens" with Windows Phone 8 phones today. Handy.
about Office, on a smart phone.
You can give away "Office Professional Really Seriously Serious Corporate Suite Edition" for every phone purchased, and you'll sell three. Not three million, three. NO ONE CARES about office on a phone!
Live tiles ? Dead squares.
Swoopy animations ? Saw it. Three years ago.
Unified operating system ? Great, now I can use Excel on my 4" screen, sexy!
Microsoft, wake up and smell the sales coffee. It's fresh sales and piping hot sales. Your sales might not be very sales fresh or almost empty sales, so you should do something about sales !
Hollow out Nokia until its just a shell valuable only for its IP, transfer everything else worth keeping into Microsoft proper and discard the rest. Wouldn't be surprised if the "Nokia" brand gets sold onto to some Asian / Indian outfit in a few years hence.
Interestingly, the Finnish stub of Nokia that was left, is doing fine. They still have a feasible telecommunication networks business.
"thinking broadly about productivity" just means selling these things to business instead of the general public. Cobbling together a random conjecture about a common business technology, OCR, further serves to endow the commitment. Microsoft knows the only repeat customer for its services as the 21st century rolls along is going to be business.
But thinking that Nokia plays any part in this is rather odd. Microsofts purchase basically forced moody's hand to downgrade its bond status to junk only one year after the purchase. Windows phone was, again, a flop. Blackberry used Microsofts restructuring as a brilliant tactical strategy to make a comeback in the businessworld, when it should have been the other way around. So in the future most businesses will opt for blackberry in the field, and iPhone for the C-Levels. In response microsoft, as they have with Azure, will strap heavily discounted or free phones to business licenses which in turn will be purchased by management in an effort to maintain license discounts on what they do use; namely Windows. These phones will sit on IT workbenches and in random cubes until the batteries rot and the password is forgotten because what microsoft is offering is a solution to a problem that was solved almost a decade ago. Sales will increase, microsoft will pump their nokia stock until losses in other units become unsustainable again, and we'll all collectively groan as another wave of "restructuring" crashes to shore in an effort to convince investors the ship is still sailing.
Good people go to bed earlier.
staying the corse with fewer people.
I'm sure that'll work out well, like the current corse is.
I'd be nice if MS had just fragmented out so we could get VC and .net on other platforms, along with Office. But as it stands now, all the kids are doing Ruby and anything else that isn't MS so the languages division (MSDN) folks are going down, and with Linux owning the 'cloud' space, now they screwed up consumer windows, so the tables and phones are taking over.
Looking back from 1999 it's amazing that MS could fuck it up so badly.
Did you just say 'focus', how did it come to this that a cutting edge technology site is reduced to spouting free slasterverts for the MICROS~1 organization ..
...
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Insert marketing buzz words: focus, framework, opportunities, phones, productivity, puck, rightsizing, skating, sunset, unify, unwind
That in any organization of sufficient size, the ass kissing retards always float to the top.
Can someone explain to me how there hasn't been a class action lawsuit against Elop and Microsoft for his blatantly obvious tanking of Nokia intended to reduce the purchase price? How have shareholders not sued? Why aren't Nokia employees, who are about to get laid off en-masse, not contacted lawyers and sued? Seriously, this is something that was insanely obvious as soon as Elop joined Nokia - we were talking about it extensively on Slashdot - and it played out EXACTLY how we all predicted it would.
Where are the lawsuits?
Miss Nokia was tricked into marriage with Mr Microsoft. Now she's abused, deprived of food, and soon she'll die and be hastily buried in an unmarked grave. Of course Mr Microsoft gets to inherit her assets.
...before Google or Apple buy Microsoft. Perfect symmetry.
>"I can take my Office Lens App, use the camera on the phone, take a picture of anything, and have it automatically OCR recognized and into OneNote in searchable fashion."
Ha, let him try that with a Surface Pro 3!
see answers.microsoft.com for more info on how the SP3 has a fixed focus lens that can't take a readable picture of a page of text.
Though I do recognize that he specifically said "phone".
I refuse to sign
I worked for a Unix server and workstation company. In the late 1990s, our hardware sucked. Our division head would tout that what matters is solutions not benchmarks. That was a line of BS. Eventually the company improved the hardware and regained market share.
Microsoft is in a bad place in smartphones. They should have fired Elop after he eviscerated Nokia losing tons of revenue and market share. Microsoft may have a strategy that eventually wins, but I wouldn't bet on it.
>Microsoft to unwind [former Nokia] engineering in Oulu, Finland. It would exit manufacturing in Komarom, Hungary
I am a hungarian and that is huge sad news here. I think these two european countries should emergency nationalize the plants, to prevent Microsoft from fire-selling all the equipment to Brazil or Bangladesh, etc. We would pay Microsoft in 20 yearly installments.
That is what exactly President Nasser did with the Suez Canal. Of course the tri-partite agressors of Britain, France and Zion invaded Egypt in response, but big daddy Khruschev sent them home with his H-bomb shaped baseball bat and in the end Nasser's Egypt actually got to keep the canal for free and even received a free hydro-electric dam on the Nile. Today, we have another big daddy named Vladimir Putin. He would be more than happy to re-extend russian sphere of influence to Finland and Hungary, kicking some yankee butt in the process.
Is a new cold war profitable for Microsoft? No, because they are not in the military-industrial complex. Why does then Microsoft push europeans to Putin's side? Because they are stupid. America will fall after Europe falls and the spoils will go to the chinese as soon as russians drink themselves to death.
In other words, the sale of a smartphone is a means to other sales.
Naturally.
Sales of Office lead to sales of Windows which leads to sales of Windows Server which leads to sales of Exchange which leads to sales of Office... Vendor lock-in has been Microsoft's core business model for decades. Why should it be different with phones?
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
"I can take my Office Lens App, use the camera on the phone, take a picture of anything, and have it automatically OCR recognized and into OneNote in searchable fashion"
OneNote is/was actually a reasonable product - but does anybody use it?
I think that Microsoft's problem is that it has always been a (fragmented) product company, not able to look at things from a user point of view.
What I would like (and pay for) would be seamless integration of all my information, securely, between my devices and optionally backed up to "the cloud" (ugh). So far, (from personal experience), Apple have nice hardware with reasonable integration, Android is catching up (if you give Google access to all your data) and Microsoft is behind.
For the future, I would not give a damn if the 'phone was an Apple, a Nokia or a generic, and same for the OS on the phone and the PC. Here's a scenario; in one hit let me take a picture of someone, somewhere, add it to contacts, and the next time I want navigate to their house/office it one click. Show me all the mails and docs for the person, one click please.
Windows 7 Pro (64 bit) supports Windows 3.1 applications because the version of Windows XP included with its XP Mode virtual machine is 32-bit. Failing that, you could buy a copy of Windows 3.1 and install in DOSBox.
I'm actually quite sad to read this. I have little interest in so-called smart phones. I have computers and tablets for running serious software and for web browsing. I don't use a lot of cloud services like those hosted by Google and Facebook, and I have little need for the kind of software that exists only as a smartphone app.
So, for many years, I have just bought a cheap and cheerful Nokia feature phone. They invariably have good battery life compared to any smartphone. They are much smaller in my pocket. They run reliably for their entire useful lifetime, without breaking or shifting everything around arbitrarily during some dramatic firmware update. They don't come with the same level of creepware that smartphones from all the major brands now do. I can buy one for next to nothing at any phone shop, without signing up to pay half my salary on a phone plan with a multi-year lock-in to the same network. And they still let me do what I actually need a phone for: pushing a couple of buttons and then talking with someone, or maybe sending the occasional text message.
I realise that smart phones rule the universe these days and I'm some sort of technological Neanderthal (aside from all the other bleeding edge tablets, computers and software I work with everyday, obviously) but I for one will miss Nokia feature phones. I guess I'll go back to hoping for a resurgent BlackBerry that at least has a business focus and therefore something resembling security and not assuming I want a Facebook icon on my home screen that can't be deleted.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
...is that it doesn't bring anything new or better to the table and Microsoft is blind to that. It doesn't have a better user interface, better performance, more or better apps, or a significantly lower price. Microsoft wants to control the smart phone business just as it was able to control the desktop computer business...but it is too late to the party.