Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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 !
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.
I like the part where they are magically going to make OCR work via the camera on a cellphone.
Windows Phone already does that though, you hit the search button, choose eye, point it at something, choose scan text, it highlights all the text at which point you can either choose copy, search, or translate. If you translate it will overlay the translated text on the image in your chosen language.
> I like the part where they are magically going to make OCR work
I'm afraid you could have left it right there, with no mention of cell phones or their cameras. OCR, much like speech-to-text software, has plateaued and not noticeably improved in the last 10 years. It's became more available as software has become more powerful. But the underlying technologies have been quite stable. Despite flurries of new patents with every update to such software, the fundamental algorithms remain unchanged and have been stable for roughly 20 years.
You can use the "Office Lens" with Windows Phone 8 phones today. Handy.
Guess that is useful for those 3 people.
Be seeing you...
I like the part where they are magically going to make OCR work via the camera on a cellphone.
Windows Phone already does that though, you hit the search button, choose eye, point it at something, choose scan text, it highlights all the text at which point you can either choose copy, search, or translate. If you translate it will overlay the translated text on the image in your chosen language.
What about errors? We are talking OCR here, which never worked great on scanners, so how is it going to work better via cameras?
Be seeing you...
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.
Microsoft's chess strategy seems to be to sacrifice all its pawns and its Queen, laying waste to its Bishops Knights and Rooks and trying to win the game with just its King left. Good luck with that one.
I don't use OCR on a scanner all that often, but last time I did (atleast 5 years ago, probably more), it had no problem recognizing the pages full of text.
As far as I've tested it myself, OCR works great on scanners, so why wouldn't it work as well with cameras?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
but "For Fucks Sake" doesn't spell anything like I thought you spelt his name but I guess I'll start spelling it like that if you insist.
For completeness, how do I pronounce it?
The "King"'s too busy fighting world poverty.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
"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.
Recognizing pages full of text is one thing. Getting a useful conversion rate is another. Even an 96% success rate means several hand-corrections per page. And if you have to manually confirm and correct each page, it's not worth it in most cases.
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 ..
...
--
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.
Same experiences here, the error rate is far to high to be used in an office setting where incorrect numbers can mean millions in losses. Even an incorrect wording can be lethal.
HTTP/1.1 400
Yes I am. The devil would have more style.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
True. Every year, my people want at least two things: Accurate OCR and better Dragon Naturally Speaking.
While I can purchase the latest software versions that have newer paint jobs, the engines are still lame.
For legal documents, less than 100% accuracy with attendant cleanup efforts and opportunities to miss something, means a laborer has to do a lot of proofing.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
You can use the "Office Lens" with Windows Phone 8 phones today. Handy.
Guess that is useful for those 3 people.
Actually you can get OCR applications for Android and iPhone. Of course the better ones you do have to pay for but there are quite a few which are free.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
>"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
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.
The OCR in Adobe Acrobat (Standard and Professional) is excellent. If the input copy is of usable quality, the OCR results are superb. I've scanned and OCR'd an entire file cabinet's worth of journal articles from a departed professor's library using a six or seven year old ScanSnap scanner on the "Better" setting. Both Spotlight and Windows Search get correct hits in the documents, and cutting/pasting works like a champ.
Maybe you're using something inferior?
Solutions matters over hardware/benchmarks if only you have the solutions. Unfortunately, looks like the competition is in a better position regarding solutions (and benchmarks). Even if 512MB of RAM might make Windows Phone itself work better than its competitors (just maybe), add applications written in mind with the 1GB of RAM of mostly anything else on the market and your device will suffer.
"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.
OCR can still be useful for search even if the accuracy is too low for complete conversion.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
It was painfully obvious they only acquired Nokia because of the patents. The rest be it R&D or especially manufacturing operations is to be disposed of.
Anything that can run Skype is a "phone" in a sense.
I've got a scansnap for the paperless office thing. The success rate is far greater than 96%. I recently scanned a whole book in, one with varying formatting tables etc, and the errors are one mistake every few pages, not several per page.
The software is ABBY Finereader.
On the other hand, this is the ideal scenario, a purpose made document scanner. A mobile phone photo with arbitrary lighting and possibly slightly out of focus probably would have a worse rate.
The other thing is that usually the occasional error doesn't usually matter is you're archiving as the document is saved as a PDF which displays the original scan as a graphic, and just uses the scanned text for searching or if you need to cut'n'paste.
Maybe, but it's plateaued at a very good level. OCR is extremely useable. If there are errors they are more likely to be in the document that you scanned than in the scanning process.
That's provided the scan is good. OCR from a mobile phone photo is more challenging...
Yes I am. The devil would have more style.
There's been a "whooooosh" somewhere along the line here....
I suspect you're right. He is after all, heavily funding the terrible standardized testing that is allowing our children to graduate high school without being able to do simple fractions. By this I don't mean a few slip through, I mean hardly any of them can do it.