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Microsoft Closing Two Phone Factories In China
randomErr writes: Microsoft is closing two factories in China by the end of March. About 9,000 people worked in these factories, and those jobs were cut a while back as part of the company's major restructuring after its Nokia purchase. Much of the equipment located in these factories from Beijing and the southeastern city of Dongguan is being shipped to Vietnam.
They finally got rid of the ability to follow comment histories on the nobeta. Now it's impossible to see if a comment has been replied to and following any comment thread has to be done manually, one post at a time.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Make sense. Chinese wages and standards of living have been increasing rapidly over the last few years, while the political systems/economies in parts of South East Asia are becoming developed enough to provide confidence to foreign investment. Will be interesting to see how China deals with this shift. Hopefully not in the western way, with all the bosses patting themselves on the back for lowering costs while the consumer economy falls apart around them.
Now if they would only close the shop in Redmond.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
This shouldn't surprise anyone. If you commoditize your labor market (which means you are competing on price) you run the risk that someone else will offer a cheaper alternative. If you can't defend your position on price, you have to compete with some sort of other value add like offering skilled labor. If you can't do that, you've got a real problem.
Given that China has historically been the nominally-communist-but-attractively-cheap-and-open-for-business destination, they can't be entirely surprised that Vietnam is now cutting into their action.
That aside, though, I wonder if this is more or less purely cost focused, or whether the quasi-mercantalist Chinese government policies aimed at aiding domestic firms and speeding up acquisition of foreign firms' tech has a bigger role? They aren't necessarily irrational, given that competing on price and low environmental standards isn't exactly a fun game, even when you are winning it; but such policies presumably do encourage foreign firms to head for the exit more quickly at the same time as they reduce the impact of their doing so.
Actually, we scrubbed the beta. Announcement here. The only thing we've rolled out today was a new header and removing the left-hand nav links, which hardly anybody used.
At first I thought this was a story of Microsoft heralding a broadsword by bringing their interests home.
As it tuns out, even the repressed have it bad in the 'global economy'.
Here it is folks, the wealthy rule the earth.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
It looks like some of the other bugs have been fixed as well - comments were not always full-width, which made it a PITA on large screens. Much appreciated. The message links still work for me (they were an off-and-on thing for quite a while) so it's not harder to follow a discussion or replies to posts ... (shrug).
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
You clearly don't understand how business works.
Also, Windows Phone is already better quality than Android, by a mile, and they're significantly cheaper.
I don't respond to AC's.
I really appreciate the removal of the left sidebar, actually. This new layout, as totally fucked and buggy as it is in so many ways, at least gives ample room to the comments. Deep comments are still not handled well, where after ten comments deep the nesting gets screwed up.
Bugs aside, this is a huge improvement over Beta, which basically ignored the fact that the comments are the only thing that make this site worth visiting. A little testing would help, though. This layout is broken on every browser I try. What browser are the devs testing it on?
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Everything becomes a commodity when too much of it is produced. This goes for gadgets, fastfood, pulp fiction, and yes even American Idols and pornography.
Umm. I read it wrong: "Microsoft Closing: Two Phone Factories In China" I thought it was two stories.
Sure, they can carry on like this for years but, at some point, they will look stupid and ridiculous. MS can't afford that.
Thanks, I just snorted my coffee.
By quality I mean the hardware specs, not how the phone actually performs, because given 4 cores and 2+GB RAM most people cannot feel the sluggishness of Android anyway. By hardware they're not cheaper than Indian or Chinese phones such as OnePlus, and they still block vendors from crippling the UI or adding garbage so it's unlikely these vendors will shift their focus from Android to WP in foreseeable future.
Either way it's not helping their market. They're actually trying to make great products and that's why they gonna fail this time.
Probably not the right thread for it, but you're answering questions, so what the hell!
Will the non-javascript classic (the REAL classic version) be staying? I prefer that version, but I sometimes have to browse with scripts disabled in order to get it to work (actually, I usually read from Dillo or Links2 neither of which do JS, because I like the responsiveness). Unfortunately, though this means that I can't metamoderate any more since that requires JavaScript.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Personally, I expected an India closure.
Especially after India "discovered" Nokia "owed" $3.4B in "taxes", as soon as they heard Nokia was being sold to Microsoft.
Yeah, sniffing and snorting like animals. Seriously what's that about?
Most testing is done in the four major desktop browsers. We support those going back three versions.
They already lost. Their market share is so tiny to the point that continuing existence would make no difference to their overall image.
The best thing they can do now is to make their own version of Android on Nokia and push the market bit by bit by superior quality / lower cost which means huge amounts of $$$, until all other brands are finished and then they could dump it.
It's not gonna happen though.
I somehow get the sense that they're headed that way! Like OneNote for Android, which one has to separately get from the Play store, allows you to draw, whereas the one that comes w/ Windows Phone doesn't! Go figure!
The OS and the UI themselves were fantastic, and unlike Windows 8.x for PCs, Windows Phone 8.x is great! Problem is that most great apps are either iOS only or iOS and Android, but most of them have punted on Windows Phone. My Lumia recently malfunctioned - the battery stopped charging. I had the opportunity to simply get it exchanged for another, but I grabbed the opportunity to replace it w/ a Moto-X, and I couldn't be happier.
Also, Verizon, while it still offers Windows Phones from HTC, seems to have stopped offering the Lumia Icons. The Windows Phones are probably now the smartphones for the Third World, where people don't use apps beyond Whatsapp, Camera, FaceBook, Twitter and Skype
I have seen a lot of garbage apps on Windows Phone, a lot of them being web wrappers. The hardware - the 510 is as cheap as anything else in the market, and in markets where people don't use phones to scan Q-readers, or read a credit card, or connect through an internet phone, or work for Uber, a Windows phone is just fine.
I think their only cheap phones are their bottom of the line phones, like 510s. Above that, they are at par pricewise w/ iPhones and Galaxies. Problem is that they lack a lot of the apps that would make one want to prefer a smartphone to one of the older Symbian based phones. Hence they hardly move. In the Microsoft store in the city where I live, I've seen employees carry iPhones IN ADDITION to their Lumias.