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Nokia To Buy Alcatel-Lucent for $16.6 Billion
totalcaos sends news that Nokia has announced plans to buy Alcatel-Lucent for $16.6 billion worth of stock. Both companies have approved the transaction, though now they must wait for regulatory approval. They said they expect the deal to close in the first half of 2016.
The combined company is expected to become the world’s second-largest telecom equipment manufacturer behind Ericsson of Sweden, with global revenues totaling $27 billion and operations spread across Asia, Europe and North America. The companies are betting that, by joining forces, they can better compete against Chinese and European rivals bidding to provide telecom hardware and software to the world’s largest carriers, including AT&T and Verizon in the United States, Vodafone and Orange in Europe, and SoftBank in Japan. ... Analysts say that Nokia has progressively focused on its equipment unit, which now represents roughly 85 percent of the company’s annual revenue. On Wednesday, Nokia confirmed that it had put its digital maps business — a competitor for Google Maps — up for sale.
Nokia is a huge telecoms company that is most well known by consumers for making mobile phone handsets, though this was a relatively small part of their total product line. Microsoft bought the mobile handset division. Then remainder of the company has a market cap of around $30bn. This means that, including stock, they easily have enough capital to buy another company for $16bn (the $7bn in cash from MS probably helped though).
It sounds like someone at Nokia realised that mobile phones were in a race to the bottom and the profit is in the back-end infrastructure.
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Wouldn't you prefer living in France?
I think op is referring to the french divisions inabillity to organize a piss up in a brewery or do anything productive for most of the summer months, but op is having to be nice because being employed at a fragmented disjointed company is still better than being unemployed.
Having been stuck with a Lumia 521 for the past 4 days, I see exactly why Microsoft can't: It's just a watered down, crappy OS.
Its only positive side is that it runs fluid on older hardware, but other than that it just can't pull off shit. In the cases where the app you need is available for WP, the API features needed to support all of the same features it has on Android just don't exist. So nice apps I use like Endomondo are missing a shitload of features, and no amount of work on the part of the developer can change that. (A huge thing that is missing: Inter-app communication.)
Not only that, but the base OS itself is rather light on features. Little things, like for example you can't set custom tones for texts, emails, calendar events, etc.
Also the whole "live tile" system sucks ass. Live tiles aren't actually live (more like 15 minutes behind, where Android widgets ARE live) and for most apps, there's no point in the larger size, and apps that are best for lists (like a calendar agenda) work like shit compared to their Android variant because tiles can't display vertically like Android widgets can, so like the calendar tile only shows one event at a time. And then tiles that preview things (like email) flip through objects so unless you happen to look directly at it, you might not be seeing your newest email. Fortunately they (kind of) copied Android's notification system to address these shortcomings, but theirs is shitty in comparison (for example, no object grouping.)
Another thing is that the OS can't multitask for shit. If you download a file that is going to take a while, you can't do ANYTHING else, you just have to sit there and watch the progress bar. If you try to do anything else, it'll just stop the download.
It really is a lame OS. There really is no reason to use it as your daily driver unless you're just a big fan of Microsoft and/or you really hate all things Google.
I used to work here in Europe for a company based somewhere on the US-west coast. Meeting invitations from 8 to 11PM were the norm on every workday, usually called by american employees in the office who didnt realize or bother too much about the time difference. Most of the meetings had the purpose of reaffirming the importance of the US-employee meeting organizer and generally, there was a lot of unproductive and inefficient blathering going on.
:-)
Yeah, you work long hours, but man, you also really waste a lot of your time in the office for the sake of looking busy and important.
Just keep repeating that myth about the lazy Europeans on the brink of financial disaster to yourselves. Those 4-6 weeks of vacation per year really are destroying the economies of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, UK and Ireland....right??