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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.
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.
Not quite. They ran their mobile phone business into the ground by clinging to yesterday at the expense of today and tomorrow. Clinging to Symbian when Android emerged was a mistake, one that they should have realized, but who wants to admit they've been out-thought? Same story as Motorola Mobility, incidentally, both outfits made superior headsets in the areas that really matter (ever try to destroy a Nokia phone? They were built like tanks. And Motorola handsets had the best radios ever made, take one alongside a Samsung into the wilderness and see who drops the connection first.....) but they failed to market them effectively and got crushed by inferior Samsung products.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Further while Microsoft bought their mobile phone business, they have since rebranded it under the Microsoft name. No models are being released with the Nokia branding anymore - some of the old models may still carry Nokia (like my 928) but the new ones are all under the Microsoft name.
The Nokia that was left was the one that made the actual cell networks, not the phones, is the business that is buying Lucent. Nokia didn't sell their patents to Microsoft, further the patent license deal was good for "a 10-year license to its patents at the time of the closing". So any new patents that Nokia happens to gain are not available for Microsoft to use unless they do a new licensing deal.
So there is no apparent connection between Microsoft and this, nor does this grant Microsoft any more patents.
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.