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Nokia Shifts To Selling Back-End Systems To Mobile Networks
jfruh writes: With Nokia's handset business now sold off to Microsoft, you might be wondering what the remainder of the company does, exactly. The company is trying to use its expertise at other end of its old business, offering data centers and virtualized infrastructure to wireless networking companies to make their businesses more efficient. Competitors include Ericsson, another mobile phone also-ran.
With Nokia's handset business now sold off to Microsoft, you might be wondering what the remainder of the company does, exactly.
Why would anyone be wondering that anymore? Network stuff has been Nokia's main business for a long time already.
Just from Slashdot:
- Nokia Buys a Chunk of Panasonic
- Nokia Networks Demonstrates 5G Mobile Speeds Running At 10Gbps Via 73GHz
- Nokia To Buy Alcatel-Lucent for $16.6 Billion
Ericsson was a key provider of telecomunication equipment long before it was a mobile handset manufacturer - in the same way as Alcatel, Lucent and Nokia long provided back-end hardware. For all of them, handset production was a short-term dalliance in the late 90s and early 2000s, not the entire history of the company...
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
Seriously... This was covered so many time during the MS acquisition.
Area51 - We are watching...
I'm not wondering that, because Nokia has always been telecoms kit + handsets and they only sold the handset division.
What I am wondering is how Elop isn't under arrest on corruption charges! How blatant does a hatchet job on a company have to be, how blatant does the reward for that hatchet job have to be before you actually prosecute?
As part of their deal with the devil, aka Microsoft, there's a non-compete clause -- Nokia can't make cell phones until 2016. Rumors are strong -- even thought they have to keep quiet for now -- that Nokia fully intends to come back to the handset business; the N1 tablet and Z Launcher are a solid hint of what's to come.
Circumcision is child abuse.
What a bullshit article; Nokia's infrastructure business is very sound, and by combining with the now (finally) profitable Alcatel they'll be a significant player in that market.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/alcatel-lucent-to-merge-with-nokia-for-15-6-billion/
Nokia didn't miss the smartphone market, they owned it with Symbian, and there was an upgrade path ahead with MeeGo. Their downfall came from the very top -- if it wasn't for M$-plant Stephen Elop and the suicidal move to Windows Phone, there's a good chance Nokia would still be the top handset maker.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Nokia, Ericsson and other similar companies were always infrastructure companies. Handsets, that made them household brands were only a distraction. They made handsets, to boost the market and motivate the network operators to buy more equipment form them. They came up with a good implementation of mobile telephony, but they needed to create a market, and they did.
Agree!
I am still using my N9 with MeeGo, and I still haven't found a better mobile platform.
It does have some problems as it hasn't been updated for a long time, many apps are not available and so on, but as a general mobile system, MeeGo is ahead of both iOS and Android.
To try out something else I have a BQ with Ubuntu, and it is fun just by being very different.
It works in general as a mobile, but the system is very rough and there aren't almost any apps.
I do hope Nokia will come back, and if they come out with a MeeGo based system, I will be the first to buy one!
It's amazing we even post anything about them. Their big time was phones until they missed the smart phone market.
Nokia was early on in the smartphone market. Already in 1990s they had the Communicator lineup. What Nokia missed was the era of sleek, user-friendly touchscreen smartphones. They stuck on with the terrible Symbian operating system for too long. Symbian was laggy, ugly, clunky to use, crash-prone, and a nightmare for app developers.
Their downfall came from the very top -- if it wasn't for M$-plant Stephen Elop and the suicidal move to Windows Phone, there's a good chance Nokia would still be the top handset maker.
You've got the history wrong there. Nokia's downfall begun years before the Microsoft deal. Microsoft was introduced very late in the play when Nokia's cart was already rushing full speed down the mine shaft. Of course it's disappointing that Stephen Elop couldn't help the company much and he still got a juicy prize for his work. But Nokia absolutely would not be "still the top handset maker" if Microsoft didn't buy the handset business. Microsoft was only called to soften the inevitable doom.
No?
Agree! I am still using my N9 with MeeGo, and I still haven't found a better mobile platform.
Nokia had two fresh Linux platforms: Maemo and MeeGo, but the problem was that neither were part of the company's main strategy. They were mostly churning out crusty Symbian-based stuff.
Rubber boots and bicycle tyres?
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I never understood how EPOC, which was light and clean and reliable, evolved into such a mess.
Second system effect?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
very interesting thanks for sharing :)
Vimax
You might find Sailfish OS and Jolla of some interest then.
http://jolla.com
http://sailfishos.org
Get the Nexus 5, it's a massive upgrade over the N9 and if you want you can put sailfish on it..
You might find Sailfish OS and Jolla of some interest then.
http://jolla.com
http://sailfishos.org
I probably should clarify that SailfishOS is basically a successor to MeeGo, based on Mer and and being developed by a mobile startup in Finland. To my understanding they have a number of the original Nokia people working for them. I guess some people decided to jump into a liferaft (jolla = small boat) rather than the sea after Elops 'burning oilrig' speech. I've always found their naming of the company amusing.
Series 60 is the curse here, not Symbian/EPOC. Symbian was designed around the idea that the operating system would provide classes/objects to do the majority of the work in creating an application (think something along the lines of Jquery in comparision to regular javascript). Nokia decided that it would re-implement its own versions of these, this was Series 60.
Nokia did it to differentiate its devices from the other members of the Symbian consortium. Sadly, this process ended up taking a vastly longer amount of time than they expected. In the end, they hired legions of short-term contractors to get the job done. This did not produce the carefully crafted code base that Symbian was created as, nor the Series 40 "ISA" platform Nokia has previously created. It was a dog, that no one wanted to admit to responsibility for. It wasn't until QT was incorporated that the crud introduced in the early 2000s was finally circumvented and performance improved again.
You probably never tried to code for EPOC. I did. Good riddance.
Nokia failed because they kept hanging on to a resource-efficient OS. The newcomers used expensive hardware, and were thus prepared when that fell in price.
I got some Nokia rubber boots, great footwear. They should have stuck to their last.
Correct. I'm speaking from an end user POV. The amount of stuff on my E71 that simply didn't work was astonishing.
Care to share some insights as to why it was a bugger to develop on? Too objecty?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Bullshit. Nokia was still the top smartphone vendor when Elop came on board. He's fully responsible for the mess he created.
He forced people to change to a totally incompatible Windows OS that was itself obsoleted by yet another Windows OS. Of course application developers fled.