Behind the Microsoft Write-Off of Nokia

UnknowingFool writes: Previously Microsoft announced they had written off the Nokia purchase for $7.6B in the last quarter. In doing so, Microsoft would create only the third unprofitable quarter in the company's history. Released on July 31, new financial documents detail some of the reasoning and financials behind this decision. At the core of the problem was that the Phone Hardware business was only worth $116M, after adjusting for costs and market factors. One of those factors was poor sales of Nokia handhelds in 2015. Financially it made more sense to write it all off.

Comments

Re:Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

And there are those who believe Elop was paid by Microsoft to do exactly that.

Re:other market factors to adjust for

[debrain]

Its only ever been effective during the browser wars

Lest we forget, the others including:

- Novell Netware
- Wordperfect
- PC/DR DOS & OS / 2

Re:Microsoft

[DrXym]

It's hard to say if he was working to undermine Nokia from the inside, or if he was merely incompetent, or if he was simply out to enrich himself. Or a combination of all three.

Whatever it was, his tenure was an unmitigated disaster. Not just for Nokia as it turns out but for Microsoft too.

Re:Microsoft

[Anon-Admin]

As someone who was stuck using a windows phone for two years. I disagree with your assessment of "It's not that Windows Phone was bad" It was crap!

The company I worked for decided to buy and use them because

A) It's windows so it should be easy
B) They got a great price on them.

First question from the user is "How do I set my background image?" Which you could not do.

Re:Microsoft

[TheRaven64]

Symbian EKA2 was a great kernel design for mobile (and still does security and power management better than Linux), but a lot of the Symbian userspace APIs were designed at a time where 1MB of RAM was a lot, 4MB was huge. When 64MB was entry level, they were really showing their age: saving 1MB at the cost of a big increase in developer effort wasn't worth it. Nokia needed to provide a modern API and a clean migration path. They provided neither and they set up groups within the company competing to provide both and actively sabotaging each other. Maemo/Meego is an example of this: Switching from GTK to Qt shortly after launching the product doesn't instil developer confidence.

Windows Phone actually made sense for Nokia: they needed a software stack that let them differentiate themselves (and no one else seemed to be using WP) and they had managed to set up their corporate structure in such a way that it was impossible for them to develop it themselves. Some of their apps were really nice (their maps app, which was just bought by a consortium of German car makers was a lot better than the Apple or Google offerings, for example).

Re:Microsoft

[Qzukk]

According to Wikipedia, Elop was in a "major leadership position" as the head of the Business Division at Microsoft prior to becoming Nokia's CEO, after the acquisition he returned to Microsoft as a VP.

I can't for the life of me imagine why someone could imagine him as a sucking tendril, deployed from the creeping horror that is Microsoft to latch onto some poor victim, injecting acid into it and dissolving it from within and sucking the guts out of the rapidly dessicating corpse before being withdrawn back into the writhing mass of flesh it calls home. No sirree, can't even fathom it.