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Microsoft To License Nokia Brand To Foxconn, Says Report (techtimes.com)
SmartAboutThings quotes a report from Windows Report: It's no secret that Microsoft's phone business isn't going according to plan. Last quarter alone saw a 46% drop in phone revenue, slightly better than the 49% drop the quarter before that. And now it seems that Microsoft is finally realizing this: according to rumors, the tech giant is considering licensing 50% of its mobile business to Foxconn -- in other words, the Nokia brand it had purchased for 10 years, until 2024. It appears that negotiations have reached very advanced stages, with Microsoft and Foxconn currently deliberating the final clauses of the deal. Some of the implications of such a deal could mean about 50 percent of the Microsoft Mobile members would be looking for new jobs. The rest of the team is said to join the Microsoft Surface team, and may be tasked with working on an upcoming Surface Phone which has been rumored for some time now.
So all those games Microsoft played with Elop to get Nokia (the top selling smartphone at the time), and its ends up with nothing. Not even the name.
It's even worse, when you think about it.
MeeGo was very likely to be hugely successful. It could be the dominant platform now, or going head to head with Android. It would be a more divided market, with room for smaller platforms, possibly WP among them. But, with MeeGo stillborn and WP widely rejected, the market quickly consolidated around Android, with iOS alone retaining its luxury niche. To the point that there is no room left for a "third ecosystem" now.
Stephen Elop fucked up in the exact right ways to make Android unstoppable. Google really should write him a check.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Until we start talking about abuse towards their employees, then Apple is Foxconn's only client.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Well I'm another "Slashdot Libertarian Type", and I think most people would define being in the top 20% of income earners in the US as successful.
That said, I think pushing minority groups towards a particular career path is kind of dumb really, and forcing companies to hire more of them is even more dumb.
Suppose we have 100 people:
50 are white
20 are black
20 are latino
10 are asian
Now, suppose there is an economic demand of 25 IT workers. Of this population of 100 people, 15 of the white guys are into IT, 8 of the asians are, 2 of the blacks are, and 1 latino is. Now, suppose all of these people have exactly the job that they want, and all of them are very good at it because they really like doing it.
Well, to social justice types, this is a HUGE problem in need of correction. Why? Because whites are 50% of the population and represent 60% of the IT work force, while asias are 10% of the population and represent 32% of the IT work force, meanwhile blacks and latinos are 20% of the population with 8% of the workforce and 4%, respectively. This obviously must be because of discrimination. People should be working in a given industry to represent their population numbers, and they aren't. So the solution is to tell the whites and asians to either not get hired or get different jobs so that they represent less numbers, and we have to convince more blacks and latinos that they need to work in IT, even if they really don't care for technology, and thus do a worse job than those who do care about it. And if that doesn't work, we just need to make more minorities in IT and have programs that exclude some groups while being exclusive to others (for example, lots of programs out there for IT education are exclusive to girls; meaning, no boys allowed.)
However here's what reality looks like: I don't know about today's k-12, but when I was in high school and younger, peer pressure was AGAINST going into a technology career. Other kids would often poke fun at you if you were into computers at all, hell, I remember being bullied quite a few times for that fact alone. I'm part of what is called the millennial generation, by the way, so I'm not sure how much has changed since the 16 years I've been out of the k-12 system. But, the present grown ups that are in IT, which is supposedly racially biased, were mostly in that generation. It sure as shit didn't require somebody encouraging me to go into IT to make me go into IT; it's just inherent in who I am.
That said, you're going to have a very difficult time convincing me that the solution is to push more minorities and girls into IT and expect to have more of them employed in IT. It's well known that people tend to associate more with other people that look like themselves, which is part of our biology. That said, different races and indeed different genders are going to have their own co-cultures that will differ remarkably from people who don't look like themselves (For example, think about how many black country singers you've heard of, and how many white rap singers you've heard of. Notice anything?) Given that they'll have different cultural values, it's inevitable that they'll be interested in different things as well, which includes career choices. Which means that if you want to change their career choices because you've taken it upon yourself to tell them that the things they value are inherently wrong, you're going to have to forcibly change their cultural values.
And if you want to do that, then I'll have no choice but to ask: What are you doing calling other people a bigot?
Personally, I think that Stephen Elop should be in prison for what he did. From every action he took it was clear that he was a plant from MS to devalue the Nokia brand as much as possible so that MS could purchase it for pennies on the dollar.
I do not think that MS was ever too serious about producing phones, but they were very serious about acquiring Nokia's patent portfolio.
To think about 1000's of jobs lost and lives ruined because of that ass hat. That, to me, is criminal.
Would Nokia have turned things around eventually? Personally, I think they would have. At the time, I was in a position to see many of the models Nokia had in the pipeline. I thought they looked fantastic. Then the came Elop and Windows phone. Then came the speedy end.
Now, I am not saying that I would condone such actions, but it has always surprised me guys like him don't get murdered by some former employees. I mean, looks at the amount of lives these guys screw up. Like Chris Galvan at Motorola in the early 2000's. This guy fired 10's of thousands of people and made one ridiculous decision after another. The year he kicked out 40k employees, he saw fit to give himself an 8 million dollar bonus. I was a lower level manager at the time as send him an email asking how much he would get when he fires the rest of the workers. I got an email back from his secretary saying his bonus was inline with the industry, to which I responded that other CEO's don't lose half their market value in 2 years.
I'm going to suggest that if your ideas about how black people actually live are derived from rap lyrics, then this is probably not a subject you should feel confident discussing.
MeeGo was very likely to be hugely successful. It could be the dominant platform now, or going head to head with Android
And what evidence do you base this hypothesis on? Is it possible that it could have been successful? Sure. It's conceivable it might have been a player. "Highly likely"? I don't see any reason to believe that. Nokia (the major backer along with Intel) was already on shaky ground by the point MeeGo became a viable product. It was always more likely to fail than to succeed just like most projects. That's not a critique of the technology or it's merits or the efforts of its backers but rather the fact that it's really frickin hard to develop a commercially successful OS that captures substantial market share. Even Microsoft with all it's billions of dollars has struggled to capture even a fraction of the market share they have on the desktop in mobile.
I agree that Elop really screwed Nokia in a big way but he really just hastened the demise that was already underway. Nokia didn't realize until too late who their real customer was. They thought it was the telecom companies and they developed phones with that in mind. Apple proved that the customer was really the person holding the phone. By the time Nokia figured that out, handset buyers were already heading for the exits and it was too late to stop them. Nokia's hardware was (mostly) great but their software was terrible. Symbian wasn't good enough and MeeGo was too late to the market. They gave Apple and Android a 3 year head start in the market before MeeGo was introduced (2007 vs 2010) which is an eternity. While MeeGo had a lot of positives, it simply was too late to be likely to capture substantial market share. Obviously we can never know for sure but it seems hard to envision a scenario where MeeGo really turned into a game changer in the face of Apple and Google.
No. It uses the cloud!
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