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Finnish Government Criticizes Microsoft For Job Cuts, 'Broken Promises' (softpedia.com)
jones_supa writes: Softpedia reports: "Microsoft has recently announced a new round of job layoffs at its Mobile unit in Finland, as it moves forward with its restructuring and reorganization plan following the acquisition of Nokia's Devices and Services unit. The Finnish government has criticized Microsoft for turning to more job cuts in the country, pointing out that the company has a huge responsibility to help those who are being let go. Microsoft's latest job cut round included 1,850 people, 1,350 of which are said to be working in Finland. 'I am disappointed because of the (initial) promises made by Microsoft,' Finance Minister Alexander Stubb was quoted as saying by Reuters. 'One example is that the data center did not materialize despite the company's promise.'" He refers to Microsoft's promise in 2013 to invest $250 million in a data center located in Finland that was specifically meant to provide services to European customers. All of these worries are not unfounded as the employment situation in Finland is still quite terrible, and the decline of Nokia's former phone business certainly exacerbates the situation.
So, it's Microsoft's job to make busy work for these people instead of letting them go?
Of course it doesn't end well for you guys. It never does. You really can't be surprised by their ethics at this point. Now bend over while we force-install this mobile OS on your desktop!
When will politicians stop believing corporate promises (lies)?? Corporations are only in it for themselves, they have zero concern for the communities they are present in.
Giving corporations sweetheart deals for promises of jobs or investment is the worst possible use of public money. It's corporate welfare, except these welfare recipients are spending the check on hookers and blow.
It was not intentional but Finland's economy is.was very dependent on two things cell phones and paper. Yes Nokia blew it when they sold to Microsoft and did not embrace their own Linux os that looked so promising, forked Android like Amazon, or went with Android. I think Nokia could have had a real winner with an Android phone with a Nokia camera. Nokia hardware was always good as are the cameras.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Every day he must wake up laughing in disbelief at how he got rewarded for destroying Nokia.
Back when Nokia cashed in in Germany to build a plant, then when the "incentives" were running out they closed shop and moved to Romania, what was Finland's reaction when Germans (plus the German government of that time) complained and called Nokia things I can't repeat in decent company?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This "Embrace and then Kill" trick is an old trick of Microsoft.
Embrace Nokia then KILL it. Microsoft killed that Finnish company, Nokia, because one Finnish kid named Linus Torvalds destroyed Windows cash flow.
The Seattle Times ran a tech piece the other day about this issue, the take being that poor old Microsoft is losing a ton of money on this effort. No mention of what Microsoft mole Elop did to Nokia in order to get the price down to where MS would by it, nor how bad Microsoft (read "Balmer") handled the whole thing. Here's the link:
All Microsoft needs to do is realize that there is a lot of pent-up demand for a top-notch, modern Linux distro that doesn't force systemd on its users.
Well, I realized the other day that I should be the Queen of England, but here we are.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Getting rid of employees here in Finland is actually quite easy. There is a process you are legally bound to follow, but it just takes 60 days and the end result is that you can let go any employees you have. If you just have a single employee and want to sack him, that can be more difficult, but these massive layoffs are easy. For long time employees, you have to give several months notice when getting rid of them, but OTOH if you want they will work for you during that time.
"The safety net" gives a person living alone about 10%-20% of the salary of a typical tech worker, so most people want to work.
This latest round of MS job cuts is not trimming, they are ending the design of phones completely. There will be nothing left of the Nokia phone division. (The rest of Nokia that was not sold to MS is actually doing pretty well nowadays.)
I know big companies are all about profits, but I highly doubt that everyone at Nokia was completely useless and unable to fill a spot in Microsoft after they took over. I have lots of big-company IT experience, so it's not like I'm totally unaware that there is always some dead wood. I've seen people "parked" in jobs in some benevolent companies because the divisions they were managing got killed 2 years before their retirement. I've seen people who watch cat videos all day and perform one or two simple tasks. But, there's no way every single person at Nokia couldn't find something to do at Microsoft. And if Microsoft promised to build an Azure data center in Finland, then they should live up to the promise...it's not like they don't need it. Europe is very different than the US - workers have rights and expect employers to be more stable.
My opinion on this topic isn't popular in the US, but I do feel that large companies owe some loyalty to long term employees. I've been lucky to work for a couple of long-tenure employers in my career, and haven't been laid off yet. Companies should realize that there is a subset of people out there who enjoy stability as well as the ability to do challenging work. Give these people both, and don't treat them like office furniture, and they'll stay, keeping your institutional knowledge inside the company. I know I'm not looking to hop jobs every six months, and lots of long-term big company employees aren't either. Not everyone is nomadic and can just move their family across the country or across an ocean for work.
I have some interesting experience with this, having done consulting work for a Saudi Arabian company. The Microsoft takeover of Nokia would be like ExxonMobil or Shell coming in and taking over Saudi Aramco (the state-owned oil company.) The MBA spreadsheet jockeys would immediately start cutting heads, because there really are a lot of "appointed" positions in Saudi companies. As a result, the country's economy would suffer greatly because they're so dependent on a few large employers. This sounds like the Nokia situation exactly. Or look at what happened in the 80s when the steel mills on the Great Lakes and in Pennsylvania closed for a closer-to-home example.
NOKIA ousted MS from dominating smartphones by establishing Symbian Foundation and getting all major players onboard. Showing middle finger to Finland, Linus & MeeGo was just a bonus, ra*ing NOKIA was a much more satisfying dominance thingy for MS.
They made their bed with Microsoft let them lie on it.
Finland made a deal with Microsoft and didn't do its due diligence by looking at every other deal Microsoft has made with other companies?
C'mon, even Slashdotters were calling this outcome when Elop got "hired". I could go find the links, but it was so damn obvious to any industry watcher that it's hardly worth the sport.
I guess the only wildcard now is whether Nadella thinks it's still a good idea to go after Google with the Nokia patents. Ballmer totally would have. Good riddance for the industry.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The Finnish government is just naive as is usual. Nothing new there. There was plenty of talks of data centers but I guess it was just the desperate grasping the straws in hopes of getting some crumbs. Whatever.
As for Nokia, going with Windows Phones was maybe the biggest mistake they could ever have made, and plenty of Finns were happy to point that out when it happened. Of course, Finns tend to complain about everything, so that does not necessarily mean anything. But Nokia had a very long time to get into the software ecosystem field, get a proper OS out, branch into Android among other things and so on. The top management just couldn't handle the transition to software side from hardware focus. This was evident years before with all the crap of Symbian never developing into anything reasonable (as in ecosystems, app development, etc.), and all other manufacturers abandoning it over time. The number of OS's Nokia worked on and never finishing any to a decent degree also tells enough. Even with hugely smaller resources, Jolla managed to put something usable out the door. Presumably because no-one was constantly throwing roadblocks at them within the company.
While hiring Elop and committing corporate suicide via WP was horrible, the later sale of Nokia mobiles to Microsoft is generally seen in Finland as a great move. Nokia management finally recognized MS and WP was a fast sinking ship, they had stacked the wrong boat, and they had to get out fast. So they managed to sell the burnt out corpse of a platform, along with its arsonist captain Elop, to MS for 5+billion and used that to get stronger on the network side. Of course, with the ongoing virtualization of network side to sfotware, and strong push from Huawei etc., who knows how that will end. But at least it is not consumer software.
Also some of the MS Mobile people in Finland have been offered positions in Seattle/US. But I guess they pick the best of the best, but so would I and anyone with any sense. What else?
Just sayin'.
Even commies know better than expropriating failed ventures.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Does this count ? http://www.microsoft.com/en-us...
They didn't ask for "budgetary discipline". They demanded policies that destroyed the country,impoverished the people,made the country a protectorate,gave boost to a nazi party,resulted in GDP to tank more than 25%,unemployment to be more than 25% and more than 50% for young people. Either they were misguided or they were and are malicious or they are fanatics. Either way,they did too much harm. I have zero sympathy for them. They should blame themselves for their problems,not Microsoft,Russia,Amazon or other countries.
Bill Gates said:"I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine" My favorite number is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74
Hah, this is a great comment. Yes, man, there is a pent up demand to go back to the old init + microsoft. The opportunity that is being squandered is a crime against humanity.
Sorry to hear about your predicament but blaming Finland is ridiculous. Finns gave more aid per capita to Greece than any other nation in the euro zone so the fact that Finland had to play tough was a simple necessity for any politician that wanted to get reelected. The number one reason for Greece's predicament is that the books were cooked when Greece wanted to join and Germany deliberately turned a blind eye to it to ensure that the euro zone was as large as possible from the very beginning. Now, obviously it seems unfair when minimum unemployment benefits in Finland are higher than many worker's salaries in Greece (or Spain for that matter) and perhaps there would've been a better way to reform the Greek economy. However, it would be ridiculous to expect more from the EU without some terms and conditions.l
Clearly there should be NO more loans to Greece. After all the EU is just making things worse, right?
That's not what you want? You want more loans with no conditions? Expand the government to be 90% of the Greek economy? Lower the full pension age to 40? Good luck.
The only answer is to kick the greeks to the curb. Let them borrow Drachma.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Greece could have left the Euro at any point, but it is highly unlikely that would have given any better result.
Other countries like Germany and Finland (among others) could have helped more, but they have voters to sell it to.
And it is a hard sell to give money to a country that cooked the books, and full of people like you who blame everyone but themselves! (and gullible enough to vote for a "no" that had not even the pretense of a credible plan behind it, sorry but that doesn't make it look like the kind of people you want to help by giving money without very tight control over it, not to mention playing friends with Putin does not exactly fan feelings of kindness from everyone else)
Last I checked, Greece was a democracy all those years, so everyone with the right to vote bears their part of responsibility for where the country is.
All that said, I think it's long past all that and time that more efforts are made to get Greece on its feet again, even if it costs other EU countries quite a bit of money.
And Greece deserved a lot more help with the migrant crisis. Unfortunately I am unable to get any information on who is to blame for not handling that one better.
So Greece laying about the budget deficit when joining EU was not Greece fault?
Isn't it true that Stefanos Manos (former Greece minister of finance) said " the Greek national railway was so poorly run and its public employees so overpaid that it would be cheaper for the state to shut down the railway entirely and give every customer taxi fare to their destination." ?
Isn't it true that Tassos Giannitsis (former minister of labor) said "When I told my colleagues in the cabinet about the reforms I was proposingâ"which mind you were not the toughest availableâ"the attitude I got was that I was spoiling the party, They were, like, âeverything is going great right now, why are you bothering us with a problem that may implode in a decade?"
Isn't it true that "the retirement age for Greek jobs classified as "arduous" is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on" and "the Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finland's"
The last thing especially is a breathtaking reading. Greeks should not point fingers at anyone until they admit that they screwed up themselves too. Sure it was the upper class that screwed you, the little people. But who voted them in?
Switching to Microsoft over SystemD is like saying you should saw off your leg because your toenail fell off.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The problem with Greece and Finland is the same. The Euro. It isn't working. You just need to look at the recoveries in e.g. Iceland or Sweden to see counter-examples of that.
The austerity policies have been a disaster and the idea that you can use the same standards and business methods in countries with dissimilar geography, language, natural resources, etc, etc is also a disaster.
What other countries? The media has only talked about the crisis in Greece. To be honest, international media is so, shall we say "colorful" in its interpretation of the complex issues that there is little possibility of gaining a realistic picture of the events and issues. German science documentary states how (of course only German-speaking) educated young Greece as fleeing the country, and the some other sources blame only one accountant for lying about Greek economy during the EU negotiations. What I saw in television about how Greek reacted towards Germany, for example, simply puzzled the hell out of me. As if the Greek had been given completely different interpretation of the reality..
The austerity policies and the effect of unreasonable old laws hit Finland much, much harder during the 1990s economic depression when many of our public services simply vanished, people killed themselves and ended up in decades of personal debt. Hopefully the Greeks don't have to go through as hard a transition this time.
You missed the first step in the causality chain: The problems with the euro were caused by Greece being allowed to join despite their economy not fulfilling the requirements. They had cooked the books and Germany let them. Bad for the euro and worse for Greece.
Why microsoft is doing like this as it is a big company in this world. they have to provide #jobs #naukri from all over all the world . As there is lots of braches so why not accepting more. get #jobs #naukri http://www.jobschahiye.in/
Finland isn't part of Scandinavia, you fat moron.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."