Former CEO of Angry Birds-Maker Rovio Hired To Revive Nokia's Phone Business (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Nokia really started to go downhill after it agreed to sell itself to Microsoft at the end of 2013, going all in with Windows Mobile. When that faltered, "Microsoft folded Nokia into its mobile business, maintaining the Finnish company's brand on feature phones, while offering up smartphones under the newly integrated Microsoft Lumia line," reports TechCrunch. In May of this year, Microsoft sold its feature phone business to Foxconn for $350 million. At around the same time, Nokia essentially licensed its brand to Finnish company HMD global Oy to create phones under the Nokia name, "which would be manufactured and distributed by Foxconn." Now, TechCrunch is reporting that Nokia has hired Pikka Rantala, the once CEO of Angry Birds creator Rovio, who stepped down in 2015 after a rough year with the mobile gaming company. He will be joining the company as Chief Marketing Officer.

Comments

Doesn't sound too promising

[Anonymous Coward]

OTOH it could've been a lot worse. They could've hired Stephen Elop.

Re:Doesn't sound too promising

[hcs_$reboot]

if you get in bed with Microsoft, you're going to get fucked!

Many people did that, but in exchange of a huge amount of money...

BRING BACK SYMBIAN!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

BRING BACK SYMBIAN!!!

Nokia was going downhill well before that

[ErikTheRed]

I've friends that worked for Nokia and from what I've heard they were in a death spiral well before Microsoft bought them out. Nasty internal politics, software development drama, no real plan for the smartphone revolution, etc.

I loved Nokia phones back in the day, but I'm not sure what they would bring to the table now. They can compete with all of the "Me-too!" Android vendors in East Asia, try to push out a new OS (good luck), or keep beating the Windows Mobile dead horse. Personally, I would *like* to see another mobile OS have some success, but that's a mind-blowingly difficult and expensive pursuit right now.

Re:Nokia was going downhill well before that

[omnichad]

no real plan for the smartphone revolution

Even if they had doubled down on simplicity, they'd have a marketshare and a chance.

Re:Nokia was going downhill well before that

[Anne Thwacks]

Elop was hired, to save the company, and he did a great job.

In the same way that the captain of the Titanic "did a great job"?

Nokia doesn't(didn't) just make phones

[Anonymous Coward]

When did everyone decide that Nokia=Phone. It's a massive company with tens of thousands of employees, making LTE, optical networks, etc.. etc...
The company didn't sell itself to Microsoft, it sold it's handset business.

They had one

[jgfenix]

It was to standardize the development in Qt and use Symbian foor feature phones and Maemo (then Meego) for smartphones. Yes, there was infighting (the Symbian section wasn't thrilled) but I thought it was a good plan.

Re:nokia already going downhill before M$

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we still trying to pretend Elop wasn't a trojan horse from Microsoft?
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/07/the-sun-tzu-of-nokisoftian-microkia-mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-whose-the-baddest-of-them-all-waterloo.html

He did this:
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/.a/6a00e0097e337c8833017743174241970d-pi

He did this by claiming the TOP SELLING, FASTEST GROWING phone OS was dying, and that it would be dead ended, and switched to Microsoft's OS. And that was the effect. The Microsoft phone OS had no market, no apps, and no features and was unfinished. The license agreements meant that Nokia was locked in a suicide mission with a failed OS vendor.

He received $17.5 million reward from Microsoft:
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/.a/6a00e0097e337c8833017743174241970d-pi

Angry Birds and Nokia

[bayankaran]

Alrighty then...angry birds dude reviving Nokia is like Donald Trump making America great again.

And the n900

[kamathln]

Also bring back the N900, Just upgrade specs to current standards

Best of luck

[roc97007]

I wish him the best of luck. Nokia got the royal shaft during their "partnership" with Microsoft, and it would be really nice to see them succeed again.

Common it's /. here: Think Linux!

[DrYak]

Oh, common, you forgot to jump on the (full GNU-) Linux bandwagon:

BRING BACK MEEGO/MEAMO/SAILFISH OS.

Nokia has already spent tons of money to finance the R&D behing the platform, back when it was called Meego/Maemo.
They spent money on severance package when they let said R&D team go, that helped them to bootstrap Jolla and rebrand the platform as Sailfish OS.

Nokia has already financed a good successor for their Symbian platform.

Jolla is good at making a nice OS (their Sailfish OS interface rocks, and it *does* support Android apps, one of the major ecosystems on the market - unlike Microsoft's piece of poo*).
Jolla isn't very good at organising hardware themselves (see Jolla Tablet fiasco, see shortage Jolla C phone shortages), and are looking to license to 3rd party hardware manufacturer (see Intex, Turing phone, upcoming official port of SFOS on Fairphone 2, etc.)

Nokia could find a nice solution together with Jolla to get a nice/newer/better OS (and common, anything is better than stay with Microsoft or beating the Symbian dead horse), that would be a nice answer to competitor Samsung's interest in using their Tizen platform (their own full GNU/Linux platform with MeeGo ancestry) on smartphones.

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*: well at least their abandoned Android-App-on-Windows project gave us WSL, so we shouldn't be complaining that much.