Yeah, everybody could see it coming, but it doesn't make sense from the POV of Microsoft shareholders.
Nokia Mobile built its success on two things: excellent relationships with its channels, the telcos; and a superb market segmentation model. (Its designs were robust, reliable, and well-liked by their users, but conservative; and its manufacturing division... did tolerably well, considering the tens of models and hundreds of variants. Not brilliantly, but tolerably; perhaps less so in the year before Elop was brought on board.)
Nokia's value resided in these two things: channel relationships, and a deep understanding of all market segments: a willingness and ability to make phones for every demographic and national market, and sell them via the established channels. Those were Nokia's core competencies, the places it created value, the things it did better than its competitors. Not manufacturing. Not design innovation. Marketing, market research, selling a large range, nearly everywhere. (The one geographical market in which Nokia didn't have good telco relationships was the USA. So it didn't sell many phones, except to the discriminating.)
That was before Elop and the "only Winpho, only North America, Apple me-too" strategy. Elop has admitted to channel resistance to selling Windows Phone, and he has pruned Nokia's tree of products down to a stump, pretty much. He's ignored (at best) nearly all markets outside North America.
Nokia's value is gone. Sacrificed to the belief that Nokia could out-innovate companies which excel at that.
Microsoft's buying Nokia in the hope of obtaining massively successful product innovation is... misguided? Optimistic? An interesting idea? Unlikely to be in the shareholders' best interests? What the hell is a suitable euphemism for "deranged lunacy"?
Whatever you like - but if you wanted promotion by a boss in that generation . ..
Promotion?
That would imply not being laid off as soon as the chief executive's bonus isn't as big is it wanted.
That would imply being permanently employed, rather than a zero-hours temp who is motiviated to work by the "promise" of a permanent job.
It would also imply that the old farts are retiring, so people can move up.
Take a look at what's happening to employment-population ratios by age group. Employment of the over 60s is skyrocketing (i.e.: they're not retiring), the 50-plus group is holding its own, and as for the twenty- and thirty-somethings... it's not a happy story.
Promotion? Delusion. Promotion happens by getting a job somewhere else, if at all.
Fair enough. Lots of people seem to have in mind the old "too cheap to meter" idea when they talk about fusion. I could never see that.
I agree: fission is way cheaper than fossil energy when costs are properly apportioned, and people are rational about risk. Wish I lived in that world.
Aside from that declaring it "evil" is specifically a move to shut off debate?
Good point. Thanks.
Automated mining is under development in northern West Australia, but yeah. More experience can't hurt. If only there were something worth bringing back from the moon...
Current global power consumption, 15 TW, is enough to raise the surface temperature by something the order of a hundredth of a degree. So if we used 10,000 times as much energy as we do now, it could be bad.
Agreed, that's not an immediate prospect; and there are five and a half billion people who need more cheap energy.
I love the way you bring evidence and reason to the debate, and also the way you rigidly avoid ad-hominems.
What exactly is wrong with the proposition that mining Helium-3 on the moon is evil--leaving aside questions of the mining being completely futile, impractical, and currently unachievable?
A teeny tiny woosh...? No, not really. I was too subtle, even for me after four coffees.
I wanted to show how "good sentence completion, reading comprehension and logical reasoning skillz" can lead one astray, if one doesn't have the necessary cultural context and background knowledge--but does have other knowledge that interferes. And I also wanted to entertain, I will admit.
(P.S. Yes, I meant to spell skillz that way. I object to the way the word is used by HR droids these days. This is my pathetic rebellion.)
This was before the Green Revolution. Food prices did get really high in the 1970s, and people were seriously worried about the re-emergence of famine. The Green Revolution forestalled that, and then daytime soaps on TV cut the birthrate...except in sub-Saharan Africa.
Current thinking is that locally-made soaps work well. They show women in developing countries women "like themselves", except for having only one or two children -- and putting their kids in school, sticking up for themselves against their menfolk, etc.
Best part is that this is an unintended consequence. The soap-opera makers just wanted to make money...
Hmmm... "...sentence completion, reading comprehension and logical reasoning..."
"Mange" is a French word, so this is un sentence Franglais.
"Mange" means eat, so "more" is probably a misspelling of "morels", a kind of mushroom. Therefore "America" is also a typo for "Americans", and "than" likewise "that". "Would" is the wrong verb here; it should be "could". An easy mistake for a non-native speaker to make.
Given that, the missing bit of the sentence is at the front.
Answer: "There are still 100 morels that Americans could eat."
What sample group? What does "keep the results of the sample group above within a 95% confidence interval" mean? There is no result. There is no sample group above -- you gave a population, despite calling it a sample group.
"Let event A be a randomly selected student." A student cannot be an event. You haven't given the set of possible values for "a student" to take, and you haven't specified which proper subset of the values of "a student" constitute the event.
Do you mean "24,000 students sit an exam, and all of them fail. Let A be the event that an exam result selected from this population of exam results is a pass"?
What you wrote uses statistics words, but it's... incoherent, shall we say. Well trolled.
It's not (really) the OS, and Office is a sunset product: it's Active Directory and Exchange... and possibly Skype (points to Ballmer for that purchase). The consumer market is lost, but there's still huge potential in 'enterprise' software in Asia.
The market is small now because most Asian business are pretty paper-based. But that will (must) change. As I said, Microsoft needs someone who understands all this and can morph AD, Exchange and Skype into products that these businesses will buy and use as they 'level up' in management practise. (And as well MS needs to get SQL Server based ERP, CRM, and vertical market apps to be popular in Asia.)
I agree that this is quite a different business model for Microsoft. (They'll have to be nice to their VARs. Inconceivable!) Chances of MS making the transition? I wouldn't put any money on it.
You've missed Microsoft's two really big corporate apps: Active Directory and Exchange.
SQL server? Plenty of alternatives, although the choice is made on the basis of CRM and accounting apps rather than the DBMS.
IIS? Meh. If you're running it because of Sharepoint, there are Salesforce.com and Yammer and others. C# and.NET? Plenty of alternatives.
Agree that Word and Excel are good...but most office workers, it turns out, can get by with a textarea in a web form when they need to write something outside of Outlook. [Rest of response (about Excel and Powerpoint) deleted, because it was boring.]
But Active Directory has no serious competition. For corporate email, neither does Exchange.
No way is Microsoft going to open-source Windows. Windows licenses are a large chunk of its revenues, and while it can limit AD and Exchange to running on Windows, Microsoft is not going to give up that money. Nor should it.
From a business point of view, Microsoft's hope is Asia. The OECD is fully saturated with Microsoft product, but there's huge growth potential in Asia. (Growth potential, mind. MS will have to work very hard to realise that potential.)
Microsoft needs a CEO who understands China, and a 2IC who knows the rest of East and South Asia. Someone(s) less important can mind the shop in the OECD. Who in Microsoft could take on the big roles?
*crickets chirping...*
Ballmer's biggest failure, one that has gotten very few pixels, is succession planning. It's the core, number one duty of a CEO: to grow his staff to the point where they can run the business. Ballmer sucked at it.
Better stop using Facebook--in fact, the entire internet--now. Discuss this feeling of yours with your doctor, and then use all the free time you'll have to learn scrimshaw and grow tomatoes.
See, the thing is, America, or rather the OECD in general, isn't interesting any more. PCs have penetrated everywhere they're going to, the population isn't growing any more, and all that's left is replacement. And there are all these annoying parasites and egg-robbers around (Google mail and docs, the various office apps for iPads, web-based workflow like Yammer, the BYOD wave, etc., etc.)
In the OECD, it's death by a million cuts for Microsoft. The slow decay back into the swamp. Not so slow, if they mess up Active Directory.
The computing market growth is in Asia. (To a lesser extent, also in Latin America, and Real Soon Now, Just You Watch, in Africa.)
And what are the Asians buying? They're buying el-cheapo 800x600 (or worse) TN panel 512MB RAM ARM-cored tablets running Android, made by Coolpad/Yulong and a million no-name backstreet factories on razor-thin margins.
Microsoft can't compete with that: its business model is high cost rent-seeking.
When Asians finally have high-enough incomes and want to go up-market, they won't want to buy something that's been perceived as a loser for the last couple of decades (as will be Microsoft's case by 2020), they'll want either what they already use (Android, or possibly Tizen by then), or new and shiny, and preferably made in their own country.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, right: it's a Ballmerism.
Yeah, everybody could see it coming, but it doesn't make sense from the POV of Microsoft shareholders.
Nokia Mobile built its success on two things: excellent relationships with its channels, the telcos; and a superb market segmentation model. (Its designs were robust, reliable, and well-liked by their users, but conservative; and its manufacturing division ... did tolerably well, considering the tens of models and hundreds of variants. Not brilliantly, but tolerably; perhaps less so in the year before Elop was brought on board.)
Nokia's value resided in these two things: channel relationships, and a deep understanding of all market segments: a willingness and ability to make phones for every demographic and national market, and sell them via the established channels. Those were Nokia's core competencies, the places it created value, the things it did better than its competitors. Not manufacturing. Not design innovation. Marketing, market research, selling a large range, nearly everywhere. (The one geographical market in which Nokia didn't have good telco relationships was the USA. So it didn't sell many phones, except to the discriminating.)
That was before Elop and the "only Winpho, only North America, Apple me-too" strategy. Elop has admitted to channel resistance to selling Windows Phone, and he has pruned Nokia's tree of products down to a stump, pretty much. He's ignored (at best) nearly all markets outside North America.
Nokia's value is gone. Sacrificed to the belief that Nokia could out-innovate companies which excel at that.
Microsoft's buying Nokia in the hope of obtaining massively successful product innovation is ... misguided? Optimistic? An interesting idea? Unlikely to be in the shareholders' best interests? What the hell is a suitable euphemism for "deranged lunacy"?
It's a Horse_ebooks wannabe.
If this is all about return on investment, why don't all CEs of multinationals do this?
Are they all that dumb? Are you saying they should all be sacked?
Also, don't hog the conversation.
Whatever you like - but if you wanted promotion by a boss in that generation . . .
Promotion?
That would imply not being laid off as soon as the chief executive's bonus isn't as big is it wanted.
That would imply being permanently employed, rather than a zero-hours temp who is motiviated to work by the "promise" of a permanent job.
It would also imply that the old farts are retiring, so people can move up.
Take a look at what's happening to employment-population ratios by age group. Employment of the over 60s is skyrocketing (i.e.: they're not retiring), the 50-plus group is holding its own, and as for the twenty- and thirty-somethings... it's not a happy story.
Promotion? Delusion. Promotion happens by getting a job somewhere else, if at all.
Fair enough. Lots of people seem to have in mind the old "too cheap to meter" idea when they talk about fusion. I could never see that.
I agree: fission is way cheaper than fossil energy when costs are properly apportioned, and people are rational about risk. Wish I lived in that world.
Aside from that declaring it "evil" is specifically a move to shut off debate?
Good point. Thanks.
Automated mining is under development in northern West Australia, but yeah. More experience can't hurt. If only there were something worth bringing back from the moon...
Thanks. Two good paragraphs.
Current global power consumption, 15 TW, is enough to raise the surface temperature by something the order of a hundredth of a degree. So if we used 10,000 times as much energy as we do now, it could be bad.
Agreed, that's not an immediate prospect; and there are five and a half billion people who need more cheap energy.
Why would fusion energy be cheap?
Fuel cost is trivial for current fission reactors. Do they produce cheap energy?
I love the way you bring evidence and reason to the debate, and also the way you rigidly avoid ad-hominems.
What exactly is wrong with the proposition that mining Helium-3 on the moon is evil--leaving aside questions of the mining being completely futile, impractical, and currently unachievable?
A teeny tiny woosh...? No, not really. I was too subtle, even for me after four coffees.
I wanted to show how "good sentence completion, reading comprehension and logical reasoning skillz" can lead one astray, if one doesn't have the necessary cultural context and background knowledge--but does have other knowledge that interferes. And I also wanted to entertain, I will admit.
(P.S. Yes, I meant to spell skillz that way. I object to the way the word is used by HR droids these days. This is my pathetic rebellion.)
Reading comprehension fail. I did not discuss GGP's use of "confidence interval".
"With a teletype interface and the Fortran language, they will be easy to use".
Hello? This is Slashdot? All of that is pretty close, not way off.
What are the <TAB>, <CR>, and <LF> characters? Yes, part of the teletype interface.
The Fortran language is still on most computers here (well, the Linux ones, anyway).
Easy to use? You bet.
I will admit, they got the color scheme wrong. It's beige, not gray. But give a mechanic a chance, and he'll paint everything gray.
This was before the Green Revolution. Food prices did get really high in the 1970s, and people were seriously worried about the re-emergence of famine. The Green Revolution forestalled that, and then daytime soaps on TV cut the birthrate...except in sub-Saharan Africa.
Current thinking is that locally-made soaps work well. They show women in developing countries women "like themselves", except for having only one or two children -- and putting their kids in school, sticking up for themselves against their menfolk, etc.
Best part is that this is an unintended consequence. The soap-opera makers just wanted to make money...
Hmmm... "...sentence completion, reading comprehension and logical reasoning..."
"Mange" is a French word, so this is un sentence Franglais.
"Mange" means eat, so "more" is probably a misspelling of "morels", a kind of mushroom. Therefore "America" is also a typo for "Americans", and "than" likewise "that". "Would" is the wrong verb here; it should be "could". An easy mistake for a non-native speaker to make.
Given that, the missing bit of the sentence is at the front.
Answer: "There are still 100 morels that Americans could eat."
Obviously, the problem was they didn't have enough guesses on each question.
It's the Great Guess Shortage of 2013. Donate to UNICEF, so it can distribute urgently needed guesses now!
WTF?
What sample group? What does "keep the results of the sample group above within a 95% confidence interval" mean? There is no result. There is no sample group above -- you gave a population, despite calling it a sample group.
"Let event A be a randomly selected student." A student cannot be an event. You haven't given the set of possible values for "a student" to take, and you haven't specified which proper subset of the values of "a student" constitute the event.
Do you mean "24,000 students sit an exam, and all of them fail. Let A be the event that an exam result selected from this population of exam results is a pass"?
What you wrote uses statistics words, but it's ... incoherent, shall we say. Well trolled.
It's not (really) the OS, and Office is a sunset product: it's Active Directory and Exchange ... and possibly Skype (points to Ballmer for that purchase). The consumer market is lost, but there's still huge potential in 'enterprise' software in Asia.
The market is small now because most Asian business are pretty paper-based. But that will (must) change. As I said, Microsoft needs someone who understands all this and can morph AD, Exchange and Skype into products that these businesses will buy and use as they 'level up' in management practise. (And as well MS needs to get SQL Server based ERP, CRM, and vertical market apps to be popular in Asia.)
I agree that this is quite a different business model for Microsoft. (They'll have to be nice to their VARs. Inconceivable!) Chances of MS making the transition? I wouldn't put any money on it.
You've missed Microsoft's two really big corporate apps: Active Directory and Exchange.
SQL server? Plenty of alternatives, although the choice is made on the basis of CRM and accounting apps rather than the DBMS.
IIS? Meh. If you're running it because of Sharepoint, there are Salesforce.com and Yammer and others. C# and .NET? Plenty of alternatives.
Agree that Word and Excel are good...but most office workers, it turns out, can get by with a textarea in a web form when they need to write something outside of Outlook. [Rest of response (about Excel and Powerpoint) deleted, because it was boring.]
But Active Directory has no serious competition. For corporate email, neither does Exchange.
No way is Microsoft going to open-source Windows. Windows licenses are a large chunk of its revenues, and while it can limit AD and Exchange to running on Windows, Microsoft is not going to give up that money. Nor should it.
From a business point of view, Microsoft's hope is Asia. The OECD is fully saturated with Microsoft product, but there's huge growth potential in Asia. (Growth potential, mind. MS will have to work very hard to realise that potential.)
Microsoft needs a CEO who understands China, and a 2IC who knows the rest of East and South Asia. Someone(s) less important can mind the shop in the OECD. Who in Microsoft could take on the big roles?
*crickets chirping...*
Ballmer's biggest failure, one that has gotten very few pixels, is succession planning. It's the core, number one duty of a CEO: to grow his staff to the point where they can run the business. Ballmer sucked at it.
Yes.
Better stop using Facebook--in fact, the entire internet--now. Discuss this feeling of yours with your doctor, and then use all the free time you'll have to learn scrimshaw and grow tomatoes.
See, the thing is, America, or rather the OECD in general, isn't interesting any more. PCs have penetrated everywhere they're going to, the population isn't growing any more, and all that's left is replacement. And there are all these annoying parasites and egg-robbers around (Google mail and docs, the various office apps for iPads, web-based workflow like Yammer, the BYOD wave, etc., etc.)
In the OECD, it's death by a million cuts for Microsoft. The slow decay back into the swamp. Not so slow, if they mess up Active Directory.
The computing market growth is in Asia. (To a lesser extent, also in Latin America, and Real Soon Now, Just You Watch, in Africa.)
And what are the Asians buying? They're buying el-cheapo 800x600 (or worse) TN panel 512MB RAM ARM-cored tablets running Android, made by Coolpad/Yulong and a million no-name backstreet factories on razor-thin margins.
Microsoft can't compete with that: its business model is high cost rent-seeking.
When Asians finally have high-enough incomes and want to go up-market, they won't want to buy something that's been perceived as a loser for the last couple of decades (as will be Microsoft's case by 2020), they'll want either what they already use (Android, or possibly Tizen by then), or new and shiny, and preferably made in their own country.
In phones, yes; in tablets, iOS is still the alpha gorilla.