Some good points, but I've yet to see an instance where a company sold their buildings to a holding company so that they could grow or shrink or move elsewhere more efficiently. I've only ever seen it as a short term cash grab.
Even if you owned the buildings, you (as a company) probably did not build them, nor do you necessarily have to have a crew to maintain them. All that can be contracted out. Moreover, you can sell a building with a 30 year mortgage and still recover some equity, whereas getting out early from a 5 year lease may be more costly.
I'm thinking because you don't want to connect it to a network (that you care about) until the disk is scrubbed and the bios is reflashed. (And perhaps, the back is taken off to make sure the box hasn't been physically compromised.) Laptops are, like, $200 apiece. Safer just to dump it.
> Let me try to refine this question - Do you want to manufacture high quality phones or clone phones? I don’t know the answer.
In the context of this question, you want to manufacture Windows 8 phones, and *only* Windows 8 phones. Whether that falls into either above category is a matter of opinion.
> Nokia is known for 1. Engineers who make really good hardware and 2. High quality manufacturing in context of supplying different models in different markets (think different languages, networking standards, supply chains, etc.).
...but the Windows 8 phone is already designed, and surely it can be manufactured cheaper in China?
> Now, can Nokia charge a premium for it’s hardware over it’s rivals “beige box” android rivals? If the answer is yet then MSFT should keep Nokia intact. If not..
I think the question boils down to, what value to Microsoft is Nokia after they're bought out? Microsoft's business model is to charge a premium for their *software*. The hardware is peripheral. Microsoft has absolutely no interest in any hardware Nokia makes that isn't running Windows. So all that engineering and manufacturing pertaining to feature phones is not interesting to Microsoft. What's left? The manufacturing and IP of the Windows 8 Phone. (Windows 7 phone being a dead product and everyone knows it.) Manufacturing can easily be shipped offshore, (everyone else is doing that; the process is known) and the only thing left is the engineering crew specific to the Windows 8 phone. Then the question becomes, do you keep a skeleton crew employed in Finland to design the next iteration of the phone, or do you just pull all that back to Redmond? I think that question answers itself.
In summary, the larger question is not, what value does Nokia's manufacturing and engineering and current (non-MS) product line have to Nokia, it's what value does all that have to Microsoft. I'm thinking, not much.
You take a laptop to China. In your coat pocket is a "live" thumbdrive, which remains on you at all times. You don't care what's on the laptop, because you boot the thumbdrive to do work.
When you leave China, toss the (presumably compromised) laptop in a dustbin in the airport restroom.
...it's a little like outsourcing. Cost savings (on paper) is largely smoke and mirrors, as the cost savings from cheaper manpower must be balanced against the cost of the outsource company's profit margin, and the increased cost of doing business due to incompetent staff.
It "reduces costs" on the VERY short term, as you get an influx of cash and then essentially have to pay it back plus the holding company's profit margin. A desperate company will try this at some point, hoping against hope that this allows them to stay in business long enough to turn it around.
Side note, does Microsoft actually need Nokia's factories or talent? Once Microsoft owns the IP, can't they simply close everything down and move the business to the US, and the manufacturing to China? If Microsoft is only concerned with (essentially) one product (the Windows 8 phone), why would they need Nokia's talent at all?
Side side note, I wonder if this will have an appreciable effect on the economy of Finland? (Probably not, but I don't have the numbers in front of me.)
3) Monetary reasons. They actually need the cash right now to stay in business. They're betting on a recovery and future sales covering the cost of money. (Speaking as having worked for a failing company that tried this. It probably helped them stay in business for a few more months.)
C'mon, the comparison to storing a copy of every letter sent by the post office for two years is ridiculous. Texts are already electronic, (they would not need to be scanned, as would letters) and textual data compresses well. This could easily be done with current technology.
Don't look for technical barriers, this will have to be fought in Congress or the courts.
> I would help the cops more if the microphone was always on a complete recording of everything in ear shot of the phone was kept in storage for when it was needed. Seems silly, just wait for bandwidth and storage costs to drop a little more.
I wonder what Orwell would think of a society that would willingly carry Telescreens around with them.
...thinks of cops eyeballing terabytes of "what u wanna do?" "IDK, what u wanna do?" and is filled with glee. But the practical part realizes that they will be using computers to check for patterns. Maybe it'll be like the old days when we all put NSA bait in our.signatures?
Or maybe, this will kill text messaging for everyone except tweens.
This is like sentencing a truck designer to death because trucks are used to transport alcohol.
But in fundamentalist societies like Iran and some of the southern US states, intelligence is not a factor in getting into power. So these people don't see the logical discontinuity between the person writing software (or designing trucks) and the actual other person using the software (or the truck) to do something illegal under their laws./anonymous because of troll baiting glib southern US state comment
Um, right. If I had a dime for every time a southern US state executed someone for creating a product used without his knowledge to do something the religious elite thought horrific, I'd have.... nothing, I think.
Wait, let me count that again.... Nope, still nothing.
You don't need a college degree if you have these two things:
1) Technical Skills - The skills actually needed to do your job. Essential.
2) People Skills - The skills to actually talk to people and convince them that you're not an idiot. Convincing people that you're worth the time and the money is the 2nd most important skill you can have.
I'm making more money than all of my 4-year degree friends because I decided long ago to educate myself in a field that's likely to GROW (and not things like art history, where you go to school just to teach other kids, so they can teach other kids, and so on) and because I can talk to people and have them see me as an asset and not a potential liability.
I personally think the days of an applicant dazzling potential employers with their technical abilities are well past. If you have tried to find a job recently, especially in this economy, you will rapidly find that if you don't have the degree, your resume gets stopped at HR. The hiring manager never even sees it. So what good are your skills then?
In the eighties, yes. In the nineties, still yes. After dot com bust, good luck getting a manager's eyes on your resume without a degree.
Now, is this practice *practical*? Perhaps not. There are a lot of people out there with skills who don't happen to have degrees. And people with degrees who totally underwhelm. But a down economy and endemic outsourcing results in a larger than usual pool of talent, and rightly or wrongly, companies are using the degree as a way to at least pare down the numbers.
To me, the meaningful general comparison is what the great unwashed masses are most likely to buy at the value stores, because that's going to represent the largest installed base. And going by what you can buy in blister packs at the discount stores, original poster is demonstrably right on the money.
Arguably, better products can be purchased at higher prices, and geeks who understand the technology and have the disposable income will buy those. But -- let's be realistic for a second -- that's not what Joe Dirt and his family are going to buy.
Right, because what angry old person doesn't want to see mercury buildup in our landfills?
Us angry old people have been hoarding incandescents until CFLs are replaced with something more reasonable. As it's not clear yet that LEDs are that replacement, it's good to see new emerging technologies.
Even old people set in their ways want to see CFLs go away. No mystery there.
Right, but there's different kinds of reliable. For instance, there is mean time between failure, and expected lifespan. A mechanism can be less likely to fail at any given moment, but still have a shorter useful lifespan. Motion implies friction, and requires something to reduce same, whether it be a coating or an actual lubricant (which is unlikely in this case considering the environment). Bearings do wear out over time.
Funny story... coming back from a photo assignment, I discovered while on the freeway why you do not put fully charged high current rechargeable batteries in the same pocket as a handfull of change. (sniff... "What's that... OH MY GOD." And then try to pull off the road safely while your pants are literally on fire.)
Well, I can see the humor *now*. It wasn't funny at the time.
But seriously, a lot of current systems (your car's gas tank, for instance) have a significant amount of stored up energy. The companies that don't put adequate safeguards in place will pay out in the courts and perhaps go out of business. I don't see this as a valid concern. The pants on fire thing, that was me being an idiot. I got a good lesson out of the experience. And a small scar.
Excellent point. And with the tendency to want to display one app at a time, it really does remind one of a DOS environment. I just realized, the lack of shadowing and 3d effects also leads to this impression. So it's DOS, but more confusing. Bonus.
A year or so ago, I complained that with all the rounded corners and semi-transparency and screen gestures (up for full screen, left or right for half screen, etc) we've lost sight of the fact that "Windows" isn't an app. It's a program loader and resource manager. I never thought I'd get to a place where I'd regret saying that.
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Right, because HP plays so fair with customers over the printer ink issue...
Some good points, but I've yet to see an instance where a company sold their buildings to a holding company so that they could grow or shrink or move elsewhere more efficiently. I've only ever seen it as a short term cash grab.
Even if you owned the buildings, you (as a company) probably did not build them, nor do you necessarily have to have a crew to maintain them. All that can be contracted out. Moreover, you can sell a building with a 30 year mortgage and still recover some equity, whereas getting out early from a 5 year lease may be more costly.
I'm thinking because you don't want to connect it to a network (that you care about) until the disk is scrubbed and the bios is reflashed. (And perhaps, the back is taken off to make sure the box hasn't been physically compromised.) Laptops are, like, $200 apiece. Safer just to dump it.
> Let me try to refine this question - Do you want to manufacture high quality phones or clone phones? I don’t know the answer.
In the context of this question, you want to manufacture Windows 8 phones, and *only* Windows 8 phones. Whether that falls into either above category is a matter of opinion.
> Nokia is known for 1. Engineers who make really good hardware and 2. High quality manufacturing in context of supplying different models in different markets (think different languages, networking standards, supply chains, etc.).
> Now, can Nokia charge a premium for it’s hardware over it’s rivals “beige box” android rivals? If the answer is yet then MSFT should keep Nokia intact. If not..
I think the question boils down to, what value to Microsoft is Nokia after they're bought out? Microsoft's business model is to charge a premium for their *software*. The hardware is peripheral. Microsoft has absolutely no interest in any hardware Nokia makes that isn't running Windows. So all that engineering and manufacturing pertaining to feature phones is not interesting to Microsoft. What's left? The manufacturing and IP of the Windows 8 Phone. (Windows 7 phone being a dead product and everyone knows it.) Manufacturing can easily be shipped offshore, (everyone else is doing that; the process is known) and the only thing left is the engineering crew specific to the Windows 8 phone. Then the question becomes, do you keep a skeleton crew employed in Finland to design the next iteration of the phone, or do you just pull all that back to Redmond? I think that question answers itself.
In summary, the larger question is not, what value does Nokia's manufacturing and engineering and current (non-MS) product line have to Nokia, it's what value does all that have to Microsoft. I'm thinking, not much.
You take a laptop to China. In your coat pocket is a "live" thumbdrive, which remains on you at all times. You don't care what's on the laptop, because you boot the thumbdrive to do work.
When you leave China, toss the (presumably compromised) laptop in a dustbin in the airport restroom.
I'm sorry, did I say that out loud?
It "reduces costs" on the VERY short term, as you get an influx of cash and then essentially have to pay it back plus the holding company's profit margin. A desperate company will try this at some point, hoping against hope that this allows them to stay in business long enough to turn it around.
Side note, does Microsoft actually need Nokia's factories or talent? Once Microsoft owns the IP, can't they simply close everything down and move the business to the US, and the manufacturing to China? If Microsoft is only concerned with (essentially) one product (the Windows 8 phone), why would they need Nokia's talent at all?
Side side note, I wonder if this will have an appreciable effect on the economy of Finland? (Probably not, but I don't have the numbers in front of me.)
3) Monetary reasons. They actually need the cash right now to stay in business. They're betting on a recovery and future sales covering the cost of money. (Speaking as having worked for a failing company that tried this. It probably helped them stay in business for a few more months.)
C'mon, the comparison to storing a copy of every letter sent by the post office for two years is ridiculous. Texts are already electronic, (they would not need to be scanned, as would letters) and textual data compresses well. This could easily be done with current technology.
Don't look for technical barriers, this will have to be fought in Congress or the courts.
> I would help the cops more if the microphone was always on a complete recording of everything in ear shot of the phone was kept in storage for when it was needed. Seems silly, just wait for bandwidth and storage costs to drop a little more.
I wonder what Orwell would think of a society that would willingly carry Telescreens around with them.
Or maybe, this will kill text messaging for everyone except tweens.
If that hasn't already happened.
I would definitely flunk that interview.
This is like sentencing a truck designer to death because trucks are used to transport alcohol.
But in fundamentalist societies like Iran and some of the southern US states, intelligence is not a factor in getting into power. So these people don't see the logical discontinuity between the person writing software (or designing trucks) and the actual other person using the software (or the truck) to do something illegal under their laws. /anonymous because of troll baiting glib southern US state comment
Um, right. If I had a dime for every time a southern US state executed someone for creating a product used without his knowledge to do something the religious elite thought horrific, I'd have.... nothing, I think.
Wait, let me count that again.... Nope, still nothing.
You don't need a college degree if you have these two things:
1) Technical Skills - The skills actually needed to do your job. Essential.
2) People Skills - The skills to actually talk to people and convince them that you're not an idiot. Convincing people that you're worth the time and the money is the 2nd most important skill you can have.
I'm making more money than all of my 4-year degree friends because I decided long ago to educate myself in a field that's likely to GROW (and not things like art history, where you go to school just to teach other kids, so they can teach other kids, and so on) and because I can talk to people and have them see me as an asset and not a potential liability.
I personally think the days of an applicant dazzling potential employers with their technical abilities are well past. If you have tried to find a job recently, especially in this economy, you will rapidly find that if you don't have the degree, your resume gets stopped at HR. The hiring manager never even sees it. So what good are your skills then?
In the eighties, yes. In the nineties, still yes. After dot com bust, good luck getting a manager's eyes on your resume without a degree.
Now, is this practice *practical*? Perhaps not. There are a lot of people out there with skills who don't happen to have degrees. And people with degrees who totally underwhelm. But a down economy and endemic outsourcing results in a larger than usual pool of talent, and rightly or wrongly, companies are using the degree as a way to at least pare down the numbers.
To me, the meaningful general comparison is what the great unwashed masses are most likely to buy at the value stores, because that's going to represent the largest installed base. And going by what you can buy in blister packs at the discount stores, original poster is demonstrably right on the money.
Arguably, better products can be purchased at higher prices, and geeks who understand the technology and have the disposable income will buy those. But -- let's be realistic for a second -- that's not what Joe Dirt and his family are going to buy.
Right, because what angry old person doesn't want to see mercury buildup in our landfills?
Us angry old people have been hoarding incandescents until CFLs are replaced with something more reasonable. As it's not clear yet that LEDs are that replacement, it's good to see new emerging technologies.
Even old people set in their ways want to see CFLs go away. No mystery there.
Understood, but that is by no means the whole story.
Right, but there's different kinds of reliable. For instance, there is mean time between failure, and expected lifespan. A mechanism can be less likely to fail at any given moment, but still have a shorter useful lifespan. Motion implies friction, and requires something to reduce same, whether it be a coating or an actual lubricant (which is unlikely in this case considering the environment). Bearings do wear out over time.
I read this to my daughter. She says "welcome fellow bronie". Um, what does that mean?
And a cutie mark?
I want a pony that flies. I bet I'll get *my* wish first.
Funny story... coming back from a photo assignment, I discovered while on the freeway why you do not put fully charged high current rechargeable batteries in the same pocket as a handfull of change. (sniff ... "What's that... OH MY GOD." And then try to pull off the road safely while your pants are literally on fire.)
Well, I can see the humor *now*. It wasn't funny at the time.
But seriously, a lot of current systems (your car's gas tank, for instance) have a significant amount of stored up energy. The companies that don't put adequate safeguards in place will pay out in the courts and perhaps go out of business. I don't see this as a valid concern. The pants on fire thing, that was me being an idiot. I got a good lesson out of the experience. And a small scar.
Excellent point. And with the tendency to want to display one app at a time, it really does remind one of a DOS environment. I just realized, the lack of shadowing and 3d effects also leads to this impression. So it's DOS, but more confusing. Bonus.
A year or so ago, I complained that with all the rounded corners and semi-transparency and screen gestures (up for full screen, left or right for half screen, etc) we've lost sight of the fact that "Windows" isn't an app. It's a program loader and resource manager. I never thought I'd get to a place where I'd regret saying that.