This was a triumph!
The Elopcalyspse continues the slow motion destruction of NokiaâŠ
If corporations are people then Microsoft should be charged with murder 1.
HugeâŠsuccess.
Genius moves all round.
Get your Trojan horse guy installed as CEO, Osborne/Ratner the existing OS, sabotage the potentially exciting future one, teasing a product people like but donât let them buy it, instead forcing your own unpopular one on Nokia fans - and in the US at least, force them to buy gimped AT&T versions too.
Having buggered up the company, pay billions for the it, sack all its staff, cancel its successful product lines to focus on the ones not selling, close the factories, kill the popular brand nameâŠ
�
Profit?
I look forward to Nokia reentering the market with excellent Android phones in a couple of years.
Elop already slashed and burned 50,000 of them while he was at Nokia.
LIMERICK CLAP
(similar to golf clap, but more Irish than Scot)
While Iâm an Apple/Linux/Android user myself, Iâm not feeling a lot of animosity towards Microsoft these days. Itâs not like the 1990s when they ruled everything. If anything, I feel a bit sorry for them â they are just the modern tech-world definition of âuncoolâ much like IBM was in the late 1980s. The world has passed them by.
âWhereas the hardware business of phones within Nokia was an end unto
itself, within Microsoft all our devices are intended to embody the
finest of Microsoftâs digital work and digital life experiences, while
accruing value to Microsoftâs overall strategy.â
It means absolutely nothing in English. If you translate it into Finnish it means âdust off your resume, yesterday.â
I guess I feel most sorry for the 18000 employees who got laid off. At times MS could have some pretty shitty business practices in the 90s and early 2000s and I think plenty of people had reason to look at them askance. No matter what, I doubt that Bill Gates and Steve Balmer are going to be as negatively impact as those laid off employeesâŠ
But yeah, they are kind of like IBM was back in the day. Although Iâm not sure they were ever really hip, even when they dominated the marketâŠ
Also, if you think about it, we are not talking about a long period of time here, from those days to these. Itâs kind of weird, if you think about it. Compare it to the rise and fall of say Standard Oil or the Steel businessâŠ
âAika pyyhkiĂ€ pölyt ansioluettelosta ja Ă€kkiĂ€.â
Yup, though the smart ones would have seen this coming when Elop took power. This is classic Microsoft, their standard way of operating. They buy a company (or âsign a strategic partnershipâ or whatever), absorb all its IP, incorporate same into Microsoft products, then spit out a worthless husk.
The companies that have survived strategic partnerships with Microsoft, like Bungie and Real, did so by having an entirely new line of IP kept out of Microsoftâs clutches, or an entirely separate business apart from software like Kodak. Others like Vivo and Stacker just went bust.
You can find those ones here: Jolla - we are unlike
Helsinki is teeming with new businesses staffed by former Nokia people. Itâs a pain in the arse to have your job removed for sure, but at least some the Fins seem to be managing. I just wonder what Microsoft is thinking?
No use crying over every mistakeâŠ
Sad though it is for the workers, this would seem to make a lot of sense for a company that has an extraordinarily huge amount of income (cries of MS being obsolete are laughable, theyâre practically printing money), but donât need a lot of new product in order to continue making money.
MS will be healthy until the PC industry collapses, and thatâs at least a decade away. Other than that, their customers are probably happiest (and willing to pay them buckets of cash) when MS is not changing things.
It would probably make sense for them to restructure themselves as a trust (if they could take the prestige hit), cut costs, gradually increase prices and milk the PC while it lasts. Thereâs a lot of money (if not very exciting money) to be made there, and unlike Apple, it doesnât require a miraculous product every two years to stay successful.
No surprise that KDE went off the rails when the Nokia deal went off in 2008. It has struggled ever since to put out a release of 4.x that was as functional as 3.5x. First there was the touch-interface/plasma distraction that never panned out for either Nokia or Trolltech, then there was the re-spinoff and retrenchment during Redmageddon, and all these years later the KDEren still seem far away from their former standards. This is what happens when any open source team lashes themselves too tightly to a corporate marketing strategy. At some point, the evil gets too large and after extricating itself, the whole project ends off worse than when it started. See the effect Oracle has on any open-source-contributing company it gobbled up.
Iâm not sure Iâd call them hip, either; more like they provided the glue that held most of the computer business together. If theyâre âcoolâ for anything, itâd be, what, XBox?
For all the flak Microsoft got and gets for Windows being crappy, it runs on so many different computers with different hardware. Look at a PC that runs like shit, and itâs almost always either shitty hardware, or a shitty vendor-provided driver. Windows itself has been pretty solid for years now.
I guess what Iâm saying is that Iâm a little concerned about the future of computing. I donât want to put all my stuff in a client/server environment, especially when the client has a 4.5" screen. And now, with Microsoft cratering, and Apple sort of backing away from the professional crowd slowly (excepting the new Mac Pros of course)âŠ
