Not even Microsoft has faith in Nokia's future
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 20th Jun 2013 18:29 UTC, submitted by MOS6510
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless So, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft was very close to take over Nokia, but that the talks eventually broke down, probably beyond repair - at least for now. The reasons the talks broke down illustrate something that I have repeatedly tried to make clear for a long time now: Nokia isn't doing well.
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RE[5]: Go ahead and short
by jeffb on Sat 22nd Jun 2013 13:44 UTC in reply to "RE[4]: Go ahead and short"
jeffb
Member since:
2005-07-19

Elop's one single screwup (and it was a spectacular one) was burning Symbian before their WP handsets were anywhere close to shipping. That created a classic Osborne Effect where the existing Symbian customer base jumped ship to competing iOS and Android platforms - which were already available - instead of migrating smoothly to Nokia's new WP platform, which wasn't.


I don't think that was even much of a screw up. Symbian phones weren't making much margin and sales had been falling for 3 quarters. Elop by shocking his people get them to move off MeeGo fast. He bought himself a transition that say compared to RIM's BBOS to QNX transition took 11 months less. Nokia is not the CIA. He couldn't have killed off MeeGo as quickly as he did in secret.

Those 11 months were key to how Nokia passed RIM in sales and is having far greater manufacturing capacity than RIM has for this generation of phones. Given Nokia's high restructuring and write down costs I don't know that he did the wrong thing.

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