JLG (we can suffice with his initials on OSNews, right?): “Nokia, once the emperor of mobile phones, shipping more than 100 million devices per quarter, is now in a tailspin, probably irrecoverable, taking its employees into the ground. And there is Nokia’s chosen partner, Microsoft. What will Nokia’s failure do to its future? Ballmer knows Microsoft can’t be relegated to a inconsequential role in the smartphone wars. Will this lead to Microsoft going ‘vertical’, that is buying Nokia’s smartphone business and become an vertically player, as it already is in its Xbox business?” Microsoft will eventually buy Nokia’s smartphone business. I mean, it’s not as if they have any other serious WP7 OEMs they can piss off with such a move.
It’s not like Microsoft doesn’t habitually abuse its powers, and Microsoft buying the world’s largest phone manufacturer (well, second largest now) is a bit more questionable than Google buying a small player like Motorola. Especially since they’re already using WP7 (and Win RT in future) to lock out competitors like Mozilla and Opera.
Sadly, Nokia’s demise does seem inevitable now that they decided to break all the eggs that didn’t fit into Microsoft’s basket. In a way, I even hope they don’t recover, as that would imply Microsoft’s success. I’d rather see a RIM comeback, with Blackberry 10 adopting Nokia’s Qt and all.
Edited 2012-06-18 21:10 UTC
really? So you are saying that MS getting into the OEM hardware market for smart phones is some how flexing its monopoly in…OSs?
modmans2ndcoming,
“really? So you are saying that MS getting into the OEM hardware market for smart phones is some how flexing its monopoly in…OSs?”
There’s no doubt about it, their software monopoly gives them great influence in the hardware sphere too. But the crucial question is whether becoming an OEM will violate anti-trust law. They ought to be ok unless they interfere with free trade. But lets be honest, microsoft has never been shy in abusing it’s monopoly.
I’m sorry but that is insane, its like saying Apple being one of the biggest sellers of tablets can control the farm tractor business. Its a classic “anyone but Microsoft” we’ve seen sadly too many times, where logic holds no sway. Look up the figures yourself, MSFT has NEVER held more than 5% of the mobile phone market EVER. if they bought Nokia tomorrow with such a huge amount of competition from the likes of Apple, HTC, and Samsung they would STILL hold less sway than any of the others so to suggest if MSFT does anything other than just roll over and die means its flexing monopoly powers is FUD, pure and simple.
bassbeast,
“I’m sorry but that is insane, its like saying Apple being one of the biggest sellers of tablets can control the farm tractor business.”
Yes, that is insane, but then you aren’t seriously trying to assert that’s equivalent to what I said, are you?
Never the less I get the feeling many people don’t realise how antitrust works. Let me speak hypothetically, just to make a point: IF apple were legally considered a tablet monopoly AND IF apple were using that monopoly to stifle the farm tractor business (*), then apple could be found to be abusing it’s tablet monopoly REGARDLESS of it’s farm tractor market share.
* The whole thing seems absurd, but we are speaking hypothetically here.
Or on the other hand…
http://www.appletractor.com
🙂
“Look up the figures yourself, MSFT has NEVER held more than 5% of the mobile phone market EVER.”
Has microsoft ever shipped any OEM phones or computers? If not, from my point of view you might as well say they hold 0% of the hardware market share, but that’s not to say they have zero control over the market share of others.
Edited 2012-06-19 05:05 UTC
Correct. But buying Nokia, Microsoft will hold more than 30% of the mobile phone business, and having already used their patents offensively to leech money off Android, they no doubt will also use Nokia’s patents in the same way (that is, after all, what they will buy). In other words, Microsoft will use their position to stagnate development in the mobile business.
This isn’t about having some percentage of a market, it’s about abusing a position to stop the competition. We all know that’s what Microsoft’s intention is.
It was once 30%. This days its much lower. A major chunk of that are dumbphones where WP is not going to win any points. The Smartphone-business of Nokia with its Lumia is below 2% market-share.
Why should Microsoft buy a dying Nokia if it can do the Smartphone hardware himself like they just did with the Surface tablet?
Edited 2012-06-21 08:37 UTC
What worries me is that MS can try hurting Qt in the process. They can’t kill it, but practically Nokia is the biggest contributor to Qt project now, and if MS will sweep Nokia under the rug, Qt might suffer a setback.
Edited 2012-06-19 16:11 UTC
I absolutely hate how Elop and the (stinking rich) morons on the board are sinking Nokia into the ground.
How could anyone think it would be a good idea to _only_ put WP7 on the phones? Why not offer both WP7 and Android models, like everyone else is doing (plus MeeGo to stand out, as Samsung is doing with Bada)?
_Then_ you can see what works and what doesn’t.
If they needed a quick fix to save the company, Android would _definitely_ have worked, since Nokia is a very popular brand and Android is a very popular operating system. People would absolutely have bought those phones, me included.
> If they needed a quick fix to save the company
You seem to assume that this is what they want. I have my doubts.
I know the whole idea was to sink the company so Microsoft could buy it on the cheap, but _publicly_ they sounded like they needed a quick fix to save the company..
Actually it’s so painful for me to watch Nokia die slowly, that I find myself wishing them a quick death.
Nokia is not dying slowly. The rate of their demise (in market share terms) is in fact unprecedented.
Edited 2012-06-19 08:40 UTC
Hi! Remember this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo
You should, because it’s a triple-A case what happens when Microsoft and Intel start pulling strings behind the stage. We probably won’t have to wait long that Nokia will announce their plans to use Intel chips for their next devices whenever they are tablets or smartphones. Of course these devices will be running Windows NT or Windows CE.
We can compare the actions of the Steven Elop and Richard Belluzzo and probably find more similarities than there are differences. The Script of this play was written long time ago.
Oh lord, again with the crazy. Belluzzo was no more to blame for the death of SGI than Intel was for the death of soundblaster. What happened to SGI was quite simple and happens often in the tech world, a disruptive technology comes along and shoots your business plans all to hell, the same thing happened to Sun and SPARC.
For years SGI held the creative market with an iron hand because commodity PCs simply didn’t have the power to compete but the explosion of cheap Windows PCs gave Intel and AMD such huge economies of scale they began to explode with HUGE leaps of power in frankly insanely short amounts of time. Look at the time line folks, look up the numbers. We went from years of 5MHz to 20Mhz speed jumps to suddenly hundreds of MHz with each rev and SGI couldn’t keep up. The final nail was the consumer GPU market giving ATI and Nvidia huge economies of scale so they too could leapfrog dedicated companies like SGI. It quickly became the case that the COTS stuff and the huge market of pro and prosumer software that came along with it simply left SGI with no way to justify their high prices and no way to survive on a low margin market.
Look I’ve always liked weird and underdog arches, SPARC, MIPS, PPC, but in the end it all came down to R&D $$$ and Intel had it, SGI didn’t. Heck look at the GFLOPS we are getting out of current CPUs and GPUs, just 4 years ago you’d have had to spend $20K to get what you can now for less than $4K, even with such a huge lead Intel with their tick tocks are putting out scary powerful chips and have been for quite awhile. Heck even Netburst, which was a dog heat wise, doubled its speed in less than 4 years, the advancements were just insane. What happened to SGI wasn’t a conspiracy, nor is what is happening to Nokia now, in both cases they simply weren’t ready for the entire technology front to do a huge leap and got caught with their pants down, SGI by X86 and Nokia by having bet everything on dumb phones.
I can’t say I am a fan of either of these guys – but let me play devil’s advocate for a change. What if maybe, just maybe, instead of these guys being hell bent on destroying the companies they ran they simply saw the writing on the wall before everyone else did…
I won’t speak about Elop because frankly I know almost nothing about Nokia – but SGI I do know about. Yes, Richard Belluzzo steered SGI away from MIPS – but I have to say that for the most part MIPS was dead already – SGI needed to be steered…
In hindsight, I think the smartest move in the early to mid 1990s would have been a merger/partnership between DEC and SGI (imagine O2s with Alpha CPU boards and RealityEngines in them – the best of both worlds) but that was never in the cards. SGI’s core competency was 3D – they should have never been in the business of designing CPUs. They were also without a fab, relying on Toshiba and NEC to fab their chips – this bit them repeatedly throughout their history. It is _really_ hard to compete as a fabless chip maker when there is someone like Intel around who can just swop in and manufacture you into oblivion. Ask AMD…
The Pentium Pro in 1995 changed the game. It was not the Itanium boogieman that was the writing on the wall for MIPS (unlike Alpha), it was the lowly Pentium Pro – a real, available, ultra-cheap, mass-produced, $400 chip that frankly blew the doors off of everything on the market at the time short of Alpha. MIPS never had an answer for it, except the R1000 a year later (at $3000), but it was only a tiny bit faster and was never widely available because of production problems. That was also SGI’s last MIPS chip.
All I am saying is that yes, Richard Belluzzo may have been a Microsoft Mole, but any competent CEO running SGI in 1996 would have had to run screaming away from MIPS in some other direction – it was a total and complete dead end. But he didn’t do that, because he didn’t become CEO until 1998 – in other words he came along way too late to right the ship, he was just desperately bailing water for those before him who didn’t see the inevitable coming 2 years earlier.
He may have done everything for the wrong reasons – but at least part (if not most) of what he did were the right things…
ps. The one thing he did that was completely and utterly wrong had next to nothing to do with Microsoft – he settled with nVidia and agreed for SGI to exit the high-end graphics market. That I agree whole-heartedly was stupid. But abandoning MIPS was not.
Edited 2012-06-19 07:59 UTC
There is nothing wrong with a company without their own fab. AMD, Nvidia, VIA… Not to mention ARM.
I think you forgot about Itanic
That was the death of SGI.
Lets be honest. The only real reason they steered away from MIPS was not the problem with MIPS but false promises that Intel was making with their “revolutionary” new architecture (I think latest example of such crap from Intel was larrabee).
R10k was announced as last MIPS chip from SGI, because SGI belived Intel and their fantastic new architecture will deliver great performance. And commodity CPU (used by everyone) would be a lot cheaper than investment in MIPS.
When they realized that Itanium will be very late and very far from promises they quickly released R12k and R14k and some new workstations. But it was too late. PC market was going crazy fast with Moore’s law. It had no sense to pay 3-4 (or more) for SGI when you could get similar performance from commodity PC.
I think MIPS had great future. SGI stopped investing in new products while the rest of the world continued race forward and that killed them. There was no problem to take MIPS and make CPU with 3-4 times higher clock (r16k went up to 1GHz).
In addition their management didn’t want to bring their technology to PC market. This market was quickly conquered by Nvidia.
Edited 2012-06-19 16:20 UTC
MIPS is actually still going strong in the embedded market. SGI was never really that important for the proliferation of the MIPS architectures since it has found its way in so many high-volume products already in the early 1990s. It is a mature architecture that is also making a bit of a come back in a more visible computing segment. There is renewed interest in MIPS for Android devices and such.
Besides being a widespread architecture, MIPS has two major advantages going for it today:
a) Unlike ARM it has industry-proven mature 64-bit variants for quite some time.
b) It makes _true_ high-performance, low-power computing look easy. Take Ingenic Semiconductor JZ4770 SoC for instance – a 1GHz part drawing 0.25W under 100% CPU _and_ GPU load. Beat that.
http://vr-zone.com/articles/mips-architecture-crashes-arm-x86-party…
Edited 2012-06-19 19:53 UTC
Even if they would push high-end MIPS, they would probably at most just match what x86 (that turned out to be the high-perf thing, not Itanium) would soon offer …and even if ending up somewhat better, then at ridiculous cost; not much point to it.
Now, the times are different, with focus on perf per Watt and lesser dependence on Windows / x86 binary compatibility (still, where MIPS will probably primarily really live on, long-term – Chinese Loongson has hardware-assisted x86 emulation)
Edited 2012-06-26 00:04 UTC
“I mean, it’s not as if they have any other serious WP7 OEMs they can piss off with such a move.”
Haha, it’s funny cause it’s true.
When they have sold their smartphone division to Microsoft, they can sell their network division to Apple. They can make towers with new patented mobile standard, not license it to anybody and make it iPhone only or whatever. Who will take their map services? It looks like Elop is only interested in killing Nokia’s phone division, the rest is up for anybody to take.
What exactly is the smartphone division of Nokia?
Unlike the N9 and pureview the Hardware is not produce in Nokias factories. Unlike the N9 and the pureview the Software is not produced by Nokia engineers.
Nokias smartphone devision consist mostly of lawyers, marekting and sales. Nothing what Microsoft doesnt already have enough from. No innovation, nothing they cannot do themself (or in the case of the Software already did themself) in just some hours.
Now that the maps are integrated into Windows Phone and now that Nokias market-share crashed Nokia has not much left that is from interest for Microsoft.
I doubt Microsoft would buy anything from Nokia but patents.
Edited 2012-06-21 08:51 UTC
Nokia used to f*ck with MS in the phone space by shattering their world domination Windows Mobile plans with Sybmian.
They waited patiently for 10 years but finally got them when they stumbled after IPhone, and sucked out from inside. The last act of this tragedy will be an MS phone after MS acquires all meaningful Nokia patents for peanuts.
Nokia and MS have also been partners for years, with Nokia phones being the only non-Windows mobile devices with Office (and later, Silverlight). I’m pretty sure they’ve had a cross-licensing agreement in place for quite a while as well.
I think the real question is whether there is any evidence that Elop has been steering Nokia over the cliff. Nokia has gone to hell since he took over. There *might* be some indication that this was a hostile take over from the inside. I don’t know what the requirements of that are for prosecution, but it certainly is shady looking. If I were Finland (assuming thats where Nokia’s home is) I would be suing the crap out of Microsoft.
Edited 2012-06-19 18:29 UTC
You forgot something: the board of directors and large shareholders.
If Elop is indeed bent on destroying the company, they approved him to proceed, thus this is not a one man ordeal.
Why they did that? Who knows.
I really don’t get the board behaviour:
Either they are terminally clueless and easily manipulated by Elop’s sweet talk (or fud, your choice), they used to approve OPK excesses far too long after all,
Or they know something nobody (including rating agencies insiders) don’t know
Or they are somehow bribed or want to cover their asses after some f*cup (like in Olympus case).
The funds in the other hand could offset Nokia looses in their long term prospects for MS stock gains.