One time I was working in an old Cold War bunker in Finland that was being used as a datacenter. Really wild place with servers in rows in cavernous caves. The toilet paper dispenser in the men's room was made by Nokia ;)
A Swedish friend of mine has a chainsaw guard made by Nokia.
They used to make even more kinds of stuff.
Where did I assume I can accurately assess how many employees Nokia is supposed to have?
There are only handful of mobile network infrastructure providers left in the world. Huawei 30%, Ericsson , Nokia, ZTE. Samsung replaces ZTE in base stations.
As for this move, from what I have heard from my friends working there it has been strange ongoings in Nokia. Earlier in the year people were being let go. There were hiring and travel freeze. All the while there was a costly rebranding exercise with new logo goodies being distributed to the employees. It made absolutely no sense to celebrate a rebrand while firing people.
As the article notes, words like cloud computing and AI are being thrown around. But many feel that the management has proven itself to be rather short sighted because there has been constant shifts in strategy - changing the business structure nearly every year to the rebranding just 2 Quarters ago.
I wonder what Nokia have as a core revenue stream these days? They really dropped the ball when the iPhone & Android came to market (and to a lesser extent, the Blackberry).
Guess they're still making a killing on telco hardware/software/infrastructure.
https://nokiamob.net/2023/07/01/apple-inc-renews-patent-lice...
> Nokia’s patent portfolio is built on more than €140 billion invested in R&D since 2000. It is composed of around 20,000 patent families, including over 5,500 patent families declared essential to 5G.
Huawei getting black bagged by the US helped a bit.
If they had followed my advice instead of laughing at me they would still be the largest cell phone maker on planet Earth.
The only thing it lacked (on purpose) was phone functionality. They were just stubbornly betting the company on Symbian and never committed properly to making a flagship Linux device. So every single maemo and meego device that they launched was encumbered with underpowered hardware, crippled features, or they would just position it as a developer phone and kill all the marketing. Because Symbian was "obviously" their future. There was a pretty big camp in Nokia who did not believe that though. And by the time the iphone and Android had launched the company was panicking and started doing increasingly more erratic things.
They came close a few times with the N8, the N900 and the N9. With the N8 they had a really nice device with aluminium body, oled screen, and 12 megapixel camera (mind you this was 12 years ago). But they chickened out and launched it with Symbian and it kind of was just another underwhelming not quite good enough Symbian device. The N900 was a developer phone and the first proper meego phone. I had one, it was great. But it was also under powered and seriously ugly.
The N9 did eventually launch but years late and with the message that they were shelving the whole meego team and betting the company on windows phone. They even managed to squeeze out an Android phone just before MS completed the acquisition (they promptly killed that). A year or so later, Microsoft bought the phone unit, and then fired the whole lot a year later as soon as they got rid of Steve Balmer.
in all fairness, there wasn't really a good move to make here yet. IOS was and is closed down, and early android was pretty rough on the software end. and Android device would not necessarily have saved them.
Windows 7 mobile wasnt much better and it was still a ways from the Windows 8 devices. Which was pretty good as devices but was simply too late to capture the network effect. A real shame; I think 3 is the minimum numbers of competitors I'd want for an industry this huge.
- Symbian S60, S80, S90. --- Symbian ˆ2, ˆ3, whatever that fuck that was. ----- Something called Open C, to facilitate porting since Symbian was a pain in the ass. ----- EasyApi (Lol). - Maemo - Qt on Maemo - Qt on Symbian - A new Qt-based UI for Maemo that I forgot the name. Orbit I think. - Its version for Symbian (which was called Morbit). - Harmattan (not a UI framework but it was a version of Maemo, a new one) - Then came the Meego disaster.
All at the same time. It was absolutely incredible how we could develop so many development/UI frameworks/OS at the same time and be wrong at all of them. What you see as the best device (N950) was built on a platform that was already dead because the higher-ups decided to merge that with Intel (with a new UI framework if I remember it) and Harmattan was already dead.
I left that company 10+ years ago and I still suffer at how complacency ruined what was the best employer I've ever had. On the positive side, people from the right sides of Nokia had enormous reputation in the marketplace, so for components such as cameras, radios, modems, etc. for all major phone makers (including Apple) you can be 100% sure Nokia people to this day work on it. One imaging team in Finland was hired as a full group by Samsung.
Good times.
It was a finicky Linux GUI on a resistive screen, conceptually closer to Windows Mobile and Symbian touchscreen devices (like the SonyEricsson phones) than any modern platforms.
Android would have still beaten Nokia to a usable iPhone clone/competitor.
Nokia was just so pig-headed, why didn't they listen? I remember when Slashdot use to rave about the device, they could have developed a niche, people who were in the mobile app development biz were also fans of the device, they would have developed so many apps of their own volition.
Apple mostly went around the carriers initially and for the first time consumers started buying phones without a carrier contract in meaningful numbers.
Nokia were proven wrong, hubris got the better of them.
The first iPhone was only available with a contract, they literally didn't go around the carriers, at least in the USA (AT&T) and Germany (T-Mobile).
Back on those days UNIX versus Symbian culture didn't get much along, when the board brough Elop, and what was essencially a UNIX shop working across HP-UX, Solaris, Red-Hat Linux and Symbian, most employees and developer community weren't pleased with "we go Windows now".
I was in Espoo the week following the burning platforms memo, and didn't meet anyone that agreed with it.
The problem was that it had a resistive touch screen. Samsung already had touchscreen MP3 players that you can install apps on, but it was the capacitive touch at that price point that gave Apple a good 3+ year head start on software. At the time, being able to dial phone numbers with IPhone was mind blowing versus a resistive touch
That’s what was revolutionary about IPhone. They didn’t invent capacitive but they brought it to the $1k range.
Nokia was developing their own OS and App Store, too, but it was the iPhone’s cohesive experience that made everything else fit together
At the time, WiMax was not available in 99% of the US, so that was a non-starter for most of us.
So I bought a Huawei one from Amazon.
"We are now beginning the process of consultation on initial reductions."
I'm not in the know.. but it comes off as if they have no idea what they're doing. You'd think you'd decide who you are gunna lay off before announcing it..? And they will be laying people off for two years straight? Seems like it'd just tank the moral of the whole place.
I thought companies generally rip the bandaid off and do it all very quickly - and have a concrete plan before an announcement
Those consultations have been going on sometime now. This is nearly over. Overall, this is just plain stupid wording.
They almost certainly have. The consultation process is basically negotiating with the unions over what sort of package they have to offer to the laid off workers to avoid the unions being difficult about the whole thing.
In the US yes, and companies are free to ruin the lives of thousands of people overnight in most states thanks to at-will employment.
In Europe, where Nokia is based, companies have to actually follow laws. No firing of individuals without cause, mass layoffs outside of bankruptcy have minimum terms (in Germany, you have up to 7 months until your employment actually terminates), and usually employers have to broker deals with unions, worker representatives (Germany: Betriebsrat) and government / unemployment insurance schemes as well. As a result, there's no need to "rip bandaids off" - employees know that even if there's talks of layoffs going on, their lives won't be upended randomly.
What? Nokia won't follow laws in other countries?
"No firing of individuals without cause"
That's generally the distinction between firing and laying off. Layed off employees generally get unemployment.
"7 months until your employment actually terminates"
You continue working at a company that you will have to leave? What incentives do you have to keep putting in any effort? Doesn't this lead to massive amount of corporate theft? In the US you are typically "shown the door" when your employment is terminated to minimize the possibility of disgruntled ex-employees taking corporate IP with them.
"employees know that even if there's talks of layoffs going on, their lives won't be upended randomly"
That honestly seems just worse for everyone involved. Aren't you in a weird limbo for months/years on end where you don't know if your position will be terminated? It seems horrible for moral. The most talented people would probably not want to put up with the uncertainty and will leave while unions are negotiating
Yep. The whole company has been like that. Just look at the rebranding comment someone in this thread.
https://www.purppledesigns.com/history-and-evolution-of-logo...
My wild ass guess from living here is this is somehow coming from the larger Finnish economy; Finland is only now starting to really feel the pinch of inflation after the combination of COVID-19, which it weathered fine for a time, combined with the war in Ukraine, which is affecting food prices all over Europe and also (understandably) closed off trade relations temporarily with Russia.
One example from my anecdotes is when they did consulting work for a telecom in my home country and pushed for firing half the technicians who were working in pairs. One of the reasons they were working in pairs was safety, like one holding the ladder and they used this as an argument and said they can just be replaced by a safer ladder. Said and done. After the fourth accident the telecom outsourced the jobs to an external company that only sent… two people teams
It's not nothing but I wonder where and what types of work gets cut first. Usually it's not people producing stuff like programmers but roles that companies in times of trouble realize they can be without.
I own a button dumb phone by Nokia, it's fine but would not explain even 1% of that employment number.
PA says they're making telecom equipment now. Fun thing it also mentions Ericsson, which used to make phones under its brand, then Sony-Ericsson smartphones (not unlike Microsoft-Nokia) and then had to drop it completely.
The Nokia-of-phones sold itself to Microsoft and was subsequently wound down. While the brand name for phones still exists, it's no longer held by the corporation now called "Nokia". That came to be, if you like to call it that, from a "reverse merger".
The telecommunications equipment branch (which makes base stations and wireless connectivity hardware) was partially outsourced and recombined with that of Siemens, and later I think parts of Ericsson, to form "Nokia-Siemens Networks". Which after "old-new" Nokia's demise took (bought ?) the name back and became ... just "Nokia" again.
So yes there are "Nokia phones" again/still, but they're no longer made by Nokia. While Nokia-of-today is still doing what they (if under slightly different names) have done for 25y+ - make, install, maintain telecommunications infrastructure.
I just hope Nokia has learned from their mistakes and don’t cut too much from their R&D.
If the executive board will receive bonuses from doing exactly the opposite, they will decide doing the opposite.
