Microsoft to buy Nokia's mobile phone division

Tilted

Tilted

..
Nokia shares surge 40% on Microsoft mobile deal

Microsoft is still trying to play catch up in the mobile device space, realizing too late (I suspect) how important it would become (and how quickly it would do so). The more time that passes without Microsoft achieving meaningful success in this area, the more desperate Microsoft gets. This deal smells strongly of desperation.
 
Beta

Beta

Smile!
So the has-been of the operating system market is buying the has-been of the cell phone market?

This is a match made in heaven...in 2003. :coffee:
 
C

czygvtwkr

Guest
Have you ever played with a WP8 Phone? It is actually quite good. The Nokia phones themselves are also some of the best phones out there, clarity of calls, signal strength and build quality. Have a Motorola Android myself but am seriously considering WP in a year when my contract is up. One only needs so many fart aps.
 
Beta

Beta

Smile!
czygvtwkr said:
Have you ever played with a WP8 Phone? It is actually quite good. The Nokia phones themselves are also some of the best phones out there, clarity of calls, signal strength and build quality. Have a Motorola Android myself but am seriously considering WP in a year when my contract is up. One only needs so many fart aps.
Click to expand...

My point is that iOS and Android are the two market leaders, by far, in the current cell phone/smart phone industry. Windows 8 and Nokia's OS are both very minor shareholders. If they combine, they might have a chance to become the #3 player, and in time, MAYBE they can compete with Android and iOS.

My biggest concern of switching away from the two main competitors is when good apps come along, the top two are always the first to get them, with the other operating systems either never getting them, or being very late to the party.
 
C

czygvtwkr

Guest
Beta said:
My point is that iOS and Android are the two market leaders, by far, in the current cell phone/smart phone industry. Windows 8 and Nokia's OS are both very minor shareholders. If they combine, they might have a chance to become the #3 player, and in time, MAYBE they can compete with Android and iOS.

My biggest concern of switching away from the two main competitors is when good apps come along, the top two are always the first to get them, with the other operating systems either never getting them, or being very late to the party.
Click to expand...

You do have a point there. I actually think WP is already in third place. I use to have a Blackberry, and the funny thing is I think the callendar on it sucked, you would think that would be something that should be great.

The thing about WP8 is that most of the must haves are built into the OS. I find myself looking at Google Play every few days and thinking wow of these hundreds of thousands of apps only one or two are anything I care about. Mostly it's ok what games are my friends at work playing, I don't want to miss out.
 
Larry Gude

Larry Gude

Strung Out
This smells desperate to me;

"We are building a strong European technology company," Nokia interim president and CFO Timo Ihamuotila told CNBC. Nokia said the board had convened almost 50 times since the beginning of the year to discuss how to create shareholder value from the mobile unit.
Click to expand...
 
Tilted

Tilted

..
Larry Gude said:
This smells desperate to me;
Click to expand...

Nokia is certainly desperate in so far as mobile phones go. They'd already largely lost the fight; they'd gone from being the king of feature phones to being on the verge of irrelevancy when it came to smartphones. So they decided to take a risk and throw their lot in with the Windows mobile platform. I can't say it was a bad decision, at least it gave them a chance. They likely weren't going to become a huge player in Android - Samsung was on the verge of taking over the meaningful parts of that market (which it has since, pretty much, done). And Nokia would be the only one devoting the bulk of its resources to the Windows mobile platform. If that platform caught on, Nokia would be positioned to take great advantage - it might be able to save itself.

But the reality is that Nokia / Windows mobile (which are largely, at this point, one and the same) hasn't caught on. It's shown some signs of life, but not enough for this late in the game. Nokia can't go on losing money on this endeavor, so it has to do something different. Microsoft on the other hand makes plenty of money elsewhere and has been willing to lose lots of money for significant periods of time in order to build relevance in an area that it thinks is important to its long-term plans / viability (see Bing). So it isn't going to give up on mobile phones. Seeing as most of the phone makers aren't devoting a lot of energy to Microsoft's platform, and seeing as the only one that is can only continue to do so for so long, Microsoft has apparently decided that - if it wants to be at all relevant in mobile devices - it's going to have to do the hardware itself. It can afford to take the short-term losses hoping to build a platform that other hardware makers will be interested in in the future.

How will this work out? I'm not optimistic, but there are reasons why I wouldn't count Windows mobile out. At any rate, desperate is a fair descriptor - for both Nokia's mobile phone operation and Microsoft's mobile platform.
 
Larry Gude

Larry Gude

Strung Out
Tilted said:
How will this work out? I'm not optimistic, but there are reasons why I wouldn't count Windows mobile out. At any rate, desperate is a fair descriptor - for both Nokia's mobile phone operation and Microsoft's mobile platform.
Click to expand...

Hemorrhaging money = desperate

Able to afford losses for quote some time = oh, what the hell. Why not?

:lol:


It seems obvious that they need 'The Next Great Idea' in mobile devices and what would that be?

4G is slow. That's an opportunity if they can create an OS that simply runs faster.

Pictures and video don't seem to be. That's Apple land.

Integration ease with ones desk top? That would seem to be their wheel house.

Car safety/integration features? Maybe some sort of HUD? There are gaps between cell phone features and GPS's.

Battery life is an annoyance.

:shrug:
 
Tilted

Tilted

..
Beta said:
They're complete crap these days. What's your point? They aren't even good at what they do. Android and iOS have blown them away.
Click to expand...

My guess is that Blackberry's device business gets sold to someone (on the cheap) in the near future and Blackberry becomes just a services company, expanding those services to work on the other platforms.

I agree that their device business is circling the toilet, though it hasn't yet suffered as much in other markets as it has in the U.S.
 
Tilted

Tilted

..
Larry Gude said:
Hemorrhaging money = desperate

Able to afford losses for quote some time = oh, what the hell. Why not?

:lol:


It seems obvious that they need 'The Next Great Idea' in mobile devices and what would that be?

4G is slow. That's an opportunity if they can create an OS that simply runs faster.

Pictures and video don't seem to be. That's Apple land.

Integration ease with ones desk top? That would seem to be their wheel house.

Car safety/integration features? Maybe some sort of HUD? There are gaps between cell phone features and GPS's.

Battery life is an annoyance.

:shrug:
Click to expand...

That should have been Microsoft's great advantage, but they haven't executed well enough (or quickly enough) to take advantage.

They do still have an enormous presence in enterprise; and although that's dissipating as a result of the mobile revolution, it isn't going to disappear overnight. If they could just stop being bunglers extraordinaire, they may still be able to leverage that presence.
 
Larry Gude

Larry Gude

Strung Out
Tilted said:
If they could just stop being bunglers extraordinaire, they may still be able to leverage that presence.
Click to expand...

But, isn't that the way, the destiny of anything that gets so big and so successful? All the energy and dynamism of the assent slowly, inexorably gets replaced with outstanding managers whose primary mission is to not make any huge mistakes therefore not take risks therefore atrophy over time, the inevitable result of under use of the muscles that made them great.
 
Tilted

Tilted

..
Larry Gude said:
But, isn't that the way, the destiny of anything that gets so big and so successful? All the energy and dynamism of the assent slowly, inexorably gets replaced with outstanding managers whose primary mission is to not make any huge mistakes therefore not take risks therefore atrophy over time, the inevitable result of under use of the muscles that made them great.
Click to expand...

I don't know that it's necessarily the destiny, but I'd certainly agree that it's the strong tendency. (If we're considering a long enough period of time, then yeah, it's fairly surely the destiny.)

Microsoft has been on this track toward that destiny for almost all of its existence. It might get credit for doing something well with the Xbox platform, but other than that the Microsoft story is one that begins with doing one tremendously fortuitous, or genius, or insightful, or revolutionary - or whatever you want to call it - thing. And then, for the most part, the rest of the story amounts to leveraging the success and position that came from that one thing to become, and remain for a long time, the titan of the personal computing and enterprise computing worlds. They got one thing really right, and they've been riding on it ever since.

That's not to say that Bill Gates isn't a remarkably intelligent man, a very competent man, and a visionary. He is. But Microsoft's continued success comes, for the most part, from his / their understanding at an early stage that software - not hardware - was going to be the important aspect of the PC age. He was wise enough to insist on keeping the right to license the software that he was providing to IBM, and which IBM would soon make the de-facto standard in the early days of the PC revolution. And from that insistence sprang the Microsoft titan that we've known for the last couple of decades.
 
C

czygvtwkr

Guest
Larry Gude said:
Hemorrhaging money = desperate

Able to afford losses for quote some time = oh, what the hell. Why not?
Click to expand...

Apple did it for a while, people forget it was actually Microsoft that saved them.

4G is slow? How fast exactly do you want to hit your data limit?
 
GURPS

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
Tilted said:
... but other than that the Microsoft story is one that begins with doing one tremendously fortuitous, or genius, or insightful, or revolutionary - or whatever you want to call it - thing.
Click to expand...

I beg to differ .... they had some success after stealing bits of CP/M to make DOS

... from there strong armed Apple for desktop Icons and other bits when M$ was developing Windows

... and IMHO have bought or copied pretty much everything else

there is a reason Word is just Word, but Excel is Microsoft Excel ... Viso - bout another company, Solomon Accounting Software etc


can you name ONE Thing M$ did 1st ... the best deal they ever made was supplying DOS to IBM ... IIRC M$ got paid per computer built wither IBM or others installed DOS or NOT ... so ofc OEM's would but DOS and later windows on a PC, they were paying either way ...


once M$ had a base they leveraged that to supply office .... they were the 900 lb gorilla in the room with the mega buck advertising campaign

Microsoft is a master at marketing ... not innovation



CP/M The First PC Operating System

In 1974, Dr. Gary A. Kildall, while working for Intel Corporation, created CP/M as the first operating system for the new microprocessor. By 1977, CP/M had become the most popular operating system (OS) in the fledgling microcomputer (PC) industry. The largest Digital Research licensee of CP/M was a small company which had started life as Traf-0-Data, and is now known as Microsoft. In 1981, Microsoft paid Seattle Software Works for an unauthorized clone of CP/M, and Microsoft licensed this clone to IBM which marketed it as PC-DOS on the first IBM PC in 1981, and Microsoft marketed it to all other PC OEMs as MS-DOS.

In 1991, Gary Kildall and the other shareholders of Digital Research Inc., which Gary & Dorothy Kildall had founded in 1975, sold the closely-held private shares of Digital Research Inc. (DRI) to Novell, Inc., and then on July 23, 1996 all of the Digital Research, Inc. assets were acquired from Novell Inc. by Caldera Inc., a company founded by Bryan Sparks with the assistance of Ray Noorda, former Chairman/CEO of Novell Inc., and on July 24, 1996, Caldera Inc. filed a private Federal Antitrust Lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. for alleged illegal activities and unfair practices in the marketing of MS-DOS and its successors, including Windows 95 and Windows 98, both of which are still Digital Research CP/M at their essential core. The lawsuit was settled out of court in January 2000 at which time Microsoft Corporation agreed to certain terms and paid certain funds to Caldera Inc.

In 2000, this CP/M Web site is official link site for CP/M resources worldwide. Caldera Inc. owns all trademark and copyright to CP/M, whose successors are Caldera DR-DOS for single-user (client) purposes, and IMS Ltd. REAL/32 for multi-user and networking. Both are the most advanced versions of 32-bit DOS available, and are ideal for Thin Server and Thin Client Server solutions in the office, POS, embedded, communications, and other important emerging markets such as hard real-time for robotic control and full-fledged Video Computing.
Click to expand...


while I make my living supporting M$ Products .... I am a long time Apple User [1988] and maybe I am a little biased ... Apple has made some monumental mistakes over the last 30 yrs ... and could have been in Microsoft position - I know thats a big maybe
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top