Microsoft's $7.1bn Nokia gobble: Why you should expect the unexpected With Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia’s mobile business for $7.1bn, the Redmond software giant has finally become a phone and device maker. The deal gives Microsoft Nokia’s global handset engineering, manufacturing, sales and distribution business; the family of Windows-Phone-powered Lumia smartphones; a war chest of 8,500 Lumia …
Notice every single thing you have named were purchased back when Billy G was running things on a day to day basis? Have to give the man credit for being so good in the late 80s and early 90s to allow the company to not only print money in the 90s but coast on autopilot for ten years after that making bank.
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The Machurian candidate shows his true worth.
Expect a continuing exodus of brains from Nokia. Microsft is not a loved company in the halls of Nokia, and not a lot has changed since they put their Trojan Horse in charge of Nokia,.
Expect the low end and Asha lines and others to be sold off, along with manufacturing facilities, lots of basic research R&D and anything else that is not specifically "smartphone" related. Apple doesn't manufacture, they contract that task out, and Ballmer desperately wants to be like Apple with a cool Smartphone. He doesn't want 90% of the stuff that is the Nokia handset division today - he doesn't want to be in the phone business - 70% of it will be on the block in the blink of an eye.
Dweeb (who has owned his last Nokia - sniff)
R&D stands for research and DEVELOPMENT.
Microsoft has always lumped in product development with its stated R&D "investments."
So almost all the billions you might think they're spending on research are going to the middle managers and code monkeys that iterate Office, Windows, etc.
I do think it's a shame they won't be Nokia phones, since they are not buying Nokia as a whole, that's a big brand name to lose.
But Lumia is developing as quite a strong brand (whether you like it is a different story) and they could for instance integrate Skype into the phone even more tightly.
WP8 is arguably MS' best product right now, though unfortunately one of their worst sellers!
I'm sure there were lots of engineers hoping for a second great time for Nokia, perhaps with Maemo or Meego or whatever. A time when they will be allowed to make actual smart phones and not just app-execution devices. However that ship probably has sailed now.
They will probably now see a lot of experienced engineers leaving with the bad ones staying behind. At first nobody will notice, but eventually the devices will become worse and worse.
"I'm sure there were lots of engineers hoping for a second great time for Nokia, perhaps with Maemo or Meego or whatever"
Unfortunately Nokia senior management with their internal turf-wars between the Symbianites and the Meegoista had succeeded in comprehensivly fucking that duck before MS came on the scene.
"The engineers will learn to appreciate Stack Ranking ... or Else!"
Stack Ranking did one thing successfully in the company I just came from. It INCREASED employee turnover levels to the point they couldn't run new people in the front door fast enough to keep up with the ones running out the back. One of my tech support team members even ended up in a ER on night thinking he'd had a heart attack due to the stress caused by working under the Stack Ranking system there.
Unfortunately, this is doomed to what has become "normal" in terms of Microsoft failures.
The problem is that neither of those guys look good enough that people "want to be them or be with them". Jobs, for all his weird crap, at least had a sexy appearance. Google? They still look like college kids. In both cases you have good looking people that others want to be like... so they buy their crap.
The MS/Nokia leaders? Well, they look like the kind of people I'd be afraid to leave my kids alone with for 10 minutes. Actually, a little more than that. If they lived next to me I'd run background checks on them.
If they want to turn this around then all MS needs to do is hire some people that you actually want to see pictures of. It's not like anyone really listens to the crap that pours out of their mouths anyway. Quite frankly, those Apple ads that showed the "PC guy" pretty much nailed it: these people are creepier versions of "PC guy". Surely there are still smart/talented/good looking people out there willing to take the reigns of those corporations.
That's an interesting idea: pick business leaders for their appearance. Well, it might work. But the alternative sounds quite good, too: don't do that. Do you know or care what the leaders of Samsung and Toyota look like? Maybe a bit like the Swiss head of state (which is actually a committee, apparently).
Quite frankly, those Apple ads that showed the "PC guy" pretty much nailed it: these people are creepier versions of "PC guy".
I always raise a wry smile when I look at how the respective careers of Mitchell and Webb have gone since they did that advert. Other than Pepp Show, and their joint venture, 'That Mitchell and Webb Look', David Mitchell, the 'boring PC' has had great success on a series of comedy panel shows, has a column in The Guardian, and has married Victoria Coren. Robert Webb, the 'trendy Mac' seems to have been consigned to a series of bit-parts, and a terrible 'look at the tiny mistakes that nerds have spotted in films' series. It's subjective, I know, but to me this perfectly exemplifies the 'style over substance' of Apple. Not that Microsoft are exactly a paragon of anything, mind...
My main issue with those Mac vs PC ads (the British version) was that anyone who watched the Peep show knew that…
Mitchel (PC) was a spineless buffoon who constantly screwed up and made bad choices but was still lovable in a pathetic sort of way,
Whereas Webb (Mac) was an arrogant dick who thought he was the greatest person ever, took advantage of people, rode the coat tails of Mitchel and was to busy being ‘creative’ to get a job.
Thinking about it they summed up PC and Mac quite well.
OK, so a dying company buys a nearly dead company, inheriting as CEO the very person responsible for "nearly dead", and this is a bold move?
Microsoft seems to be between a rock and a hard place -- everyone else is selling hardware with free software, and that's the opposite of Microsoft's model. So getting into hardware might seem a good move, except this strands all the hardware manufacturers with whom they currently have deals. I wonder how that's going to work out.
I was just searching for a reasonably priced, Android-based, dual sim smartphone and found them by the bucket full. There are now many makers in China flogging a useable phone starting at around £50 unlocked, no contract. Granted, these are not cutting edge tech and may only be 3G and/or not have GPS or two cameras, but for most people like me, those features aren't worth the extra money. With so many players out there and IOS and Android OS's dominating the market, M$ may be hard pressed to earn back their investment. They will certainly have a hard time making back the cash fast enough to satisfy stockholders.
When the iPhone 5 came out and the sales numbers weren't as strong as previous models, I started thinking to myself that the market may be very close to saturation. With the standard contract running 2 years, many people are sticking with the phone they have until it's time to re-up. The small tablets are also eating away at smartphone sales. Why not keep your phone and pick up a tablet for apps? Tablets are much like a giant screen smartphone sans voice (I have seen ones with voice and I'm not going to look that stupid holding one up to the side of my head.) There is a nice savings going with a 2 device system. Once you're off contract for your phone, you can go to a service reseller for half the cost.
Go ahead monkey boy, take the saturated market by storm with your "also-ran" mobile/desktop OS. You may wind up retiring even earlier then your current plans.
At least that's what came to mind as I considered the ramifications this morning... To the bean counters, the idea is trivial. They stick a number on the thing they want to buy, and then they see if they can buy it for less than that number. How can they deduct for Microsoft's abysmal track record in hardware? Especially small hardware?
Wait a minute? Did Microsoft ever make a profit on their mice?
Hi,
Microsoft's $7.1bn Nokia gobble: Why you should expect the unexpected. Tough going. Microsoft half-hearted acquisition of Nokia is too late. Microsoft have not considered market changes as Apple will lose dominance to Google und Samsung. Apple being too expensive flooding the market with too many models with Microsoft attacking using windows as operation system will lose out on compatibility questions and speed.
Maybe they could call this new venture and any new handsets MSN... no, wait...
+1 for the Patent Troll Division. I see profitability for many years to come, gouging fees from the competition, outsourcing all the hard work, developing, manufacturing and selling the hardware to the already dominant players in a market M$ still hasn't made significant headway in.
At least Mexico loves you Steve!
... is in the financials.
First of all, Microsoft is buying the Devices and Services business. Microsoft states they're paying € 3790 million for that. Microsoft is licensing the patents for € 1650 million - they are not buying them.
Now, the really fun part is, that the whole deal seems to be a question of profit laundering. Read the second paragraph of the Microsoft press release:
"Microsoft will draw upon its overseas cash resources to fund the transaction."
In other words, they are buying Nokia with cash that they cannot bring back to the U.S. without that money getting taxed. This cash is parked in an overseas subsidiary and they can't really invest it in their U.S. operations. Basically, this money's sitting there, parked in money market investments that are earning an interest rate which is lower than the inflation rate. By spending the money on Nokia mobiles, they consolidate the value of the purchase divisions, and they integrate the Nokia numbers into theirs, hopefully feeding into their stock value at no real cost.
When (rather than if) they write parts of the acquisition down, this hits their reported profits (without generating a real hit to their operating income) and down goes their tax bill. So at the end of the day, Microsoft'll have gotten Nokia for free. All the costs will have been borne by the U.S. government, i.e. the great American tax payer.
I doubt it. Google's U.S., Motorola was U.S. - they would have had to bring the money back to the States to fund it with foreign cash. that would have defeated the point of using foreign funds.
This is the reason why foreign takeovers are a lot 'cheaper' to pull off.
Under the Dome is also sponsored by Microsoft. The main kids love getting their Lumia's and Surface tablets out at strange moments. The other day the main boy was showing his girlfriend some photos on his tablet and attached the keyboard for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
I know there is a ton of Apple stuff in nearly every modern TV show, but it just always looks so forced when MS do it.
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