One piece of information that's missing in this article:<p>Nokia closed down its plant in Bochum, Germany in 2008 and transferred the jobs to Romania in Eastern Europe where labour is cheaper. This damaged their reputation in Germany significantly. The Bochum theatre put up dumpsters where people could get rid of their Nokia phones and replace them with a competitor product.<p>It's not a small irony that just 3 years later, the employees in Romania lose their jobs as well.<p>In retrospect, the people in Bochum got really lucky because Nokia agreed to pay millions to be able to shut down their plant.<p>Edit: The Bochum theatre also produced a play at the end of 2008 with the prophetic title "Connecting People - Erinnerungen an einen Handy-Hersteller" (memories of a cellphone manufacturer), its cast consisting of former Nokia employees:
<a href="http://www.derwesten.de/wr/westfalen/kultur/Erinnerungen-an-einen-Handy-Hersteller-id946825.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.derwesten.de/wr/westfalen/kultur/Erinnerungen-an-...</a>
I don't want people to forget how they helped out Egypt and Iran finding more people to torture:<p><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-22/torture-in-bahrain-becomes-routine-with-help-from-nokia-siemens-networking.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-22/torture-in-bahrain-...</a><p>I can't imagine why I would ever spend a penny on anything made by Nokia or Siemens, again.
> Nokia’s high- volume Asian factories provide greater scale and proximity benefits.<p>Bye bye Western technology. It was nice knowing you. "Greater scale and proximity benefits" are crowning China as the new 800lb gorilla. Special thanks go to the "let's outsource to China for $10M bonus this year" top management.
"Joy to the world!<p>What a trainwreck."<p>I find news about Nokia interesting, so thank you for posting this, but what is up with the tone of the article? It feels more like a youtube-comment than news.
Nokia has/had awsome hardware but it seems their software platform has always been lacking.<p>Is hardware > software
or is software > hardware
or is software ≈ hardware?
If you look at their financials, they are still a very profitable company. Revenue is ~40 billion, net income a little under 2 billion. It seems if they continue on the path of "we can make a better smartphone!", their financial statement will be murdered in the next 2-3 years. If someone fiscally conservative took over and focused them on the niche where they do well, they can still survive in a post-smartphone world. That would require trimming jobs, cutting costs...
Laying off jobs is kind off expected since there whole software division has become redundant due to Micrsoft's OS... Agreed they still have to make some software but that's still way lesser than what it did previously.<p>Whats troubling is that it is reducing manufacturing... Does it actually expect to sell less phones and if it does than how does it plan to make money... They are mass market devices, numbers are really important
nokia has been continuously losing market share in both their high end and low end products. if microsoft is in a better position, it could be accretive for microsoft to buy nokia to support microsoft's flailing mobile division.<p>stephen elop's only hope is for nokia's vertu sales to remain high.