1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=fi&tl=en&u=http://www.hs.fi/talous/artikkeli/1135263739290&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&twu=1&usg=ALkJrhgcMoG2wO4B5oGULvdpMwc0RkStCA

by benwerd • 15 years ago

252 165 15 years ago

translate.googleusercontent.com

Kilimanjaro2• 15 years ago

No PR campaign can save Nokia from this well-deserved disaster.

Btw, NOK is down 15%

joelhaasnoot• 15 years ago

Not sure this is well-deserved, but it certainly has been a couple of years in the making. Who didn't see this coming?

Oh, and there go our tax euros. Symbian has been given EU tax money to develop a "European localized mobile operating system"

mayank• 15 years ago

In fairness, those tax dollars could be used to "European-localize" WP7 as well.

shareme2• 15 years ago

Maybe next they will try Bada?

pclark2• 15 years ago

Better than continuing with Symbian and having to lay off all the employees in a few years time.

_delirium• 15 years ago

The stock market appears to predict otherwise, believing that this move lowers the net present value of the company. Of course, stock markets aren't necessarily accurate prediction markets, but given suitable efficient-market hypotheses they're an approximation of such a thing.

protomyth3• 15 years ago

Is Symbian really that bad or is it a case of not cool/new?

rbanffy10• 15 years ago

Sticking to Symbian and finishing MeeGo were not their only options. AFAIK, the Android stack would run just fine on top of the MeeGo kernel. They could have gone with Android in their high-end while gradually pushing Symbian down towards their dumbphone range.

notahacker• 15 years ago

Hmmm... and RIM is up. I'd be betting on them to be the big losers if Nokia/Microsoft's partnership actually works.

Kilimanjaro2• 15 years ago

Wow, they just lost 10B in market cap in the morning.

Ten billion dollars!

mise• 15 years ago

Heh heh, try to back-button yourself out of that page.

benwerd• 15 years ago

Although it works for me, I'd imagine that's a Google Translate issue.

Here's the original article URL: http://www.hs.fi/talous/artikkeli/Nokian+ty%C3%B6ntekij%C3%A...

davidw2• 15 years ago

Whether it was Android, Microsoft, or slowly dying, people working there would be affected, so I'm not sure the choice of Microsoft changes things too much from that point of view. With Android, perhaps they could have kept more people on board to hack on it and customize it, but still, the axe was going to fall.

Should be interesting to see how this is handled in Finland. Stock is down, layoffs, and some "arrogant foreigner" in charge would be a recipe for even more change in some places.

rbanffy10• 15 years ago

Android could be built/merged with MeeGo. They have the same kernel and all hardware-specific work would be reused. Both userlands could run side by side.

zokier2• 15 years ago

I don't think you realize how different Android and MeeGo (or atleast Maemo) are. They aren't running the same kernel and their userland is completely different. The fact that both have bits of linux inside doesn't really make them alike. It probably would be easier to port Qt for WP7 than integrate Android on top of MeeGo.

alf• 15 years ago

Something tells me Google would have been very happy to help Nokia add the Dalvik VM to MeeGo. Nokia would get Android apps and developers, while still being able to diversify their OS and and UI from the competition. Google would get Dalvik as the dominant development platform in mobile.

sjs• 15 years ago

Nokia had been moving towards an open-source culture. Those are the types they've attracted the last several years.

This is a very radical departure from their previous path.

davidw2• 15 years ago

Sure, I think Android is in some ways closer and more interoperable, but still... people were likely to go in any case.

spiffworks• 15 years ago

You should've seen Ryan Paul's twitter feed today. It was brutal watching his love for Meego break down into cynical snark for Nokia.

leon_• 15 years ago

Yup, I started liking Nokia again because of their Maemo/Meego engagement. I'm an iOS developer but in private I use a Maemo phone (the N900) which fulfills my geek needs.

I hoped for a cool N900 successor with a cap. touch screen and a little more power but ... well ... I guess Nokia will make something half assed.

Meego phones (which run a real linux - not closed bullshit like android) would have been an awesome alternative to iOS and Android. At least for the more geeky consumer. :/

Good bye, Nokia.

marshray13• 15 years ago

Let's see

1. Hire someone from Microsoft to run the company

2. He says "our platform is burning, we have to do something drastic" which most people interpret as "prepare to come up with a strategy and fight like hell to win".

3. Guess what, he already had something in mind! It was "throw out our current reasonably successful development efforts and become a licensee of Microsoft's failed platform instead". And piss off all our QT-based app developers at the same time.

What could possibly go wrong?

I seriously wonder if this guy might not end up having to leave and not set foot in Finland (or the EU) again for fear of arrest. I have a feeling some Finland business regulators will be going through his emails with a fine-toothed comb.

arethuza2• 15 years ago

"for fear of arrest"

Whether you agree with the decision or not, nothing about it sounds in the least bit criminal.

rbanffy10• 15 years ago

It depends on local law and where you are applying it. Elop's action can be interpreted as in breach of his duties towards Nokia shareholders. 15% of Nokia's value evaporated this morning.

There are places he could be arrested if there are any hints this value destruction is on purpose.

windsurfer• 15 years ago

Europe's anti-trust laws are very different from the USA's. I don't know enough about it to be sure, but simply making anti-competative actions such as partnering can be illegal.

marshray13• 15 years ago

An executive switches from company M to competitor N then abruptly throws much of N's development investment in the trash and signs a deal to license all of it from M instead, it smells funny.

I'm not saying anything actually is wrong, I don't know enough about it to care. But what I do see is Nokia being a big employer and part of national pride for Finland. This will likely become an issue in politics there.

They'd be wise not to lay off a single soul due to this deal at this point. Ironically, if Nokia really did need to trim R&D expenses, they may have more trouble doing it now.

Keep in mind the EU is still active in MS antitrust and users are offered the choice of Firefox when they install Windows. I would not want to be the guy who's name was attached to the sinking of Nokia at the advantage of Microsoft.

kjhghjkjh• 15 years ago

Might be if he has a bunch of MSFT options - particularly if those options were tied to the performance of the Wp7 platform.

stcredzero5• 15 years ago

What could possibly go wrong?

It's like he took the playbook from ObjectShare (Smalltalk vendor) when the CEO announced, "Hey gang, let's go Java!" then was surprised when the personnel situation started to go pear shaped.

Someone is out of touch with his employees here.

robgough• 15 years ago

Perhaps, but those employees work for a company that was out of touch with the market. Something has/had to give.

I think the move to WP7 may well be a savvy one (though I too would like to have seen a demo of it running), but can completely understand the employees concern.

Perhaps it would have made more sense to be more specific about what is going to happen with their employees, and done it internally - before rushing to tell the world about their new partnership. The resultant leaks wouldn't have been much bigger than what we already had this week.

MichaelGG• 15 years ago

WP7 is a failed platform already?

mc32• 15 years ago

>1. Hire someone from Microsoft to run the company

Except, he was only at Microsoft a year and a half and before that he was with Juniper Networks and before that with Adobe Systems.

What I mean is, he knows more about Microsoft and how their offerings might fit in at Nokia (than say an OS by a company he's not familiar with), but it's a stretch to couch it as if he was an old time Microsoft employee who is going to force Microsoft on Nokia.

rue2• 15 years ago

Such a short service could equally well be explained by a concerted “takeover” effort.

halo• 15 years ago

It's amazing how hyperbolic people are being about this, presumably out of blind Microsoft hatred.

Pretty much everyone agreed that Nokia's Symbian/MeeGo strategy was a failure, that Nokia were quickly losing marketshare and that they needed a new OS.

The only options were Android and Windows Phone 7. WebOS would have been a better fit than either, but that option had already been and gone.

I think there are compelling reasons why Nokia would choose WP7 over Android.

There is a competitive advantage in being the flagship manufacturer of a platform, they won't have to play catchup against much more established competitors, or have to directly compete with cheap Chinese phones from companies like ZTE in the low-end. That's without going into the favourable terms that Microsoft no doubt offered.

enjo• 15 years ago

I'm not sure everyone here fully appreciates just how bad things are at Nokia. It's been a LONG time coming. Their software development structure, from top-to-bottom, is just awful. You can see it in Symbian (which was developed independently but with much the same issue).

I have to tread lightly here, as I don't want to get anybody in trouble... but I can assure you that the new CEO is doing very much the right thing. Software development is not a core competency (or even a competency) at that company. It's just not. I'm not surprised that about half of tampere left, they are going to be hard hit by this. They should be.. the quality of the work just hasn't cut it.

Their best hope to survive today is to tie themselves to a much healthier eco-system. I would have thought Android to be the very logical choice... but the Microsoft move certainly makes sense.

marshray13• 15 years ago

There's certainly some Microsoft anti-love going on here, but it's also not exactly unfounded or irrelevant. After all, they were supposedly competitors in the cell phone OS market before this move and now it appears that Nokia has psychologically completely caved to Microsoft.

This is not going to go over well in Finland's politics is what I was saying. If this move costs thousands of white-collar jobs, this guy may end up being as popular in Finland as Julian Assange is in Washington DC.

DanI-S2• 15 years ago

People also seem to have forgotten that the bulk of Nokia's sales don't come from smartphones. All they're doing here is replacing the OS of their 'flagship' lineup. Since Nokia smartphones have barely entered into the consciousness of the wealthy Western consumers who have been buying Apple/Android in the last few years, this /has/ to be an improvement.

intdev• 15 years ago

I am surprised that not many people are excited about this deal. I have only heard good things about WP7 so far and things will definitely improve as the platform matures. I don't understand why people have already labeled it as a failed platform.

People are also saying that the deal is only beneficial to Microsoft. The two real choices Nokia had were Android and WP7. WP7 seems like a more sensible choice to me. Sure they will have to sacrifice things, but they might gain overall. I think Microsoft and Nokia together make a killer combination that is going to help both these companies to bounce back in the mobile arena.

joe_the_user2• 15 years ago

Maybe there were compelling technical reasons and good licensing terms that lead Nokia to choose WP7 over Android.

But if a person is leading a company, they might perhaps consider the psychological impact of their decisions along side with technical and market factors. I mean, his job is to make money - not to make decisions that "would have worked if it hadn't been for those pesky workers" (unless the intent was to gut the company from the get-go - though I doubt that would leave more money in the end either).

Desperate measures were needed. But I don't think I'm alone in feeling depressed that the desperate measures seem involve a move back toward proprietary systems (even if my only involvement with Nokia has been using the excellent QT library).

If, assuming, your aim to get some value out of a company - get some value out of the technical teams that exist in the company, one assumes that one needs to keep the morale of that company at a certain level. And giving the impression that you're gutting everything the company stood-for seems like a not-terribly-effective approach here even if Nokia's internal process was broken.

If you're the underdog, being able to claim you are "fighting for good" is psychologically useful. If Nokia had gone with android, one might be able to believe they'd bring some open source "chops" to the table.

Again, my experience is programmers are willing to work to fix a broken - if they feel like the company if offering them loyalty. Obviously, today's announcement didn't make Nokia's workers feel that was happening.

Nokia's stock dropped a bit after this, btw.

Better link to the story also: http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Microsoft-is-the-p...

TheCondor• 15 years ago

No doubt there is plenty of MS hatred...

I guess my question is maybe a little different, if Nokia is in that much trouble, then isn't WP7 a gamble? Its not just flying off the shelf where Android on the other hand is. Two losers don't usually make a winner. I don't know, seems like Google is all in with Android, they've got a pipeline, they've established themselves and proven themselves and they are legitimately competing with iPhone.

Now if they think WP7 is the future and it's going to take the market away from iPhone and Android then it makes sense, but I don't know that anyone really thinks that, it might carve out a niche but it's not going to beat the other guys. There are now iPhone, Android, RIM, WebOS and WP7 in the smart phone market, seems like a lot to me.

martinshen• 15 years ago

What I don't understand is how it took over 1000 people to screw up modding Symbian (which has been around forever) into a usable interface. This platform should have been more quickly developed because at the end of the day, Symbian just needed a beautiful skin.

shareme2• 15 years ago

reasonably successful? Losing 40%points in market share is success? I am of course talking about the full Symbian time line not just currently

marshray13• 15 years ago

I don't follow the exact numbers, but my impression was that there were a hell of a lot of Nokia phones running Nokia OSes sold in world.

Do you have a source handy? It would be interesting to see how Nokia's market penetration (however declining it may be) compared to Microsoft's.

trezor2• 15 years ago

It was "throw out our current reasonably successful development efforts and become a licensee of Microsoft's failed platform instead".

Reasonably successful? I dare you to name one single Nokia-phone made the last half decade which you would consider relevant.

The truth is that platform-wise and software-wise, the bits you interact with, they've been stagnant since around 2000 and no amount of megapixels or Carl Zeiss optics will be able to compensate for that. They seriously need to throw their old stuff away and start going on something new. Like Microsoft did with Windows Mobile prior to Windows Phone 7.

I'm honestly surprised they didn't do it years ago. Now they've finally gotten a CEO which actually understands this and is willing to act on it. About time! While Microsoft is a risky bet, this move may actually save Nokia from complete annihilation and is certainly better than doing nothing at all.

And so far, Windows Phone 7 looks pretty good. Care to elaborate on how it is a failed platform already? Not disputing it if you have numbers, just that so far I've actually seen more enthusiasm for it than I expected to see.

marshray13• 15 years ago

Reasonably successful? I dare you to name one single Nokia-phone made the last half decade which you would consider relevant.

Well "dare" is a pretty big word, as if you're making some kind of threat of retaliation if I do.

So let's just ask Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=nokia+market+penetration

Second link: http://gigaom.com/2010/03/18/the-mobile-os-market/

Check that out. According to that data, in the 2007-2009 time frame they shipped more cell phone operating systems than everyone else combined. That probably translates into a lot of physical Nokia phones, too.

The point that it may be stagnant is well taken, which is why I said "reasonably successful" instead of "stomping everyone else into the ground".

But irrelevant it is not.

nerme• 15 years ago

Nokia sells LOTS of phones. You've got to remember than not everyone lives in the Bay Area and has a Twitter account... People living in Sub-saharan Africa and central Asia still need cell phones and the majority can't afford some flashing thing with a touch-screen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_pho...

tptacek• 15 years ago

Marsh, these appear to be people walking off the job because Nokia management is insufficiently nurturing to Symbian. How much sympathy can you muster for people protesting on behalf of Symbian?

marshray13• 15 years ago

I don't know enough about Symbian to have an opinion about it in particular. I've never been the least bit interested in playing with it, which suggests to me that it's not a very attractive development platform.

But I have a lot of sympathy for developers who have good reason to think their employer is steering their job into the trashcan, especially if they're in a city where there aren't a lot of other places to work.

Apparently the market isn't too keen on this either http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:NOK

zokier2• 15 years ago

More like

1. Board isn't impressed with current inhouse developements, and wants a "modern" mobile OS. There aren't really many alternatives to WP7.

2. Old CEO doesn't want to bend over to MS

3. Kick old CEO out and get a guy from MS to do negotiations with MS to license WP7

rbanffy10• 15 years ago

> There aren't really many alternatives to WP7.

Can you say it with a straight face? Without laughing?

taylorbuley2• 15 years ago

Regardless of whether you agree with the CEO's position I think it's pretty childish to walk out on your job.

darklajid3• 15 years ago

If you are afraid that this decision means that your job is in danger it's quite okay to show protest in my book.

And - they even did it on their own free time (using flexible working time), not 'stealing' paid time for their protest.

I like that move a lot.

taylorbuley2• 15 years ago

I apologize for not fully reading the story before I commented. Using your own PTO is quite admirable. I was under the wrong impression.

marshray13• 15 years ago

If you think the CEO is leading your company or your job into the trash, there's nothing wrong with taking a vacation day to work on your resume'.

You can bet he's working on his on the clock.

shortlived• 15 years ago

I would urge you to read up on the history of labor and unions in the US (or elsewhere). We have a civilized work environment because of strikes. I'm not equating the importance of the Nokia strike with those of the early 20s but, still, they are not "childish".

rue2• 15 years ago

For most employees, it's the only recourse.

xbryanx• 15 years ago

If I understand the garbled translation, the Nokia workers took advantage of extremely flexible work time to stage a coordinated, but totally non-rule-breaking walk out. I've never heard of this sort of half-strike method, but it's interesting. Is this something that is common in Europe or Scandinavian countries where a more flexible work schedule is common?

dspillett• 15 years ago

It has been known to happen in public sector places that work flexitime. If enough people coordinate they can effectively stop business/service for a couple of hours without breaking any hard and fast rules being even bent. There are usually fluffy-wuffy rules regarding reasonableness being broken, but they are so vaguely worded as to be practically unenforceable and anyway no individual can be got by them as they could all make up perfectly plausible reasons to need those particular couple of hours off (as it permitted by their flexitime contract).

While not nearly as effective as a day-long strike or other such, it has the advantage of not being covered by certain laws (so a ballot of the union is not required) meaning it can be implemented quickly to send a very visible message if enough people agree strongly enough with the message.

eli• 15 years ago

Workers in the United States sometimes stage "sick outs" where everyone calls in sick on the same day, especially if they're in jobs where they are prohibited by law or contract from striking.

Coordinated work slow-downs are another example of a "half-strike"

stcredzero5• 15 years ago

It's exactly this sort of tech expertise revolt that happened at the largest Smalltalk company at the time -- when out of touch management announced the company was going to go the direction of Java/JVM.

This is not an indication of mismanagement. This is mismanagement (of employee expectations, culture, and perception) plainly visible in public.

Nokia needs to figure this out right now, or they are going to bleed intellectual and technical assets.

roel_v2• 15 years ago

In Finland, where are they going to bleed to? What options do the regular (under 80th percentile) Nokia employees have? If a company of that size were to lay off 100's of technical people here in the Netherlands, that'd be a large supply to absorb for the industry, and especially those with 10-15 years of highly specialized skills (antenna design, phone chipset design etc).

stcredzero5• 15 years ago

It doesn't matter if the employees leave for startups or other companies, or if they just don't cooperate wholeheartedly. In either case, resources they used to have access to are lost. Management needs to do something, or they'll bleed intellectual captial.

If a company of that size were to lay off 100's of technical people here in the Netherlands, that'd be a large supply to absorb for the industry, and especially those with 10-15 years of highly specialized skills (antenna design, phone chipset design etc).

If their jobs were based in something technical and had significant value, they'll be able to find employment elsewhere. This was also true of former employees of the Smalltalk vendor.

The thing to remember here, is that your most valuable employees are also the ones that can find new jobs fastest.

latch• 15 years ago

This kind of behavior makes me wish at-will employment was the norm throughout the world. If you aren't happy, quit. Change was clearly needed and change was made. Work hard for your company or find a different place to work that'll make you happier. Everyone thinks they could make better decisions.

raganwald• 15 years ago

This kind of behaviour makes me wish golden parachutes for executives weren't the norm throughout the world. If you can't make money for the company, quit or be fired.

Isn't it amazing how "at will" seems to apply to both employees and management, but somehow management's version of "at will" is considerably lower risk than the employees, even though the manager has considerably more influence over their future.

ianb2• 15 years ago

I don't really know the answer, but are golden parachutes really the norm for many executives? We hear about certain extremely-well-connected CEOs of very big companies, but that's hardly a representative sample of executives.

shimi2• 15 years ago

I wonder what was the reaction if Nokia would have decided to adopt Android?

eiji• 15 years ago

Am I the only one happy that WP7 is NOT dead?

I very much prefer a threesome! Every mobil user will benefit from this. And this is not like Desktop. Everybody will have to bring their A-Game.

darklajid3• 15 years ago

I think the reactions are split into camps:

1) "Windows Phone is cool":

Think of all the people that like the tech (.Net) or the visuals (Remember the recent "No chrome in the UI" thread). That want this platform to succeed. I guess if you're in this camp the news are great: WP7 gains a very experienced hardware vendor. You can expect a couple of good/decent handsets soonish, pushing WP7 (with a lot of marketing and money) and thereby solving the chicken and egg problem (platform <-> apps) with cash.

2) "I liked Nokias history", "I'm a QT/maemo/MeeGo fan"

In this case the news are bad: Nokia changes direction. How much only time will tell, but the company that over the last couple of years slowly started to adopt open source is now going for a closed platform. QT and MeeGo are more or less declassed in the press release (research..? N770, N800, N810.. They did that in the past, the devices were unusable for non-hackers. I know, I own one). In this case you don't care much about WP7, you basically moan about the loss of plans that YOU had for that company/platform. That's what I see alot around now.

I understand both points, but the latter seems both easier to understand (I've got a bunch of maemo shirts, the N810 hardware etc..) and at the same time completely irrelevant (Seriously.. While mom and dad might have heard about Windows Mobile and that a new version is coming, who around you cared about MeeGo to succeed?). I'm quite sure this is the death sentence for MeeGo handsets. But we haven't even seen one of those yet. How do we know that we lost something of value? Please - no ideology (while I'd probably be with you, that's not something a company of that size should care about in a self-crisis) based answers about being open etc..

bayleo• 15 years ago

You're not the only one. I am stoked for some nice WP7 handsets. I'm currently an Android user but the new WP7 UI looks gorgeous and Microsoft's response to the Chevron exploit was admirable. It appears that they generally understand the importance of a homebrew ecosystem coexisting with their IP.

My career path has me working at or consulting with huge companies who are typically entrenched with Outlook & MS Office and if Microsoft can provide a better integration experience than Android with a piece of hardware that rivals Android handsets I will definitely check them out when it comes time to upgrade. I'm hoping the Nokia alliance works out and starts providing some competitive hardware.

tituomin• 15 years ago

Human-translated version: http://www.hs.fi/english/article/More+than+1000+Nokia+employ...

brk• 15 years ago

If I interpret the page correctly, somewhere between 1000 and 1500 employees at this location ALL worked on the Symbian OS.

THAT might have been part of the problem. 1000+ people for a mobile OS? And people wonder why Nokia can't innovate fast enough to keep up with iOS or Android?

beagle32• 15 years ago

Does this remind anyone else of SGI?

- Total domination of their own field

- Resting on laurels while others snatch the market from under them

- Panic

- Get a CEO from Microsoft

- CEO quickly decides that the O/S developed in house is not worth maintaining. And that the right O/S is no other than Microsoft's offering

- Company continues dive to irrelevance, albeit at a much faster rate than before

Well, the last one hasn't happened to Nokia. yet.

Goodbye old Nokia. You will be missed.

marshray13• 15 years ago

Yeah I was reminded of OpenGL.

Haha, at least Nokia isn't claiming that they and Microsoft are going to develop technology "jointly".

senko• 15 years ago

They are (claiming so).

In the press conferences, they stressed that they're going to contribute to WP7 ecosystem (by bringing OVI maps, and their expertise with developing for range hw range, or something along those lines).

protomyth3• 15 years ago

yep, it is almost and exact match. Don't forget who bought the patents after SGI went http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/01/16/sgi_transfers_3d_gra...

yuhong• 15 years ago

Don't forget Palm too, but they eventually recovered with WebOS, and HP eventually bought them.

pavlov4• 15 years ago

Goodbye old Nokia. You will be missed.

By whom? The old Nokia was a terrible software company, with so many abject failures at creating platforms (Symbian, N-Gage, Ovi, etc.) that I don't think anyone else in this business can compare.

It's a good thing that they're getting out of software and concentrating on stuff they're actually good at.

andrewljohnson• 15 years ago

Symbian was not a failure... it was a giant succes for quite a long time. That's like calling MS-DOS a failure.

joe_the_user2• 15 years ago

QT is great. Even if Nokia simply bought it, they've so far done a good job enhancing it.

samstokes• 15 years ago

They were terrible at software, but managed to make some really good phones despite it.

statictype• 15 years ago

The only way you could say Symbian was an abject failure is by comparing it to Android or iOS. Before those two systems came out, Symbian was the best mobile OS that was available.

I agree that Nokia is better at hardware than software, but I wouldn't go so far as to call Symbian a complete failure. It served its purpose at its time and did it well. [My old N70 with S60 from years ago ran a python interpreter on it. Can iOS do that? :) ]

It's biggest issue was probably fragmentation. There were too many releases - Symbian 3, 1st Edition, Symbian 2, 3rd Edition etc... That made it difficult to write software that could target more than a handful of the latest models. And with so many models available, the audience you reached was significantly less.

hvs• 15 years ago

I don't disagree with you in general, but IRIX was a dog of an OS. They dominated in hardware, but the OS was always something you just had to live with.

gaius• 15 years ago

Hah! RHEL 6 is only just getting GRIO. XFS is still a world-class filesystem. If you didn't love IRIX you weren't using it for what it was for.

wazoox• 15 years ago

A dog by what metric? In 1994 IRIX was the first 64 bit Unix kernel running on the first 64 bit workstation. In 1997, the same IRIX 6.5 could run on machines from 100Mhz/16MB to 512 cpus monsters. IRIX had really a nice, easy user interface, and many features (real-time IOs, /hw virtual filesystems giving a hint of /proc and /sys long before they came into existence, modular kernel, full 32 bits compatibility on 64 bits machines...) that were long to come on other OS.

beagle32• 15 years ago

IRIX was a god of an OS.

It had real time I/O. It had the best user interface at the time, with super fast scalable vector graphics for everything in '94. (Modern desktops have caught up some 13 years later). It had usable 64 bits everything before anyone else - R10000 was generally available in '95.

They were insanely fast compared to the Sun and Digital stations of the time - the only competitor was Digital Alpha, and IRIX beat Ultrix to the ground and mopped the floor with it.

These were the days of multiculture, where my employer insisted on having several Alphas, Suns, SGIs, RS/6000 and more to make sure we're not locked to any specific vendor.

tres3• 15 years ago

> - CEO quickly decides that the O/S developed in house is not worth maintaining. And that the right O/S is no other than Microsoft's offering

And it's even better when you factor in that in each case there is a viable and much better suited free and open option available. Linux would have made a much better choice as a transitional platform from IRIX.

It's nepotism on the corporate level & just like nepotism will destroy the morale of a department, this kind of nepotism will destroy the morale of an entire company.

kragen• 15 years ago

> Linux would have made a much better choice as a transitional platform from IRIX.

It would have, but this was 1998, so very few of us knew this at the time. I don't know if you remember the tech zeitgeist in 1998, but Linux was still a pretty hardcore geek alternative at the time, maybe like Vim today. NT had things like journaled filesystems.

You can delve into history to see what the Linux community was talking about at the time:

http://old.lwn.net/archives/ http://old.lwn.net/1998/1001/

"Intel and Netscape are now officially investors in Red Hat Software. A year ago such a thing would have been almost unthinkable. But times have changed."

"With this release, the GNOME desktop is reaching a usable state."

http://old.lwn.net/1998/1008/

"Expect that, with the introduction of pre-installed Linux systems from vendors like Gateway, IBM, Dell or others, the number of people searching out a Linux VAR in order to get a pre-installed Linux system will rapidly dwindle."

http://old.lwn.net/1998/1015/

"Oracle has announced that it will ship and support a Linux distribution."

http://old.lwn.net/1998/1022/press.php3

"Like sex in high school, everyone's talking about Linux, but is anyone doing it?"

http://old.lwn.net/1998/1029/

"140,000 Mexican school labs to be outfitted with Linux and GNOME." (That was the "Red Escolar" or "Scholar Net" project. Its failure is described in http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2001/08/45737: "RedEscolar, or "Scholar Net," has put computers in 4,500 schools, but fewer than 20 are equipped with GNU/Linux machines. The rest are running Windows 95 or 98.".)

So, from the standpoint of 2011, it's easy to see that committing head-on to Linux could have saved SGI. But, at the time, it was a risky decision.

They did actually start to hitch their wagon to Linux a year later: Scott Bekker "SGI Backs Away from Windows NT - Silicon Graphics - Company Business and Marketing". ENT. FindArticles.com. 11 Feb, 2011. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FOX/is_15_4/ai_55675...

Rick Belluzzo was the CEO who made the NT decision. WP says had been working at HP for the last 23 years, not Microsoft, but he did take a job at Microsoft after being deposed at SGI. WP also says his only degree is a BS in accounting from Golden Gate University, a vocational school, so he's probably not very smart.

Here's what he said about working with Bill Gates: "I was always surprised how much Bill knew. I wonder how you find time in the day to be on top of how many things Bill seemed to be on top of. Bill is so passionate about technology, and he really is in the right role to focus the vast majority of his time."

To me, that sounds like typical non-hacker cluelessness. So maybe it's not that surprising that Rick was blind to the finer points of technical risk, compatibility, portability, and how the free-software community worked. (He was also largely responsible for committing HP to Itanic, effectively killing PA-RISC.)

podperson• 15 years ago

Linux wasn't viable when SGI started selling NT workstations. BSD might have been viable. (It would still be viable now.)

rbanffy10• 15 years ago

Actually, I think you are confusing things. Rich Belluzzo worked at HP, where he convinced the company to reduce development of PA and HP/UX, favoring Windows and Itanic. He then went to SGI, where he convinced the company to license its IP to Nvidia, support NT on x86 and other stupid ideas. He then went to MSN and it became obvious, at least for me, he was working for Redmond all that time.

p90x• 15 years ago

I guess we won't be seeing a RIM, Microsoft merger any time soon then.

yason• 15 years ago

The end of the last ten years of Nokia's downhill: a quiet disappearance into a puff of irrelevance.

bigB• 15 years ago

I guess its a ballsy move, but it was much needed. Going with Android would have killed Nokia anyhow as they would be just another face in the already crap filled Android market ( and before anyone shoots me down, for every decent Android handset out there, there are 3 other really crappy ones)

Think about it though, what do they have to lose. The company was dying rapidly, There are relatively few WP7 products on the market, so they can stand out in the crowd, Microsoft have absolutely 0 to lose and everything to gain as Nokia may just pull this off.

But then again, I actually thought that Paul Thurrot had a good idea when he suggested that Microsoft and Nokia merge. Its not quite a merger but if this move actually works I think a merger is in the future.

fosk• 15 years ago

Nokia share price has a 15% drop (http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ANOK).

Time to speculate?

majorlazer• 15 years ago

Well maybe if Symbian wasn't a total piece of shit they wouldn't be shutting it down. Seriously, I owned an N97 for a while and that was the flagship product of Nokia for sometime, the OS is complete shit. Hardware was awesome but the OS was almost as bad as the old Windows Mobile OS.

runjake• 15 years ago

I'll miss Series 40 phones. A basic, no frills dumb phone OS with a UI that made sense. I'll miss the flexibility of Python for Series 60, even though the Series 60 OS was crud.

Flam• 15 years ago

The Nokia n900 (Maemo) albeit with some flaws, is the greatest phone I will ever own. Allow me to explain.

I live in Canada. We get a lot of snow over here. Last winter, I lost my Nokia phone. I remember it was a night we had a huge snowstorm, and I stayed in drinking hot chocolate by the fireplace only to wake up the next day stressing out because I couldn't find my phone. After an hour of searching, I came to terms that I must have lost it in the mall the day before.

I end up leaving later that day, and find it on my driveway buried in snow. Snow plows came twice and cleaned my driveway and they must have driven over it with the plow part of the truck. Not only that, it was completely submerged in snow for over 12 hours. I picked it up, brushed off as much snow as I could, and tried using it.

It still worked. It didn't even have any scratches (1 minor one). I've owned many phones in my life, and most of them break in the stupidest ways. Nokia is the rambo of phones.

nagnatron• 15 years ago

I like the WP7 UI so I'm looking forward to that combined with Nokia's build quality

1000+ Nokia workers have walked out in protest (in English via Google Translate)

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