Microsoft Buys Nokia
 

. . . Nokia's cellphone business, that is.

For just $7BN. How Nokia has fallen.

Thoughts?

It's all about the patents.

And the loyal customer base.

Only half the market cap, but hopefully my couple hundred (worth very little) shares do something now.

My thoughts exactly.
Jim

What's the over under on how long until MSFT has a 7 billion dollar write down for it's mobile investments?

Surprisingly MSFT is only licensing the patents. I'm assuming that doesn't mean they 'own" the patents which surprises me. I always thought a lot of Nokia's value was in it's patent portfolio as Kaptkaos mentioned. I guess the license agreements could be for 100 years. I have not seen the details on that. EDIT 10 year non exclusive deal on the patents.

I bought a nokia phone running windows this spring and unfortunately for MSFT the weakness in their phone isn't the device it is the operating system. The operating system just doesn't compete with android or iphone.

Ballmer is leaving 3 years too late, IMO. Elop is leading candidate at the moment and has been rumored to be so long before buyout was announced. This would be an excellent move as MS strategically transitions to a device and services business.

Yes, the hardware is the best part of a Win8 phone, but slowly the eco system is catching up. I have bounced for about a year between a Galaxy Nexus and my Nokia 620. Lately the Nexus has just sat on the shelf. Win8 clearly lacks a few things I want, but the overall experience is vastly better for my use.

I think the long term strategy is an integrated phone/tablet/desktop experience. Everything available on every device. The idea is good, but the implementation so far is lacking.

BTW, Microsoft pissed me off when they upgraded the Phone OS (back at 6.5) and left many users and applications behind. I've switched everything to Android and am quote happy with the results.

if they are only licensing, and don't own the patents, this is a really bad deal IMO.

I'm not sure it's a good deal, I have a Samsung Windows phone and it's much better than Nokia, so another instance MS telling their partners, we don't want to play anymore. As well the numbers don't add up unless the triple or quadruple there sales per quarter.

It will be interesting to see if they go the way of Palm (other than their patents)

Hmm - where have I heard that long-term strategy before? Oh yeah, Apple...

I'm not about to bash Microsoft - I've been using the MS OS since the days of DOS. But they are late to the game of integration, and when they finally brought a product to market with Surface, there was nothing revolutionary about it.

They have a lot of catching up to do right now, and lots of folks are abandoning MS for greener pastures. The Nokia deal is a step in the right direction, IMHO. Will be interesting to see how they are working on improving the OS and bringing a better integrated experience to the consumer. On the other hand, they could be the beginning of the end for the technology giant that pioneered the consumer computer market.

-Z-man.

Apple does not have a very good desktop/phone/table integration/synchronizing, except for music.

Yup 10 year non-exclusive licensing agreement.

Microsoft really had to do something. Management has certainly put their eggs in the mobile basket.

At first I thought it was a pretty bad deal for Nokia shareholders. It appeared as though MSFT bought the handset unit with almost no premium paid. IE they got half the sales and paid about half the market cap of the company. Not many mergers get done without a premium being paid. But MSFT has committed 2 Billion+ over the past 9 quarters to Nokia and will be foregoing royalties payments to the tune of 1.7 Billion or so.

The story for Nokia as a stand alone company now are much different than before. I assume they are going to focus almost entirely on their NSN network business. Maybe they can get apple to license some of the HERE mapping features. Lord knows the Iphone could use some mapping help.

To MSFT's credit they have been talking about streamlining the home experience for a LONG LONG time. Well before an Iphone ever hit the market. Honestly the Xbox360 does an OK job of doing that, but still has some work to go. I can stream movies, music, photo's etc to the xbox, but it needs to be simplified. It'll be interesting to see what the Xbox One brings to the table this fall. If they could streamile the xbox experience some and market it as a gaming / home entertainment hotspot it could really work well.

This +10000000000000000000000

iTunes is the biggest piece of excrement that Apple has. The whole platform is designed around protecting music rights, and that makes it incredibly UN-user friendly.

I'm not taking about iTunes. I'm talking about how Apple has integrated their App storage into their desktops, and how devices such as AppleTV and Airplay offer seamless integration between devices. Most siginficantly, both OS X and iOS are based on the Darwin OS kernel. While the look and feel of OS X and iOS are different, the processing behind the GUI is essentially the same, making integration are the core significantly easier.

I agree that iTunes is severly lacking - and unfortunately, that is the most user-facing integration interface Apple has.

-Z

iCloud wireless sync and backup is pretty brilliant. Any contact, bookmark, email, music, etc you add or change on one device is automatically changed on all other devices. Effortless way to mirror devices. The key is "effortless". A more thorough or powerful sync - but that has to be manually figured out and set up - that's not Apple's style.

Then we're talking Apples and Oranges here (sorry, had to do that).

What Microsoft is working towards is all your applications and data on or accessible to all devices with a similar GUI. The idea is you own a PC, laptop, tablet & phone and they are all synchronized.

Apple does NOT have anything like that. And even trying to transfer data to Apple devices is extremely difficult. My sister gave up her iPad for a Galaxy Note 8.0 once I showed her the Galaxy would do what she wants (act like a sub-micro Laptop).

Android is trying. But since they don't have a Desktop that anyone is seriously using, they aren't in the running.

My intermediate solution is using the Galaxy S4 & Galaxy Note 8 with a Windows Desktop.

But not data, like your documents.

Sure it can:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1378229191.jpg

So, that syncs documents on the phone. What about documents on your desktop? Is that automatic as well?

Nokia is a decent trade in place of Ballmer

Microsoft needs to go mobile with their products and Nokia has lost their cool factor with the market.

iCloud document sync works for applications that support it. Which doesn't (yet?) include MS Office, AFAIK.

I think you will have to use a 3rd party sync application to synchronize MS Office documents across iPhone/iPad/iMac. I've heard good things about SugarSync, but not tried it myself.

More broadly -

Apple is trying to get away from the traditional approach of treating files and folders and applications as separate things that the user has to manually manage.

In the traditional (computer) realm, the user creates a hierarchical folder structure, chooses where to store various files in those folders and subfolders, opens an application and navigates to a particular folder, subfolder, then file, and opens that file. In the new (smartphone) world, the user opens an application and opens the desired file created in that application, finding it with an unstructured search (like searching the web) rather than by navigating a folder structure, in fact as far as the user knows there is no visible folder structure - everything is "flat".

Not sure which approach I prefer. I'd say the "computer" approach is better for advanced, organized users dealing with a lot of files - power users. I think the "smartphone" approach is better for casual users. Over the years, the Windows and Mac OS'es made the "computer" approach fairly accessible to casual users, mostly by creating a default folder structure ("MyDocuments" etc), automatically assigning particular applications to particular file types, and including auto-indexing/search. The iOS and Android OS'es have a ways to go to make the "smartphone" approach suitable for power users, but they have just started and since unstructured search techniques are powerful enough to handle the whole internet, it can clearly handle the output of a single user.

Anyway, iCloud document sync works in the context of the smartphone approach. If the application supports iCloud sync (the API is available to all) then when you open the application on a device - iPhone, iPad, Mac - all the documents you created with the application on any of your device are automatically available on all of your devices. The problem currently is that not that many applications support iCloud sync. iCloud document sync isn't intended to work in the context of the computer approach - you can't point to an arbitrary file or subfolder and say "I want this mirrored across all my devices". I doubt that will ever be enabled, it doesn't really make sense in a smartphone world.

Another option, BTW, is to use GoogleDocs, access documents that live in the cloud via a web-based application. That is how my high school daughter and her friends do it. They hardly use MS Office and wouldn't even understand what you meant by synchronizing local file copies across devices.

Android has a standard file structure. You have access to the files either with a file manager (which then auto launches the appropriate program) or you open the program and it find all the files for you (Docs to go).

The main thing I like is I can connect to any LAN drive or FTP site and grab the files I want and drag them to my Android device. Or I can connect my Android device and drag and drop files onto it from my PC.

The "best" thing would be a seamless syncing in the background. Any files I've worked on with my PC are available on ANY other device. I think this is where Office 365 is going.

The "problem" with storing everything in the cloud is a combination of bandwidth for syncing and security. I know that for most of my programs I'm better of copying files from our server THEN working on them locally, than trying to open them through the VPN.

Also, I don't really want to keep my data "in the cloud". Who exactly is safeguarding my information?

About 25 years ago, while working on my undergrad degree in computer science, my professor predicted that object-oriented coding and relational database processing will be the future of computational processing.

Took 25 years for the hardware and software to make this prediction viable, but the future is now. :)

-Z

I think - not positive - that iCloud will let you manually drag files from device to device. But it is manual, not sync'ing.

AFAIK. I don't actually create documents on the iPhone/iPad. With laptops now so thin and light, with real keyboards and Haswell power, 10 hour batteries and nice touchscreens, and tablet-like form factors if you must have that, I can't imagine trying to peck out a spreadsheet on an iPad. View one - maybe. Write an email, sure.