

Nokia’s Losses Fires Up Finland's Start-Up Culture - pbahra
http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/08/04/nokias-losses-become-finlands-gains/

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latch
I went through hundreds of resumes from Nortel employees (and a few
interviews) while Nortel was bleeding employees. It was pretty brutal, their
skill set was irrelevant and the entitlement high. I felt pretty bad for them.
The experience leads me to believe that the sooner someone leaves a sinking
ship, the better he or she is. Both because they are able to recognize the
problem and because they have options available to them.

Can't it be argued that Nokia's losses are due, at least in part, to bad
engineering?

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sliverstorm
How do you figure? Have you ever owned a Nokia phone?

The software maybe isn't a glittering example of perfection, but my E72 is the
best phone hardware I've ever owned or seen.

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untog
Well, he could have included Software Engineering in that.

That said, I don't think the _engineered_ part of Nokia's software was bad. In
fact, from what I understand Symbian was/is fanastic. But the UI was
absolutely awful.

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nextparadigms
I'm glad Finland doesn't think they should "save jobs" and bailout their big
companies. Paradigm shifts and temporarily killing some jobs are the only way
to progress. I'm sure Finland will come out better than it was.

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getsat
Finland has successfully brought their economy back from the brink. They
definitely did not do it by bailing out failing businesses.

I highly recommend reading "The Information Society and the Welfare State"
which covers Finland's economic recovery and business/innovation culture.

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dirtyaura
Actually, we did bail out banks in 90s.

However, drawing parallels to current situation is not necessarily relevant as
Finland's economic crisis happened in quite unique conditions due to collapse
of USSR. There was no Western European (in political sense) country which was
as depended in exports to USSR.

Situation in Japan in 90s seems much more relevant to situation that US and
Europe are currently facing. A few hours ago I HN-posted a link to an
interesting video where Mr. Koo explains how Balance Sheet Recession (Japan in
90s, US now) is different than traditional recession (he is in favor of fiscal
stimulus) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2846561>

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getsat
Ah, interesting. I wasn't aware of a bank bailout. Thanks for the info/link.

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dirtyaura
I think raise of startup culture in Finland is quite independent of Nokia's
current fall, but Nokia's earlier success has been an ingredient for the raise
of the current movement. The godfathers of this movement started their
companies in late 90s in either mobile or gaming sectors and are now acting as
angels and mentors or serial entrepreneurs. It's clear that Nokia's success
did help mobile startups a lot. Success of gaming companies was independent of
Nokia and was due to Finnish demo scene, but also for mobile gaming companies,
Nokia's presence was an obvious benefit.

However, the raise of the new startup movement in Finland started earlier than
Nokia's problems became obvious. I think it's part of the same global startup
movement that e.g. Y-combinator has been creating. As it's mostly cultural
phenomenon, role models and blogs like Arctic Startup has played very
important role. I was part of Jaiku that was acquired by Google, and although
it was just a talent acquisition, many people have said afterwards that it
really inspired them to become more interested in startups.

