They went back to the drawing board and got really big in the wirekess communications field, I believe. When I lived as a quasi-new EE grad from the States in Oulu, I actually applied to work for their 6G department, since I quite liked the math around digital communications and it was a huge thing my advisor had hyped up in college. Alas, Northwestern just wasn't impressive enough a school for people in other countries to know about by name, and I never even got a reply... ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
Nokia makes all kinds of telecommunications gear that is not consumer facing.
One time I was working in an old Cold War bunker in Finland that was being used as a datacenter. Really wild place with servers in rows in cavernous caves. The toilet paper dispenser in the men's room was made by Nokia ;)
A Swedish friend of mine has a chainsaw guard made by Nokia.
Personally I read it a little differently, more along the lines of "I didn't realise Nokia was that big! Are they involved in other sectors I don't know about?"
This is correct. All I know them from is their mobile phone business, which is all but gone nowadays. The Nokia brand lives on through HMD Global so I figured Nokia itself must do a ton of other stuff. I got a few replies with what they do nowadays, thanks!
Maybe on Reddit. Here, I instead did learn that Nokia still has a substantial worldwide stake in telecommunications, especially wireless. And that Nokia has much older origins than that dating back to selling rubber in the 19th century. even if their heyday of consumer products is long over, a few responses helped me see otherwise.
Regardless, the user already clarified their point so this is simply a thought exercise rather than a search for truth.
You don't need to accurately assess it to be surprised they still have a lot of employees. They don't seem to do much anymore that is visible. Quite a long time ago they were a leading company. I have no idea what they even do anymore.
I would read his comment more as "I didn't know the company was still so big" than "wow how stupid are they that they didn't fire all those people years ago"
there are more inscects in a cubic mile of rural land than humans on earth. are you surprised?
Humans in general are horrible at encompassing large numbers. We can interpret and understand them, but our mental model sense of scale isn't flexed often enough in daily life (where we maybe deal with thousands at most) to truly appreciate hundreds of thousands, or millions intuitively.
To be fair, 86000 is the size of Meta. and I'm surprised to begin with that Meta has 86000 employees to begin with. They weren't saying that they shouldn't have that many employees, just unaware of the scale of the company.
There are only handful of mobile network infrastructure providers left in the world. Huawei 30%, Ericsson , Nokia, ZTE. Samsung replaces ZTE in base stations.
4G/5G and PON(technology used for providing "Fiber To The Home") - these are really big markets as you can imagine. But everybody is cutting investments right now in fear of recession.
For people who are unaware Nokia is working on Mobile Networks (5G Base stations etc), Network Infrastructure, Cloud Networking etc.
As for this move, from what I have heard from my friends working there it has been strange ongoings in Nokia. Earlier in the year people were being let go. There were hiring and travel freeze. All the while there was a costly rebranding exercise with new logo goodies being distributed to the employees. It made absolutely no sense to celebrate a rebrand while firing people.
As the article notes, words like cloud computing and AI are being thrown around. But many feel that the management has proven itself to be rather short sighted because there has been constant shifts in strategy - changing the business structure nearly every year to the rebranding just 2 Quarters ago.
I wonder what Nokia have as a core revenue stream these days? They really dropped the ball when the iPhone & Android came to market (and to a lesser extent, the Blackberry).
Guess they're still making a killing on telco hardware/software/infrastructure.
Although they don't make mobile phones (themselves) now, they're deeply involved in everything to do with mobile/wireless hardware and services that the phones connect to. As well as their own products probably just about every other phone manufacturer also pays to use their IP - I think Apple still pay Nokia $8 for every iPhone sold.
> Nokia’s patent portfolio is built on more than €140 billion invested in R&D since 2000. It is composed of around 20,000 patent families, including over 5,500 patent families declared essential to 5G.
A year before the first iPhone was released, I told Nokia they needed to take their N700 Internet Tablet, add voice calling and text messaging, and offer it in many screen sizes like 3", 4", 5", 6", and 7".
If they had followed my advice instead of laughing at me they would still be the largest cell phone maker on planet Earth.
You and loads of other people in Nokia. Including me. The N800 actually had a silly webcam and skype running on the device. And Google used it to dual boot early versions of Android on it. This was before they had the first nexus phone to work with.
The only thing it lacked (on purpose) was phone functionality. They were just stubbornly betting the company on Symbian and never committed properly to making a flagship Linux device. So every single maemo and meego device that they launched was encumbered with underpowered hardware, crippled features, or they would just position it as a developer phone and kill all the marketing. Because Symbian was "obviously" their future. There was a pretty big camp in Nokia who did not believe that though. And by the time the iphone and Android had launched the company was panicking and started doing increasingly more erratic things.
They came close a few times with the N8, the N900 and the N9. With the N8 they had a really nice device with aluminium body, oled screen, and 12 megapixel camera (mind you this was 12 years ago). But they chickened out and launched it with Symbian and it kind of was just another underwhelming not quite good enough Symbian device. The N900 was a developer phone and the first proper meego phone. I had one, it was great. But it was also under powered and seriously ugly.
The N9 did eventually launch but years late and with the message that they were shelving the whole meego team and betting the company on windows phone. They even managed to squeeze out an Android phone just before MS completed the acquisition (they promptly killed that). A year or so later, Microsoft bought the phone unit, and then fired the whole lot a year later as soon as they got rid of Steve Balmer.
Now it's easy to see the Windows Phone as a dumb decision, but for us insiders at the time it was a bit of a desperate situation as there was no solution in 4-5 years given the absolute zoo of frameworks that took over the company. I remember being told by my VP that Anssi Vanjoki cried when the OS+Framework+Hardware situation was clearly demoed to the leadership. He knew it was over.
Anssi Vanjoki was the one that strangled the software strategy and created that mess. First by flogging the dead horse that was Symbian for way too long. And secondly by frustrating the Maemo/Meego strategy for something like seven years. And indeed failing to provide adequate leadership when it came to managing internal UI platforms.
Windows phone was a risky decision and they literally bet the company on it and then MS got all hand wavy about doing an update and then took their sweet time doing that update while Nokia basically died. The whole strategy could have worked but it would have required Microsoft to be way less flaky. And of course having outsourced the future of the company to them, Nokia no longer was in control of their own future. Which was an expensive mistake for Nokia share holders.
> With the N8 they had a really nice device with aluminium body, oled screen, and 12 megapixel camera (mind you this was 12 years ago). But they chickened out and launched it with Symbian and it kind of was just another underwhelming not quite good enough Symbian device.
in all fairness, there wasn't really a good move to make here yet. IOS was and is closed down, and early android was pretty rough on the software end. and Android device would not necessarily have saved them.
Windows 7 mobile wasnt much better and it was still a ways from the Windows 8 devices. Which was pretty good as devices but was simply too late to capture the network effect. A real shame; I think 3 is the minimum numbers of competitors I'd want for an industry this huge.
I worked there for a long time. The development of Maemo and what came after it was one the biggest slow motion software fuckups at all time. At one point we had:
- Symbian S60, S80, S90.
--- Symbian ˆ2, ˆ3, whatever that fuck that was.
----- Something called Open C, to facilitate porting since Symbian was a pain in the ass.
----- EasyApi (Lol).
- Maemo
- Qt on Maemo
- Qt on Symbian
- A new Qt-based UI for Maemo that I forgot the name. Orbit I think.
- Its version for Symbian (which was called Morbit).
- Harmattan (not a UI framework but it was a version of Maemo, a new one)
- Then came the Meego disaster.
All at the same time. It was absolutely incredible how we could develop so many development/UI frameworks/OS at the same time and be wrong at all of them. What you see as the best device (N950) was built on a platform that was already dead because the higher-ups decided to merge that with Intel (with a new UI framework if I remember it) and Harmattan was already dead.
I left that company 10+ years ago and I still suffer at how complacency ruined what was the best employer I've ever had. On the positive side, people from the right sides of Nokia had enormous reputation in the marketplace, so for components such as cameras, radios, modems, etc. for all major phone makers (including Apple) you can be 100% sure Nokia people to this day work on it. One imaging team in Finland was hired as a full group by Samsung.
I had an N700 too. Nokia would be in exactly the same place today if their iPhone competitor had been that platform augmented by 3G phone capabilities.
It was a finicky Linux GUI on a resistive screen, conceptually closer to Windows Mobile and Symbian touchscreen devices (like the SonyEricsson phones) than any modern platforms.
Android would have still beaten Nokia to a usable iPhone clone/competitor.
N700 was underwhelming. N950 was a complete badass in all the ways it was not and in a bette world we would have a vibrant ecosystem on N950 successors. Sadly is was not to be.
People really underestimate the paradigmic leap capacitive touch and momentum scrolling were. iOS didnt mature till probably the 4th phone, but it FELT different immediately.
I remember the N900, it was such a geeky device, with it's Maemo OS, it had the hallmarks of all the things possible from a small portable handheld, a la Steam Deck.
Nokia was just so pig-headed, why didn't they listen? I remember when Slashdot use to rave about the device, they could have developed a niche, people who were in the mobile app development biz were also fans of the device, they would have developed so many apps of their own volition.
They did a LOT wrong, including thinking their 'customer' were the phone carriers, betting that Nokia understood those 'customers' better, and betting that Apple wouldn't be able to make any meaningful inroads without the carriers.
Apple mostly went around the carriers initially and for the first time consumers started buying phones without a carrier contract in meaningful numbers.
Nokia were proven wrong, hubris got the better of them.
We used to tell on the internal shows for products to be announced, that Linux based devices like the N700 that the biggest missing feature was a radio antena, however the feedback was always that they didn't want to step into Symbian business unit.
Back on those days UNIX versus Symbian culture didn't get much along, when the board brough Elop, and what was essencially a UNIX shop working across HP-UX, Solaris, Red-Hat Linux and Symbian, most employees and developer community weren't pleased with "we go Windows now".
I was in Espoo the week following the burning platforms memo, and didn't meet anyone that agreed with it.
The only other choice was Android. I was in a team close to the decision. The roadmap (optimistic) shown to the board where we could have a product line based on Meego covering mid-range S60 to something close to the iPhone was three years away.
Interesting, although I would say that Symbian Belle did look quite good, and QT/PIPS was going into the right direction as well, but that memo killed the remaining goodwill of the developer community that cared enough for the transition.
And the release of N9 was mostly due to ongoing contracts, which were going to be quite costly by not releasing it at all.
But the thing (n810) had WiMAX? I don’t think the problem was text/voice.
The problem was that it had a resistive touch screen. Samsung already had touchscreen MP3 players that you can install apps on, but it was the capacitive touch at that price point that gave Apple a good 3+ year head start on software. At the time, being able to dial phone numbers with IPhone was mind blowing versus a resistive touch
That’s what was revolutionary about IPhone. They didn’t invent capacitive but they brought it to the $1k range.
Nokia was developing their own OS and App Store, too, but it was the iPhone’s cohesive experience that made everything else fit together
I still remember the N900 when it was first launched. It was revolutionary. Period. It's unfortunate we ended in this situation where phones are just incapable of doing anything but being a camera.
When I was looking for a 5G router Nokia's FastMile product came up, but when looking for pricing info it had none. Not even any info on where you can get one (unlocked, not from a Mobile Network)
I suppose Nokia is more operator-oriented than individual customers. It takes additional resources to maintain helpdesk and support - the operators are doing this for them.
"We are now beginning the process of consultation on initial reductions."
I'm not in the know.. but it comes off as if they have no idea what they're doing. You'd think you'd decide who you are gunna lay off before announcing it..? And they will be laying people off for two years straight? Seems like it'd just tank the moral of the whole place.
I thought companies generally rip the bandaid off and do it all very quickly - and have a concrete plan before an announcement
In Finland there is a mandated period of 'consultation' - usually at least 2 weeks long, between company and employees (or their representatives) when such things happen. I don't know if the actual term in Finnish is supposed to sound as euphemistic as the English one - but at this point it's pretty much decided.
"Muutosneuvottelut", which literally translates to "change negotiations", is basically the Finnish way of saying "mass layoffs and corporate restructuring incoming". Not the same thing as what you're describing but I find it funny in the same way.
Microsoft didn't buy Nokia the company, despite what a lot of journalists made it sound like at the time. They bought Nokia's mobile phone division and related businesses. With the purchase they also got 10-year exclusive right to use the Nokia name on phones.
You'd think you'd decide who you are gunna lay off before announcing it
They almost certainly have. The consultation process is basically negotiating with the unions over what sort of package they have to offer to the laid off workers to avoid the unions being difficult about the whole thing.
> I thought companies generally rip the bandaid off and do it all very quickly - and have a concrete plan before an announcement
In the US yes, and companies are free to ruin the lives of thousands of people overnight in most states thanks to at-will employment.
In Europe, where Nokia is based, companies have to actually follow laws. No firing of individuals without cause, mass layoffs outside of bankruptcy have minimum terms (in Germany, you have up to 7 months until your employment actually terminates), and usually employers have to broker deals with unions, worker representatives (Germany: Betriebsrat) and government / unemployment insurance schemes as well. As a result, there's no need to "rip bandaids off" - employees know that even if there's talks of layoffs going on, their lives won't be upended randomly.
That's generally the distinction between firing and laying off. Layed off employees generally get unemployment.
"7 months until your employment actually terminates"
You continue working at a company that you will have to leave? What incentives do you have to keep putting in any effort? Doesn't this lead to massive amount of corporate theft? In the US you are typically "shown the door" when your employment is terminated to minimize the possibility of disgruntled ex-employees taking corporate IP with them.
"employees know that even if there's talks of layoffs going on, their lives won't be upended randomly"
That honestly seems just worse for everyone involved. Aren't you in a weird limbo for months/years on end where you don't know if your position will be terminated? It seems horrible for moral. The most talented people would probably not want to put up with the uncertainty and will leave while unions are negotiating
Aren't you in a weird limbo for months/years on end where you don't know if your position will be terminated?
Isn't that every day at a job in an At-Will state in the US?
Also if you quit of your own volition while the unions are negotiating you get nothing. If you wait until the unions are done negotiating and get laid off you get several month of severance pay. In fact quitting while layoffs are being discussed has to be among the dumbest financial decision you can make.
> quitting while layoffs are being discussed has to be among the dumbest financial decision
I understand how one would want to stick around not to miss out on a juicy package but this seems counter productive for the employer, the employees and society in general. I can assume that the productivity impact is non negligible, with many workers sitting on their ass waiting to be laid off. Conversely, some workers might have immediate opportunities elsewhere which they can't take for fear of losing out on the bonanza. Finally, If everybody hits the job market at once when it's done there's more chance that the package money is going to get spent just looking for another job.
There really should be a fair retroactive + proportional compensation mechanism for people leaving on their own during the "negotiation" period.
This is generally speaking not a problem. It's technically possible, but generally in at-will states in the US, for exactly that reason, there is a strong incentive to not "randomly" lay people off b/c the company gets a reputation for being unpredictable and people don't feel secure in their jobs. They start to view their jobs are more transitory and it erodes company loyalty
Most companies will intentionally avoid doing layoffs and only do them in these large batches when there are financial necessary (like the tech sector layoffs we saw recently). Only "shitty" companies lay off people randomly to balance/adjust the books
"What incentives do you have to keep putting in any effort? Doesn't this lead to massive amount of corporate theft? In the US you are typically "shown the door" when your employment is terminated to minimize the possibility of disgruntled ex-employees taking corporate IP with them."
The incentives to keep doing a good job are your intrinsic motivation to do a decent job, your professional reputation and receiving good references for your upcoming job applications. Doesn't the american approach of showing employees the door right after being fired to a poor transfer of their responsibilities?
Yes and no. People are also free to leave at any moment - so the concern is inevitable an you generally structure your responsibilities to minimize the "bus factor"
> You continue working at a company that you will have to leave? What incentives do you have to keep putting in any effort? Doesn't this lead to massive amount of corporate theft? In the US you are typically "shown the door" when your employment is terminated to minimize the possibility of disgruntled ex-employees taking corporate IP with them.
If employers fear that, they can do something that's called "Freistellung" in Germany - basically, employees don't have to work any more but still get paid just the same until the employment contract expires.
But also you did sign the NDA which still applies even after you no longer work for the company. Though most people working in tech work on such mundane things that their workplace really doesn't have anything worth stealing IP wise.
If you as an employer are afraid that people will take sensitive IP with them, continue employing them on paper and paying them for the inconvenience of not being able to go to a different employer.
> What incentives do you have to keep putting in any effort?
Your paycheck?
You can still be fired on the spot if you are not doing your job. Though it might require a warning depending on the jurisdiction.
> Aren't you in a weird limbo for months/years on end where you don't know if your position will be terminated?
At least in Finland the legal requirement for the negotiations is 2 weeks and usually they take exactly that long. It can be even shorter if both sides agree.
The 2 week period also works well in a lot of low paying fields where you are paid every 2 weeks. Basically meaning that everyone knows they are getting their next paycheck in full (outside of a proper bankruptcy which is pretty much the only way out of these rules)
Yeah term of notice is a different thing which you can work around of with severance packages.
Terms of notice in Finland change a bit based on position/field but in general (might be off by a year here an there but in general 6 months is the longest after 10 or 12 years depending on the position/field)
After probationary period 2 weeks, after 1 years 1 month, after 4 years 2 months, after 8 years 4 months and after 12 years 6 months. (these also apply in the other direction when you are quitting but with different numbers)
Also something telling about the speed of these negotiations this the 3rd round this year for Nokia in Finland.
Also this is just for Finland. Pretty much every country in the EU has their own rules when it comes to large scale layoffs. EU pretty much just says "you have to try and negotiate with the workers/unions" but that is all.
Probably means that folks in Finnish, German, and US offices are out, and in Romanian and Polish offices will receive no rises of their already meager salaries.
Asking in Europe anything higher than 60% of what levels.fyi claims for any publicly traded company guarantees not receiving an offer. Funny because our public services and healthcare are the same dysfunctional as in US, only in different ways.
> Funny because our public services and healthcare are the same dysfunctional as in US, only in different ways.
The same, or different? There's various levels of dysfunction depending on the country, but outcomes are better and there is zero risk of life crippling debt. Anyone not a multi-millionaire who could afford the best private care would take that deal any day of the week.
Waiting times in months in context of cancer, pregnancy, and other critical health issues. Distributing the public services through nepotist barter, even basic services like a stupid consultation. Doesn't matter if one dies with or without some debt on top of it.
Not in my Eu country. Where do you get your info and where specifically are you referring to?
I can choose to wait for an appointment or i can pay. Waiting involves non-life changing issues so the wait is based on severity.
My last referral was 'within 7 days', and i got seen (fairly serious).
Either, someone got bumped or there's enough flex in the system to handle surprises.
My last stay in hospital [oct of 21] my costs were about €40 - for 10 days, inclusive of everything.
Waiting times in months for pregnancy makes little sense since:
* many pregnancy related things have specific timelines that should be followed
* pretty much all European countries have negative natural growth, meaning that there are fewer and fewer babies being born. It's highly unlikely related specialists are being overburdened.
Ain't got no time for discussing the obvious. Low fertility rates are a result, not like anyone is doing anything reasonable to address it. Doctors? Why bother when they can charge EUR 2k for "birth experience" in private clinic. Politicians? At this stage they only care about the real estate they hoarded.
This tells us very little about healthcare quality because of differences in choices made by americans and europeans. Americans are much fatter and more reckless. Other than smoking Americans partake in life shortening activities more often.
Is this like the delayed echo of the US tech redundancy wave (Europe always operates with a phase difference - maybe its the time it takes for management consultancy powerpoints to cross the Atlantic) or is it something more specific?
Not really, Nokia isn't really at the start startup-y end of the tech field like that. It's way more "esoteric backbone hardware for the world" these days. Closer to General Electric than Google.
My wild ass guess from living here is this is somehow coming from the larger Finnish economy; Finland is only now starting to really feel the pinch of inflation after the combination of COVID-19, which it weathered fine for a time, combined with the war in Ukraine, which is affecting food prices all over Europe and also (understandably) closed off trade relations temporarily with Russia.
No, they’re famous for pushing for cutting costs from unnecessary resources, like good employees most of the times they’re hired.
One example from my anecdotes is when they did consulting work for a telecom in my home country and pushed for firing half the technicians who were working in pairs. One of the reasons they were working in pairs was safety, like one holding the ladder and they used this as an argument and said they can just be replaced by a safer ladder. Said and done. After the fourth accident the telecom outsourced the jobs to an external company that only sent… two people teams
> One of the reasons they were working in pairs was safety, like one holding the ladder and they used this as an argument and said they can just be replaced by a safer ladder. Said and done.
One consultant must had an orgasmic enlightenment while creating that powerpoint slide. Wonder what they are up to now.
Not suprisingly, most people commenting in this thread have no idea about Nokia and what they are doing. They are really big and somehow succesful company, but no one can escape recession.
Agreed. I think just like everyone in this world, they hired aggressively when money and contracts were there and firing now that it's slowed down. Majority of their networking has been from Alcatel Lucent over which they built their own products but I feel good management can take them to the top. They don't make groundbreaking networking products but they do offer solutions people are willing to buy which telecom companies in North America would love to invest in if done right. It's sad they couldn't capitalise on Huawei ban that much.
Today they have 86000 employees so the reduction is about 16% of the total work force.
It's not nothing but I wonder where and what types of work gets cut first. Usually it's not people producing stuff like programmers but roles that companies in times of trouble realize they can be without.
I can assure you personally that there are all kinds of sectors impacted (also R&D). This is happening also to get rid of people with large salaries and upgrade cheap sites.
I own a button dumb phone by Nokia, it's fine but would not explain even 1% of that employment number.
PA says they're making telecom equipment now. Fun thing it also mentions Ericsson, which used to make phones under its brand, then Sony-Ericsson smartphones (not unlike Microsoft-Nokia) and then had to drop it completely.
The Nokia of today has little (left) in common with "the Nokia of lore". Just as that had little in common with the company that used to supply the Finnish Army with Rubber boots.
The Nokia-of-phones sold itself to Microsoft and was subsequently wound down. While the brand name for phones still exists, it's no longer held by the corporation now called "Nokia". That came to be, if you like to call it that, from a "reverse merger".
The telecommunications equipment branch (which makes base stations and wireless connectivity hardware) was partially outsourced and recombined with that of Siemens, and later I think parts of Ericsson, to form "Nokia-Siemens Networks". Which after "old-new" Nokia's demise took (bought ?) the name back and became ... just "Nokia" again.
So yes there are "Nokia phones" again/still, but they're no longer made by Nokia. While Nokia-of-today is still doing what they (if under slightly different names) have done for 25y+ - make, install, maintain telecommunications infrastructure.
While the brand name for phones still exists, it's no longer held by the corporation now called "Nokia"
The corporation now called "Nokia" still owns the brand name "Nokia" for phones, but is licensing it to HMD Global, a Finnish mobile phone company started by ex-Nokia people, but largely financed by Foxconn.
Nokia Siemens Networks didn't had anything from Ericson as far I can remember.
I was there from the Nokia Networks days, through the whole NSN merge process, and finally closing down most of the German locations, moving them to Indian and Eastern Europe locations.
This button dumb phone is not even produced by Nokia - it only has Nokia logo. Nokia is one of major players on both 5G and PON markets - and that would be more than enough if not the recession.
There's not much value in yet another reseller of Broadcom chipsets, they need to keep investing in their own product lines. However, I am pretty biased.
