Comment on That time when Microsoft bought and killed Nokia phone unit
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 2 weeks ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In 2002 Canadian startup Research in Motion launched a proper smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard (its BlackBerry two-way pager had existed since 1999 and already become a hit product) and before long you couldn’t attend a meeting without someone wearing one in a naff holster.
When the first telephone call using GSM was officially made in December 1991 by Finland’s then-prime minister Harri Holkeri, it was using Nokia kit – even though the Suomi nation hadn’t joined the EU yet.
Cheap colorful phones started selling like iced water at a summer rave, and with Nokia providing both the front and back end it was time to make a killing.
In your list of top ten most famous Canadians (in the tech field at least), Stephen Elop must rank highly – if only as the man who decided to destroy Nokia to save it.
To add insult to injury, when Microsoft “upgraded” to Windows Phone 8 it dumped the old WinCE kernel for one based on NT – meaning that apps developed for the earlier operating system needed to be rebuilt.
In 2015 Microsoft declared it was writing off $7.6 billion on the Phone Hardware division as “goodwill and asset impairment charges” – $400 million more than it had originally paid for the Finnish firm.
The original article contains 2,363 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 91%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!