this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
532 points (98.4% liked)

Technology

59390 readers
3724 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

When bad management meets bad software, even great hardware is useless

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months 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!