[joe_mamba]

It's what you get when you have no phone manufacturing supply chains anymore because you shipped them all to China 20+ years ago then lost the OS wars to Apple and Google leaving you with no local phone industry. Then it's gonna cost you through the nose when you're making, what are now to your industry, niche low volume items.

Remember when you could buy EU made Nokias, Siemens and Ericssons? Even the chargers were made in Finland back then.

[pjmlp]

As ex-Nokia, I can tell quite a few stories about the rampdown in Germany, of factories and R&D sites, merge with Siemens and what not.

For those that care, search the news for strikes or layoffs, around the time iOS/Android were taking off.

[joe_mamba]

>As ex-Nokia, I can tell quite a few stories about the rampdown in Germany, of factories and R&D sites, merge with Siemens and what not.

Well please go on, spill the tea, don't leave us hanging. This would be very interesting to hear.

>For those that care, search the news for strikes or layoffs, around the time iOS/Android were taking off.

Well, according to my google-fu, the factory closures from Finland and germany were relocated to Hungary and Romania, so still EU, therefore the EU could have maintained a domestic phone manufacturing sector in its lowest cost countries as well, if they had kept those fabs and not close them down as well to move everything to china.

Everything about this screams of corporate greed and mismanagement on Nokia's part, way before Microsoft entered the picture.

[dddw]

Another good reason to dislike M$

[pjmlp]

I dislike the board that brought Elop in, and promised him a bonus if he managed to sell Nokia Mobiles business unit, and they were also the ones that decided to off-shore factories and R&D into Eastern Europe and India.

[mytailorisrich]

Unfortunately Nokia was doomed because it was too slow and bureaucratic and could not adapt to the iPhone... Contrast with Samsung that managed to quickly churn out iphone "clones" and to iterate quickly.

[pjmlp]

Sure, if you miss the whole Bada OS failure, and Tizen for that matter.

[joe_mamba]

What does MS have to do with this? The Nokia factory shuffling and strikes GP was mentioning happened before MS took over.

And people love to blame MS but Nokia was a sinking ship already by that point. MS was just a new captain added to steer the Titanic but the same fate was inevitable, as its home grown MeeGo/Maemo platform arrived too late and to too little adoption to stand a chance against the already established iOS and Android platforms who were throwing infinity money on becoming the undisputed mobile duopoly platforms, selling 10x as many devices as Nokia was selling Maemo N900s. It was already over for Nokia by that point same as it was for Blackberry. Nokia's own engineers admitted this the moment they got to play with the first iPhone at their Espoo HQ.

That's like blaming a drunk driver for hitting a guy that previously shot himself in the head.

Nothing MS could have done would have changed that fate for the better. WHat did people expect MS to have done?

[actionfromafar]

Sure, but still, the driver was very intoxicated and ran over the guy, then put the car in reverse and ran over the guy again.

[joe_mamba]

What does the driver matter if the guy was already dead?

[pjmlp]

I bet a judge would disagree on the inocence of the driver in such scenario.

[actionfromafar]

Didn't look quite dead to me. Until after MS was done.

[actionfromafar]

I think of those two, the OS wars is the much more substantial EU/US difference. It's not like Apple is making much hardware in the US, yet they wade in pools of cash.