"Upon the closing of the transaction, Nokia would be restricted from licensing the Nokia brand for use in connection with mobile device sales for 30 months and from using the Nokia brand on Nokia’s own mobile devices until December 31, 2015."
Nokia sold Microsoft its production lines, and licensed its patents. Starting in 2016 Nokia can reenter the cell phone market again. Basically Nokia gutted its legacy capital, and is taking a two year break and reevaluating what direction it should orient itself.
Nokia and Microsoft could not have made a more mutually beneficial deal. Microsoft gets a thriving hardware division NOW, and Nokia gets cash and the ability to reboot itself with no short term risk.
My point is, Nokia DOES need a change of strategy and tech, they will just be taking at least two years to blow bucketloads of cash on R&D, instead of worrying about short term end-consumer sales. Personally I'm kind of excited to see what Nokia comes up with. (Everyone seems to also be forgetting that Microsoft only purchased the mobile device business. Nokia's most profitable sector was its Nokia/Siemens Networks, which it still owns. They also kept their Patents and Mapping software. Microsoft get's a 10 year license with the option to upgrade to a perpetual one. Nokia is going to make a TON of money off one of the worlds largest companies, and Microsoft gets cheap intellectual property. Win/Win.) The sky is their limit.
As a Nokia R&D employee (staying in Nokia), I'm glad other people are starting to get the insane potential of New Nokia (with its retained R&D labs and talent, its mountain of patents, and its newly found mountain of cash--and no longer dividing attention between smartphone improvements and going after "the next big thing")
That said, I'm still emotionally bummed at what happened to Nokia in the last few years, and don't think it was inevitable that this had to happen to Nokia.
Maybe not inevitable but I prefer this path to following google down the android hole. It's hard to be truly innovative when you let someone else hold the reigns.
Content should be first. Search, maps, news, video editing, messaging (basically everything Apple isn't that google, microsoft, and yahoo are.)
With a top tier software services stack, and exclusive content, it's a lot easier to convince people to latch onto your hardware platform.
Nokia sold Microsoft its production lines, and licensed its patents. Starting in 2016 Nokia can reenter the cell phone market again. Basically Nokia gutted its legacy capital, and is taking a two year break and reevaluating what direction it should orient itself.
Nokia and Microsoft could not have made a more mutually beneficial deal. Microsoft gets a thriving hardware division NOW, and Nokia gets cash and the ability to reboot itself with no short term risk.
My point is, Nokia DOES need a change of strategy and tech, they will just be taking at least two years to blow bucketloads of cash on R&D, instead of worrying about short term end-consumer sales. Personally I'm kind of excited to see what Nokia comes up with. (Everyone seems to also be forgetting that Microsoft only purchased the mobile device business. Nokia's most profitable sector was its Nokia/Siemens Networks, which it still owns. They also kept their Patents and Mapping software. Microsoft get's a 10 year license with the option to upgrade to a perpetual one. Nokia is going to make a TON of money off one of the worlds largest companies, and Microsoft gets cheap intellectual property. Win/Win.) The sky is their limit.