I see ABSOLUTELY NO reason why Microsoft has to spend that much money to buy Nokia.

Lets analyse a bit further down in steps!
Why would Microsoft need Nokia? Or lets first start with seeing what Nokia has. The major ones to list seems to be (not in any specific order)
1. % of phones sold in the market
2. % of phones using Nokia's Symbian OS
3. Super Hardware Quality
4. Nokia-Siemens Networks (NSN)
5. A partnership with Intel-and-many-others on MeeGo
6. Qt
7. Patents
8. R & D (for their future Morph like phones, etc)

Now, lets go back to see what Microsoft would need from these with an takeover.
1.
2. Microsoft would definitely love that much of a market share but the point here is that Nokia's market share (OS %) is not newly acheived. It's like this: Symbian%=IE% and Android%=Firefox%. Also, it's very unlikely that Microsoft when buys Nokia would let Symbian (especially Symbian^3/4) live. It will start putting WM7 on all new Nokia phones.
3. Microsoft has already proved its hardware capabilities with its Zune and XBOX devices. Zune though is more relevant here.
4. Microsoft never hinted that it is interested in network business. I am aware that Microsoft is pushing their Cloud platform thing harder but buying a network business for that doesn't somehow seem right to me.
5. Microsoft & Open-Source don't go well.
6. Qt ? Microsoft don't need Qt and more over they have their .NET.
7. Buying an entire empire (at that much cost) just for patents?
8. Is Nokia R&D working on some handheld rocket controllers in their labs?

Am I missing something?

WOW!!!
April 1st already!!!!

Time flies like an arrow................and fruit flies like a banana.

Really?? As an American I can appreciate technology and innovation from places outside of the USA... wholeheartedly. When you speak of Nokia, you mean a successful company that has/is resting on it's laurels. There's no forward thinking, no innovation. Where is their focus?? Maemo?? MeeGo?? Symbian?? High end, low end smartphones?? They are all over the place, hence not moving forward. And as Nokia continues to rule the mid to low end feature phone in Europe and other countries, North America has been wanting/needing a high end smartphone that has most recently come from HTC, Samsung, Motorola and Apple and has been completely ignored by Nokia. Is there any idea what the ethos of Nokia is?? Does anyone know??

There is no foothold at all in North America. Who's fault is that?? The old, stubborn traditions of the previous regime hopefully has been put to rest.... but in what direction?? Some of the top level executives directly involved with the Maemo and MeeGo projects have left to other competitors. All we hear from Nokia is S^3. That's fantastic for your low end phones but what about your high end??

Sorry, but North America (unlike most of Europe) crave smartphones....high end ones and dual core is here, like it or not. Large capacitive Super AMOLED screens are here and by ignoring these and other specs that are coming into the fold from other handset manufacturers from all over the world, you are alienating and ignoring a LARGE marketshare.

That is fine Nokia if you wish to toil with cheap, low end feature phones that you sell by the million every month to placate your precious S^ but if you continue to turn a blind eye to innovation and forward thinking, you too will end up like Palm.... desolate and alone, only to be bought out by a software and computer systems company. Even with new leadership, you've shown no vision.... it's already too late.

And thanks to this community (not Nokia) and the real smart people who are forward thinkers, my device continues to be relevant and continues to impress current "high end" Android users even after a year of release.

And for the record Micro$oft is definitely NOT the answer either...!!!

True.

They are definitely not a hardware orientated company. Apart from the X-Box series, what have they done that's been a roaring success on the scale of the majority of Nokia devices?

I've gone through 6 sidewinder joysticks before I settled on a Saitek, which has already outlasted all of them.
Zune? Megafail on looks and attractiveness (just like the Sidewinders).
They are now relying on other manufacturers to build the devices while M$ just provide the O/S. And didn't they attempt to get into the PC hardware market, but failed miserably?
That, IMHO, is where M$ and Nokia share an interest. Nokia want to build handsets for M$ and M$ think it's a good idea. Soon, we could be seeing Nokia devices with Microsoft branding, either made by Nokia or license built by M$.

Nokia's lack of recent continued success (and only lack of continued success - it's not succeeding as well anymore, in other words; it's not actually 'failing' in any sense) has nothing to do with a lack of innovation. And while that was an excusable position a few years ago, enough information has floated to the surface to know what Nokia's real troubles are: Internal bureaucracy that results in good ideas being killed off, combined with a mass-produce-phones-for-every-market-segment approach which, while not bad in itself, meshed horribly with the aforementioned bereaucratic woes.

As was summed up somewhere in some article before, too many people in Nokia's middle-of-decision-making-process can say no to taking risks with new ideas, and almost no one can truly force something new to go through.

It's not that Nokia hasn't innovated. It's that Nokia innovations have mostly languished internally, coming out either too late or too wrongly implemented.

- On this Microsoft buying thing -

Misguided notion. Not so much because it's American-centric. It is, but not in the American-business-is-the-only-thing-that-can-succeed sense.

But because it completely fails to take into account what, well, so many people/entities fail to take into account when thinking about business-related matters. IE, anything that doesn't have an associated $/€ value attached to it. There's quite a lot to be learned from psychology and sociology about how people would react if Nokia was bought by Microsoft, and quite a lot to be learned from history which combined with a decent understanding of cultural/social changes would indicate that frankly, Microsoft is not that well off long-term, and it certainly wouldn't be any more well-off than Nokia in the mobile business. (Unless they radically change of course.)

For instance, the article mentions that people buy Nokia because it's Nokia, not because it runs Symbian. True, but people also expect Nokian products to have a degree of familiarity and most importantly, quality. They trust Nokia because it's Nokia (as Nxx0 owners, it's important to remember that while we've gotten quite limited support/improvements, the mainstream Nokia phones are less poorly handled by Nokia); if Nokia suddenly became Microsoft-with-Nokia-name, they'd only trust it if Nokia kept making similar decisions it used to make. If Symbian got suddenly dropped, Nokia services were slowly end-of-lifed, and Win Phone 7 flooded Nokia phones, even if by themselves none of those changes would push users away, enough of them close enough together would.

Also, I would argue that from a sociological perspective, Microsoft is in a fading position. Business-wide, it's just fine. And it will remain a market presence for a long time to come. But I would argue in terms of relevance, deep down in the sociological-influence-and-importance level, Microsoft is not better off than Nokia. Not much worse, but not better. Both are giants who succeeded in pulling off their own era of dominance. But both are also heading in a direction the public itself is slowly starting to not care about. Both have also done their best to slam on the breaks and to adapt to the changing market - but both are behemoths, with all the difficulty-of-changing-momentum implied.

The difference is, Microsoft's inflexibility is a lot more inherent to the way it runs and the products/services it offers. Nokia's inflexibility is an internal problem they inflicted on themselves due to a slow descent into bureaucratic self-inhibition. Microsoft probably has the same bureaucratic problems, but that's the point - Microsoft's business approach has never been one to be undermined noticeably by the bureaucracy. Nokia's is. But by the same token, when the environment in which Microsoft's business strategy was successful recedes, Microsoft's relevance will be pulled out in the undertow. It'll be a slower process that the time scales most people view - something discussed in historical appraisals of large business in the 21st century or something, not in current business analyses - but it will also be more certain unless Microsoft changes drastically.

Nokia, I would argue, is in a similar predicament - but Nokia's bureaucracy has been the norm for far less time than Microsoft's. So Nokia is in somewhat of an all-or-nothing predicament. Either they fix the internal stifling of innovation (and successfully combine that with this MeeGo maneuver of theirs), or they won't. Microsoft - assuming it ever made the decision to buy Nokia, which I think it won't - can come in and keep Nokia in better circumstances than it would end up in the 'won't' scenario - but it will also nearly guarantee that Nokia wouldn't succeed in pulling off the 'will' scenario.

That said, I'm really hoping having a Microsoft-ian CEO doesn't have a similar effect. When the news first came out, I recognized that he's a human being with his own ideas and biases, not a Microsoft lackey - but there's always the possibility he thinks like Microsoftian leadership enough to go in the same directions it would.

- Edit -

Also on a personal note:

Super AMOLED Multitouch capacitive = ewwww. (Seriously, can there be more omg-that's-so-awesome-I-just-came BS in the name of a technology?)

AMOLEDs suck in sunlight, I'd rather either go the Pixel Qi route, or the transflective type of screen that the N900 has. I mean really, just look at that screen. Now ask yourself (set it to full brightness first, then run something colorful), do you really need more colorful brightness on your screen? How about actual visibility in sunlight? I remember a few weeks ago I was playing some games on an iPhone... yeah, it's 'vibrant' and colorful and ****, but... ewww. I can't even begin to view an average 'American' smartphone screen in sunlight - with the N900 I just have to pick at worst a slightly different angle. The only time I have trouble viewing anything in direct sunlight on it is my X-Terminal windows... Because I have the background set to black and the font as a light gray, relatively small letter size, thing. Not much to reflect light through.

Oh, and as I've argued countless times, the only advantage of the capacitive screen the multitouch, and there's already technology to bring multitouch to resistive screens. Given how 'light' of a resistance a high-end resistive screen gives before you can get touch recognition nowadays, there's little reason to defer to capacitive.

I haven't really followed how Microsoft is doing business wise, but i thought that they are doing better now than for long time?
W7 is selling like hot cakes, Xbox 360 is doing great and as a whole it feels like Microsoft is doing very well right now, or?

Good to remember that Windows mobile was peanuts compared to rest of it's business. They had at best 18% of the smartphone market and smartphone market was nothing like it's today in it's size. WP7 actually looks very promising imo.



And for the actual topic? Why in world would Microsoft buy Nokia!
Nokia is very big on the manufacturing side with 9 factories totally owned by them that produce 1.4 million phones a day.
They also spent second most to R&D in Europe and got huge patent portfolio.

Nokia's next years are tied to Qt that's tied to Symbian and linux based MeeGo primary. Nokia got over 130 000 people working for them, where's 60 000 people work for Nokia Siements Network and over 24 000 people work in Finland.

Does that really sound like a software company or company that Microsoft usually goes and buys, and i'm not talking about the size, but the type of the company.

And that's the kind of Euro-centric rhetoric I was regarding to in my earlier post in regards to an American based blog talking about any opinion piece about any European company. Simply put, they don't want Americans in their business, and quite honestly, I don't want them in my business in North America.

Nokia will continue to flail about as if they have a clue on what they're doing, it all looks good, they'll continue to make money up until a point. Realizing that your business shouldn't be built around building a timed obsolescence into either the hardware and/or OS and stop selling hardware like the razor blade/razor mentality is what needs to happen.

The Nokia products are successful in other regions. Awesome. Let them stay there then.

There... I said it.

I can be just as ignorant as you lot regarding Nokia in the North American and Japanese markets. Just will have to learn without any presence in those areas, I will speak from my own experience and/or exposure and your ranting, raving, cursing and attempts to convert or educate me will fall upon deaf ears (or eyes really) because I'll not have the same experience and exposure as you blokes in Eurotopia.

Simply put... the problem is with Nokia. Marketing isn't so out of the ****ing question when you have something you want to sell. Last I checked, that's a good thing.

So the solution is either expand the marketing or expand the training/knowledge of your products. That happens via clear communication, products that don't adhere to the "It's brand new, it's great, it's awesome, you want it..." and then in 6 months drop the support for it while announcing the new OS iteration and/or hardware and how you will have to pay another 550 Euros (or whatever Eurocentric currency that fits your egocentric nature) to stay current and get the next dot revision of an OS that's ultimately a work in progress or a dot revision of the next version of Flash or Skype.

Americans didn't create that problem. They're only reacting to their experience and exposure to those aforementioned products.

Your anger is wholly misguided. I'd suggest that you step out your "American blogs suck arse" mentality for a moment and think about what it really could be if things were done differently starting with Nokia.

NOTE: And by "you" in all of my sentences, I don't mean just gazza_d. And if you're an American, reverse the structuring of my sentences to point that we need to stop thinking that our American blogs are the best damn resources on the planet for all things gadget based. We don't have enough exposure to some aspects of the successful sides of their businesses and only are getting the short end of the stick on a few products - want unbiased exposure and information, look at the countries of origin for those gadgets. You might be surprised.

Totally disagree. I wanna stress, you don't need a faster processor for a faster phone, you just need an optimized OS. Nokia is the best at this, that's why their hardware is so "low-grade". On my N79, with something like 96 megs of RAM, I could run 28 applications at any given time, and they would run hang free unless the program was poorly written or bugged - like Opera Mobile 10s betas, they weren't ready yet, but when it was released it ran flawless.

The GHz and MB competition is what you do when you're out of ideas of what to do next.

Having an optimized OS on my N900... I wish!