WTF Nokia, being a hardware company, is it not in your capabilities to produce a slick mobile like the Iphone (because users like it) instead making a bulky N900(i love it though) and put a polished Maemo on it, give your relentless support and give endless powers to this community (who can create their own technology company and beat everyone.

But instead what you do is fire your CEO and bring in a an EX - microsoft employee whose agenda from the start was to kill the innovation of Maemo and then Meego and kneel to the company like Microsoft.

Elop must have got huge sums to do this from Balmer and will get even bigger sums in a while to sell Nokia to Microsoft one fine day.

What a waste of this innovative OS, i just love it of what it can do and fear for the future when i will not be able to use these kind of handsets after my N900 wears out

Next time try typing your rant on notepad, since it will be just as useless there as it is here

Microsoft to pay Nokia more than $1b to dump its software: sources March 9, 2011 - 10:33AM


Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Photo: AP

Microsoft will pay Nokia more than $US1 billion ($990,318,727) to promote and develop Windows-based handsets as part of their smartphone software agreement, according to two people with knowledge of the terms.

In February the company announced it would ditch its own mobile phone operating system and instead use Microsoft's, which it was going to get paid to do so.

Nokia will pay Microsoft a fee for each copy of Windows used in its phones, costs that will be offset as Nokia curtails its own budget for software research and development, said one of the people, who declined to be identified because the final contract hasn't yet been signed. The agreement runs for more than five years, the people said.

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Nokia CEO Stephen Elop. Photo: AFP

If it succeeds, the partnership may benefit both sides financially while helping stave off a smartphone threat from Apple and Google. Nokia shares have dropped 26 per cent since the accord was unveiled February 11, reflecting doubts about the move to adopt Microsoft's operating system, which is less than six months old and has just a few percentage points of market share.

“This gives Microsoft scale and allows Nokia to rip out costs,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Partners in New York, who recommends buying Microsoft shares. “Microsoft is getting the platform boost that comes from acquiring a Nokia for about a billion dollars.”

Shrinking margins

Espoo, Finland-based Nokia needs to cut costs to keep operating margins from narrowing further, after they shrank to 4.9 per cent last year from 19 per cent a decade earlier. For 2011 and 2012, Nokia may cut its budget for research and development in devices and services by about a third from last year's spending of about 3 billion euros, said Sami Sarkamies, a Helsinki-based analyst with Nordea Bank.

Microsoft spokeswoman Melissa Havel declined to comment on the specifics of the agreement. Laurie Armstrong, a spokeswoman for Nokia, said the final contract hasn't been signed and the company will share further details when they are complete.

Nokia's royalty payments will help Redmond, Washington- based Microsoft make a profit on the accord even after the payments to Nokia, one person said. Some of the payment to Nokia would be made before the company starts selling the phones, meaning Microsoft bears some upfront cost in the partnership.

Ballmer under pressure

Microsoft shareholders want the company to salvage its mobile software business while also reining in costs. The company doesn't break out results for its mobile software unit, and instead groups them with the profitable Xbox video game business, making it difficult to evaluate the financial performance of phone software.

Chief executive officer Steve Ballmer has come under pressure from investors and his own board to improve sales of mobile software after the company lost market share to Google and Apple. Microsoft stock has declined 7.8 per cent so far this year.

The agreement for the more than US billion-dollar payment was part of a campaign by Microsoft to keep Nokia from choosing Google's Android operating system, one of the people said. Nokia also opted for Microsoft because Windows Phone software, which is newer than Android and has a smaller number of handsets for sale, gives Nokia a better chance to stand out, one of the people said.

The agreement also has Microsoft paying Nokia for the right to use its patent portfolio, one of the people said.

As part of the deal, Microsoft will use Nokia's Navteq mapping products for functions such as geolocation services and selling local advertising and coupons tied to a user's position. If successful, that also could generate additional revenue for Nokia, which will share in the sales. The two companies will also divide revenue from services like search and advertising, Microsoft President Andy Lees said last month.

Generating profit

Peter Klein, Microsoft's chief financial officer, said last week at an investor conference that sales from these kinds of services are important to generating profit from the deal.

“In success, it is a very mutually beneficial deal economically for both companies,” Klein said.

Such tailored user services may provide billions of dollars of revenue to Nokia over the term of the contract, one of the people said.

Days after the agreement was announced, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said the agreement will add billions of dollars in value to Nokia, without specifying how much. Microsoft's Lees said the agreement involves funds changing hands for royalties, marketing and ad-revenue sharing. Both companies have declined to provide specific amounts

Seriously, somebody please delete these pointless threads

Yes please delete this, Thanks

OP Cool Story Bro.

Well, Symbian wasn't really ready to take on the heavy leagues right? WP7 alliance was probably the best bet at this time...of course, maybe the perks made it more attractive...

But I agree, we've seen to many threads about this since that Friday announcement. I say, let's just get back to our N900 (3G Video call and voice navigation Ovi maps)!

OP has genuine reason to rant, ranting at Nokia has proven pointless, why delete the thread instead of leaving it here? Near as I can tell, if Nokia and its management had ever bothered to go through the threads in addition to the messages sent directly to them (again, it doesn't appear they do), they would have probably been a fair bit smarter and saw this coming long ago. They COULD still learn. Deleting is tantamount to censorship. At best, close the thread but deleting seems to just add to the blunders.

to anybody still WTFing and OMGing ....

read this microsoft employment contract excerpt:

http://lopho.org/files/49542881-Micr...-Agreement.pdf

i tells us that any employee leaving microsoft may NOT engage in any form of competition with microsoft within 6 months after leaving microsoft.

so, in terms of nokia-microsoft:
microsoft builds an phone os
meego or maemo is in the "same" market as this
thus making meego/maemo a competitor to win 7 on phones.

_cant let you do that elop_

That's actually pretty commonplace in most of the industry and typically fails in courts when it's challenged (since it would effectively put most people out of work for those six months--think about it, what DOESN'T Microsoft do in this industry that an IT/IS/developer/etc wouldn't be in competition with Microsoft over if they got a new job anywhere?)

It's particularly common in California where judges have long been aggravated by Microsoft's repeated attempts to enforce this through lawsuits.