I have fond memories of using skype to contact my friends and family circa-2011 when I was working for Nokia in Finland.
Ironically, microsoft killed nokia the same way microsoft killed skype, an acquisition and then strangulation.
if nothing else, it’s at least two times the european tech sector was actively harmed by US tech giants… which isn’t much, but weird that it happened twice.
Loved my yellow Lumia 920. I thought the panels and scrolling start screen was much better (concurrently used Android and iOS at that time).
Just like with Zune, it was not part of MS strategy and therefor dropped. You need to keep working on something like this for years to make it successful. Large companies though drop products that are not a huge success after two years, associated with such products is a career killer.
[Edit] I got the Lumia to decide as a CTO at that time if we would go into Windows phones or not. I asked for more Lumias and XBox (to show cross plattform eCommerce) from MS to evangelize inside the company, but was let hung dry. So we did not support Windows phones. They never went full in.
If I remember correctly, the CEO at the time Steve Ballmer said they were betting the farm on mobile and ARM-based tablet computing. They went very hard on mobile until SatNad came along and killed it.
And here we are, in a world where Apple has made arm work wonders for them and Windows still isn't really a thing on ARM 10 years after ballmer resigned.
Then again arm doesn't seem to be necessary when looking at AMDs APU offerings. It was just a decade of intel struggling with their fabs.
Windows is definitely on arm. It just sucks because Qualcomm failed to deliver a good cpu package. The experience is within a stones throw of Apple, though.
I also have one of the new AMD 300 AI platforms, and it still can’t do power right. Either the laptop is miserably slow on battery, or runs way too hot on power.
I think the bigger issue is legacy software on Windows. It is Windows biggest moat and also their biggest albatross. So many companies and individuals rely on a specific piece of software that will never be ported to ARM. Microsoft can’t force the conversion. Developers have no incentive to support both until there is a critical mass of users and there will never be a critical mass of users unless ARM is 3x better than whatever Intel / AMD can deliver. On mobile it got close for a moment in terms of efficiency and then Intel and AMD immediately closed the gap. No incentive for users to switch.
They really should do a clean slate OS where native apps are all C# and legacy stuff is run in a VM. An ARM Xbox would also help develop a gaming ecosystem without the massive legacy concerns.
That was the funny story - Nokia got it's latest CEO (Stephen Elop) from M$, successfully almost-destroyed company, got it acquired by M$ and hopped back to M$. So, probably, it was the plan all along
Exactly. There's a business reason hardware companies like Nokia got killed (because it wasn't just Nokia. Lots of telco hardware companies were making handsets before and aren't anymore). That seems to me to be that Nokia didn't know how to make $100/user/year by controlling the software like MS and Google do (MS with "enterprise" sales and ads, Google with ads)
Also makes the choice for Microsoft, as opposed to anyone else, very understandable. The other choice that "worked" for cell phone companies was to be a Chinese company, with state subsidies amounting to zero, maybe even negative tax, no environmental regulations at all (my favorite whoopsie was an algae bloom that started inside China and reached 1/4th to 1/3rd the way from China to the US. It is terrifying to think about just how many fish, animals and plants must have suffocated when that happened), plus definitely using WAY cheaper labor, maybe even using slave labor.
I think you just hating and out of touch with reality (if this is not satire) cause how much less substance this comment are
the simple reason they die is because they sucks, that's just it. HN user just overthinking this simple reason the CONSUMER want
user just want something that's good, that's why nokia and blackberry die
not because they got killed by another big corpo, but because they can't adapt
Yeah I don't agree with the tone of this comment but the substance is correct. I didn't own a Nokia phone, so I can't speak to that. But Blackberry died because their phones just plain sucked. Even before the modern smartphone era they were unpleasant to use, but at least they were enabling something that nobody else did. But once the iPhone came along (and Android after that), they had competitors who were flat out better than them in every way.
And even that wouldn't have necessarily killed them, if they had adapted quickly to make this new kind of phone. But instead they made the Blackberry Storm as a "hey we can do this touchscreen thing too", but crippled it by giving it a resistive touchscreen which was incredibly unpleasant to use relative to the competition. And iirc they still insisted on tying it to BES, even though their competitors offered an email experience which Just Worked without having to use RIM's server. It seemed (from the outside to be fair) like RIM refused to recognize that the competition had blown them out of the water, so instead of pivoting to catch up they doggedly tried to offer "what we had before, but with grudging minimal concessions to the things our customers want". But that was never going to work, because customers had never liked their original model to begin with. They liked what it enabled for them, but once competitors could offer the same benefits with a more pleasant to use interface, it was over for that model.
Yes, most acquirers bungle the acquisition (regardless of nationality), but the reason these companies decide to sell in the first place is because their future prospects on their own don’t look great.
Skype was a consumer success but consumers violently hate paying for software (just read HN).
The market for video calls-as-a-business is entirely B2B. Skype with their fun whimsical branding and non-sales dominant culture couldn’t hack it. Plus, big dumb enterprises hate screening new vendors, so Microsoft/Cisco/etc were always going to win that space.
Zoom basically swooped in later able to take all the learnings from Skype and go B2B from the start.
Both Nokia and Skype went under due to usual European leadership stagnation and comfort before getting bought. Thankfully both sales funneled enough funds into EU to bootstrap a startup culture here.
I've worked for a European company acquired by big tech in the US. My experience was that the Americans were quite full of themselves and didn't want to learn how we operated. There was a vibe of “things are going to change around here, no more free rides, the grown-ups have arrived.” Awful management decisions were made, most of the talent left, and the team from the original company now only exists on paper.
n=1 and all, but I've heard similar stories. European tech companies have very different cultures and ways of making money, shaped by our laws and consumer expectations.
Skype, for example, was used as a pay phone and a simple messaging app before Microsoft bought it. You put in a euro, and you call and message your friends. It mutated into a bloated Microsoft Live app with several different front-ends, including some integrations with Office and various subscription services that sold the same thing in multiple ways. Core features stopped working, too. I'm sure someone liked the Frankenstein monster that it became (I don't kink-shame sadists), but most of the original users, and especially Europeans, did not.
If Microsoft had a purpose for Skype except for taking out a competitor, I'd say the decline would have been the result of managerial incompetence and American managers' lack of understanding of Europe. But of course, once a competitor bought Skype, there was no reason for it to exist anymore, so perhaps that is the reason it died.
Still, I wouldn't blame Europe so quickly. American big tech often fails to do business here within the local culture and laws, too.
I too have worked for a European company bought out by a large American company.
They too didn't understand our culture. They completely ignored the parts of our business that were scalable and taking off, and focused instead on nebulous "synergies". They actually seemed more interested in us taking on their branding than what we actually did. They'd push down demands to chase some latest trends but when we needed something back from them they struggled to give us the time of day.
They also immediately tried to give pay cuts and force immediate redundancies and seemed shocked to discover they couldn't legally do that. So instead they had to polite request that people in our company take a pay cut. I only know of one person naive enough to take them up on that offer.
I left a few years post acquisition, it was clear things would not get better we were just left rudderless because we'd previously been run by the founder for ~25 years and now were run by no-one with no direction.
What both of you are describing is just what normally happens with MOST acquisitions (regardless of the nationality of the acquirer).
Most acquisitions don’t turn into YouTube or WhatsApp/Instagram-level success for the acquirer. The academic literature on CEOs empire building via acquisition is that most of the time it’s value destructive.
I love a good US vs Europe debate but acquisitions aren’t an area where either corporate culture excels. European acquirers are equally as careless with their gobbled up playthings.
What I gather about the differences between American and European attitudes towards work hours and vacation leads me to believe that there's actually a material difference between American and European acquisitions. I'm certain that new Euro bosses don't walk in expecting to be able to pull everyone back from summer holiday on a whim, but I've heard of just such a thing happening when we Americans rolled in.
> I've worked for a European company acquired by big tech in the US. My experience was that the Americans were quite full of themselves and didn't want to learn how we operated.
Yup, that's also my experience. Americans are just like the unofficial President - they don't take "no" for an answer when they demand something, no matter what, unless you manage to get court judgements because that actually threatens the bottom line.
> Still, I wouldn't blame Europe so quickly. American big tech often fails to do business here within the local culture and laws, too.
I always remember when Wal-Mart tried to come to Germany... and had to leave with its tail tucked in because they just couldn't cope with stuff being done differently here [1].
>Walmart employees are required to stand in formation and chant, “WALMART! WALMART! WALMART!” while performing synchronized group calisthenics.
Do they still do this to this day? This is definitely an -ism of the early 2010's but I figured corporate stopped pretending that "we're family" by the close of the decade.
The smiling argument makes perfect sense. I hear several EU countries simply have a more blunt approach and pretty neutral mannerisms towards strangers. Americans would call the approach "cold", so there's definitely a cultral difference.
> I hear several EU countries simply have a more blunt approach and pretty neutral mannerisms towards strangers. Americans would call the approach "cold", so there's definitely a cultral difference.
Yeah. To put it blunt: When I want to get smiled at, I either woo a partner or go to a brothel.
That sure is a funny way to refer to a president who was elected by both the popular vote and the Electoral College. I'm no fan of Trump, but it sounds like a form of derangement syndrome to believe that he wasn't democratically elected.
Edit: Parent more than likely meant Musk as replies to this comment explained, I should have figured that out but it's too late or early or some other excuse.
I assumed GP was referring to Musk. No one voted for him, but he can crash a presidental press meeting to ramble about DOGE propoganda.
But it is hard to tell. They are cut from he same cloth after all, simply separated by a generation of figuring out how to squeeze more out of their labor.
Yeah I agree parent meant Musk. It really is bizarre the power he's been handed. Crazy the party that supposedly backs 'small government' is fine with that even if it takes the form of an unelected fool billionaire being given unreasonable amounts of power and doing nothing but causing damage.
GP probably meant the immigrant billionaire standing next to him all the time, who can't even bother to dress properly to meet with (arguably) some of the most important people in your country, aka Elon Musk.
Nope, Nokia was killed via suicide-by-microsoft-exec. They took in a MS aligned CEO and promptly proceeded to destroy their own chance of competing (using Maemo/meego or android for their phones) by using MS operating system.
I guess one could call it leadership stagnation, but I would argue more it being just plain old stupidity
> Both Nokia and Skype went under due to usual European leadership stagnation and comfort before getting bought. Thankfully both sales funneled enough funds into EU to bootstrap a startup culture here.
What? None of those were EU government owned, all was private. Do people really have this sort of (completely incorrect) view on how things work in Europe? Not even donald was ever stating such ridiculous things
Not true, just some cheap internet meme for people too lazy to bother understanding economics and different principles US and European societies and markets work on.
And the claim of parent that income from sales would go to EU, which is not true, it went to Nokia owners who aren't in any meaning 'EU'. Its like saying any sale of any US private company to some foreign one goes to trump and his government.
Your post is typical lazy propagation of trivially verifiable made up claims, not sure even by whom or for what purpose, but this forum has higher standards
I have fond memories of using skype to contact my friends and family circa-2011 when I was working for Nokia in Finland.
Ironically, microsoft killed nokia the same way microsoft killed skype, an acquisition and then strangulation.
if nothing else, it’s at least two times the european tech sector was actively harmed by US tech giants… which isn’t much, but weird that it happened twice.