Nokia has been losing two things at alarming rates recently – market share and employees. In what is the third round of redundancies in recent memory, Nokia has announced it will be cutting loose 4,000 employees from its operations in the UK, Demark and Finland.
As well as shedding all those employees, Nokia will also be transferring around 3,000 people working on Symbian to technology outsourcing giant Accenture. Hang on a minute – Nokia has three thousand people working on Symbian? No wonder they are in trouble if they are paying three thousand people to develop an OS that precisely 0% of the US smartphone buying public are looking to purchase (according to Nielsen numbers released yesterday).
The staff will be tasked under Accenture with the continued development of Symbian OS (this is despite previous rumours of it’s demise), as well as building services and products to sit atop Nokia’s newest OS, Windows Phone 7.
Jo Harlow, executive VP for Smart Devices at Nokia painted a rosy picture of the move –
“As we move our primary smartphone platform to the Windows Phone platform, the transition of skilled talent to Accenture also shows our commitment to provide our Symbian employees with potential new career opportunities.”
Nokia still has a firm grip on emerging markets, but as Android begins to penetrate the low-end is continuing to develop Symbian really viable – especially with that many staff?
Although outsourcing Symbian development will undoubtedly be cheaper for the Finnish handset giant, new CEO Stephen Elop’s famous “Our platform is burning” memo seemed to imply the approach required was to fix the platform they were on, not shuffle their people around to a variety of different, lightly-smouldering platforms.
