Nokia still has a patent business Nokia may have been dethroned in handset sales supremacy but in terms of reaping in royalties, the vendor continues on a sweet ride. According to Nokia’s Q1 results for 2012, the vendor estimates that the current annual IPR royalty under its smart phone and mobile devices business unit income run-rate is approximately €0.5 …
Not quite.
SCO never had a research department the size of Nokia research. It never had an IPR portfolio the size of Nokia either. In any case "this movie" is not likely to be "shown in theaters" for very long.
In order to collect revenue from patents you have to file them. In order to file them you have to have working engineering and research. If times gets rough this is the first thing which the management consultants rationalize as surplus to requirements.
Microsoft saying anything other than their involvement with Nokia is to get their patents is a more obvious lie than a tory cast iron guarantee, a labour boom and bust promise and a libdem tuition fee pledge all rolled into one.
You can hear the cackling all the way to Redmond, where Stephen Flop will scurry back to clutching them, once his mission is complete.
They were making even shittier Symbian ones until very recently. I'd consider this a step up considering the state Symbian was in by then. Not even open-sourcing could save it.
Sad, really. Nokia still make some very good low-end and mid-range phones, but I don't think that's going to save them.
Article: “Over the life of the agreement, both the platform support payments and the minimum software royalty commitments are expected to measure in the billions of US Dollars. The total amount of the platform support payments is expected to slightly exceed the total amount of the minimum software royalty commitments,” Nokia said in its quarterly report.
So its as good as "earnings neutral" then?
Microsoft is in effect paying Nokia a few quid (net) in its attempts to expand its Windows Phone 7 user base; Not the $ Billions that was much heralded when the agreement was first put together...
Presumably the minimum software royalty commitments from Nokia to Microsoft continue once the platform support payments from Microsoft to Nokia dry up. IOW they become significantly earnings negative.
Your first hit is free...
I missed that point and it has to be one of the most relevent in the whole Microsoft/Nokia saga.
If Nokia are tied in to paying MS almost the same amount in royalties that they get in platform support payments, the the OS is effectivly zero cost, but no more than that. However android is also zero cost and a lot more popular. Nokia is really swimming against the tide and with a not very popular OS to boot (historically).
Nokia can only be gambling that MS will see windows phone as too essential to fail and promote it to the hilt, something that's not yet happened.
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