Nokia's colossal mistake

Stephen Elop's sale of Nokia's device division to Microsoft was a colossal mistake for both companies, writes Juha Saarinen. Photo / Getty

Watching Nokia's device division, once a world leader in technology, being dismembered by its current owner Microsoft is pretty horrible, even more so because it was pretty clear from the outset that the marriage between the two companies would fail.

And failed it has. The latest round of job cuts is again large, 7,800, and most of these will be in Finland.

I've put in a few questions as to whether or not this is it, no more Nokia-made handsets and other devices, but it's hard to see how manufacturing can continue although some of the design capability could be retained.

As it's been said before, Stephen Elop's sale of Nokia's device division to Microsoft was a colossal mistake for both companies - that's apparent when you look at Nokia Networks, which provides telco infrastructure equipment, and which appears to be trucking along nicely despite tough competition.

Nokia will go down in history is a technology pioneer that led the smartphone market by a huge margin but which was, and I hate the term, disrupted. So much so that there was no coming back once it was in dire straits. Painting itself into a Microsoft corner with no real decision making capability or flexibility only served to further tighten the noose around Nokia's corporate neck.

The latest round of sackings should also make it clear that Mr Nice Guy Nadella really is an iron fist in a velvet glove.

His relatively short tenure has seen Microsoft shed almost 26,000 jobs. Most of these are at Nokia, and the sackings will hurt Finland as a whole - I'm betting Microsoft will be a swear-word in that country from now on if it isn't already.

Nadella is no doubt looking at how Nokia is falling to bits in front of him, and trying to stop the rot from spreading to Microsoft as well. Expect the chill winds of Nadella's trimming the fat and focusing on core business to blow through other parts of Microsoft as well.

Who actually was the father of SMS?

Speaking of Nokia, it seems I was too hasty in anointing Finnish engineer Matti Makkonen, who died earlier this week, as the person who invented the Short Message Service or texting.

Instead, Makkonen appears to have had little or no involvement in the development of SMS, apart from working in the telco biz when it happened, despite what BBC and others reported.

If you really want to know the history of texting, it is published in the book Short Message Service: The creation of personal global text messaging in great detail in 2010, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the technology.

Who the actual creators of SMS then? That's not clear, unfortunately, but it seems to have been a team work by engineers in the GSM mobile telco standards organisation.

There was no pizza either, as Simon Rockman of The Register notes.

Makkonen's role or lack thereof in the development of SMS doesn't alter the fact that it's pretty amazing technology that has changed society globally. It would be great to find out who put it together and give them the kudos they deserve.