Nokia to lay off 4,000 staff - mostly in Symbian and MeeGo areas

Within a week of Nokia and Microsoft signing their "strategic partnership", the next phase of Nokia's change in direction has been revealed: a reduction in headcount by 4,000 and the move of 3,000 additional staff to Accenture to maintain Symbian:

Nokia laid out plans to align its global workforce and consolidate its site operations to deliver upon the new strategy, as well as the projected cost savings announced last week. Nokia expects the total reduction of personnel, across all sites and countries, to total 4,000 employees (out of approximately 65,000 worldwide, not including NSN) by the end of 2012. This includes an estimated 1,400 employees in Finland.

Reductions are expected to take place in phases until the end of 2012, linked to the rollout of Nokia’s planned product and services portfolio. The planned reductions will have the greatest impact on the Symbian and MeeGo R&D. In addition, approximately 3,000 employees are planned to transfer to Accenture to support the continued delivery of Symbian software development and support services. In accordance with local country legal requirements, discussions with employee representatives started today.

Our thoughts are with our friends at Nokia who may be affected by this move; and this also casts a dark shadow over the release of Nokia's Harmattan device later this year: with such a reduction in staff, the long term viability of Nokia's MeeGo efforts - even as an R&D project - must be called into question.

MeeGo Conference keynote & schedule published

The schedule for the MeeGo Conference, next month in San Francisco, has been published. Starting at 10am on Monday, 23rd May, Jim Zemlin's keynote will feature "many participants" and promises that the "future of MeeGo starts now":

A lot has happened since the last MeeGo Conference. Jim will begin his keynote by providing his perspective on the MeeGo Project today. He'll follow those remarks by bringing onto the stage a variety of project contributors and leadership to help attendees intimately understand the work that is happening on MeeGo and how it is shaping the future the Project.

With three weeks to go, your editors are looking forward to catching up with old friends and seeing the new developments. As at the Dublin conference, at the end of the warm-up on Sunday evening, and before the conference proper starts on Monday, MWKN will be "crowd-sourced" with live publishing. Bring your laptop, tablet or smartphone and help with contributions or fleshing out an issue. Location will be provided when we know what the venue's like: follow @Jaffa2 or @MWKN on Twitter, or hang out on the #maemo and #meego IRC channel if you want to know where we are.