It probably goes without saying that many of the great Canadians posting on Twitter are no longer based in Canada, but in Kevin Restivo’s case, a move overseas seems to have only offered him a better perspective on the IT industry’s biggest stories.
Kevin (who I’ll refer to by first name because we once worked together at CDN) has moved up the ranks over the years at IDC to a role where he now acts as senior analyst for the research firm’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker. This would obviously be an interesting area in light of the news this week that Microsoft plans to lay off some 18,000 workers, many of them from its Nokia division.
While our FollowFriday feature is usually a collection of interesting accounts, I was impressed enough by the stream of insights Kevin put together that I think it’s worth bringing them together in one place.
As with any major story like this, part of an analyst’s role is to give people a sense of how Earth-shattering it really is.
Sad day for too many @microsoft with cutback announcements. Not unexpected however given new leadership & uphill battle facing the company.
— Kevin Restivo (@krestivo) July 17, 2014
Then it’s about focusing people’s attention to the most salient details.
More interesting than the coming end of the Nokia X experiment is the fact phone production will be shifted 'mainly' to Hanoi. Unusual.
— Kevin Restivo (@krestivo) July 17, 2014
Like this:
2/ also, phone engineering efforts being maintained in Finland hopefully means job losses there as Nokia's bearing the brunt of cutbacks.
— Kevin Restivo (@krestivo) July 17, 2014
But before anyone freaks out . . .
3/ make that 'minimal' job losses in Finland given today's announcement of Microsoft job cuts. See last tweet for context.
— Kevin Restivo (@krestivo) July 17, 2014
This was a good point:
4/ while cutbacks are always viewed positively by markets, streamlining of operations needs to feed into larger vision for gains to be made.
— Kevin Restivo (@krestivo) July 17, 2014
And this was an interesting prediction:
CEO Satya Nadella wants to minimize company exposure to hardware production. Follow-up outsourcing news from MSFT wouldn't be a surprise.
— Kevin Restivo (@krestivo) July 17, 2014
Kevin has been doing this kind of analysis-via Twitter for a while now. Check out more from his dream about the Apple-IBM deal, changes at Google and more.