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After MS-Nokia Pact, Many Nokia Workers Walk Out In Protest
Mr. McGibby writes "After the announcement of the partnership between Nokia and Microsoft this morning workers voiced their concern with the deal by walking out of Nokia facilities. It is believed that as many as a thousand workers marched out today (or took the day off using flex time) so that the company would know that they don't believe the partnership is in their best interest, even after CEO' Stephen Elop's startlingly frank 'burning platform' memo earlier this week."
Looks like many investors felt the same way.
Looks like many investors felt the same way.
A thousand people are suddenly not at work, and no progress appeared to be lost. Really speaks volumes about where theyre headed. I know theyre a huge company, but come on......
If I worked at Nokia I would be looking for a job, like yesterday.
Who owns your data?
So finally, both decided to jump into the sea together.
Stephen Elop
Steve Ballmer
Steve Jobs
Scuba Steve
Should I name my next kid STEVE??? \(`)/
The summary is a tad misleading. It states that most who protested this work on the Symbian OS. So they are protesting because lots will probably lose their jobs. Not because they hold in their belief that the partnership is bad.
Holy fuck, Nokia employees got balls.
Already covered well in these slashdot stories from '06.
http://slashdot.org/story/03/01/06/1159207/Sendo-vs-Microsoft-The-Truth-Comes-Out
http://slashdot.org/story/02/12/26/1423247/Sendo-Accuses-MS-of-Stealing-Smartphone-IP
I suspect the same happens to Nokia.
Ya, it doesn't seem very likely that people would continue to buy phones that reliably make phone calls when they could spend more than I spent on my first car to get a phone that drops your call if you accidentally hold it comfortably.
Nokia makes good phones. Your prophecy will only come true if they completely ignore their workers and hold tight with Microsoft.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
MS has a history of hosing it's "partners". Sybase, threats to cutoff Intel's air supply, and the "Stinger" phone OS are some examples. As the saying goes, "If the lamb lies down with the lion, it better not fall asleep."
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
They should zune ahead of Apple and Google in no time.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
This is one move I don't understand.... Nokia has been fumbling for so long I guess this is one more fumble closer to the grave. I loved their phones especially when you de-branded them.
Nokia your mistake was allowing carriers to degrade your product with their junkware.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Nokia is sinking on it's burning platform, but then instead of jumping onto the water, the CEO just tied all the workers to an anchor (WP7) and chucked the anchor into the water.
Couple this with "lol, let's move the hq to CA" bullshit, and they're surprised the employees aren't happy?
Goodbye Nokia. It was nice knowin' ya.
--
BMO
Maybe it was the site of CEO Elop hopping around the stage yelling "Windows Windows Windows Windows Windows!" that made the Nokia long-timers grab their top coats.
You wanna bring in Silicon Valley software dynamism so you bring in a Microsoft exec???
Of course it's a stupid idea. But what did they expect? They hired a former MS exec to be their CEO. Of course he would make them dependent on MS - that's the only thing the fool can be expected to know.
It's like SGI hiring a former HP exec to be their CEO and then killing off MIPS to move to Itanium - totally and utterly predictable because these guys only know the bubble they've been in for most of their corporate career. They can't "think outside of the box" because they are the box.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
A Nokia executive once said that switching to Android would be like peeing your pants for warmth. It might help temporarily, but would turn your phones into commodities. Nokia would be forced to sell based on price alone!
I submit that going with WP7 is worse. It has all the disadvantages of Android in that your competitors can use it also, so it turns your phones into commodities. But it has none of the advantages - the extensive Android market, UI customization, and no OS licensing fee.
Using WP7 is like peeing your pants while Redmond gives you a golden shower.
i would like to see same kind of thing happen in america. or, any other country for that matter.
Read radical news here
I have not considered a Nokia phone in years. Who needs a phone that is three or more years out of date?
Now musing a little, I wonder isn't a partnership with MS one of the last things a company does either before being acquired by MS or filing for bankruptcy?
Gentlemen! Gentlemen, please! Can't we come to a compromise where you all fuck off?
Finland should take a page from Egyptian protesters and get their ass to Tahrir Square to demand the departure of Microsoft regime.
"Irhal Elop"
Just like every other partner.
i4i was one of their partners too. Look where it got them.
Who's got the list of former partners that wound up being smothered with a pillow in their sleep by Microsoft?
--
BMO
And here i was, waiting for the successor to the n900 (the whole pesky no 3g on att and all that) and thinking that the n900 replacement with an updated OS, 3/4g connectivity, and a capacitive screen would be the ideal phone....
Oh well, the atrix looks pretty nifty. Gonna have to spend $500 on the nebook-like dock, but it'll be worth it, i hope...
At least they aren't grabbing their ankles.
New Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop's career, as documented on Wikipedia
Before starting at Nokia, Elop worked for Microsoft from January 2008 to September 2010 as the head of the Business Division, responsible for the Microsoft Office line of products, and as a member of the company's senior leadership team. Before this, he was the COO of Juniper Networks, the president of worldwide field operations at Adobe Systems, and the CEO of Macromedia until acquisition by Adobe.
----
Lots of CEOs,CIOs, etc. bring in old workmates in their new workplace. While the existing relationship simplifies trust and reporting, things don't always go to plan, as folks don't really know workmates that well. I wonder is this is similar. He knew Ballmer and decided to forge an alliance based on a past work relationship. Or perhaps, one of the big reasons for his hire was his relationship with the Microsoft leadership team.
Alternatively, consider HTC - you know, the company that basically got started selling WinMo devices, and is now one of *the* big names in smartphone manufacture world-wide?
I'm not saying this couldn't go sour for Nokia, because it obviously could. But it certainly isn't guaranteed to, and could in fact pay off very handsomely indeed.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The Nokia execs and some tech writers make the case that Nokia thrives by selling very low end, but very robust phones in the hundreds of millions to the 3rd world where a modern smart phone wouldn't survive a day. They make the case that the Internet will be brought to developing nations via cell phones...low end cell phones, not high end smart phones.
It's a failed vision.
It is the vision of yesterday and today, but not of tomorrow. The "low end" of today won't exist tomorrow. Smart phones are advancing at such a pace that in the very near future none of the drawbacks they have today for developing nations (not rugged, very low battery life, high cost, etc) will still hold true. The market for low end voice/text-only cell phones will get taken over by low end smart phones....and chances are they'll be running Android, not Windows 7.
Nokia will be dead in ten years, quite possibly five.
My
That does it for me. Glad I've already switched to Pantech phones. (Pantech Impact. OS: Other) I specifically wanted a smartphone which did not use WindowsPhone, Android (you trust Google with YOUR personal data?), or Apple. That left Pantech and Blackberry, and the Pantech has a nicer keyboard.
HTC appeared on the map because they were early adopters of the android platform.
If it were for their WinMo offerings alone, they would have remained in obscurity forever.
MS want to go after Android. With an ex-MS man at the helm of Nokia, I'm not surprised they have pushed this deal through (especially since MS have managed to piss of their other handset manufacturers, and they have in turn jumped to Android). It may hurt Android market share very briefly, but I'll wager it won't be for very long before Nokia dumps WinPhone7 if this deal even goes through.
MS is trying to play catch-up with Apple and Android, and is losing badly. Wasn't Elop complaining the other day that Nokia was stuck playing catch-up? How can throwing their lot in with MS help them? Unless Elop is playing this deal with MS, so he has a magic bullet against Apple, I can't see their market position getting any better.
I do have to wonder if this deal is more about solving Nokia's legal battles with Apple. Surely MS will happily hand over patent licenses if Nokia is going to make WInPhone7 devices. Not only would this potentially void some of Apple's patent claims against Nokia, but even if Apple won in the ITC, the devices it is seeking an injunction against will not be around much longer. On top of that, MS would see a handy market boost if the ITC found in favour of Nokia and placed an injunction against the GSM iPhone. There is a reason Apple is trying to kill GSM and pick up CDMA: they probably see they aren't going to win the GSM patent lawsuits that Nokia have filed against them. In terms of the Apple vs Nokia battle, Nokia aligning themselves with Microsoft is an almost perfect match. I'd say that there is a whole lot more going on behind the scenes of this deal, in terms of patent cross-licensing, but Nokia won't reveal that until they get in a courtroom.
Given the sharholder and employee revolt against this decision, Elop may not be around much longer to see it through.
Is there any reason why phones cannot be dual/trible boot? Take a phone like the N8,add a good processor and give the choice of Andriod, WP7 and Symbian, and it would be a killer choice Other than the added effort of driver development, what would be the difficulty with it?
OMG, it's a troll convention :O
Right back at ya. My "dumb" Nokia is still going strong after almost 4 years. Of course the plural of anecdote isn't data; but if my "old reliable" is any indicator, they'll only go out of biz because they're stuff is too well built.
As for smart phones, I just don't care. Why do I want to pay that much extra for the privelege of playing stupid games while waiting for a burger, like the guy I saw today. He had those stupid tribal tattoos too. It screem "conformist waste of money". I bet he pulled up in an SUV, that he drove from his McMansion that was "never going to go down" but is now on the verge of foreclosure. Stupid consumerist trend followers.
See? I can take out my frustrations by being a ranting Internet asshole too!
Didn't sidekick get them on the map?
I think it was them that built that.
Even their winmo phones were appealing.
Htc is on the map for making good hardware, and finding decent software to augment. Android was not the start of that. I like sense enough to use it on my american g2
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Those articles are from 2003 and 2002 (respectively), not 2006.
But they do offer some insight into Nokia's future.
...the day Nokia committed suicide, abandoning their own top selling smartphone OS for one of the worst selling smartphone OS on the market.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
MeeGo apparently just wasn't ready to go. They had years to ready maemo/meego for the mass market with apparently little to show for it. Maemo SHOULD have been Android. Give up on C++/QT already guys. The clear path forward is a sandboxed, garbage collected environment for standard "app" development, with low level access for game development.
Anyhow, I'll still get what I want out of it. They're going to put out a MeeGo geek toy by end of 2011. If selling WP7 to the masses is the price of being able to do that, then that's fine by me.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Because, you know, the modern web is about 13 years old, and the pace of evolution is INCREASING.
In 5 years we'll have batteries that cost 10% of the price with components that draw 5% of the power and work off environmental factors (super efficient solar panels). You're post sounds like it was made by the guys at Nokia making 1999 phones in a 2010 world. Stand still and die.
I for one am happy someone FINALLY bashed Nokia over the head. Maybe now they at least have a chance to survive, at least a better one than the buckethead bracket of Dell and HP.
-rt
Unfortunately, good phones only go so far when nobody's buying them. People don't want good phones, they want flashy apps.
Big difference there - Nokia is well-established as-is (especially in Europe), and becoming "just another WinPhone vendor" is a major demotion.
Here. My favorite one:
And finally,
Nokia. No, not this OS deal, but in August 2009 ”The worldwide leader in software and the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer have entered into an alliance that is set to deliver a groundbreaking, enterprise-grade solution for mobile productivity. Today, Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop and Nokia’s Executive Vice President for Devices Kai Öistämö announced the agreement, outlining a shared vision for the future of mobile productivity. This is the first time that either company has embarked on an alliance of this scope and nature.”
The plan was to bring “Microsoft Office Mobile and Microsoft business communications, collaboration and device management software to Nokia’s Symbian devices.”
What happened? One and a half years later the same Stephen Elop announced that Symbian will be deprecated.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
you'll get up raped by a dog, if you get up at all.
Don't lie down, Nokia.
Unfortunately, good phones only go so far when nobody's buying them. People don't want good phones, they want flashy apps.
This recent story would seem to indicate otherwise. Dumbphones are cheap, tiny and durable. There will always be a market for that.
I carry around two phones, one personal and one for business. My personal dumbphone has survived through 3 different business smartphones and it is still going strong. The batteries still last a week, while I can hardly get my iPhone to last more than a day. Maybe that is why the manufactures prefer smartphones - they don't last nearly as long and so you have to keep buying new ones.
So it's still one mistake after another for therm... when will they learn!
Early cell phones were expensive to buy, expensive to operate, and very unreliable. Which is why investing the cheap, reliable COCOT paid off so well.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Fix the UI and browser and people will buy. It's crazy to abandon an ecosystem size of an ocean and jump into a pool that MS mobile is. But Elop did what he was hired to do.
I am wondering if there will be shareholder suits. Elop's action is clearly not in the interest of Nokia shareholders as graphically demonstrated by the trading results today.
Even more interesting would be if evidence of breach of fiduciary duty was uncovered on Elop's part. Were bribes paid?
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Imagine owning a company that partners with Apple. You'd lose all your staff, interns, apprentices and the hobo sitting outside your building.
Nokia and Ericsson (SonyEricsson) USED to make good phones, but neither are up to the quality and functionality that customers expects when it comes to the software. However Microsoft aren't there either with their phone operating systems. Reboot the phone at least once per week to keep it sane.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Seems like the OP is taking the chronology at face value. Its far more likely that Microsoft called Elop and offered a lot of money if Nokia switched to WP7. The "burning platform" memo came later, to make it look like the initiative came from Nokia.
Dear god no. Their smartphones are utter crap, and their dumb phones are on par with everyone else's dumb phones.
Did they pick m$ because 1) the CXO was drunk, 2) the company is in dire financial straits and m$ gave them a boatload of money to start using their stuff 3) m$ bribed the CXO with a boatload of money (and bedamned the company). I just don't understand why they didn't go with either Java, or Android, or make their own proprietary knockoff of Linux (like so many others have). Symbian might no longer be king of the hill, but if they were number 5 in the market, windows phone 7 is number 4 in the market. Why not try using number 1 or 2? Similar software means the differences lie in hardware. This deal looks like two drunks leaning on each other for support.
Throwing acronyms around doesn't make you informed.
The UAW didn't wreak the US economy or the auto market. Americans wreaked themselves collectively believing a bunch of corporate bullshit being promoted heavily by corporate created think tanks which started hitting full force in the 70s. They even got one of their spokespeople to run the nation into the ground for them (I'll let you guess who.) Bigger trends played bigger roles than a union stuck in a bygone era with forward thinking contracts and benefit packages which actually did more to heighten the decline of the USA than it showed their greed (which is how it was portrayed and continues to be.)
Everybody can't be the boss and form their own business even if we were all equally capable of it. Somebody has to be an employee. Fairly paid workers are not a handout; union workers are not handouts they are just not pushed around like pawns so easily-- like the permanent 20% underemployed people we have today who have zero bargaining power.
Unless you can live like the Chinese, we can't compete with the former communist's ability to out capitalize us.
If I had a smart phone provided by business, I too would have a dumb phone for personal.
Specifically for the charge issue.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I hope not.
I regularly shit on Nokia's mobile phone division because they largely can't get their shit together. however, nokia's enterprise communications stuff is fucking brilliant. I hope Nokia doesn't leave that market.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Sidekick guys were bought lock stock by Microsoft. The Kin devices were from that department and as we've seen, it died a horrible horrible death. HTC was originally MS and one could very well say got their legs by specializing in MS WinMo smart phones. Luckily, they were -agile- enough to jump onto Android when both HTC and Google really needed one another, now the rest is history.
Bye!
Now that Microsoft is going to assimilate Nokia, I am sure QT is in great danger. I pray that someone would get it and continue making it great as it is.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Have you learned NOTHING from the past twenty years of history?
Have you?
Here you have a giant company with major pipes into company accounts. They then pair with the largest builder of mobile devices in the world, that has agreements in place with every carrier on earth.
That sounds like a recipe for domination to me.
What you are overlooking is that in fact WP7 is a pretty good mobile OS, but it was gaining traction very slowly - it's just out the starting gate after all. But even so Microsoft is uisng deep pockets to by apps, and with Nokia's help can get a lot of really well built hardware running WP7 well, with Nokia's input on what customers want.
Within three years I think the dynamic duo will have surpassed Android in marketshare.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In almost all collaborations Microsoft came out better or broke even while the other partner had an NDE. To see these CEO lacking common sense and yet being able to command millions in salary and perks is amazing.
I won't be surprised if Nokia became a near non-entity in a couple of years.
If Nokia had slapped a compass and gyroscopes on the N900 I would have bought one over the iPhone or any Android device 6 months ago when I was in the market.
I got to play around with one for about a month, along with an iPad, Nexus One, HTC HD and Nokia N97, while doing some testing for a web app.
To me it was the standout. It's true I lurvs me Linux but even looking at it from the eyes of Joe Sixpack it was a slick little unit.
Of course it didn't have the number of apps of the Apple or Android stores, but let's face it, a big percentage of those hundreds of thousands of iPhone apps are custom apps for companies with flash based websites that don't work on the iPhone browser. Android and Meego don't have that problem.
The compass/gyro issue sent me to a Samsung Galaxy S in the end, but if a Nokia's Meego device similar to the N900 was available at the time sporting a compass and gyros I would have grabbed it with both hands and jumped on the development wagon.
I found it amusing reading endless product reviews and articles on technology sites constantly claiming Nokia had no response to the iPhone or Android. No one seemed to know the N900 even existed.
Why they chose to promote the N97 and hide the N900 from the public I'll never know. The N97 was easily the worst device of the bunch that I tested. The N900 absolutely spanked it. I guess the CEO at the time had a boner for Symbian.
Nokia choosing WM7 over Meego or Android before WM7 has even proven itself in the market looks to me like a similar decision.
Alternatively, consider HTC - you know, the company that basically got started selling WinMo devices, and is now one of *the* big names in smartphone manufacture world-wide?
I'm not saying this couldn't go sour for Nokia, because it obviously could. But it certainly isn't guaranteed to, and could in fact pay off very handsomely indeed.
Yes, they are one of THE big names selling Android phones. Sure, they had winmo stuff before but winmo was never huge compared to iPhone and Android. Sure, they're doing WP7 stuff on the side but that's not why they're one of the big names in the smartphone world.
Honestly, this Nokia-Microsoft partnership sounds to me like two losers in the smartphone world working together to make a really BIG fail.
... serves them right (posting as AC to not get into trouble).
The 1000 people who staged a walkout in Tampere, Finland were mostly Symbian developers who are protesting/scared for their jobs. As someone who lives in Finland and works with mobile devices for a living, this makes me plain angry. Nokia has 1500+ Symbian developers in Tampere and 500+ in Salo, that's over 2000 developers working on Symbian. What the fuck have you people been doing for all these years? Where are the results? And now that finally the new CEO decided to shake things up before Nokia goes completely tits up, you are protesting? Gee, the bubble you've been living in bursting must've hurt - think of it, Symbian wasn't a good, user- and developer-friendly environment you've brainwashed yourself into thinking it was.
It really was/is cringe-worthy, how out of touch you people were. Not 3 months ago, I was talking to some Nokia developers and they were keeping a straight face while touting the N8 as some kind of an amazing device and downplaying the Apple and Android ecosystem and talking how "Symbian added value to the user-expience". I kid you not!
http://getsatisfaction.com/nokia/topics/petition_to_nokia_reconsider_meego_as_strategic_platform
In the past, when we see company X do business with Microsoft, the only moaning we hear it limited to slashdotoid circles. This has got to be the first time I have ever seen where a body of employees and the stock market also agreed that doing business with Microsoft was a bad idea.
I haven't read through all of the comments yet, but I'm guessing someone has already started asking questions about "acting in the best interests of the share holders" matter. Of course, as Nokia is not a US company I'm guessing that's virtually a non-issue.
I hope the whole world is now paying attention to Microsoft's touch of death. Microsoft "partners" are usually just lambs lining up for the slaughter.
HTC was a nothing company that got lucky making a deal with a big partner. They had nowhere to go but up, and nothing Microsoft could take from them.
Nokia is a huge company that is selling its soul to the devil. I'm not talking about Microsoft: they've chosen the route of dying tech giants. They've refused Android because of their patent portfolio. It is one thing for a company to use patents while they continue to innovate, but when they give up innovation to focus on extortion, that's a death deal.
They could have chosen differently: they could have decided to make both Android and WP7 phones, and even continue with Symbian (although Symbian is dying). Samsung makes beautiful Android and WP7 phones. If anything, this deal most resembles SGI, giving up on their own excellent OS to run (what was then pathetic) WindowsNT on their machines. Not long after SGI became a shell of a company, with nothing but a large patent portfolio. RIP SGI. RIP Nokia.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yeah, I wish I'd chosen one of those instead of an E71.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You're thinking from a US centric view... There's what, 300m people in the US?
The rest of the world subsidises their phones properly.
I paid $0 for my iPhone 3G, and my iPhone 4.
If anybody still has illusions about Nokia being well-established somewhere and able to hold this position for long, come to Finland and check how many people are toting iPhones and Android devices. Walk into any cellular operator's store, or check Verkkokauppa and see which models are on offer.
I consider WP7 a passable stopgap solution for Nokia. Certainly better than to continue flogging the dead horse that is Symbian. Those employees walking out should have seen the writing on the wall long ago and walked out of their Symbian teams for good. The sharpest ones actually did. Unfortunately, the old Nokia guard in charge carefully shielded the rest from the harsh reality. Now is the time to wake up.
And this time it's not Windows Mobile. That would have been a sad story, indeed. Instead, it's a reworked platform free from Win32 legacy and the 20 year old mouse UI paradigms that are ingrained into it.
And Nokia is in a position to become for this platform what HTC was for WinMo.
What is a smart phone. For many its a mini laptop.
But for 99% of users in the developing market its a phone
1. Which can surf the internet
2. Watch videos
3. GPS
4. Facebook/docs/gmail
In India we already have rebranded chinese phones for 6000 INR. These are unlocked, as concept of locked phones has not caught on in India.
A bare bones phone(sms + phone + alarm) costs 1500 INR.
If you want a decent phone which can take a few bumps and yet run apps and surf the net, you have 8000-9000 INR "sportsphones".
2 years back this was unthinkable.
2 years from now, a 5000 INR phone will run apps and will run pdf and surf the net.
OF course to play that new game, you will need the 15000 phone.
3 years back a mid range laptop was 1000$. IT can still run docs and surf the net.
But today a 1000-1100$ laptop can run high end games.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
For "Nokia" as a company and its shareholders, it could pay off; but for those who have invested time and energy in the companies software technologies, it certainly doesn't. Such people now have their skills made almost completely redundant. Most of Nokia's technologies are open source, so there's still hope for alternative work with 3rd party compnanies using the technologies targeting non-Nokia hardware, but for most it means falling back on base skills like plain C++ or re-tooling to learn WP7. For those who decide to start from scratch (again, for many) - good luck if this gamble doesn't pay off.
For those who don't need to start again, but just worry about being screwed by Microsoft, there is only one sign of hope - one of the people going into this, the CTO Rich Green, has been screwed by them before, so at least he will be wise to it...which is fine for something called "Nokia" but for most of the employees - the people - it means next to nothing.
Nokia releasing WM7 Nokia phones isn't a terrible idea by itself.
Nokia dumping their other OSes for WM7 on the other hand is just pure fucking insanity.
By all means, bring out some WM7 phones.
But for sweet little baby Jesus's sake, why not bring out some Android phones and some Meego phones and some decent Symbian phones.
Why not bring out some phones that allow the customer to choose which OS they want at the time of purchase?
That would be innovative.
Is this guy a Microsoft plant? Is Microsoft now the majority Nokia stock holder? How does this shit happen??
The point of this deal is that Nokia will stop making good phones and start making Winphones. I, for one, will stop buying Nokia as I do not like Winphones.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Given that they are about to hit 10,000 apps, the developer uptake has been quite good for a platform that has failed to sell like hotcakes. I think that reflects the polarized attitudes developers have towards Microsoft. The majority say, "not on your life" but a very large number say, "sure, the dev tools are great, I'm a Windows developer, so why not." In other words, they've successfully tapped into a loyal developer base, and that part of their strategy is working.
The Nokia deal will inject more life into this as it's a sign of significant activity around the platform. Good, bad, immoral, whatever, WP7 developers are only boosted by this news, so it could accelerate development.
How HTC will react isn't clear. It may drive them further into Android for obvious reasons. But another way to look at it is that the cost for HTC to repurpose Android phone internals for a WP7 phone is pretty small. Remember, they are a Taiwanese company - they know how to turn around hardware designs cheaply like nobody's business, and as long as they are making money, they don't give a rat's ass about the license fees any more than Dell or HP does with Windows.
I can't recall another time I've posted anonymously.
I worked with Stephen Elop back in the Macromedia days, starting with him being my boss^2, in the late 90's. I've always found him a fascinating exec to watch. In the four years or so I saw him at Macromedia, I watched him: ... Whirlwind, I think?) for about three months which was long enough to fuck it up; so they promoted him ...
1. Come into IT, get the existing CIO kicked out, become the CIO, and fuck IT up[0]; so they promoted him and
2. He came into the Andromedia purchase, ran that business group for about a week which was long enough to fuck it up; so they promoted him and
3. He started a brand new business group (Internal name
The pattern reached its logical conclusion when he became CEO of the company and then ... sold it to Adobe.
Stephen is the most perfect example I've ever seen of the sometimes-mythic "failing upward" tendency. He turns everything he touches to shit, and ... then gets rewarded for it. It's like magic. I look forward to Nokia failing miserably, being sold to Microsoft, Stephen making billions out of the deal, and getting elected President of the United States, which he will drive into the ground, formally make into a Chinese colony like Hong Kong, and finally get promoted to God.
[0] Favorite story from that time: At the beginning of my time at Macromedia, our website was running on four servers, and I remember one time for a stupid reason three were not taking traffic. The first reason we found out about this was because someone mentioned the website was "a little slow." And we were taking tons of traffic. So Stephen came in and forced us to have a dynamic website. Hey, that's a GOOD idea. And then he decided we should use Broadvision for this. Which was a steaming pile of shit which BV recommended we reboot "as often as you can" because it was unstable. Which required horrific investments of money (we were buying Sun E4500s like there was no tomorrow and putting in 14GB of RAM in each -- back when Sun RAM was at around $7000 per GB). Which Stephen brought in KPMG to "help us" implement, which had the predictably hilarious results that anyone here who's worked with a big consulting shop has likely seen for themselves.
The way to fix that is not to use 3G, WiFi, GPS or Bluetooth, but then what's the point.
I took an old G1 to Thailand, 2G networks only, no data a spattering of WiFi and I charged it once every 4 days. When I used to use it for work it would last about 16-30 hours depending on usage.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
SE has always been shite, they've just been popular in Japan.
Nokia still does make good hardware but their software is nowhere near competitive with more advanced platforms. The E7x series performed its job brilliantly and had good battery life but they were really designed for a very specific function. When people complain about Nokia's, they complain about high end Nokia's like N8's which really are shite, because the OS is shite whilst the HW is fine.
Nokia's mid and low end phones are fantastic. My 6500 Classic runs perfectly after 3 years. 3xxx's only need to be replaced when they switch off the older 1 and 2 G networks. Battery life is phenomenal. Hardware is almost indestructible.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
No, both of those phones are subsided by the service contract you took out. You have paid full price for them, just in hidden monthly instalments over 2 years.
I paid A$600 for my Moto Milestone unlocked and unbranded. I then pay A$30 a month for service and 1 GB data. To get the same deal paying "$0" I would be paying A$70 a month for 24 months and be locked into Australia's worst carrier. So I'm saving $300, getting a phone months before it's released in Oz and my choice of carrier.
People really need to get it into their heads that "free" ($0) phones aren't free.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
...and every time I hear someone talk about Symbian I think about the Howard Stern show. Confusing.
Rather topical Daily Chart" over at the Economist last week. Yes, HTC have held their own, but look at poor Nokia. Totally squeezed out by Apple, who with a < 5% market share are taking > 50% of the profits. Looking at their downward spiral, it's clear that Nokia need something radical. It needs to be more radical than the Razr was for Motorola.
Google gets a Nokia deal at last!
HTC is rising, and fast. MS is their stepping stone.
Nokia is going the other way and MS is their life-boat.
That's the problem. Dumb phones last forever, smart phones don't. Those who switch from dumb phones to smart phones and those who renew their smartphones drive the market. Nokia has missed the train.
> And what will a similar screen cost in 3 years?
More than a monochrome display. And that is all that matters.
While obviously absolute costs need to go below a certain threshold so someone can afford a phone in the first place, cheaper is still better, especially for developing nations.
Let me tell you a story, once upon a time there used to be this innovative IT company (not who you think it is), they were going places, they had vision,they were almost a cult. Then over the years they lost direction and tried to diversify to recover but it didn't work. Then one day the CEO had this bright idea, lets do a joint venture with Microsoft, many sat there stunned. some called it sleeping with the devil. Anyway sales increased for a while but the main problem of "vision" was still missing. So to get around the lack of vision problem they decided to produce cheaper and more generic products. Well this didn't work as anyone can make a cheap generic product and sales stagnated, their long time customers left and towards the end they were looking for someone to buy them out. So who is this company you may ask, well its Apple in the 1990's. Now if you stand back and look at Nokia you cant help but feel Nokia are missing the point by hooking their rudderless ship to the good ship Microsoft especially considering Microsoft supplies software (immature as is) to any mobile phone maker. So Nokia's CEO now thinks he has the vision thing fixed , the share holders will see some sales but as a term solution the joint venture between Nokia and Microsoft are no better than Apples and Microsofts. At the end of the day if you hand over your hardware to Microsoft you become no better than the grey PC box makers that Apple was trying and failing to compete with.
> Within three years I think the dynamic duo will have surpassed Android in marketshare.
If you expressively limit that bet to Windows OS and not Meego, Android or other, I am willing to take you up on this bet.
Ideally, I'd suggest FOSDEM 2014 for exchanging of the goods, whatever they may be. Looking forward to it.
I work with companies which are designing and manufacturing phone CPUs (sometimes tablette CPUs), to be introduced in the market 1-2 years from now.
I can assure you that those manufacturers are validating their design with Android, Ubuntu, Symbian or even BlackberryOS benchmarks. But WP7 has ZERO visibility in this field. CPU makers just dont care about WP7 because market shares are so damn low.
At least. Meego was Linux-based.
I have become excited about the Nokia N900, which is like an ordinary computer in that it runs a Debian-based Linux distribution (Maemo) with a software repository and everything. Now, I was eagerly waiting for the successor to the N900, running MeeGo (the successor to Maemo) and then they go and cancel it! Unless I settle for the ageing N900, there is no reason left for me to consider Nokia products anymore. I'll just go on with my current eight or nine years old phone, which can do all the things I actually need - GSM, SMS and alarm. Killing their most flexible Linux operating system and initiating a collaboration with Microsoft - pfft, how unimpressive.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Thing is, there isn't really any major WP vendor right now. There's 5 devices by HTC, 2 by LG, 2 by Samsung, and 1 by Dell. So HTC comes closest, but still, compared to their Android line-up, this isn't all that impressive; and the rest are clearly token efforts. So there is a niche to fill here (assuming WP itself is viable long-term).
Now if Nokia went for Android, then they would end up as "just another Android vendor" - which is probably why they didn't.
I'm starting to think he wasn't hired, he was temporarily transferred to a remote office to shut it down.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm actually wondering what the other development team involved thinks about this: the guys who created WM7.
Now Nokia is supposed add input with regard to further development? They might perhaps veto some design decisions, add other goals? Surely Nokia would love to outmaneuver the other hardware manufactures. This cooperation seems to grant Nokia enough leverage to do so.
As a WM7 developer with a vision for my product I'd feel pretty pissed. Strategic thinking of a hardware manufacturer will steer the future of my software baby? Of a manufacturer with distinctly different mindset? Who just realised that his software strategy tanked.
To my knowledge I don't know anybody on the WM7 team. But I feel already sorry for you guys.
That's just the corner of this deal that interests you. Finland has a great deal invested in Nokia - as their largest corporation and business it was a huge employer and its stock a huge part of retirement funds, since it was for a long time a reliable producer. The dissipation of its worth to a remnant small enough or Microsoft to acquire, the loss of the jobs overseas, the lost taxes, the loss of the profits and the secondary and tertiary effects are going to be a huge hit to Finland. Many thousands of very good engineers are losing their jobs over this also.
Other people care about different stuff. Your personal choice of a cellular phone platform isn't the most significant thing happening here by a long stretch, even if that's the fraction you most care about.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It's clear what the geeks would get out of MeeGo on smartphones. It's not at all clear what Nokia would get out of it. N900 was a wonderful device - for a hacker. But "look, it's a full Debian distro" is not a kind of feature that will woo casual users. They want their shiny. More importantly, they want third-party support - apps and such. That's where the "ecosystem" angle comes in. We already have iOS, Android, Blackberry, WebOS and WP7 - all with incompatible development frameworks and APIs. Muscling one's way into this market with your own brand new offering, again incompatible with everyone else's, is very, very hard. Heck, look at WP7 itself - it's still struggling hard for developers attention, because it had to go against the already established iOS and Android. MeeGo would have stood no chances there.
I think Maemo was a fine platform for about five years, until it was merged into Meego.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
HTC was a much smaller company, and still are. They did not have their own OS which could have given they greater differentiation. They were not facing the same level of entrenched competition from Apple and Android.
Selling Compaq devices. HTC made iPAQ. Then went on from there. That MS software was on it made no difference; Compaq did the software to tie the MS OS to the HTC hardware. Yeah, Compaq, not HP, which was even crappier before it took the iPAQ line as its own.
Second, at another site, people just decided to go get dru^W^W home early, after the announcements, within their flex hours or whatever, not in huge protests. Much ado about nothing. Nobody would've gotten any real work done anyway, who would have?
HTC was never particularly successful in the mass market before Android. In the WinMo days, HTC phone targeted the poweruser that could live with WinMo's faults while it perfected the in-house hardware design and software customization skills. Basically, MS gave it a launching pad, but you have to give credit to HTC for their initiative, most Taiwanese WinMo partners wasn't able to see pass the fact that WinMo was a dead end. HTC saw this and tactically positioned itself in the Android camp, while paying lip service to Microsoft. The HD2 was the ultimate exercise in the futile attempt of polishing a turd.
In GSM markets, since the release of the Desire, things have been up and up for HTC. The Desire is the first real iPhone alternative for the casual smartphone user. It's easy to use, looks good, and can load apps from the Market fuss-free. Push email works well and you get to sync all of your important PIM details such as contacts and calendars for free. Navigation via Google Maps is not only free but ever improving.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
And HTC is currently successful with selling WP7 phones???
Consider Motorola, they stood up from their grave because of?
Memo to Elop: Just because we are on fire doesn't mean you have to add more fuel...
It became "one of *the* big names" after it partnered with Google and went for Android.
17 out of 29 current HTC devices run Android, the rest WinMo.
Sigs are for the weak.
[1] Not to single them out here the PRC is even better at this, and Apple over the past few years has been trying hard.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
In memoriam : Microsoft's previous strategic mobile partners lol
All immediately after the N900 gets Android apps too, sad & stupid Nokia. If Intel's buddies continue pursuing MeeGo tablets, we'll maybe come back around to a MeeGo phone again, eventually.
Ideally, Finland might provide startup funds for some ex-Nokia employees wishing to bring another MeeGo phone to market. A small tech company with less overhead could do so far more inexpensively.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Ericsson used to make good phones. The T68 was the first phone I owned that seemed to do everything I wanted in an easy way. It let me sync via bluetooth (really nice with range notifications - move the phone into the same room as the computer and it syncs automatically). It properly supported the Bluetooth dial-up-networking profile, so I could use it as a GPRS modem.
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if provided by business, most of the times you will get a blackberry, just like I did.
And it will all be managed by a disgruntled windows admin allowing you almost no possibility to install anything on it, or change any of the options.
So basically I have a dumbphone where I can also write emails, but blackberry big.
chimes a bell to anyone ?
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
HTC did a lot of customizations to Windows Mobile to make it a usable OS, especially after iPhone was released. Before that HTC was one of generic OEM Windows Mobile manufacturers. Since Microsoft decided to prevent manufacturers from customizing the software in WP7 (most likely to prevent fragmentation like Android), Nokia can only differentiate themselves by producing interesting hardware.
Remember that Palm, while producing great hardware, couldn't win the market with a series of Windows phones.
I second that, hopefully the flagship phones will be loaded with Meego while the midrange phones will operate on wp7
"and is now one of *the* big names in smartphone manufacture world-wide" Y'know, AFTER they became the partner-of-choice for the first batches of Android phones? HTC nowadays mostly pays lip-service to Microsoft, but it is an Android shop now.
HTC is best known for their Android devices...
This pact is like the pact between a vampire and its victim. MS will suck all blood out of Nokia. Wouldn't be surprised if Elop has been working for MS all the time. Obviously he is not working for Nokia.
Who buys Nokia phones anymore? Symbian is a fine technology, but management made numerous mistakes that took Nokia from the lead position to next to oblivion. Betting the future of your company on a Windows phone doesn't seem too smart, either.
What are the major cell phone OSs? There's iOS, Android, Symbian, RIM and WebOS and Windows. Maybe Microsoft's plan is to take out Symbian and RIM (HP/Palm already has botched WebOS) so that they are one of the top 3. That would at least follow their general business plan for computers - instead of innovating they conquer and divide.
HTC sells Android devices now.
What made the iPhone such a success? Apple looked at what they thought a phone should do and then developed an OS and infrastructure around that vision. Google did a similar thing with Android but started with where Apple left off. Not really innovating, but it will be successful because of sheer market presence. Innovation with Android comes from the phone manufactures because the OS can be adapted to so many things. Microsoft is also not innovating, but trying to stay in the game. To do so, however, they need manufactures and so enters Nokia.
Nokia who once was a leader in innovation for both hardware and OS is left with the task of producing a commodity product to run somebody else's non-innovative idea for a phone. This does not bode well for Nokia as their success will now be tied to Microsoft. Furthermore, alienating their developers for Symbian is a real issue. If as a Symbian developer, I will have to learn a new platform, will I chose the low penetration Windows or put my efforts into developing for iOS or Android? Palm's WebOS developers faced a similar fate and many of the best went Android.
Why? Not because Android (or iOS) was better than WebOS, but because they have families to feed and bills to pay. The same will be the case for Nokia's Symbian developers. There was already internal friction between Symbian and Meego. Adding Windows to the mix will just further fractionate the developer community and it makes Nokia look like they don't have any kind of strategy at all.
As the phone makers have learned, to have a successful smart-phone, you need developers. Alienating your developers is not a good way to succeed in a market that can change overnight.
Why would anybody want to run WordPerfect on a phone?
when they hired Elop? I am not saying that Elop is a Microsoft plant, but he sure looks like a Manchurian Candidate.
1. Get hired as CEO of Nokia...check
2. Torpedo all initiatives within Nokia to adopt Linux based OSs...check
3. Profit!!!
Good work, Ballmer!
In 2008, Apple’s market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent
Impressive: at +18% per year; in just 10 more years they'll have 241% of the market!
They are enjoying a tremendous growth trajectory with a 78 percent earnings growth year over year in Q4 2010.
That does look good. Let's see: "2010 revenues at Apple Inc. totaled $65.2B" (http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/earnings/earnings.asp?ticker=AAPL:US). So 10 years from now they should have $20.8 trillion/year in revenue!
disclaimer: past performance does not guarantee future results
I wouldn't call EU a "3rd world".
In 2008 Nokia sold about 60 million smartphones, when the next competitor, RIM, sold 23 million. Numbers changed but not drastically
Please stop bashing the company you know so little about...
Actually, I pay $60 p/m and get 2GB data and way more than $60 worth of calls... you're just trying to justify spending $600 for a phone.
Try using it sometime. If Nokia had created WP7 with a Linux kernel Slashdot would have nothing but nice things to say about it.
It's possible that this could work. But given the track record of partners with Necrosoft...I mean Microsoft, I think this is the start of a much faster decline for Nokia.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
My biggest concern is, what does this mean for Qt and it's further development?
Why is Symbian dying? Last I checked the smartphone adoption was something like 20% at global level. Much less that that in individual countries. What are the 80% dumbphones of the world running? Aren't most of them running Symbian?
If you mean "Nokia is [i]killing[/i] Symbian" then ok, but that's a whole different bunny.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
I have been buying exclusively nokia phones for 15 years for self and family. Liked the brand, quality, simplicity & consistency of UI, reliability, exchangeable chargers, exchangeable batteries in the earlier series.
But this move marks the end for me, sadly. I will never buy a nokia with any variant of windows on it, period. I want a phone to never crash, be 100% stable, and "boot" instantly. Windows cant do that. Blue screen of death on a phone? Busy windows based UI, or anything basically microsoft touches turns to crap.
Swapping out symbian for android would've been a more sane move.
Goodbye nokia, brought down by a ex-microsoft idiot who probably doesnt get that microsoft only makes money because of the monopoly. If microsoft had to compete head on without the backwards compatibility drag against google et al, it would be history.
Microsoft hasn't been real good about innovating and competing lately, but they still have piles of money with which to buy themselves a boost from desperate dying companies where they can get it cheap.
A Microsoft executive just took them over and handed Nokia over to Microsoft. The fact that they already have a prototype WP7 phone suggests Elop has been working on this right from the beginning of his start less than 6 months ago.
I predict this will be pretty helpful for Microsoft, but not so much for Nokia, who will essentially dump most R&D and end up being merely a distribution organ of Microsoft corporation.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Oh, it's been much more than just one partner. And that's not even a list of everyone they've ever screwed--just smartphone makers. Unbelievable.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
First, you were talking about three years. Now, it's five to ten all of a sudden. Nice trick, but that does not change much, really.
While China will have a higher average income, most of the over a billion people will still be dirt poor by our standards. Same for India. And Africa. Eastern Russia, Mongolia etc as well. Look at how income develops, and at how it's being distributed, over time. Ten years is nothing for the poorest of the poor. They will still be in exactly the same situation.
Once demand for monochrome displays drops below the threshold that simply keeping old factories and machines on running is not a worthwhile endeavor any more, then yes, the same will happen as with DDR2.
But that will definitely not happen withing three years. And most likely not within ten years, either.
If anything, this deal most resembles SGI, giving up on their own excellent OS to run (what was then pathetic) WindowsNT on their machines.
The OS was not the problem, it certainly wasn't Windows. The problem was that SGI started producing "commodity" based hardware that ran Windows. These were nothing more than low/mid-end PC's with the SGI logo on them. The hardware sucked compared to the older real SGI hardware.
At the same time Intergraph was making relatively nice PC's that ran Windows and they did just fine. They ate SGI's lunch too (all while running Windows NT).
I can only see this deal as downhill. There seems to be little upside for Nokia here. They get to ride a downhill track alongside Microsoft which has yet to succeed in any other market under Ballmer, using a platform which has barely left alpha ( the point at which MS seems to start selling platforms these days if the problems are anything to go by) and with no innovation other than different coloured "me-too" ripoffs.
On the other side is Nokia who could have been smart by opening up their hardware a la HTC and simply go back to core business, making hardware. That is what they ARE good at.
But hey, this is what you get if you put an ex MS droid at the top.
If I was a shareholder I'd drop the shares as fast as I could flog them. Better a slightly depressed price than no money whatsoever. I bet the price will bump shortly because a lot of smarter people start shortening the stock, the only possible reason MS stock is still hanging on..
Nope, I don't buy this as anything good. Nor will I buy anything of that club - not a chance.
Insert
The problem with Nokia is that if it keeps acting like Sun it will end like then. It's not too late for them, though, because their mobile (not talking about smartphones) division is very strong and its brand is respected, at least here in Europe.
...the cover page of their personnel file.
As soon as HR are ordered to exert some rather literal firepower to help the head trojan horse (dropping a payload of Windows) "show how much he means it", yesterday's timesheets are all its going to take them them for compiling a hit list of perceived illoyal and/or unionized employees who "have asked to" be jettisoned off the "burning platform" first.
I think the real issue here is that Nokia is trouble. Big as they are, their market share is sloughed off at an alarming rate. They are dying. Symbian is doomed. They are way behind in terms of technology and certainly had to make some change. They really had only two viable options. They could either jump into the Android market and join the blood bath, or go to Microsoft.
Going into the Android market would have meant going back to what they were doing half a decade ago, which is to say that they compete on hardware and price. Plowing into the Android market means that you are one competitor among many and that you are in a commodity market. This isn't some place Nokia has never been. They did their best when they were slugging it out on in the cheap cell phone market. It is scary for Nokia in that every time a customer goes to buy a phone there is nothing to differentiate Nokia other than price, hardware, and reputation, but this is a market Nokia knows and did well in. Nokia is afraid that all things being equal, when a consumer is presented with a list of options, Nokia is not going to be offering the best hardware at the best price with the best reputation. Getting in bed with Android is basically a declaration that you think you can make the cheapest, best, highest quality piece of hardware and that you can win on the merit of what you have done with the hardware.
The other option was to jump in bed with Microsoft. Getting into bed with Microsoft means that you try and win by promoting a platform. You are trying to get people to buy a Nokia phone not because it is cheap, the hardware is good, or because Nokia has a good reputation for quality, but because the person in question wants a Microsoft phone. Nokia is essential terrified of competing in the hardware market, and so is going to link their desirability to software which they don't control control.
Personally, I think their plan is insane. Microsoft is lagging well behind Apple and is light years behind Android. Stuff Android has been doing for years, and things Apple has been doing for a year are still not implemented on WiMo7. Maybe Microsoft is going to come blazing ahead of the technology pack, but I really doubt it. It would take a pretty extreme overhaul of the OS to get within technological striking distance of Apple or Android. Microsoft just doesn't show a capacity for rapid development that Android thrives on. Apple isn't so extreme in their rapid development as Android, but they have shown a capacity to develop at a pretty moderate pace and maintain a very stable OS. Microsoft has shown no capacity to develop at stability and moderate pace as Apple does, nor at the rapid and frantic pace that Google pushes. MS is behind and shows no signs of catching up. None of their non-phone products show that they the management potential to develop like Google or Apple does.
I think Nokia has hooked their wagon to a dead horse. They are going to try and win in a market based upon an OS, and the OS they have picked shows no signs that it can even begin to close the gap, much less maintain pace.
The user interface provided by Nokia has from their early days been very hard to understand - at least for me, and that has put me off from using Nokia. And that has been on their simpler models.
As for Ericsson/SE - the best models were the earlier models - like the SH888/I888 - built like a tank and reliable.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
"Asshole", "shill" "Amateur"? Thats the best you can do? Really?
My phrase Foss Teams was not intended to be derogatory. I put it in quotes because I wasnt sure what phrase to use. There are companies that provide FOSS products, some only do FOSS, some contribute to FOSS but also sell proprietary solutions. Then there are groups of people that develop FOSS products. If FOSS Teams is not a the right phrase, then what is?
FOSS (LAMP) in particular in the sever space has a strong presence. But, I maintain it is not dominant. Microsoft sells lots of server products every year. Overall, the numbers Ive seen are more favorable to Windows server and related products. Of course, you can look at narrower markets and show different numbers. For example, in 2008, the super computer market was dominated by Linux (at like 90+%). It still is, but much less so today. Almost a year ago, Computerworld published this article, saying Windows Server had a 73.9% market share for the fourth quarter of 2009. In June of 2010, Mary Joe Foley (who loves to rake us over the coals) wrote this article saying that PP
I found these two articles pretty easily. Im sure you can could find some others. I suspect the data wont be materially different - it is unlikely that, in aggregate, FOSS server software has a dominate market position by any stretch of the imagination. Note, Im not arguing that if you narrow things to specific sub-markets that FOSS will show much stinger numbers, but dominant ones? In major markets (not just niche things).
Said another way - what is your definition of dominant? Mine is dominate like the iPhone, or Windows, or Office.
The major FOSS products, like Linux, the LAMP stack, and MySQL (there ere others too...) are great products, developed by very capable and innovative people. They are also free. But even in the face of those characteristics, and the huge advantage of being free, MSFT has a solid and profitable market share competing with FOSS in the overall server space - its a $15 Billion market for us, and growing, and very, very profitable. That is success by any measure. We sell stuff to millions and millions of happy customers every year, year in, year out. Thats speaking with actions.
We make some really great products. Weve also built some super-crappy ones. Just like many other companies. We are a dominate number one in some big markets and were a strong number two in many others. We are committed to becoming so in some other markets (like search). We are good at growing profitable business over time and pruning ones that fail. Microsoft people almost universally have a strong and healthy respect for the people and products we compete against. The Apple iPod, iPhone, and iPad are insanely great products. Apple, Google, Oracle, and IBM all have smart, capable, innovate people. So do many FOSS projects.
Its cool that you dont like Microsoft - its a free country. But do you have such disdain for other major technology companies like Apple, Google, Oracle, IBM, Amazon, HP, or Facebook? Is the company that employees you any better? Or do you work for your self? If so, what do you do that is more moral or better? What FOSS projects have you contributed to in a material way? How many bugs have you fixed in FOSS software? Did these fixes make it into actual shipping releases? How many people did they help? 10s, 100s? Millions? Or is a sneering, cursing, hyperbolic post the best you can do to compete with Microsoft?
Its trivialy easy to b
Jibe!
There is no doubt to my mind that Nokia seems to have lost direction while blackberry / android / ios have good robust plans. I remeber during the mid - late 90's how dominant they were.Will the WIN7 Mobile platform help them get back on track ? I dont know but at least they seem to be trying to regain traction to keep themselves relevant.
While many have have said that the engineers have paid the price for bad management - I agree. However not trying to get the company competitive again may result in everybody facing job losses if the whole company becomes a thing of the past
Dumbphones are dying. That's basically why. I have nothing against Symbian, but unless it makes the jump to smartphones, it will ultimately be relegated to a very small niche as smartphones become cheaper and cheaper. Surely you can see this.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Nokia is behind development of Qt.
Qt is a dependency of KDE.
Should I be worried?
So.. why doesn't Elop go to jail in Finland for this act of Corporate Sabotage?
You owe me $ 0.000 006 4 (preferably NOT payable in U.S. $)
Fathers of three kids, 38 years, newly bought house, new car, new boss, no job. I can sympathize with those who not only dislike but also have no respect for Stephen Elop who does not own any Nokia shares, but several hundred thousand Microsoft shares.
If you have experience with Symbian OS you know how ridiculously hard it is to write a correct app for it and how writing for Symbian OS often leads to brain damage. I suspect all 2000 Symbian developers were working on a single Twitter app for Symbian, but after a year of development all they could show their CEO was a picture of a bird going chirp, chirp. I suspect that's when the CEO decided to just give up on Symbian.
Why is Symbian dying? Last I checked the smartphone adoption was something like 20% at global level. Much less that that in individual countries. What are the 80% dumbphones of the world running
They are running S40 and the like. S40 and S30 is still Nokia's money-making machine, and they continue to be part of Nokia's strategy.
Symbian needs to be buried.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
By "price" did you refer to the cost of developing the software? Improvements in programming languages, source code editors, and methodologies have reduced the cost per function point. Or by "price" did you mean the sticker price that each end user pays? Improvements in subsidy models and larger markets have reduced that too.
You're forgetting that in 5-10 years, many developing nations (most notably China) will have higher mean incomes.
Mean isn't as important as median. Mean is skewed by millionaires and billionaires, raising an economy's Gini coefficient. The median income isn't as likely to increase substantially until agricultural automation allows the population to become at least 50 percent urban.
As demand for monochrome displays drop significantly and that of smart phones rise
Not guaranteed. Smartphone service is still much more expensive per month than dumbphone service, and some people in even the developed world can't justify paying for it. Until smartphone service becomes cheap enough to match the under $10 per month that I pay for service on my dumbphone, dumbphones will continue to have economies of scale.
For both businesses, the decision to partner was one of brilliance.
I have no doubts that it will be successful.
I would like to drop a short comment about the diffuse (partial) misinterpretation about Nokia's stocks fall.
Many websites report the above mentioned fact as a direct consequence of the Windows Phone deal exclusively. This is basicly untrue.
Nokia stated that 2011 and 2012 will be "transition" years and, most importantly, is not releasing any financial annual target for 2011, which is the main cause of investors' dissatisfaction.
YES! Because there are so many people out there looking to buy the new windows 7 phone, because its totally awesome right? Surely this will help Nokia tremendously.
In reality nokia gets little to no benefit from windows 7 phone, it is microsoft that serves to potentially benefit from this aspect of the partnership.
(this pcomment is written by the same user who submitted the opening one and includes no furtherly useful information about the subject.)
Sic, sorry for mistyping the title. I am currently writing with a terrible keyboard which feels alien to me.
"Our smartphone platform has no future. It isn't providing the experience users expect. 3rd parties aren't supporting the ecosystem so you can't get good apps. OUR NEW FLAGSHIP MODEL THE E7 IS NOW ON SALE AFTER 6MONTHS PROMOTION."
A race to make hardware (be it high-tech, or not) and software cheaper in the East while simultaneously raising the standard of living there in order to create a replacement market at a faster rate than they lower the standard of living in the West and so destroy that market. Quite the knife-edge balancing act...if they destroy too many jobs in the West before the market in the East grows enough to make the profit loop self-sustaining...or if there is another great big financial scam that collapses...global decompression.
lolll..of course, the designated loser is the West...well, give or take between 0.2% and 1.0% of the West's population, so to be precise "labor" in the West is the designated loser.
Oh, they make another gamble: A gamble that the West will never face another military threat capable of moving across or even jumping between continents. For a nation's industrial infrastructure is its true arsenal...and the West decimates theirs to make a few people great piles of the illusion that is known as "money"...amusing, since the latter is a figment of the human imagination created solely to facilitate trade and denominate true wealth...true wealth, like the ability to take resources and transform them into useful things.
Of course, you may believe that Microsoft will change its act and go against the corporate greed/herd mentality and so won't immediately or eventually transfer the majority of Nokia's intellectual property and "work" to the East...if that is your wager, then you should stay away from places like Monte Carlo and Las Vegas.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
All my thinking was predicated on the fact Nokia had chosen a direction with Microsoft. But now I see they have chosen all directions, which will end in a horrible wreck at some point:
http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/12/nokia-new-strategic-direction-what-is-the-future-for-qt/#comment-2498
So sorry about the excitement, bet is off, you were right to bet the other side.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Anecdotally, HTC seems to be selling plenty of WP7 devices. Samsung has a slightly larger slice of the WP7 pie, but HTC has the second-biggest chunk.
How well their total sales volume compares to expectations, I cannot say. They certainly haven't turned their backs on the platform, though - there are 4 HTC WP7 devices that I know of, the HD7 (revised HD2), 7 Pro (revised Touch Pro 2), Trophy (not sure what its ancestry is) and Surround (no ancestry that I know of). I think that may be more than any other single OEM, in fact.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Well, and 4 of the 9 known WP7 models...
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I've got my 6 months of "fuck you" money saved up
There was a very good series of articles in the English edition of Helsingin Sanomat: http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Knock+Knock+Nokias+Heavy+Fall/1135260596609
It basically tells, that it all began around 2003, when the development focus shifted from actual devices to software and services.
Then came hordes of managers of various levels, but there was no leader, there was no vision at all, just @ss-covering 'en masse'.
In the end, dozens of managers could say "no" to just any idea, but the one, who can say "yes" was just nowhere to be found in the crowd.
Etc., etc.
By the way, quite the same thing happened to MeeGo, however in a bit smaller scale. Inside Nokia, everybody knew, that Symbian was a dying platform. The managers fleed like rats from a sinking ship, and eventually too much of them ended up in the to-be-featured MeeGo Dept. Guess what happened next...