Nokia Has a Billion Reasons To Love WP7

theodp writes "A report from Bloomberg notes it ain't easy, or cheap, to outbid Google. Microsoft has reportedly agreed to pay Nokia more than $1 billion to 'promote and develop' Windows Phone devices under the agreement between the companies. Bloomberg says the agreement for the payment was 'part of a campaign by Microsoft to keep Nokia from choosing Google's Android operating system.'"

Comments

Re:Nokia has amazing hardware, but not software

[gbjbaanb]

If its so great, how come they sold sweet f*** all of the things?

sure, the adverts were pitiful, but the reviews were generally positive. As such, I'd expect a lot more to be sold than the reported 2 million over 3 months. (eg Apple sells 40 million in the same time, Android sells 30+ million).

So, the only answer I can think of is either they'er not as good as some people make out, or people really don't want Microsoft products (ie they only buy Windows and Office because they have to).

Combine that with the great devices Nokia makes and you have ... a Windows 7 phone that still no-one wants. Nobody bough Nokias because of the hardware, it was a combination of HW and SW that did what people wanted. Sure, they fell way back int he smartphone stakes, but the old voice+sms phones were very popular and the software was comparitively very good for the time.

I think that people bought a Nokia because their previous phone was a Nokia and it ran almost the same SW, and all the menus and options were the same. Now, they have to really make a choice, and as a result, they have no loyalty - and that means more sales for Google and Apple.

There's one more nail in the coffin - if someone is going to buy a Windows 7 phone (to be different from their peers perhaps :) ), then why would they buy a Nokia one when there are phones from LG and HTC that are just as good.

Re:Nokia has amazing hardware, but not software

[TheRaven64]

In case you're wondering why you keep being modded down, it's because you're not putting any real information in your post. You don't explain what MS Visual Studio does better than other things. I can think of a few things that other programs do better than VS (although I've not used VS for a while, so these may be out of date):

• ddd is much better at inspecting complex data structures than Visual Studio's integrated debugger.
• Even gcc is better than VS at providing helpful error messages[1], clang provides much nicer ones. Any IDE that uses libclang benefits from this (XCode does, and so does the IDE that I'm working on)
• Intellisense is okay, but Clang's autocompletion seems to work better. Purely a subjective thing there though.
• VS doesn't seem to realise that C is not C++, and does some nasty things treating C as C++. The compiler has pretty shoddy standards compliance, although it's not too bad for C++.
• No static analysis tools.
• No refactoring tools (I think this is out of date, but I'm not sure how good they are).

I'm sure there must be some things that VS does well, but from your post all I know is that you like it. This seems like astroturfing - if you have a valid argument that VS does somethings better than other IDEs, then list what these things are and why.

[1] This one, at least, I know is current. I'm currently teaching a module on HPC at the local university, and some of my students decided to write the assignment code in VS then port it to the Linux lab machines later. They all found that it became much easier to find bugs when they tried compiling with gcc and got sensible error messages.