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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.'"
Hi, Microsoft marketing department, we almost missed you guys here.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Right you are good sir. Having used Maemo for the last year I only recently took a look at Android - naturally my opinion is subjective, but it struck me as being a much more tedious experience, inferior in many ways. This is not to say it's bad, maemo just felt more intuitive and easier to use.
I haven't seen WP7 though I gather from the responses to the parent that it's not so great.
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.
No shit, 1 minute after the story is posted no less. Saw something similar happen around the end of last year too, but it probably happens more often than that and I just have missed it.
If it wasn't for the "best possible tools" crack then it wouldn't have been quite so obvious, but the rest of it is just another "part of a campaign by Microsoft to keep Nokia from choosing Google's Android operating system" as the summary says. Interesting that they'd rather see people buy iPhones than Android. And that they think that they can change our opinions just from some noob saying how great MS is. Slashdot does have a lot of groupthink, but it doesn't quite work like that.
which is totally what she said
Yeah... he really gave it away by jamming "best possible tools" and "Silverlight" into the same sentence, didn't he?
Ha! Anyone who has anything positive to say about MS is a shill! Everything is black and white! Ha!
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
The next version? It took them years to develop this and it didn't even have copy/paste at launch. They will have minor updates periodically but the next major version is long off. They are so far behind on mobile they don't know what to do.
When I saw the headline, I thought: "Nokia is rolling out WordPerfect v7???"
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
The only Areafor MS is business if they convince their corporate customer to switch off Blackberry. Goto any store and watch what interests people its the iPhone and the big screen Android phones. I suspect Ms is regretting doing the "tile" thing
that it could be the single best operating system on the planet that is superior to every other system in every possible way, but...
It's still A Trap(tm).
Microsoft has a very long history of blatantly destructive behaviour. They have a lot to make up for before they should be considered trustworthy enough to rely on.
Anyone who willingly buys microsoft products should be pitied, because clearly they're trapped in an abusive relationship. "Oh! He's not like that anymore! He's changed! Oh no, I got that black eye from falling down the stairs!"
Nokia: We've had a good think about it and we're going to start developing for Android
Microsoft: What would it take for you to start using and developing for Windows Mobile?
Nokia: *Has a think* *Pinky moves towards mouth* ONE BILLION DOLLARS!
Microsoft reps: *look at each other, shrug shoulders* Yeah, OK, I can't see any reason why we can't do that..
Nokia: Err, OK, I guess we're using Windows Mobile then....
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
So serious sweetners are the only way to pull it off again.
1 billion dollars US.
No difference, really.
It's still selling out. The scale is just different.
--
BMO
Yes yes, I know we all hate Microsoft, but on the face of it this was a very shrewd business decision. Nokia was getting killed by the fact that people now want their phones to do such exotic things as email and Web browsing. They had no real internal direction in terms of software development, as evidenced by the schizophrenia of Symbian and Maemo, and the fact that they were trying to do it all in-house wasn't helping things any.
Meanwhile, Microsoft comes along with a ready-made solution to Nokia's woes in the form of a pretty complete mobile platform and a $1 billion payout to help with the transition. To Nokia's idiot board of directors this probably looked like a no-brainer. Meanwhile Microsoft gets amazing value in the form of a very, very large company now pushing out its software products worldwide. This isn't going to put WP7 ahead of Android or iOS, not by a long shot, but it will do wonders in terms of shoring up their position.
On the flip side of things, consider Motorola. At one point they were kind of in the same boat as Nokia, having missed the first wave of the smartphone epidemic, and went from being the company that had it all with the once-super cool RAZR to an also-ran. They got behind Android in a very complete and enthusiastic way and the results have really paid off for them. I'd venture to say that they make some of the best Android phones out there, and they're taking a great stab at the tablet market. And no one had to pay them $1 billion to do it!
In short, this is great news for MS, bad news for Nokia fans. I always thought the path to Palm's demise was paved by Windows Mobile ending up on Treo smartphones. They just couldn't be bothered to invest in an innovate mobile OS of their own until webOS, and that was obviously a day late and a dollar short...
He's not a n00b, he's a highly trained and experienced marketing person, selling the same old 'viral memes' that they think is a good way to get "mindshare" for a dud product.
They do give themselves away by banging on about the developer experience, when its a product aimed at consumers who don't give a fig about development. you could program the things using goats blood sacrifices for all consumers care, and someone trying to explain how good the product is should really be describing how intuitive it is to use, how its a new design of interface to help you organise your stuff. (too bad it appears to be so Facebook centric)
and definitely do not talk about silverlight! (besides, most phone devs want C/C++ development, not to rewrite everything they do for other platforms in .NET). If MS really was interested in "developers, developers, developers" they'd realise that devs want a common platform upon which to code so we can reuse code and don't have to write the same damn thing several times. And definitely not in Silverlight - you were right to ignore it at the PDC, go open standard HTML5 (or even Qt, go on MS, do a Qt port to WP7 like the projects for Android and iPhone). Ignore the vocal minority who demanded to keep their Silverlight skills, let that platform stagnate and slowly die.
Well, based on experience of both, I'd say Visual studio is a much better development tool than Eclipse. I also prefer C# to Java or Objective C.
Some of us actually quite like Microsoft's dev tools. We're familiar with them and they do the job they do fairly well.
It's not about whether it's good or not - it's that this guy obviously is shilling because of the way he talks, and the speed with which he responded to the story.
I've never used WP7, and only used iOS briefly. WP7 did look like it had a nice smooth flashy interface from the videos I've seen, but I don't base my choice of OS purely on how flashy it looks. Having said that, it's kind of funny how shit even Windows 7 (the desktop version) looks whenever I have to use it. I'm guessing Ubuntu does a lot more anti-aliasing on its interface than Win7.
which is totally what she said
'promote and develop' windows phones and slide to obscurity in the process ....
..
.... DONT !
great case of forfeiting long term future for short term gain on behalf of nokia
nokia
Read radical news here
It's not that at all, it's just obvious. 1 minute after the story was posted. At least this time they didn't make it quite so obvious. Last time I saw it they had several large paragraphs of pro-MS sentiment in the first post - again posted 1 minute after the story was up. The "best possible tools" line is a complete give-away though, seriously who outside of a marketing department would even say that? I certainly don't think that any programming tools available today are the best possible.
which is totally what she said
I have also been using Maemo the last year and it is a vary good linux/mobile system it is lacking in overall mobile phone performable it is still using the n900 like laptop wasting performance and battery. that could have been used better.
My next telephone is going to be a Android whit full qwerty keyboard if Nokia don’t make a new Maemo or a good Meego phone within 6 months.
Jukka Eklund at Nokia writes to the Meego Dev list: "I am thrilled to announce a little thing we started at Nokia. Basically we want to have MeeGo running in N900 device, so that it's really usable as your daily development device. Basic Handset UX should work, phone calls, SMS, web browsing. So we are concentrating on a few selected features and polish those to be "perfect". It might mean that we leave out some things in MeeGo 1.2 trunk for this edition, but that is not the default intention.
We are doing this fully on the open, and I hope this is an interesting project where we all in the community work towards the same goal: have a great MeeGo edition in the N900. This work is naturally based on the great work done already by N900 adaptation team lead by Harri and Carsten.
The wiki is up here: http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/N900/DeveloperEdition. It will populated with more information as we go, thanks for the patience.
Br, ...Also folks, be sure to stay tuned for the new Nokia N950 meant only as a (likely) unsubsidized Developer's hardware refresh of the N900. Only rumor has it that it will not arrive with a slide-out keyboard. How important is having a N900-style keyboard to you, along with the new Meego Love Nokia software continues to offer?"
Jukka
Developer Edition product manager"
[note this was posted as an article Saturday and wasn't accepted as newsworthy by Slashdot. I cannot imagine why not.]
Dear Microsoft: if you're going to shill your dev products on /., maybe you want to not be so obvious about it.
I'm a C freak, my first word was "ifndef" and my first book was Kernighan & Ritchie, and about the last thing I would ever say about any Microsoft dialect of the language is that it plays well with others. From incompatible bullshit like CreateFileMapping to linguistic trash like explicitly allowing casted lvalues to the endless parade of pointless clutter macros, MS was probably singlehandledly responsible for creating the perception that C and C++ are somehow hard to use or esoteric. Maybe that's changed and maybe it hasn't, but for Microsoft to claim that standard C runs better on Windows than on NeXT/Mac OS is insane.
Apple uses pretty well bog-standard C in both ANSI and C99 dialects. Their compiler is good old GCC, which they tirelessly support. I don't know what these quick and shoddy decisions you're referring to are. Granted they do change the Objective-C language standard more often than most geeks change their underwear, but at least it's well-documented and submitted to standards bodies for approval. I don't like that they abandoned both Cocoa Bindings and the garbage collector on iOS; the latter was for performance reasons and I don't for the life of me know why they did the former. But at least all this is well-documented, and none of it's going to affect your C/C++ code one bit.
Maybe I'm not the "standard" C guy. I'll take Automake and Eclipse over Visual Studio any day of the week. But I've survived Microsoft crapware from Win32 to MFC to GDI and I have to tell you I am not eager to repeat the experience.
[PS. I'm going to take it as prophetic that the Captcha for posting this comment was "blunders."]
I think you seriously underestimate Android. Would be interesting to know what limitations you would hit that a complex 3D game dont.
HTTP/1.1 400
Because no one wants a web controlled by MS technology. You laugh now because competition exists with Flash, etc. But what happens when MS starts throwing around billions of dollars for exclusivity on major sites? MLB comes to mind.
It's not about technology. It's about a company that thinks in terms of total control, not competition.
You havent done your research. Windows Phone 7 doesnt allow native apps yet - they all run on Silverlight and I don't think any C++ at all
As far as I know this deal has to do with WP7, not Windows itself
People don't buy MS because they want to, they buy it because they think they need to or because they don't realise anything else exists...
Phones are different, people know that alternatives exist...
Windows is associated with crashing, blue screens, viruses and other forms of malware. People don't want that on their phones...
When people see a product with the same name from the same company they assume it will be compatible, windows mobile has never been compatible with desktop windows leaving many users severely disappointed...
Windows mobile 6.x and earlier versions were also so horrendously bad that they have left a bad taste in many peoples mouths...
MS' most successful attempts to enter new markets have actually been achieved by distancing themselves from windows, look at the xbox for instance, i doubt that would have been as successful if it had been called "Windows Game" or something.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
On android you couldn't copy/paste in the browser until 1.5, released 7 months after 1.0: MS is releasing a system wide copy/paste in the next couple of weeks.
Also, wasn't Android lacking multi touch at launch? All this crying is from people who wouldn't even consider using the platform.
Yes, I realise that this is either astroturfing or a troll, but responding to it still makes sense. This post essentially represents both Nokia's and Microsoft's best hopes for success from this partnership, and it is pretty clear that it is a very slim hope.
The major problem with the partnership is that Nokia doesn't have a Windows Phone to sell today. The best that they can do is sell people on the idea of a cool new Windows Phone that *may* be available before Christmas (not likely). Current Windows phones are getting slaughtered by everyone right now, and this announcement is only going to make things worse over the short run.
Think about it. Microsoft's current Windows Phone partners have just found out that Microsoft is willing to pay Nokia over $1 billion U.S. to compete with them. If Windows Phone sales have been poor to this point imagine what they are going to be like over the next year as all of the current Windows phone manufacturers begin their marketing campaign against Windows. Microsoft has just pushed everyone that isn't Nokia into the Android camp. Unless, of course, Microsoft is willing to make similar deals with other handset manufacturers (even less likely).
Not to mention the obvious fact that Apple and Google are both going to widen their developer lead over Microsoft while Nokia gets up to speed. Android and iPhone have tons of developers. Windows phone has almost none in comparison. A year from now the situation is going to be even worse. That means that when Nokia finally does launch its phone it will primarily launch with software Microsoft and Nokia have paid to develop internally, with a few 1.0 ports of popular software titles that Microsoft and Nokia have bribed independents to offer. Even if the hardware is sheer genius Nokia's phone is not going to be competitive on the software side.
Plus, all this assumes that Nokia's first Windows phone won't suck. I think that's a long shot. Microsoft has a long history of sucky phones, and Nokia has no history of dealing with Microsoft's idiosyncrasies. Those consumers brave enough to buy a Nokia-Microsoft phone are going to be beta testers, and if the phone is not flawless the blogosphere is going to crucify it. Not that it really matters. When it comes to phones Microsoft's brand is probably already toxic. The current WinPhones reviewed very well. That did *not* translate into sales. There are simply too many people that wouldn't buy a Windows phone if Microsoft paid them. The early adopters already have a smart phone, and they are happy with it. Heck, they probably have even invested a considerable amount of time and money in the software for their smart phone. Luring these people (and those people that invariably follow their lead) to a new platform is going to be very hard, especially considering Microsoft's history in the mobile sector.
Both Microsoft and Nokia needed to do something to remain relevant. From that perspective this deal makes sense. After all, they could hit the ball out of the park and become an actual contender. Their phone is going to need to be something special, however, or it is just going to be the smart phone without useful applications.
You don't have to use Java, I prefer to use Ruby (see Ruboto). Android is very open, you are allowed to use any language you want, even interpreted ones (those are banned on the iPhone, I don't know how the situation is on WP7)
My personal opinion is that WP7 is the first OS that actually has style. Android is ugly and iPhone is very plain, imho.
Nonetheless, I'm still very happy with my Android for these reasons:
- I was able to replace the OS with a customized version that allows me to use my phone as a wifi hotspot
- I replaced the home screen interface with a different one that is closer to how I want it to work
- I can program apps for it without owning a Mac, in fact the SDK runs on Windows, Linux, Mac and since it's open source some people are porting it to BSD
- I got Ruboto IRB from the market for free, wrote a little server directly on the phone, opened the terminal emulator that comes with the custom rom (Cyanogenmod), and used telnet to connect to localhost, all within maybe 5 minutes.
While Android is the perfect thing for tech savvy people, I honestly don't know which device I would recommend to the "average" user. Maybe it depends on the integration: WP7 for Microsoft users (Outlook, XBox...), iPhone for the Maccies (iTunes) and Android for the Google users (Mail, Calendar, GTalk etc.)
8 billion US dollars.
1 billion... Really doesn't cover that...
Deleted
>And i agree, i challange anyone finding such a pile of crap as Visual Studio in use today. Nothing compares to it.
Why is it a pile of crap? Seriously.
This space for rent.
What's wrong with Silverlight - well, to be fair to it, its not a language, its declarative XML-based markup that has C# behind it to do the good bits. Its a bit like HTML + javascript overall.
But my point is that I don't agree with the plethora of languages, frameworks and platforms that have appeared recently. I know MS is trying to provide a single, common platform based around .NET for all developers to use... the trouble is, that platform is common only for Windows developers, and I have issues with that kind of lock in. I disagree with objective-c for the same reason, we all spend our efforts writing code for 1 platform and than have to manage the pain of porting or rewriting for the others.
So, for Silverlight. what's wrong with it is that its a Microsoft only language. If I have to write a XML-based markup, I'd prefer it to be a more open, standard one like HTML5 with javascript, even if Silverlight+C# is 'better'. The disadvantages of it being a 'proprietary' platform outweigh the benefits to society.
You're quite right about them all being tools, and only bad programmers blame their tools :) but if I need a hammer, I want a lump of metal firmly attached to a lump of wood, not a super-charged hammering device that requires special batteries from the hammer corporation that will only bang in x-shaped nails that can be purchased only after signing a licencing agreement.
Regarding point 3, isn't WP7 accepting only managed .Net code at this point? Which would make sense, considering that the underlying OS is still in the WinCE / Windows Mobile line, so will be replaced by a "NT line" kernel in the future. So it makes sense for MS to hide the internals and force all developers to stick to their VM until this transition is done (WP8?).
In this case, it looks like WP7 is even worse than Android for you. And QT is coming to Android, although it's still young.
seriously, this isn't a Microserf doing marketing? And I thought that WP7 didn't allow C/C++ and was some form of MS .NET language and runtime. And aren't all the UI's "custom" UIs for these phones or are you somehow using a COTS UI? lol And FYI, Android is not Java but uses the Java language and pointing to previous /. stories about Java performance? really?
This really sounds like a lame marketing post from a Microsoft employee. just saying.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
No shit, 1 minute after the story is posted no less. Saw something similar happen around the end of last year too, but it probably happens more often than that and I just have missed it.
If it wasn't for the "best possible tools" crack then it wouldn't have been quite so obvious, but the rest of it is just another "part of a campaign by Microsoft to keep Nokia from choosing Google's Android operating system" as the summary says. Interesting that they'd rather see people buy iPhones than Android. And that they think that they can change our opinions just from some noob saying how great MS is. Slashdot does have a lot of groupthink, but it doesn't quite work like that.
See http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/03/08/1424243/Why-Do-Videogames-Struggle-With-Sex
See his/her first comment and the time and the time of posting the article. I guess you're just paranoid.
This space for rent.
Again, see his posting history and the other stories where he had long comments under a minute of posting the article... I guess you're just biased because it's MS.
This space for rent.
Nice Troll. Apple wants to control its own ecosystem, but they use and define open standards. There is a difference.
Jonathanjk.com
So if I release a single-tasking desktop operating system today would you let me off the hook since "well, DOS couldn't multitask either when it was launched!"
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
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):
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm pretty sure that I read somewhere that you can't use native code for WP7 unless you were a member of "certain third parties." MS never defined who that was but I would assume it meant the big developers like Adobe. For normal developers like yourself you have to use the Silverlight framework.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Something just short of negative one billion dollars. At least, Nokia thinks so. I think they got screwed, but they can probably hang on for a couple years.
It is the customer who gets screwed.
I wish I had a link to the last post I accused of this. It was the first post ever on a just-created account, one minute after the story was posted, with probably more words in the comment than is humanly possible to type in two minutes.. all pro-MS BS.
I wasn't quite sure before that that any company would even bother to do such things as post shill comments to Slashdot, but I know now I'm sure that it does actually happen, rather than just seeing the accusations. We do perhaps overreact a bit though.
which is totally what she said
On the iPhone the first homescreen is for search.
On Android every homescreen is the same.
On Windows Phone 7 the left homescreen is pretty badass, but the second one (used for apps) sucks.
Apple came with the iPhone 4; better battery life, faster, HD recording and banned Flash.
Android came with a simple update that simply doubled the battery life, made the phone 3 times faster, included HD recording and included Flash (the phone's now 3 times faster and Flash draws back 2/3rd of performance, still making the phone 1/3rd faster) - you can shoot my math with this one
Now Windows 7 comes with a fancy new thing.
Google will probably just include another homescreen like Apple for the information centered stuff, bring some basic typography goodness like on the new Windows Phone, include some hubs and it has beaten Microsoft's advantage with a simple update that took 3 months to release.
Now you might say that Google's problem in fragmentation of Android (thousand different versions), but Microsoft is in for some serious problems too given they will have to support a lot of different CPU's, so apps need to be C#'ed anyway, leaving devs with serious problems as well.
Now how's Apple and Microsoft going to respond to Google's awesomeness. Well they can't because they are too slow. Google simply kicks ass.
Here be signatures
I think this is what you're looking for. http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1831452&cid=33967886
Microsoft partnered with yahoo and destroyed yahoo search. Look where yahoo is today (Thanks to management and MS) Now same would be done for Nokia..
Why would I want a WP7 phone? Let's look at the ads:
Apple: Look, we've got an ultra-stylish phone with more cameras than you can shake a stick at that does everything you might possibly want to do with a computing device.
Android vendors: Apple already explained what a smartphone does so we don't have to. Expect similar stuff from us.
RIM: Our phones are made for businessmen but they work for everyone.
Microsoft: Are you sick of spending a lot of time checking your Twitter and Facebook with your smartphone's browser? Be glad because we built a device exclusively around efficiently interfacing with social media!
I don't spend enough time on Facebook to need a dedicated Facebook interface, ergo I don't need WP7. Case closed. (Seriously, I don't know if WP7 even has an app store. It might, but at least Microsoft's German ads suggest that it's a very focused device.)
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
The iPhone came out years before and had nothing for a point of reference .
PalmOS.
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
The iPhone came out years before and had nothing for a point of reference
Seriously? My old Nokia phone (not smartphone), running S40 - not a smartphone OS by a long shot - had copy/paste when iPhone just came out. Most certainly all actual smartphones then on the market also had it.