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Nokia Issues Profit Warning
jones_supa submitted an article in the Guardian. From the article "Shares in the Finnish phone maker Nokia plunged by 15% on Tuesday as the company warned that it may make no profit on phone sales in the quarter to the end of June, and that overall phone sales will be 'substantially below' its earlier forecast of €6.1bn to €6.6bn. Carolina Milanesi, mobile phones analyst for the research company Gartner, said Tuesday's warnings could mark the low point for Nokia, which has not made a loss in its handset division for more than a decade."
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Ka-poof!
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Never been known to fail..."
It's been that way for decades.
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Well since they arent using anything from MS yet it would seem what they were doing before wasn't very profitable.
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
Will be interesting to see if this is their low point or if it is heading down to their low point. The other manufacturers are putting out some pretty schmick Android phones at the moment and the iPhone 5 should be released (or at least talked about) in the not too distant future. Nokia's competition seems to be strengthening while it's away regrouping.
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They're just copying the Microsoft XBox model, sell at a loss and hopefully make it up elsewhere.
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TFA says it's mostly due to them getting cut at both ends. By the Chinese on low price phones, which Nokia has traditionally sold an ass-ton of, world wide. And by android and apple on the top end. (I think this is a lot more in the US than the ROTW, but US is a big smartphone market...)
Kind of a shame really, I was looking forward to more N900-esque phones, but I don't think that will be happening anymore. I'll also miss smartphones with buttons on them.
"It remains to be seen how low [market share] could go, but for smartphones we are talking about going under 20% this year." Only two years ago Nokia had a 40% share of the smartphone market, but it was passed in the first quarter of this year by Android, with 32%. Nokia had 24% and Apple 18%.
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When they finally do, they'll be discovering that the other big manufacturers have Windows phones, too. I'll bet that'll be a big shock to them.
When Nokia made their deal with Microsoft, they basically told the world "Don't buy any of our current phones because we're orphaning them."
Remember, they said that they would be switching ALL their phones to WP7. Would you lock yourself into a long-term contract for an orphan phone?
Microsoft wasn't stupid - they could foresee that Nokia share value would collapse - by next year, they'll be able to buy Nokia outright for a lot less than the money they gave them.
"Coming soon - The Microsoft X-Phone - it works great with your X-Box!"
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Goatse link.
It seems more likely to me that the decision to partner with Microsoft was because they knew they wouldn't be making a profit and something had to change.
I think the real reason they're not making a profit is their phones are so dreadfully out of date with what people want now that they aren't selling as well. Nokia's had a branding and model issue for quite some time - go to nokia.com and see how many different phones you can find. Different colors, shapes, too many options. Too many OSs, no clear dev schemes for third parties.
Compare that against apple's previous 'We have one phone that comes in black' and current 'We have one phone that comes in black or white'.
First and foremost, Nokia is losing money because of Nokia.
Secondly Apple / Android is why Nokia is losing money.
Thirdly, Microsoft is why Nokia will continue to lose money.
No, this is why they signed a deal with the devil. Everybody has been taking a crack at Nokia lately and they haven't been able to deal a single decent blow in return, iPhone and Android have been eating the aging Symbian for lunch and the Maemo/Meego replacements haven't been ready. They could of course become the latecomer to Android, but so many companies now make good Android phones they'd be sure to disappoint. So they went to bed with Microsoft, the market already then realized it was a mark of desperation sinking their stock price. Now we learn it's actually worse. I figure the layoffs are about to begin and who do you think that will be, the Microsoft Phone developers or the Qt developers?
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The TFA said that, as I've suggested over and over again that cheap Chinese phones are eating their lunch at the low end and Android and iPhone have been eating their lunch at the high end.
They have the GM problem. Being number one doesn't keep you immune from having to still pull a profit.
Granted in future quarters Microsoft is going to probably be an albatross on their necks, but that's not Elop's fault, it's OPK's fault.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
The CEO? Surely not! I bet he's very confident he'll get his old Microsoft job back plus bonuses in much the same way that Rick Belluzzo was given a President+COO job at Microsoft to thank him for killing PA-RISC and HPUX in favor of NT-on-Itanium (when we was EVP at HP) and killing IRIX and MIPS in favor of NT-on-Itanium when he was CEO of SGI.
The other shareholders? Sure, they got screwed; but they were probably so enamored with how awesome it was to be a microsoft partner that they never noticed.
The employees? They've been wishing that all along.
Same happened to their first cell phone partner
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/01/07/sendo_sues_microsoft_over_secret/
"Microsoft's secret plan was to plunder the small company of its proprietary information, technical expertise, market knowledge, customers and prospective customers," the filing said. "Microsoft gained Sendo's trust and confidence through false promises that Sendo would be its 'go-to-market-partner'."
This information was passed onto low-cost manufacturers in Asia, Sendo alleges. The first Microsoft Smartphone launched in Europe was the Orange SUV, built by Taiwanese firm HTC. It will be interesting to see if this deal is dragged into the case.
A lot of the Symbian hate is justified, it's a bit of a pain to develop for and things like that (although new symbian releases support Qt right? should make things easier).
But symbian has some nice features too. Like being designed ground up for phones, so you get things like having much longer battery life - days, not hours. Try that with an iphone or android.
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How is the lagging Symbian business, which has been rotting for years, remotely related to Microsoft?
When you tell the world you are jumping ship, you can expect many potential customers will as well. Similar to the Osbourne effect.
This the beginning of the end for Nokia. The company's not been able to answer the competition that American companies like Google and Apple poised to it. The reason for this is that the company's internal processes are not from the IT but traditional manufacturing industries. (All explained in painful detail in this article.) Nokia's only viable products are Qt and Maemo, which were both developed externally outside the so-called "Nokia Process", both of which coincidentally are not part of the current future roadmap (MeeGo is Lost In Action and Qt will not be ported to WP7).
For those who say Elop will give new direction: no, I don't believe it. I am be tempted to raw parallels to Obama: a black horse; lots of hype, but little actual concretion, all while the economy still continues to plummet. My advise for those who own Nokia's shares: hold them until mid-Q4. If there is no takeover bid from Microsoft by November, dump them at whatever price the market is still willing to pay.
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I always thought it would have been cool for Nokia to partner up with Apple in the pre-iphone days. Apple had the software and UI know-how, Nokia had superior hardware... well, iPhone has gone through many iterations and has progressively become superior to anything Nokia could ever muster. Nokia will rue the day Apple comes out with a $100 iPhone, they'll be relegated to making cheap solar powered 'dumb phones' to sell to developing countries. My current Nokia is a 'dumb-phone' that was made in India, has a 1 inch colour screen, built in radio, and LED flashlight. The phone is functional, nearly indestructible, and cost me about $30. This is Nokia's future.
Maybe they can get Microsoft to prop them up with some money? I'm sure Redmond would like to keep their partner going strong.
They actually had no choice in the matter.
They had sat on their backsides and done nothing for years, and when they finally realised it, the one realistic option of forgetting about their own in-house phone OS and going with Android (like Motorola did) was something they refused to do because the Nokia name would have been absorbed into the Android eco-structure with a dilution of their brand name.
Microsoft needed a phone manufacturer for Windows Mobile (or whatever it's called now) and Nokia needed an OS - plus the Nokia name would stand out still.
Nokia were a great mobile phone manufacturer who completely ignored smartphones from the outset - so they were in deep shit even before the Microsoft partnership.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I'd wait until they are worth the same as Skype:)
Not as much as Microsoft do.
Major LOLZ.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Thirdly, Microsoft is why Nokia will continue to lose money.
Which makes me (and others in my field) wonder... When is Microsoft planning on scooping up Nokia?
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
Atari sales are down. Outdated companies that can't continue to innovate and keep up with their competition become casulaties in a free-market system. End of story.
Yeah, you seem to have the cause and the symptom confused there, dude.
On 2008 they released their online game store called NGAGE 2.0, but a year later they announced they were closing it. They shut down the activation servers earlier this year making it impossible to reinstall anything you legally bought from them. A lot of people usually complain about DRM, well Nokia did the worst use of it by locking out customers from their purchases. If their fate after the Microsoft deal is horrible, they may actually deserve it.
Between two and six quarters from now. They'll let Nokia mostly bleed out before the "I don't want to go on the cart" scene happens.
That problem is that they didn't say 1: we're jumping ship and 2: we're launching WP7 devices within the next 30 days.
Letting symbian die a long slow death is monumentally stupid. They've had time to both think about this decision, and build the partnership with MS (or google), and actually implement solutions. Symbian should be dead already, and the only Nokia phone you should be able to buy should have WP7 (or whatever else they could have gone with).
Nokia is the (old) GM of the phone business. They had a phone for everyone. That's not, in and of itself, a bad strategy. But the 'computer' part of the phone (which apple and google are doing well with) sucked, they had great 'phone' parts (call quality, voice dialing etc.). Whether or not WP7, and MS cash can save them remains to be seen. But announcing your current product lineup is dead out the door, and *not* having a replacement ready to launch is begging for trouble.
July 2011 is the 3 year anniversary of the iPhone 3g, which, IMO was the first good computer with a phone attached. Before that, Nokia had better phones, browsers etc. as did RIM. Now my iPhone 3g is, in many ways, a piece of junk (lack of replacable battery for example, general lack of build quality etc.). But on July 11, 2011 (3rd anniversary of the 3g), Nokia won't have an offering on par with the iPhone 3g. That says a lot about what they've been doing, or not doing, for the last 4 years. Don't get me wrong, the N8 isn't a terrible product, but it has no where near the software umph that the iphone does. Better camera, replacable battery, good, terrible software, bad.
By now Nokia should have either an ARM or x86 WP7 on the market, even a single core roughly on par with a nexus S/iphone 4 sort of level. Windows phones might be behind the curve, but with a big backer they might kick their ass in gear. Nothing of the sort has happened, and they're getting nothing done.
I know it's fashionable to blame Microsoft around here but I seriously doubt that Nokia's sales have suffered because of their deal with Microsoft. Most of their customers probably don't even know about the deal with Microsoft. I think it's far more likely that their sales are suffering because their current phones simply aren't appealing to consumers, and that's probably the reason they decided to "orphan" their current phones. In other words, sales aren't bad because they orphaned their phones, it's the other way around.
I'm probably not the standard consumer - but it's definitely going to be a factor for why I wont be touching Nokia. And I've stuck with them since I first had a cell phone. I really, really like their hardware - they take most of the abuse I can throw at it. I currently have an e71x which is overall a fairly decent phone, but it's getting dated compared to the options available today.
The degree of my loyalty to their product is noted by the fact I'd almost seriously consider trying out the latest Win Mobile platform in order to retain the Nokia hardware - however, my contract renews in two months. Do I just snag whatever Nokia is offering now or do I wait some undisclosed time until their hardware has Win Mobile on it? Probably not. Most likely I'll just get some android variant and then maybe reconsider in 2 more years.
I seriously doubt that Nokia's sales have suffered because of their deal with Microsoft
I'd blame the 'roid platform and the iThing. Not to mention utterly incompetent upper management at Nokia.
I guarantee Microsoft haters are a vanishingly small percentage of the overall market. There's just not that level of animosity outside of nerd circles, and even then, it's greatly diminished from the days of yore.
It's easy to have a phone last days when it's basically unusable and hence unused.
The Nokia N7xx-8xx were really, really nice for a smartphone and plenty hackable and had a large (open source) software repository by the time Apple came up to speed with the App Store. The main reasons those platforms bled to death was because they didn't want to invest even a fraction of time and money in it. The community around it was great however but Nokia euthanized it at the point they needed it the most. It could've beat Android before it even became successful, it has all the same great features of Android but none of the sluggishness.
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Agreed. I actually enjoy a lot of MS's products. I feel like an endangered species existing on slashdot sometimes. It's really just the period of an obvious transition that's going to be fairly painful for the company. The question is - will they pull out of it and still be relevant?
I work for a large cellular firm. Not more than a handful of employees use our software products but instead use the Apple iPhone. It shows in the software quality side of our product. If we actually used our own product, those errors would disappear because they are obvious and the developer would fix his own phone.
I suspect the same thing happens at Nokia. I am currently running a Nokia N8. Hands down, the best cell hardware available. I can make calls, from my office, will full bars indicated. My iPhone 4 could not make the connection and appeared out of service while I work in the middle of a large city. I can drive through the local mountains with no dropped calls on the N8. The iPhone, constant drops. Why do people put up with the hardware, because they think the software is so good. Can't make a phone call, no biggie because I have this neat bird rage game from the easy to use app store. My N8, takes amazing photos and videos, but moving the media is as straight forward as it should be.
So I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that Nokia employees are not using Nokia products. If they were, the simplest app errors I find on my N8 would not exist. The owner of that software component would soon feel the problem and fix it. My N8 has basic problems with Bluetooth functionality. Screens popup when no user action triggered it. My ear can hangup a phone call because when I answer it and put my head to the phone, my ear touches a button and the software happily complies. Did the developer check the orientation sensor and disable the buttons? The dialer is inconvenient. How many automated systems are out there Nokia? And whenever I encounter one, it is a pain in the butt to punch in the dialer. How about when the orientation is more horizontal, pushing the dialer button puts it into speaker mode. But, only if you aren't on a connected blue tooth. I could go on an on.
Maybe that isn't enough to convince? I worked for Nokia a while ago. Many engineers had Nokia branded phones. They would write custom software and re-flashed their phones for even more innovative functionality. Then the Motorola Razor came out. Within a month, every engineer, in the meetings I attended, had a Razor. The Razor was perhaps the beginning of the end of good Nokia software. They just can't seem to catch up and even my N8, which as an updated UI drops back to an old school UI when I push the button.
When Nokia bought Trolltech, I was a little apprehensive and felt they would probably kill the framework. When they started working hard on the phone platform, I really started to get into it. My desktop QT code was reusable on my devices. But Nokia didn't disappoint. After a record QT Dev Days event, which seems to indicate a swelling interest by developers, Elop mothballs QT. Figures, Elop isn't a visionary. He is a snakeoil salesman trying to get his next bonus at the expense of a long range vision and plan. Everyone thinks they can be a Steve Jobs, but when you tie your products to your month to month, and quarter to quarter results, you get rushed, poor products.
At Microsoft, many of the Engineers do use the Windows 7 phone. It's not bad and is usable....for 2004. but Microsoft will slowly evolve the platform and will probably carve out a large piece of the market. If they put native code back in, I will develop for it. but none of this is going to help Nokia. What's going to be their value add? Their employees will still probably not use the phone so their rendition will just be a poor copy of a Windows 7 device while they try to sell their GSM chips.
If I were Elop, I would have tied bonuses to owning the company products. You own a device not branded by Nokia? You forgo bonuses and promotions. Apple produces compelling technology because your employees have a passion in it. They live and breathe the brand and work to produce the best product available. My guess is that Elop has a Blackberry or a Windows 7 phone. It starts at the top. He should ow
Declare the maximum number of devices = 6 and maximum number of platforms = 2. 1 smartphone, 1 basic.
That solves 99% of the problems which Nokia have created for themselves.
Whether their smartphone platform was Symbian or Meego wouldn't have mattered, the R&D organisation would have been able to concentrate on actually making it good.
Their problem was not Symbian. Their problem was and still is 150 (yes really) different phone models. Elop hasn't actually fixed the problem.
Now like all Windows OEMs, they're a box shifter, so they need to get into a box shifter mindset. R&D will have to go entirely, there is no place for it in a low margin box shifting business.
Deleted
could mark the low point for Nokia
Nope, not yet.
And then Apple will swoop in and buy them up right under Microsoft's nose.
When Nokia made their deal with Microsoft, they basically told the world "Don't buy any of our current phones because we're orphaning them."
More importantly perhaps, they told developers considering one of their many mobile platforms not to bother with any of them, and to focus on offerings from other companies instead. For their smartphones and plans for an ovi store that will be the kiss of death.
Nokia will coast for another few years as they have a huge install base and dominate the low-end, but when higher end phones start moving down, they will have a real problem, and being in hock to Microsoft is going to be part of that problem.
As for Qt, I think Microsoft will be hostile to it from the start, and encourage Nokia to burn their boats (and they have a place man at the head of Nokia to implement this). So the outlook for Qt is not good - it will probably be starved of cash and developers and left slowly to die. Best case would be if Nokia spins it off again right now, before they are taken over by MS or go into a death spiral.
Mod parent +10, sensible
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Why would apple want nokia? Do they want a piece of the "phones no one buys" market?
Seriously though, would it be to improve tech aspects that nokia does better than apple?
Or buy out a competitor only to destroy it?
patents
Between two and six quarters from now. They'll let Nokia mostly bleed out before the "I don't want to go on the cart" scene happens.
They're already being carried to it, bleats to the contrary are irrelevant.
We used to get almost exclusively Nokia phones (a few Blackberries for upper level PHBs), but in the last month or so any Nokia phones due for a refresh have been replaced mostly with HTC Android models. The number of employees exceeds 10^5 worldwide, so we're not a small operation. About half of the personnel in Europe have smartphones, but mobile phones are less common in the Americas (probably due to rip-off service prices). Don't know about policy in Asia-Pacific.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I bet that now they wish they never made that deal with The Devil Microsoft.
I guess the time to draw that conclusion is next year when there are some handsets out that use MS phone software. If they still don't sell Nokia is in deep shit. If sales pick up and Nokia launches a brace of tablets & other WP7 devices to huge acclaim then it will look smart.
It made it into the global print media and not just sites like this.
For Apple, the only reason would be patents. They don't want Nokia's market share. Microsoft wants the patents as well as the market share (or what little of that remains once they finally buy them).
These are the same consumers who buy IPhones because they are made by Apple.
And quite often with out really comparing with other alternatives.
They buy what they are told.
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These are the same consumers who buy IPhones because they are made by Apple.
And quite often with out really comparing with other alternatives.
They buy what they are told, and most likely dont even know about this, or the ramifications for what they are buying or have just bought.
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would that be Nokias 30% market share that is still 6 times lager then Apples 5%?
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Nokia's problem?
The Communicator.
Nokia 9000,
Nokia 9500
Nokia E90.
Those where my last 3 Phones, and none of them could be bought outside of a small window, or at a decent price on a contract, at lest here in .AU When a customer wants to buy a phone, and they cant get the model they want though the stores, the partners or any shops what do they think will happen?
Those phones where fantastic, and held a high resale vale for a long time due to demand, but would Nokia make more available? No, most of the shops I went looking for them in didn't even know of them at all, the ones that did would only offer company contracts, and I am still hesitant on paying over a grand for a phone though Ebay.
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I have seen it coming. Nokia have been living in their comfortable telco-friendly niche for too long.
1. They have a ton of low-end models, each one seems to have different menus and a lot of missing features, as if telcos got to choose what features to remove so that they can try to sell a new phone contract every year.
2. Their middle-range models also lack in features and the quality does not always reflect the price. I paid 240 EUR and the side keys fell apart in one year.
3. Their high-end phones were basically show off pieces without a proper or at least not developed enough eco-system.
4. Their PC software has become a bit too bloated and it has some basic bugs (some MP3s not showing on the phone list, disk crawler locking up files...).
The combination of these drive many low-end users to experiment with other companies phones and most high-end users to try iPhone or Android.
And then Apple will swoop in and buy them up right under Microsoft's nose.
That would actually be pretty funny. I'm not sure what apple would get from the deal though.
Why would apple want nokia? Do they want a piece of the "phones no one buys" market?
Seriously though, would it be to improve tech aspects that nokia does better than apple?
Or buy out a competitor only to destroy it?
Nokia have the basics of cell phone design down to a fine art. Apple is still new to this game and makes cock-ups. Remember the ariel problems?
Apple and Nokia could result in a killer new iphone.
iPhone and Android have been eating the aging Symbian for lunch and the Maemo/Meego replacements haven't been ready.
It seems that the Maemo replacements *are* ready, except for a tussle with Intel about whether they can be called "Meego compatible", "Meego ready" or otherwise use the Meego brand. Since Intel now employs two thirds of the Technical Steering Group which makes this decision (Nokia's representative moved to Intel after the Nokia MS announcement), and Intel isn't happy about the Nokia MS announcement, the fact that the Maemo 6 phones haven't been announced is due to the MS agreement, not that the phones aren't technically ready.
I figure the layoffs are about to begin and who do you think that will be, the Microsoft Phone developers or the Qt developers?
Well, the question is, why are layoffs coming? Because phones aren't selling, after Nokia announced "our current phones are dead, our new phones won't be ready for a while".
While a change was required, announcing a drastic change without having new products on the (3-month) horizon is foolish.
It seems many companies are keen to pick up the Qt developers ...
I agree on Nokia's unnecessary device proliferation, however not:
Too many OSs, no clear dev schemes for third parties.
Since S^3 (all S^3 phones ship with Qt 4.7) shipped, the dev scheme for all smart phones (including S60v3/S60v5, S^3, Maemo 5 / N900, upcoming Maemo6 or Meego devices) was Qt and Qt Quick. Until the MS agreement, which removed almost all incentive to develop for Symbian.
In the meantime, Qt for Android is coming along nicely ...
And still, even if unused, my Android phone doesn't last two days.
It's probably both. I would imagine that the sales people at the phone shops know about it, and they'll tell the customers who are looking at Nokia phones, especially if they happen to have some very similar but slightly more profitable phones ready to replace the Nokias.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
According to this recent statement from Nokia, that 30% marketshare is not very profitable right now. That means Nokia makes a lot of cheap phones that make little profit. Apple's 5% on the other hand makes it the most profitable cell phone company in the world. I would suspect that market share means very little to Apple. Patents on the other hand would be worth it to buy Nokia.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
That's quite true, even sociopathic businessmen should know that you don't announce "Our current phones are dead and our new phones won't be ready for a while". Instead, they're supposed to announce "Our old phones are dead, but see this brand new sparkly shiny phone in my hand? It's the new hotness and you want to buy one right now. There's a limited supply so only the first hundred people who line up on the right here with cash in hand will get the best phone the world has ever seen. No pushing or shoving please, the people in the back will just have to accept that they won't get the world's best phone today."
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I think Symbian is a problem, and Nokia is aware of it. However, I suspect that windows mobile won't be the savior they hope it will be. I was just looking at the e7 phone. Other than it running symbian it's a nice looking phone; possibly preferable to my Motorola droid2 global. Unfortunately, I am not going to be any more interested in going to windows mobile/Ce again after the recent changes/drm that MS added so for me the shift from Symbian to Microsoft is not an improvement at all.
I guess they're trying to differentiate themselves by going with windows mobile, but they sold 124 million phones last quarter and didn't turn a profit... I don't see how switching to an OS with higher costs (licensing) helps them turn a profit. IMO they've got some huge operational problems to overcome.
this is done to get the price of Nokia down so much that Microsoft can buy Nokia a lot cheaper. Simple business as usual.
Microsoft hate has nothing to do with this. Even if you think MS is the best thing since sliced peanut butter, buying a Nokia phone right now means a two-year investment in a system supported by a shaky company with an unclear strategy that may not actually involve continued support. That's a turn-off right there. (Also, of you are a MS lover, and really want a WP7 phone, you're not going to buy anything Nokia makes that doesn't include WP7.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Sorry, Nokia, but that's what you get. Time to short NOK like it's going out of business.
Really? My iPhone goes for about 4 days if I kill the wifi and avoid playing games and don't go out of service too often. Granted, that is sort of artificial since I constantly have an urge to play some game or another.
Microsoft wasn't stupid - they could foresee that Nokia share value would collapse - by next year, they'll be able to buy Nokia outright for a lot less than the money they gave them.
If MS were that clever, then surely they wouldn't have given them more money than they thought they would be worth in a year's time? And why would they want to chuck money at a failing company anyway?
I must be missing something, but I don't see what MS's cunning plan here is supposed to be.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I guarantee Microsoft haters are a vanishingly small percentage of the overall market. There's just not that level of animosity outside of nerd circles, and even then, it's greatly diminished from the days of yore.
There was only ever actual animosity towards Microsoft in nerd circles, the vast majority of people couldn't care less about who makes software as long as their computer works.
This is why the inability of Linux to out-sell Windows as a consumer OS is so frustrating, it's not as though 99% of consumers ever had any great loyalty to or love of Microsoft in the first place.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Even if you think MS is the best thing since sliced peanut butter
I'd stick to car metaphors if I were you.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Android sucks, it's just that people hadn't realised it yet.
Your carefully reasoned and almost grammatical argument has won me over.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Compare that against apple's previous 'We have one phone that comes in black' and current 'We have one phone that comes in black or white'.
Having a wide choice of models/specifications/options/colours doesn't seem to bother car manufacturers much.
Also, have you noticed that the first thing most people do when they buy an iPhone is get a coloured case/protector?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
If anything, it's the opposite of MS-hate- the inclination not to buy one of their current (non-MS) phones as they are already out-of-date (even their own company has disowned them) and instead wait for the Nokia+MS phones (which could be a year or more away yet). Or buy an Android/Apple/WinMo phone that's already on the market (from a non-Nokia company).
No-one has any reason to buy a Symbian or MeeGo phone now. And it's a long wait until Nokia has something to replace it.
No matter how you slice it, Nokia comes up a loser until at least the end of the year.
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