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Microsoft Pays $44 Million To Samsung and Nokia For Mango Marketing
CSHARP123 writes "Ballmer opened up the company's coffers to Nokia and Samsung for a holiday blitz of Mango marketing. Hold onto your hats though, it's no carte blanche access to Redmond's Gringotts. According to a report on Mobile Magazine, inside sources claim MS has set aside £28 million (about $44 million) for the endeavor, with about £20 million of that reserved for Nokia's first Windows Phone 7.5 handset. This joint marketing effort is reportedly a broader extension of the cooperative agreements all parties agreed to, ensuring future WP devices get the media saturation they deserve. Samsung is also due to unveil a major Christmas ad push for the Omnia W with an estimated £8m spend. Maybe this is what Samsung gets for making a deal on patents to cover Android OS? Not a bad deal for Samsung."
Windows Phone 7.1 and later. And if you have looked at N9 from Nokia, you'd be ignorant to notice how great it is. Both at hardware side from Nokia, and from software side from Microsoft. I was going to buy iPhone before, but now I just want to wait for what Windows Phone 7 mobiles Nokia comes out with.
Presumably the Omnia W is a phone, which can be inferred from context. Gringotts is a Harry Potter reference for bank or vault, so that one's fairly hit or miss depending on your taste in books and/or films. Mango is Windows Phone 7.5, which you could have at least learned by reading the artic— bwa ha ha ha ha. Sorry, I couldn't keep a straight face.
I'll get off your lawn now.
So you're saying that Microsoft has selling versions of Windows for smartphones since 2002, and you're hoping that maybe by next year they'll finally make a version that is good enough for you to buy?
I hope Microsoft doesn't pay you to shill for them. They're wasting their money.
Step 1. Collect patent royalties from every Android device that Samsung sells
Step 2. Turn around and give that money back to Samsung to push Windows Phone 7
Step 3. ???
Step 4. Profit
I was setting up an Internet/Wi-Fi router for a friend this weekend to replace an old flaky DLINK, and I set it up with a hidden SSID as well as a moderately secure WAP2 PSK. Then I reconnected all their devices to the new setup WiFi access point (laptops, iPod, BlackBerry, my Android phone). All except for the phone running Microsoft Windows Phone 7, because apparently there is no way to specify an unadvertised SSID in WP7. Not even if you turn on advertising the SSID, connect the phone, a disable SSID advertising again. That might not be an issue for some people who don't run unadvertised Wifi at home or work, but I wouldn't want to invest in software that encourages less secure configurations.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
If you want your hottest new phone OS to seem like a half-measure, make sure it labelled 0.5 behind than your current OS.
Do you think that Windows Phone 8 exists yet? They're naming it 7.5 to AVOID naming it Windows Phone 8.
Microsoft never could have done this, as they have set themselves up as an insular platform vendor that not use outside technologies unless forced to. They absolutely would not release something with their name on it that ran something developed by Google, much less Linux.
Rather, they have placed a new UI on the Windows CE core and added all the proprietary goop you asked for. MS is doing exactly what you suggested, but doubling down on the FUD to try and drive other vendors off the platform of a competitor and on to theirs.
I've heard it's even been dragged screaming into the 1990s with multitasking!
WTF is it with the above comment suggesting you look at a linux phone to see how good the next MS Windows phone is going to be? Do you really think there are drivers for MS Windows Phone 7.1 for the devices in that phone? I'll bet the next Nokia phone with MS Windows on it will have very different hardware because it's still too far off for them to announce it.
It's an OS playing catchup so I really have to question the motives of somebody pushing it this way - acting as if an impulse to buy an iphone has been stopped by an impuse to buy something a year or two away and pretending one system is just like a very different one that lags behind in all measures.
I know people that used to work at Nokia and would still have jobs in development (even on a different platform) if Nokia had any sort of plan for survival. It's being wrecked until it will be cheap enough for Microsoft to buy and have as their mobile phone division in a petty game of "me too" with Apple. If instead they put enough people into developing MS Windows Phone they could go beyond catching up and get phone vendors they don't have control over to put it on their devices by choice.
There were concerts, ads, product placements on popular TV shows, purchased "Likes" on Facebook and followers on Twitter - and of course astroturfers to beat all previous levels of astroturfing, including here in these comments by folk who've done no else but astoturf by their comment record. Ad placements on all prominent online venues ensured adoring reviews on those same sites. At best estimate they moved 2M phones, so the cost of marketing is more than the build cost of the equipment - which is not that odd in general but pretty weird in phones at this level. They'd have done better to buy some phones in bulk and give them away to likely influencers. They've not got great ROI for a company whose legions bear Return On Investment as a standard to sell their ware.
The money to Samsung is probably balanced against the patent licensing agreement so Samsung will continue to build new phones noone will buy. Nokia? Well, that's probably part of the $1B already well commented on. And they're not going to turn down any deal because they have the Manchurian CEO.
So now the news is they're stepping it down by 80% and hoping to do more with less. Good luck with that.
WP phones are single core at best. They have limited choice and old tech. At any one retail vendor there will be 0-2 Windows phones up against 0-5 iPhones and 19-30 Android phones. As soon as the customer says "what if..." the salesman is compelled to find the best fit, and the greater selection leads to better fits. Call it fragmentation if you want to. It works.
Nokia built their business on providing many slightly different options to fill the vendor's shelf, pushing out competing options from the shelf. Android vendors have learned from this, and are now out-competing Nokia for shelf space. If you want customers to buy it, it helps if they can fondle it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Very much wrong. Even wikipedia lists it in the Windows CE family because as the GP stated... it is a fancy new UI and API set. You can even link against the older Windows CE libraries and they will run on the phone. Good luck getting it in the Marketplace though.