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Nokia CEO Blames Salesmen For Windows Phone Struggles
An anonymous reader writes "Steven Elop of Nokia has placed some of the blame for the struggles of Windows Phone on mobile phone shops — for not pushing it. As The Register points out, sales staff 'want their commission,' and tend to only show phones they think might sell. Exact details of Windows Phone sales numbers are being covered up by both Microsoft and Nokia, who refuse to state specifics; sales figures to operators are stated at one million, but the majority of those seem to be unsold to consumers, and neither Microsoft nor Nokia will give numbers on activations. The best available numbers seem to be maximum Lumia sales estimates from Tomi Ahonen, a former Nokia Executive and the only analyst to correctly predict Nokia's market share fall for the end of 2011. Nokia's Lumia sold around 600,000 phones in 2011 (again, including the large portion in warehouses). One of the worst signs for WP8 is that Nokia's N9 — despite being crippled without marketing, and often selling at full price compared to the almost fully subsidized Lumia phones — is selling better than Nokia's Windows phones, with 1.5M or more phones reaching end users. Interestingly, if the Nokia N9 had been available in all markets, it might have sold almost 5M units and pushed Nokia into profitability."
Have a marginal product that you can't sell? Blame it on anybody other than the designers/manufacturers. Let's ignore the fact that Microsoft wrote the specs for the phone as well as the operating system, let's ignore that the phone is locked up tighter than a 14 year old Mormon virgin, let's ignore the fact that there's been practically no marketting and advertising for this brick. It's the salesmen's fault, pure and simple.
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tend to only show phones they think might sell
They must have more business sense than Elop? We'll see who's still in business next year, ye olde cellphone shoppe or Nokia. I... would bet on the cellphone shop.
Exact details of Windows Phone sales numbers are being covered up by both Microsoft and Nokia, who refuse to state specifics
Must be extremely bad if its coverup time. Even the Zune figures weren't kept this well buried. Aren't there stats from "popular" apps like the facebook app or angry birds where you can assume 75% of owners have those 3rd party apps, therefore if they have 750K sales of AB or FB on the MS app store or whatever, they would probably therefore have about 1M phones out in the wild?
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"Steven Elop of Nokia has placed some of the blame for the struggles of Windows Phone on mobile phone shops â" for not pushing it. As The Register points out, sales staff 'want their commission,' and tend to only show phones they think might sell
Those salespersons know something about those phones that "burning platform" Elop does not. WP7 on Nokia does not sell.
Interestingly, if the Nokia N9 had been available in all markets, it might have sold almost 5M units and pushed Nokia into profitability."
Truer words not said.
Only Schettino of the Costa Concordia could have done worse.
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FTFY
Salesmen sell things that people want to buy. Full story at 11.
Explain the N9 then, actively crippled by Nokia itself, not for sale in shops in many countries AND still it sells more.
Also, how does webshop push you to another phone then the one you are searching for?
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It's alot of stuff, brand being one of them. Tomi Ahonen has a really detailed analysis of lumia's failure, much of which is abandoning Nokia's way of doing things and alot of it is about wp being utter crap and Elop handling things catastrophically.
The real Top 13 reasons why Nokia Lumia and Windows Phone will fail, not just in USA but across planet
It's worth reading.
To be fair, and just in case you didn't know, WinPhone 7 is very, very heavily rewritten from the WinMo days of yore. (Not that I'd ever voluntarily touch one myself.)
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I used to sell phones and special phone commissions, known as spiffs when I was selling, can indeed vary from phone to phone and carrier to carrier. The thing is you used to get a percentage of the retail price of the phone and you also got a special spiff that was independent of the price. So you could sell a $9.99 phone with a $290 subsidy and make $15 on the phone (assuming a 5% commission) and then get a $20 spiff on top of it. Sell 10 phones a day and you did pretty good. Sometimes the spiffs were linked to all phones for a specific carrier and sometimes specific models (though probably still paid by the carrier).
I have no idea what the rates are like now, but it is absolutely plausible that iPhones and Android phones could be more attractive to sales people than Windows Phones if there are specific model spiffs in play.
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Moron, the E55 is Symbian S60: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S60_(software_platform)
It is outdated recycled crap for cheap phones.
I'm talking about the Symbian^3 platform: http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/14093_Reasons_NOT_to_want_Symbian_Be.php
Kinda different?
Here be signatures
N9 doesn't run Symbian. It runs Harmattan, which is a transitional system between Maemo and Meego. It's Linux based. From the userspace it looks a lot like a normal Linux system, though the N900 was much better in that respect.