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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."
People have been so fed of this that made a site with horror stories listed on a map.
http://wptattletale.com/retail-locations
People who even walk in looking for Windows Phones are steered towards Android phones.
This space for rent.
https://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=7933375107&sk=wall 1.3 million monthly users of the Facebook app on WP7 According to http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/17/facebook-android-iphone/ facebook for android has 85.4 million users montly, IOS has 99.1 million monthly users.
The dutch wanna-be tech site tweakers.net ran this figure a day or two ago... and you had fanboy after fanboy proudly proclaiming that 1 million sales to vendors showed just how this was the end of Android and iPhone and the full victory of MS and Windows Phone 7... ignoring quite easily that Android has 700.000 activations a DAY and that the latest iPhone does something like 4 million in a weekend.
MS market share on the mobile market has always been and continues to be laughable but being outsold by a Linux phone that has no marketting and isn't available in the west? That is just beyond sad, it might even be time for shareholders to start questioning if Nokia is upholding its duty as a publicly traded company to maximize shareholder value.
Missing from this story is that MS is funding Nokia for quite a lot of money, I believe it came down to about 150 or so dollars per sold MS phone IS they actually sold 1 million (185 million subsidy).
Some MS fanboys already admit that 7 and 7.5 are already duds but surely 8 will be the lucky numbers (actually a far higher version number but who can keep track when failure comes so fast and reliable) but without any real claims.
The sad part is that MS doing so badly isn't helping the market any, competion is good for the customer and right now there just isn't any from MS.
Elop should just be fired by the shareholders, how can you claim with a straight face that your phone doesn't sell through the fault of the shops when the phone you won't put in the shops outsells it by a gigantic margin?
If any Nokia shares are still in private hands, I would be highly suprised if this story won't have a tail (shares owned by MS and MS friends don't count of course).
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
For what it's worth, I had Windows Mobile 5, 6, and 6.5 phones. The non-touch Blackberry-style phones (e.g Moto Q) were decent but the touch phones were a buggy unstable mess in no small part due to the crapware that came pre-installed on many though I'm sure the OS design was the primary culprit.
After being convinced to go to Android and an EVO 4g, I had a chance to use a WP7 phone in the store and was pleasantly surprised. You can't really understand how interesting WP7 is until it's in your hands. I have owned the WP7 Phone (HTC Arrive) since last April and the thing has locked up on me exactly once, and it recovered about about 20 seconds (disclaimer: I don't install a ton of apps on my phone). It is a completely different experience. Probably not everyone's cup of tea, but it is light years ahead of Windows Mobile and, in several ways that matter to me, ahead of Android and iOS.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
I bought one for myself, another as a gift and I'm thinking of buying two for my parents.
It has seamless Skype and SIP integration, so you can type in a number and choose which service to use from a drop-down box, all from the standard interface. Messaging is all integrated, with SMS, Google Talk, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, etc. The UI looks great and is very smooth. The phone runs Linux on a 1 GHz processor, with 1 GB of RAM, so you can do a lot with it, with true multitasking and a lot of features. Application development is really nice, since it's all based on Qt. And you can imagine how neat it is to run Linux on a phone, and use apt-get to install stuff.
I have no problem with Nokia making Windows phones. It's nice OS, even if it's lacking apps (in particular, no Skype and no SIP stack). But cancelling Meego was madness from a business perspective. Elop killed an amazing product, and what is in my opinion the best mobile OS out there, for both consumers and developers.
very heavily rewritten
A whole load of new bugs to deal with!
...and that's not just a joke.
I have a friend that bought a WP7 phone (she used to have an iphone, and loved it, but got a little tired of seeing the same thing every day and wanted to try something new) 'cause it seemed very slick and flashy in the store—only to find out it's insanely buggy / flaky / ill-designed in everyday use. She updates the software regularly and has actually had the hardware replaced multiple times, but things never seem to really improve.
She's not sure whether she'll go back to iphone or try some android thing next, but she's adamant that she's never getting another winphone...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
T-Mobile has has the Lumia on sale since the turn of the year or so....
What's interesting is that *all* the "review" comments for the Lumia are glowing, all praise the technical features, and all seem to be quite well informed about the features and have correct spelling and grammar. While the review comments on the LG and other phones are more typical bitching and griping about how the phone quit working because the screen broke when the user dropped it....
The mind reels.
Well, to counter your anecdotal evidence with more anecdotal evidence, I haven't found any bugs or weirdness with my Windows Phone.
I don't respond to AC's.
You mentioned, "WP7 is designed *superbly*. It's immensely usable, it's very, VERY fast even on a single core processor." ...This sounds just incredible--not even close to what I would expect. The exact opposite of what we have been hearing from many others.
I don't know about the AC - or you for that matter - but i've used a windows phone (phone?) and it certainly is incredibly smooth (even if you haven't used one i'm sure you can have a look at youtube videos). As for usability i can't say i found it any less usable than any other smartphone, things are generally where you expect them to be just like on iOS, skydrive and office integration is pretty nice if you like that sort of thing. I think their zune (on the phone i mean) software needs some work though, for example creating playlists isn't exactly intuitive.
It's basically the modern smartphone experience (android, ios) just presented in a bit different way and with ties to xbox live, I don't see it winning over happy iphone or android customers by virtue of it not being something particularly revolutionary or anything like that but for what it's worth it does appear to be pretty well done.
The live tiles. I have some complaints about how the tiles handle group contact alerts but I really appreciate their economy. Put the phone down for an hour and one glance at the start screen can give you 6 new data insights. For me it's normally: new work email, new personal email, new missed calls, new responses to Twitter or Facebook posts, new status updates from my family, upcoming calendar appointments. Also, the ability to deep link live tiles is great as well.
Yes, this is what I liked as well. The iPhone "sea of icons" is not as nice as tiles that actually do stuff, display information, etc. WP7 is a denser, more power-user-friendly UI.
Oddly enough, I know several WP7 people who love their phones and would not trade them for iPhone/Android competitors. I am forced to admit that their phones are very nice.
Me? No. I own too many iOS apps and the switchover is too much headache. Microsoft, you came too late.
Advice: on VPS providers
This just isn't accurate. It's not insanely buggy nor flaky, and so I'd like to know what your friend was seeing. I've switched from iOS to WinPhone 7.5 with an HTC Titan about 2 months ago, and I've found a couple of bugs:
1. The disappearing keyboard bug. This is sporadic, and easily worked around (by just refocusing the address bar), and is slated to be fixed soon.
2. Some web pages don't render quite as well as iOS Safari and Android web browsers. But this is pretty rare.
3. Music Hub needs some navigation work, certainly.
Aside from these issues, I've found it to be rather bug free, quite fast, and usable. I wouldn't at all characterize it as "insanely buggy" or "flaky" and I recommend it highly. Yeah, go ahead and accuse me of being paid my MS and what not. This is purely my point of view.
In which universe the N9 had 6 months on the market? Its official release date is 27. September 2011 ( http://conversations.nokia.com/2011/09/27/nokia-n9-is-heading-to-the-shops/ ) and the first reported online store (with 4 weeks waiting period!) appeared in mid October. The release was followed by a huge number of complains from people not being able to get it all over the interwebs throughout the whole October (read the news from NWC, 26. Oct, and read the complaints in the comments from people not being able to get it. That lasted 'til at least mid November after which the sales chain stabilized.
At best, N9 had a month more than the Lumia 800 + Lumia 710, it had much higher price, it was released in non-key and weak markets for smartphones (except China, where they'd surely release the Lumia if the designers of the Metro UI in their unfathomable wisdom didn't decide to make a typography-centric UI that takes quite some time to change the script, if even possible), some of those announced markets never received it, quite a number of them with people earning $1-$2/day on average so it could only be a niche device, it had almost no subsidization (and where it had, it lasted only for a month, those markets are now becoming Lumia markets), it had a measly marketing budget compared to the Lumia line, it had a DOA stamp all over it (including the Elop's own - even if it's a success, we won't be making any more MeeGo devices)... And it beat the Lumia sales at least 2:1, and some are even claiming 3:1 (of course, we'll hardly know the exact numbers). And nobody blamed/cheered the salespeople for its 'success' (well, it is quite a success compared the number of things it had against it, including the silent hate from the very company producing it).
This is why the N9 is selling so well. It runs Meego, an OS with a paradigm similar to iOS. The market desperately wants a competitor to iOS that doesn't suck as badly as Android does.
"Nokia were up shit creek bereft of paddles before MS infiltrated them, with engineers incapable of finishing any of their new OS projects."
I would challenge that notion. Lot of feedback from internals indicates that this time management was that who blow it. Reasons where numerous, but mostly Nokia legal's deep distrust with open source and Linux per se. As far as I remember biggest problem was to provide closed DRM based system within Linux system (that wouldn't be so easy to override). As Nokia legals has always have been overzealous pro-IP, this isn't really a surprise. They could easily release normal working Maemo system year and half ago. I mean, that OS and stack were battle tested on N770 and N800/N810. But legal fears and trying to introduce half-backed DRM solution when world strictly moved away for them killed any hope for Maemo.
It also explains why Nokia management fell into Microsoft arms in nanoseconds. Unfortunately, they are made for each other.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!