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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.
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....
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.
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).