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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."
Then maybe you should fire your marketing department, because clearly you are trying to convert the wrong people.
then they'd love us. Or hate us. Which ever, we'd have more money.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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.
I invented my own mobile device. It is fully awesome. I blame its lack of success on the fact that no-one would agree to manufacture it.
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.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
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?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
"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.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Salesmen sell things that people want to buy. Full story at 11.
Meego project had huge potential, but you went for the quick bucks.
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.
Elop has shown his ignorance in the way mobile phones are sold (at least in the UK). The pressure on sales staff is incredible to make the numbers. They cannot afford to put all of their efforts into selling a lame duck. And the public are all buying iPhones, Android and BlackBerry smartphones. The WP7 Nokia Lumia are not generating much if any interest in the buying public. So the sales staff are going to focus on all and anything that will fly off the shelf, and WP7, no matter how much smoke Elop blow up our arses about how good it is (it isn't) will make a blind bit of difference. Nice try Nokia. Now do the right thing, swallow your pride and put Android on the N8 and be prepared to be hit with a tsunami of orders.
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?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Blaming WP7's failures on every mobile phone salesperson all over the world is a cop-out.
Remember Windows Mobile? It powered several nice smartphones, especially models from HTC. Those sold very very well up until the iPhone took over. Did salesmen require bribes to sell those?
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
From what I've seen of the reviews, WP is a pretty good OS, and the Lumia phones are being sold at pretty competitive prices with lots of marketing behind them. So, now MS and Nokia are fishing around for explanations for why they aren't selling to consumers.
The answer is the MS brand. After years of pushing crap on users, using nasty and anti-consumer tactics to fight their competitors, and trying to harm the Internet, MS is a tarnished consumer brand - surprise, surprise.
Obviously, I think this is fair, but I also think it is fair that consumers and the industry re-evaulate brands. MS has been much better behaved in recent years (e.g. they are trying to win the browser wars by making their browser better) so maybe they deserve a second chance?
I sold audio equipment for a couple of years and one of the first things I got to learn was to always give the customer TWO options. Unless the customer seemed unhappy with both choices, introducing a third option would only make the buying decision harder often resulting in a "need to go home and think about it"-response. This of course combined with lazy salespersons who doesn't feel they need to learn anything more than they absolutely need to close a deal.
This isn't exactly news to people in sales. Anyone trying to enter as a "third option" will have an extemely tough time trying to break through in the market, even if their product is better in many aspects.
(And as with any golden "rule of thumb" within sales, there is of course a shitload of exceptions, but I doubt the smartphone market is one of them)
Jesus had a UNIX beard.
Windows sucks. Face it most people had a bad experience with Windows even if it's their own fault. It's also something their company uses so a lot of people associate their distaste of work with Windows. Combine that with the fact it doesn't look that cool and offers nothing all the other phones have and you have to question why anyone would want one.
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.
Not about the phone, I've never heard of it. But in NZ they're advertising the Windows 7 OS. The TV ads are absolutely terrible.
One is a father and son both on laptops, the son gets dad to help with division on his computer(which you'd expect to be easy on a computer), and the son goes onto his dad's laptop. He then groovies up his powerpoint presentation with noise, wallpaper, and 3D extruded text and graphs.
Compare this to the elegant and elitist Mac ads. They make you think that one becomes stylish and cool with lots of good-looking friends of all races with perfect smiles. This is proper marketing. Mac is much better at it than MS.
I bought an E71 and I can certainly say that it wasn't the smartest decision I ever made.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
The market is already saturated with locked-in, walled garden type smartphones. Microsoft isn't offering anything that other manufacturers aren't already. Most people aren't going to want to buy a WP7 device if they can get an established Android phone or iPhone at the same price.
Windows Phone, according to Facebook -> https://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=135892916448833
My last phone was a Nokia XPress Music 3510. The only reason I binned it was because, after 4 years, the screen cracked and began cutting out or losing backlighting. I was shocked at how few Nokia phones there were on show, either in the "Pay as you go" or Contract sections of the stores (I went to about 6 to find the best prices). If there were any Nokias they were relegated to the "Other makers" section, alongside makers. Blackberry's got their own (small) stand, as did iPhones, while about 2/3s of the walls were the myriad Android handsets from Samsung, HTC, et al. This is in the UK btw, and the O2 store in particular had probably two Nokia handsets in total. The had more Sagem handsets than Nokia. (Not to besmirch Sagem, I have owned TWO sagems out of 5 phones I've owned since 2002, the first was actually my first phone, and was fine. Simple, but fine. The second got wedged between the inside and the outside of a car and refused to work afterwards but was a good phone while it lasted).
Frankly, Nokia had a good thing making phones that were phones. Their attempts to break into the Smartphone market have been schizophrenic at best. S60 was supposed to be superceeded by atleast three different OSes IIRC. Maemo, Meego (Which was an evolution of Maemo) and Symbian 3. Now they're making Windows phones and, while I don't think anyone doubts that it's a capable OS (if not the best, I don't think anyone will say it's unusable), and requires only marketing and visibility to sell, I don't think Nokia realise that the name "Nokia" is no longer synonymous with "Good Phone", and hasn't been for some time. They've been overtaken by Samsung, HTC, Apple and RIM (and that's saying something considering RIMs in a bit of bother). And the reason is plainly one thing: They were late to the party and they brought more drink while everyone was already sozzled and sleeping comfortably with their poison of choice.
It's like what happened with IBM and OS/2, they've lost and don't know it yet. They need to refocus to survive. Maybe in a few years a gap will open up when the next big tech leap comes out. Bide their time and come back stronger.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Remember when OS X and thus Apple started to gain in users? Why was that?
It was because OS X was catering to the right people: The opinion leaders. To us.
The very same thing goes for mobile phones. It doesn't suprise me the least that N9 sales are better. It runs Symbian
I can't say what amuses me more: that you consider yourself an opinion leader, or that you don't know what are you talking about.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Essentially, it's a spin on the phrase: "A poor workman that blames his tools"
That's not what that link says. It says Microsoft is making more _revenue wise_ from Android than Windows phones. Per phone, Microsoft makes more on WP7 (which brings in $22 per phone).
I have a feeling that Microsoft have been mistaken branding everything they do "Windows something". People generally run Windows not because they like Windows (they curse it, generally) but because they have to have it to run the apps they want.
If that driver isn't there, people run a mile from anything branded Windows, because they see Windows as dull and a source of discomfort from their experience on the PC. Android and iOS don't have that baggage. Also, there will be a lot of negative baggage from memories of the old Winmo devices. Non-technical people don't realise that Windows Phone 7 is actually a different platform, they see the name "Windows", and remember what WinMo and WinCE (pronounced wince) was like. Also you'll get the folks who see "Ah, Windows, therefore it'll run suchandsuch an app for my PC too", then find that Windows Phone is actually completely different to Windows on the PC and is incompatible, and get disapointed.
Note that Apple didn't call the iPhone OS "OSX", even though they share a codebase - it got called something completely different, thus avoiding confusion and avoid having disappointed nontechnical people who think their Mac software can run on their iPhone or iPad.
In short, I think Microsoft should have invented a different name that's not Windows for their phones to break all the negative associations people have with Windows (dull, something I use only for work, etc.). But then again, we've seen Microsoft try to be cool in the past and it was painful to watch (Zune).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
It's just an unmitigated disaster, and in Steve Ballmer's infinite wisdom, they simply scaled it up to desktop size and called it Windows 8.
They started with scaling XP down to phone size, and that was an abortion. So, all they could think of was to do the polar opposite, and develop a TERRIBLE phone interface, and just scale it up to desktop size.
Can we burn Microsoft to the ground already? They're completely irrelevant and only hang on because humans are afraid of change.
So, Elop, MS's installed "Service Pack" for Nokia is trying to deflect blame for their ho-hum OS onto someone else? Nothing new. I've only used Windows Phone in demo settings and I've been underwhelmed enough; its trying to be iOS in terms of "experience" and popularity but doesn't want to totally let go of the customization of Android. It seems like everything Windows Phone is doing, someone else is doing better unless you're just totally enamored with Microsoft products. I can see when Windows 8 gets here there will be a lot more convergence between Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8.
That said, I'm as pissed as any here about MS cash infusion and installed puppet diverting or just plain firing so many good Linux and QT developers while calling for an end to Maemo and MeeGo development. My old N900 here sits beside me and it probably doesn't have much life left. When I purchased it, I was looking forward to Harmattan and MeeGo to be installed upon it, followed by my next phone being one of a handful of high-end MeeGo devices. Maemo5 was to be the last "Geeks Only" OS, and that Harmattan/MeeGo would break triumphantly into the public view, with the kind of polish, UI and features that the iOS user could love, without compromising the Linux-loving hacker from adding his favorite repositories and apt-getting what was needed, or freely developing software for the thing without having to beg for a dev kit and agree to capitulate to giving censor rights to a major corporation. From what we see regarding the N9, this was certainly on target - it doesn't surprise me that people are going out of their way to find one despite Nokia's attempt to hide them in the mud, so to speak. Now, imagine if this happened a few years back as it would have done so without MS meddling in Nokia's affairs, and I'm guessing that MeeGo (7 or 8) by now could easily be one of the major, well known mobile operating systems, where it is just second nature to develop your app for iOS, Android, and MeeGo. I have to admit that the lack of "normal" apps affected me with the N900 - when MMORPGs made their mobile authenticators, they didn't consider porting them to Maemo platforms. However, it was looking that MeeGo would have no problem running Android applications, especially at the beginning of its presence before it was popular enough for big-name application developers to add MeeGo to its list of must-launch-upon mobile OSes. Especially considering that there were already working variants of Alien Dalvik that allowed you to run Android apps on a Maemo/MeeGo phone as close to native as they run on their their own, MeeGo could likely be one of the dominant OSes around.
Microsoft's cash flow gives them the ability to basically throw money at a sinking ship if it is in their best interest to do so to sink other, more vulnerable ships. They can afford to subsidize every Windows Phone sold if it means killing MeeGo and putting the world's biggest phone manufacturer under their thumb while, (as they may have planned) trying to get Windows Phones to market cheaper than everyone else. Unfortunately, people just aren't excited enough about Windows Phone which seems to be "meh" in every way so they're not taking the bait. While I'll never buy a Windows Phone just because of what they did to MeeGo, they're finding that even Joe Mobile doesn't want their product. I'm guessing that in time, if they can't manage to bring out some killer new feature with Win8 and WinPhone8 on the magnitude of "Your Phone is now an Xbox360 ! Install to disk on your home console and its uploaded to the Live Cloud, so you can play on your Windows Phone 8! Supports built in connections for 4 X360 controllers and voice with or without headset! Phone camera is Kinect-compliant on every WinPhone 8! Want to play on the big screen? Just use the included HDMI cable! All for free with your XLive subscription!", they'll probably fade into the ether as Windows Mobile did; likely even faster because they don't have an entrenched PDA and business phone community.