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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.
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.
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.
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.
very heavily rewritten
A whole load of new bugs to deal with!
Stick Men
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.
How do you propose Nokia will do anything now most of the engineers were either sacked, walked or were transferred out of Nokia along with the IP?
Nokia were up shit creek bereft of paddles before MS infiltrated them, with engineers incapable of finishing any of their new OS projects. MS and WP7 just took away the boat as well and put concrete boots on the company.
[...] I have owned the WP7 Phone (HTC Arrive) since last April [...] (disclaimer: I don't install a ton of apps on my phone).
No need to say the same thing twice ;)
On a slightly more serious note: App selection is one of most important aspects on a smart phone today, and Windows Phone is nowhere near the quantity and quality of iPhone and Android in this area.
It is the built-in facebook functionality according to http://wmpoweruser.com/windows-phone-7-facebook-app-finally-crosses-1-million-monthly-active-users/
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.
Get back to us when you manage to turn it on.
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.
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
Err, yes, it's stuff like this that has led us to mock windows for decades now.
"Sure, the keyboard vanishes, but . . . "
"Windows is stable, it's all those third party things you need to make it usable that make it crash."
"Yeah, the windows automobile explodes killing all its occupants every 200 miles, but that's a 47% improvement over the prior version."
It's not that we hate windows. It's like the French military: we mock it because it writes all of our material for us.
hawk
It doesn't have text reflow in the browser. That's pathetic. Eventually MS will allow native apps and Opera will be released for WP7, but IE9 should have come with text reflow. And don't give me the stupid fanboy response of "I don't need it." or "It's woooorse with it". Screw those fanboys.