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Former Nokia Exec: Windows Phone Strategy Doomed
itwbennett writes "Slashdot readers will recall that back in January, Nokia CEO Steven Elop blamed the company's Windows Phone woes on commission-minded salespeople, who pushed phones they thought would actually sell. Now, ex-Nokia exec Tomi Ahonen is calling the Nokia's Windows Phone strategy 'a certain road to death.' He bases this grim assessment on UK market shares from Kantar Worldpanel: 'When Nokia shifted from "the obsolete" Symbian to "the awesome" Windows Phone, Nokia lost a third of its customers! In just one quarter!' Can MeeGo or Tizen save Nokia now?"
Nokia is dead. Enough said.
>who pushed phones they thought would actually sell.
Really?
Isn't news supposed to be impartial? This writer definitely has an angle they're trying to push. How'd this get through?
I think everyone who follows closely the industry was already aware of that fact. It was a shit move for Nokia, I'd go so far as to say it wasn't just a bad decision: the guys in charge should be prosecuted.
I'm so glad I no longer work for them (Nokia).
The royalties from their vibrating tattoo patent will keep them afloat...
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Pretty much the only thing I see saving Nokia is Android. Make some awesome quality Android handsets and customers will return. Make them with a nice clean stock Android loadout instead of some dumbass custom crapware laden ugly UI and you'll stand out from the pack even more. (Geeks will embrace you too. Word of Mouth is powerful advertising!)
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
And Meego is dead anyway. Nokia can, should, and probably will in some way develop Meego/Maemo Harmatton further, as they still seem to develop Qt further. But going with Tizen and dumping Qt -- and for what? -- would be dumb, and is unlikely to happen.
Nokia seems to be taking the Blackberry approach to dealing with disruptive change.
Nokia's Windows phones continue to tank, meanwhile sales of the 'dead' and most excellent N9 (which was killed to make way for Nokia's WP handsets) are doing well. People are clamouring for Nokia to reconsider its position on the N9. Will Nokia listen and respond in time? Probably not.
Mer is the Qt-based successor to Meego. Tizen is all HTML5 happy, without Qt.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
No.
Nor can any other niche platform. Stop coming out with stupid new platforms that exist only to serve incumbent technology players. Phones and software are for people to use, not so Microsoft or Intel don't get left out.
Design something to help your customers rather than yourself. This means you Nokia, Microsoft, and Intel.
After seeing they gave-up on their Linux based OS, I took the plunge on a nice Android based smartphone (HTC Rezound.) So now I am locked into a 2 year contract with Verizon. This means even if they came out with some awesome/super-open new OS today, I wouldn't be able to buy it until after they are dead (I give em a year until they are bought by another company.)
A substandard phone is doomed to fail. In other news, the sky is still blue.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Now, ex-Nokia exec Tomi Ahonen, is calling the Nokia's Windows Phone strategy 'a certain road to death.'
There are two layers of bias. The first is the tone of the submitter. Then there is a the second layer with the ex executive. All we need is a Netcraft meme thrown in for good measure...sigh...
Seriously why would we put any stock in what the Nokia exec says? Nokia has been loosing market share for years, this guy clearly wouldn't know a growth oriented one if he saw it.
"Former Nokia executive" would be meaningful if it were someone who left around the Feb 11 announcements, not someone who once upon a time long long ago worked at some random position at Nokia.
Ahonen is a nice guy but has an incredible way of spinning things around, and has been so violent in his statements his only options are to stick with them or stop blogging and lose all credibility. If the new strategy pays off he becomes irrelevant because he would have been so wrong. (Not that that stops idiots from listening to eldar). He HAS to spin everything this way, which of course does not take away from facts but it's like reading an Apple article on Gizmodo.
Nokia has been plenty stupid with their 11 feb announcement, but it was the original Symbian crowd in Nokia which strove to completely kill any other projects such as Maemo and later Meego, and that crowd had to be shot in the head. Boom. Now we can work on other projects. They'll be back.
It would have:
1. Nokia's excellent call quality
2. Great camera like Nokia's latest 41 megapixel phone with a huge sensor
3. Replaceable battery.
4. Nice, open Linux setup with easy API (like WebOS HTML/Javascript).
5. WebOS-style UI (especially cards)
6. Not needing to be tied into an account like Google/Android or iPhone/Apple in order to simply use it.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Nokia should stop trying to compete in the Smart Phone market. It's already flooded with too many models and manufacturers. Nokia should go back to what they do best, and make low cost basic cell phones for those people not looking to pay for data plans. Most of the carriers have lots of Android models, but few good basic phones.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
The Rule 34 implications of that are immense!
It might even be enough to save Nokia.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Microsoft dominated computers for a generation because they were (almost) the only game in town. Businesses bought Windows for people's work machines, and people were largely unwilling to pay a premium for their home machines to do things completely differently than they did at work. Phones (and MP3 players) however, don't have a "learning curve", and are much much more of a fashion statement than a computer. For the very reason Microsoft is ubiquitous in the office, they're not going to be ubiquitous on phones. Car/shoe analogy: busses and boots all look alike, cars and shoes are all different. So, if you want to drive a bus/wear boots/use a Microsoft phone, go right ahead, just don't expect anyone to think you're hip.
Microsoft's Windows 8 desktop OS strategy?
I put two comparable desktop systems on Craigslist, one running Windows, the other Linux. I sold the Linux box in 12 hours. Maybe just a lucky day for penguins.
Actualy posessed of such gall!
Selling what people want to buy! I can tell you, this does not bode well.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Blaming Nokia's smartphone sales decline on a move to Windows is pre-mature. Yes, there is a correlation here, but that does not imply causality. What about the sale of Palm, RIM and other proprietary OS smartphone? Have they held their respective marketshare steady? Nokia Symbian would have failed to complete with Android and iOS much in the same way as Windows. To truly calculate impact of move to Windows, I will calculate Nokia's smartphone market excluding these two ecosystems before the move to Windows and after the move. Currently, iOS and Android have about 76% market share. This means that Nokia at 14% has roughly about 60% of the remainder and that is definitely not bad.
Nokia exist now as a cautionary tale to the likes to Google (and by extension Samsung), and of course to Apple. Cast your mind back ~10 years, and the Nokia 3310 and 6210 were simply the mobiles you bought. Why? They were well built, easy to use and everyone knew that Nokia were at the top of their game.
What went wrong? With hindsight, it seems they just utterly failed to build on their good brand and reputation. They started facing some competition from Motorola and a few others who offered (imho) poorer UI's, but better looking hardware. And I think that is the key part - Nokia not only failed to keep ahead of the curve design-wise, they seemed to completely miss the shift in what people wanted. Good solid hardware and features, with good battery, were no longer enough. Mobiles became a fashion accessory, and the likes of the Razr offered far more interesting designs than the Nokia bricks. Oh sure, there were snap-on cases for Nokia phones, but they didn't cut the mustard for long.
They had the potential to get ahead of the curve again with the N-Gage. It could have found a solid niche for itself, but some bizarre usability choices (holding it sideways to make a call, so you look like a buffoon?) killed it on arrival. While they flapped around on this and continued to fail to deliver what people actually wanted, Apple (and others) continued to eat into their market share. Nokia seemed to completely fail to see the touchscreen/smartphone tsunami.
It's a sad tale, but as I said at the outset, every manufacturer should study Nokia's downfall to help mitigate their own demise.
As I'm living in the UK I can state that this is definitely not for lack of marketing. Every shopping centre I have seen has several slick looking panels advertising Lumia and it seems to have made zero effect. People just simply do not want them, and that is probably going to be a great puzzle to Nokia and Microsoft.
They had a next generation phone with what Meego was actually starting to turn into. Now they're going to need a stop-gap measure, and the only option is Android.
As a former Nokia customer, I'd buy the Lumia hardware with a stock pure Ice Cream Sandwich android in a heartbeat...
The problem Nokia faced is that Symbian was a fading, older platform. It still has fans and users, but that's a market in decline and a sure road to ruin (eventually). Meego was having trouble getting off the ground and wasn't gaining much traction.
Microsoft shows up with a wad of cash and offers to make them the premier Windows Phone people. If it works, they're set. If it doesn't work, they're on a faster road to ruin.
But really, if you're already on a road to ruin (which they were), can you afford not to take a risk to try and get off it? I don't think Nokia really had better options aside from becoming yet another Android handset maker. That gamble hasn't worked out for them, which happens sometimes. Shame too, I loved Nokia phones back in the day for how tough they were.
At this point, their best chance is the unlikely scenario that Windows 8 tablets take off. If they do, people will become more intersted in phones that can run the same things and work with the same UI, so Windows Phone 8 devices will see growth. I'm not willing to bet on it though, and it's a bad place for Nokia to be because their success now depends on things outside their control.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The only thing that can save Nokia is if Microsoft just flat out buys them outright and makes them Microsoft's Mobile division. That is, if you consider that "saving" them.
Quite seriously. Windows mobile was a godawful platform right until the current version (which is actually fairly decent... or would be if it was stable, would boot up in finite time and most of all I didn't have to create a windows live account just to update the frickin' firmware, are you kidding me, MS? What is my company supposed to do should I decide to leave, never update the phone again? Or am I supposed to hand over my account and let someone else be online with my personal data? And before you ask, not my fault, my company made me use it...). But back on topic.
Windows mobile was maybe the worst platform there was in the mobile field. Don't ignore that a sizable portion of your customer base is the customer that gets his phone with a new contract, especially in the younger echelon, the 14-25 crowd, which is also the people who always want the latest and greatest. And WinMobile was much, but it was not cool. Nokia used to be cool. Now it's Android. Android is cool for the 14-25 crowd. There's tons of software for it and you can easily download it from the net. An iPhone is cool, for exactly the same reason. WinMobile is ... umm....... not. For exactly that reason.
I remember the time when I was young, and I can only assume that today cells are what computers used to be in my time. There were those that were cool, and those that were not. Those everyone else had and those ... well, that I had. Commodore, first C64 then Amiga, was cool, Atari, neither 800 nor ST, was not. Why? Because your peers have them. It's as simple as that. You can go around and compare, give tips, belong together. WinMobile doesn't belong.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So, who made these projections? 20% market share in a few years? That's absolutely insane especially when you consider they had the history of Blackberry and Palm to compare to before joining Microsoft.. which, unsurprisingly, is the second red flag they should have seen.
It's intriguing to me that even over the screams of "gawd no!" from Nokia's end-user community, they went ahead and did the microsoft merger anyway. Sorry, Nokia, but you guys got pwned. It's your own fault.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
He's been vehemently against Nokia's decision to leverage their smartphone strategy on Windows Phone. For more awesome reading explaining why, check this out.
As explained in the link above, it's not Nokia's decision to use Windows Phone on their smartphones that is the chief problem. They are, essentially, hedging their entire existence on the platform, which is a very bad bet for a company whose popularity has always been stronger in Europe, Asia and developing nations. It's almost like a Kodak in reverse in that they are, more or less, giving less importance to their bread and butter and more importance to a huge, HUGE risk. (Notice that HTC and Samsung, the top dogs in the non-iPhone smartphone world, use more of their resources for building Android and their own OS's than Windows Phone.)
The sole fact that, to this day and despite a very recent system update, Windows Phones still have the crippling text-message-of-death bug clearly demonstrates where Microsoft thinks they're at with the OS. I haven't seen any of the major players on Android/iOS commit serious time to Windows Phone yet; until this happens, it's a sinking ship.
But that's only if you've used the latest Windows Phone OS, anything from the 7 or before era was terrible. To be honest the current one isn't BAD, but it's going to be impossible to sell anyone on it as long as it has the "windows" moniker.
Nokia almost went bankrupt about 8 years ago and still is on the verge of bankruptcy. Signing deals is for bankers and investors to trade useless stock. Windows 8 will not go ahead despite the hype.
How can you get excited about a phone... a vibrator maybe. Remember there are only so many people on the planet and those who you can sell phones to before one hits saturation point of the marketplace. Expect all mobile phone manufacturers to suffer in the not to distant future along with M$ and Apple!
The bubble will burst and is bursting but it is all in slow motion so that you do not notice it as much.
For some strange reason that reminds me of how "The New World Order" has been implemented over the past 40 years!
All cows eat grass!
Nokia CEO Steven Elop blamed the company's Windows Phone woes on commission-minded salespeople, who pushed phones they thought would actually sell.
Sounds completely sensible behavior from the salespeople. Maybe Nokia should talk to their engineers and get them to make phones that people will want and then salespeople will try to sell them.
The latest Sybian Anna phone's pretty decent and finally caught up in features and usability with Android or iOS, I was looking for a new phone a couple of weeks ago and I was really tempted to try one... but looking at Nokia's appstore, it's pretty empty... coupled with less than enthusiastic salespeople that say the return rate for these Nokia models are quite high, I got myself a low-end Samsung with Android for half the price instead, This being my first touch phone, my previous one was the qwerty Nokia N72, a phone built so good back then I predicted it'd be the last Nokia I'll ever own, and it was. Nokia still differentiate between their middle or high-end phones on OS, with lower end being S40, while the Koreans like Samsung and LG, and even Sony are starting to have cheap Android phones now, for a price of a 'feature phone' you could have the latest and greatest apps like the flagship phone too... People are saying that Nokia still dominates the low-end market, I see it as not for long as smartphones become cheaper and move downmarket.
Death of 2 known brands, MSWinPhone & Nokia, is underway.
The article's discussion of the facts is straightforward and looks like a death spiral.
Perhaps their motto should be "Smart phones for dumb people"? I'm only half joking. Traditional dumb phones are pretty much gone now, but there's still a huge market of people who want a phone that is "just a phone" but don't want to fiddle around with installing apps (maybe a few basic preinstalled apps like browser, email & scheduler). Unfortunately, it's also a market that's very price sensitive so I don't know how much money Nokia can make with that strategy (and in many parts of the world they'd be competing with Blackberry who also seem to have accidentally fallen into that market)
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Everyone fails to understand what is actually happening:
1) Elop mission is to keep destroying Nokia and eventually lower it's price so it can be acquired by Microsoft at lower price;
2) Microsoft has all interest on acquiring one of the manufacturers which produced outstanding hardware;
This is the reality, not anything else :)
The absolute best feature of the N9 is not even Meego but the Harmattan UI. It bring the deeply addictive and beautiful swipe interface witch is certainly the best UI to handle multitasking on a mobile phone. Now that the Android Linux tree start to be merged into the mainline Linux tree, the obvious goal is to make the N9 and his successor able to run Android apps into the Swipe interface. That will make a winner.
and die in process. It is all calculated. Both parties knew Nokia is done and finished. They cannot be that dumb to not see what every consumer sees. So that billion bucks paid by MS is like money paid to advertisement. And just maybe, there is clause that another MS bailout would come.
I don't want a phone.
Then, I saw the n9... and totally fell in love.
Just, like I fell in love with the n800, and bought it.
Just, like I fell in love with the n900, and bought it.
And, while they are awesomely superior to just about anything.
Nokia, continually tries to f*ck it up, successfully, I might add.
So, I am breaking out of this co-dependent relationship.
hmmmm... I wonder, if I can run android on it???
Rule 34a:
If it exists, there's a pornographic Nokia tattoo of it.
Attitudes in any company tend to trickle down from the top.
Does anyone see something of the like on the horizon for Windows 8?
They have been in the rubber business once so ...
...now that Nokia is doing so badly, it would be an ideal time to acquire them for a song! Now if you're an 800lb software company looking to expand into the mobile phone market...
A hundred and twenty characters ought to be enough for anyone...
With Motorola's handset group now owned by Google, surely the other Android vendors like Samsung, HTC, and others can't be happy that they're dependant on a competitor for their OS. If Nokia and HP create a more democratic consortium around WebOS and everyone could win.
You missed the 'Amazon' option (as did Nokia), combine 1&2. Take Android and fork their own version, just like Amazon did.
Last year Nokia stated that Googles insistence on bundling Google Maps as the default if they wanted any of the apps package played a large part in killing the Android option. However Nokia was well positioned to replace all but the Market with their own services and that would be less risky than completely going alone.
Worse still, shipping with G Maps doesn't stop users using a Nokia map service anyway, or any other service they want to supply. I have an Orange phone here that openly puts it's own mapping app on the home screen to catch unwary users. My Xperia tries so very hard to entice me to use Sony servers, while running fairly stock Android.
The reality is few users would have voluntarily switched to Nokia versions but they'd still have a business. Instead they decided selling their homegrown maps service to Microsoft was more important than actually selling hardware. Or more likely Microsoft plant Elop simply vetoed any non Microsoft future.
They lost a third right after the switch huh? And they switched randomly, at a random time, for no reason whatsoever. And, most importantly, they lost a third compared to the control nokia group that lost nothing right? Uhuh.
Oh, and certain death, right. compared, again, to not doing it and being gloriously successful? No. Compared to going some other random way and maybe being kind of sustainable. I respect people who decide to try for better and risk having nothing over those who decide to stay middle-of-the-pack.
So what would you prefer? Yet another android phone, this time with samsung scratched off and nokia silk-screened in its place? Or would you prefer something totally different that has a chance of failing?
Tell you what. Go and buy the someone's android device, scratch off the logo yourself, and use a silver sharpie to write nokia in its place. then you'll have what you want.
Watch Steve Job's come back key note : MS supported Apple because they saw them as an important eco-system player. This is what they are doing with Nokia now. Without a successful Nokia MS is looking at Apple and Google/Motorola carving up the market. They are not prepared to allow that.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
FcuK Tomi Ahonen. He was a mid level manager on the network side of the business, miles away from phones, in the NINETIES.
On the other hand - credit to him, he has parleyed his insignificant role in the lasts century up to something remarkable.
Defending existing marketshare or trying to reinvent, they chose the latter.
Nokia Lumias are getting great word of mouth in the tech community and the press, Microsoft has the money to make it happen on the developer side as well as the carrier side. Nobody thought Microsoft could build a credible game system, and they did it. With Nokia's superior hardware, they might have a shot.
If you haven't used a Nokia Lumia 800, I suggest you do so before you claim their use of Windows Phone is "criminal." It's a gorgeous phone and it's running a fantastic operating system. It might not be for you, but it's certainly not garbage. This is best of breed.
..that way the fireball will be twice as big when they crash.
This is where licensing is key. In the Google case, if Google screws you, it is perfectly feasible to go it your own. You do lose critical things like the market, but many vendors are in fact growing their own (e.g. Amazon).
With MS, when you get screwed, you don't have much choice in the matter.
I am willing to believe that Google datacenter guys might be afflicted by a touch of hubris and their partners are kicked out the door as fast as they can possibly do it even before it is the prudent course of action, but as a standardized mobile OS provider, the contingency plans don't get much better than open source.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Its the name Windows, it sounds old and tired to most people. Even if the phone version has nothing to do with the desktop. It just doesn't sound sexy. People hear windows phone and they picture some old Chevy truck sitting on the lawn on blocks.
There are two layers of bias. The first is the tone of the submitter. Then there is a the second layer with the ex executive. All we need is a Netcraft meme thrown in for good measure...sigh...
It's amusing to read Ahonen in retrospect. It's basically goes like this: shout things about Nokia, be proven wrong about most of them in the next few months. He claimed Nokia lost leadership in cameras (citing some silly megapixel race numbers), before they announced PureView. He said Lumia lacks the all-important front facing camera and the overall specs are lackluster, then Lumia 900 was announced. The development platform is limited, um, but soon we expect the Windows 8 convergence and its native C/C++ APIs. Nobody is buying Lumia phones, oh wait, this just in, the sales are taking off.
Even more amusing is Slashdot, cherry-picking this bozo among all the recent news about Nokia or Windows Phone. I guess many people here would be pissed to see a strategy involving Windows Phone succeed, after a strategy involving Linux failed (through no fault of Linux, I must say).
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
something remarkable.
A citation in a moderate-interest news story that will be forgotten by the vast majority within 24 hours? Your threshold for remarkability is remarkably low.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
So was that the third that loved Symbian so much they wanted to spite Nokia for their partnership with Microsoft? Or the third that were too tight-fisted to buy the N9 that all the Microsoft haters are so fond of? Or maybe losing that third of the customer base had nothing to do with Nokia's plans for Windows phone?
This article stinks on so many levels. It is well-known that Nokia had an internal war going on for years around the Symbian platform, resulting in, among other things, the well-designed but effectively DOA Nokia N9 which in effect became the prototype for the Lumia 800. Maybe Meego would have gone on to be a market-leading platform, but it got buried by politics. Clearly this guy was on the losing team and now he's trying to use whatever authority he still thinks he has to trash-talk Nokia.
Yet the very first comment on his blog post is proof that Nokia is far from dead. No, market share for Windows Phone 7 isn't that great, but it's obviously growing at a rapid rate, and even if it never passes Android or iOS - there's plenty of room in the market for a third player. Blackberry was it for years until they shit the bed.
What the world most certainly doesn't need is yet another Android phone manufacturer. We already have more than enough. Microsoft had the cash that Nokia needed and an OS that, while not perfect, is certainly a differentiator. Couple this with Nokia's design sense and you get a phone which stands out in the sea of blandness (and the fact that the Lumia 800 alone now accounts for something like 85% of all WinPhone7 sales in the EU is evidence of this).
I don't want to go too much into subjective opinion here, but my own experiences with the Lumia 800 is that it is a damn good phone and a pleasure to develop for. It performs much better than its meager specs would suggest. It is certainly proving popular in my circle of friends, almost all of which owned high-end Android phones before. Thanks to the apparent ease of porting stuff from Xbox, there is a ton of great games for it. And it's being marketed VERY competently - certainly better than any Android phone I've seen except possibly Samsung's. I have a very hard time believing it will flop.
However - and this is important - even if I'm wrong, Microsoft can easily afford not to have Windows Phone 7 be an instant success. They are swimming in money. And so can Nokia, because they are feeding off Microsoft. It's happened before with the Xbox, the same Xbox that got laughed at and is now making enough money that Microsoft can afford to keep going at the smartphone business until they succeed.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
http://nokia.cn/
Everything I've heard says it's a great phone as well as a general purpose Linux box in your pocket. Pity I can't buy one.
They already made the N9, which runs Meego. They did everything in their power to kill it, including only selling it in a few markets, not listing it on their website, publicly announcing that they were abandoning the platform no matter how well it sold.
According to the figures in the article it is still outselling the their Lumia WP7 line 3:1.
They don't seem to be dropping Microsoft like a hot rock.
Well, if you read the comments here, people want something like the N900. Which you won't get by relabelling an Android device.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
What is happening is an absurd from the business perspective. Sorry for a hyperbole, but I see Elop as a mind-controlling parasite who managed to instill himself in the host's brain. Through Elop Microsoft gained complete control of a successful transnational company without investing a penny. This is even crazier than a 90% leveraged buyout. Under the circumstances MS is free to suck it dry and dump the carcass without a second thought.
This is also not the first time MS ex-execs in new positions of power steer the subordinates to be milked by MS -- I recall something about ex-MS exec government officials happily signing away our tax dollars for MS. There was recently a lawsuit initiated by Google to dispute this. Thus we establish that this "trick" is a long standing part of MS "business practice".
From logical and business points of view the effect of a "Trojan CEO" is simply not possible. Even if we were to assume that Elop is a super-loyal-fan of MS cannot justify stripping all the non-MS product lines from a giant such as Nokia (used to be). After all, CEO's are smart people and supposed to be capable of looking after their own pocketbooks and reputations. This brings me to the only logical conclusion - somehow, somewhere Elop is getting personal kickbacks from MS. Maybe he is promised a small island with a castle, ownership of a nation, or a banal anonymous Swiss bank account. Finnish authorities should take a close look at this strange business arrangement. And if that does not happen (and it will not), an angry mob of investors with torches and pitchforks is in order.
Microsoft has a LOT of experience at being "everything to everyone." Their backwards compatibility is legendary. The platform their software runs on (PC) has traditionally been fragmented as hell; it's only within the past 10 years or so that things have really settled down and gotten standardized.
I have a feeling Windows 8 is going to work pretty much like they plan it to. Xbox 360 or Windows XP is the appropriate analogy here, not Zune.
There's most certainly a "I only want great call quality" market that won't pay for data. We call this the Symbian market. There clearly is no Windows market, but there's a decent "I want a phone that surfs the web but isn't carrying a 'cool' or 'business' surcharge": Android market.
You need to ask if there are actually any advantages to that something different. And the reality in this case is... no it doesn't. [...] So, in effect, you've sacrificed the benefits of a big apps ecosystem to go with something different that provides no competitive advantage.
My bet is you're wrong.
I mean, your argument basically boils down to, it's absolutely impossible for another player to get started without an existing base of apps. That's stupid, and wrong, and there's more to a successful mobile platform than that. Who gives a flying f--k about existing apps, when 90% of them are garbage anyway? Mobile apps are in their infancy; trust me, in 5 years the apps of today will look primitive and antiquated by comparison to what we're using then.
A billion more apps will be written before we get to the point of having software that's worth a damn, so why cling to the crap that's out there just because there's not (yet) other options? No, I don't think we need to sigh, shrug our shoulders, and start standardizing things on whatever bullshit platform is most common and least shitty (Android) just yet. I think there's plenty of room in this market for new players to come in and shake things up. I'm rooting for Microsoft to come out with something at least half decent if for no other reason than to make other players quit slacking off and improving their own offerings.
Really?
Isn't news supposed to be impartial? This writer definitely has an angle they're trying to push. How'd this get through?
Hi there!
Welcome to slashdot.
Thank you for this. How the fuck can anyone say how well Nokia and Windows Phone will do in the long run? We are still months away from the Windows 8 release, which might I remind everyone is in plenty of time for Christmas?
It's like some people are totally incapable of predicting the future beyond a week or two tops. They point to declining sales figures this month and want to talk about how this is concrete proof Windows Mobile is doomed. What a bunch of clowns. I hope Microsoft and Nokia prove the loudmouths wrong, just because.
Nobody ever got fired for going with micros.... oh wait! We *all* assumed that the $1 Billion US that M$ gave Nokia was to die or go M$ and die or something. M$ has bought out companies before (to kill them). There are two sides to this 1) They might have valuable technology in house that can be incorporated into mainline products 2) a competitor goes away. That's how I looked at the deal between M$ and Nokia. There might have been a 2%-5% chance of success in mating the M$ stuff to Nokia's hardware. But talk in the industry might have lead to buzz, M$ gets access to some of Nokia's technology, Nokia doesn't go Android, and M$ can appear to remain relevant. The $1 Billion Nokia took, basically kills Nokia. But it would have been a big Android player, and keeping Nokia out of the Android landscape helps to keep M$ from being pushed further into the smartphone wilderness.
Again....spot on. This mirrors what I have been increasingly seeing and now soap box preaching about Google for a while. This company is stupid and evil. Over and over I have watched them bungle, screw up, and fail to follow through.
Those who are paying attention closely will note the following: Google's culture sure does seem a lot like those incompetent dot-com companies which went bust around y2k, doesn't it? Remember those big expensive office spaces and Aeron chairs? Google is just as stupid with its niceties and amenities and lack of real leadership and direction.
The story I'm seeing out of this company is basically this: they hit the jackpot with the search thing, which was the Right Thing at the Right Time, and made their billions. They logically extended that through other services and gained a huge foothold. Only problem is....the other services they provide, by and large SUCK. Even the SEARCH feature is starting to suck.
These are bad signs, folks...the signs you see of a company at its peak and beginning a gradual downhill slope. Give it about 6 months more or less, then Google is a sell.
When I owned a n900, it seemed like the first step to a great Nokia future, replacing Symbian with Maemo.
Having a n900 was a weird experience: the lack of apps created one of the best communities for an Open Source project. I really enjoyed talk.maemo.org forum. People helping each other, speeding up the OS, patching, etc.
And then what? Nokia moved to Windows? Really? WHY? Maemo was excellent. Yes, we all knew it was unfinished, but it definitely had a future.
The only good thing about this Nokia situation is that Economy Schools in the Universities can analyze the case as an example of what NOT to do with a company.
There was a much better option:
4. Get Dalvik running on Maemo6.
Everyone forgets that Android apps are interpreted code, running half the speed of native code.
Two companies already claim to have Dalvik running on operating systems like Meego.
The N9 is a wonderful phone, seemingly outselling Lumias in spite of Elop's attempt to kill the former.
All they had to do was keep updating the hardware and adding Android compatibility.
Either Elop is a trojan horse or he panicked. There is plenty of room for 5+ operating systems in the market. Apps are not everything.
Yes he needed to cut costs. But he also needed to capitalise on Nokia's strengths: advanced, reliable hardware and Linux expertise.
He did the opposite. He alienated his Maemo/Meego developers and bet the farm on the one operating system which couldn't use Nokia's advanced hardware.
Well, I'm waiting for a Tizen phone, or equivalent, before I replace my N900. I could care less about iOS and Android. No interest in buying a trojan horse for my pocket.. Too bad it looks like I won't be able to get another Nokia.
[Me] I'm not going to consider either Apples (been there, don't want to return) or WinBoxen. What do you have?
[Salesman] Would you be interested in this WinBox?
[Me?] Why? It's a WinBox, so not condidered.
[Salesman] But ... shouldn't you consider it?
[Me] Why? You're the minion ; why are you telling me what to ignore?
[Salesman] Ignore your opinion ; suck my commission penis.
[Me] I think that you've misunderstood the nature of the kicking you are going to get for being so rude to your customers. (sharpens teeth, "come here!)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
So what did Nokia get from Microsoft? Nokia had to downgrade and remove their other lines. Microsoft hadn't signed any agreement to be a Nokia-only supplier. But Nokia became a Microsoft-only shop.
So what, really, did they get from Microsoft that they weren't going to get from Google that they didn't pay for anyway?