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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?"
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.
Honest question, why didn't they just go with Android?
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!)
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Cause Microsoft paid them more than Google.
Nokia seems to be taking the Blackberry approach to dealing with disruptive change.
Because everyone and their mother is invested in Android. If they go with Android, they're just another manufacturer in an already saturated market. If they go with Windows Phone, they get financial and technical backing from one of the biggest companies in the world, and have the advantage of being the manufacturer with the best windows phone integration as a result. Further, if they go with Android they're probably looking at legal issues with Microsoft and Apple, without any help from Google, just like every other Android manufacturer. Honestly they're making a big bet, but if Windows Phone starts picking up steam it will pay off big time.
That's an easy answer, and a very unfortunate one for Nokia. It's a classic trojan horse. The Nokia CEO was hired from Microsoft. And suddenly Nokia became very MS-friendly... eventually becoming Microsoft only. And that's the whole story. There was really little benefit to Nokia, it was more of Nokia taking a big risk to help Microsoft. Great for Microsoft with no risk; big risk for Nokia for questionable gain. Even a dual strategy of Microsoft and Android would have made sense, but nope, why go with Android that is a major market force with lots of backing and third party support when you can put all your eggs into the MS basket with 1.5% of the market and a tiny fraction of the third party support. It's a shame, I don't know if the shareholders could make a lawsuit stick, but I'd be really angry if I had counted on the exMS new Nokia CEO being there to grow Nokia.
yes but windows phone is in the toilet and about to be abandoned aka zune.
financial and technical backing doesnt mean squat. micro$hit is a vampire who eats companies which partner with it unlike google.
Because everyone and their mother is invested in Android. If they go with Android, they're just another manufacturer in an already saturated market.
If they went android, they'd have a small slice of a very large pie. And then they could compete on price, or leverage their name, or simply be one of the many android phones. A small android maker is bigger than the biggest windows phone maker.
Yeah, they could go with Microsoft. And get lots of backing and no sales.
They could transition back to Harmattan, and continue the N9's success. That'd get people's attention, but I suspect that Microsoft won't allow that to happen.
There, FIFY. It is like C-people can't bother googling a company name before closing multi-billion dollar deals with them.
Rethinking email
Microsoft offers legal support to all manufacturers, and for Nokia they are offering technical engineering support and cash, which is a pretty good deal compared to what Android is offering.
That's lovely and all, but it's not working because they're not selling. That's death for any company.
1. Continue on their own with Symbian/Meego/Maemo or whatever they develop in house and try to carve out a niche for a 4th (or 5th depending on how you count) OS in an already highly competitive market.
2. Develop for Android and compete with all the other Android manufacturers with no support or partnerships to help in the transition.
3. Develop for Windows Phone and gain a partner in the OS transition who not only will help in support of your hardware but will work independently to improve the ecosystem
So the theory goes for some people, but even as a third-rate Android reseller they would probably be selling a hell of a lot more than the Lumia phones they have done. Microsoft is also not anywhere near proven as any sort of risk-free partner in the mobile sector. They've been trying for years and gained little, if anything other than Android 'licensing' fees.
In terms of applications and the 'ecosystem' Android is by far the better choice. It took Android some time to catch up with the iOS on the application front. I'm not so sure how well a second mobile OS behind that is going to fair.
Option 3 is risky, but not as risky as going at it alone.
They were already on their own with Symbian, and more successful.
Although many here on /. believe Option 3 is doomed to fail, those who use the WP platform see it as a rising star, and obviously Nokia sees the same thing.
Well, it's lovely that you have such faith but consumers simply are not buying it and if and when WP rises high enough Nokia will be bust. It's not turning out to be the least risky option.
1. Continue on their own with Symbian/Meego/Maemo or whatever they develop in house and try to carve out a niche for a 4th (or 5th depending on how you count) OS in an already highly competitive market.
Given that they are really the only manufacturer making a serious play with Windows Phone, they were still in this position of trying to carve a market for a niche OS. It made no sense for them to abandon the traction they had already gained with their preceding developers models and return to shaky ground with a new, untested platform.
Moreover, Elop did his best to sink their flagship MeeGo device, the N9, by deliberately only selling it in low-income, low smartphone areas rather than the core markets you'd expect to place any device you actually want to succeed - and despite being made into a pariah, it outsells their entire Lumia (Windows) line 3 to 1. This is a device that that Nokia don't even list on their website as a product, but it still outsells all their Windows phones combined? I don't think Elop succeeded in his mission to make Linux phones look bad.
The bottom line is that despite taking his paycheck from Nokia, Stephen Elop appears to still work for Microsoft.
Yes and no. They do care about battery life, and a kernel with a driver architecture that was designed with power management in mind from the start helps there. They do care about being able to run random apps without getting malware on their phone, and a kernel with a capabilities model at every layer helps with that. They may not care about the kernel itself, but they certainly do care about things that are dependent on the kernel.
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They really didn't have to gamble everything on a single platform. Other smartphone vendors manage to support multiple platforms - if HTC and Samsung can make Windows Phones alongside their Android offerings, why couldn't Nokia do that?
I'm wondering whether my old nokia dumb phone will last longer than Nokia the company ;).
I'm wondering whether my old nokia dumb phone will last longer than Nokia the company ;).
I'd bet on that for sure.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I'm guessing the cash injection from Microsoft came with the stipulation they don't support android. I haven't heard about anyone else receiving money from MS, so this is probably a situation specific to Nokia.
You're obviously going to get modded troll when you phrase it that way, but you're actually dead on.
Think about the possible outcomes of this for Nokia: The worst case is probably what is actually happening, which is that nobody is buying Windows phones. But even if they actually succeeded, what do you think Microsoft would do then?
Nokia currently has the option of Microsoft paying them to make phones nobody is buying, but as soon as anybody starts buying them, Microsoft is going to want Nokia to start paying them. Nokia ends up in the totally perverse situation that the more Windows phones they sell, the stronger Microsoft's leverage over them becomes, because demonstrating a market demand for Windows phones would get other phone makers into bed with Microsoft and thus into direct competition with Nokia.
Right now Microsoft needs Nokia more than Nokia needs Microsoft, but Nokia has put itself in the position that in the event Nokia succeeds, that situation reverses and then Nokia fails. In the long term it's totally lose-lose for Nokia.
It really feels like the focus on quarterly profits has doomed them. The Microsoft deal, if the market hadn't decided that it doesn't want Windows phones, would have been the most profitable for them in the short-term, but it completely ignores that inserting Microsoft into your supply chain does nothing but drain your margins in the long-term. And it completely ignores the very strong possibility, which has now been realized, that Windows phone would fail to sell.
Ok, as much as I'd love to see MS keel over and die, I have to call "Citation Needed" on this one. MS appears to be pumping a lot of money and effort into WP7, the same way they did with Xbox, with their strategy basically being brute-force, or "let's keep pumping money into this thing until we achieve dominance, no matter how much it costs and even if it's never profitable". Hopefully this one will fail though.
He didn't actually say it was the least risky. He said best risk/potential benefit ratio.
... for the CEO.
For the rest of the company, not so much.
Because Android sucks. It lags and drains battery extremely fast. No, ICS still lags. Android was developed as a Blackberry clone originally. It doesn't give the UI thread priority, and therefore will *always* lag.
Nokia should have gone with MeeGo. All that work done over the years by various developers who dedicated so much time and effort to MeeGo, just to throw it away... that's pathetic.