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?"

Comments

Everybody in Slashdot already knew that

[baka_toroi]

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.

Re:Everybody in Slashdot already knew that

[Dionysus]

Everybody on Slashdot also knew that iPod, iPhone and iPad were failures.

Android

[d3ac0n]

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!)

Re:Android

[d3ac0n]

And how are they NOT competing against them now?

Nokia is in the Mobile Phone market. They compete against ALL other mobile phone makers. The OS the mobile phone runs is just one part of the overall feature set. All they have done by going with the crappy Windows one is hobble themselves unnecessarily by adding a rotten feature. Take the same exact hardware, put Android on it, and it would sell like hotcakes!

I don't see why removing a bad OS and replacing it with a good one makes them LESS able to compete for market share with Samsung, HTC, ET AL.

Re:Android

[d3ac0n]

See my reply to missing meter. Nokia is already in compettition with the Android handset makers. There isn't a separate "Windows market" and a "Symbian market" and an "Android market", as though changing OSes would be somehow entering a new market. There is simply "The Market". In this case the "Mobile Phone" portion of that market, which they are already very much in.

While I agree that having OS schizophrenia is a bad thing, if your Symbian OS is dying, and your Windows OS is DOA, why on God's Green Earth would you EVER stick with them? it makes NO sense. Put in a feature that your customers want, Android OS.

People aren't buying Nokia because Nokia is suddenly a bad handset maker. They aren't buying Nokia because they aren't Apple (iOS) and they don't have Android. It's really that simple. Give the people what they want and gain customers.

Re:Android

[errandum]

The flaw in your argument is, you can build a clean working interface for Android and differentiate yourself that way, while having hundreds of thousands apps available to captivate users.

No one denies the Lumia 800 is a good phone, but windows mobile clearly fails to captivate a user base. The only reason it isn't dead yet is that Microsoft can afford to keep throwing money at it. On any other company it'd be dead already.

Re:First

[Anonymous Coward]

Cause Microsoft paid them more than Google.

Re:First

[gwking]

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.

Re:First

[marcosdumay]

Microsoft offers free backstabing to all manufacturers, and for Nokia they are offering technical engineering traps and bait, which is a pretty good deal compared to what Android is offering.

There, FIFY. It is like C-people can't bother googling a company name before closing multi-billion dollar deals with them.

Re:First

[Dr_Barnowl]

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.

Re:First

[Asic Eng]

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?

Re:First

[archen]

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.

Re:First

[Anthony Mouse]

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.