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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?"
>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.
The royalties from their vibrating tattoo patent will keep them afloat...
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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!)
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Cause Microsoft paid them more than Google.
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.
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...
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.
Pretty sure Nokia is a Finnish company...
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Are you saying they're Finnished?
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..."
I, for one, would prefer there was an alternative to Android & iOS. Both those systems have a lot of problems, and a little competition could help everyone (the customers, mostly). Nokia's excelent reputation, justified or not, could certainly accomplish that.
What that alternative should be-- not sure. Apparently not WP, but Mer/Tizen, perhaps? Or are those doomed to remain vaporware?
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.
I know you're probably saying that as if it's bad, but in reality Google offers effectively no support to manufacturers who make devices for Android. 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.
So it seems to me Nokia had three choices:
There are pros and cons for each option, so it's easy to argue all day about which is best. In my opinion they chose the one with the best risk/reward ratio. Option 1 is the riskiest, but with the most reward. Option 2 is the safest, with the smallest reward. Option 3 is risky, but not as risky as going at it alone. 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.
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
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!
Yeah that's the issue I see too. Their trajectory before Windows PHone was ruin because Symbian is in decline and everything else they had wasn't getting traction either. Trying to go with WP7 was a gamble, but so was staking the company on Meego.
Everybody's having a hard time competing against the twin juggernauts in this market.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Could it be because Steven Elop came from MicroSoft? Albeit MicroSoft Canada, which is little more than a renovated fur trading post.
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.
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!
I own a Windows Phone, as well as my wife and a few friends. It's just fun simple and easy. It's like the argument people have about making a desktop a tool, when nobody looks at their desktop, they have applications taking up the whole screen, either in shared space or singly taking it all up. I want to get to my app quickly and with no need for decoration I'm only going to see momentarily. Also, the tiles are able to provide complex information at a glance, with no need to open some apps, till more interaction is required. You reach a point in gui design, where you get tired of the constant progression to replicating the look and feel of a physical desktop at the sacrifice of usability and speed.
There, FIFY. It is like C-people can't bother googling a company name before closing multi-billion dollar deals with them.
Rethinking email
If you're going to lock yourself for 2 years, you could, at least, have chosen one of the best phones on the market: The Galaxy SII (any of it's US variants)
Have you ever used maemo or meego?
Maemo is perfect for developers/geeks.
Meego is perfect for everyone else.
All the backends/insides are the same, BTW.
They didn't even need to change platform, just keep doing what they were doing already.
I'm reminded of the Vietnam era 'It became necessary to destroy the town [in order to] to save it'.
I've seen a lot of business plans in my day, and my biggest gripe is when people come at me and say "The market size is X, which is huge! So if we only get Y% of X we'll make a ton of money!" It's such an amateur mistake, and the companies that make it have no appreciable competitive advantage over any other company. Nokia, for all its reputation, does not offer any real competitive advantage in the Android marketplace. Whatever brand recognition it does have, will simply be diluted among the other players.
When a company switches platforms a large portion of their customers switch. That is the risk of changing.
Why?
1. People Don't like change.
2. When forced with a change, they will evaluate their other options.
3. After their options are evaluated they may no longer choose you.
For Nokia. For smart phone owners They have a few "popular" choice Get Windows Mobile, Get Android, Get iPhone. Being that Nokia only loss 1/3 of their customers is a good sign, logically if all product quality was equal they would have loss 2/3 of their sales to competitors.
Car analogy.
GM stops selling Pontiac, because they have many other cars similar to their Pontiac models.
Pontiac owners who need a new car but liked their old Pontiac will need to get a new car.
Because they need a new car they will take a look at all the options some that GM owns and also what their competitors have Ford, Toyota...
Some will choose GM products others will go with the competitors.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Where did you get the impression that you can develop an app on iOS and deploy it on Android?
As for porting apps, other than the fact that the OS, frameworks, and toolchain is different, the leap from Java to C# is a pretty short one. I'd call the gap between iOS and Android development at least as big as the gap between either and .NET.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
I'm sorry, but you have to be kidding me. I may not be a developer by trade, but from the way I see it...
.NET XNA/Silverlight
.NET that you couldn't port the code halfway decently? I mean, my God, Java and C# have so much of the same syntax it isn't even funny. Objective-C has quite a bit different syntax than Java, and you don't even see that being a problem do you?
iOS - Objective C
Android - Java
Windows Phone 7 -
Is Java really so far away from
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.
Also, windows phone runs really really well on middling hardware. The Nokia 710 is sold periodically by T-mobile for as little at $250 without a contract, and it is a vastly superior phone to most andriod phones in the same price range. Windows Phone is not a perfect OS but a generation of MS hate has really clouded people's ability to look at their products objectively. And lets be honest, Nokia wasn't going to survive by going the way they were going. They made a bet that they could team up with MS and produce phones people wanted to buy because if they hadn't they'd still be on the RIM path. This is very clearly visible in the bets that Nokia is making on inexpensive phones (Lumia 610) for developing markets. Not everyone wants to pay $800 for a phone off-contract.
Maybe next time wait for them to assemble the words into a coherent sentence before you take them from their mouths.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
My boss has one and he hates it when he sees everyone installing awesome apps on their Android and iOS phones and tablets, and he can't install nearly anything that we have. Of course, we are software developers.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Death of 2 known brands, MSWinPhone & Nokia, is underway.
The article's discussion of the facts is straightforward and looks like a death spiral.
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.
I'm honestly surprised Java is even a choice for Android. Most people write in C++ afaik. http://developer.android.com/guide/basics/what-is-android.html
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
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.
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.
Option 3 is risky, but not as risky as going at it alone.
From my point of view, #3 is by far the most risky choice. Here is how I see it:
1. It's going with a platform with 0% marketshare. Damn more risky than staying with Symbian or going with Android.
2. It's going with a partner that let its last platform go from a decent marketshare to almost zero in 4 years. Much worse than Nokia did themselves with their own platform.
Damn! I wouldn't have bet 1 cent on WP at that time. I saw it - as did many others - as the death of Nokia. And so far, sales reports are validating our view. The only worse option would have been to license RIM's OS if that was an option.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
And why does it do so well? Great hardware. And LOTS of work in software to overcome the shortcomings of Android 2.3.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
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?
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.
I'm wondering whether my old nokia dumb phone will last longer than Nokia the company ;).
Maybe instead of being a dick, realize that not everyone is a native speaker of English?
He didn't actually say it was the least risky. He said best risk/potential benefit ratio.
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.
Great for Microsoft with no risk; big risk for Nokia for questionable gain.
I don't think it's quite that bad... the way I see it, Microsoft actually does havegreat risk - they desperately need Windows Phone to succeed. Their mobile phone strategy revolves around this, and they've already thrown away Windows CE and Kin.
Nokia does takes some risk, but their fallback plan is... Android and/or reviving Symbian/MeeGo/whatever (options 1 and 2 from Missing Matter's post). They'll lose some money, but if Windows Phone is doomed they should recognize the signs and prepare an exit strategy.
The only way I see this is the end of Nokia is if they ride Windows Phone all the down and don't do anything at all to prepare. Now that would be executive/management gross incompetence.
On my part this is just wild speculation but, since Windows 8 metro apps look similar to wp apps, and windows 8 metro apps can be written with Javascript/HTML/CSS, I'm expecting at some point that MS is going to announce if you write an app for windows 8 metro, it can also be compiled for windows phone at which point a lot of web developers that don't care to learn Java or objective C are going to jump on board.
Just my guess though...
I don't have time to make a sig
Because if they decide the windows strategy is going to fail they can always change to android later. Microsoft offered them cash up front, and entering the android space against competitors like Samsung was probably not a great plan.
As an overall experience android is pretty weak compared to how Nokia and MS want things to be, or even compared to iPhone. I think they figured they'd have more success with MS than with android in the long run, and they might. Just look at the clusterfuck that has been ICS. ICS itself is sort of fine, but source has been out for months, some handsets have it officially, some don't yet, sometimes features that worked in 2.x don't work in 4 etc.. The great selling point of android is that 1: it's not locked down to apple and 2: if you are technically capable you can do all sorts of great stuff with it that is a pain on iphone. The problem with this plan is that most customers aren't technically capable, so there's a market there for easy to upgrade, plays nice with windows and isn't apple. But MS hasn't really got it together. The iPhone works in part because Apple did a giant FU to the carriers and does its own thing without them, MS should do the same, but google by nature of not actually being the ones releasing the OS for the phones really can't. A
Unfortunately microsoft hasn't really delivered with WP7. Everyone I've used and everyone I know that has one thinks it's good. But they don't seem to have congealed the ecosystem or built any killer apps, it's good, but why would I buy it when android has 50 bazillion apps. Which might be why we've only seen a trickle from MS and Nokia product wise. Whether they're really aiming for Windows 8 and this is just learning and transition time, or they're just never going to pull it together I don't know. My uninformed guess is that Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 will be the big push, write once, works on desktop and mobile, plays nice with all your business apps, plays nice with xbox games or something along those lines.
If they had gone with android they'd probably be in far worse shape than they are now. Being just another handset maker, in a market where Samsung is going to announce a quad core phone in a month, and you're still selling single core cpus as a flagship isn't a good plan.
MS could have the best product on the market. They don't, but they certainly could, the freedom of living outside the reality distortion bubble, with the compatibility of windows talking to windows rather than one of many different desktop controllers for android. One version (like iPhone) that can just be pushed out to everyone, fuck the carriers. I doubt it will materialize, because ballmer doesn't get it, but one could always hope.
Which is I think where MS is trying to go with this shared kernel windows app store strategy. It's very compelling to make apps for desktop, mobile, and tablet all at once without having to run very divergent code paths. That doesn't really work with WP7. But Windows 8 and WP8 that seems to be the plan (which may fail spectacularly).
Mono is pretty good option for backend logic for all three platforms.
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.
With the help of Microsoft pushing Windows 8 on the desktop, apparently with a tighter integration to phones than OS-X/iOS.
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.
Do you realize the massive patent portfolio Nokia has? Apple went after them, and if my short term memory is correct it ended up with Apple having to pay Nokia (can't be bothered searching for a reference). If there's one company who do not need any patent protection, it's Nokia. Patents were not a factor in the choice.
The big factor is that they believed they would have an easier time being a leader in the WP ecosystem, and that it would be a positive differentiation vs. Android. Any money from MS is a nice sweetener, but if it drove their decision then they were nuts: it's only a small part compared to expected sales.
But in the end, they still have to compete with the Android ecosystem on price and features, and WP is not a positive differentiation at this stage for most. For now, it's a flop and it would take a lot of faith to believe it can get much better quickly. Nokia said they want to refocus on low cost WP phones now, but with all the Chinese and Taiwanese vendors targeting low cost with Android and extremely dynamic with 2G/3G/AP integrated silicon (not all markets care about LTE yet) and a large experience of extremely cost optimized designs, good luck to them. I'd put my money on the East for low cost.
I'm quite pessimistic on Nokia strategy, and believe they would have had a better time differentiating on an Android base with superior hardware, camera and possibly a hybrid Meego / Dalvik system --- add on top of Android, but still ride a very dynamic ecosystem. But we'll see. Things won't be able to last for too long as it is with some big change happening anyway. As sideliners we can enjoy the drama, but let's have some thoughts for the Nokia employees (not the managers who killed the company with silly internal bickering between Symbian and Meego and poor execution, but the ones who delivered so many great products and innovations in the mobile space).
As far as I can tell, they are still making Symbian and MeeGo products, but clearly their emphasis seems to be Windows.
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???
My best hope for Windows phone is that it is being developed with full knowledge of the shortcomings of Android and iOS, and the presently available tech that Android and iOS had to launch without.
Of course, it's a tougher problem to solve- doing Android and iOS one better, compared to just throwing something out there and saying "it's a 1.0, it'll get better..."
Have you ever used maemo or meego?
Maemo is perfect for developers/geeks.
Meego is perfect for everyone else.
All the backends/insides are the same, BTW.
They didn't even need to change platform, just keep doing what they were doing already.
I was wishing they would see this route through, but that wouldn't have gotten them a tie-in with a "real" desktop, you know, a desktop that hundreds of millions of people use daily... that's hard to ignore.
I would believe it! What has MS not abandoned? Keyboards and mice? That's about it. I guess their OS and Office software could count too, but hardware and platform initiatives like Plays-For-Sure get canned before they even give them a chance. Just look at the Kin.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
One thing that really interests me for potential tightness of integration is the idea of the phone as a portable desktop - I think that for many people, a phone that you slap on a docking station on your desk to use like a desktop or even a tablet could well be all the computer they need.
Inevitably, some people will complain about the desktop experience there, but for browsing and email it should be just fine. Microsoft have made their fortune on "good enough" - well, this is easily good enough to serve the needs of the majority of people.
Rule 34a:
If it exists, there's a pornographic Nokia tattoo of it.
Except that their entire Windows 8 strategy is predicated on tablets and phones. If they were to abandon it now, what they'd wind up with is a crummy tablet UI that's only available on desktops.
Stuff like the Zune and Kin were peripheral.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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.
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 ...
I'm not so sure that licensing RIM's OS would be even worse; at least RIM has an established ecosystem, applications, etc. WinPhone7 is all-new, and Nokia is pretty much the only maker supporting it.
The whole thing is a giant gamble; they're betting that the Microsoft brand really means a lot to people and has value, and that people will start abandoning iOS and Android for WinPhone now that MS has finally created a UI optimized for touchscreens instead of continuing to try to push a bad copy of their desktop UI on a handheld device, and also that promises of integration between WinPhone and Win8 (which isn't out yet anyway) will come true.
I think Nokia would have done better taking all their cash and going to Las Vegas and gambling it all there.
Problem isn't on that end. Never was. Nokia has some of the best engineering minds in the industry, or had before Elop decided to start throwing these best engineering minds off the "oil rig".
For example he kicked out entire MeeGo team essentially before they got to release N9 (it was finished up with a skeleton crew). Which was, and still remains worlds ahead of any iteration of windows phone.
Elop is a Microsoft stooge........ and "http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=embrace%20extinguish&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCYQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FEmbrace%2C_extend_and_extinguish&ei=8BlqT-_8KYHOhAfWoYWOCg&usg=AFQjCNEBmeXEdu084jQ7DVdhdm6uOQFkQA"
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
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.
...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...
think that for many people, a phone that you slap on a docking station on your desk to use like a desktop or even a tablet could well be all the computer they need.
This is dead on. This is the future. I don't think Microsoft gets it, and if they don't they're dead. Someone wll certainly figure this out (I'm betting Samsung) and will replace the home PC.
Microsoft has by far the best suite of products, if software worked effortlessly between phone, desktop, and gaming console. There was a time when a suite of products that worked together was all Microsoft needed to dominate, despite second-rate offereings. But I think that time has passed - there's no evidence thus far that the top people at Microsoft understand their road back to the top. From what we've heard so far, the platforms will share a kernel, but software won't just work across all 3.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No, they might just decide to switch to another Windows Phone. Different and incompatible with the WP8. Like Phones with Windows (PW12) or something. And everyone has to switch to stay with MS. I seem to remember there was another windows phone back in the Palm days. Is that compatible with WP8? I don't know for sure, but I would guess no.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
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.
Wild idea, I know, but they could have worked on making better phones than the competition. You know, hardware. Is a phone maker a software company? I don't think so.
Yeah, that's something else I don't really understand.
I can run both Ubuntu and Windows 7 on pretty much every PC made in the last five years. Somebody want to explain what fathomable reason there is that every model Nokia sells is not available with both Android and WP7 as options?
You're mistaken. The SDK mentioned in that link is for Java (Dalvik). From your link:
Android will ship with a set of core applications including an email client, SMS program, calendar, maps, browser, contacts, and others. All applications are written using the Java programming language.
To code in C/C++ you need the NDK, and you can't even use it standalone:
The NDK is designed for use only in conjunction with the Android SDK.
Dilbert RSS feed
Except that they normally make excellent hardware. My N8 has been stood on, dropped, operated at extreme temperatures and generally abused for well over a year now. I would buy a nokia for the hardware alone. And Symbian ^3 Belle is actually very nice. I reckon it could have been competitive...
Pity... Anyone know what the next best manufacturer for good solid rugged phones is?
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
This is such an amateur strategy mistake. I see it all the time from investors who think that they know how to run a business.
Something different (e.g. Windows Mobile OS) does not equal a competitive advantage automatically. 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. And then you need to factor in that the apps ecosystem is an area dominated by the network effect. The bigger the network of phones using the OS, the bigger the apps ecosystem. And apps are the biggest driver of smartphone purchases at the moment.
So, in effect, you've sacrificed the benefits of a big apps ecosystem to go with something different that provides no competitive advantage. In other words, you're dead on arrival.
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?
Uh, telling a little white lie on geography can get you to the N9 pages. It's not limited to low-income low-smartphone countries either, but it's certainly not listed for the largest markets (US, UK, Germany, etc.). However, it is shown for Sweden and Finland. Since you likely are not linguistically comfortable with either Swedish or Finnish, the Google translate versions are here and here respectively.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
They have done better and are doing better than Android in their non WP phones.
The real question is why they didn't stick with Symbian and MeeGo/Maemo?
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.
I honestly think it might still turn around. And I mean completely turn around.
Paint a picture of in 5 years time where Nokia's bombproof hardware combined with Microsoft's just good enough software has once again dominated the market.
Let's assume that in the age of quad/octal core multi GHz processors they can make windows 8 mobile a similar user experience to Windows 7 desktop. Buggy, sure, but good enough.Windows always used to be useless at phone call quality, so let's asume that the Nokia guys have spent a few years getting that up to a good level (remember how bad the Iphone call quality was on the first few models)
From the average user perspective why choose android? All the apps they want to run run on windows. The web browser isn't great but IE is still fairly dominant as a browser so it's clearly good enough for most people (or you can download fiorefox for your phone because you know, desktop in your hand). They can plug their phone into their docking station and it's their work and home PC. It's their media centre etc.
Now in this future time the android user is talking about how less buggy their phone is, how they have much more vendor choice and how we all agree it is the better technical solution. However they have trouble interfacing the phone to their car because Microsoft signed deals with the car manufacturers and were a single target rather than half a dozen competing manufacturers
We on slashdot would probably be saying how this was inevitable, how the idiot that is the general public would always take the path of least resistance. How much of a shame it was that the promise that was android was doomed to fail except in niche markets, how it was all {xyz's} fault for trying to branch out on their own and ended up fragmenting the market to the confusion of the general consumer.
I honestly believe that mobile is the future and that home PCs and even laptops are dead so the market will fragment into servers and mobile phone + docking station (a tablet/laptop becoming a docking station for your phone). In that world I don't see microsoft giving up and I don't see the average Jo or the CTO taking a risk and choosing android for their desktop.
It's the same argument that "nobody got fired for buying IBM" but they're certainly not what they once were, so who knows, we could all be using android on the desktop in a couple of years but I am certain that mobile and desktop will soon run the same OS and I'd be astonished if windows isn't in that equation. If that's true then it could be that this is in fact a very low risk bet for Nokia.
It could be that Nokia is experiencing the clam before the storm at the moment and it's all about to kick off. It could be the wisest thing Nokia ever did.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Theres a good article at Businessweek about Elop and the direction change.
The article states they negotiated for Android, but got no quarter from Google on special access to Android or direction on features. They didn't want Nokia to be Just Another Android Vendor. Whether that's false pride that will cause them to disappear, or a stroke of genius that allows them to be different, though much smaller, only time will tell. MS did throw some cash at them, this seems to be a partnership of weakness, where both sides have a weak hand and need each other to succeed. I kind of want Windows Phone to survive - it's an interesting new OS, one I'm sure I'll never own a device that runs it. But it will never succeed in any stretch.
Of course you could argue that any moves toward Android were just cover for a long term strategy with MS Windows Phone.
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.
This is incorrect, you can write android apps wholly with NDK now.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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."
Because MSFT cut them a HONKING fat check and Google wouldn't pay them shit?
Lets cut through the bullshit and FUD, okay? the problem is NOT WinPhone, the problem is Ballmer is as shitty a CEO as the fucking Pepsi guy was at Apple and if it wasn't for the sacred trilogy of Windows, Office, and the X360 (which they are now making a couple a billion a year on) he would have completely killed the company and now he is gonna torpedo the first and most sacred of the trilogy because he has such a fucking hard on for Apple he probably has an iPad under his pillow.
Here is the problem with WinPhone in a nutshell...it ain't Windows. that's it, Ballmer has no damned clue what to do with anything that he can't shove his "Win Live 3.0 .NET Cloud Zure Home Edition" branding onto and in mobile that shit just ain't gonna work. They could make WinPhone a hit tomorrow simply by spinning off the company, renaming it Metro and have NOTHING of the Windows branding anywhere near it. Instead first they had WinMo, which had a teeny tiny start menu which made NO damned sense, then WinPhone which they covered in Windows branding trying to fool the customer into thinking it had something to do with Windows 7, but instead it just confused people, and finally you're gonna have Windows 8 ARM which will have the Windows name but won't run Windows programs....can you smell that? This stench of death and fail that is leaking from the MSFT mobile division like the fetid air surrounding a porta potty at a chili cookoff?
The only nice thing I can say about Windows mobile "strategy" is maybe it'll finally get that sweaty idiot fired, I mean nobody has had the sheer mind numbing stupidity to fuck with the sacred cows, especially not Windows, and here is hoping that taking a big dump on the Windows brand will be the final straw that gets the shareholders to chunk his dumb ass. ARM IS NOT X86 okay MSFT? Quit trying to tie the Windows branding which has fuck all to do with ARM into the mobile branding! Either accept you are the new IBM, with mature and stable markets and just kick back and enjoy that monthly visit from the money truck or bite the damned bullet already, spin off mobile so they aren't bogged down by 30+ years of Windows, let them dump the windows brand and innovate. Because I bet if you handed people a nice Nokia smartphone and said "Here try the new metro phone' they would probably like it, but when you tie the Windows brand into it they immediately start thinking "Why would I want Windows on my phone?" which of course they don't, so they pass you by. When you spin them off spend about 100 million of that assload of cash you are sitting on to buy some of the top mobile game and application houses and have them be metro phone exclusives, so you'll have some apps that aren't just the same old shit, who knows you may get lucky and have them make the next angry birds. But all you are doing now is pissing money down a rat hole MSFT, hell even little shop owners like me could do better than what you are doing, its a strategy that stinks of failure and desperation and that don't sell handsets!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
The worst case is probably what is actually happening, which is that nobody is buying Windows phones.
Probably, really? Lumia is already outselling Symbian in the UK. Lumia 800 is listed among best-selling phones at many operators' websites. The U.S. have only seen the cheaper Lumia 710 on T-Mobile, and it is gaining quite a following. Check the approval rate and the reviews at T-Mobile's website.
Living in the Slashdot groupthink bubble is cosy, but the disadvantage is, reality sometimes differs.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Everyone and their mother is invested in electronic phones. If they sell electronic phones, they're just another manufacturer in an already saturated market. Nokia should sell cans and strings!
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Because phones are appliances and it takes extra hard work to make a general computing device (which modern phones are, plus radio equipment) into something which is not.
If one phone maker decided to sell just the hardware and let independent shops install the various possible OS (from vanilla Linux to W8) maybe they would become the IBM of "IBM compatibles". A medium fish in a gigantic pond. But executives hate the idea that sometimes, you should let the market work, instead of centrally planning everything.
I would have thought Nokia have enough of a patent portfolio to be able to defend themselves from the likes of MS, Apple, Samsung, Motorola and the like, without having to go the route they chose to with MS. It's not like they've only just decided to start making phones now; they've been making and selling hardware and operating systems for years.
Me too, I really hoped they would just go away, software with restrictive licenses matched to a business incentive to make money (through sales not just support) is never in the consumers best interest. Anyways....
But lets look at Microsoft's other "failure" the xbox:
Early on they not only couldnt get market share, but they were shipping a literally high failure rate device. It was bulky and breaky. They even charged to play on line.
But they are such a big company that they can afford to lose money for a long time, eventually establishing them selves. Microsoft has enough people fooled into doing things their way that there always will be a sucker, and those adopters will pull in more suckers, and so on. Eventually they might even make a semi decent product.
We certainly know it isnt their advertising that gets people to buy their half-assed awful products: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oGFogwcx-E
I'll never understand this attitude of Nokia can't enter the Android market because they'll get slaughtered by HTC and Samsung. Other posters make a lot more sense when they say Android is much more popular than Windows Phone and Nokia is essentially already in competition with other phone companies anyway.
Ideally, Nokia never would have entered into an agreement with Microsoft that was exclusive. My position is that they should have offered an OS neutral phone and sold it with stock Android, WP, or Meego (as well as letting users install something else if they want to). To avoid the button problem, just get rid of them and use the same soft button method ICS uses for the other OSs. Smart phones are all about getting the biggest damn screen you can get in the smallest package.
Finally, nobody should sell Nokia short in terms of the admiration people have for their hardware quality. If they offered an Android phone with the PureView camera, a 1280x720 Clear Black display, typically excellent call quality, as well as exceeding on GPS, speaker quality, etc., then people would be all over it. They could easily beat out HTC, Samsung, or Motorola - none of which impress me all that much - they can't seem to get the entire package together. Even the Galaxy SII couldnâ(TM)t get the DAC right.
You're just reaching now. That is only the European market, and barely outselling a thing which is deprecated and abandoned is hardly progress. According to your own link WP7 has only 2.5% of even that market. That's practically a rounding error.
I don't see why you actively want WP7 to fail. Competition is always good, even if you don't like their products.
Let's take your Xbox analogy. You could say that WP7 is a completely new market, since it throws away nearly everything Windows Mobile was.
The Xbox was a completely new market, and as such they took the wrong approach and had a hard time making it profitable, so they threw money at the problem and planned the 360 by correcting the original's flaws and trying some of Sony's strategies. The 360 was definitely successful.
The same can happen with WP7: Make a rough sketch of where you're going and push it. If it fails, keep financing it and wait for the refresh. Mango was widely expected to be the huge refresh, and while it did improve the OS a lot, it still didn't address many core concerns. I'd compare it to a (ficticious) Xbox 180 that would have solved small issues like size, weight and DVD playback (which required an IR adapter and remote).
WP8, from a technical point of view, has a lot more promise than Mango ever had. By switching from Windows CE to the real Windows kernel, they solve a significant number of problems at once - hardware support increases dramatically (multi-core processors, anything that is used in tablets can be made to work with WP8 with minor changes), security updates are the same as for Windows 8, application portability is much improved (especially between ARM tablets and WP8), to name a few.
Of course, this is all potential - they have to make something out of it now.
I keep hearing about windows phones but I've see 1 (one) out of hundreds of droids and dozens of iphones. I guess people are buying them and stockpiling them instead of using them. This hurts MS not at all since they're extorting money off the droid sales of course.
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.
Have you ever used maemo or meego?
Maemo is perfect for developers/geeks.
Meego is perfect for everyone else.
I'd be thrilled to see a smartphone running MeeGo. As far as I know, there is only Mer for N9, which is far from perfect.
All the backends/insides are the same, BTW.
Care to elaborate? Maemo was the software for some older Nokia models such as the N900. N9 got the last Maemo release which was rebranded as "MeeGo instance" for face-saving reasons. No phone has ever been released with MeeGo installed on it.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
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.
1. I think tehir first hand experience told them that if it were possible, they weren't going to be the ones to do it, so they already knew the risk/reward wasn't going to pan out.
2. Which is a lower technical burden of 1, and while they didn't acheive sufficient market success, they did at least pove they have the technical chops to do a hell of a lot on their own.
3. I think the risk is underestimated here and presumes that MS will inevitably succeed in this space, despite over a decade and counting of evidence to the contrary.
This would be different if they had hedged their bets with the ability to ditch Android or MS on the more profitable path taking off, but they put everything on the MS option.
those who use the WP platform see it as a rising star
That may be true, but then again if userbase fanatacism were significant, then WebOS would've been considered an overwhelming success. It however was not despite having some of the most dedicated fans.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I have no inside information as to whether or not WP8 will work on existing nokia handsets. You'd think it probably would, but I really have no idea.
Deride it all you want, that might be their plan. And it might be good. They need the vision to make it good, and I'm not confident they have that. But the first iPhone, if you weren't in the reality distortion bubble was pretty bad. It takes a while to build the ecosystem, the infrastructure, and to figure out how you're going to carve your niche in the market.
I *think* we've seen that with WP7 already. Live tiles, xbox integration, works with windows. Seems to make sense generally. But your apps don't just work on regular windows. I'd expect WP8 will change that. But you can't just test your phone inside MS and nokia offices. You need to put it out there, tell people you're in the game (even if you aren't) and see if it gets any traction. A strategy for... I'm guessing Windows 8 will be october ish, and wp8 will if they're smart be about the same, that might be a good strategy. That doesn't mean microsoft and or nokia won't fuck it up catastrophically, but I think there's a lot of room in the market for a very cool windows 8 phone, that plays nice with windows 8, and next year will form the mobile component of the Xbox strategy, which will have a TV connected xbox 3, a mobile phone, and a desktop OS all running the same basic software.
As an investor/stakeholder in the company, what I'm hearing from you is that you plan on positioning Nokia as just another run of the mill Android manufacturer. You say compete on price, I say any random Chinese manufacturer can undercut you. You say compete on name, I say there are already HTC, Samsung, Motorola and other big names already in the ring.
No, I say compete on quality and hardware features - you know, the stuff that Nokia has always been good at, and the stuff that HTC and Samsung compete with each other on. Even investing in Windows OS, they're still competing against Apple, Samsung and HTC (they're all in the same market, after all) but they've given up the opportunity to reproduce some of those companies biggest advantages for free (the Android name, and the Android app ecosystem). And why? So they can tie themselves to an unproven competitor that offers neither.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
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
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.
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.
The problem being, even if your kernels are byte-for-byte identical, you still have to deal with making apps that run well on everything from a 4" 848x480 display to an array of 30" 2560x1920 monitors, then deal with GPU capabilities that span from roughly "Gamecube" to "multicore GPU cards running in SLI mode", and contend with everything from Model M keyboards & high-end gamepads to quirky capacitive displays that can't even do 848x480 finger-painting accurately.
Hell, just look at Android. You can't even get one app to be "best of breed" on both a high-end phone and reference-design Tegra2 Honeycomb/ICS tablet without splitting the codebase and basically rewriting half the app to optimize the UI for the larger display. The iPhone/iPad situation isn't much better (not *quite* as fractured if you compare an iPad2 to an iPhone4s, but things get uglier the more you diverge from the latest generation). Windows is guaranteed to be a thousand times worse, because neither IOS nor Android even TRIES to be everything to everybody on hardware that ranges from a pocketable phone to a pimped-out gamer's wet dream.
Still, it's not impossible for the entire windows 8 strategy to fail. People might boycott windows 8 like vista, windows phone might also not sell as well as expected. microsoft might back down and produce another windows 7 in response.
You didn't say how long it took to sell the Windows box. From all you say, the Windows box might have been sold after five minutes.
You also omitted a lot of other information which would be needed to evaluate what this anecdote might say (well, given that it is an anecdote, a data set of just one data point, it does not say much anyway). You didn't say how you priced them (both relative to each other, and to whatever a comparable system would typically cost at a common retailer). You didn't say which version of Windows you put on the Windows computer (nor which version of Linux you put on the Linux computer).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Your first mistake was thinking that I care.
The second was letting your ridiculous white-knight tendencies get in the way of a good joke.
Your third was assuming that every illiterate moron is a non-native English speaker.
Now that you just read that sentence, I'm sure your fourth is taking me seriously when I called the poster an illiterate moron. I don't know the guy. I don't care. It's insult humor, and to that guy I'm just some dumb turd on the internet, so if my post ruined his day he probably gets every single day ruined by someone. Lighten up, Francis.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Cause Microsoft paid them more than Google.
Whatever it was, it obviously wasn't worth it.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
The N950 (developer only) and N9 (publicly available) have meego actually, not maemo.
The interface is a bit different. Check out some videos on youtube... meego's interface is more appelaing to average user than maemo's, just that.
You so totally make sense and you so totally explained why NOK tanked 20% the day of the deal with Microsoft.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
I know you're probably saying that as if it's bad, but in reality Google offers effectively no support to manufacturers who make devices for Android. 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.
Depends wether the cash from MS outweighs the cash they would have got from actual paying customers, had they gone the Android route...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
So, I have an Android now and used Nokia phones in the past. What I read there: no bluetooth file transfer, bad build quality, no sms draft save, no FM radio, no own mp3 as ring tones, ...
Seriously, I did not look into Lumia myself, but reading that list, I would expect sales to be bad.
As an anecdote, a family member has an iphone 4, and I was visiting and explained how they could go on their home wifi to see websites on their iphone! Rejoice, Revelation! People with cash buy these things and expect phone to work, SMS to work, music playing/radio to work, photography to work, and quick picture exchange. They did not even check mail via the phone! So, all the rest in a smartphone is extra if you have time, but many people with jobs and children really do nothing else with their phone. If windows fails there as this guy says, then Nokia will fail
I'm wondering whether my old nokia dumb phone will last longer than Nokia the company ;).
I'd bet on that for sure.
My 5310 Music phone is going great and I often carry it in preference to the bulkier Android because it is a tiny fraction of the size, has great call quality and great speakers. Really amazing for a gadget that size. Plus it's built like a tank in spite of being small and light.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
He's probably having another nervous breakdown.
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.
They could have bought Las Vegas.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
By "cash injection" do you mean "bribe"? Paid to the company, or paid to individuals?
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
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.
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.
Well Samsung is the leading Android manufacturer and got quite a lot of Microsoft's marketing $$$.
So you are saying that Nokia wouldn't be able to make competitive hardware? Is that it? Then how are they going to get anywhere with Windows Phone?
How so? If WP becomes a success everyone else will be using it too, and Nokia will be just another manufacturer in a saturated market.
Clever signature text goes here.
Wait, Windows Phone doesn't let you save drafts of SMS messages? Even my old dumbphone can manage to do that!
Please read this:
Thanks, but this looks mostly like a regurgitation of his earlier writings. "It is a severe downgrade of past Nokia flagship phones like the N95," wow. This guy piles shit high, and he wants to find problems so badly he invents use cases for them. So, if you compose lengthy prose in SMS you may want drafts. Of course he did not notice that you can return to a recently abandoned message view and this is all that you really need most of the time; he decided he found a problem, and he is not interested in a solution. Bad build quality, in a device that is a rip-off of the venerable N9? He needs to settle on some coherent line of thought, even though it's probably not required to win appreciation from people who take him seriously.
Seriously, I did not look into Lumia myself, but reading that list, I would expect sales to be bad.
If all people based their purchase decisions on ramblings of somebody with an obvious axe to grind, then sales would be bad. But they are not.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
It was updated to 4.0 now. Too bad 4.0 introduces frame stuttering into all browsers. Screw Google and their worthless plague of an OS. And screw Nokia for throwing away MeeGo.
Paint a picture of in 5 years time where Nokia's bombproof hardware combined with Microsoft's just good enough software has once again dominated the market.
That's a big gamble for a system just coming out of the closet. I will parrot what everyone else said on this forum and repeat that should that happen there is still no upside for Nokia: 1. 5 years is three generations in mobile world. Nokia will not last that long. 2. Should MS-phone become a success numerous competitors will instantly jump in the boat and add a few product lines, alongside their multiple Android and dumb-phone offerings. This is a wet dream of MS, Elop will be presented with an island nation and a castle, but where does that leave Nokia? One of the many after N years of struggling to be profitable? There was a precedent with HTC (among others) where MS just distributed all designs created during MS-HTC patnership to HTC's competitors. This will happen again as MS has not invested a penny in Nokia and does not give a damn if it goes under.
The N950 (developer only) and N9 (publicly available) have meego actually, not maemo.
I happen to know more about these things than some marketing materials may have led you to believe.
The software in N950/N9 is a direct development of Maemo. MeeGo, in its proper sense of a platform that was intended to be supported in the future, was a system co-developed with Intel, which got many of the Maemo components bolted on after repackaging and other adjustments, but was never completed to be released on a smartphone. The plans called for a MeeGo smartphone release to happen some time after N9, which was released some six months ago. This means that we could see first real MeeGo smartphones hitting the market about now. Instead, we got a second iteration of WP7, which already enjoys quite an evolved feature set and some 60000+ apps.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Yes, but they were against Sony and Nintendo in that market. Now they are locked against Google and Apple, completely different beasts and hardened veterans in the sector. Look where MSN/Live/Bing is after all these years and and what about the Zune?
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Have they fixed the sound problems and stuff? I heard there was problems with access to some APIs.
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, FIFY. It is like C-people can't bother googling a company name before closing multi-billion dollar deals with them.
Reference? I searched but I only found companies like HP, Dell, HTC, Intel who made hundreds of billions off their deals with MS. Stop with the retarded meme already.
This space for rent.
Because stock price reflects the next quarter, and everyone knew that the transition, even if ultimately successful, would be painful in the short term.
This space for rent.
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.
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I think he was actually going for "a plausible cover story" to keep the executives out of prison.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
We already knew at the time that Windows Phone wasn't taking off.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If they so lost confidence that the felt they could not distinguish themselves with quality design and engineering on a level field, the right thing to do would have been to lock the doors that very day and sell the assets off to the highest bidder, returning the value to the shareholders intact.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
No, competition isn't always good, not when you have a monopolist with tons of cash to throw at something until they get their way and gain a new monopoly. I'd rather see them just die off.
One of the nice things about Android is that it's mostly open-source and customizable, so the phone makers and the carriers are both able to highly customize it, while still maintaining apps compatibility for the most part. So a T-mobile HTC Android phone may work rather differently than a Motorola Verizon Android phone, even though they're both running nominally the same OS. And that way, there's competition without having a completely closed ecosystem (the trade-off, of course, being that you can't count on all Android phones to be as good as each other, and the app compatibility isn't 100%, as some apps may have small problems with some phones that the app developers have to fix; you see this in the changelogs frequently for Android apps).
it's not impossible for the entire windows 8 strategy to fail
I thought it already did.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Nokia, for all its reputation, does not offer any real competitive advantage in the Android marketplace.
Absolute rubbish. Nokia's rep for good hardware would given them a special place in the market. And of course they could customize Android as some do successfully. Then they would be selling a product people actually wanted. Let's be honest. Nobody wants a Microsoft phone.
By the way, I seriously doubt your are an investor/stakeholder in Nokia, except to the extent you answer to your Microsoft masters.
It's all moot anyway. Nokia is doomed, and with it Microsoft's phone ambitions.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Because stock price reflects the next quarter
If that's what you think then I have some advice for you: stay out of the stock market.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
This was a very good article and I recommend it. But think about it for a minute.
If this is true then to Google the offer looks like this: NewCo with huge market share, legendary brand and immense resources offers Google an opportunity for short-term profit if Google will only betray the numerous partners who helped build a dynamic Android ecosystem, depriving them of the well-earned benefits of their investment and risk. Instead NewCo would be the preferred partner with special advantage and access. Google would reap huge benefits of instant market share and credibility with NewCo's legendary engineering and marketing expertise. Now this would be evil for Google to do, which some here would tell us is reason enough for Google to take the bait. But let's set that aside for a moment. It would be immensely profitable in the short term - if their new friend NewCo remained constant in delivery of their promises despite their insistence that Google betray theirs (do you see the logical failure here?)
Google's thinking long term - they bought Android long before the iPhone launched. In the longer term the betrayed partners would obviously look for another platform to support (WebOS?) rather than play second fiddle, deprecating Android as some say those very same OEMs are now abandoning Windows Phone. NewCo, standing alone in the field would not be able to sustain the robust and diverse product developments that an entire field of partners could, and would have no hope of filling all the retailers shelves to overflowing with competitive products, nor drawing the huge stable of developers - the very problems Windows Phone is now sufferring from. And so the ecosystem would fail, Android would fail, and ultimately this short-term boon to Google would be a poison that destroyed both their good name and their mobile efforts. It was, of course, a transparent trap relying on greed and a failure of constant character - disloyalty for profit. It was the usual devil's bargain of brief comfort at leisure for the small, small price of your immortal soul. And of course there's the risk that people who demand betrayal aren't generally trustworthy themselves: a key indicator you're dealing with Old Nick. Google's Android was on a course to rip the guts out of NewCo's market share anyway (and it seems they were right according to the fine article). And so Google squinted at the generous offer of the NewCo CEO (and recent Microsoft senior executive) and said "Thanks, but no." and walked him out before reminding security not to let him back in and heading down to the onsite gym for a quick shower. That was probably the right, the smart, and the good thing to do all at the same time.
And then Nokia toddled over to Redmond and got this deal straight away, because it was a slam-dunk obvious win for them: is that what you're telling me? All that remains is to figure out which of the pair got cheated more.
Maybe HP and Dell should have a look at this story. There's a lesson here for them - if the story is true.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Ah the old M torpedo executive plan. Worked great on HP, I must say.
Yeah, I' m gonna order a 3,182 of these so i can make my own beowulf cluster to replace my pc.
Any one have a few hundred KVM's to spare?
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.
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.
Sure you can get an N9. The 16GB models go for ~$400 unlocked on ebay. I picked one up, and I can tell you that it is, indeed great.
Where did you find that the N9 is out selling Nokia's WP7 devices 3:1? The numbers I have been seeing say that the WP7 devices have been out selling the N9 2:1.
I'm sorry, but I take those phone operator web sites with a large pinch of salt. For all I know, Microsoft or Nokia paid to get the Lumia listed as 'best sellers'. In any case, given the amount of astro-turfing these days, I certainly wouldn't pay any attention to the approval ratings or reviews.
You have to remember that Nokia is now a run-of-the-mill Windows Phone manufacturer (don't forget HTC et al. make them too). Except a quick google search revealed from October 2011 to Jan 2012, Windows Phone market share fell 1% in that quarter alone, while iOS and Android gained 1.4 and 2.3 respectively...
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
prison for what? if risky business decisions that didn't pan out were crimes there are NO businesses that would not be in jail. I do think a bit more research should have been done and that they should not have based their entire business around one product (that was retarded level of stupid), but there was no crime here.
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.
I'm leading an android development project at the moment at a university. We're adding several major new components to the universities existing mobile app, last year my students did the blackberry and android versions of the existing iphone app, this year they're doing new features but in android, because for some reason none of them wanted to touch iOS.
What do I mean by how Nokia and MS want things to be, is that this was in reply to a question of why Nokia went with MS. They have a vision as to how the user experience should be which is very different than the clusterfuck that is android. Thank you for proving my point, ICS has been out for 5 months, one phone, which is basically the same as another phone has ICS, but the Galaxy S II only has it in some countries as of last week when I looked, some tablets have it, others don't, even if they run nearly identical hardware, and yes, there will be ICS rollouts on various hardware this coming year, but compared to Apple, who say "this update is going out, for these phones, and you'll have it on this date which is usually about a week from now" or the Microsoft desktop experience which is everyone on windows 7 gets the same updates at the same time, android is just confusing. Nokia don't want that experience for their customers and MS aims to do something akin to apple's software pushes, but on to any of a huge selection of phones.
And I agree, generally there isn't a backwards compatibility problem with android. Which makes the ICS stuff, where things that work in 2.3.x don't work in 4.0.3 really annoying (my particular peeve was the video recording not working, and some microSD card issues). And yes, you're going to correctly tell me that if I dig around XDA enough I can find solutions. That goes to my whole point about user experience. Android is a giant inconsistent mess, and you need the technical know how to get the most out of it. Intentionally so, and that's arguably their intended selling point, but there's room in the market for a middle ground between having to live in the reality distortion bubble of apple, and having to install your own firmware manually because you don't want the carriers garbage, and they haven't rolled out an update for your phone anywhere other than finland yet.
Maybe the timing was off and the SII wasn't quite out when he bought his.
Personally, I'm quite happy with my HTC Sensation.
Assuming Android turns into a monopoly - what incentive is there to improve it? Once improvements slow down, fragmentation will increase as manufacturers increasingly customize their versions of the OS. Just like Windows Mobile - in the end, nearly every phone had some sort of alternative interface. If Microsoft hadn't thrown money at the Xbox, Sony would probably have a monopoly on the non-casual gaming console market.
Competition is always good, especially for the one on top - because when competition returns after a period of absence, the one on top tends to fall.
Oh, well, I guess when I compiled that netcat binary I was using the NDK. Honestly, I had no idea. Now I have even less interest into writing apps for Android. Thanks.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
Nokia's engineers have absolutely nothing to do with making phones that people want. Their engineers only do hardware; it's the software that customers hate, and the software is made by Microsoft.
As long as the apps generally work on all versions of Android (which is a pretty good assumption, since that's one of the main things making Android popular; consumers won't want a phone that can't run Android apps from the Android store), then fragmentation isn't much of an issue. Handset makers like being able to create alternative interfaces, and this lets them differentiate their products; consumers will just buy the phone (w/ interface) they like the most, but as long as it runs all the Android apps, there won't be a problem.
The incentive to improve is 1) iOS doesn't appear to be going away anytime soon, and 2) the Android handset makers still have to compete with each other. It's not a "monopoly" when there's 6 different vendors all offering different Android versions on their phones.
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"
Nokia removed their other lines because they were either old and unworkable (Symbian) or not even ready and unworkable (meego, or whatever you call it this week). MS had nothing to do with it.
They got money, and somewhat exclusivity - they're the Big Dog when it comes to Windows phones, though the exclusivity may be more rats escaping a sinking ship.