Slashdot Mirror
Former Nokia Exec: Windows Phone Strategy Doomed
itwbennett writes "Slashdot readers will recall that back in January, Nokia CEO Steven Elop blamed the company's Windows Phone woes on commission-minded salespeople, who pushed phones they thought would actually sell. Now, ex-Nokia exec Tomi Ahonen is calling the Nokia's Windows Phone strategy 'a certain road to death.' He bases this grim assessment on UK market shares from Kantar Worldpanel: 'When Nokia shifted from "the obsolete" Symbian to "the awesome" Windows Phone, Nokia lost a third of its customers! In just one quarter!' Can MeeGo or Tizen save Nokia now?"
I think everyone who follows closely the industry was already aware of that fact. It was a shit move for Nokia, I'd go so far as to say it wasn't just a bad decision: the guys in charge should be prosecuted.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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'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.
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.
Microsoft offers legal support to all manufacturers, and for Nokia they are offering technical engineering support and cash, which is a pretty good deal compared to what Android is offering.
That's lovely and all, but it's not working because they're not selling. That's death for any company.
1. Continue on their own with Symbian/Meego/Maemo or whatever they develop in house and try to carve out a niche for a 4th (or 5th depending on how you count) OS in an already highly competitive market.
2. Develop for Android and compete with all the other Android manufacturers with no support or partnerships to help in the transition.
3. Develop for Windows Phone and gain a partner in the OS transition who not only will help in support of your hardware but will work independently to improve the ecosystem
So the theory goes for some people, but even as a third-rate Android reseller they would probably be selling a hell of a lot more than the Lumia phones they have done. Microsoft is also not anywhere near proven as any sort of risk-free partner in the mobile sector. They've been trying for years and gained little, if anything other than Android 'licensing' fees.
In terms of applications and the 'ecosystem' Android is by far the better choice. It took Android some time to catch up with the iOS on the application front. I'm not so sure how well a second mobile OS behind that is going to fair.
Option 3 is risky, but not as risky as going at it alone.
They were already on their own with Symbian, and more successful.
Although many here on /. believe Option 3 is doomed to fail, those who use the WP platform see it as a rising star, and obviously Nokia sees the same thing.
Well, it's lovely that you have such faith but consumers simply are not buying it and if and when WP rises high enough Nokia will be bust. It's not turning out to be the least risky option.
1. Continue on their own with Symbian/Meego/Maemo or whatever they develop in house and try to carve out a niche for a 4th (or 5th depending on how you count) OS in an already highly competitive market.
Given that they are really the only manufacturer making a serious play with Windows Phone, they were still in this position of trying to carve a market for a niche OS. It made no sense for them to abandon the traction they had already gained with their preceding developers models and return to shaky ground with a new, untested platform.
Moreover, Elop did his best to sink their flagship MeeGo device, the N9, by deliberately only selling it in low-income, low smartphone areas rather than the core markets you'd expect to place any device you actually want to succeed - and despite being made into a pariah, it outsells their entire Lumia (Windows) line 3 to 1. This is a device that that Nokia don't even list on their website as a product, but it still outsells all their Windows phones combined? I don't think Elop succeeded in his mission to make Linux phones look bad.
The bottom line is that despite taking his paycheck from Nokia, Stephen Elop appears to still work for Microsoft.
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!
They really didn't have to gamble everything on a single platform. Other smartphone vendors manage to support multiple platforms - if HTC and Samsung can make Windows Phones alongside their Android offerings, why couldn't Nokia do that?
I'm wondering whether my old nokia dumb phone will last longer than Nokia the company ;).
I'm wondering whether my old nokia dumb phone will last longer than Nokia the company ;).
I'd bet on that for sure.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I'm guessing the cash injection from Microsoft came with the stipulation they don't support android. I haven't heard about anyone else receiving money from MS, so this is probably a situation specific to Nokia.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
You may wish that to be true, but that doesn't make it so. It also happens to be incorrect.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.