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Operators: Nokia Would Sell Better With Android
nk497 writes "Mobile operators are complaining that Nokia's Lumia line of handsets would sell better if it ran a different OS — or if Microsoft was more willing to put marketing money behind Windows Phone. 'No one comes into the store and asks for a Windows phone,' said an executive in charge of mobile devices at one European operator. He said Microsoft's software worked nicely with PCs and allowed you 'to do tons of cool things,' but few customers knew this. 'If the Lumia with the same hardware came with Android in it and not Windows, it would be much easier to sell,' he said."
The bet thing ms / Nokia can do right now is take their lumps, invest in advertising, and have faith that they have a great product on the shelf. Build it and people will come.
The only concern is that while ms has deep pockets to take a bath for a while, Nokia is more precarious. Acquisition, anyone?
As Steve jobs said, "real artists ship."
Our company runs almost entirely on Microsoft products. We use Exchange Server and Microsoft Outlook for our e-mail. We use self-signed SSL certs.
This week an employee got a Nokia Lumia 900. He brought it in for us to help him get the e-mail set up. It won't accept self-signed certs. It's a pain in the ass to get set up. He took it back and got an iPhone.
We have people running iPhones, Blackberries, and Android phones all connecting without problems. But you got a WP7 device? Sucks to be you.
just install nitdroid on n9 ...
well dont hold your breath , but it's booting and you can install apps, anyway I prefer meego/harmattan :-)
--
http://rzr.online.fr/q/omap3
-- http://rzr.online.fr/
People don't want Windows.
Microsoft's software worked nicely with PCs and allowed you 'to do tons of cool things,' but few customers knew this.
That's a strange statement. Do the customers have their eyes closed when they see the Windows banner splash across their PC? Hmmm. It seems natural to me that if you have windows at home, and on your laptop, you'd want it "on the go" as well.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
The N9 was an unknown home run. Really. They killed it and used most of the parts for the Lumia, but Nokia could have knocked one out of the park with Maemo / Harmatten.
Fools.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Well, that article is mostly a "duh". Of course people come in wanting one of two things- #1 Android or #2 iPhone. It is going to take a LOT of work on Microsoft's part to try and get visibility now.
Nokia ditched perfectly good Linux based mobile OS's for their high-end phones and now they will have another uphill battle.
I have an Nokia N9. The multitasking with swipe is brilliant. Did you close the app? (as simple as swipe down) No? Then it is still running. And by running I mean actually running, not the half-baked task-switching employed in Windows Phone or iOS. And it takes only a swipe to see which apps are running. Even on Android I am often guessing whether an app is still active or not, which can be quite annoying.
QML/QtQuick makes app development easy yet powerfull. The normal Linux kernel with X makes porting easier. The N9 truly is a great device for novices, power-users and hardcode hackers.
The current Lumia 900 probably couldn't even run Android. It is a single core CPU with 512MB of RAM.
I personally find it funny the Smartphone market is the inverse of the PC market. Android is a resource hungry, WP7 is not. Windows 7 is resource hungry where Linux isn't.
Slashdot community bashes Windows 7 and praises Linux. Slashdot community bashes WP7 and praises Android. Odd.
[VOICE type="Nelson-Muntz"]
HA HA!!!
[/VOICE]
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Wait till October. WP8 will come out and you'll see so much marketing your eyes will bleed. At least that's what my sources say.
I'm sure Nokia wants to become Just Another Android maker. That'll sure fire them up.
They're gambling. If they go Android, they'll be dead in 5 years, nothing really differentiates them there. With Windows, they may be dead in 5 years (or 2 ;) but they may also hit a home run and come out way ahead.
Contrary to what neckbeards and fanbois would have you believe, Windows Phone 7 is very nice. The only thing holding me back from WP7 is the shit, circa 2010 hardware. That they need to get a handle on, and soon.
More importantly, the convergence Windows 8 would have with an Atom based phone is very huge. You could buy a phone that could be your phone, but you could then slot into a tablet and have the same phone be your tablet. Then you could slut it into a laptop "shell" and have it be your laptop. Then plug in a keyboard and mouse and use it as your desktop. Same machine, just a little phone you plug into different "shells". For 90% of the population a dual core Atom running at ~1.6Ghz with 4Gigs of memory will be able to handle all their computing needs.
If Nokia can get in on that shit, they're golden.
The Linux based (!=Android) N9 outsells the Windows phones despite being geographically hobbled. Microsoft's Elop is just in the way of letting it happen.
That, and despite having Aegis, the N9 is far more open out of the box. You can do all the "cool things" that the operator is thinking about as well as the things that the operator doesn't want you doing - unlike the more easily boxed-in Android platform.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I work in the upgrades department, which means that people buy phones from me. I can tell you from personal experience, no one ever comes on the phone and asks "You got any of those windows phones?" My current ratio is 20 iphones for every 17 android devices to every 1 windows phone. Nobody buys them, and here's the reason: they're all inferior, by a long shot. HTC released the one series of phones a couple weeks back, android to the core. Where are the quad core phones for windows? I dont see them.
While it might seem obvious now, now that Android has a decent looking Ecosystem. But look at this, in 2-3 months time, perhaps Microsofts stratergy regarding how to handle its Xbox live intigration with phones, might pay off? Perhaps some of us will get a Windows Phone, merely to get access to the markedplace.
This seems to be a case of hatching a egg to get a chicken, too stave away that pesky chicken and the egg problem. Of course, it might also fail, this is Microsoft and Nokia, with Nokia as the bottom and possible losing chesspiece in a match.
More like Nokia hardware would run slower, more laggy and have to be rebooted frequently with Android on it. BTW: WP7 devices now have all top 5 spots for devices on Amazon rated by customer satisfaction
Communities Dominate Brands: These Steps or Nokia is No More - the way back to profits and growth http://goo.gl/fzi3u Communities Dominate Brands: Nokia Profit Warning (again) - Here is what you need to know why it is actually far worse http://goo.gl/MZxIA
In other news the Lumia 900 is topping the charts at Amazon, selling out there, and selling out at AT&T stores and online. AT&T recently stated that the launch is exceeding expectations, which couldn't have been very low given the giant marketing blitz behind the device. Further, TFA states: "Rival operator T-Mobile says the Lumia 710 is among its most popular phones."
So where's the disconnect? Right here: "Microsoft's software worked nicely with PCs and allowed you 'to do tons of cool things,' but few customers knew this." So wait, you're telling me that people don't know about Windows Phone, so they don't ask for it, so it won't sell, so you don't want to sell it? It's circular. How about you tell people about it, maybe they'll like it, and then maybe it will sell, then maybe you'll want to sell more? People buy what they know, and as AT&T and T-Mobile are showing, if you advertise a device, it will sell. This doesn't say anything about the relative merits of the operating system, unlike what this summary is trying to imply.
No amount of marketing money would convince users to use a Windows phone. And seriously, it wouldn't matter if it was identical to iPhone, pixel-for-pixel. People don't want Microsoft on their phones. They think it means it will crash. It doesn't matter what reality is. It just doesn't.
I think Microsoft is just sitting back waiting until Windows 8 comes out. Most people will learn about the new Windows and Metro no matter what, then they just have to be shown the phone that works like what they [now] already know (and, for Microsoft's sake, hopefully like).
WP7 "SP1" is called Mango, and it is what is shipping on the Nokia Lumia.
But isn't the wide open Android market full of malware? What are they gonna do about that?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Offering $100 rebate on a $99 phone means 100 million free phones... (Using the $10B MS gave Nokia) that's a lot of phones by anyone's standards. But it'll be pathetic if WP7 isn't worth paying for... and unless sales are at least modest, that is the market verdict.
From all accounts the N9 was the pinnacle of Nokia engineering. People *wanted* it. But alas, Nokia would not sell it in any market that matters.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
What else to say?
Uh-huh. That's why MS tools said October 2010. ALong the lines were gems like 3/4 of a m^HBillion dollars of marketing. Then, when the fizzle, didn't, it was, wait for the "next". That sort of was the NoDo, which was at most fixes. Then after that great white hope never went nowhere, there was, wait for the "next". That was WP7.5 (OS version 7.10). And of course, the "Nokia will be the great blonde hope" (are Finns also blkones?) that will bring the Phoenix up from the smoldering pits. So along those lines, ... here's to WP8 - APOLLO !! Bound to be the one that does it. Here it is, thought, less than six months away from release (October) and no ones knows anything about it. No tools. No nothin. I hear the fizzle, like a wet bottle rocket - a bit of noise but it aint' going nowhere !!
Microsoft could not have done a better job of killing Nokia if they actually purchased them and started instituting anal cavity searches for all customers.
The only question I have is why?
And thats why Windows 8 is a Fail boat.
The big marketing hurdle of Nokia isn't going to be in pushing Windows Phone - once Windows 8 launches and the Metro UI becomes ubiquitous then more people will be comfortable with it on their phones as well.
The big marketing problem for Nokia will be in convincing people to shell extra for a Nokia branded Windows Phone - I've been satisfied with my (cheaper) HTC Windows Phone with largely the same functionality and apps for the past 11 months.
This is coincidentally the same problem they'd face in the Android handset market as well.
MS has a history of not putting any effort behind mobile OSes and mobile devices. Can't say as I blame them but they don't see the big picture.
Apple and Google both know what they are - nifty tech companies. They make nifty gadgets (and in the case of Google, nifty tech, too) and don't get too bogged down in one market niche. Is Apple a computer company? Yes and No. Is Apple an MP3 player company? Yes and No. Is Google a search engine? Yes and No. Is Google an OS company? Yes and No. You can't define them by what they sell and they sell whatever you want to buy.
MS, on the other hand, is a software company - cut and dried. They weren't always just that but their two big successes in Windows and in Office atrophied their legs and stranded them in that position. Now they will live or die by Windows and Office.
Nokia would sell better with a pack of fishsticks. At least then you'd have _some_ fun.
Probably better for the finnish economy too.
Wait...its tough to get traction when youre a new offering and theres two big players in the market?
For those of us who follow the tech industry work in it etc . . .it is interesting to note, a key microsoft exec, the gentlemen who ran the Office division, left microsoft in 2010, where did he go? He is now the CEO of Nokia . . hello!!! Shortly after he took the helm he announced they would use exclusively Windows phone 7 for their new line . . . come on !!!
Nokia sold their soul to M$ and Erlop will see the Faustian compact consummated,
RIP Nokia, Sad but true.
MFG, omb
The WP8 marketing is included with the Windows RT slate marketing. The tools are the same: Windows 8 with Visual Studio 11 (which they have been marketing fairly loudly to developers). The phone is just a small piece of the picture. Your xbox, PC, phone, slate, and any other Windows device will have the same "metro" apps. They're going to do a hard push this fall with the slate and wp8. Whether or not they get the marketshare is TBD, but they're putting a lot on the line this time. The whole picture where all your M$ devices are tied into a single account is still a few years off if I'm guessing correctly.
They're literally giving the phones away until April 20th. $100 rebate due to a memory management defect if you buy by the 20th... The phone is $100 w/ contract. Or, it's $50 w/ contract on Amazon, meaning they're willing to pay people to buy them.
I don't see how paying people to use your product isn't the most extreme form of advertising possible. Maybe the problem isn't the advertising? Maybe the problem is no one wants a Windows phone?
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
While I agree with part of what you say (the WinMo back-compat being killed, the abandonment of some enterprise features even though they included some anyhow), you're just pretty much wrong about the app developers thing. BTW, I'm one of the first Recognized Developers on the WP7 section of XDA-Devs.
ChevronWP7 (Labs or otherwise) wasn't useful for Marketplace developers (who would have already had developer-unlock through their developer accounts), it was used by people who wanted to install non-Marketplace apps. Microsoft, for reasons completely unclear to me, appears to be very anti-homebrew in WP7, and the people who care about that but don't care about developing official apps are the people hurt by the ChevronWP7 Labs fiasco. Everybody else, both those who don't care about unsigned apps at all (the vast majority of users) and those who develop (or even think they might at some point develop) apps for the Marketplace, are unaffected.
That's not to say Microsoft isn't being stupid here, because they really are. ChevronWP7 Labs was late, was too limited, and is now being discontinued... all for cheaper access to a built-in-but-paywalled feature of the OS (although iOS seems to do just fine without any equivalent feature at all...). Homebrew development was one of the things that kept WinMo alive as long as it was. The interop-lock in Mango blocked access to a bunch of apps that implemented unofficial but badly needed features, ranging from the superficial but highly in-demand (custom themes) to the critical (the ability to migrate app data and message history between phones).
I will also say that the article you linked contains a fair bit of senseless foaming at the mouth. Things like questioning how you'll be reimbursed for the free year of AppHub (it's a credit on the credit card you used to sign up, just like every other time Microsoft reimburses a cost) and claiming that WinMo was "immensely popular" (in any timespan even vaguely relevant to WP7, that's just not true) suggest an author whose frustration is overriding rational thought.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
My thought is that at this point, Microsoft should bite the bullet and support Android. They could spend significantly less to convert some of the nicer elements of WP7 to apps, and go full time into supporting their apps across the fragmented minefield that is Android. It would put the Microsoft name in Android, giving the OS a further leg up over Apple, on top of likely creating some decent profit from app sales (I'm pretty sure everyone and their brother would pay a couple to several bucks for an official MS Office with support for Android). Unless they really do something radical that gets the attention of the entire world, and manages to put them two steps ahead of Google and Apple, there is absolutely no way they can sustain. Are there some elements of profit involved I'm not aware of that may be a significant factor? I just can't see holding an insignificant percentage of the smartphone market and coming out of it profitably.
...but is ultimately a false choice. You can't have android on the Lumia because it doesn't exist that way. [It] is like saying, [the] iPhone would be better with android on it.
Why can't I? The Nokia N900 and N9 both have Android ported to them, I see no reason the Lumia could not be blessed in the same way.
Android has been ported to the iPhone as well, and there are groups working on porting it to the latest iPhone hardware.
I would have loved to have the iPhone 4 hardware back two years ago with that 960x640 screen running Android, it would have been better.
I am not sure how stable the ports are, but it is not a false choice, it is a choice that Nokia made and operators are saying it was a bad choice, fix it.
Nokia Anssi Vanjoki said something to the effect of adopting Android is like Finish boys who "pee in their pants" for warmth in the winter.
Well it seems Windows Phone is like taking some money on a dare from another Finish boy for defecating in your pants...
The bet thing ms / Nokia can do right now is take their lumps, invest in advertising, and have faith that they have a great product on the shelf. Build it and people will come.
The Windows Phone advertisements have been great. I loved the one with the people so distracted by their phones, especially the chick in the black nighty.
Even better is the latest one with Dr. Spaceman telling everyone their previous smartphone was a beta.
The advertising is very clever, the problem is the Windows brand is tarnished, who wants a phone running Windows? Everyone loathes Windows.
On the other hand the iPhone and Android advertising campaigns are fairly blah, but the brands are hot. Everyone wants Apple and knows what the iPhone is. Everyone also knows there is something they call "Droid" despite that being the Verizon brand. If you do not want an iPhone, you get a "Droid" phone, those are the cool ones.
Microsoft should have used the xBox brand, brought out the Phone-X or Mobile-X or something cool. Windows branding was just a bad choice.
As you said we know Microsoft can continue to dump tons of money into Windows Phone.
Android despite being superior seems poised to piss all over itself with confusing hardware releases and crippling skins.
Steve is dead and Apple seems poised to follow.
I am praying Nokia will wipe itself, leverage the Microsoft funds, and use MeeGo excrete some other bodily fluid on the competition.
The problem is microsoft doesn't have anything to say that makes windows phones obviously better, there's no killer app. Whether you think its better or not is another matter, but google can point to 'we're more open than those guys' (and have more diverse hardware). What does MS have? Yes, it's a different experience, but no one is saying 'see this thing WP7.5 does that none of the others do? We want that'. Google and sony are cannibalizing themselves with semi competing PS vita and android phones, and the fractured tegra zone and everything else. Apple is such a well walled off garden you can't have a lot of fun without technical know how.
Windows phones could (and should) offer you something, office documents, integration with windows 7/windows 8, in a way people actually care about. It seems like MS gets this, with skydrive, Xbox, windows 8 etc. But they don't seem to have delivered yet. Which is bad for Nokia, and might be too late. It might also be that the integration will suck balls and end up a disaster.
Windows on a slate (tablet, iPad like device, whatever lingo you choose) makes a lot of sense on the productivity side. The phone is a harder argument. If Nokia had somehow gone with an x86 CPU with a WP7.5 that could run any windows app, just with a different skin than regular windows 7 (even at 1024x768) that would have been interesting. As it is they have a very different approach to icons/tiles... and uh... a minuscule app store? Customers need something to say 'I want that device because __________" and right now MS hasn't got that. I would have thought they would have realized this was their DS/PSP/Blackberry/iPhone all in one moment. But apparently if they got that, they did so quite late.
Nokia needs a hit. Microsoft can afford to speculate. Did Nokia agree to use MS only? It might even be interesting to give customers a choice of the same hardware running Android or Windows Phone software, if the hardware is so great.
Nokia and Motorola owned the cell phone market in the 1990's and all they've done since is fail. The problems are with the companies in their entirety not the products they make.
Based on that criteria they are literally giving away cars at your local dealer.
They're literally giving the phones away until April 20th. (snipped for brevity) Maybe the problem is no one wants a Windows phone?
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner here
Do you realize that AT&T actually pays Nokia a lot for the device and then subsidizes it?
The phone is $449 unlocked($349 if you count the $100 rebate).
They're not paying the customer when the customer has to sign up for an expensive contract plan for 24 months with the threat of an Early Termination Fee.
This space for rent.
It depends on your definition of "still running" but yes, the WP7 kernel is a variant of CE. It's a huge change from previous versions, though - they've added a permissions and accounts system, removed a number of old APIs like SetKMode, re-written the memory manager (it now uses something much more akin to a desktop OS, removing the per-app RAM limits and such), changed the application model (blocking third-party EXEs, changing the way apps launch, and more), and generally yanked it into the 21st century rather abruptly. If you target Compact Embedded 7 APIs, you can generally do pretty good WP7 native code development (yes, it's possible to do native development on WP7; even sometimes to get it approved on the Marketplace).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
For that comparison to work, dealerships would need to hold you to a contract to buy a set amount of gas from them every month for years and not actually charge you for the car itself.
This is just some lazy sales guys griping because phones aren't selling themselves any more. As far as Nokia/Android that would never have worked. Google didn't need hardware and has no need for anything else Nokia has to offer (Navteq). At the end of the day Nokia would never have gotten the kind of partnership deal they got with MS from Google. Google would have, at best, allowed them to contribute to the OS etc. I think it's kind of funny to see all these people talking about high end high spec phones when that is not where Nokia makes it's money. Nokia makes money (until recently) from it's lower spec s40/s60 feature phones in the "emerging markets" Android and Apple are rapidly eating up market share in those areas. Don't think it's a coincidence that Tango included a 256 MB emulator. There is a ton of money to be made in mid to low end "smart" phones that function well without an always on data plan. Is the American high end market important to Nokia? Absolutely, which is why they are investing heavily in it. Nokia knows it needs good brand recognition. MS has never been an innovator but they have proven to have the warewithall to push into markets time and again. Windows 95, Xbox, IE, Bing. Love them or hate them they are all marketplace success stories and they were all long slow slogs to success.
No, they are not "literally" giving the phones away. They still require a contract that requires people to part with money. Perhaps you meant "virtually"?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Having used an android phone for 2 years, I had found it a PITA to get anything useful out of it. When the "Droids" first came out, I was eager to get my hands on one. With selling points like "Linux based", "Open source", and "Customizable" I couldn't wait to start making apps for it! But after about 2 months of having it, I realized it was a godawful mess of bad graphic intuitiveness and poorly written "apps" that had no optimization for the hardware they ran on. While waiting for my contract to finally end, I started looking for a replacement phone. While trying to find something simple, easy, and intuitive, my obvious first choice was the iPhone. Although not a big fan of apple to begin with, I have used an iPod Touch and they seem to be very quick, and since apps were optimized for them, there was no problem with speed since all of the apps were written specifically for the hardware provided. But after learning I couldn't get one on T-Mobile(I can't do with just 2G) I started looking at the next best thing, and that being WP7. Few months later, I'm using an HTC Radar, while the lack of apps is a bit of a downer, Windows Phone is extremely streamlined for daily use of a college-aged young adult like myself. Although for a professional on the go, it may be lacking some key features. But after reading all of these comments, the consensus seems to be that the go-to OS of choice would be android. My advice to everyone is that you drop by an AT&T store, pick up a Lumia 900, and play with it for 15 minutes. I know I wouldn't have gotten a windows phone if I hadn't played with one in person.
Don't you think we have enough android phones already?
Is it possible that MS and Nokia are astroturfing? Isn't is even likely? Check this out (from below)
I went through a lot of Lumia 900 reviews on Amazon. Most of them repeat the same stuff. And for most of the reviews, Lumia 900 is the only review, nothing else ever reviewed. Several reviewers had the same text posted on different colors of Lumia 900 and had no other reviews.
My guess is that MS/Nokia shills are everywhere, not just on Slashdot...
Say you're not an astroturfer are you? You didn't just create an account to astroturf slashdot?.
YOU ARE A TURD.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The fact that it's as popular as it is given that the vendor has basically announced they're giving up on the whole OS speaks wonders about the product.
Check out this guys "extensive" posting history, on how wonderful WP7 and Lumia is, and how there is no astroturffing campaign.
Caught red-handed.
What a joke.
Maybe the problem is no one wants a Windows phone?
I was due for an upgrade on my phone (Verizon Wireless HTC Ozone). Walked in to my Verizon store that I've been dealing with for years with the intent on getting a HTC Trophy with Win Mo 7, $29, it was steal and the reviews I saw on the phone were great. When I asked to see the phone (it wasn't on display), the rep literally started laughing and said, "There's a reason you don't see it on display, it's crap and I don't sell my customers, crap."
When I asked him why he thought it was crap, he told me that people only ask for Windows phone due to either, a work requirement or to have the ability to use XBOX Live features on the phone. I stood in neither camp. I just wanted to try something other than Android or iOS.
Needless to say I walked out with a Droid Bionic (I know, I know, I should have stood my ground and asked to see the phone and judge for myself).
If manufacturers and Microsoft have to rely on representation like descrcibed above, they're doomed.
The screen resolution sucks .. its 800 x 480 .. people are not going to switch to it. They need to offer something beyond the typical phone .. they should have made it HD resolution.
HTC:
http://www.businessinsider.com/htcs-shares-tumble-cfo-change-samsung-launch-weigh-2012-4
Motorola
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/26/us-motorolamobility-idUSTRE80P23W20120126
LG:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-28/lg-electronics-profit-falls-33-after-company-falls-behind-in-smartphones.html
and
Sony:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/sony-ericsson-posts-surprise-loss-in-its-final-quarter/67399
The only mobile company making real money from Android is Samsung.
The whole picture where all your M$ devices are tied into a single account is still a few years off if I'm guessing correctly.
It's already here - WP requires a Live ID (at least if you want to use the Market) since the very first release, and Win8 now also allows you to log in with Live ID instead of a local user account (and syncs stuff across different Win8 machines).
They can hang their hat on: "we're lukewarm. Not too hot and not too cold."
Our marketplace is more restrictive than Googles, but less restrictive than Apples.
Our OS update policy is better than Androids, but crappier than Apples.
I still think it's hilarious that Microsoft probably would have sewn up the tablet market if, when they first came out with a tablet OS 10 years ago, the Office division actually reworked the Office UI for tablets instead of refusing to change anything [the tablet OS guys actually had to code all kinds of hacks to get the on-screen keyboard to hide/show properly with Office, particularly Excel. Of course, it still would have sucked because it REQUIRED the use of a stylus and still was a desktop OS shoehorned into a sublaptop form factor, but it would have made it much harder for the iPad to steamroll over Microsoft the way it did [it took something like only a couple of weeks to sell more iPads than all Windows-tablet devices ever sold.]
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
And if Bill were still CEO, Lumia's would come with a stylus...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
What? I believe he was referring to the auto loans. You can get a car with zero down these days.
This space for rent.
Just like "let's put this on your credit card" equals "free".
Nobody is giving you a free phone, and nobody is paying you to buy a phone. You are the one who is paying for the phone, every month for the next two years.
Clever thinking like "it's free because it's no money down" gets you to become a nation of trillions in public debt and trillions in credit card debt.
They're the ones that fractured the Android platform. If Apple had listened to the carriers, I'd bet that none of the different carrier's iphone's could play each others videos or send multimedia text messages. Microsoft is doing precisely the right thing by following Apple's lead: Don't mess with our interface and maybe we'll let you sell our outstanding and consistent interface.
Everyone forgets THERE IS a world outside USA. People here don't have a PC nor do they care. They need to be able to do 'things' without being connected to internet. They dont care what OS is the phone running. All they need are apps/services that help their lives get better. When some one walks in a phone-shop here they are if the phone is crash-proof (data-loss), good-signal receiver, avoids dropping calls, has radio, has lots of EXPANDABLE memory, good battery-life, some download mechanism for songs & offline games. Seems like most of the phone-companies have egg-heads in their market research dept.
I thought that Slashdot is full of Anti-MS shills.
No, it's full of people who cannot for the life of them conceive how any number of other people could genuinely like a Microsoft product on the basis of merit. Or that there are people who value different qualities in their phones than they do. This goes together with lack of critical reasoning: note the moderation on the N9 sales myth thread up in the comments. Sad, actually; this site was supposed to attract people with better cognitive skills. Maybe it's just certain topics that attract the fanboi crowd.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
This is a bug, not a feature. Unless the phones are simply defective, I don't want some salesman at a shop deciding for me what phones I can and cannot buy. This is the missing piece that no one can do anything about - phone salesmen will refuse to even suggest phones they don't personally like. Look at your example - is that an answer to your question about why the salesman thinks the phone is "crap"? No, it's nothing of the sort, it's a garbage answer from someone who doesn't know what his job is. It's some buffoon with a high school diploma (times 10,000) perverting the wireless market in favor of existing big players.
If Nokia moves away from Windows, then all of the Windows-dominates-phone-market-in-2015 predictions will be wrong!
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Yes, the phone is defective. On top of that, like the salesman said, it's crap. If he forces a sale of a crap phone, it's not going to help him. If you buy a crap phone at the urging of the salesman, you're unlikely to go back to the same store to try to buy a good phone, unless you're a fool. There are just too many competing mobile phone shops out there to warrant putting up with less than top service and that mean the salesman will be steering you away from bad models/brands towards the good ones.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Where Nokia still has a kick-ass advantage are the cheap dumbphones sold to poorer countries. That's certainly a one cornerstone the company relies on.
For the market to be perverted, a statistically significant amount of salesmen would need to find Windows Phone "crap" compared to its competitors. At that point, one might conclude that the problem isn't their education or personality but the Windows Phone itself.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
And even if it was... they are not "perverting" anything... this is how markets work.
According to an earlier story on /. they might simply be waiting for the new version of Windows to come out. It will have an ARM based version called Windows RT and I'd bet a lot of the current windows mobile phone tech is in it. So maybe they're saving their marketing spree for the right time.
But the fact that Oracle is suing Google over the Java implementation in Android and Apple might be seriously considering a direct lawsuit against Google for Android copying much of the user interface of iOS, I'm not sure if this is a good idea for Nokia to embrace Android 4.0 and later.
As such, Android may be very popular now, but its murky legal status might stunt its growth prospects in the future. Meanwhile, Windows Phone 7.5 and the upcoming 8.0 uses the very unique Metro user interface, which appears to not violate any of the Apple patents and copyrights on the iOS touchscreen interface.
The problem is microsoft doesn't have anything to say that makes windows phones obviously better, there's no killer app. Whether you think its better or not is another matter, but google can point to 'we're more open than those guys' (and have more diverse hardware).
A lot of it is just down to people showing their friends their Android phone and then said friends wanting the same thing. Being given a personal demo by someone you trust is priceless in marketing terms.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I still think it's hilarious that Microsoft probably would have sewn up the tablet market if
MS have a pretty good history of completely misjudging new technologies. For a long time they considered the internet to be a fad and refused to invest anything in it (hence Trumpet Winsock instead of an official IP stack, no MS web browser until quite late on, etc). Luckilly for them, they have usually had the resources to catch up enough once they realise they've screwed up (often by buying up the companies who had become successful through MS's lack of foresight).
the Office division actually reworked the Office UI for tablets instead of refusing to change anything [the tablet OS guys actually had to code all kinds of hacks to get the on-screen keyboard to hide/show properly with Office, particularly Excel.
I think you're wrong. If you're using a word processor, spreadsheet, etc. in any serious way on a tablet then you're insane. Tablets lend themselves to surfing the web, browsing photos, watching video, etc. and 10 years ago these things were largely not mainstream, so very few people would've spent a reasonably large chunk of cash on a tablet to do them.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
This is a bug, not a feature. Unless the phones are simply defective, I don't want some salesman at a shop deciding for me what phones I can and cannot buy.
Back when I wanted a new phone a few years ago, I went into the local Carphone Warehouse and asked if I could look at the HTC Dream. I explained that I wanted an Android phone with a physical keyboard. The sales man told me that the HTC Dream was rubbish because it wasn't very "iphone-like" and got out an array or other phones (none of them an iphone, many of them running Symbian, none of them with a physical keyboard) and explained to me that I should choose one of those because they are much more like the iPhone. I walked out after explaining that if I wanted an iPhone I would have damned well bought an iPhone and that I didn't much appreciate him wasting my time by showing me devices that in no way met any of the criteria I had expressed as requirements. I then went and bought a HTC Dream off ebay and have been pretty happy with it (although it is started to get to the end of its life now since it can't run the latest Android any more and the wifi has died).
http://blog.nexusuk.org
I don't want some salesman at a shop deciding for me what phones I can and cannot buy.
Sounds like a good reason to shop online. I wish brick and mortar stores would realize that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
In my opinion, the problem with Windows Phone sales is NOT that people don't come in asking for it, but that when you go into a phone store, NO salespeople even bother to recommend it. Please, go try for yourself and see, as I have already. The salespeople push Android. Maybe someone can tell me why, but I'm pretty sure it is because they get a big commission on the phone and accessories for Android phones. In addition to marketing the phones and OS better, Microsoft or the hardware makers need to give the salespeople a better commission than an Android phone. If they did, they would get pushed first, even if the salesperson likes Android better. Sales is a tough job, and the salesperson just wants to make more money.
After reading what you say, I could hazard a guess MS wants Nokia to fail, then they can buy them up on the cheap and put out their own phone (with the stuff you said it should have, built in....) It wouldn't be the first time MS has screwed a partner so that they can come out ahead in the end...
Especially with the timing of an Arm based Windows coming out, some time for debugging and market penetration (Apps for Arm based Windows), and then buy up Nokia and put out an Arm based Phone with the Office Integration, etc. Say 1 to 1.5 years from now, Apple will still be putting out the same thing (and getting old -- I have no faith in Tim Cook as being anything close to Jobs capabilities) and Android (more than likely) infighting to the point of causing fracturing in the market (which has already started -- and I like Android), leaving MS in a perfect position to clean up (and, of course, the fact they make 5-10 dollars per android device sold anyways means they can take the hit and wait out the storm and jump when the time is right for a massive takeover). Sort of like Netscape faltering and IE cleaning up for a few years, I can see the same sort of event happening with Smart Phones; and we'll probably have to wait 2-5 years again to get anything half decent again [Now I'm depressed, I hate predicting/watching History repeat itself]
Maybe the fact that Microsoft's entire strategy with windows was vendor lock in, which works great for making billions on an entrenched system, but when you try and actually compete with other platforms it just makes people run like your phones are infested with plague?
If salespeople do not want to sell the phone it probably has less to do with quality than with the profit per unit than with the commission. If the provider has to give away Windows phones they won't pay a big commission to the salesperson who sells the plan. The "Windows phones are crap" comments can probably be translated as "my commission for selling Windows phones is crap." I don't see a reason to get a Windows phone as it stands, but I would not shop somewhere that refused to show or sell me an item they advertise. I'm not partial to places that push commission either as they are going to try to push high margin items and hide bargains.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
> it's a garbage answer from someone who doesn't know what his job is
He does know what he wants out of his job, and that is commissions. He tries to sell what make him the most income. Returns reduce his income. If he had sold the Win phone and it was returned (for the reasons he stated) then he gets no commission and a lot of paperwork to do.
When selling houses the best strategy is to sell an unsuitable house to the buyer because that way the house will be on the market again in a short time and the owner will want to buy something else. This maximises the commissions available.
When selling phones it is best to sell a phone that is suitable otherwise it get returned.
With the diversity of phones available nowadays, somebody deciding what I should buy is exactly what I want. I'd pay for it.
The problem is that in nearly every store selling a phone (or computer) around me, the person in that role can not be trusted. that's why I shop those things online.
Rethinking email
By now MS's astortuf campain keeped only the top 3 spots.
Rethinking email
I think you mean a cashier. The cashier is the person who rings up the purchase. The sales person is the one to tell you which phones are good and which ones are rubbish.
Don't feel embarrassed, it's an easy mistake to make.
Yes, and auto-loans don't provide you anything in addition to the car.
I'm going to have (and pay for) wireless service for the next two years, whether or not AT&T gives me a new phone.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Except that a customer like me won't see any difference on his bill for buying the phone, as (barring unemployment or death) I will have a wireless plan for the next two years anyway, whether I keep my MB300 or not.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
I don't think that these bad decisions had been due the lack of foresight of Microsoft.
I think that the reason is even worse than that.
Microsoft thought that those technologies had great potential.
But the collosal greed of Microsoft, pushed them to deny, from their monopolistic perspective, the facts, and try to force the industry to dance with their music, even with the adoption of new standards.
They tried to do that with the Internet, tryin that its MSDN were the chosen alternative.
They have tried, fortunately without success, to expand their monopoly in the world of PCs to the mobile world.
Their Achilles heel have been always their unlimited greed.
DOS32bit with GEOS GUI, and with 512meg MEG MEG of ram and in 100% ascii large font interface, with ansi art would even kick but over Winmob7.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
"[...] meaning they're willing to pay people to buy them. I don't see how paying people to use your product isn't the most extreme form of advertising possible."
You have no idea about business. The terms on which they can sell phones depend on their bargaining position.