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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.
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.
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.
They didn't. Elop did.
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.
People who use Windows at home and at work probably know they don't want it on their phone as well.
I was shocked a few years ago when I rented a car in Italy and it had a Windows logo on the steering wheel; no idea what it was running, but I was continually expecting a BSOD across the dashboard.
After decades of dealing with Microsoft crap, Windows is a negative branding, not a positive one.
The N9 barely sold more than the Lumias have. So, no, it wasn't a homerun.
Considering it was dumped on by the CEO of Nokia, had next to no marketing budget compared to the Lumia line, wasn't sold in the biggest markets like the Lumias were/are, and out sold multiple phones, I'd say it wasn't a home run either. It was a freaking miracle and the fact that Nokia isn't running with it is a mistake of legendary proportion.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
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...
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