It Costs $450 In Marketing To Make Someone Buy a $49 Nokia Lumia

benfrog writes "According to market-share estimations compared to marketing dollars, it costs nearly ten times as much to sell the Windows Phone-based Nokia Lumia as it does to buy one. Other analysts agree with the low sales numbers."

Comments

Subsidized price

[Google Fanboy]

Nokia Lumia does not cost $49 to customers. It costs (and makes profit of) $49 + whatever mobile operators make during the two year contract. God americans are stupid if they still go for this marketing trick. Even Slashdot runs bullshit story like this!!

On top of that Nokia is trying to capture US market, so they can spend more on it while they generate revenue from rest of the world.

Re:Subsidized price

[Anonymous Coward]

IPhone has first mover advantage. Windows phone is a me-too product. Also, people don't like Metro.

Re:Subsidized price

[NixieBunny]

Perhaps most of those limitations aren't really important to most people.

Re:Subsidized price

[oakgrove]

That list has 121 items on it and you took issue with thirty of them. Assuming you are 100 percent right, that still leaves 75 percent of what the OP said on the table...

Re:Subsidized price

[grumbel]

What's *really* weird is that the iPhone has some of those same limitations and yet it is wildly successful ...

The difference is that the iPhone got there first, so whatever problems remain, people learned to live with them. The whole trouble with the Windows Phone is that it's late to the party, so to actually be accepted it would need to be superior to the iPhone, not just on par, as just being on par won't make people switch. Why waste time learning a new phone OS when it has no advantage over the old one and still a lot of the same problems?

Re:Subsidized price

[Tridus]

"Apple" is a positive brand. You attach it to something and the something gains percieved value.

"Windows" and "Microsoft" are not positive brands. You attach "Windows" to something, and people immediately think of their home PC. That is not a good thing given how awful the average home PC is.

There's also first mover advantage for the iPhone, things that people do care about like very high resolution displays & games, and Microsoft's well earned reputation for killing their media products on a whim (which they just did to all WP7 devices). But even if it was just as good as the iPhone they'd be facing an uphill battle simply due to the Windows name. Windows is a brand you tolerate, not one that inspires loyalty.

Re:Subsidized price

[Tridus]

Now if only stuff being added to Windows Phone 8 was in any way useful to people buying a Lumia today...

Saying "it's fixed in 8" is totally meaningless when current phones can't be upgraded. Why would anybody in their right mind want to buy a Lumia right now knowing that? Microsoft threw the current lineup of phones under the bus on that one.

Windows Phone needs a hook

[mozumder]

The iPhone worked because people could use it as an iPod, and it had the whole exclusive iTunes infrastructure behind it.

Blackberry's killed it with their keyboard.

Android didn't get popular until the Droid came out with their keyboard, giving it that differentiation from the iPhone, and that it was available outside of Cingular/AT&T.

Windows phone doesn't really offer any exclusive hook that'll sell itself. It has a nice UI, but the other systems are pretty good and ultimately very usable.

I suspect they'll have to tie in deeper with the upcoming Windows 8 infrastructure to get Windows Phone to sell. Or maybe XBox games. But right now it doesn't have that absolutely exclusive must-have killer app or selling point.

It's really shame, because Windows phone is a perfectly fine system that just needs a critical mass to get going.

Wow!

[SmallFurryCreature]

Let me guess, when Ballmer did the monkey dance, you were the one person in the world who was sexually aroused?

I have seen some delusional posts in my time but this one takes the biscuit. You don't deny any of the shortcomings, just come up with endless excuses or even downright admitting it is a huge failure and that is what you think of as a rebuttal.

With fans like you, what need has Windows 7 of enemies. You are supposed to damn things with faint praise, not by dragging them through the mud and stepping on their wind pipe.

Thanks for this amazing post, if I had even the slightest incline to perhaps one day try a MS phone, you have thoroughly killed it off. Oh I get, you are secretly an Apple fanboy and seek to discredit MS in disguise? Good job!