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Digia To Acquire Qt From Nokia
First time accepted submitter MrvFD writes "Ever since the most recent layoffs were announced by Nokia last month and the end of Qt related programs at Nokia was rumored, the fate of Qt has been in the air despite it nowadays having a working open governance model. Fear no longer, Qt brand, since Digia has now announced acquiring the Qt organization from Nokia. While relatively unknown company to the masses, it has already been selling the non-free (non-LGPL) licenses of Qt for 1.5 years. Hopefully this'll mean a bright future for Qt in co-operation with other Qt wielding companies like Google, RIM, Canonical, Intel, Skype, Microsoft, Jolla and the thousands of Qt open source and commercial license users. Digia now plans to quickly enable Qt on Android, iOS and Windows 8 platforms, where work has already been underway for some time."
Good to hear. Maybe Digia can also push them to fix a number of the bugs they neglect since it doesn't fit into their mobile device circle jerk that never amounted to anything.
Is Digia a solid company ? as in: "profitable enough not to get bought in 6 months with Qt changing hands ... again"
I see Embarcadero buying Borland history repeating itself... Sad...
I checked to see their latest offerings.
Well that clears everything up!
Nokia sells patents to a patent troll: suicide by M$ almost complete.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120809005600/en/Vringo-Nokia-Execute-Patent-Purchase-Agreement
That's it for Nokia....all the talent has left, and now they sold the last real assets to a troll. M$'s trail of destruction continues.
- credit to phands on IV for pointing this out.
--
BMO
Good.
Now Digia should acquire the Trolltech trademark as well if they haven't, and rebrand themselves as Trolltech. Then everyone could forget Nokia ever happened.
and had to have their blessing. Not to mention that they took over an existing business of managing existing licensees so that is no proof they are not here and have not been contracted to shut it down orderly. Is there proof anywhere that they are growing that business by growing customers?
Since the late 1980s, I've never seen Microsoft not want to shut down a cross platform development platform of any appreciable size. I doubt very much the Nokia deals were the first and especially not with Elop at the helm of Nokia. IMO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
A company I've never heard of to acquire something I've never heard of from a company going out of business. Nice.
Just because you've never heard of it, doesn't mean it's not important. Are you sure you're reading the right newsfeed?
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
You've never heard about Qt? Seriously?
Do you go around telling people you don't own a TV too?
It really is a shame that Qt has languished in relative obscurity for so many years. It really is a great toolkit (and I say that as a non-programmer who has only dabbled with it).
It's relatively simple, consistent, and has a large number of Windows-like constructor tools. It can be easily bound with many different other languages to construct a working program in a fairly short period of time. It's cross platform, running on everything*. The CPU overhead is relatively negligible (sans a massive framework like KDE).
It really astounds me that it's remained so cursory over the past decade or so. We had things like Qtopia way back in '00, and then it kind of went nowhere, even though there have been a lot of promising projects where it's been used - it's just fallen short of dominating like I'd have expected it to have. For instance, it was used in Maemo - but then replaced with something GTK-based. Why?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Hey, you may be right: who needs the decades of know-how in building great phone hardware, the global logistical network, the long-held relationships with operators and sales channels... This all has been eliminated in a poof of universal Windows Phone hate ('cause everybody thinks about it exactly like you do), where Symbian was not a problem at all.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
I checked to see their latest offerings.
Well that clears everything up!
Thank you for that in-depth analysis!
Nokia has really shot itself in the foot. They could have pushed the porting effort to get Qt on Android and then get a nice native app ecosystem going but instead they went the (classically) shortsighted take-the-money route with Microsoft. Now they are stuck with this burden called Windows 8 Phone which is on a whooping 4% of cell phones. Windows 8 Phone just needs some apps, right? Well it's bad enough to come into the game late but when you have a hostile environment for developers (developers! developers!) you are not going to get anything but crappy ports from Android or iOS from developers that dont know any better.
It seems this culture of CEOs/board members coming and going on a regular basis has made corporate investments shortsighted.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
What?? There was world wide financial collapse??? When did that happen??? Guess it's not important because I didn't know about it.
Hey, you may be right: who needs the decades of know-how in building great phone hardware, the global logistical network, the long-held relationships with operators and sales channels... This all has been eliminated in a poof of universal Windows Phone hate ('cause everybody thinks about it exactly like you do), where Symbian was not a problem at all.
I don't see very much Windows Phone hate. Mostly I see wonder at how Microsoft could be so late to this party and mild amusement at their struggle to remain relevant in that market. As for the MS/Nokia deal and considering who Nokia's CEO is, it doesn't take much tin foil to realize that something smells bad there.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
Often investor driven companies find "buying opportunities" and then milk them for all they are worth missing the whole point that made the company successful. (Think Sears) I can see myself trying to explain open source to a group of MBAs for a week and still having zero impact.
"So if we open the source we can force people to use our code?"
"If we stop development won't people just keep buying the same old buggy junk?" "So the L in LGPL means they buy a license?" "Can we patent C++?"
"How much did we pay our lawyers to draw up this LGPL license."
"Nothing, then they can't be very good lawyers."
"Can we sue these wx People to stop them from giving away a GUI api for free?"
"I don't use linux. I think we should stop shipping a linux version."
"I only use a BlackBerry. RIM is offering me personally $50,000 if we stop development for iOS and Android. I think we should first develop a BB version."
"We have to figure out a way to legally stop people from forking."
My prediction is that QT is dead if they release the iOS and Android version as commercial only versions. It won't die that day but that is the day the hour glass is turned for the last time.
decades of building great phone hardware which then had to be scaled back because the OS didn't support current hardware and then 2 years after the deal a new version is forced on them which is incompatible. That's great for the hardware designers, great for their global logistics network, great for their operator and sales channels. They are becoming great at shrinking lots of great resources.
FYI, it was a poor choice because the OS sucked, was outdated and already had a shrinking market share after many years on the market. It just so happens that it was such a great technology company like Microsoft who built and owns that product and I happen to know them too well.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
This is a good thing. The best thing for Qt is for it to be owned by someone whose business depends on it. I worked for a firm that, for legal reasons, had a commercial license from Digia, and I attended the Qt Dev Days in SF in 2011. I was impressed with what I saw. Digia seemed like a good company. I hope they can make a go of it.
CDE went open source.
decades of building great phone hardware which then had to be scaled back because the OS didn't support current hardware
By "current hardware" you must mean multi-core CPUs, which Nokia hasn't yet put on any device? Neither did they go beyond 800x600 screens. The cameras in top-tier Lumias are pretty adequate. So, there was nothing to scale back.
and then 2 years after the deal a new version is forced on them which is incompatible. That's great for the hardware designers, great for their global logistics network, great for their operator and sales channels.
It's not great, but neither it is a big issue. Not all users are novelty junkies, and WP7 devices don't suddenly stop being useful because there's a new version out. Ask the users of all the dirt-cheap Gingerbread phones that are pumping up Android sales statistics.
FYI, it was a poor choice because the OS sucked, was outdated and already had a shrinking market share after many years on the market.
I see you are confused about Windows Phone vs Windows Mobile. The rest of your comment does not look well-informed either.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
They had Meego, they had Qt, they even have a lot of cash. So they could have done something unique. Now all that is gone. Enter Windows.
Honestly I read his article in Business week where he outlined the logic. The whole thing makes sense. Nokia was desperate and need the cash plus a credible OS to run on their hardware. Balmer wanted the credibility Nokia bought him and had cash. It was a dangerous play but I don't buy it was corrupt. It makes a lot of sense for the board / shareholder's perspective where chewing up the equity and bankruptcy are roughly equivalent.
Nokia was desperate and need the cash plus a credible OS to run on their hardware.
Except; this was a lie.
If you had just taken Nokia's spare money, put it into a separate company and started building a mobile phone based on Android, recruiting people from scratch, you would have had a very good chance of getting into a major position in the market. It's well worth looking at some of the graphs which show how Nokia's Symbian sales only started going down after the "Eliop Effect" made everyone think they were a dead end.
His logic was good, but his facts were completely wrong. If you pick up a gun; decide for no apparent reason that it's a "wrong way round gun", and then shoot yourself, it's not your logic which is at fault. Grip on reality? Maybe? Sanity? Yes.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
If you had just taken Nokia's spare money, put it into a separate company and started building a mobile phone based on Android, recruiting people from scratch, you would have had a very good chance of getting into a major position in the market
If the shareholders could have easily gotten equity out of Nokia there wouldn't have been a problem. But under the labor rules they had layoffs were going to cost the company a pretty penny. They couldn't get the money out.
Nokia was profitable!
Nokia had increasing sales! Including increasing sales of "smartphones"!!
Nokia had a huge cash mountain (> 5Billion Dollars!!)
Absolutely. Symbian was still doing well but....
1) They had decreasing sales on the high end.
2) Margins were collapsing
3) Their Meego / Maemo strategy wasn't ready to go. It wasn't until 2011 they released the N9 and that phone is priced much to high for the hardware.
I don't think that Elop's facts were wrong. Assume the N9 comes out June 2011 at $550 ballpark comparable to the iPhone 4 though a bit cheaper. The Samsung Galaxy II is out. The 4S comes out 1 quarter later. How do you sell 100m of those N9s at that price point? I don't see it, so the the N9 is a great phone that sells at best a few million. Now it does have the realistic potential to be a $250 phone by 2014 / 2015 and replace Symbian low end base all over the world. I just don't see how Nokia had 5 years, based on Symbian given how much staff / overhead they had.
Elop needs Balmer's cash. If you see some way to get around that, tell me the plan that works. How do they get people transition from Symbian to Meego during the 2010-2014 time frame without viable Meego / Maemo phones?
>Nokia was profitable!
True, like RIM was profitable last quarter.
>Nokia had increasing sales! Including increasing sales of "smartphones"!!
Everyone with half a brain cell knew Symbian was not sustainable. Apple and Android were just taking their time in Asia and Europe.
>Nokia had a huge cash mountain (> 5Billion Dollars!!)
That doesn't mean anything really, without data on debt, assets, bonds etc.
>If you had just taken Nokia's spare money, put it into a separate company and started building a mobile phone based on Android, recruiting people from scratch, you would have had a very good chance of getting into a major position in the market.
You mean like HTC that's suffering horribly now?
http://www.bgr.com/2012/08/09/htc-criticism-2012-apple-samsung-competition/
http://www.bgr.com/2012/08/07/htc-q3-2012-earnings-guidance-market-cap/
>Symbian sales only started going down after the "Eliop Effect" made everyone think they were a dead end
Symbian had to be dropped like a hot potato to save the company. The Nokia execs working on Symbian did everything they can to kill Meego/Maemo for their personal benefit thus making Nokia suffer hugely even before Elop was hired.
Honestly I read his article in Business week where he outlined the logic. The whole thing makes sense. Nokia was desperate and need the cash plus a credible OS to run on their hardware. Balmer wanted the credibility Nokia bought him and had cash. It was a dangerous play but I don't buy it was corrupt. It makes a lot of sense for the board / shareholder's perspective where chewing up the equity and bankruptcy are roughly equivalent.
Nokia didn't need anything. And in all reality their Maemo/MeeGo devices outsell the Windows Phone devices when in the same markets. They had a credible OS and one they didn't need to pay someone else for. And as someone else pointed out, they were profitable and didn't need the cash. Their ability to remain profitable changed only after they started pursuing Windows at all costs.
If you want to get an accurate picture of what Microsoft and Stephen Elop did - try reading this blog from a former Nokia Exec that is highly respected in Mobile Phone Sales. You'll see why Nokia is doing so poorly and having to sell off everything, and why Windows Phone will be a no-go (and who made it such).
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
"Hey, you may be right: who needs the decades of know-how in building great phone hardware, the global logistical network"
Both Apple and Samsung have better logistics networks and are able to get components cheaper. Nokia's logistic network has been decimated over the past year or two.
"the long-held relationships with operators"
They are reducing the number of operators....
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/07/if-apple-is-running-away-from-this-strategy-and-samsung-growing-by-opposite-strategy-why-is-elop-try.html
"and sales channels."
http://www.zdnet.com/nokia-confirms-layoffs-pulls-back-sales-channels-in-china-7000000781/
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/6/15/how-to-stop-nokia-channel-boycott-and-save-the-company.aspx
And in all reality their Maemo/MeeGo devices outsell the Windows Phone devices when in the same markets.
Their Maemo/MeeGo devices don't sell nearly enough to sustain a company Nokia's size. If Nokia was a small company the N9 would have been awesome. Elop BTW agrees, that they might be able to get the N9 down to around $250 by 2014/2015 and then they do have a viable device. The problem was he didn't have enough money to last that long.
Certainly customers hate the Lumia and that hasn't worked out for Nokia yet, and may not work out. But the problem with MeeGo devices when we start talking about sustaining Nokia was the ability to produce something inexpensive enough to transition their Symbian base quickly enough. I've read Tomi's blog. Its an interesting blog. But he tends to think like a guy who works for Nokia not a control investor. The people who held Nokia's bonds didn't share Tomi's opinions about Nokia's prospects. Nokia was at $40 a share in late 2007 and at $15 a share when Elop came in. If there had been a MeeGo phone like the N9 when he showed up with a strategy to cut the cost of manufacture there never would have been an alliance with Microsoft.
Now don't get me wrong I think Tomi's criticism of the terrible job Elop did in managing the transition are spot on. But I don't have access to the T&C with Microsoft. I don't know that Microsoft, after the fiasco with LG, can afford to let Nokia sink and the strategy may always have been: heads Windows works out and the investors get profits from Windows, tails Windows 7 flounders and Microsoft buys Nokia the time it needs.
Yes. An excellent analogy.
But for now the question is "What does this mean for Qt?" I really doubt that the company is currently a patent troll. OTOH, the posts about where it has been getting its money aren't reassuring, and they may be driven to it. The gripping hand is that the LGPL is powerful magic. On the fourth hand, running a major project like Qt isn't something that can be set up quickly and do well. What percentage of the developers are external to the company? (My guess is rather few, perhaps none.)
If forking Qt were a minor problem, then KDE would have done it when Trolltech was bought. It may be technically possible...well, it's certainly *technically* possible...but I'm not at all sure that it's practical on any short timespan.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
And in all reality their Maemo/MeeGo devices outsell the Windows Phone devices when in the same markets.
Their Maemo/MeeGo devices don't sell nearly enough to sustain a company Nokia's size. If Nokia was a small company the N9 would have been awesome. Elop BTW agrees, that they might be able to get the N9 down to around $250 by 2014/2015 and then they do have a viable device.
The N9 and its cousins without any marketing (promotions, discounts, etc.) sold at full price and outsold its Lumia brethren which had millions of dollars in marketing (promotions, discounts, etc.). The Maemo/MeeGo OS also would have run on a lot cheaper devices than they can run the Windows Phone OS on. So I call bull - especially on it coming from Elop. If Nokia pursued Maemo/MeeGo on their phones they could easily have transitioned to it from Symbian. If they had put out the N9 and its brethren in sufficient quantity they could have lowered the price through volume discounts. Instead, under the direction of Elop, they did the least possible - low volume kept the price high, no marketing meant lower sales than they could have had, etc. It was simply a matter of he didn't want the Maemo/MeeGo platform to outshine the Windows platform - which, ironically, it did anyway only proving how strong a platform it is. Jolla will have a good business at Nokia expense as a result.
The problem was he didn't have enough money to last that long.
They had plenty of money, and plenty of sales to last that long. Nokia was far larger than the smart phone market and dominated the phone market around the world. The exception was the US where they didn't dominate the smart phone market, and were not quite as strong in the feature phone and dumb phone markets. However, the rest of their business more than offset it. Until Elop, his direction for abandoning Maemo/MeeGo, and his statements about abandoning Symbian for Windows in a very short time frame Nokia was very profitable. And, btw, it's hard to destroy a company like Elop did to Nokia, and as the article I linked to shows the shareholders have a very good likelihood for a successful lawsuit against him for what he's done - in 3 different countries nonetheless.
Certainly customers hate the Lumia and that hasn't worked out for Nokia yet, and may not work out. But the problem with MeeGo devices when we start talking about sustaining Nokia was the ability to produce something inexpensive enough to transition their Symbian base quickly enough. I've read Tomi's blog. Its an interesting blog. But he tends to think like a guy who works for Nokia not a control investor. The people who held Nokia's bonds didn't share Tomi's opinions about Nokia's prospects. Nokia was at $40 a share in late 2007 and at $15 a share when Elop came in. If there had been a MeeGo phone like the N9 when he showed up with a strategy to cut the cost of manufacture there never would have been an alliance with Microsoft.
Now don't get me wrong I think Tomi's criticism of the terrible job Elop did in managing the transition are spot on. But I don't have access to the T&C with Microsoft. I don't know that Microsoft, after the fiasco with LG, can afford to let Nokia sink and the strategy may always have been: heads Windows works out and the investors get profits from Windows, tails Windows 7 flounders and Microsoft buys Nokia the time it needs.
Who knows what the strategy was. As the blog noted, the board had to be involved in the decision for such things to go on without Elop's head rolling (thus they're liable too).
Share value is not a metric of how successful a company is, but rather a metric on how willing others are to bet on the success of the company. You can be the most successful company in the world and have a zero share price; or the worst in the world and have a very high share price.
Only time will tell if the investors truly agree with Elop. For now, they seem to be sitting on the sidelines; but they may be waiting for another shoe to fall (or so to speak) before doing anything more.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
The N9 and its cousins without any marketing (promotions, discounts, etc.) sold at full price and outsold its Lumia brethren which had millions of dollars in marketing (promotions, discounts, etc.).
It's a myth made out of thin air and circular web references.
The Maemo/MeeGo OS also would have run on a lot cheaper devices than they can run the Windows Phone OS on.
Tall tales from the fandom, too. Earlier N9 prototypes had 512 MiB of RAM; they had to bump it to 1 GiB because the software couldn't be fit to run without endless swapping. Windows Phone 7 has no problem running on half a gig even now.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
And you may add one more to that list:
4) The world market for cheap phones - Nokia's bread and butter - is saturating. We have 6 billion cell phone subscriptions now, pretty soon you run out of new people to sell phones to. Nokia will get much less business selling replacements, not to mention the rich buy smartphones saturating the second hand market with cheap but usable dumb/feature phones. Nokia could not afford to stand still.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
While about 5% of what Ahonen says is insightful, about 95% of it is just inane gibbering. His blog is best avoided.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I'm not saying Nokia is at the top of its game now, but those things are worth something, and they can be improved, unless we all believe in made-up stories such as the "Elop effect" and market rejection of Lumia phones.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
We agree that the N9 is a really cool phone with potential and that the Lumia was a phone that customers hate. I also will stipulate that with a promotional campaign Nokia could have sold 10m of the N9 easily. The question is all about how cheaply could they make 100m of them. Nokia seems to be building the Lumia 900 at about $450 each. I have no idea who they are spending that much given that this is over what Apple spends to build the iPhone 4S with considerably better hardware specs. But that seems to be the case.
If say $20b-22b would have gotten 100m of these made then the N9 is a the killer phone and the Symbian -> MeeGo strategy would have worked. If on the other hand this phone costs $40b-45b to make 100m then it wasn't viable. At that price the phone has to compete with the high end Androids, best Blackberry, and iPhone 4 and there the hardware specs to say nothing of the software just aren't on par. This really is the crucial question as to whether Elop had a "burning platform" or not. Heck at $250 my daughter's birthday present would be an N9, and this is coming from a 11 year Apple user who agrees with Elop, living in America, which is Nokia's weakest major market.
Jolla will have a good business at Nokia expense as a result.
Jolia can afford to sell a niche phone. Nokia can't the overhead is totally different. In Jolia moves 3m or 5m phones they will be thrilled and thrive while Nokia would go bankrupt.
Share value is not a metric of how successful a company is, but rather a metric on how willing others are to bet on the success of the company. You can be the most successful company in the world and have a zero share price; or the worst in the world and have a very high share price.
I agree share value isn't a great metric for viewing how successful a company is. It is however a useful metric for determining what the board thinks of the share value. If the stock is way below what the board thinks the company is worth they are going to be shopping for a buyer or taking the company private. If it is way over, the board is going to engage in equity financing. More or less the board of Nokia seems to agree with Elop's assessment of the situation, that there was no viable internal option. You can see this in the 2010 report: http://i.nokia.com/blob/view/-/263824/data/1/-/Request-Nokia-in-2010-pdf.pdf
For example 2008 to 2009 sales dropped 19% and profits decreased 76%. The board's analysis was
That wasn't Elop and that wasn't the burning platform memo. By 3rd quarter 2010 the board had made up their mind that the MeeGo strategy wasn't viable. This wasn't one guy. If they were wrong why where they so wrong?
Agreed on the market for cheap phones saturating.
On the smartphones, the nice thing for Nokia is that the average life of a smartphone is 11.5 mo. Until that number comes up long lived dumb phones are fine.
Short-sightenness. They didn't see their strategy through. No Maemo/MeeGo phone had been released yet; and nothing had been built up yet. They were probably talking with Ballmer and Elop at that point as well, and getting a lot of FUD from those circles on why Maemo/MeeGo wouldn't go.
The developer community didn't know what to think of Maemo/MeeGo quite yet as they hadn't seen it. But coming out of the gate it was more mature than Windows phone 7.5, and many third party developers quickly got behind it even after Elop's buring platform memo. Maemo/MeeGo is actually a very viable 3rd OS platform for the mobile market - more viable than Windows Phone is. All that is to say, prior to the N9 being released there was a lot of hype but not many bites - so the market was really unknown. However, releasing the N9 and the N900 and having Elop get out on stage the next day to show of a phone that wasn't going to be released for another year really undercut the platform. As it was, the N9 and N900 when compared to top of the line Android and iPhones give them a go for their money.
It would have been better for the Nokia to shoot a multiple OS strategy and let the market itself figure out which one to keep. If you're making a business decision you let the numbers run through. If you make a political decision, you choose what you want and ignore the numbers. As it stands, that's what Nokia did - a political decision.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
While about 5% of what Ahonen says is insightful, about 95% of it is just inane gibbering. His blog is best avoided.
In this case, that specific blog post would be in the 5%. A lot of what he's stated I've been seeing in other areas where I deal with Nokia or Nokia personnel.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
By "current hardware" you must mean multi-core CPUs, which Nokia hasn't yet put on any device? Neither did they go beyond 800x600 screens. The cameras in top-tier Lumias are pretty adequate. So, there was nothing to scale back.
You are an idiot. Reparse the sentence. He's saying Nokia essentially stopped dead in its tracks with windows phone. The GP is talking about decades of Nokia building great hardware [that continually push the boundaries of what is possible]. They have been stuck with variations of the same windows phone specced shit since they delivered the first Lumia. And since "there is no plan B", they weren't about to just put Symbian or Meego on some real high spec stuff. Oh no, fuck making money when we Nokia can just collectively lick Ballmers ballsack, right? All the while the rest of the industry has moved forward with HD screens, dual-sim handsets, and with native coding and high performance GPUs the ability to play honest to goodness real 3D games.
It's not great, but neither it is a big issue. Not all users are novelty junkies, and WP7 devices don't suddenly stop being useful because there's a new version out.
What separates a fanboy from a mere platform enthusiast? The enthusiast honestly admits when the platform vision has ran off the rails and the fanboy just makes excuses. Listen, drone, the people buying Windows Phones today that go home on a 2 year contract are getting screwed. First of all, obviously they won't be getting the wp8 upgrade they'll have to make do with the window dressing wp7.8 shit sandwich. Do you think at&t is telling them that? Ha! Secondly, they are getting screwed because when windows phone 8 drops it has a lot of new features that developers have been asking for like native code. Native code on a phone is good for amongst others, 2 main things: 1) some code runs much faster in optimized native form rather than jitted managed code and 2) porting software from one platform to another. The next time you talk to one of your betters, ask to see his Android phone and install an app called Addons Detector. Run it and marvel at how many apps use the NDK for native code. Guess what? Many of those apps will be the ones getting ported to wp8. Practically none will ever see the light of day on wp7. So while your wp8 wielding peers are rocking out on Shadowgun and Deadspace, you will have to console yourself with yet another playthrough of Angry Birds (that is on your market right? Ha ha). And if miracle of miracles wp8 actually takes off and gets a sizable number of users, guess what happens to wp7 dev support? Go bye bye. Windows Phone devs will be too busy chasing the real market and your wp7 might as well be an OpenMoko Freerunner as far as they're concerned as a rounding error of market share isn't worth developing for. If wp8 takes off, prepare for your lumia 900 to be all but abandoned inside of a year (into your multi-year contract). Guess what? You got screwed! And even if wp8 doesn't take off, that only means not only are they screwing you behind your back but they're scewing you directly to your face because MS and Nokia's every intention is for wp8 to succeed so if their vision succeeds, they know your handset will be losing serious dev support.
Ask the users of all the dirt-cheap Gingerbread phones that are pumping up Android sales statistics.
Oh this trolling again? You think you have an actual point with this? Guess what, bucko? Unlike above where wp7 loses developer support, Gingerbread has over a hundred million users and any Android dev that writes an app using newer api's is prompted to download the compatibility library before the project even gets loaded the first time in Eclipse. See, Google gives a shit about their users of older devices in the most important way. Not window dressing bullshit but actual backwards compatibility. So keep ignoring reality and argue in soundbites
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
No, 5% of what's in that blog post is useful, but not even insightful (then again, perhaps I already have more insights than most, having spent about a third of my working life at nokia, including the last 4 years; however, it's all been said a dozen times already). The other 95% is inane gibbering.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
>Nokia was profitable!
True, like RIM was profitable last quarter.
Well; yes. Are you trying to suggest RIM would be better off if it was making a $800M loss every quarter rather than a modest profit?
>Nokia had a huge cash mountain (> 5Billion Dollars!!)
That doesn't mean anything really, without data on debt, assets, bonds etc.
Nokia is not some secret entity. It is a public listed company which reports it's earnings and assets to shareholders on a quarterly basis. You can find them directly linked from the front page of www.nokia.com That number takes into account debt, assets, bonds and a whole bunch more.
Symbian had to be dropped like a hot potato to save the company. The Nokia execs working on Symbian did everything they can to kill Meego/Maemo for their personal benefit thus making Nokia suffer hugely even before Elop was hired.
Resource investment in Symbian could quite reasonably be stopped, or at least scaled massively back. Just as Eliop proved he could do with Meltimi; this should have been done silently and without further comment. Symbian phones should have been sold for as long as they kept selling. The Osborne effect and the Ratner effects were well known before the "Eliop Effect" and were something every competent CEO knows to avoid. This would have bought Nokia another two years of profits. What they do with those two years is another question, but throwing them away needlessly was negligant bordering on criminal.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Assume the N9 comes out June 2011 at $550 ballpark comparable to the iPhone 4 though a bit cheaper. [...] How do you sell 100m of those N9s at that price point? I don't see it, so the the N9 is a great phone that sells at best a few million.
Why do I have to assme that?
We can speculate about alternate realities all we want. How about discussing something about the real world as it actually is?
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Short-sightenness. They didn't see their strategy through. No Maemo/MeeGo phone had been released yet; and nothing had been built up yet. They were probably talking with Ballmer and Elop at that point as well, and getting a lot of FUD from those circles on why Maemo/MeeGo wouldn't go.
Unless Elop and Balmer are lying that's not possible. Elop approached Balmer after he realized the MeeGo strategy wasn't viable. Balmer may not have even known how unhappy Elop and the board were with MeeGo when the threw the cash in. Both sides were desperate.
As it was, the N9 and N900 when compared to top of the line Android and iPhones give them a go for their money.
Maybe. Physically I think its a bit behind in areas like CPU, and screen resolution. The N900 doesn't even have a capacitive touch screen. The problem was platform. But regardless at least strategically that's not where it needed to be. It needed to crush mid range Androids and be on par with bottom of the line iPhones; or it needed to be much better by 2011 to take them on. Had Nokia not lost 2 years screwing around and these phones come out in 2009 go after the top end. But what Nokia needed in 2011 would have been a path for Symbian customers.
People willing to buy a $600 phones weren't coming from Symbian. Again no one has ever said the N9 couldn't sell 10m phones, the question was whether it could sell 100m.
It would have been better for the Nokia to shoot a multiple OS strategy and let the market itself figure out which one to keep.
I agree. Probably Microsoft's cash made that impossible.
He's saying Nokia essentially stopped dead in its tracks with windows phone. The GP is talking about decades of Nokia building great hardware [that continually push the boundaries of what is possible].
Um, your reading between the lines of the GP is a bit too rosy. I don't remember Nokia ever creating anything exceptional, just many things that were damn good for their day. Like Lumia 900, for example.
They have been stuck with variations of the same windows phone specced shit since they delivered the first Lumia. And since "there is no plan B", they weren't about to just put Symbian or Meego on some real high spec stuff.
Right, because high specs is the only thing that sells, who needs software that doesn't make you furious while using it?
All the while the rest of the industry has moved forward with HD screens, dual-sim handsets, and with native coding and high performance GPUs the ability to play honest to goodness real 3D games.
I'll give you that: with Windows Phone, Nokia is not yet in a position to collect the stupid money spent on unnecessary things (dual SIM works fine on S40 at the price points where it really matters). It's getting there, though.
First of all, obviously they won't be getting the wp8 upgrade they'll have to make do with the window dressing wp7.8 shit sandwich. Do you think at&t is telling them that? Ha! Secondly, they are getting screwed because when windows phone 8 drops it has a lot of new features that developers have been asking for like native code. Native code on a phone is good for amongst others, 2 main things: 1) some code runs much faster in optimized native form rather than jitted managed code and 2) porting software from one platform to another. The next time you talk to one of your betters, ask to see his Android phone and install an app called Addons Detector. Run it and marvel at how many apps use the NDK for native code. Guess what? Many of those apps will be the ones getting ported to wp8. Practically none will ever see the light of day on wp7. So while your wp8 wielding peers are rocking out on Shadowgun and Deadspace, you will have to console yourself with yet another playthrough of Angry Birds (that is on your market right? Ha ha).
I hear an obnoxious spoiled kid who buys a phone to engage in dick-waving contests with his peers about who has the coolest lastest apps. It may never cross your mind, but there are people buying a phone that has everything to fulfill their current needs, that's it. :-)
But hey, doesn't it start bothering you that your Android phone is so five months old? It no longer has the greatest number of (PenTile) pixels per square nanometer, and lack of an octocore CPU will soon make you a social outcast. The aging GPU no longer delivers the best "instant gratification victim playing an immersive 3D game on a phone" experience. Time to upgrade?
And if miracle of miracles wp8 actually takes off and gets a sizable number of users, guess what happens to wp7 dev support? Go bye bye.
Which will mean little to Nokia who will be laughing all the way to the bank counting money from new WP8 sales? Anyway, what various WP software vendors will do is still hypothetical. Nokia already has a sizable set of applications written for WP7, I guess not every one of them will need to lose backwards compatibility to the point that it cannot be maintained even as a trimmed down variant.
Ask the users of all the dirt-cheap Gingerbread phones that are pumping up Android sales statistics.
Oh this trolling again? You think you have an actual point with this?
I'll write it down here, too: not everybody needs to chase the absolutely latest and greatest device. Hundreds of millions of Android users to attest.
You're right (about Windows
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
The operators were desperate to subsidise the N9 to create a credible an iPhone competitor; the price to customers would have been tens of dollars
I doubt that. The US market is the big subsidy market so lets use the USA. $360 is about where they put the subsidy. No one is getting the $410 type subsidy from iPhone, desperate or not; Nokia customers haven't proven a willingness to overpay for their carrier related costs and accessories. Still if we assume that Nokia could have lived with $370 making it a free phone the carriers might have gone that high, they love free phones. And if it was free they might have eaten the marketing costs themselves as part of the package. So is your contention that Nokia could have made say 15m phones for the US market (that means both GSM and CDMA models) at $370 each in 2011 when the entire $370 is going to cover phone, warranty, basic, support...?
If the answer is "yes" then you are absolutely correct Elop is an idiot. If on the other hand in 2011 they would have needed more like $550 then you have a problem. The phone sells for $199 which means it goes head to head with the iPhone 4 during the holiday season and Apple's billion dollar a year marketing to the US base. And I don't see the N9 getting the volume for those customers.
I doubt that.
The phone did actually go out with subsidies on some operators in minor countries. More importantly, China Mobile was absolutely desperate for this and it's was made public knowlege (look around the Jolla announcements) that they were willing to subsidise.
The US market is the big subsidy market so lets use the USA.
Nokia is an exception to that. They never played ball well with the US operators, so they gradually lost market share since the end of the '90s. I won't go into the detail of your calculation since I'm really not sure how that would play out in the US market.
So is your contention that Nokia could have made say 15m phones for the US market (that means both GSM and CDMA models) at $370 each in 2011 when the entire $370 is going to cover phone, warranty, basic, support...?
If the answer is "yes" then you are absolutely correct Elop is an idiot. If on the other hand in 2011 they would have needed more like $550 then you have a problem. The phone sells for $199 which means it goes head to head with the iPhone 4 during the holiday season and Apple's billion dollar a year marketing to the US base. And I don't see the N9 getting the volume for those customers.
Nokia's margin figures were around 20%. The N9 was at the top end of their margin, something that can be seen from the visible effect it had on their profit numbers, so probably the marginal cost per phone was below $200 (remember Nokia can make a profit on a phone for $30 - they have quite a number of models at that price in India).
Based on the actual sales, and simply moving them over to the high value large countries where it wasn't sold (Germany / UK / France etc) together with a proper China strategy, it could easily have sold in the 10s of millions. Probably hundreds of millions worldwide. I wouldn't want to speculate too much about the USA; Nokia has had problems there for a long time; but they had good reviews and I think they had had good response from operators and might have broken into the millions in the US without a problem. Outside the US, there are lots of customers worldwide who used to just automatically buy for the Nokia brand. They would have upgraded their Symbian phones unthinkingly to the new Nokia. Moving to Windows was so loud that even they realised that something had changed; checked what it was at the next visit to the phone shop; then started buying something else instead.
Remember the main criticism of the N9 was that it would take six months to come out with a companion model. That lack of confusing models and a simple consistent platform is exactly what is the iPhone's strength. It could have been a really major seller.
Elop is an idiot.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
You've never heard about Qt? Seriously?
Quicktime? Sure, I've heard of that.
At $200 + 20%, i.e you aren't talking $370 anymore but $250. You pick up a good chunk of the prepay market possible another 30m. At that rate not only do carriers advertise your phone everyone (no charge to Nokia) but they would be willing to do all sorts of incentives for customers like: phone free + first 2 months service free. You sell 50m in the USA easy. Or you kick the price back up to $370 sell 15m and use the $3b in extra revenue to build a first class US application platform.
As far as the carrier problems in the USA, I don't believe the problems are deep at all, they are surface I don't think they would carry over to the MeeGo brand. Here are the usual problems you tell me if you think Nokia wouldn't get around them:
1) Nokia refuses to make CDMA radios. I'd assume on a major rollout they wouldn't do that. If they did, yeah that will kill your US sales.
2) Northern European aesthetic. This might be a problem, less of a problem at the $370 than at the $250. But certainly the N9 is way more attractive than Android.
3) US customers don't like Symbian (not applicable since different OS)
4) Not enough American apps: this would apply but if they are selling tens of million of one handset this problem would disappear almost immediately
5) Not cooperating with carrier strategy. Well right now the strategy is anyone but Apple.
I have to hear some other people. But if you are right about $200 manufacturing cost for the N9... you are talking a phone that would beat Apple in their home country.
Um, your reading between the lines of the GP is a bit too rosy. I don't remember Nokia ever creating anything exceptional just many things that were damn good for their day
The OP said "decades of building great phones which then had to be scaled back because the OS didn't support current hardware" Obviously "building great phones" in that sentence is what had to be scaled back and not the actual hardware itself and the only way for the entire phrase to be logically consistent is if OP was referring to the state of being a great phone maker rather than any specific phone. Taking his statement at face value, my interpretation is more likely as it is consistent with both facts and how he worded it (even with the espoused admiration for Nokia hardware). Your interpretation isn't any more likely based on his verbiage however it does imply the logical inconsistency which has a stronger burden of proof taking the posters history in account. Maybe Locutus will clue both of us in.
Right, because high specs is the only thing that sells,
There are of course many reasons why Windows Phone doesn't sell other than just the dated specs but the fact is that many people do respond to things like "dual core" and "HD screen" and "32 GB" (whoa, what? The L900 is limited to 16). You are confusing the tone of my post with the content. I am not judging windows phone because it has lower specs, I'm saying many consumers do and that's one of the reasons they don't buy it.
who needs software that doesn't make you furious while using it?
I've never used an electronic device in my entire life that didn't infuriate me from time to time including Windows Phone. When I had my HD7 it used to drive me nuts when reading a webite in landscape mode then having to go to portrait to access the url bar. Sometimes you'd flip it back to landscape and the text would be massively zoomed in with no way to fix it other than a slow page reload. As a person that browses a lot on his phone that was a deal killer right there and part of the reason I got rid of it.
stupid money spent on unnecessary things
So what's stupid? HD screens? I have to look at that screen everyday for the duration of my ownership of the phone and I want it to be a good one. And if you amortized the additional cost of the screen over the life of the contract it would be pennies a day. Of all the specs that you can't see that probably don't really matter that much, you bring up the one thing that makes a clear difference.
It may never cross your mind, but there are people buying a phone that has everything to fulfill their current needs, that's it.
But that's a fallacy and a perfect example of your mind playing tricks on you. Human nature leads you to exaggerate the importance of the present over future utility. A phone can "fulfill your current needs" and still be a bad deal because you are stuck with the phone until your contract is up. That's why people don't save and why they don't successfully diet. It's also why they might buy phones that are likely to lose developer support before their halfway through their contract.
Which will mean little to Nokia who will be laughing all the way to the bank counting money from new WP8 sales? Anyway, what various WP software vendors will do is still hypothetical. Nokia already has a sizable set of applications written for WP7, I guess not every one of them will need to lose backwards compatibility to the point that it cannot be maintained even as a trimmed down variant.
I doubt Nokia will be laughing all the way to the bank anytime soon but at any rate I don't care as that has nothing to do with what I was even talking about. And what do Nokia's apps have to do with wp7 losing dev support if wp8 takes off? You will have wp7 with minimal third party support and, oh yeah, some Nokia apps. yay
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Wrong. N9 sales didn't even cross 1 million until December 2011
Operators had already found their iPhone substitute in Android by 2011.
So, rftatroll, you are simply wrong.
I don't see very much Windows Phone hate.
I have to agree, i see a lot of mocking about how it has low marketshare, but not much in the way of objective criticism. The biggest problem was they were too late to the party so people are already familiar with Android and iOS as the defacto choice.
FYI, it was a poor choice because the OS sucked, was outdated and already had a shrinking market share after many years on the market.
Oh stop with that rubbish, that OS still ran better on EVERY handset than Android ran on its FLAGSHIP handsets. Windows Phone might not offer users compelling reasons to change, it might not have the huge app catalogs of its competitors, it was late to the game, you might not personally like the aesthetic and it might ultimately fail for all those reasons but lets not pretend the OS itself "sucked". Unlike Android it didn't need the latest quad core CPU to every so often give a brief moment of smooth performance, it managed it all the time on lower-end hardware because it is more efficient. That said I'm not going to pretend Android hasn't evolved to become competitive in the performance stakes with the release of Jelly Bean and the focus on "project butter".
Actually it does strike me now that with this "a shrinking market share after many years on the market" you probably don't realize that Nokia didn't adopt Windows Mobile, they adopted Windows Phone, which is a very different operating system, they have about as much in common as Symbian and Meego.
You are an idiot.
Oh no, fuck making money when we Nokia can just collectively lick Ballmers ballsack
Listen, drone
wp7.8 shit sandwich.
window dressing bullshit
Brain is obviously far too overloaded with the task of frothing at the mouth to be able to make an intelligent point, you're clearly a very angry person with far too much emotionally invested in this to be taken seriously, pathetic.
At $200 + 20%, i.e you aren't talking $370 anymore but $250.
Remember that 20% is average margins taking into account R&D as well. Also, the low end phones tend to be more directly competitive with lower margins. This means that the margin on each incremental phone sale would normally be much more so the $200 price should be a safe estimate, if not too high. The N9 was, however, however, already developed making the R&D a sunk cost. That means that, when making the decision to essentially cancel it, the $200 price was what should have been taken into account.
1) Nokia refuses to make CDMA radios. I'd assume on a major rollout they wouldn't do that. If they did, yeah that will kill your US sales.
Nokia has in the past made CDMA chipsets. I think (though I'm not sure) that the only reason they don't make them much now is that the US operators don't want to deal with them. In any case, they had a fully paid up patent deal with Qualcomm a few years back so this is absolutely no problem to change.
2) Northern European aesthetic. This might be a problem, less of a problem at the $370 than at the $250. But certainly the N9 is way more attractive than Android.
No way for me to say. I like the N9. I think the Americans that saw it thought it was great.
3) US customers don't like Symbian (not applicable since different OS)
right.
4) Not enough American apps: this would apply but if they are selling tens of million of one handset this problem would disappear almost immediately
Right; plus they were reasonabl open source friendly which gave a huge library of code from which to build new applications fast. Also Nokia had designed a good migration story for non US apps aimed at Symbian to be portable to the US. However, this is actually a bit of a deeper problem. For example every stereo you buy comes ready to integrate with an iPhone. This is one of the strongest barriers which is making Windows Phone fail. I am not sure at all whether this barrier is one that can be overcome, however the N9 clearly had a better chance than the Windows strategy which has already been tried and failed with Windows Mobile.
5) Not cooperating with carrier strategy. Well right now the strategy is anyone but Apple.
In this case, Apple has already helped. The main problem was Nokia wanted to offer features, such as WiFi hotspot router and access to non-operator app stores the operators didn't want customers to have. Apple has proven that you have to offer these to be competitive so the operators will no longer push to stop them.
Overall, I agree with your analysis above. I am guessing that Microsoft saw the N9 as a serious trojan for Linux applications
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
So what's stupid? HD screens? I have to look at that screen everyday for the duration of my ownership of the phone and I want it to be a good one. And if you amortized the additional cost of the screen over the life of the contract it would be pennies a day. Of all the specs that you can't see that probably don't really matter that much, you bring up the one thing that makes a clear difference.
I can't see it. Literally. I have a good vision, but there's nothing that pops out on me as badly pixelated on 800x480 screens. Small fonts in the browser are sometimes difficult to see... because they are just rendered damn too small, physically. Use the zoom feature, your eyes will thank you for it whether you have a "stupid money" display or not.
It may never cross your mind, but there are people buying a phone that has everything to fulfill their current needs, that's it.
But that's a fallacy and a perfect example of your mind playing tricks on you. Human nature leads you to exaggerate the importance of the present over future utility. A phone can "fulfill your current needs" and still be a bad deal because you are stuck with the phone until your contract is up.
It's a fallacy to assume that I'm a prey of US mobile operators. I'm not tied to a contract, I can change my unsubsidised phone any day. If you buy into a two-year contract, you'd better make sure it has all you really need now, not expect it to gain utility because of somebody's unstated plans or the general feeling of "market momentum".
I doubt Nokia will be laughing all the way to the bank anytime soon but at any rate I don't care as that has nothing to do with what I was even talking about. And what do Nokia's apps have to do with wp7 losing dev support if wp8 takes off? You will have wp7 with minimal third party support and, oh yeah, some Nokia apps. yay
I will continue having such little things as free offline navigation in any part of the world I could expect to get to, public transport route finding, maps with Groupon deals, and Sports Tracker, all provided by Nokia. I actually feel well-stocked on the applications that I can make use of. Now personally, I would jump to WP8 if the new features such as the wallet are made useful enough in my country, but I don't see much loss in staying with WP7, at least for now.
Um, when many of those hundreds of millions of Gingerbread users bought their phone, it was the latest spec or very comparable. OEMs didn't really move to ICS en masse until very recently.
How is this different from people buying WP7 devices even though WP8 devices are already announced?
Something you need to keep in mind is while normal people might not know what "dual core" means or "1 GB RAM" or any of the specifics, most people have sense enough to recognize "faster" vs. "slower" and "bigger" vs "smaller" and "more" vs "less" and people respond to those things because it makes decisions easier. People love turning off their brains and when one number is higher than the other it "must" be better. The fact is most people don't have the patience for a more nuanced argument over a smartphone so rejecting the windows phone is an easy decision to make.
Are you saying that top-priced Android phones sell well not because of superior user experience, but because of specs overdriven to impress the people with stupid money to burn? There are a few more dimensions: "drains battery faster" and "crashes often" vs "no problems at all". Unfortunately, those can only be evaluated after some usage; for many people changing their smartphones, their experience with Android phones will make them look out for alternatives.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
OK do you have a source for the $200? Like I said, $200 is an earth changing number, it means that Nokia had a phone that could have easily #1 phone on one of the markets that they traditionally do worst in.
I think the Americans that saw it thought it was great.
Liking European style correlates strongly with social class, education and living on the coasts. Look where Ikea stores are located, and consider that warehouse style stores with low prices are way way more popular in middle America than on the coasts. So you are getting a biased feel by talking to American techies.
When you start talking about a national rollout this would be more of a problem though again I think it is not huge problem. Computer gadgets in general all have this correlation with class, education and liberalism. You can't reach who you can't reach but I think this problem is solvable for most Americans. Apple has offended middle America by explicitly appealing to liberals. And they are facing the a problem where they get backlash from their base when they try to reach out.
Linux has associations with Libertarianism and thus friends in the Tea Party (19% of the Americans that are most politically conservative). Its hard to imagine a European brand pitching itself this way, but assuming that Nokia could stomach a campaign with someone like Sarah Palin as a national spokesperson... I can think of some rather good appeals that would work strongly with middle America. For example show where Finland is on the map and mention that is a Lutheran country when advertising (and yes, I am being serious probably 60% of Americans don't know where Finland is). Nokia could make the aesthetic work to their favor but they can't ignore it. This is something any American ad agency could help with it doesn't require genius just attention.
. However, this is actually a bit of a deeper problem. For example every stereo you buy comes ready to integrate with an iPhone. This is one of the strongest barriers which is making Windows Phone fail.
I assume you mean car stereo. As an American I don't see that at all. Most people who want these expensive sorts of attachments buy them in the aftermarket not from manufacturers. Blaupunkt I'm sure has a good relationship with Nokia and could roll out something instantly to work with the N9 and I believe they are the #1 selling aftermarket stereo company. Sell ten million phones and you can get the 3rd party attachments. Besides the N9 uses standard micro USB, so most attachments fit.
If you mean home stereo, like alarm clocks speakers, again micro USB is standard. Nokia even has their own line of these things which the electronics stores would be happy to sell. I don't see this as much of a problem. Its been a problem for Android because every single phone has different attachments so no phone is getting into the tens of millions to create an aftermarket. Again easy problem
The main problem was Nokia wanted to offer features, such as WiFi hotspot router and access to non-operator app stores the operators didn't want customers to have. Apple has proven that you have to offer these to be competitive so the operators will no longer push to stop them.
There are going to be things the carriers aren't going to want to offer. Don't offer those things. The WiFi router is a good example. Nokia Lumia comes with tethering shutoff by default for AT&T, AT&T turns it on remotely for subscribers who buy tethering. Heck, I had a Nokia phone about a dozen years ago when the switch to pay ringtones came through. Those went from free to an extra charge instantly via. an online software update. So I assume whatever problems Nokia had with not listening to the carriers are in the past. Even Apple loses battles on these issues. My Verizon iPhone had this shutoff and now Verizon wants the access to it buried under multiple layers of menus by default (with an icon for paying customers).
The fun part is, that Qt could be the savior for Microsoft, because few developers want to create cool stuff for Windows 8/Phone. With Qt developers could develop for all platforms at once, so even Windows Phone would get the cool Apps.
The joke is in the Apps is a lot of money, with Qt Nokia may could have taken a good part of the cake if they would have thrown the resources at that (and mobile Linux). Developers are lazy, if you can write one App for all platforms with your framework, your framework wins. You control it, you win.
I can't see it.
Is a legitimate subjective evaluation. Flippancy like "it's dumb" gets answered in kind: "How them grapes taste?"
It's a fallacy to assume that I'm a prey of US mobile operators. I'm not tied to a contract, I can change my unsubsidised phone any day. If you buy into a two-year contract, you'd better make sure it has all you really need now, not expect it to gain utility because of somebody's unstated plans or the general feeling of "market momentum".
Slashdot is a US centric site so I was talking about the typical experience in the US assuming that would be implicitly clear (you know this being a US site and all and you not explicitly mentioning you were coming at the conversation from a non-US pov). Of all the things to consume every single moment until the heat death of the Universe, having to explain every little thing to preempt pedantry on Slashdot is pretty low on the list. Just imagine a [In the US] in front of every statement. There's also the fact that a significant fraction of European smartphone owners are on a contract. There are even contracts in Canada that go for 3 years which would be an even worse place to be with a recently acquired Windows Phone 7 device.
I will continue having such little things as free offline navigation in any part of the world I could expect to get to, public transport route finding, maps with Groupon deals, and Sports Tracker, all provided by Nokia. I actually feel well-stocked on the applications that I can make use of. Now personally, I would jump to WP8 if the new features such as the wallet are made useful enough in my country, but I don't see much loss in staying with WP7, at least for now.
You still haven't explained how that has anything to do with third party support drying up. You're not being specific so I have to infer from your paragraph that you don't use (many?) third party apps but that is atypical and most consumers would be effected.
Um, when many of those hundreds of millions of Gingerbread users bought their phone, it was the latest spec or very comparable. OEMs didn't really move to ICS en masse until very recently.
How is this different from people buying WP7 devices even though WP8 devices are already announced?
I've already told you why if wp8 takes off wp7 dev support will likely suffer. The dynamics of the Android market are different from windows phone and as a result Gingerbread phones bought today will still have solid dev support for the likely length of any contract.
Are you saying that top-priced Android phones sell well not because of superior user experience, but because of specs overdriven to impress the people with stupid money to burn?
I was indulging your argument a little bit. My mistake. Between my Nexus S and my Galaxy Nexus both running identical software but the latter handset with the higher specs is the superior experience. When you're trying to generalize an entire market you have to couch your terms in words like "typical" and you have to discount edge cases. The "typical" higher specced phone is going to give a superior user experience than a lower specced phone. Why is it superior? Because people think it is and that's what matters to the market.
There are a few more dimensions: "drains battery faster"
The phone with the highest battery life on the market runs Android and almost all phones last a day of typical usage anyway. People have to sleep and when they do they plug their phones in.
and "crashes often" vs "no problems at all".
I've never had an Android phone "crash" and do a spontaneous reboot. Also in the only real study I could find, the evidence showd iPhone third party apps crash more often than Android apps. And I've had an HD7, multiple Android devices and currently own an iPad. The
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
sure, it was so new and exciting that in less than 2 years this new OS is getting replaced with Windows 8. The hardware limitations so minimal that nobody cared because it was all about the OS UI yet Nokia is... correction, was known for making good hardware. And yes, it is a shrinking market share just like the install base for the different versions of desktop Windows is lumped into one at times. If they can't get Windows Mobile customers to move to the new phone, how in the world will they get people who have not drunk the koolaid?
Face it, Windows CE based devices were limited because of the limitations of the design. Otherwise a company like Nokia would not be forced to dump an OS they've only just got and has only been on the market for 1.5 years. It does not matter if the limits were worked with and the UI ran fine on it. I can take a 16 bit embedded proc and get and OS and UI running just fine on it too but it also limits what can be done on it. And there are lots of things getting done on these phones these days when the OS allows it. So Nokia was limited by these limitations and they were forced to push customers toward a new version of the phone OS just when they finally got a "flagship" phone model shipped. ouch.
I was surprised to see an HP commercial for Windows 7 hardware during the Olympics when Windows 8 is just months away and the marketing dollars, in the millions is about to dump on the public.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus