Slashdot Mirror
The Three Pillars of Nokia Strategy Have All Failed
An anonymous reader writes "'When all 3 legs of your 3-legged strategy fail, what do you do? You rush — run run run — to change your total strategy. But what would a madman do?' Ex-Nokia exec Tommi Ahonen's new article has a few suggestions. Is the Nokia board either asleep at the wheel, or incompetent, or in collusion with the incompetent CEO? Ahonen provides an insider's view not just of how Nokia's Windows phone strategy has failed, but how this has spread to other parts of the company's technology. He says the 'Elop Effect' has 'single-handedly destroyed [...] Europe's biggest tech giant.' He raises the question: Why is Nokia's board failing to act? We've discussed Tommi's articles before, where he was correctly predicting Windows Phone's market failure at a point where others were claiming that 'the Lumia line is, in fact, selling quite nicely.'"
Hatred towards Nokia on Slashdot... Why not failing HTC, patent troll Motorola Mobility (nobody in Europe buys that Chinese crap btw)...
You call Apple, and say "Hey, I hear you have a maps problem. Guess what? We have lots of map data and experience."
"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity." It's the Occam's Razor of the corporate world. Yes, people get greedy or manipulative, it's true... but that's the exception, not the rule. For the most part, people are just really, really, fucking stupid. Senior management in particular tends to develop problems like target fixation, confirmation bias, and even when everything is in the spiral of death and the alarms are going off, engines on fire, they somehow think they'll be able to pull out of the dive and fix the problem... right up until the part where they crater. They teach this in every management course studies... Have an exit strategy. Know what your breakpoints are and when to bail. And company after company, even big ones, really really big ones, still fail at this, not because of greed, but because of stupidity.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Nokia had no true smartphone os so it was windows or android. And android is Samsung.
The geeks might have liked the n900 or whatever it was but the iPhone and droid had all the hype
But I'm very skeptical of this article's honesty.
Seriously, nokia's been delivering very high quality products lately, and I still see a LOT of people using their phones (I'd say 10:1 to apple's stuff) where I live.
So I'd say this is just paid FUD. By whom. No idea, but I'd point at whoever could benefit from nokia's stock falling.
I was quite a fan of Nokia choosing Qt, and the change to Windows quite a disappointment.
But to my knowledge, they are betting on Windows 8, and calling it a failure,
while there hasn't been released a single Windows 8 phone, seems to me a bit too early.
Woah, he predicted Windows Phone would not succeed at the level of iPhone and Android? Better tell James Randi to hang it up, because we got a real god damned psychic right here!
Nokia stock has gone way down. By most estimates its value is near book value and that it's patents alone (which are not included in book value) have a worth that exceeds the book value. Nokia goofed on symbian and they made a choice to not compete on the android platform with samsung. Now considering that they did very well in the low end market (and still do) it's slightly surprising they were averse to sheer price competition. However one has to realize that Samsung is backed by an in house fab so they might have made the right decision.
Windows 8 gives them a chance to draw on some strengths by adding value from other assets they own. At the time there were 5. 1) superior mapping, 2) superior camera 3) superior enterprise connection via Siemens network 4) a history of strong design 5) a very strong patent portfolio that might allow better comms.
The siemens argument if floundering. The mapping one has not been exploited as much as it could be but I think it is latent, waiting for win 8 to release. So they still have 4 of the 5 cyllinders.
The problem they have is the rise of the smart phone. It's inevitable this will creep into their vast low end market. So they were doomed. They may have accelerated this fal however by bad management.
The problem with their stock price was the cratering of their profit centers by announcing the end of symbian prematurely. THey have been selling off and or leasing off assets to maintain cash flow. They are closing facilities in europe but opening them in 2nd world countries. So they are really squeezed on cash.
hence the stock is teetering.
But when they return to profitability with win 8 release, perhaps as a leaner company, I think their stock price should rise enormously from it's under -book value at present. THey have very serious competitive advantages for the technologies they can intergrate into win8.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's hard. Apple won't let them use IOS. Android is generic, so they have no edge over Chinese manufacturers. Blackberry has tanked. Microsoft looked like a good option.
Nokia makes excellent hardware at a good price. Their gear tends to be much more rugged than Apple's fragile mobile devices. Their problems are more on the marketing side.
Before Elop got involved, Nokia was working on a Linux-based OS called Meego. Then they killed it. Who benefits? Microsoft of course - the less Linux to compete against the better.
If you were on Nokia's board of directors, and you had stock in both Nokia and Microsoft, would it bother you at all to see Nokia collapse for Microsoft's benefit?
Oh, a link to blog post by Ahonen, with nothing really new.
I agree that execution by Elop has been sub-par. But calling that "SYMBIAN WAS WINNING" is even by wearing Symbian-goggles a very red-rosed opinion of what was going on. Nokia was in huge trouble, it's UI teams competing with each other and handset teams not building on the same platform as noted in in an article from yesterday. Symbian as it was was dead. Developers hated it, users disliked it compared to competition and why it did so good up until the end was good quality Nokia hardware.
Ahonen is right on some points, but he seems to totally disagree on that Nokia had to do something, by going on with Symbian without major rework was just not feasible, the whole MeeGo thing was really screwed up with competing package managers, UIs and teamwork with Intel so as a CEO what what would have he done - he doesn't tell. Maybe MeeGo strategy would have proved to be success.
I don't want to resort to ad-hominems but in case of Ahonen I would take his comments with a grain of salt - he clearly has an axe to grind with Nokia and the postings he has made and appearances on interviews smell like bitterness. And they always boil to one point: Profits before elop and profits after Elop.
Neither Windows phone 8 or the Lumina 920 have been released and we have people already yelling "rrruuunnn!!!"
There is a fine line between working vigorously to save a sinking ship and trying to work the pumps and hand bailer after it is too late. You need equal quantities of balls and intelligence to make the correct decision.
What TFA is doing is seeing a puddle on the floor and immediately sounding abandon ship and running for the life boats.
There is no low hanging fruit left in business. Sometimes you need to slug it out and take risks because changing strategies every two seconds is not a winning proposition either.
I'm not saying they won't fail or that windows phone is good or bad. I'm only asserting it is too early.
Nokia had an alternative, MeeGo. The trouble was at the time it was already outpaced by iOS and Android, so Nokia thought they probably could not catch up without a lot of rework.
And that's why they chose Windows Phone 7. But, as one of the comments in the article notes, the real problem is that Windows Phone 7 was not really a way to catch up either. It was a temporary solution, to be abandoned by Microsoft to the degree that even fairly powerful Nokia phones running Windows Phone 7 could not be upgraded to WP8.
If that were known (as the comment alleges) then Nokia probably would have been better off putting in an All-Hands effort to make MeeGo compete with other modern smartphone OS's. I'm not sure they would have been in a worse place than where they are now, and then they would be in full control of their own destiny.
But as things stand the fate of Nokia and Microsoft are intertwined (with more risk to Nokia than Microsoft).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Other cellphone makers are leaving a lot of 'easy' niches open IMHO:
- You need a shop in high street. Android is too generic, Samsung is too much of everything else (TV's and stuff) - Nokia could have an 'Apple store' and get away with it.
- You need security and robustness. Smartphones are moving from a hipster-thing to a commodity right now, so it's time you start addressing companies to use smartphones for company uses. And then I mean properly - with security inside the phone, bigger batteries and compatibility with office tools. Huge market.
- Stop doing everything that's irritating about Apple: no app-store, no iTunes obligation, no stupid connectors, no wrong way to hold it. No selling your soul to placate His Steveness. Emphasize it. Android does that, but not enough - it has no commercial incentive: make sure that hipsters are on the defensive - it's easy: they're hipsters.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
If just Nokia had a single mind, either for failure or success. But they build something great and then destroy it in the next breath as a norm. They had something maybe not perfect, but with full of potential, with the N900. Then they crippled it (making it with a lot of closed parts, not giving it enough main memory, etc), not going after all markets, and then called it a failure and killed it. They had Symbian, the next generation, they got Meego with the very innovative user interface of the N9, and when they got both ready to take over the world, basically declared both platform dead. Announced Meltemi, and killed it before releasing any product with it. Those where their own winning cards, along with their hardware what could put them forward than the rest.
Even those efforts, with mostly open software, could had leveraged their hardware offer, if they published enough specification on their hardware to have drivers to enabling them for alternate operating systems (nitdroid, cyanogen mod port, webos, meego, etc), or even push forward the groups trying to giving new uses to their phones giving them the specs, help and support to do so.
And they closed the door to Android, that have a very healthy ecosystem, because they would lose the control, and instead they gave that control to Microsoft, a company with a lengthy record of stabbing partners in the back (and exactly that, unsurprisely, did with Nokia declaring that the windows 8 won't run in any of the then just released Nokia windows phones.
Nokia failed to realise is that their customers were buying because they had a reliable brand with a respectable name, but that in most other respects, most of their customers considered Nokia's phones to have similar features as all the rest. They were trusted and reliable - they were an IBM, not an Apple. When they stopped making phones with similar features as all the rest, they were taking a big step into unknown territory.
If they had simply built a solid android phone, they could have retained much of their customer base and charged a premium for brand/quality. I guess they still could.
History has shown that most companies that strike a 'strategic' pact with MS, don't live long after.
So, after looking at another thread on Slashdot, is Nokia just a simulation or some kind of hologram?
With no legs?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
A. Nokia had been losing market value for quite some time before Elop was placed at the helm. More or less this is why he was placed at the helm
B. Nokia management effectively sabotaged engineering efforts via 1) destructive competition between different groups and 2) excessive corporate bureaucracy.
C. MeeGo was practically dead on arrival for multiple reasons. Political: essentially because Intel was involved. Technical: the Slashdot hive mind needs to learn that Qt is not very good. It has a variety of serious technical defects(memory leaks and performance issues being at the top) and is poorly suited for mobile. From the point of view of engineering, its innards are a mess and it's documentation is lacking to the point to figure out what a member function of a class is going to do, on one needs to examine the source code. One can witness that even Trolltech knows that is sucks to a large degree in that Qt 5.0 is about pushing QML driven by JavaScript. That is right folks, the C++ interface is such garbage to just avoid it.
D. The N9 (Harmattan) was late, very late. Moreover it is not even really a MeeGo device. By the time the device was out, the hardware was horribly outdated for a high-endish phone. The N9's hardware has some serious feature issues: slow GPU, no hardware video decode being the top issues.
What is awful is this: if Nokia had stuck with Maemo (which was not Qt based at all), then the N9 would have been out sooner and the platform would have been better. Weather or not to stick with Maemo/MeeGo or to dump it was a non-trivial call. That platform had a HUGE number of issues (some of which are caused by that Intel and it's Moblin involvement). It also had horror issues coming from Qt. Nokia was WISE to dump Qt to Digia, but it was terribly unwise to have bought it in the first place. I can name only a few programs that use Qt and I hate them all. KDE sucks ass, it is slow and gets in my way. Origin (that is right EA's version Steam) is also a Qt application. Anyone like Origin? I did not think so.
"Ex-Nokia exec Tommi Ahonen's new article has a few suggestions. Is the Nokia board either asleep at the wheel, or incompetent, or in collusion with the incompetent CEO?"
..
No, they are just another in the long line of suicide-by-Microsoft victims
AccountKiller
... by getting a Windows Mobile 7 device.
She used to be a happy Nokia customer but being a M.D. she didn't pay attention to the gizmo market and unfortunatelly didn't ask me prior to deciding on her new phone.
Basic functionality that she needs for her job i.e. Outlook contact import, how long a call lasts, alarm function when the phone is turned off etc. are not working. The touch screen menu is so sensitive that sometimes she accidentally places calls, on the other hand she sometimes has a hard time accepting calls.
Other than that the phone and its software looks really sleek.
After spending hours on the Nokia hotline and getting answers like "we don't know if this is supposed to work" or "we never thought about that", she now considers returning the phone and has been turned from a loyal low attention Nokia customer to one that wants anything but another Nokia.
I've been actually missing a good Ahonen troll story.
Lately even comments citing his long-winded ramblings have become rare. Not every story about Nokia gets one that is moderated sufficiently high. I've been almost afraid that he has lost credibility even among Linux zealots. That point-by-point debunking has been published that made the majority of people concerned about Nokia think rationally again. But no, this one has made it again, and how timely: just before Q3 results, and the start of Windows Phone 8 sales. Think of it: even if Tomi will be proven a total ass in the next few years, he will be a well-to-do ass, because of all your traffic generating ad revenue. Help him, he's trying really hard.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
the company was heading for dismal state before he took it on ... just like blackberry didn't take the iphone release seriously, playing catchup ever since...
Whatever hardware they can come up with (they make one of the best hardware, no doubt about it) the success was dependent on what ecosystem it brings together. The option was to go with Android or Microsoft, there is simply no third option to ready to compete. So with Android, they would have been me too player and not really any strong support from Google both on IP or monetary. In addition they may have to pay Microsoft and Apple if they went that route. Regarding Microsoft, strong financials with one of the largest developer community and ecosystem. Even with few % market share the applications have increased faster than Android, which is telling us something. Say what, but desktop, enterprise, cloud no one has the integration as good as Microsoft. The Windows phone, as a product in itself is actually better than iOS or Android. It is not as closed as Apple or open as Android, but the UI is fresh, new and very effective. Simply said, if this had happened 3-4 years back we would have a different market composition. Regarding future, the Lumia 920 is the top contender in terms of display, features, camera, navigation and the OS. Not even iPhone 5 or any of the current Android phone come close to it. The interest is picking up, but Microsoft has to fight against the bad image it created with its earlier Windows mobile 6.5. The providers are not helping in any way. Verizon is all behind Android, Sprint is confused so the only players are ATT and TMobile. If both Nokia and Microsoft are persistent for some more time the success is sure to follow. Expect better traction in the market, once the Windows 8 PC, tablets are released. Any one with objective mind will appreciate what Microsoft has done.
Woah, he predicted Windows Phone would not succeed at the level of iPhone and Android? Better tell James Randi to hang it up, because we got a real god damned psychic right here!
Bra-vo, very sarcastic and blasé, but unfortunately it makes you look quite ignorant. Ahonen predicted this in February 2011 right after Elop's announcement. For example:
I got way down the page and found that I was in reality not even a quarter through and still hadn't seen any explanation of the title of the article (three pillars). Just a bunch of rambling. I tried reading some more then hit the tl;dr; wall.
Can someone list succinctly (like the article should have) what the three pillars are?
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Nokia has build and still builds great hardware, with great cameras. The Lumia phones are well designed and would surely sell well even with stock Android. Nokia had as much as 3000 people working on Symbian and other software. What if Nokia had just decided to build and sell high-end Android smartphone and tablets? As well as good and cheap ones too? They have world class maps and navigation, are experienced in manufacturing huge numbers of devices -- if independence was what they wanted they could have had more of it this way.
And the market could easily have a role for them. They were seriously good not all that long ago.
They had Symbian, the next generation,
As in Belle. Meh.
they got Meego with the very innovative user interface of the N9, and when they got both ready to take over the world,
No, they couldn't take over the world with a somewhat polished, but deeply troubled product, officially obsoleted one and a half years before it was ready (the N9) and a platform that is not yet usable on any kind of target hardware (MeeGo as in the shared effort between Nokia and Intel).
Announced Meltemi
Huh? Could you point me to a public statement from Nokia regarding anything so named?
Even those efforts, with mostly open software, could had leveraged their hardware offer, if they published enough specification on their hardware to have drivers to enabling them for alternate operating systems (nitdroid, cyanogen mod port, webos, meego, etc), or even push forward the groups trying to giving new uses to their phones giving them the specs, help and support to do so.
Your idealism is infectious. Surely you can provide examples of mobile phone companies leveraging this kind of benefits from the community?
Sorry to be rude, but your whole post is typical armchair CEOism: it would have been easy for them to do this, that, or the other thing because I like those and I'm ignorant of pretty much everything else, how stupid of them it was to decide otherwise.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Ahonen predicted this in February 2011 right after Elop's announcement
He and 90% of the /. crowd, myself included.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
I'm writing this from a n9. It's not perfect, but is only a little behind Apple in usability and much less confusing to normal users than Android.
They were plenty usable but the problem was not there, is from the developer side of things. Nokia was lacking a number of the higher level frameworks that iOS and Android had at that point to make crafting applications easier.
Microsoft managed to catch up from a similar deficit though, I thought Nokia could have as well given time and laser-like focus.
I think it is too late now though. Microsoft possibly can make it work, Blackberry I think cannot at this point come back, and Nokia is just too far back now to make MeeGo what it would need to be to compete.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If any hate is spewing, is targeted against the ex M$ bigwig Elop which brew this destructive strategy.
As pointed out above, it was the board that was already decided at ditching the previous CEO and hiring Elop/MS instead.
Now, as Dilbert has pointed out, this was a strategic move of sheer genius, with which MS has realised three very strategic goals:
1. Windows phone introduced in the market,
2. Nokia, the biggest competitor for their own phone hardware sales ambitions has been crushed,
3. Linux as OS for the mobile phone has been disabled.
Luckily, there is still the Jolla (currently connection time out) initiative with Tizen.
The grand question: How did the Nokia board get played up so much by Microsoft?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Nokia was on a downward slopes WELL before adopting Windows Phone, and now HTC is also hurting...it's the industry. Google and Apple are crushing the competition with patent claims, marketing blitz, buying up competitors etc. Android hasn't been enough to save HTC, I don't know why people think Android would help Nokia. Samsung and Motorola rule the roost in that platform, that's not going to change soon.
FTFY
for those of you not familiar, a horror story; the last ceo had huge salary, while ordinary workers with a lot of their retirment in polaroid sotck, got the shaft
"The option was to go with Android or Microsoft, there is simply no third option to ready to compete" so Meego did not exist?
"Android, they would have been me too player". Yet Microsoft threw Nokia under the bus with WP8 and HTC have announced their windows phones first, and cheap than comparable offerings by Nokia.
"The Windows phone, as a product in itself is actually better than iOS or Android" No its not. It is be every measure behind them by years.
"Lumia 920 is the top contender in terms of display, features, camera, navigation" No its behind again. Its specs are massively outdated, so much so it cannot even run Windows Phone 8. A stillborn phone.
There are some serious denial issues going on here Nokia is dying, pretending that things are going to change is the problem. Worryingly its not just you that tells themselves this lie. It looks like Elop is going to continue on its current path of destruction.
If Microsoft wants it that bad, then Apple would be stupid not to bid the price up. They win if they win, and they win if they lose.
Or one of them overpays hugely and never recoups the investment. It is very possible to overpay for a company like Nokia and overpaying is always a bad thing.
Top tip when investing, if you hear a company start talking about "transformative acquisitions", run away as fast as you can. That is an almost sure sign that a company is about to overpay for something.
Nokia makes excellent hardware at a good price.
Maybe back in the day. Nokia's hardware now is fine (not great, just fine) but the prices are nothing special. Their high end stuff historically has tended to be wildly overpriced.
Their gear tends to be much more rugged than Apple's fragile mobile devices.
I have no general data to point to but I used Nokia phones almost exclusively for 10 years and have used Apple's for the last 3 and the Nokia stuff I had was no more or less durable than my Apple gear. I'm pretty sure Nokia's current smartphones will break at pretty much the same rate as iPhones.
Their problems are more on the marketing side.
Their problems have been on the product side. They have had no answer to the iPhone and Android phones. Their software has seriously sucked for a long time. Symbian was a dead end years ago and MeeGo wasn't going to get the job done. Nokia's problems are simply that they have had no phones anyone wanted for quite a while now. Their dumb phones were fine but they missed the smartphone revolution big time.
There was absolutely a third option. Go with both platforms Android and MS. ( Ignoring that they already had a new OS ready to go. Tested, proven and in phones )
Who in their right minds would put all their eggs in the Microsoft basket when the entire planet knows Microsoft's track record with consumer products. At the time of the decision to go with Microsoft the Zune platform was circling the drain. Zune was a disaster from conception straight to it's death. Somehow the decision was made to go with an OS that really didn't exist. Wasn't in a consumer product that anyone had played with. And came from the same creative minds as:
Zune
Kin ( One of the shortest lived phones in history )
MS Bob
Saying that the market was already flooded by cheap Asian android phones makes no sense at all. Since all the these manufacturers make MS phones as well. So you could easily state that the market will be flooded with cheap MS phones. ( I say will because at the time MS didn't really have a viable OS for mobiles ) So not matter what path was chosen Nokia would be battling Asian phones.
I have to completely disagree that choosing MS was the best option.
Choosing MS was a long shot. So to safe guard that bet Nokia had to have a backup plan that was and is clearly Android.
Good one. One I didn't dare to propose because I have no shred of any evidence.
Swiss bank accounts maybe?
(Or bitcoins, anonymously generated over TOR?)
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
The plan I'm on is the same price as the Samsung SGS3. So no, it's not "huge markups". This same one trick pony is trotted out with respect to Apple PCs too, and it's as false there as it is here. A top of the line Android is every bit as pricey, depending on setup and/or contract.
Not "huge markups" for you, but (at least in the U.S.), for your mobile carrier. Apple is well-known for demanding substantially higher subsidy rates from their partners, who then have to try to recoup the extra cost from subscribers. For instance, back when Sprint finally caved in and offered the iPhone, they broke their own records for new subscriber enrollments -- and simultaneously lost 1.3 billion that same quarter, in large part due to the exorbitant price they had to pay.
http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/12/technology/iphone-5-carriers/index.html
The price customers typically pay for a new iPhone is a heavily discounted rate cushioned by the carriers, who buy the devices from Apple for close to their full retail price tags. (The 16 GB iPhone 4S that generally goes for $199 with a two-year contract has a list price of $649.) Carriers eat the difference and make it up by padding the monthly cost of their customers' phone contracts. The iPhone's subsidy typically runs about $400 per device -- the highest of any smartphone on the market.
"Microsoft must be getting rather frustrated with the Nokia partnership and its inability to break through in smartphones."
http://www.unwiredview.com/2012/10/01/microsoft-is-working-on-its-own-branded-wp8-device-windows-phone-surface-to-launch-in-h1-next-year/
Microsoft has a history of scamming (naive mobile phone) companies
http://slashdot.org/story/02/12/26/1423247/sendo-accuses-ms-of-stealing-smartphone-ip
Has no teen hacker rooted the WP7 Lumias so that Android or Linux can be installed? That would make them start selling like hot cookies.
I'm curious how a strategy has failed when it's just starting to be implemented. Windows 8 has yet to be released, a handful of Windows 7 phones were released just before Windows 8 was announced, Nokia's market share is growing worldwide (US market being the exception), and Christmas is just around the corner. Nokia has enough on-hand cash and income to keep operating for another 2 years, even if nothing changes.
I'm anticipating that we start seeing signs of a turnaround by first quarter 2013.
But it's entertaining to see the armchair quarterbacks here on Slashdot yelling about Elop and MSFT collusion to force Nokia to fail.
Firstly, CEOs make money when the company succeeds. Elop makes decisions and strategy that are going to try to put Nokia into a positive market position, because if he does that well, he makes a shitload of money. That's first off.
Secondly, would it be the opinion of people here that Nokia would have been better served by sticking with Meego, which was barely in a finished state? Or switching to Android, where they'd be pitted against people who could make a phone a lot cheaper than they could, plus Google throwing its weight wholly behind Motorola?
Elop chose a strategy where they are the biggest fish in a little pond. I'm not saying this is a winning strategy, but it's probably one of the best ones at their disposal.
The Lumia 800/900 were mediocre phones all around. They were basically the exact same body with a different OS, and nothing spectacularly different than their Symbian counterparts. It's not a big wonder that it didn't sell.. Microsoft screwed up Windows Phone because v8 has a lot more features and v7 is a stopgap that doesn't upgrade. Not a lot of people are going to jump onto that bandwagon, and as a result, you should think that Joe Belfiore and Sinofsky should have been canned, along with Ballmer.
The 920 is really a great piece of hardware. It's got the best camera, hands down, of any smartphone. Has the best PPI (better than the "Retina" display). It has the extreme Nokia durability we've all known to love. And with Windows Phone 8, it should be a good contender.
However, to knock it down before it's made it out of the gates because it's associated with Microsoft is just silly. I skipped the 900 because it was mediocre. I want the 920 because it's a stellar phone. And because it's really durable. It has more to do with being a Nokia, than it does with anything that MS has to do with. And that still plays very well for Nokia. I think they have a shot, they have carrier partnerships and relationships worldwide that other companies envy, and they can make a good push back into the market because they weren't afraid of tossing a POS operating system out (unlike RIM, whom will find themselves in the unemployment line soon) and going with something that is pretty good. Yea, I said it -- Windows Phone is pretty good. I have owned an iPhone for 5 years, and after seeing Windows Phone up close and personal -- I don't see any real benefit in staying with it. The Windows Phone OS is very slick, very fast, and very nice to use even on mediocre hardware. Battery life is good too.
So while I know it's fashionable to lay down the MS hate early on, let's at least wait until Nokia brings out the 920 and see how it is received worldwide. I think most folks here will be surprised that people actually think that the phone itself is better than most out there, in almost every way.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Wow, it's been years since someone reminded me of the comicbook store guy in the Simpsons. Thanks!
Ahonen gets it wrong. You can see the problem in his chart here: http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/.a/6a00e0097e337c8833017ee41902ae970d-pi
Samsung and Apple were already on their respective trajectories when Nokia stumbled. Like Blackberry, Symbian wasn't. The writing was on the wall and Elop read it. If Nokia stayed the course they would promptly slide from #1 to #3. Perhaps not as painfully but every bit as surely.
Unfortunately, Elop then made two inexplicable mistakes. And in this Ahonen and, well, everyone on Slashdot at the time saw it.
1. Planned obsolescence of the core product. Did he learn nothing from the 60's and 70's disaster with the U.S. automobile industry? Customers don't like that!
2. The new product line to challenge the meteoric rise of Samsung and Apple would be... Microsoft Windows? Really!?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Facebook app data shows that Windows Phone was already a dead duck when Elop penned his "burning platform" memo. Much less than one percent. Absurdly poor showing. Many of us knew it, and it is just not plausible that he didn't know it. That makes what happened to Nokia deliberate. It's not just that in hindsight he might have chosen better. He KNEW he was putting Nokia on a train to nowhere.
Maybe, like Elop, the board members also hold a lot of Microsoft shares they hoped would increase, or at least hedge against Nokia somewhat?
No matter what, it seems a matter of politics and greed vs. soundly running a business with engineers and manufacturing.
Don't forget: the carriers have always hated Nokia's support for VOIP, even before Microsoft bought Skype and who owns Skype. The carrier's that subsidize phones were not favorable to Nokia *before* Microsoft/Skype came along.
If Steve Job was in the same position as Elop at the time Elop wrote the burning platform memo, well not only would Steve not have written such a memo, but Steve would have been hawking the glories of the in-house OS N9 for all they're worth, meanwhile he'd quietly be developing the next big thing without killing off his revenue (and dare I say his relationship with Intel also). When the N9 team delivered a Seriously Quality Product a few months later they proved what a fraud Elop and his timely burning platform memo is, as well as his decision to relegate the Meego N9 device to a few regional markets of minor signifigance. Also we know very well about the never-made-available-for-sale-anywhere N950 from the chosen few (developer) owners. Those products and their successors would have generated plenty of revenue so Elop could have kept his job. What an idiot Elop is.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Wow, it's been years since someone reminded me of the comicbook store guy in the Simpsons. Thanks!
How do you manage to avoid that while spending time on slashdot? Or have you just become desensitized?
A slowing of sales growth since 2005 in not equal to a massive decline in sales since 2010. Nokia were the largest thing in the market making the most profit in that sector.
In technical terms Windows phone was worse than anything Nokia already had (not even fucking multitasking back then - what was it still 1980 not 2010?), was very resource hungry on hardware so wouldn't run on anything Nokia had, as well as there being zero expertise with Windows phone inhouse. Initially they couldn't even use Qt on the platform. It's the sort of choice than is not driven by any practical consideration on the point of view of the company so it appeared that Elop was in the wrong place to do something that ignored available resources - the idiot was acting like he was in a startup in somebodies garage.
Anyway, I can't understand why you are pushing this line since the last two years have proved it. Nokia's Symbian phones are still vastly outselling the Lumia despite all the cuts to the Symbian division.
Nokia was selling well and had a good strategy, not a great strategy but it could been invigorated and face lifted to increase share ratios against IOS and Android.
Meh whatever. I've got Nokia lumia 710 supplied by work and quite like it. I used to have android but really don't miss it. Regardless of what the haters say - its not bad
I've been reading Tomi's blog for a few years now, and while he has some points, i started to question him when he talks about symbian as a top smartphone OS. Then i found another ex-Nokia employee who writes counters to Tomi and actually debunks some of Tomi's statistics. The blog is: Dominies Communicate
Turns out that Tomi sometimes just makes stuff up - eg, Only 40% of all smartphones sold are not touch screen. Unfortunately people believe Tomi's word. He was right about WP7, but wrong about Android and very wrong about Symbian. I'm not Elop isn't at fault, or has been exemplary, but Tomi's word shouldn't be taken at face value.
(Disclaimer: I'm no fan of M$)
First of all: It wouldn' t be the first market that they rolled up from 0% marketshare: see the whole xbox stuff. They have the money reserve to fight a long uphill battle.
If you look at the big picture things start to make sense in their strategy: Basically they want to bundle everything. It doesn't matter where you enter your data (pc|phone|tablet) it will be synchorinzed with skydrive. Your dashboard will look the same regadless of what device you have. Some of the applications will be on all your devices.
They even add all the xbox stuff so you buy your game on your phone and will arrive home to find the game on your xbox.
As for nokia? well they will be on the lifeline until windows 8 is out..
Lets see what kind of marketadoption this will get.
Windows 8 is mainly a feature redux. But this will lead to it that many people who shy away from complex things will buy such a phone.
The Windows Phone has already overtaken PalmOS and Samsung Bada, and will probably soon even overtake the plunging Symbian to become 4th-most-popular!
Actually, looks like they're also going to overtake Blackberry so they'll be platform nr. 3
I have no general data to point to but I used Nokia phones almost exclusively for 10 years and have used Apple's for the last 3 and the Nokia stuff I had was no more or less durable than my Apple gear. I'm pretty sure Nokia's current smartphones will break at pretty much the same rate as iPhones.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf1fRu9YgfE
Their problems have been on the product side. They have had no answer to the iPhone and Android phones. Their software has seriously sucked for a long time. Symbian was a dead end years ago and MeeGo wasn't going to get the job done. Nokia's problems are simply that they have had no phones anyone wanted for quite a while now. Their dumb phones were fine but they missed the smartphone revolution big time.
I guess you're oblivious to the N9. And many people won't give up their N900s.
I guess you're oblivious to the N9.
How many people have you actually seen with an N9 in their hand. I haven't seen one in the wild yet and I do pay attention to this sort of thing. Almost no one cares, myself included. I don't have anything particularly against Nokia but they are playing catch up and so far have done a poor job of it.
And many people won't give up their N900s.
Which proves what exactly? A device that never sold particularly well is beloved by a tiny few devotees. You'll find some people who love all sorts of devices. I'm not even saying the device is a bad design. It just isn't what people actually want and it runs software that no one cares about.
My own experiences with Nokia devices is that they engage in checkbox design. My last Nokia smartphone had a browser and email and all the same features as the iPhone that was available at the time. However in practice they were so badly designed that they may as well have not bothered. The browser was horrific, the email clumsy, it required special headphones and installing music was a joke, etc. The software never got upgraded or improved. And the worst bit was the interface with my PC which was worse than useless. Their Ovi suite was just a mess. Nokia produced such crap devices that they're going to have to work hard to win me back as a customer. They can't just match Google or Apple, they have to be significantly better - and I doubt they can be.
Proves the N900 would sell well if they'd bothere to even market it.
But nobody knows why they hell you didn't see this.
Former exec predicting the doom of his own company because they are not doing as well as Android or Apple? Colour me shocked... Going up against 800lbs gorillas requires more than just a good product, which my Lumia 900 is, (I am using it to write this post) but slick marketing. The Windows/Nokia combination has given me a nice, able and durable phone with very few complaints. People have had their heads in the sand because they don't want to believe that "m$" could possibly make a nice or useful product. Oh well, more for me.
Sent from my Windows Phone
Strategy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Belluzzo
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I'm no Elop fan but this Tomi guy is one nut-bar. He got fired from Nokia and still hasn't got over it. There's so many inaccuracies, and stuff that just doesn't follow, with his long diatribe that I'm surprised he's still taken seriously. Oh wait.. this is Slashdot so anything anti-MS is taken as gospel.
Tendency to agree with you on a bit of this, but I wouldn't say to count the CEO out of the game just yet. He might have some kind of Plan B.
and it's really the best thing ever. An excellent price and an excellent product. Great clear calls too. It does everything that I need for work and more, my Nokia Lumia rules. The problem is that people use new phones as toys and not as utility devices.
Meego is a poor copy of ios with no developers.
Nokia announced their phones about a fortnight before htc, and yes htc cost less but that's because it's made of much cheaper components. Also Microsoft is using htc because they have a more vanilla version of win8, if they used nokia people might expect wireless charging, city lens, pureview and all the other extras nokia gives on every windows phones.
Windows phone is defiantly more advanced than ios and windows phone 8 is potentially better than android (more libraries and compatibility, even if you can't cover your desktop image with dodgy apps).
Lumia 920 is an awesome phone. What are you talking about it cannot even run windows 8 (youtube lumia 920 and you'll see it work), that is the os it's being sold with? (it's running the dual core s4 at 1.5ghz which uses semi a15 architecture like apple a6). If your too biased (or stupid) to realize it beats the competition is almost every area then it's your own loss.
Is it that hard to understand that not everyone is happy with either ios's simplicity or androids bugs and tracking. Note, i currently use android nexus s running jellybean, but i'm defiantly tempted by the lumia 920, and some internet troll won't change that.
Rocket Surgeon.
would 1 billion dollars a year change your mind.
Almost right.
The problem for Nokia is that they've got almost all of their eggs in the one basket.
Before Elop, Nokia's strategy was massive diversification: a phone for every segment in every market. Elop, like Ballmer, became hypnotised by Apple's success in the anglophone markets. Elop decided he had to compete with Apple, in Apple's home market, using Apple's strategy, and that everything had to be sacrificed to this idea. So hypnotised was he that he completely ignored the two most important facts of Nokia's existence: that Nokia Mobile's biggest markets were in Eurasia, and that the big growth markets in mobile are in Asia.
Thanks to his obsession. Elop has systematically crippled Nokia Mobile's ability to compete in its key markets by removing product lines. Now it's left with S40 dumbphones, Windows 7, and very little else.
> The Three Pillars of Nokia Strategy Have All Failed
No it did not. Nokia was purposefully sacrificed by the finnish government, because the USA made that demand for the export of JASSM-158 air-launched stealth cruise missiles, which the finnish air force has been desperately trying to obtain for at least 9 years (inlcuding at least two previous attempts rebuffled by the USA).
Finnish government agreed to trojanize, undermine and collapse Nokia by letting in american-run traitors and in exchange the finnish F-18 are now being armed with the super advanced JASSM-158 in order to scare the russians. (Not that the russians are scared. First, they already have the Iskander quick-reaction theathre ballistic missiles on station in the Konigsberg enclave, which are super accurate and devastating even with conventional warheads. Secondly, the russians are already privy that the JASSMs sold to Finland are export variants and have a remote transmit disabling code. The same trick already made fun of the georgians with their izzi-made UAVs and guided missiles. Sucks a big time when enemy advances and your gear won't lock the target.)
As for Nokia, the USA gov't has a policy that no major personal comms maker with HQ outside USA shall exist, to better facilitate NSA's job. That is why Samsung has also been put on the slaughtering block recently. Do not think for a minute the DoD, DoJ and NSA are not pushing Apple from behind for more bulldozing power.
If you can run with three broken legs I'll be very impressed.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Hm. I think you read the parent comment differently than I did. I read it as saying the dude predicted it correctly, but then, so did the rest of the world. There was nothing about the consequences of Nokia's decision that was not immediately obvious to anyone even slightly familiar with that field of business.
In other words, Ahonen is not an idiot but then, a genius was not needed to get the prediction right.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Well, you make it sound like Apple and Google never had their share of failures. This is business, things go wrong with timing, readiness and dozens of factors. With you logic, we should never buy Apple products because Newton failed or Nexus did not do good, so no point in buying Android. Zune - As a audio player, it has the best elements but the timing was heck wrong. It came when the market was already saturated, and ramping down. Kin - It seems to be a test pilot, trying a concept which was prices outrageously for the intended teenager market. MS Bob - Another Idea, with no substance and hence failed to pick up. Tons of these in the market, Bob was not the first or the last Anyone comparing Windows Phone 8 with above just ignorance, the UI is not only well designed but the philosophy of activity centric use is very productive and addictive. Android in a way is bad copy of iOS mixed up with remnants of Windows 6.5 (openness, custom skin, etc). Windows Phone seems to have the best of both sides, controlled experience like iOS with better integration and customization options.
Meego has zero ecosystem support, unlike Android or iOS. Unproven, not ready for market. On Lumia 920, you better get the facts correct. It is based on Windows Phone 8 and display, camera, navigation are the best in all respects. E.g. Display is more sunlight readable than any other phone, you can operate it with keys or with gloves (no other phone can do that), best image stabilization in phone camera, navigation (they own Navteq, best maps period), first with build-in wireless charging, etc. etc. Search the net, you will find dozen links which actually show how Nokia 920 is better http://www.phonearena.com/news/Photo-contest-against-the-Nokia-Lumia-920-shows-how-the-Galaxy-S-III-and-iPhone-4S-shoot-in-the-dark_id34152
You're correct, we did read it differently :) I read it as pretty much making fun of Ahonen.
While I wholeheartedly agree that the consequences of Elop's "strategy" were quite obvious, Ahonen did more than speculate - he tried (and, for the most part, succeeded) to back up his statements. He provided hard data, several possible market share collapse forecasts (which turned out to be faily accurate - much closer than the projections issued by any other ratings agency), and several ways to try and fix Nokia's decline.
That's why I was a bit miffed - I dislike other people's actual work to be brushed aside with a shallow joke. I know this kind of belittling "humor" is endemic, but it's representative for the pernicious "bah, big deal, I could've done the same thing if I'd only bothered to work at it" mindset.
"Any one with objective mind will appreciate what Microsoft has done."
Bzzzzt wrong. All Nokia should have focused on is what consumers would appreciate, and they are most certainly not objective minds....
All the arguments about android being too 'me too' conveniently ignore the massive handicaps of WP adoption - low single digit user base, poor carrier / channel relations, MS being MS esp in mobile space.... and also overlook the fact that android would have let Nokia leverage their traditional brand instantly (I don't know if you're American, but in case you are, prior to 2009 or so, Nokia was seen as the IBM of the mobile phone world by the entire world barring the USA and possibly Japan) - something you could trust.