Can Nokia Save Itself?

Nerval's Lobster writes "When ex-Microsoft executive Stephen Elop took the reins of Nokia back in 2011, he memorably compared the Finnish phone-maker to a burning old platform in the North Sea. 'I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform,' he wrote in a widely circulated memo. 'And, we have more than one explosion — we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fueling a blazing fire around us.' Elop suggested competitors such as Apple and Google had 'poured flames on our market share,' with the damage accelerated by Nokia's failure to embrace big trends. His solution: abandon Nokia's homegrown operating systems, including Symbian, in favor of Microsoft's Windows Phone. Nokia's Windows Phones managed to attract some significant buzz at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, and early sales seemed solid. But now there are signs the situation could be deteriorating."

Comments

Go back to making fishing boots

[stevegee58]

After all, that was their core competency.

Re:Go back to making fishing boots

[ackthpt]

After all, that was their core competency.

That's where Samsung have them beaten - they started out making food, including noodles.

Re:Go back to making fishing boots

[gadget junkie]

After all, that was their core competency.

no. It was toilet paper.

Re:Go back to making fishing boots

[semi-extrinsic]

The company one generally refers to as Nokia only produced rubber boots between 1967 and 1990, when they were merged with two other companies. Before and after that, the rubber boot manufacturing was a different company (now called Nokian). So it was never their core competency, unfortunately.

Re:Go back to making fishing boots

[weffew...]

Coincicentally, Samsung is one of the biggest boat builders in the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Heavy_Industries

Re:Go back to making fishing boots

[tlhIngan]

After all, that was their core competency.

That's where Samsung have them beaten - they started out making food, including noodles.

Not to mention Samsung can make boats as well. So Nokia's screwed.

yes it can

[hjf]

yes, it can. ditch winphone/maemo/meego/symbian release a good android phone, and a series of ME TOO cheap android phones. profit.

Re:yes it can

[Missing.Matter]

How well exactly is HTC doing releasing a series of "ME TOO" android phones? All the sales and profit in Android seems to be accumulating with Samsung, which is almost synonymous with the OS.

Re:yes it can

[Tough Love]

You forgot "fire Elop and sue his ass off".

Re:yes it can

[Synerg1y]

Nokia maps anyone?

Re:yes it can

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

I started using Nokia phones some time around '95-97 and was happy enough to stay pretty much locked in. Early last year I wanted a new one and was trying to decide which Symbian-based device to buy. Then came 'The Announcement'. If they had decided to add a range of Windows Phones to their Symbian range (maybe even offering a choice of OS on a phone?) I'd still be a Nokia customer now.
I held off for a year and now have a Samsung. I tried one HTC device but gave up after minutes because the touchscreen keyboard was simply too small for my fingers.

Re:yes it can

[Missing.Matter]

As if Elop made this decision unilaterally? The board of directors went along with him on this. Further, what exactly would you sue him for? Potential profits that maybe the company possibly could have made by going with Android?

Microsoft offered them a very sweet deal: $1 billion, engineering support from Microsoft to help with the transition, and technology sharing agreements which lead to Nokia mapping technology being used in Bing, Windows 7/8, and Windows 8/RT. Not to mention the patent protection provided by Microsoft in all Windows Phone licenses, something that Samsung knows all too well Google does not provide.

And Google was offering.... absolutely nothing. It would be pretty hard to show that Elop was being somehow "negligent" by taking the company in this direction, as it's not even certain that had they gone with Android, they wouldn't already be dead.

Re:yes it can

[Anonymous Coward]

So the solution is to jump into a super-saturated, undifferentiated market with reckless abandon.. With a worse product that's doesn't play in the established ecosystem?

Nokia died the day it hired that hatchet man from MS. I said it then, I say it now.

MS is there to rape and pillage Nokia's IP. They're using the company as a testbed for development, and will throw it's corpse in the ditch when they're done.

Re:yes it can

[mcwop]

Too late IMO. In fact, this is also what RIMM should have done, and they still cling to their OS fantasy. People are tied into the mobile iOS and Android ecosystems. Windows Mobile may have a chance, but it will be tough - especially with the iPad mini in the mix.

Re:yes it can

[Anonymous Coward]

Only when it stops requiring an active connection to 4G internet so that my phone is "authorized" to access the maps I have already downloaded onto the phone, and communicate with the satellites it already says it is connected to.

Re:yes it can

[Lumpy]

"Further, what exactly would you sue him for? "

For being either a turd sandwich or a Giant Dusche.

Re:yes it can

[Xest]

I still actually to this day like a lot of Nokia hardware.

If they released an Android phone with no extra shit, just plain old vanilla Android on their hardware I'd buy it, and I suspect many other old Nokia fans would.

They could easily eat a healthy chunk of both Samsung and Apple's marketshare if they did this. It's so obvious, I just don't get why they fail to carry it out. Even if they didn't manage to regain the top spot, one thing is for sure, and that's that they'd certainly be in a much healthier position than they are now. They have the hardware to distinguish themselves in the Android market, so talk of fears just being another Android player is idiotic, especially when even just being another Android player is still a thousand times more profitable than being a Windows Phone non-entity.

Re:yes it can

[mspohr]

I think Nokia actually excelled at making "plain vanilla" phones which "just worked". They used to have a large market share (and profits) with people who just wanted an inexpensive, easy, reliable phone.
I think they could go back to this market with solid, reliable Android phones and clean up... it wouldn't hurt to also have a high end (Android) phone at the top of the line.
The Windows phones are a dead end.

Re:yes it can

[MrDoh!]

Yes. Totally this. If it then later added on the cool hardware/camera things later? I'd then upgrade. Simple.

Re:yes it can

[zenith1111]

Are you saying that you can't use nokia maps without internet? What device/OS are you using?

I use them on my nokia C7 (Symbian Belle) without internet, I just downloaded the maps and voices I wanted and that's it. I do find, however, that the address search is a lot better if I'm connected to the internet.

Re:yes it can

[Xest]

Even their smartphones used to be good though.

As far back as 2002 I had a Nokia 7650, and I could install and run Doom on it absolutely fine. It had a colour screen, camera, etc. It's limited memory was the biggest pain, but given that it took a whole 5 years for the iPhone to come along and even then didn't have half these features I think in hindsight it was a pretty impressive device.

Even now I think a lot of their Windows smartphones look quite nice, and the hardware feels quite nice, and the cameras etc. are still pretty awesome. I just don't want a Windows phone.

It really is literally just nothing more than the OS they're using that's holding them back from being a multi-billion dollar profit company.

Re:yes it can

[NatasRevol]

Also, that $1Billion is per year, not a one time offer.

Which is about equivalent to their annual cash from operations.

Re:yes it can

[saihung]

I bought an E6. I like it. It works, the battery lasts, the keyboard is nice and accurate. Nokia Belle is finally ready for prime time, which is ironic in the extreme.

Fire Elop. Immediately. Find the deepest trench in the ocean and throw him in, and then throw in the WinMo phones on top of him just to be sure.

Then take all of the lovely WinMo devices that Nokia developed, and put the OS from the N9 on some and Belle FP1 on others. Sort out Skype so video chat finally works. Finally, clean out all of the trash from the Nokia Store and get, by paying them directly if necessary, developers to build out the basics (e.g., a proper chat client integrated into the messaging app, GMail sync as a default setup option).

Re:yes it can

[Tough Love]

Further, what exactly would you sue him for?

Breach of fiduciary duty. Or in other words, acting against the interest of shareholders by selling Nokia down the river to Microsoft.

Re:yes it can

[zerosomething]

I still actually to this day like a lot of Nokia hardware.

If they released an Android phone with no extra shit, just plain old vanilla Android on their hardware I'd buy it, and I suspect many other old Nokia fans would..

I think that's been the Nokia problem all these years. The can't seam to release a phone without all the extra crap the carriers want on it. I remember wanting an N80 sooooo bad because it has WiFi but you just couldn't get one in the States first off then when it was available the WiFi was disabled!!!!

Re:yes it can

[Anonymous Coward]

No, reports are that Google offered $250 million in cash. Nokia has lost more than $1 Billion now, so the MS money is long gone. The other support is essentially meaningless. Their licensing deal means they can't use Android unless they give the money back, so no option there.

Re:yes it can

[bill_mcgonigle]

it's not even certain that had they gone with Android, they wouldn't already be dead.

Nokia quality hardware that's well-supported by an App Store and something like Cyanogenmod? Sign me up!

I like my Motorola handset well enough but it's just not as well-made as my old Nokia gear.

Re:yes it can

[bill_mcgonigle]

Breach of fiduciary duty. Or in other words, acting against the interest of shareholders by selling Nokia down the river to Microsoft.

What, just because every other company that got in bed with Microsoft ended up acquired or destroyed? Good luck getting a judge to go along with it.

Re:yes it can

[Tough Love]

Keep in mind, it would likely be a European judge in this case.

Re:yes it can

[Dog-Cow]

Research in Multimedia?

Research in Massively Multiplayer?

Research in Mickey Mouse?

Re:yes it can

[moderators_are_w*nke]

I think their fear of being just another Android player was valid. Samsung have run away with that one by making some pretty nice phones spending insane amounts on marketing.

I don't see what was really wrong with Symbian/Qt and Meego/Qt at the high end. These platforms (which were now mostly compatible) could have taken them forward. Also Symbian outperforms everyone else on battery life by a fair distance. I know there were some issues (neither would do LTE for example) but I don't think these were unsolvable. Certainly less risky than getting into bed with Microsoft, who in the scheme of things have basically screwed them over with Winphone 7.8 / 8

Re:yes it can

[richlv]

actually, meego probably had the biggest potential. they mostly killed it by _already_ ditching it. it probably is too late to properly revive it, not many would trust nokia anymore to develop for it...

Re:yes it can

[IICV]

That's why it's so sad (and incredibly weird until you realize Elop came from MSFT) that Nokia dropped their next-gen smartphone OS; it would have been quite a bit ahead of Android, and their maps applications rival Google's (offline maps? hell yes).

I mean, my Nokia N900 (from which I'm writing this post in fact) is almost as good as any phone currently on the market; give it some modern phone hardware, and it would have rocked worlds.

Re:yes it can

[AwesomeMcgee]

You got it all wrong, he was breaking up his post with an arbitrary car noise to meet the slashdot car analogy quota, Rimmrimmrimmmmm!

Re:yes it can

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft offered a very sweet deal? Really?

"This means that had Nokia not knifed Symbian and had sold the shortfall units at an average price of $200 they would have received an additional $9 billion in sales. Furthermore, assuming a margin of 33% for those units, Nokia received from Microsoft one third from of what she gave up for exclusivity." Source: http://www.asymco.com/2012/10/22/nokias-price-for-exclusivity/

Re:yes it can

[TENTH SHOW JAM]

Carrier crapware is common to all phones.
My Samsung Galaxy S had a crapload of "handy applications pointing to services". Happily, nothing was crippled. But deleting the shortcuts took about 15 minutes and I was put out that I could not uninstall a bunch of it. Fortunately, they did not cripple the handset, so tethering was permitted.

I was much relieved, when I got the courage to re flash my phone with a 3rd party upgrade to discover that I now had a relatively clean interface.

So then I upgraded to the GalSII. Crapware!!! all over again. But at least it runs faster than my last phone...

Re:yes it can

[metamatic]

It's their stock-ticker symbol. People often refer to companies by their stock-ticker symbols.

Re:yes it can

[pnot]

If they released an Android phone with no extra shit, just plain old vanilla Android on their hardware I'd buy it, and I suspect many other old Nokia fans would.

You and me and ten million others. But Elop won't allow that kind of sanity.

I've just figured out who Elop is: The Old Man of the Sea from the voyages of Sinbad. He hops on Nokia's shoulders, clamps on like a barnacle, and uses them like a bitch till they drop dead.

Re:yes it can

[nazsco]

> android is samsung

yeah, because that does not change... as it wasn't HTC a year ago, until samsung showed up with slighter less bad quality phones.

Nokia can totally show up tomorrow with slighter less bad quality phones than samsung and became synonymous with android.

Re:yes it can

[rtb61]

Want proof just have a look at a google search for images of Elop and Ballmer together https://www.google.com.au/search?q=elop&hl=en&safe=off&prmd=imvnsu&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=vzaHUJLhEe6eiAfsr4HwBQ&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1536&bih=724#hl=en&safe=off&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=elop+ballmer&oq=elop+ballmer&gs_l=img.3..0.2205.4418.0.4673.10.6.1.3.4.1.236.1305.2-6.6.0...0.0...1c.1.PVLo-wHolpU&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=796a483025b4c77a&bpcl=35466521&biw=1536&bih=724. Look at those images, now if you for a second look and those and don't think something really Uncle Fester bent is going on there then you need your head read, it looks very much like M$ is killing Nokia for it's patents.

Re:yes it can

[the plant doctor]

Are you sure you're using a Nokia phone?

That's one of the best features about my N9, off-line maps.

Hell, even my N97 Mini has this feature. There is no need to be connected at all, assuming you downloaded the maps prior to use.

Re:yes it can

[Eskarel]

Except that that's a bit like saying that if Apple could just sell 30 times more Macs they'd have the majority of the desktop market. True in theory, but unrealistic. Symbian 60 sucked royally, it was the worst phone OS I've ever used to the extent that it made the hardware seem cheap and unreliable. I've heard that some of the phones that got a more recent version of Symbian didn't suck and that Meego was passable, but no one was buying those phones, and the development of those operating systems was costing Nokia a fortune.

Nokia got shafted in their deal with Microsoft(as did everyone who bought a Lumia this year), but don't go pretending that Nokia wasn't already down the shitter well before Elop got there. The deal they made was a bit like putting it all on red, but the alternative wasn't any better.

Re:yes it can

[Groo Wanderer]

You do realize that before the Manchurian CEO took over, Nokia was making money. In Q3/2013 alone they lost $1.27B, and the bleeding is accellerating fast. Yes they get $1B/year from MS. They have to PAY MS for OS licenses though, and it is at a hefty premium, $10-15 per unit if memory serves. That said, they aren't selling squat, but it does take a bit off the top, maybe $1-200M a year.

Short story, the $1B per year is chump change compared to the damage MS inflicted on the company.

                      -Charlie

Re:yes it can

[davester666]

There is one notable exception to the claim of "Carrier crapware is common to all phones."

The iPhone.

Re:yes it can

[21mhz]

I love how your only statement of fact is a Google search of images, some of them doctored for fun, and this gets modded up.
I'll spare comments about coherence of your writing...

Re:yes it can

[21mhz]

Then take all of the lovely WinMo devices that Nokia developed, and put the OS from the N9 on some and Belle FP1 on others. Sort out Skype so video chat finally works. Finally, clean out all of the trash from the Nokia Store and get, by paying them directly if necessary, developers to build out the basics (e.g., a proper chat client integrated into the messaging app, GMail sync as a default setup option).

You mean like, they should redo all the work that Microsoft is currently doing for them, and do it for their own money? Just because you don't like Microsoft?
Belle... Yeah, that will move millions of devices.

Re:yes it can

[21mhz]

Nokia Maps on Windows Phone 7 need online access to (not hitherto cached) map data.
AIUI, applications in WP7 cannot share data between themselves, so it's only Nokia Drive that gets to have offline maps. Managing two sets of identical offline maps on one device was probably deemed too wasteful, so they made this compromise.

Proper offline maps, shared between Maps and Drive, are reportedly implemented on WP8.

Re:yes it can

[dwater]

wp7.5 has offline maps (I just d/led one to the L800 I'm giving to my sister-in-law[1])...I don't think there's a Nokia WP7 phone out there that can't be upgraded to WP7.5 (or whatever it is).

[1] no, I didn't buy it...Nokia were giving them away...I tried it a bit, and was quite impressed, but no bluetooth file transfer, no microsd, no multitasking (seems to be better in 7.5)...many things I think will be fixed in wp8, but I think my next phone will be an Asha since I'm keen on getting a dual-sim, and am convinced this smartphone/featurephone divide is bogus.

Re:yes it can

[dwater]

"Symbian 60"?

That's where I stopped reading...

Re:yes it can

[dwater]

US Carriers...imo, they're the root of Nokia problems...they weren't willing to sell phones unmodified (in serious ways) and Nokia weren't interested in selling the crap they were modified into, so they gave up the US market..to their peril.

Wifi was disabled in PRC too (on, eg n95), but that iiinm was a government enforced thing - makes you think.

One of the master-strokes Apple made was to force the carrier to release the iPhone un-crippled, and with unlimited data. Only Apple, with their manic fans, could do that...no way Nokia could.

(imo)

Re:yes it can

[Xest]

Motorola didn't make a loss on any of it's Android phones, all of Motorola's losses were down to the costs of separating Motorola into two if you look at the financial reports.

Re:yes it can

[saihung]

Nokia is STILL selling more Symbian devices that WinMo devices, so this isn't something we have to play guessing games about. People don't want WinMo, but lots of former Symbian users didn't purchase newer Symbian devices because Elop told them the platform had no future.

Have you ever used Belle? If you haven't, then from what position of knowledge are you speaking?

Re:yes it can

[john.willis1]

Wasn't HTC based on the Compaq Pocket PDA which ran Windows CE ? Which was a similar device to the Palm Pilot.. and that eventually got bought by the competitor that bought Compaq and then bought Palm and then cancelled both the Compaq PDA and the Palm OS and Products and then gave up on cell phones and sent them all to China? That HTC?

Re:yes it can

[Rexdude]

Even the glory days of Nokia hardware are getting over. They shut down manufacturing everywhere but (where else) China, and the current Windows phones are just subcontracted to generic Chinese assemblers who slap a Nokia sticker on top.

Re:yes it can

[Eskarel]

Yes, it's an old version of Symbian, and technically it's called Symbian Series 60, but it's what was on nearly all the phones Nokia was selling in the market. It's what was forging their reputation. Yes they had better phones, but they cost as much as an iPhone and were much crappier so why bother.

Re:yes it can

[dwater]

IINM, there was never such a thing as "Symbian 60". Symbian was the base OS, and S60 was the platform put on top of that. The 'S' in 'S60' is, as you say, 'Series'. It wasn't called Symbian Series 60 by anyone I know, technically or otherwise, and I worked on it from its 2nd edition days (with Nokia and I worked at Nokia too, though not for Symbian or S60).

So, in summary, no. Closer, but no.

Re:yes it can

[Stuarticus]

What are you revving, it sounds like a cinquecento.

Re:yes it can

[TENTH SHOW JAM]

I got an Iphone from the same provider. I have to disagree. Crapware on that too.

Sorry mr fanboy.

Re:yes it can

[Eskarel]

I didn't develop for it, I only used it. It's the Symbian OS and it's referred to for compatibility purposes as Series 60. When I say "Symbian Series 60" or even "Symbian 60" you know damned well what I mean and you also know it was a massively shitty OS. Maybe as an ex Nokia employee you'd rather focus on the technicalities of what it was actually called instead of the fact that it was the face of Nokia seen by most customers and was the worst smart phone OS to ever exist, but that's beside the point really. S60 is why the Apple iPhone exists, it's why Android exists, and it's why Nokia is about to go out of business instead of being the market leader. It was, is, and will continue to be a steaming pile of shit.

Re:yes it can

[dwater]

lots of opinion there. nothing new.quite common stuff. Your opinion, not mine. please don't tell me what I "know", since I obviously hold a different opinion, and base it on my own experiences of developing for it.

anyway, when you can't even get the name right, it leads me to disregard anything else you have to say about it. i figured you wouldn't much care if I cared what you have to say, but it seems I was wrong.

Re:yes it can

[davester666]

Um, which carrier did you get an iPhone from, which had carrier-specific crapware preloaded on it?

Re:yes it can

[hazydave]

Yeah, Nokia was hurtin'. They had much the same disease that RIM had -- their former smartphone business was being devoured by iPhones and Androids, and rather than even try to compete, they pretty much put head to hole-in-sand and pretended it wasn't happening. So their new phone releases were incrementally better than the year before, which put them a year, then two, behind the hardware that Apple and Google were enabling. Add to that the fact that apps as much as anything drove the consumer smartphone revolution, and both Nokia and RIM sucked at this. Nokia didn't even include the Ovi Store app until much later, and only on some models. Most SymbianOS users though they had feature phones, not smartphones.

But Elop accelerated the fall like made. He made a deal to go Windows Phone exclusive, and to functionally do that a year before he had any Windows Phone hardware to sell. By announcing this, basically announcing that SymbianOS was dead, soon, the whole Nokia income structure came tumbling down. The $1 billion+ losses for each quarter so far this year are due to SymbianOS sales falling off a cliff. Even if Windows Phone had sold well, there's no way that could have made up the difference. Elop didn't HAVE to go exclusive... wouldn't have changed the final results, but it would have given them at least a chance for Microsoft to get their act together. Windows 7 Phone didn't even fix their hardware problem -- Microsoft's use of WinCE in there prevented any competitive hardware from Nokia in 2010-2011. The Lumia 920 is at least in the ballpark, even though this is rapidly turning into the year of quad-core phones...

No.

[mister.woody]

Simple answer: No. I wish they did, though.

Re:No.

[Culture20]

This *is* the answer to any title-as-a-question. Hmm, that reminds me: I need to post "Did Culture20 not win several billion dollars recently?" as a new story.

No of course not, Nokia is dead

[gelfling]

You can't 'fix' not having a clue how to save yourself. You can't 'fix' looking for other people's money to help you do the same things wrong some more. Nokia is a dead man walking like HP phones, Palm, Symbian and others. And make no mistake, Windows phones will once again be killed off by Microsoft soon with or without Nokia. MS has no stamina, and their credit, they quickly recognize the instances where they themselves have failed to promote something.

Re:No of course not, Nokia is dead

[Cid Highwind]

There is no non-third-party Flash anywhere now. It's never been available on iOS, it's EOLed on Android and Blackberry, and it's never going to be in Windows phone 8.

Mobile Flash is dead (and good riddance.)

Re:No of course not, Nokia is dead

[bill_mcgonigle]

And make no mistake, Windows phones will once again be killed off by Microsoft soon with or without Nokia

Eventually, probably, but not this go around. This time the strategy is to install their guy in Nokia, burn it to the ground, and absorb through acquisition the remains to make a full-tilt effort against Apple and Google with Microsoft Phone 8. They'll need Nokia's hardware people and patent warchest to attempt this. Because if Microsoft fails at mobile, Microsoft fails for the long term, at least in its present form. Yeah, maybe it becomes a SaaS provider, but that's not what keeps it rolling in the billions.

Re:No of course not, Nokia is dead

[Raenex]

Stamina was the original Xbox. Sony killed them and they lost tons. Xbox 360? Awesome success.

The fact that they stuck it out and chose to make the 360 is where the stamina comes in.

Can Nokia Save Itself?

[Anonymous Coward]

Short Answer:
No.
Long Answer:
Nooooooooooooooo.

Re:Can Nokia Save Itself?

[foma84]

Short Answer:
No.
Long Answer:
BWAHAHAHAHAHahhaah, no.

Re:Can Nokia Save Itself?

[Anonymous Coward]

Standard answer. When the new CEO comes in and his first plan is to outsource the core business, the board to needs to fire him immediately. It's a signal that he's not up to the task of actually managing a complex business.

Not with those decision making skills

[grasshoppa]

I'm sorry, but you have two major players in the smart phone market, along with a third minor player, and you bet the bank on a non-entity in the market? That stinks of a hail mary. By itself, that is less than encouraging. Their choice of MS, given MS's history in the mobile arena, should immediately call into question the sanity of the decision makers. Or at the very least, their bias.

Were I trying to save the company, I would have thrown my lot in with a line of android devices which had distinctive features. Maybe aimed at the mobile market. Hell, maybe I would have even approached RIM about developing a secure platform for corporate users to pair with my hardware devices.

Re:Not with those decision making skills

[Anonymous Coward]

No. You have three major players in the market. You are the biggest of those three globally, but you don't matter in the USA. What should you do?

a) Keep doing as you are, screw the US, don't try to compete with US players, and (possibly) profit
b) Keep doing as you are, but improve your presence in the US. Compete globally with the US players, playing up your strengths, trying to adopt their strengths. Probably, profit a lot.
c) Change your focus entirely. Keep your focus on hardware (your top strength), and use the software that's considered the strongest (Android). Face heavy competition from other manufacturers who have more experience with that software than you. Maybe you succeed, possibly you won't.
d) Say your products are shit, destroy your position in the market, AND bet your bank on a non-entity in the market. As the saying goes, "You will die in seven days".

There was NO possible choice for Nokia that would work out worse than what they did.

Re:Not with those decision making skills

[Maximum Prophet]

Their choice of MS, given MS's history in the mobile arena, should immediately call into question the sanity of the decision makers

You question the sanity of a multi-millionaire, who even if he flops, probably leaves with millions. According to his wikipedia article, he got a $6 millions signing bonus, and $1.4 million per year.

Egads, for that kind of money, *I* am willing to run a company into the ground and suffer the slings and arrows of the Internet.**





** Do not taunt Happy Fun CEO.

Re:Not with those decision making skills

[grasshoppa]

Well, the implication was that the goal of said decision makers was to save the company.

If, instead, the goal of the decision makers is to cash out as offensively as possible, then their sanity is beyond reproach.

Re:Not with those decision making skills

[gutnor]

Samsung has now become more or less synonymous with Android, so there would be a lot of work to do in order to offer the necessary differentiation. At that rate they may aswell have persisted with their own OS. MS was the only option to get differentiation on the cheap. The real question, is why did they think they think they needed to have another option than their own OS.

Anyway, MS killed all the momentum Nokia managed to build up with the Nokia line up by instant deprecating the whole line months before giving Nokia an alternative to release. That is a case study of why depending on another company to deliver your key technology is a bad thing, and should be repeated a few times when people wonder why Apple replaced Google Map, and RIM persist developing its own OS.

Re:Not with those decision making skills

[gbjbaanb]

its a true comment, and Elop made incredibly huge mistakes - particularly dissing his existing product base, that killed off all market share that could have kept the company thriving (even if long-term those products were going nowhere).

Instead, he comes out and says how crap it all is, buy Windows Phone (and Microsoft says "no, not this one, the next one of course") and you have a total disaster.

This blog says a lot of sense, Elop is a terrible terrible CEO.

I think they would have done well with Maemo, but they chose not to work with it. Although most product groups end up with 2 dominant players (and a lot of nerdrage over which is better), there is always profitable space for several more. Nokia could have completely cleaned up in Asia without doing much of anything, even updating Symbian would have been a better choice than going with Windows. Android would have been a better choice than Windows in the worldwide marketplace.

So what can they do now? Being a Windows Phone manufacturer when Microsoft has shown they are perfectly capable of making surface tablets, and by implication, small tablets with the phone software on them.... so putting all your eggs in a basket owned by Microsoft is just stupid, so they have to fire Elop and try something else - go back to featurephones and maybe put Android on those Lumias, ditch Windows Phone now before they get dumped, its the only sensible option left.

Re:Not with those decision making skills

[gbjbaanb]

hmm. what happened to my link?!

this blog

Re:Not with those decision making skills

[s73v3r]

Except nobody is going to give a shit about what differentiates you if nobody wants that. Their hardware would have made a pretty decent differentiator in the Android market for a while.

Re:Not with those decision making skills

[HiThere]

Saying he made a huge mistake is making an assumption about his purposes. It is not clear to me that he made any mistake at all. You just assume that the CEO of a company will want it to succeed.

Signs it's deteriorating?

[s.petry]

Oh come now, who wrote this crud a Microsoft Marketing rep? The market hates MS phones, and it showed after the first what.. 2 were released and sales of Nokia devices plummeted to single digits? Fan bois would buy it, but hell they also bought a Zune. bah...

Look, the market has really 2 devices they are choosing from. If they want lock-in, they to with Apple. If they want cutting edge they go with a Droid. Everyone, and I mean everyone advised against dumping Symbian for another lock-in phone OS in Windows Phone. Those same people saw what happened to Blackberry, which was an exceptional OS and fully mature. It died a painful death, simply because of the 2 choices I started with.

The only reason this deal ever went through is because.... well fuck it I'll be blunt.. look who Nokia hired to captain the ship..

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[onyxruby]

We're agreed that the deal was really, really bad for Nokia and their customers. I am not sure I entirely agree with your view of why the deal went through. Fundamentally, you have to think that the Nokia exec's took the deal, /because/ they didn't see a better option.

Symbian needed to die, I think you'll find most people agree with that. It was taking up a significant amount of resources for appreciable gain. Unlike Blackberry they never had the corner on a given market (unless you want claim very basic phones) with very little profit.

They should have hedge their bets by splitting their resources between Android and Windows phones. As for Microsoft, well they made one of the best deals in their corporate history. I think a fair part of the market expects Nokia to either get bought out by Microsoft as their phone division, or to go bankrupt and purchases by Microsoft for their patents. Frankly, the patents are probably worth more than the rest of the company combined.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[menno_h]

The only reason this deal ever went through is because.... well fuck it I'll be blunt.. look who Nokia hired to captain the ship..

Stop being so hard on Elop. He was desperate to get out of MS, and Nokia seemed like a good idea at the time.
Image working with Windows, for MS, all day, five days a week, all year, for decades... *shudder*
Either that or he was sent by Ballmer so that MS could control Nokia from within.

But yeah, whoever is in charge of CEO acquisition at Nokia should be fired.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[Xacid]

Let's be fair and admit you're just anti-Microsoft, ok?

The market doesn't "hate" MS phones. The market isn't buying MS phones. There's a subtle difference in your wording but a massive difference in perception.

Those that actually have tried the platform have seemed to enjoy it quite well - especially those here on slashdot, so I'd trust their judgement over someone who likely hasn't touched one of these devices.

I'm not disagreeing that Nokia made some very large mistakes but to imply this is written by someone with bias while you obviously have a strong bias yourself...it's hypocritical.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Windows phone?"
"Why would I want that crap, my desktop has it and it's always full of viruses, needs defragmenting, etc etc etc."
That name is tainted, Microsoft idiots.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[rvw]

The only reason this deal ever went through is because.... well fuck it I'll be blunt.. look who Nokia hired to captain the ship..

Nokia only hired Elop because of the deal. I don't think he would have gotten the job before they decided to go with WP. So I disagree. The only reason this deal went through - no idea, but probably hoping for the better plus a bag of money and many nice promises from MS marketing because for them (!) it was a good deal to get Nokia on board.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[s.petry]

I agree with you that Symbian needed to die, honestly I do. But you make the real point in your next paragraph. They should not have locked themselves in to Windows Phone. This put them in the exact same position they were in with Symbian.. except it was not "their" OS.

If they went with 2 OSes it would have made sense, but what they did was not logical.. and I think someone got a hell of a bonus check to cut that deal.. and it was not Nokia paying the Bonus..

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[Missing.Matter]

I can easily imagine that Microsoft stipulated a single OS solution, or they would not provide the same assistance they did in terms of augmenting R&D and cash infusions. If Nokia went with Android as well, I could easily see Microsoft saying "Look, you're on your own. Oh and by the way, we need to talk about certain patent agreements like the ones we have already put in place with other Android manufacturers..."

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[s.petry]

Yes, the market does hate MS phones. The same way they hate Blackberry phones. The sales numbers from the first release were bullshit, and it was reported on a few days after the "huge buzz (according to Microsoft and paid media)". The numbers they reported were numbers they "sold" to factories that hold the devices prior to purchase, and not what was sold to consumers.

Developers have bitched since Microsoft released the APIs for WP8, apps suck, controls suck, it's too expensive, etc... So developers are not touching the Phone either. In fact the /. article referenced fart machines as the best application that could be created for the phone, which was validated by them having nearly 30 on the store compared to a dozen or so flash light applications. I just read another article a week ago where a development team just said "fuck-it" to developing even after dumping 50K in to MS licensing.

Look, I'm sure it's a great platform.. for someone.. I work with a fan-boi that has one. He thinks it's great, but he can't do anything with it. Our T&M apps that run in Droid and IOS won't run in Win Phone, mail does not work, so if all you do with your phone is need a "phone" and "camera" I guess it's fine.

And me implying that the person who wrote the article is biased, makes me biased? Did you RTFA? It's worded like WinPhone was uber awesome, and because Apple and Google are big meanies it will make Nokia fail. If the article is biased, how would you expect me to react.. like I didn't read the fucking thing?

Now, am I anti-Microsoft? That's a loaded question. I never had a Zune, and thought it was a failure (damn, I was correct). I never had an X-Box, and refuse to get one. I won't be buying a Windows Phone either. I use MS products at work, some are okay. I think Visio was much better before MS bought them, but that's not an unpopular point of view. I use Office and despise the 2010 ribbons and bullshit like "font auto-preview" that makes doing something so simple take a long time. Excel is still a good app, but there again the ribbons make it inefficient.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[strength_of_10_men]

The market isn't buying MS phones.

I think MS is following Gandhi's quote:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

but I think they stopped at step two.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[Dragonslicer]

Look, the market has really 2 devices they are choosing from. If they want lock-in, they to with Apple. If they want cutting edge they go with a Droid.

Just to be annoyingly pedantic, that should be "Android". "Droid" is a line of Android phones made for Verizon, mostly by Motorola, but HTC made at least one.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[MrDoh!]

They do 'hate' those phones. How many times do we look back fondly on our other phone devices? Palm/G1/Nokia/Blackberries? How many people 'look back fondly' to any Windows Phone? They're hated with a passion, from both consumers, and the execs who've dealt with MS before.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[NatasRevol]

I'm not sure they ever left step one.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[h4rr4r]

Samsung has also made some, and HTC has made more than one.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[BumpyCarrot]

I think there's something to that. Look at the original XBox. It was effectively an old (even on release date) PC running a locked-down console version of Windows. They didn't mention Windows at all and the device did well enough to carry a new division forward, easily better than ANY pass that MS has made at the phone market.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[amiga3D]

Ballmer? That you?

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[amiga3D]

I'd be interested to know if the original X-Box ever made any money.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[metamatic]

Actually, my BlackBerry was a fantastic phone, in 2004.

The problem was, they were still trying to sell the same phone in 2011.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[Narnie]

I owned a Windows phone and I hated it. I hated it so much I replaced it with a blackberry. I don't care how awesome the next Windows phone will be, I'm not buying another one.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[MisterSquid]

I think MS is following Gandhi's quote:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

With MS the steps seem reversed. Going back to when MS was so entrenched the US DOJ convicted them of monopoly abuses:

1. First you win.
2. Then they fight you.
3. Then they laugh at you.
4. Then they ignore you.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[dwater]

"A friend who knows" tells me that it was an oft asked question inside Nokia at the time, if Microsoft had made the dropping of Symbian and MeeGo part of the deals, but it was always denied...for whatever that is worth. I'm pretty sure that Android wasn't part of that question though - just Symbian and MeeGo. The arguments against going with Android were pretty solid, though it was always presented as an 'either-or' proposition - not sure why. Samsung has always been the whore of the phone world, using every platform out there and even making their own, and I'm not sure why Nokia couldn't do similarly.

So my friend tells me, anyway.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[dwater]

Well, never mind him - I *am* anti-Microsoft, but Nokia gave me an L800 and I figured I could give it a try so I could justify my hate.

Unfortunately, I was impressed, somewhat. It had all the short-comings of the iPhone when it first came out, but had some subtlties that I liked. I concluded it deserved some success, but it didn't have the backing of the Apple crowd, so I couldn't tell whether it would be or not - I guess it would, but it would take its time. I thought it might win in markets like China, were (free) Microsoft Windows is pervasive and there's not much of an anti-Microsoft attitude.

But it wasn't for me...for the same reasons the iPhone wasn't. It's locked in. It doesn't take microsd cards. You can't bluetooth files. No multitasking[1]. And the device itself wasn't up to the n950 that I am still using (despite the screen starting to die) - sound quality is not quite there (way better than the n900 though), and non-replacable battery sucks.

Some of these things were fixed in wp7.8, and I'm lead to believe that many (all?) others of these issues will be fixed with WP8, so I figure it'll be a nice device to use then. Of course, my L800 won't upgrade to wp8 for some reason, so I doubt I'll get to use it.

My next phone will be a dual-sim phone, which likely means a Nokia Asha. I think the smartphone/featurephone distinction is quite bogus - and I think I'll find out for sure. Anyway, I don't know of any "smartphones" that are dual-sim

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[dwater]

Well, never mind him - I *am* anti-Microsoft, but Nokia gave me an L800 and I figured I could give it a try so I could justify my hate.

Unfortunately, I was impressed, somewhat. It had all the short-comings of the iPhone when it first came out, but had some subtlties that I liked. I concluded it deserved some success, but it didn't have the backing of the Apple crowd, so I couldn't tell whether it would be or not - I guess it would, but it would take its time. I thought it might win in markets like China, were (free) Microsoft Windows is pervasive and there's not much of an anti-Microsoft attitude.

But it wasn't for me...for the same reasons the iPhone wasn't. It's locked in. It doesn't take microsd cards. You can't bluetooth files. No multitasking[1]. And the device itself wasn't up to the n950 that I am still using (despite the screen starting to die) - sound quality is not quite there (way better than the n900 though), and non-replacable battery sucks.

Some of these things were fixed in wp7.8, and I'm lead to believe that many (all?) others of these issues will be fixed with WP8, so I figure it'll be a nice device to use then. Of course, my L800 won't upgrade to wp8 for some reason, so I doubt I'll get to use it.

My next phone will be a dual-sim phone, which likely means a Nokia Asha. I think the smartphone/featurephone distinction is quite bogus - and I think I'll find out for sure. Anyway, I don't know of any "smartphones" that are dual-sim (if you know of one, I'm all eyes).

[1] I started to download some apps and figured I'd check out the rest of the device while it did it. When I went back to check how it was doing, it hadn't got any further at all, but immediately started from where it was.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[Xacid]

Ok, you've caught my interest with the Asha. How does that work? Like if you have a US SIM and a Canadian SIM will it switch as needed or anything cool like that?

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[dwater]

I'm afraid I have to investigate that myself. I think it is mainly for the African market where the carriers give free calls to people on the same network, so they want to have many sims to get free calls to friends depending on what networks their friends are on.
I've also heard that people share phones in Africa, so it could be that they have a sim per user...but I don't quite see that working so well so I'm not sure.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[Xacid]

I looked up the specs earlier this morning and it's only 2g. :( So yeah, makes sense what you're saying. The appeal to me is having my main SIM for my normal use but having a prepaid one for my travels instead of having to pay giant roaming fees.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[NikeHerc]

The market doesn't "hate" MS phones.

My former employer provided ms-based cell phones to my group. I don't remember the name of the model, but to my dying day I will remember how much I HATED this horrible piece of crap!

It hung up, spontaneously rebooted, generated a few BSODs, displayed "unable to load .dll" (or something similar), and was horrendously slow to boot up. (Does any of this sound familiar?) Having been bitten once, I would never, ever, under any circumstances use a ms-based cell phone again.

Re:Signs it's deteriorating?

[Xacid]

I have to ask - which version? I'll agree, their previous versions were craptastic, but the latest is pretty dang swanky.

They're pretty

[rodrigoandrade]

Nokia Lumia phones are pretty and the WP8 interface is a joy to use, but, when the honeymoon is over, we need APPS, which WP8 doesn't have.

Until WP8 has a huge library of apps like Google Play and iTunes, I don't see the situation improving.

This, in turn, leads to a chicken-and-egg situation: Consumers go for the phone with most apps, developers, developers, developers develop for the phones with most users. Ballmer throws chairs...

Re:They're pretty

[MrHanky]

We don't need apps. We need functionality, which WP still lacks.

Re:They're pretty

[Quanticfx]

Nokia Lumia phones are pretty and the WP8 interface is a joy to use, but, when the honeymoon is over, we need APPS, which WP8 doesn't have.

This... The WP8 OS itself, from most perspectives, looks pretty good. The lack of apps is a large detriment though, plus it's probably getting harder and harder to get people to switch from a platform they have become increasingly invested in over the years of using it. Who wants to have to repurchase apps for a new OS (if they are even available)?

Between this and the shunning WP8 and WP7 phones seem to get from most cell stores (from my limited experience) they'll probably keep the few people, like me, who are slightly invested in the WP environment or those that are platform agnostic, have no or only a minor investment in another OS, and are looking for something different.

Re:They're pretty

[Genda]

Had Balmer a "BRAIN" he would have tasked the M$ software development tools division with coming up with an inspired development platform that would work on Windows, OSX and Linux, and would take one code in (Python? or better yet, a decoupled language front end of choice) and spit out apps for IOS, Android and WP8. If the tools were great, free and had a huge supported free community, it would have been natural for application developers to port their apps to as many platforms as possible and WP8 would have started out the gate with a health stable of goodies. Of course, all of this would have required that Balmer have a brain... enter zombie allusion... enter Wizard of Oz parody... perhaps he should consider politics.

How much would this have costed? $40 million? How much did they bet on WP8? Chump change. Instead, too little too late. Another poorly executed belly flop, with no attention to what the consumer wants. See, Americans live in the fscked up fantasy, that as long as "I'm" in power, and I have an advertising budget, I can tell you what you want. Steve got away with it, because he actually cared about leaving people blown away... (he was still an egomaniac, but he got off on giving people goosebumps) the money always came after (eg. Pixar.) You can't grab for the money first, and hope that people can later be convinced to love your schist. Balmer needs a Steve Jobs sans massive ego. He needs someone with the sensitivity, artfulness, style, intelligence and vision to create products and product experiences that people love. He needs a queer eye for the Geek guy. Good luck on that.

Re:They're pretty

[Lumpy]

100K fart and flashlight apps is not impressive.

Re:They're pretty

[Duhavid]

"..inspired development platform that would work on Windows, OSX and Linux, and would take one code in (Python? or better yet, a decoupled language front end of choice) and spit out apps for IOS, Android and WP8..."

Microsoft does not do agnostic. They only touch other platforms is they believe it will act as a bridge to bring you to their platform.
So, it would be ".net for devices".

Re:They're pretty

[morgauxo]

Balmer doesn't need that! Microsoft needs that! And if Microsoft had that what would it need Balmer for?

Re:They're pretty

[bkaul01]

But Windows Phone does have apps. It has lots of apps, actually. Not the sheer numbers of iOS and Android just yet, though Microsoft's outreach efforts to developers, or their view of the strength of the platform, is such that the selection has been growing at the same rate Apple's did after their launch and faster than Androids. But I can't remember the last time I went to look for something in the Marketplace and came up empty.

You could add to that the issue of integrated features being good enough to make apps redundant (e.g. Bing Local Scout > Yelp!; Bing Music Search > Shazaam!; Bing Vison > tag reader apps; etc.), but all those apps are available regardless, along with all the other big names, and several have better UI experiences on WP than on iOS.

Really, the idea that there aren't apps available is FUD these days. That hasn't been a serious roadblock for a year or more, and the situation is improving all the time. And the presumptive ease of porting apps between WP8 and Win8 can only help in the future.

What Windows Phone really still lacks is consumer awareness, retail sales support, and marketing.

Re:They're pretty

[Doctor_Jest]

What Windows Phone really lacks is a "killer" app that you can't get on iOS or Android. If Windows XP is any indication, most people don't simply change because of something newer. Most people like their iPhones and Android phones... Going to a new phone "and learning new crap" isn't on the average phone user's to-do list.

Re:They're pretty

[amiga3D]

But really what's the point? There is already the Droids and iPhones and they have tons of apps for anything you can think you might want to do with a phone, no matter how silly. Why would I want a phone that has limited apps and is different than what all my friends have? Why would I bother? There are tons of great Android phones from many different manufacturers and then there are the iPhones if I want to live in the Apple world. Both have advantages but I see no point to a WinPhone.

Re:They're pretty

[cbhacking]

What functionality are you looking for in Windows Phone that it doesn't have? Not the early versions, but WP8 or even 7.8 or Tango?

Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware of some missing functionality. I'm the first one to claim that MS left out some functionality that they shouldn't have. But, I'm curious what *you* think is missing, because the majority of complaints on that front that I've read are either severely outdated or outright false.

Most - not all, but definitely most - of the people I know who've tried WP7 not only like it, they're planning to go with WP8 even though it means buying new hardware (and since some of these are Nokia Lumias or other gen2 devices, that means buying new hardware before the end of a two-year contract). I won't pretend that this is in any way a scientific study, but I live in Seattle so, even discounting MS employees (which I am doing here) I see a lot more Windows Phone devices than the total marketshare would suggest.

Additionally, I've heard a *lot* of interest in the Lumia 920. Not so much in the other models, but both current iOS and Android owners seem quite interested in the 920.

Re:They're pretty

[stymy]

Frankly, I don't see why people care so much about the number of apps. While I don't use a lot of apps, and I don't play games on my cellphone, I've found that for there was a WP8 app for everything that I wanted, that worked well. So why do I care if there are 100 music player apps, for example, if there's 1 that works well and does everything I want?

Re:They're pretty

[s73v3r]

It has apps, but it doesn't have the new, exciting apps. New stuff tends to come out first for iOS. They then either make the Android version at the same time, or afterward. That's about it. Once in a great while people will think about doing stuff for WP.

Re:They're pretty

[Groo Wanderer]

"What functionality are you looking for in Windows Phone that it doesn't have? Not the early versions, but WP8 or even 7.8 or Tango?"

The ability to sync it with a non-MS or Apple device.
The ability to not feed MS's patent trolling machine.
The ability for me to customize the OS how I choose.
The ability to load ANY app I want.
The ability to not be tracked by MS.
The ability for me to tinker with it how I want.
The belief that the whole thing won't be sh*tcanned in the next year for a new paradigm.
The belief that the whole thing won't be pulled out from under me for the next MS lock in attempt.

FWIW, I feel the same way about iOS and some versions of Android.

                      -Charlie

Re:They're pretty

[Tom]

Does that remind anyone of the lock-in to the windows platform, which basically everyone uses because all the software is on it and nobody uses it because the OS is superior?

Sure does.

Here, MS, take a sip of your own medicine.

I kind of fail to feel sorry for them.

Right...

[advantis]

"damage accelerated by Nokia's failure to embrace big trends". So let's embrace something else that isn't a big trend: Windows Phone. Yep... that would work.

...not savable anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

Whilst I was still working there, I thought we could save the company, even after the loss of Southwood, Copenhagen, and the Symbian developers.
  Now that 9999 colleagues and I have been swept away - no.

Windows isn't working. It isn't beating the old Symbian phones and that will only change when the old Symbian models are ramped down.

Stephen was supposed to fix the software engineering issues. :o(

Re:...not savable anymore

[21mhz]

Stephen was supposed to fix the software engineering issues. :o(

And he did. The problem was, Nokia didn't have a workable culture of software engineering, with a possible exception in S40.
Now the smartphone OS is in the hands of Microsoft, who, for all their faults, know how to develop and maintain software. Sure, they threw WP7 under the bus, but the changes appear to be worth it, and there is forward app compatibility, so at least the existing app ecosystem is preserved.

They can, but wont.

[Kenja]

First step would be to stop making only Windows phones. The Windows phone platform is too strict to allow creativity in design. Frankly, one Windows phone is much like any other regardless of manufacturer. So there is nothing to distinguish a Nokia from any other brand. No brand distinction, no brand recognition, no Nokia.

Re:They can, but wont.

[Genda]

The problem is they wanted to carve out a completely new product space by copying the dominant leader. Doing that is a saturated market usually means you develop a fanatically loyal following in the cook islands or some other place equally pointless. Its like that great cartoon... Balmer makes a smart phone -> Then a miracle Happens -> and it garners a top market share. He needs to work on that middle part of the business plan a wee bit. Better yet, would someone give this poor man a dip into the clue bucket. For the love-o-jebus, I'm tired of seeing this lost soul twisting in the breeze.

Lumia looks good

[vux984]

My wife got a couple weeks to demo a spare lumia 800 they had at work this week, and likes it enough to be seriously thinking of switching to a 900 series when her contract is up.

I looked at them hard myself when i upgraded earlier this year, i ultimately went with a galaxy s3, which i don't regret as the lumia's at the time are going to be stuck on windows phone 7.5, and I'm perfectly happy with the s3. It would have been a tougher choice had the lumia 900 series with windows phone 8 been out. (I upgraded from an iphone, but had no interest in the then unreleased iphone 5 given that it was pretty well known that it wasn't going to be a big leap forward from the 4S.)

I also note that the pre-orders for the lumia 920 seem to be going well. I heard BestBuy is sold out online already of the quantities they put up for pre-order.

Overall, I hope Nokia pulls it off. And i hope Windows Phone 8 succeeds. Its a good mobile OS, and competition is good.

Re:Lumia looks good

[Cinder6]

This, pretty much--the Lumia phones (particularly the 900 series) look great, and I actually like the WP7/8 interface. A friend of mine has one; when I tried it out, I found it perfectly usable (even enjoyable!). However, the sales have been so poor that I just can't bring myself to actually buy one. It's a chicken-and-egg problem: without apps, people won't buy it, and without people buying it, nobody will make apps. It's much the same problem that Palm, and then HP, had. WebOS was a great platform, but we all know how that ended.

Re:Lumia looks good

[richlv]

assuming the story is true, try to get n9 for her for a comparable period of time ;P

Re:Lumia looks good

[richlv]

btw, i find it a bit uncomfortable how similar your post is to this one : http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3204941&cid=41742727

almost as if there were several message templates created by a marketing department that were then put together and slightly modified...
(yeah, i'm posting this in response to the other message as well :> )

Re:Lumia looks good

[vux984]

She's had lots of time to play with my Galaxy S3 which she likes, and also demoed an older Motorola droid of some sort on gingerbread which she thought was really klutzy.

Re:Lumia looks good

[amiga3D]

I like seeing MicroSoft having the problem Linux has on the desktop. No support because too few users but can't get more users because not enough support. One thing though, MS has enough money they can spend a few billion brute forcing their way into the market if they have the will. It worked with the X-Box.

Re:Lumia looks good

[vux984]

-shrug-

I'd chalk it up to a million monkeys on a million typewriters.

Re:Lumia looks good

[cbhacking]

Windows Phone actually has a pretty healthy app store these days (they crossed 100k a while ago). It's not going to equal the iOS or Android stores any time soon, but it got a very late start and grew faster than the "big two" did at the equivalent times in their existence.

Have you actually gone and checked on your friend's phone for the apps you'd want to use? The iOS and Android app counts are increasingly filling in the "long tail" of very niche apps, "dedicated apps" that simply wrap a website, and so on. Most of the big deals in mobile apps are already on WP7, and with WP8 that will only get better (since contrary to some remarkably inaccurate info that keeps circulating, WP8 can run WP7 apps just fine).

Re:Lumia looks good

[21mhz]

Lots of MS fanboys like to say competition is good when rooting for Windows Phone 7/8. But I doubt they would actually agree competition is good in general. What about competition in the Desktop OS space? Would those MS fanboys applaud if Windows dropped to 50% market share because competition is good? Nope.

I would love to see GNOME 3 taking a comparable share.
(Ducks.)

Re:Lumia looks good

[vux984]

Lots of MS fanboys like to say competition is good when rooting for Windows Phone 7/8.

Yes, I think competition in general is good.

What about competition in the Desktop OS space? Would those MS fanboys applaud if Windows dropped to 50% market share because competition is good?

Let's see... I mentioned I have a Galaxy S3 in my original post, and I'm writing this on a MacBook Pro, so I'm clearly an MS fanboy and would would be mortified if Windows dropped to 50% marketshare. /sarcasm

That said, I don't care for the direction apple is going, and I wouldn't applaud Apple becoming the dominant desktop OS, but I think their recent resurgence over the last decade has been good for the industry.

I'd also be happy to see linux take a larger share of the desktop market, at the expense of microsoft.

Yes they can

[thammoud]

Create Android phones. They have fantastic engineering talent that is being wasted by a dead platform.

Re:Yes they can

[Rob the Bold]

Create Android phones. They have fantastic engineering talent that is being wasted by a dead platform.

Or rather, they had fantastic engineering talent before the layoffs.

Re:Yes they can

[menno_h]

They have fantastic engineering talent that is being wasted by a dead platform.

It's quite saddening that the home country of Linux, the molotov cocktail and the dish draining closet is exporting Windows phones.

Re:Yes they can

[Mike Buddha]

They may have been talented, but they hardly produced anything. One phone. Not exactly a record of excellence.

Re:Yes they can

[Kjella]

Too late for that now... first attempt Android phones, losing the exclusivity money from Microsoft, yet more customers who feel abandoned, all the bridges to business partners they've already burned? No, perhaps earlier they could have sailed in a different direction but now they're in the middle of the storm and just have to tie themselves to the mast and either float or sink. I'm thinking sink but abandoning ship for the life boat now would just be even worse. It's no coincidence that Apple starts taking preorders for iPad 4 and the iPad mini on the 26th, same day as Win8 is released - they're now going to try to steal as much of the launch day thunder as possible. I bet they're looking for headlines like "Win8 released, 100 million preorder iPads".

other partners ?

[KernelMuncher]

I think Nokia would have been better served partnering with Facebook to produce a good mobile version. That would have served both companies well.

A Microsoft Exec

[mk1004]

When all you have is a hammer, all problems are solved by using MS products.

Re:A Microsoft Exec

[Mike Buddha]

Unfortunately, Nokia didn't even have a hammer. It had a lackluster engineering corps that couldn't make smartphones to save it's life (almost literally).

Re:A Microsoft Exec

[roc97007]

I thought MS products *were* the hammer.

Re:A Microsoft Exec

[Genda]

Nailed it...

Re:A Microsoft Exec

[caluml]

When you have is a Nokia Lumia, everything looks like a nail :)

could you start a company with their assets?

[ThorGod]

I don't know about you, but it'd be easier to start a cell company with Nokia's resources. Sure, they probably have some kind of stigma of bad quality now or whatever. They've still got more going for them than a newcomer to the cell industry.

Stupid Slashvertisement for SlashCrap

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Please stop posting stories that originate at slashdot. Slashdot can't even bringitself to successfully edit paragraph sized summaries. Why would a whole story written by slashdot staff be any better produced? I trust the slashdot community, that's why I'm here. Not for the slashdot editorials on clouds or Buisness Intelligence. That's buzzword bs.

Re:Stupid Slashvertisement for SlashCrap

[Safety Cap]

I trust the slashdot community, that's why I'm here. Not for the slashdot editorials on clouds or Buisness Intelligence.

Welcome to /.

Re:Stupid Slashvertisement for SlashCrap

[Megane]

It's a SlashBI story. If you check the firehose, you'll see that this guy posts at least 2 or 3 of them every day for some reason. Most of them go nowhere, because they're crap, just like the rest of SlashBI.

Intentions?

[hutsell]

A former Microsoft employee takes control of a failing company, uses a somewhat over the top analogy accusing the non-Microsoft competitors of setting the company on fire while Nokia stood by and did nothing and wants to solve the problem by replacing the OS with a Microsoft's system. Are there any other solutions better than a classic market share strategy?

Meego

[Jack Malmostoso]

The more I use Android the more I LOVE my N9 the more I hate Nokia for killing it.
I know there is a lot of politics involved (not last the usual OSS community circle jerking) but the capabilities of that OS over anything else are amazing.

Re:Meego

[Frekja]

Mod parent up! The decision to EOL Symbian sort of makes sense, though it was totally stupid to say so. The decision to axe Meego was stupidity in the extreme. The N9 swipe user interface is so transparently superior to WP7/8, Android, and iOS that this alone should have told Nokia to keep Meego alive. It also does all that normal back-end stuff (bluetooth OBEX push, actual multitasking, etc) that WP still doesn't do. And the N9 won loads of awards and tech blog / reviewer love. I'm not a developer, so don't understand if Qt makes it as easy to port things as Nokia implied, but if apps are the measure of the ecosystem, it's hardly better than WP.

Re:Meego

[amiga3D]

I think Meego is part of why MS shoehorned their way into Nokia. Meego had to die at all costs.

Not with the current board

[Ami Ganguli]

They need to make a clean break from Microsoft. That means get rid of Elop and the board that hired him. Beg some of the respected execs who fled, like Anssi Vanjokio, to come back. If they're not willing to come back to manage day-to-day operations, at least put them on the board to give a sane strategic direction.

Then buy up Jolla as a long-term investment, while producing Android phones to pay the bills.

Get me back, get us all back....

[CdBee]

My old Nokia rocked, it was fast, light, quality hardware and great GSM stack - fast, reliable connections to data and voice services - which was always a Nokia strong point. I'm only using a SonyEricsson android unit because they haven't produced a new handset to my liking. Nokia hardware plus android would bring me right back into the fold.

To post something a bit to the contrary here...

[HerculesMO]

I think Nokia and the WP8 ecosystem will do well, and there are a few reasons.

First, they have the best device. Forget the OS -- the best camera, it's built solid (nokia solid), looks slick, wireless charging, and a very high PPI (even more than the iPhone 5).

Next, the Windows phone ecosystem is going to grow pretty rapidly when they release Windows 8. Right now only a handful of devs have the dev tools for WP8, but when the floodgates open and the new API that is shared between WP8 and Windows 8 (Windows RT), you'll see a lot of apps come around.

That said, keep in mind that while people think that the "apps" aren't there, there's over 100k apps now. It's not small potatoes, and they managed to do it faster than Android hit 100k apps as well.

The way I see it, I want MS/Nokia to succeed. They have a very good mobile OS (I'll be buying a 920 myself, specifically for build quality and camera), and having more competition is good for everybody.

Re:To post something a bit to the contrary here...

[Ogi_UnixNut]

Sorry to break it to you, but Nokia no longer have their build quality, they stopped producing phones in Europe like they used to, and outsourced everything to China like everyone else. Their phones will be the same build quality as pretty much every other phone nowadays. All they seem to have is the brand of "most solidly built", but that is no longer reality.

Re:To post something a bit to the contrary here...

[HerculesMO]

Sorry to break it to you, actually... but the Lumia 900 is pretty damned well built. I only expect more of the same for the 920.

Re:To post something a bit to the contrary here...

[Mike Buddha]

I was with you, until Elop announced that the flagship 920 was only going to be available on AT&T. He's playing the game like he has an iPhone on his hands that everyone will be clamoring for. That is incorrect. As fond as I am of the 920, it's isn't enough to get me to switch to AT&T.

I'd like to see Nokia succeed, but I think they need to play the game that they've entered, which is the put-your-best-foot-forward-and-scramble-for-everything-you-can-get game instead of the we're-doing-you-a-favor-by-allowing-you-to-buy-our-device game.

Re:To post something a bit to the contrary here...

[malkavian]

The best device? That's a moveable feast, and pretty much something you'll have a hard job selling to the public. A solid camera isn't the big thing. Wireless charging? That'll take a while to catch on, and a lot of people are quite happy with their multiple charging points. It'll become more important over time, but won't sell many on it. High PPI? Well, there's more than good enough (iPhone etc.) and there's un-noticably better.. It may be a superior hardware platform, but hey, betamax did so well from that, didn't it?

The expansion of WP8 is pure conjecture. You're saying "If you build it, they'll come", despite most being quite heavily entrenched in purchases of apps already on smartphones (it's one of the things that I have to consider jumping from my current platform). And the good developers go where they'll make good money. Currently WP8 is niche (very) and you'd be betting good time and money to develop just for that. Maybe you will see a lot of good apps, but it'll have to tempt people away from _existing_ good apps they've already paid for. Microsoft relies on that in the fight to keep the desktop from going to other Operating Systems (there have been some good contenders, and Microsoft has always brought out the "Does it work with your existing applications that you know? No! Don't buy it!".. And that's already been shown to be a persuasive argument.

Having 100k apps doesn't mean that it's 100k apps that will sell, or do what people want to a sufficient level to chuck what they have and re-invest in completely new apps.. Or that the apps are actually decent in the first place.

Yes, having competition is good, but the arguments you pose are very subjective, and rely on others having your own tastes.. Most probably don't..
Still, I'm waiting to see what happens with interest. I like Nokia (my earlier phones were almost exclusively Nokia because of the quality), and I only switched because smartphones did what I wanted, and Nokia didn't have any.

WP8 doesn't look bad; that's not my beef with it.. It's just that it's not good enough to make me swap what I have, and have to replace a load of apps I use a lot (my dive log, gas mix calculators, music aides, work tools etc.) with new ones that I'll have to buy again and hope have the same functionality (and transcribe all the data for again!).. If it ever is, I'll jump, but that day isn't here, and WP8 isn't that OS. And I know I'm not alone in that, software history showing the trends of inertia in the market (BeOS, OS2 etc.).

Re:To post something a bit to the contrary here...

[HerculesMO]

My hope is that we'll see a 922 on Verizon in pretty short order. I'm with you on the AT&T situation as well... I can't stand them.

But the US isn't their only market, and across Europe they are available on multiple carriers.

Re:To post something a bit to the contrary here...

[jd659]

and a very high PPI (even more than the iPhone 5).

Sure, a high PPI is good, but how about the more important Modulation Transfer Function, is it also good?

Re:To post something a bit to the contrary here...

[richlv]

btw, i find it a bit uncomfortable how similar your post is to this one : http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3204941&cid=41742567

almost as if there were several message templates created by a marketing department that were then put together and slightly modified...
(yeah, i'm posting this in response to the other message as well :> )

Re:To post something a bit to the contrary here...

[amiga3D]

I agree with you but for a different reason. I think that MS will bully their way into the market no matter how many billions they have to bleed in the process. They can not lose out on the phone market. Their failure to realize what was up until lately will cost them big but they have the money to succeed if they have the will to spend it.

Re:To post something a bit to the contrary here...

[HerculesMO]

You realize my Slashdot ID is lower than even yours right :)

Re:To post something a bit to the contrary here...

[richlv]

sure, doesn't make similarities less eerie ;)

Re:To post something a bit to the contrary here...

[Ogi_UnixNut]

I never claimed they were badly built, but that they are no longer special in the build quality department. I checked out the Lumia 900, and while well built, it was no better than my Samsung SII. The old Nokia's (up until Elop, I was a 100% Nokia guy for years) were something else, I mean seriously overbuilt. I felt like I could beat someone to death with them if necessary.

What would save Nokia?

[Jailbrekr]

merge it with RIM, and bring in new management so neither culture can dominate the other.

There is good in both companies, but both companies suffered greatly at the hands of management.

Re:What would save Nokia?

[Mike Buddha]

Wow, merge the two companies and make a super loser! This would have been a great idea 10 years ago when both companies were on the top of their game.

No they can't (anymore)

[Anonymous Coward]

The talent has left the building when Elop booted all Meego/Harmattan en Qt-devvers. The development team left is only a shim of its former self. They pull some hardware stunts so now and then (PureView) but without a platform to really benefit from it... Android won't save them, as they still won't have the dev-team to adapt it to their needs.

The N9 is the last great device they've released IMO.

Re:No they can't (anymore)

[Mike Buddha]

Oh yeah, the talented Meego developers who spent 6 years to produce exactly one (1) phone. That's not talent worth crowing about.

Re:No they can't (anymore)

[squiggleslash]

Two phones, the N900 and N9, and four tablets. N770, N800, N810, and N810+WiMax. That's if you're being fair by saying "Six years" in which case you have to include Maemo. If you're limiting yourself to Meego(tm), and not including Maemo, then they certainly weren't working on it for six years.

It's also worth pointing out that the entire point of Meego (as opposed to Maemo) was to get management behind what until then had been virtually a skunkworks project. Nokia's management more or less refused to give Maemo any backing initially because they were too committed to Symbian. It's an interesting question what would have happened had the N810, as originally intended, been released as a phone rather than cut down at the last minute and released as a tablet.

Re:No they can't (anymore)

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

You're assuming that the problems at Nokia are the lack of talented engineers. Looking at the Pureview 808, this is clearly not the case. Not by a long shot. The problem Nokia faces is really incompetent management.

Re:No they can't (anymore)

[higuita]

The nokia drowned itself in analysis, QA tests and bureaucracy. They were the top player and drag their feet releasing products with big innovations (they were all stored ready to be used slowly, so each phone could last longer and increase the revenue). They were also maximizing the symbian live and no one had the courage to let him go and die. Then apple blackberry and the iphone show up, with many things they had internally, but didnt released. Symbian core was a nightmare to expand and meego hadnt enough developers to finish the outstanding issues, nor a clean plan and objective (many internally saw it just as a playground for new ideas).

Blackberry should have warned nokia about incoming trouble, they ignore it... iphone arrived and destroyed their top market. Android arrived later and they still couldn't release something as good as this late player... they were still trying to improve the dead-end symbian. Everyone on nokia knew that but again, no one had the courage to kill it.

A new vision was needed... ... the top management and shareholders choose Elop!! he publicly killed symbian for the market, while all his products were all still symbian based, he choose to try a radical switch to zombie windows phone and abandon all its internal assets and meego and choose to ignore android as temporary solution to fill the hole left by symbian. All this was accepted by the top management and shareholders.

The rest of the story you can see it now, but all this to say:

the nokia failure was not from the bottom folks and engineers, but the top management and shareholders... they got lazy and blind to the reality

Nokia’s price for exclusivity

[Relayman]

Horace Dediu of Asymco wrote about Nokia's situation yesterday and showed where Windows Phone phones have not filled the gap in the loss of sales for Symbian phones. He also concludes that the goal of 150 million Symbian phone sales (beginning Q1 2011) will never be reached. He's got some good thoughts on this situation.

Re:Nokia’s price for exclusivity

[fm6]

Slashdot is increasing being used by people to slant the news to support some kind of controversial belief.

FTFY

Slashdot has always done that. It's a discussion site, and if the meaning of stories were uncontroversial, there would be nothing to talk about.

Re:Nokia’s price for exclusivity

[Relayman]

Actually, it was one story I was upset about and now I've forgotten what the subject was. Time to update the sig!

Sure ... by selling excellent winter tires again

[acidfast7]

Nokian tires are the best. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokian_Tyres

They sold their soul to the dark side

[ruir]

Now they are paying the price. The market only cares about iPhone and Android...who can't see that?

Re:They sold their soul to the dark side

[Relayman]

They better start caring about Windows Phone 8 or Steve Ballmer is going to throw some more chairs!

Microsoft is doing a decent job with apps

[SuperKendall]

WP7/8 do not have the size of library that Android and iOS have.

However Microsoft has been doing a good job of courting (read: buying) development of some of the most popular applications. So they are actually not as far behind app-wise as it would seem.

Microsoft also has a core group of developers that really like the whole Microsoft toolchain, and will also work to provide some good applications - especially now that you are developing for Surface using the same tools.

So don't count Microsoft (and by extension, Nokia) out yet - Microsoft is still quite powerful, and has a TON of money to make something happen that has to happen for them to matter going forward.

Re:Microsoft is doing a decent job with apps

[srh2o]

Buying development only confirms how far behind they are app-wise.

Re:Microsoft is doing a decent job with apps

[SuperKendall]

It confirms they realize they are behind.

But it also says they are going to catch up quicker than you would expect. They have the resources to essentially buy a healthy App market, and are already part of the way there.

Lame, poorly timed speculation

[mcrbids]

Microsoft has a knack for getting it wrong several times before finally coming up with something that works. They are not, in any way, a visionary company, they are simply good at recognizing their mistakes early and dropping them.

Look at their history going all the way back, it took until MS Word 3.x before it even compared to their competition. They suck at first, and always do.

But now that Apple and Android have led the way, Microsoft is about to release the biggest update to their product suite since Windows 95. And this time, I'm rather certain they mean it. They are betting their farm on Windows 8, and have revamped all their products on a unified code base. This isn't Zune, this isn't Wince, (er, WinCE) this is serious.

And it's about to launch. Speculating about the future at this stage in the game about the most useless endeavor imaginable. I'm willing to throw a few hundred in to buy Nokia junk stocks just because, while the odds of MS making Win8 seem scant, the payout if they do could be significant.

Re:Lame, poorly timed speculation

[roc97007]

I agree with most of what you say, but in the back of my mind is a little voice saying "just because Microsoft is really really REALLY serious this time, doesn't mean it won't still suck at first."

Re:Lame, poorly timed speculation

[Lumpy]

"Microsoft has a knack for getting it wrong several times before finally coming up with something that works."

And then giving themselves a head injury after they get it at a point working so they FORGET what works. Windows 7 was a home run like Windows 2000 was. Now we have to suffer through 2 more iterations of crap until they come out with Windows 11 that will actually be usable....

Re:Lame, poorly timed speculation

[TheSpoom]

The nice thing here is that instead of tanking themselves, they only tank Nokia! Win-win, right?

Re:Lame, poorly timed speculation

[Belial6]

The personal computer industry has never really been about who did things right, and more about who shot themselves in the foot with the fewest times.

Re:Lame, poorly timed speculation

[pscottdv]

Microsoft has a knack for getting it wrong several times before finally coming up with something that works.

Yeah, but they have been trying to make a name for themselves in the mobile market since the 1990s when their only competition was Palm! Even if they do manage to get it right some day, what are the chances that it happens in time to save Nokia?

Re:Lame, poorly timed speculation

[NatasRevol]

At the cost of $1B/year in platform support payments, and huge loss of brand name value. (Windows Phone will be worth less when the premiere manufacturer dies)

Still, better than doing it themselves.

Re:Lame, poorly timed speculation

[cbhacking]

In the pre-iPhone days, Windows Mobile had more market share in the smartphone space than iPhones do today. The problem was that it was a very niche market, and Microsoft let their product stagnate too long.

Support both Win and Android--on the same phone

[ebrandsberg]

If a company did that, I think there would be a nice market for people that want to try both. You would have to choose which you want loaded at any given time, but it will insure that if windows 8 phones do start to look really nice, you won't be stuck with cellphone envy.

Re:Support both Win and Android--on the same phone

[roc97007]

...and the phone would be the size of an egg carton...

Re:Support both Win and Android--on the same phone

[Cinder6]

Not sure why you think that--you can get more flash storage without changing the external dimensions of the phone. The iPhone 64GB model is the same size as the 16GB model, after all. There would possibly be the need for another chip in there to handle switching, but then again probably not. We've dual booted computers for years now.

Re:Support both Win and Android--on the same phone

[roc97007]

Calm down. I was being facetious. Besides, I don't think original poster was talking about dual-booting, but an environment that merged the best features of both environments, and including the ecosystem necessary to run both Win8 and Android apps simultaneously.

Re:Support both Win and Android--on the same phone

[Voyager529]

...and the phone would be the size of an egg carton...

No, it wouldn't. If a group of volunteers could port four different operating systems to a three year old phone through some impressive feats of reverse engineering, you can't possibly expect me to believe that the smart people at Nokia (or HTC, or Samsung, or whoever) couldn't design a phone that allowed the user to pick their operating system using a more official means. No, the fact that a phone and an operating system are part and parcel with each other is due to either the finance departments or the marketing departments, not the engineering departments.

Launch a rugged, open android

[deanklear]

The one thing missing in the market is a waterproof or water resistant rugged touch phone. Offer it with and without cameras for corporate clients. Make it open, semi-upgradeable, and relatively inexpensive. Work with someone like arduino to develop an ecosystem of input devices that allow experimentation which simply isn't allowed on closed platforms like iOS. Offer a dock that has USB and HDMI outputs to turn it into a mini computer or just share media on a larger display.

Make it compatible with worldwide cell services, make it easy to swap SIM cards out, and easy to expand with SD cards or some other type of storage.

It could be done. But not with that schmuck running the place.

Re:Launch a rugged, open android

[roc97007]

> The one thing missing in the market is a waterproof or water resistant rugged touch phone.

That is absolutely brilliant. Or at very least, water sealed so you could take it out in the rain without it self-destructing. Add a range of docking stations for car, motorcycle, bicycle. A good maps app with programmable presets. A good, intuitive, extensible hands free setup. I'd buy one. I know a lot of people who would buy one.

Re:Launch a rugged, open android

[Cinder6]

Lunatik had a (successful) Kickstarter for an iPhone case that does exactly this--cover the thing in water-tight CNC'd aluminum and a Gorilla Glass screen protector. Only problem is it makes the phone huge (and probably heavy), though not as big as an Otter Box.

Re:Launch a rugged, open android

[cbhacking]

I don't know how it stacks up with the other items you requested, but the IS12T (a Windows Phone 7 device, released in Japan) is waterproof (and of course uses a touchscreen).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_Toshiba_IS12T (stub article; look at the references section for more info).

Microsoft wants to get into hardware

[kawabago]

The best way for Microsoft to get into making their own hardware is to buy an existing hardware company. The best way to buy a company is to drive down it's value before you take it over. Microsoft used it's influence to get Elop hired as CEO of Nokia so he could destroy the share value of the company which Microsoft could then buy for a song. Nokia's share price tanking and eventually a Microsoft take over was the plan from the start. It has all been a show to steal Nokia from it's shareholders. Typically Microsoft.

Re:Microsoft wants to get into hardware

[MrDoh!]

As cynical as that sounds... I do strongly believe this is the most likely outcome. MS have shown prior form on destorying a company just to get the assets. (Stinger phone with Orange being the most obvious example).

Re:Microsoft wants to get into hardware

[NatasRevol]

Well, they are paying $1B/year for it right now.

Nokia's fate is already sealed

[Dracos]

There is only one possibility: Nokia spirals down the toilet, and MS buys it when it becomes a good enough deal. MS, according to their plan of hoodwinking Nokia's Board and installing Elop, gets a handset manufacturer they can call their own which is already primed for Windows Phone exclusivity.

Re:Nokia's fate is already sealed

[roc97007]

> There is only one possibility: Nokia spirals down the toilet, and MS buys it when it becomes a good enough deal.

Personally, I believe that was always the plan.

Re:Nokia's fate is already sealed

[tuffy]

They're not going to buy Nokia. Microsoft will let Nokia take all the arrows in the back, then scavenge their corpse for useful patents before launching Windows Phone 9 hardware of their own.

Re:Nokia's fate is already sealed

[roc97007]

Buys it... picks over the corpse... you say toMAEto, I say toMAHto...

Re:Nokia's fate is already sealed

[rahvin112]

They aren't a manufacturer anymore. All the factories were closed and production moved to contract manufacturers in China in 2010-11.Most of the designers were fired last year. They are a shell of a company with MS handling most of the software side and a skeleton crew putting together the product order from the ODEM's in China.

Re:Nokia's fate is already sealed

[21mhz]

Whoa there. Do you have any sources to back all that up?

Should have dumped meego sooner and gone android

[Eravnrekaree]

Nokia ditching the Meego stuff was something they should have done sooner. There are just too many mobile OSs around. App developers really only have the resources to target one or two platforms. I have heard people say that Nokia needed Meego to diffentiate, but I just dont see it, at best meego would have been no better than android and probably would have been worse, it would simply not be a selling point, and it was letting market share slip away at a rapid pace while it tried to develop its own OS. If it had gone with Android right away, it would have gotten the immense app ecosystem and an off the shelf OS that would be ready to go right away. It could have had a phone on shelves years ago. Nokia could then soup up Android in any way it needed to later on if it felt it needed improvement. The fact is Meego would not have been any better than Android could have been, and would not have differentiated Nokia, or it would have differentiated them as being worse. People don't care if it has a different OS, they want it to work and Android works. It having a different OS than Samsung would not sell phones. Period. End of story.

Going with Windows Phone was perhaps a mistake, compared with going with Android, but not nearly as much of a mistake of staying with the Meego platform, which would not have been seen as being any advantage to consumers whatsoever, at best it would have been equal to android and simply does not provide with a reason to buy the phone.

Unfortunately for years Nokia killed it self with the not made here syndrome, wasting years developing an OS that would haev done nothing that Android could not do, and probably would have been worse and that people would not want anyway, With the solution staring them in the face with just taking off the shelf android and getting a phone in stores in a month, it really shows how thier ego and arrogance clouded their thinking, willing to bring their company to the brink of destruction than to touch Android because "its not made here".

Nokia is getting what it deserves, just like RIM, because of such arrogance. I expect both companies to be out of business in a few years.

Get on the Android train

[guano79]

I used to love Nokia before Android phones came along, if they come out with a good Android phone I might switch back

Corporate Culture

[fm6]

It's always the case that corporate culture has a really hard time adapting to changes in technology. I saw that in Sun's final days, when the development and sales models continued to revolve around pushing SPARC systems even as top management told the stockholders and press that these models were obsolete and had been abandoned.

Difficult but not impossible. Despite having created the standard desktop computer, IBM resisted moving out of the mainframe world where top management didn't even use email. Then Lou Gerstner took over and did a remarkable job of retooling the corporate culture to use and sell modern tech. Alas Gerstners are few and far between.

Bottom line: can Nokia save itself? Certainly. They just have to change the way they think. Will they? Probably not.

oh, Canada!

[Thud457]

By accepting personal funds from Microsoft for the deal with Nokia which should have never happened, Elop has brought Nokia to its knees. He is directly responsible for the layoffs and terminations of thousands of Nokia employees. He has demonstrated that he cares more about his pocketbook than others' jobs or the future of the company.

Here I was going to make a smartass remark about Nokia finally adopting modern American corporate standards, only to wiki up that Stephan Elop is a Canananadian. How mortifying for you polar bear buggerers.

Re:If they just had access to Android apps...

[Genda]

Hard to compete in a gun fight when all ya got are knives.

No, they have a gun, but it fires potatoes... hey, the russets hurt like hell!

Nokia is the next Digital, Sun, etc.

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

If we could go back 10 years, Nokia was king of the world of mobile telephones. They had the sales - everywhere. Ericsson, who was at one time a fierce competitor, gave up and formed a joint venture with Sony to try to stay in the marketplace. BlackBerry had its users, but Nokia had the best technology in their phones. They had developers who write apps for it (not anything like today's market for Android and iPhone, but it did exist). Nokia sold all kinds of phones all over the world. You want one of those "I just want a phone that's only a phone" type of phones? They had your phone. You wanted a model with the latest technology, they had it. I remember going to Taiwan in 2007 and seeing commercials there on TV for Nokia's latest and greatest phones. I bought the N80 when I returned to the US around May of that year. Keep in mind that the term "smartphone" applied to phones like the N80 at the time because even though it only had the "phone keyboard" thing where the letters a/b/c are on the 2 key, d/e/f are on the 3 key, etc. and it's time consuming to type messages, there was a web browser on it and you could sort of do internet things on the phone. Maybe not easy. Probably not fast. But it was possible. And the phone could tether to a PC and give you an internet connection.

Then a couple of months later, Apple puts out the iPhone. I was just amazed. My brand new N80, which was just one step below Nokia's top of the line N series phone, was turned into crap over night. The N80 looked primitive compared to the first gen iPhone. It was like the N80 was some pathetic loser phone sold on another planet where only poor people lived. Over the years I watched Nokia (I owned the stock until earlier this year, when I sold at a huge loss) and they never came out with a phone I knew of that anybody took seriously any more in the developed world. Oh they apparently are still the kings of low tech phones so if you live in some desperately poor African country, your phone is probably Nokia. But they never even competed with the iPhone and Android. It was kind of like Digital when the computing world changed away from main frames and they never really got it. Or Sun when cost became the driver in business and they tried too late to offer cheaper models. Selling your soul to Microsoft to save the company seems stupid to me when all of Microsoft's previous phone attempts failed big time and it became well known that the first Nokia Windows phones couldn't be upgraded. Nokia had a good reputation and had they quickly punted and moved to Android, it might have saved the day. I don't believe Nokia will go under and they may get bought out, but from now on they are likely going to be the kings of low end phones. I can tell you that one of my old friends in Taiwan recently bought a Lumia and she likes it, but she is not a techie and she is extremely cost conscious. She told me she would rather have had an iPhone, but she cannot afford one right now. Again, Nokia is the king of the low end phone. I guess they can barely survive as the cost conscious alternative to Android and iPhone, but how much fun and how much profit can you make at the garbage end of the business relying on people to buy your phones because they are affordable, not because they are good?

It was a brave choice, but also wrong

[poisonborz]

Back when Elop arrived, Nokia had to make a choice. They obvious one was to go Android, but they tought - and this was completely sane thinking - that WP as a platform has no real flagships. Filling this spot, now with an MS guy on board, seemed indeed like a more creative idea. They rushed out a whole new range, and the Lumia line came with the limited WP7.5 on board, followed by mixed reactions and meager sales.

But I have to admit that by now, with WP8/Lumia 920, Nokia made everything it could. Even with shortening reserves, they pushed R&D came out with standout features like the stabilized camera system. They created/refined a clear, iconic design. WP8 as a platform is still very limited to customization, but Nokia made a range of apps, based on the content of their most/last valuable asset, Navteq.

And still, it probably won't be enough. People distance themselves from WP ecosystem, and (at least on the outside) WP8 does not bring much to the table. Win8 is another story, but I don't think it will drive up phone sales, even if the design language/kernel is common. And the disappointed WP7 userbase won't come back. Looking at Nokia's work in the past 2 years, I think they made a choice that can be rightfully defended, but still, it was the wrong one. Android would have allowed much, much more freedom on the software front (even if Navteq resources could not have been used, and standout software solutions was never really Nokia's strength).

At least they now go out in glory, and not staring in the oblivion, like BlackBerry.

Can they save themselves?

[roc97007]

Almost certainly.

Will they do the necessary things to save themselves? Almost certainly not.

Re:Should have dumped meego sooner and gone androi

[TheLongshot]

Sorry, but every single phone OS currently out there don't serve my vision for what I want from a portable OS. All them seem to be weak OS just built to serve the AppStore mentality, locked down so to do anything like backing up your phone is a PITA.

Maemo was the first phone OS that I actually felt was a full-fledged computer OS, that had the flexibility to do what I wanted to do. It fed the dream of having a mobile computer in your pocket. Android feels like an appliance in comparison.

I'm not saying that Maemo/Meego would have solved Nokia's problems, but abandoning all home-grown solutions basically put them in the large pool of manufacturers making generic phones, with little to differentiate them. While going with Windows Phone does do that, it does it for the wrong reasons basically telling everyone that you are an also-ran. Personally, I think there is a place in the market for a Meego-like phone. Those of us who want a computer in our phone and don't want to buy into the appstore mentality.

Who dies first?

[JasoninKS]

I'm more curious as to which company will die first, Nokia or RIM. Blackberry was "the man" 10 years ago. Nothing else like it. And by God they held onto that belief even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They didn't innovate or evolve, others did, they got left in the dust. Nokia is much the same, I feel. You can get a low-end Droid phone for little more cost than a phone with a proprietary OS like Nokia's. And that Droid is way more capable. Now I can't *fully* blame Nokia for trying to take on a new Windows OS for the phones, but geez it seems like such a dumb idea too. It was a gutsy move, that's for sure. And OS 8 looks very different graphically, but I don't know if the guts are truly any different. Besides, with the overall cruddy sales of Windows phones over the last few years, it's a big gamble on Nokia's part. They build good phones, but I think if they'd have gone Droid they'd be more relevant.

oil, not old, platform

[starless]

burning old platform in the North Sea
should be
burning oil platform in the North Sea

Of course they're deteriorating

[saleenS281]

Why wouldn't sales currently be deteriorating? Their current phones run WP7.5, with no upgrade option to WP8. They pre-announced the 920, 2+ months before anyone could buy one, so people have stopped buying 900's. Why would you buy a phone that you know is obsolete when you can wait a couple months? If their sales still suck in February, we can start calling it a crisis. Until then, it's just people making something out of nothing.

The one thing I will say I think is an absolutely idiotic move on Nokia's part if it's true, is that they are supposedly giving AT&T exclusive rights to the 920. In the position they're currently in, they should be trying to get it onto every network possible from day 1. It's not like the iphone where there were no other options on other networks. By going exclusive, they're just going to give HTC and Samsung the opportunity to build a user base on Verizon/T-mobile/Sprint. They gain essentially nothing. The only way it would've helped would have been if they were the only WP8 phone on the market.

Re:Should have dumped meego sooner and gone androi

[MMC Monster]

Nokia is getting what it deserves, just like RIM, because of such arrogance. I expect both companies to be out of business in a few years.

Or, of course, making Android phones.

I think (and apparently I'm not alone, based on replies to this story) people would be interested in a Nokia Android phone. Solid hardware by a known hardware manufacturer combined with a known OS. Nokia is still known for good hardware. And Android has better brand recognition than anything other than iOS, Windows, and OS X at this point. Sounds inevitable.

Hopefully they don't screw it up.

Play to your strengths, Nokia

[Cloud K]

When I think Nokia, I think "phone that is reliable, built like a brick shithouse and with a battery that lasts all week or more, and can pick up the faintest whiff of a signal and make it work"

Never mind making "yet another smartphone that is only 2 molecules thick and with a battery that lasts a whole 4 hours!"

Do smartphones if you must, but make it the same way you used to make phones. Make it a rugged beastie that the highly destructive creatures known as "sales reps" won't keep handing back to the IT department with shattered screens knackered batteries broken buttons and chunks missing. Make a phone that can connect to Exchange but that our CEO won't brandish angrily at us while shouting about terrible battery life and dropped calls. Trust me, we'll love you for it and we'll buy lots.

Ta.

Re:Play to your strengths, Nokia

[Cloud K]

P.s. we don't mind a few sacrifices. The kind of people who liked this type of Nokia phone (and I think you'll find there are quite a few) held onto their old monochrome 3310s for as long as possible like their lives depended on it so really, it's fine if it's not got a SuperMegaBrite(TM) Retina Display pushing 400ppi. It's okay if it's a bit thick and a bit ugly. Really :)

Re:Elop = corruption at its finest

[Mike Buddha]

Seriously? You think that Stephen Elop's honest letter about the state of the company was what caused Nokia's downfall? I suppose you think Obama caused the recent recession as well?

What Nokia should have done

[ThePeices]

What Nokia should have done is not hire an ex microsoft executive as CEO who is obviously still very much in love with Microsoft.

The fact that he cannot see that Windows Phone is a doomed platform is a huge problem. Nokia is not going to save Windows Phone, and Windows Phone is not going to save Nokia.

What Nokia *should* have done is created a very good Android phone, with the quality and ease of use that Nokia is famed for. They have a real winner with PureView image sensors ( when used as designed, i.e. 8MP output images ), and they also know how to build quality hardware.

All the pieces to save Nokia were there, the opportunities to save Nokia were there.
But they blew it.

Nokia. R.I.P.

Microsoft will never buy Nokia.

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

Any one that thinks European antitrust officials will allow MS to buy Nokia after an exMicrosoft executive makes a deal with Microsoft that severely damages Nokia, is out of their mind. Nokia will be bought, but it won't be by Microsoft. Maybe Google or Samsung or ( shudder ) Apple. Whatever Nokia does, the first step to health is to fire Elop.

YES die Nokia die!

[cfalcon]

Ever since I saw a Nokia product placed in Star Trek- which implies than Nokia will live through a eugenic revolution, a mass die off, an age of darkness, and the transition to a post commerce, post scarcity society- I've wanted them to go under in my lifetime. The arrogance, and how jarring that dumb moment was, clashed together. I want the product dead and the name buried!

Nokia - a sad story

[vonkas]

Nokia has acquired a bad bad name in user support - in my region anyway. It failed to support its various OSs to the point where people bought a phone only to see it's platform abandoned months later. Burned customers look elsewhere! Apple's secret apart from great design, is a long term (free) support relationship to allow people to serious fall in love with the product. Even Microsoft has not achieved this, instead luring users with an ever changing way of doing stuff. In case of Nokia's demise - good riddance, well deserved.

he almost did it unilaterally

[joseprio]

While the actual decision was definitely agreed with the board, I'm sure that the famous "burning platform" memo pressured them. I think that the biggest problem was his certainty that he knew what was wrong and was sure how to fix it.

Elop should have been fired, and probably sued, as soon as he published that memo; even if he was convinced that Nokia's products were crap, he should have kept that information to himself and Nokia's "inner" circle, because that's the only thing they had at that moment; after they had a new, shiny product out there, feel free to talk about how bad the old product was and how great the new product is, but his actions have no rational explanation. Even someone as passionate and perfectionist as Steve Jobs tried his best to sell products he considered sub-par, like the Mac OS in the first iMacs.

The decision to go for an unproven platform like Windows Mobile was a bold, extremely risky move, which is why Microsoft had to pay that kind of money to have Nokia use it exclusively. For me, the biggest mistake wasn't to use Windows Mobile, but to put all of their chips into it, after completely dismissing their own products. They could have kept developing their own products, and also Windows Phone and Android devices, and let the market decide. I'm convinced that the Android phone would have sold a lot better than it's Windows counterpart, and Nokia would have had their own OS out there to compare.

Now it may be too late for Nokia to react; not only because of time and money, but because of the dismissal of the engineering teams that took care of Nokia's new software developments (specially the Linux-based Series 40 platform successor Meltemi), the damage to the Nokia brand, and the dependency of Nokia to a soon-to-be-competitor like Microsoft, when they release their rumored Surface phone. It looks like they're betting everything on Windows Mobile 8, and it will probably work as well as it did with 7.

In my opinion, the best thing Nokia can do is to find some kind of credit line that can sustain them for a few more years, negotiate the removal of the exclusivity clause with Microsoft, and add some Android phones in their portfolio, to try to recover some of the market share that went to Samsung; then, invest as much as possible in the development of what works (the only good news lately come from the success of the Asha line), and make the only thing that can distinguish Nokia from the other vendors: innovate, innovate more, and then some!

Things like the PureView are a good example of the innovation that may help them survive, but only if they don't keep screwing up in the marketing department, like when they mentioned in the announcement that the megapixels were interpolated (which wasn't true), or using the "PureView" name for different things (for image stabilization or large number of megapixels).

Say what you like

[Rexdude]

..but the original plan before Elop appeared on the scene was sound. Yes, Symbian was showing its age but it still had a good couple of years to it, and they were planning on introducing mid to low end models based on Symbian for their traditionally strong markets - India, Africa and China. Meego was to have been the OS of the future with its Linux underpinnings, and Qt would be the bridge for developers to easily migrate to it from Symbian. In fact, by the end of 2010 there were quite a few Qt apps starting to appear on the Ovi store. Speaking of 'ecosystems', Nokia had a nice little one of its own from since long before mobile was anywhere on Steve Jobs' horizon.
  Along comes Elop with his idiotic burning platform memo, and publicly declares that Symbian is dead.

He starts the process of selling the crown jewels to Microsoft - lay off half the staff, shut down plants and get the entire company on board with an unproven OS from Microsoft of all people, who have never really succeeded at anything mobile.
In one stroke, he alienated the long time Symbian users by launching an OS that was even more crippled than iOS, and the developers by declaring that they would not support it anymore. This doesn't even take into account the poisonous hatchet job that was relentlessly done by US tech sites (Gizmodo, Techcrunch etc) who kept sneering at every Nokia innovation in-between going down on Apple. They have always had disproportionate influence in the mobile space compared to their experience with anything other than Apple.

What's even worse - he launches awesome devices like the N9 and N950, then refuses to sell them in Europe or India despite the demand for fear that it will expose the fact that people would rather prefer them to the Windows phone. And I haven't even gotten started on Nokia's swansong, the Symbian based PureView 808, that uses a 41 megapixel sensor to take ultra detailed 8 MP photos!

Look at where Nokia is today, losses of more than a billion euro, and long since forgotten in the mobile space, which has become a 2 horse race between iOS & Android. Samsung has taken the crown of world's largest mobile manufacturer, and in the low to mid range segment where Nokia traditionally ruled, you just have crappy Android devices from a hundred manufacturers trying to cram a resource hungry OS onto puny specs - 256 MB RAM, 800 MHz CPU - when any Symbian phone with the same specs at the same price would just zip along.

Had they stuck to the original plan, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be in as dire straits as they are now.

Re:Say what you like

[dwater]

> he launches awesome devices like the N9 and N950, then refuses to sell them in Europe or India

The n950 was never 'launched' unless you count internally to Nokia or as a give-away developer device - it was certainly never sold *at all*, *anywhere*.

Re:Say what you like

[Rexdude]

It should have! It would have been the first Meego device with a hardware keyboard, to complement the touch only N9. Both these devices would have sold like hot cakes, in fact the n9 alone sold more in a month the Windows phones did in a quarter. A responsible CEO would have recognised the demand and ramped up production, instead he was too busy making sure that these devices wouldn't steal the non existent thunder of Windows phone.

Re:Say what you like

[dwater]

> It should have!

Well, yes. It was quite dated in terms of h/w specs, but it is still a joy to use in general. The OSSO/Maemo/Meego devices have always been somewhat lack-lustre in terms of h/w specs, but the audience has in general found other things more important. I think some people were hoping that would be different with the N9 and N950 (and other predecessors), so I guess that's why it was sold (or updated to N9 specs)

Even though I would have preferred the *addition* of WP approach (if necessary), rather than abandoning everything and going with *only* WP, I still think it wasn't a terrible decision - brave, for sure. The graphs I've seen tend to show the sharp drop off in demand well before Elop made his announcement, so I guess the writing was on the wall to some degree (sorry, I've no reference, but I guess AllAboutSymbian)...and I still think it is too soon to tell if it will work. Yes, I think Elop and the others still at Nokia would have preferred it turn around sooner, but I don't think it's done yet. The latest results, if you look closely, seem to suggest there could be a turn around happening. The first WP devices aren't so great when compared to the competition, but they're not at all bad if you take them for what they are and consider them as a beginning. IMO, the next ones will be the great ones - when WP8 comes (and Nokia can put back long-standing features that its customers have become used to, like bt file transfer, microsd support, and no need for a computer) and they get Pureview into such a device, then it'll be great.

I doubt I'll ever buy one though, but you never know. I used to hate McDonald's, but they've changed over the past few years and I'm happy to recognise that and go 'back' because of it. I hate Microsoft with a passion, but it's mostly history so perhaps I can forgive and forget there too. They'll have to open up a bit more than they're doing, I think...otherwise I might as well just settle for an iPhone.

When all you have is a Balmer

[stooo]

When all you have is a Balmer, all problems are solved by using MS products.

The answer

[strikethree]

Of course Nokia -could- save itself. Will it? I doubt it. The whole network connection/configuration stuff remained crappy and unintuitive for years. If that can not change, then they are incapable of taking a deep look, reassessing, and changing themselves. I really should be shorting Nokia stock. Sad.