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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."
After all, that was their core competency.
yes, it can. ditch winphone/maemo/meego/symbian release a good android phone, and a series of ME TOO cheap android phones. profit.
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.
Short Answer:
No.
Long Answer:
Nooooooooooooooo.
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.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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..
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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...
"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.
Question for religious people: where do unrepentant masochists go when they die?
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(
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.
Create Android phones. They have fantastic engineering talent that is being wasted by a dead platform.
When all you have is a hammer, all problems are solved by using MS products.
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
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.
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.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
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.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
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.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
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.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
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.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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.
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.
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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?
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.
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.
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!