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Nokia: Microsoft Must Evolve To Make Windows Phone a Success
DavidGilbert99 writes "Microsoft's priorities are Windows, Office, Xbox, and Surface. Windows Phone is no where near the top and that is the main reason why it has failed to make the impact many hoped for in the three years it has been around. While Microsoft can take the hit and play the long-game, the same cannot be said for Nokia, the other main player in the eco-system. While it has done all it can to evolve the platform, it needs Microsoft to step up and begin innovating. Bryan Biniak, Nokia VP, agrees: 'We are trying to evolve the cultural thinking [at Microsoft] to say 'time is of the essence.' Waiting until the end of your fiscal year when you need to close your targets, doesn't do us any good when I have phones to sell today.'"
If your company future depends on Microsoft innovating on your behalf ... you're already screwed.
I'm hard pressed to think of anything really innovative Microsoft has done in years -- mostly they look at what others are doing and copy it (or buy it).
If they're going to put out the Windows Phone platform and then wait around until people buy it to take it seriously, nobody is ever going to take it seriously.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Wasn't the reason to go with Microsoft that you could customize more(hence not need ms to greenlight api's) than, say, your own OS or android?
in Finland we have this saying ":D".
(Sure, for Nokia developing for windows phone is probably cheaper than the other platforms but that's just because "can't do it" is the line instead of "yes we can!").
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
What, at this late date, makes anyone think Microsoft is actually capable of evolving...?
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Well if Nokia financial situation becomes unbearable, I am sure microsoft can step up and buy her up, obviously at a discounted price. Which likely was the objective all along.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Microsoft OS: 90 bucks or whatever they're charging
Smaller ecosystem for apps
Compared to:
Larger ecosystem by orders of magnitude
An OS that doesn't cost a dime (unmodded)
Going with Microsoft on this is corporate suicide and the stock price chart shows it.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=NOK+Basic+Chart&t=5y
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/06/the-final-reckoning-of-burning-platforms-memo-damaged-nokia-by-wiping-out-13b-in-revenues-and-destro.html
--
BMO
Nokia cuts its own throat and now has no one else to blame. Elop will quietly move back the MS once they are done.
Exactly zero people will be surprised.
...you made a mistake by ditching symbian and focusing on Windows...hmmm.....
MS is spending most of their time putting out fires these days: Windows 8 has a horrible reputation and disappointing sales, Xbox has had to do a complete 180 after a disastrous E3, Surface has been a flop with an estimated 6M unsold units. WP8, while not having great sales, isn't in crisis mode.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Don't let MS buy them.
Be seeing you...
with the "Deal"
now we are on long term consequences, and everybody told you it is not a good idea to stick with !Win phone and nothing else.
One is a guy who used to teach MCSE classes. The other a grandma out at the community garden.
The MCSE guy won't say anything bad about MS, but he did ditch the windows phone and get an android one.
The grandma didn't know what she was purchasing, and is very disappointed that none of the things her daughter can do with her phone (iphone) can run on the windows phone.
Tiny sample size, but that is about all there is. Looking at the logs for the captive portal at work (10,000 students), windows phone doesn't even make up 1% of logins.
Its dead MS. Give it up.
As for Nokia, they are moribund too. Terrible management. Not sure anything can prevent Nokia from becoming a zombie patent troll now.
So the gist of this article is that Nokia is doing fantastic things with hardware, but Microsoft isn't keeping up and holding Nokia back. If Nokia had control of the OS, they'd be in much better shape. They would have this freedom with Android AND instant access to its software market. And Maemo/Meego was a fine OS (I owned the n800 and n900), which shipped with Android app compatibility. It's clear that Windows Phone was a horrible choice. How could they not see this coming when everyone was yelling at them telling them they were making a mistake?
Come on Nokia, are you that dumb (oh wait, you are) that you are actually telling Microsoft that if they don't hurry, you are going to go bust and they can buy what they want of you for loose chance?
The Windows Phone platform turns a lot of otherwise not so smart people into blittering idiots. Take this gem:
You can't compare Windows Phone sales to Android and iOS because it has only been on the market a fraction of the time.
The truth? Windows Phones is now the OLDEST smartphone OS now Symbian has gone the way of the Dodo. MS has been trying for WELL OVER a DECADE. Yes, they keep renaming it in an attempt to wash away the stench of defeat... actually defeat is not the right word, the would imply they stood chance, I can claim I was defeated in the 1 mile race but it sorta looses any meaning if I never made it across the starting line.
Nokia bet its future on an OS from a company that hasn't managed to sell for over ten years. Why would it chance NOW when there are to OSes selling like hotcakes and a bunch of upstarts and re-entries fighting for the scraps. It like betting on the boxer who knocked himself trying to get into the ring in the next round because the next fight is on top of mount everest and everyone is bringing guns so his losing streak is... is there ANYONE who can walk upright who thinks MS was a good bet for Nokia?
Symbian was not dead yet, the N900 and N9 sold faster then Nokia was willing to sell them and Android is available if they wanted it. They HAD OS'es with proven track records. They went for the OS that didn't sell and has never sold. That is beyond risk taking, that is even beyond putting it all on one horse, that is insane. Personally I think Elop is even more a Trojan then most people realize. MS never bet on Nokia, they wanted to ruin them while they experimented and then hope to buy the assests cheaply and make their own phones.
You can't mis-manage a company like this by accident.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
All Microsoft problems really indirectly boil down to one problem. They try to be a licensing company, rather than a technology solution company.
This is why google nailed them in both search and phone and now tablet. Even IBM got the message, and moved toward a Linux datacenter strategy.
I just amazes me to see all their "reforms" all their "restructuring" all their products that have been doomed to fail, and they still don't get it.
True, but Apple mostly improved upon the things they bought. Microsoft has a history of thinking "hmm, that's not quite right, it needs more cruft!".
No one consciously chooses a Microsoft [product|platform|environment] on it's merits alone. If it is chosen it is largely, if not entirely, because of external factors ,the dominant of which is market dominance. Microsoft have had a terrible history of being slow on the pivot with regard to changing markets. They are in actual peril and in fear of being bypassed by more agile competitors even those with their own problems of inertia.
I think Nokia needs to create programs that will make the windows phone attractive to buyers. The phone is truly amazing, but the price tag is high. Maybe Nokia can make a cheaper smartphone with more memory etc, and stop wasting it's time blaming others for it's own short sightedness.
A computer without programs to run on it is pretty useless. Some come built in, some are added after the fact, but they're all just computer programs. "Apps" are the entire point of having a smartphone. Having a good set of them available, both by default and as additional downloads one of the main reasons computer platforms succeed. People use Windows on desktops because it runs their programs. Macs and Linux are less popular, because the same programs aren't all available. People buy game consoles that have games, and don't buy the ones that don't have games available. People buy phones with a good set of usable apps, and don't buy the ones without. Calling them "apps" or "applications" or "programs" is just semantics.
Not a sentence!
Apple and the Android groups have one major advantage over Windows Phone: Each has a stunning amount of control over what they are releasing. HTC, Samsung, et al don't care what the market share of Android itself is so long as people want their phone. Not their OS, their device.
At the same time, the iOS and Android devices pay nothing per unit for the privelege of running their device on that platform. To develop your own flavor of android for your device is cheap and attainable. Drivers may be proprietary, but the chipmakers have nothing to lose by letting you use them. Even for iOS, Apple owns it and can install it as many times as they like without incurring additional cost. Microsoft, you can be sure, takes a different view. In fact, as of March, Nokia disclosed that for the remaining life of their existing Windows Phone contract, they have to pay Microsoft â500 million.I've got to admit that odds are, they'll come out in the black on this proposition in the end. But certainly with their pockets â500 million lighter than if they'd sold the same number of Android phones at the same price point. At â10 a license, that's 50 million units, and at â20 a license, that's 25 million units. If they sell only 10 million units, that's â50 per unit.
You don't get deep pockets by giving away unnecessary slices of your pie.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Did this guy just say that they "are standing on a burning platform"?
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
1: Ditch Microsoft before it's too late.
2: Buy QT back.
3: Buy Jolla and start making the phones your customers want.
Thanks, Kurt.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Ericsson worked with Verizon to create LTE which could operate with Verizon's legacy CDMA network. By working with the telecoms to create LTE, Ericsson is going to benefit from decades of contracts to provide support and equipment to telecoms worldwide in the adoption of LTE.
Nokia chose to anger the telecoms by backing WiMAX in an alliance with Intel, WiMAX being promoted as a technology that could disintermediate the major carriers. Considering 9/11, this was an EXTREMELY bad time to threaten the US telecoms. Think about it. Nokia did not get access to Intel's fabs. Unfortunately for Nokia, in 2008, it became clear that its fab partner, Texas Instruments, was bowing out of its alliance. One can follow the ugly story of the Nokia-Intel alliance here. By backing the wrong technology, WiMAX instead of LTE, Nokia went from owning the IP for the entire wireless stack to selling it all off. So now Nokia has to go to another party for its wireless chips, in particular, for the upcoming LTE.
Only Nokia was at the same time engaged in an IP battle with Qualcomm, its real mortal rival. Qualcomm possesses the IP for interoperability with CDMA, Verizon's network. And Nokia lost that battle, an unprecedented IP settlement to the tune of a massive instant payment of roughly $2.3 billion USD.
So Nokia by not developing an LTE chipset found itself at the mercy of its mortal enemy, a company that would have been glad to have seen Nokia disappear from the face of the Earth a few years ago, especially as Qualcomm's business of licensing IP could be threatened previously only by the likes of European Nokia. And Nokia made itself into the mortal enemy of the US telecoms by pushing for WiMAX in its alliance with Intel, in the decade following 9/11.
What could have possibly pushed Nokia into making such an alliance with Intel and such a technologically and politically mistaken decision of pursuing WiMAX? I speculate it was all due to a fateful decision by the previous Nokia leadership to (badly) follow the advice of a fellow Finn, none other than Linus Torvalds . (And yes I get the irony that Torvalds was at one time working for a competitor to Intel, that's why Nokia's leadership clearly followed his advice horrendously.) "But it had a "Plan B", and had been considering it for years. In 2002, I'm told, Linus Torvalds convinced Nokia to create a Linux unit."
Cannot charge up via usb, and have to use a proprietary 2mm nokia charger (generic ones do not work)
non-standard 2.5 mm audio jack, so you cannot use any cheap, generic 3.5mm earphones ones off the shelf without an adaptor
microphone that wasn't soldered on (!), so it detaches and nobody can hear you and you have to resort to hands free
flaky wi-fi that constantly drops signal
flaky bluetooth that works depending on which way the wind is blowing, and what day of the week it is
slow and unresponsive at times
I also had a 'flagship' N97 for a while, OMFG what a piece of shit that thing was, I won't even go into all the issues THAT thing had.
Then you had the N8, yet another 'flagship' product with serious issues...
Nokia *cannot* make smartphones for toffee, coupled with an epic fail of a mobile platform in winders 8, after leaving symbian and meego users high and dry, they are on a flaming failtrain of a downward spiral. I won't go anywhere near ANY of their products ever again. It's really no surprise they are doing so badly in the smartphone marketplace.
-- Fuck Beta
It should offend anyone who follows tech if a company that had been a world leader for decades would listen to the bean counters and stop investing in a core technology which constituted a major part of that company's identity. That's exactly the sort of irresponsible and short-sighted decision-making that should be denounced forever for what it is, simply evil.
Well Nokia pre-Elop did exactly that. Nokia chose to disinvest from the wireless modem business, going from a position where they owned the IP for the entire hardware stack to simply selling it off.
And this was at a time when everyone else was starting to rush INTO the development of LTE chipsets not sell off the entire unit BEFORE the company was seriously tanking.
Incomprehensible and evil.