Slashdot Mirror
Nokia Insider On Why It Failed and Why Apple Could Be Next
An anonymous reader writes "The former chief designer of Nokia explains how the company's success and its corporate culture stopped it from taking risks and left it open to being beaten by Apple. He now sees the same warning signs emerging at Apple. Quoting: 'I look back and I think Nokia was just a very big company that started to maintain its position more than innovate for new opportunities. All of the opportunities were in front of them and Nokia was working on them, but the key word is a sense of urgency. While things were in play there was a real sense of saying "we will get to that eventually."' He worries Apple is now in a similar place: 'Nokia became more of a maintainer, more of an iterator, whereas innovation only comes in re-invention and Nokia waited too long to make the next big bold move ... that is now Apple’s challenge. Apple has arrived at a very safe place, it is responsible for something everybody loves, so it feels it has to keep it going.'"
Oddly enough, this comes alongside news that a different former insider, Thomas Zilliacus (who was Nokia’s former Asia-Pacific CEO), has founded a company called "Newkia" in the wake of Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia. His goal is to take on former Nokia engineers and set them to building phones again — this time, running Android.
Nope, Nokia wasn't defeated from the outside, it committed suicide.
Getting Balmer to cough up 7B for this iterator didn't seem like failure if you ask me. Not to mention they still keep some IP to themselves.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
A guy discusses how Nokia totally drops the ball and then link baits it by adding Apple? And, let's be very serious here - there is no similarity between Apple now and Nokia before their fall - Apple is still releasing innovative products with several new innovations obviously on the very immediate horizon). While they may not reinvent an entire market every year, they are most certainly not sitting on their hands doing nothing. Nokia, by contrast, fell from grace because they didn't change at all when the market around them underwent a massive shift in direction. Anyone who thinks Apple would succumb to a similar failure is either INCREDIBLY anti-Apple and wants to hate on them any chance they get or they are completely out of touch with reality.
Or they are adding "Apple" to a blog post to link bait.
Imagine a game where you can choose between two options:
A - Try to move up: 1/5 you move up. 4/5 times you go down.
B - Try to stay: 3/5 you stay. 2/5 you move down.
In such a game, to place yourself in front, a good strategy is to try to move up until you reach a certain point where you're the first and then stay there, forcing everyone else to risk moving up.
There's a limited amount of people with a limited amount of money. It's not important how far ahead you are but whether you're the first one.
Assume the strategy is good and accept the times you move down as natural and only push when you're behind. Don't judge the strategy for the times where you move down.
"take on former Nokia engineers and set them to building phones again — this time, running Android"
Nokia needed to innovate, and an example of this is to build the same phone everyone else is? Good luck with that.
My sister got a newkia after her old car was totalled. Personally I wouldn't be caught dead driving one.
"...the key word is a sense of urgency."
Apple's development pace has always been glacial, but since 2012 it seems to have slowed even more. Samsung's new watch shows what can go wrong when you rush a product, but there is a happy medium between those two extremes. I'm hopeful Apple's recent comatose posture stems more from management shuffle than a fundamental limitation on capability or worse, a deliberate choice.
Getting Balmer to cough up 7B for this iterator didn't seem like failure if you ask me.
When Nokia's market cap was $245 Billion circa 10 years ago and as high as $150 Billion as recently as 2007 then that counts as a HUGE failure.
Apple, under Jobs, definitely didn't suffer from a risk-averse willingness to uncreative iteration (How many more incremental generations of the bestselling-product-ever iPod Mini could they have squeezed out when Jobs basically said 'Hard drives make me sick, fuck the Mini and go build me a Nano, I don't care if it actually reduces storage capacity until you get to the higher-end model a generation later."? However, Apple also (mostly, the 'why not make the shuffle a featureless rectangle for no reason, even though we had a version that was only slightly larger and incorporated the iconic control-wheel design?' was not a clever move) had the virtue of having a good idea waiting in the wings when they exercised their willingness to take an already-successful product out and shoot it.
That's possibly the even trickier part: there are very strong incentives to be a conservative, risk-averse, iterator when you are on top, so people tend to do so; but there's also a well-developed literature on 'just sitting around and milking your cash cow is how you get eaten by hungry upstarts'. Trouble is, unless you actually have lots of good ideas, like those hungry upstarts just outside the gates, staring at you, doing some cargo-cult management and killing random cash cows won't actually save you, just reduce the amount of delicious cash-milk you get to collect before you die.
You don't want conservatism to crib-death the upstart ideas that could genuinely save you from succumbing to old age and laziness; but you also want to be careful to recognize that, if you are in fact ossified and uncreative, that milking the situation for all it's worth and then cashing out gracefully beats the hell out of increasingly desperate flailing as you bleed out.
I'm due for a phone upgrade soon, and I'm currently looking at whatever mid-range Android phone is the best value for money.
I have a good job, but I'm simply not willing to spend 40GBP a month on an iPhone (plus 200 upfront costs) when a 20 a month Android phone will let me make calls and check Facebook just as well.
If the iPhone 5C exists and is competitively priced, then maybe Apple will get back in the game, but at the moment, they're stumbling in the smartphone market.
Summation 2
All companies can become complacent based on past success and fail to acknowledge new technologies or a shifting customer base or anticipate future needs. This is further complicated by new technologies that change the business model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma . It introduced me to the concept of the S curve in terms of the innovation life cycle and it has great examples of how disruptive innovation can negatively affect a business that's at the top of their game when they fail to adapt to the change.
There's a lot of companies that were once industry leaders such as Sears that were models of management and efficiency but they're now husks of what they once were. Nokia fits that pattern as would Microsoft because of their lack of either not fully embracing new technologies or being a trailing influence in others that negatively impact their PC based core.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
"Apple has arrived at a very safe place, it is responsible for something everybody loves, so it feels it has to keep it going."
Not quite. Apple is responsible for something many people love. Not me. I much prefer the features of Android to the point that I wouldn't consider an iPhone. iOS is an inferior product for functionality (specifically, customizability of the user interface) and it doesn't play well with non-Apple software and has excessively restrictive controls on what the user can do with their device. I have other issues with Google (their data use policies). There's room in my mind and wallet for a new player with better for the customer data use policies and an Android-like feature set.
To summarize: if you're not selling the next big thing in the next product cycle - no matter how big you are, and Apple is literally the biggest - then you will face certain doom.
Frankly that sounds like all kinds of ridiculous. I don't particularly like Apple, but I don't sense any sort of stagnation, they have a fairy wide portfolio of products, and have they committed any serious foibles in recent history. They could afford not coming up with the next two big things and still not suffer mightily. Some might point at Microsoft, Nokia and Blackberry as cautionary tales of not innovating. To which I would respond: Microsoft's current ills can be largely attributed not to not innovating, but to half-assed innovation at the expense of its core businesses (while if it had stayed boring it wouldn't presently be undergoing so much restructuring); Nokia was and is largely a phone maker which did not diversify enough when it had a chance while also making a wrong bet on the future of phones, while Blackberry, ah... Blackberry is a monkey in the time of chimpanzees.
...but Apple is responsible for the Android you know and love. (Personally, I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole, given Google's involvement, but each to their own). If it weren't for Apple you'd be using a Blackberry rip-off instead.
IMHO, the secret to Apple's success is disruptive technologies and products. From the Apple II (and Visicalc), to the Mac, to the iMac (in a way), to the iPod and iTunes, to the iPhone, possibly to the iPad. These products all were designed to throw a wrench into the hulking giant business models. Nokia never had any of that. That said, Apple needs to keep trying to disrupt the "way things have always been done" and at the same time they need to keep copycats from ripping off their ideas. I'm just wondering if the whole notion of the iWatch is a brilliant misdirection to tie up Samsung and send them down a path Apple has no intention of pursuing.
The beginning of the end for Nokia happened around 2004, when UMTS arrived in Europe, and Nokia made an intentional business decision to not support EDGE, and to basically walk away from CDMA as well (even though at that point, probably half the phones sold by Verizon and Sprint were Nokia, as well as the majority of high-end phones sold by AT&T and T-Mobile).
As a result, their phones became useless paperweights in the US as far as anybody who ever used data was concerned. EDGE wasn't exactly "high speed", but compared to GPRS, EDGE is just "annoyingly slow" compared to "uselessly slow". Circa 2005-2008, EDGE was the best that existed in most of the US anyway... T-Mobile hadn't even started deploying HSPA yet, and AT&T's HSPA data existed in maybe two dozen cities.
Nokia presumably wrote off the US market because, in terms of total unit sales, it was roughly equal to Portugal or Switzerland. What they overlooked was the importance of mindshare... half the world's tech blogs and web sites are American, and as far as anyone in America was concerned, by ~2007 Nokia had effectively ceased to exist. At best, they were a company that used to be popular, and now just made throw-away low-end phones sold to people in remote African villages.
Other companies learned their lesson. Today, companies like Sony-Ericsson are working as hard as they can to break their Qualcomm addiction(*), and make a point of getting their phones into the hands of American reviewers who live in cities where T-Mobile has good HSPA+ coverage.
(*) Qualcomm insists on licensing LTE radio firmware to carriers rather than manufacturers, which means it's basically impossible for a manufacturer to sell phones capable of using LTE on AT&T or T-Mobile without the active involvement of AT&T or T-Mobile, and de-facto impossible to sell a phone built with a Qualcomm LTE chipset that's carrier-agnostic and capable of doing LTE on both AT&T and T-Mobile.
It's technically possible to use a separate non-Qualcomm chipset (like Beceem's) for LTE, but the price premium is fairly stiff (about $100, by the time the phone gets to retail stores). That's why companies like Sony-Ericsson (who desperately want to break the stranglehold American carriers have over the American phone market as gatekeepers with economic -- or in the case of Verizon & Sprint, real -- veto power) have eagerly embraced chipsets like the Renesas MP5232 and MP6530, which will enable them to make phones capable of doing LTE on AT&T and T-Mobile, and break the "LTE Lock-In" AT&T in particular has been working overtime to exploit as a way of making their nominally-GSM network into one that's as de-facto proprietary as Verizon's.
Apple stole their iphone design from Sony, proved in the court of law by Apple's own evidence and having Sony blueprints. Apple's iOS is based on BSD with an very dumb UI, nothing new there, it's kiosk level functionality and existed for decades. Apple's store is nothing more than a copy of a BSD or Linux distro's repository which have been around since the mid 90s.
So what exactly did Apple create when their entire product line is just repackaging existing products, software and off the shelf components made by other companies. Even the Mac is just a crippled PC clone these days.
Is selling your company for billions of dollars considered failure? I'd love to cash out at 1% of that and enjoy the rest of my life.
In mid-2006 Apple appeared to be in much the same position they are now. A number of years previously they had introduced a product (ipod) that revolutionized its market then spent the years tweaking the form factor, case materials, adding colors and incrementally improving features (playback of video).
Then came rumors that they had been working on another new product. And in 2007 they redefined another market with the iPhone. It took even less time for them to introduce the ipad. So just because Apple has spent the last six years tweaking the form factors, improving the screens and adding colors to the iPhone is no reason to conclude that their behavior demonstrates they have stopped looking to truly new products.
Whether they will succeed at reshaping the "wearables" or TV markets is a separate question, but the data to dismiss them as stagnant just isn't there.
Fair enough statement.... but oddly enough, as long as I've been into computers and I.T.? I still vastly prefer my iPhone to any of the Android devices I've tried using in its place.
To address your points specifically?
Customization of the UI is something I don't necessarily consider "inferior", simply because what's provided doesn't allow as much modification. The REAL question is how much you like what they give you initially. (To use the way popular "car analogy" on Slashdot once again? With very FEW exceptions, vehicle dashboards are not user-configurable at all. Many accepted standards have been kept to, such as placing a speedometer someplace more or less directly above the steering column, and placing a fuel gauge just to the left of it. Several items like a tachometer are absent or present, depending on the particular vehicle's design, but you'll always find an odometer in about the same place, turn signal indicator arrows done a similar way, etc. etc. This arrangement works quite well, and most people don't feel a pressing need to rearrange it. If you asked most drivers about preferences for the dash, they'd talk mainly about the styling details ... whether they preferred chrome rings around the gauges, or if they liked the gauge needles to be white instead of red.) That's how I view the iPhone. You can still pick custom "wallpapers" to change up the look a bit, and you have control over arrangement of the icons on multiple screens. Without jailbreaking and using unsupported hacks, no ... you can't "go crazy" with it, radically changing the UI. But that also means businesses writing instructions for configuring the phones can safely write them ONE time, based on a single sample iPhone, and the instructions will make sense for pretty much all iPhone users. It means someone who mastered his/her iPhone can easily share knowledge with any other iPhone user. So the ONLY valid benefit I see to all the customizing possible on Android is if you really dislike what Apple has done with iOS and find the UI unworkable/frustrating enough that you need a totally different design. Again, fine if that's you. But iOS works great for many millions of satisfied users every day.
Not quite sure what "non Apple software" you're upset the iPhone "won't play well" with? It supports the latest Bluetooth connectivity standards, so in that regard, links up with all manner of non-Apple branded devices just fine. Yes, it's designed around Apple's iTunes as the preferred "central management hub" for placing media on it. But 3rd. party alternatives exist too, including programs that will let you download music FROM your iPhone to save onto a computer, instead of Apple's default "one way" setup where content only syncs TO the phone. Overall, I find I use smartphones as essentially "stand alone" devices anyway, once I have them initially configured. There's only so much outside software it needs to work with?
Nokia's decline began over a decade ago. It started when they got focused on phones as a fashion accessory you're supposed to replace every 6 months. The wanted to be the Swatch Watch of phones, a comparison I recall hearing at the time. While others were envisioning of smartphones Nokia was banking on phones turning into a disposable commodity. This was less evident in the US because they were already losing a foothold here. But I was overseas and Nokia was releasing some truly wacky designs; one of the more ridiculous implementations being the Nokia 7380.
So when they finally realized they were losing ground they finally jumped into the smartphone space. Except that they embraced technological dead ends in Symbian and Meego. I'm not suggesting that they're bad OS's at all, but Nokia simply didn't have the resources to make them a viable competitor to Android or iOS. And honestly, I don't think Nokia has ever really had the capability to create a proper OS experience anyway. Their mobile software interfaces have always been incredibly clunky, something that wasn't evident back when all they offered was a keypad and calculator-style display.
Now here comes this guy who's big idea is to create an Android also-ran. There's already a massive amount of competition for Android, what makes this guy think he's implementation is going to make any sort of impact. You've got the market leader in Samsung. Second to them is HTC, who's continued success seems largely dependent on whether they're able to produce a popular phone but generally continue losing money. Then you've got the multitude of other companies, the more prominent of those being LG, Sony and Xiaomi. But here comes this guy offering what many others already offer in the form of a company that's Nokia, but not really. It's ironic that he's talking about risks given his business model.
yeah -- and I for one stick to Apple becauseI have no need to waste time fucking about with my phone's UI and the fact that most vendors lock you to a specific OS release, leaving it up to the user to go about figuring out how to get in and update the OS by themselves.
So hey -- you might get a big stiffy for all that "hands on uber-geekness", I for one just want a smart phone that works well, gets regular OS updates and where I don't have to suspect each and every app of being a trojan.
There is someone trying to be that third player -- Canonical.
Lots of people have recently taken on more negative views of them because Upstart, Mir, Unity and also the Amazon stuff. Should they succeed, there's no reason to think you couldn't mod the crap out of an Ubuntu phone or slap on your own distro unless the heavy lifting is done via blobs I guess.
Clearly he doesn't _mean_ 'everybody loves', but he has to be suitably deferential to what Apple has achieved in order to score funds from people who admire Apple so much they want to beat it.
Okay, listen. I know it's popular to bang the 'Apple is failing to Innovate' drum, but it's STILL NOT TRUE.
The problem is that people are compressing the last decade of work into a much smaller space than it deserves. Apple doesn't release huge, blockbuster game-changing products every year. Not even every couple of years. It's MANY years between cycles. The time between the iPod and the iPhone was a long time. The iTunes music store was its own special story. Yeah, the iPhone has sort of settled into a pattern, but it's still a very good phone.
People are looking to Apple to change the PHONE industry again, and they probably won't. They changed the music player industry ONCE, and iterated on that until it wasn't relevant anymore. Apple will continue to make a good phone--even a GREAT phone--but they probably won't ever really be the industry leader again.
Apple will find a new market to disrupt. It's easier than trying to disrupt the market you're entrenched in. Is the next thing a watch? Maybe iWatch refers to a TV (that would be a big surprise, wouldn't it--it's the sort of misdirection that I would expect from them). In all likelihood, it's something that people won't be able to predict, just like the iPhone was.
Stop asking Apple to a) really, truly innovate faster than they have before; and b) ask them to innovate in a space that they're already making money in. That's not the way they've ever worked.
they are in Jolla, helping bring back meego with sailfish OS.
Not me.
Everyone who counts loves Apple.
To be fair, the Republicans would have just gone and bombed Syria already.
Consequences be damned.
Like Russia vowing to help Syria if they're attacked.
Or most of our embassies being attacked in the middle east.
Nokia went with devices like the Communicator, which opened out to give a big screen for web browsing with a computer style keyboard, with much of their pre-iPhone touch screen developments still on the drawing board when Apple pounced.
That makes it sound like Nokia's Communicator only failed because it missed the "next big thing'" of touchscreen. The real reason they failed was because they were awful phones. Even without the touchscreen iPhone around to compare to, they were terrible. Slow, buggy, poor UI, heavy, bad hardware design.
Nokia may have lacked courage and vision, but they also lacked technical ability.
As often happens in businesses that have 'missed the boat' on a marketplace change, a new leader comes in an decides to shake things up. By definition, they know little about the company's history and relative strengths - they just see the weaknesses and feel that change is what they were hired for. And naturally, lacking some vital info, the tendency is to 'go with the Microsoft playbook' and reap the glory when Microsoft is proven right. And with Elop's past history with Microsoft, that approach was a given.
Except that Microsoft's playbook itself is in 'missed the boat' territory, and those 'bold and brilliant' managers that play that game don't seem to have figured that out. And of course, the money guys on the boards are completely clueless, so the game goes on.
There was no reason Nokia couldn't have succeeded with Android. Their strengths are in hardware, industrial design and a large, relatively loyal customer base. That customer base is currently providing what little success Nokia's having with their Lumia line - and it took the low end versions of that line to do it. I.e., those customers didn't want Windows Phone - they wanted a cheap, attractive Nokia phone. They could have had that two years earlier with Android, and they could've done it without fighting the battle of the missing apps. In short, they could've been the Samsung of Europe. They could've even done it while testing the waters with Windows Phones.
But you don't get to be touted in the business press as 'bold and brilliant' by hedging your bets. And you don't get to be rehired by Microsoft and short-listed for the CEO slot without that 'bet the shop on MS' attitude.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
The summary is missing what we can see from the outside - Nokia had plenty of "skunk works" projects going on which could be seen from the outside even if the former chief designer wants to pretend they could not be seen from the inside. I'm hoping that it's misquoting him and he's not just trying to sweep under the carpet that he starved some successful projects that spawned products which sold well on nothing but word of mouth.
I agree with that. I think the way to achieve this is to fork Android and distribute it without so many Google apps installed by default. The challenge is, what you are going to replace those apps with.
The customers still need to be able to download applications onto their phone, including those well known Google apps, to the extent they want those apps. I think Google Play is by far the largest app store for Android, so it would make sense to still have Google Play installed by default for those customers who want to download applications through that.
That leaves one question open, to which I don't know the answer. Can you use the Google Play appstore on an Android phone without needing low level services throughout the system, which communicates with Google?
I'd also like to see a bit more openness by default. Though Android is open compared to some other phone platforms, Android appears quite closed compared to other Linux distributions. If you buy a piece of hardware, you should have access to a root shell on it by default, no exceptions.
I'd also like to see users get more control over installed applications. First of all the set of permissions an app gets shouldn't automatically be whatever the developer decides to ask for. The user need to be able to decide for themselves, what they will permit an app to do. Ideally this is done in a way where the permission can be faked such that it is impossible to write an app which fails in case of the absence of a permission. For example if the app wants network access, but the user doesn't want to grant it, the app might not be able to tell the difference between lack permission or lack of coverage. Or if an app wants to send SMS messages, the user could be promted with a question where they can decide what happens to the SMS, for example send it, store it, or discard it.
Another important feature is the ability to downgrade an app. Getting updates that fixes bugs is great. New features are usually also nice. But occasionally updates introduce new bugs or simply change the app in ways that serves the interests of the developer but not the user. In such circumstances the user should be able to downgrade. Without the ability to downgrade at will, every update implies the risk of never being able to use that app the way you used to. This risk means keeping all your software updated is no longer a sound piece of advice.
Those two features could perhaps be done at a layer below the app store. If they could, then installing multiple app stores on the phone by default would make a lot of sense.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
"To be fair, the Republicans would have just gone and bombed Syria already."
Bullshit. The only idiots suppporting this are RINO dickwads, progresives and shit for brains morons like you slashdot Obama loving shitbirds.
Go fuck yourself.
LOL
"specifically, customizability of the user interface"
If that's your best defense of a superior product, perhaps you might see that most people don't want to fuck around with the user interface and just want a good one that works consistently & reliably. iOS isn't perfect, but it's more consistent & reliable than any Android skin.
Or they just want cheap. Until they see that there's a reason it's cheap.
Imagine a game where you can choose between two options:
A - Try to move up: 1/5 you move up. 4/5 times you go down.
B - Try to stay: 3/5 you stay. 2/5 you move down.
In such a game, to place yourself in front, a good strategy is to try to move up until you reach a certain point where you're the first and then stay there, forcing everyone else to risk moving up.
If the "up" and "down" motions are equal in magnitude, then you lose 0.6 per turn in strategy A, and 0.4 per turn in strategy B. Clearly strategy "A" is the optimum one to maximize your return: to place yourself in front you chose strategy A, and gain the front position because every player who doesn't goes down faster than you do.
There's a limited amount of people with a limited amount of money. It's not important how far ahead you are but whether you're the first one.
OK, now it gets more interesting. Say that there are N players, only one can win, and you want to optimize the chance of winning after K moves. Now everybody is sliding down, but you can take a gamble on strategy A. It's a losing bet, on the average, but if you're already losing, the incremental cost is zero. So you take strategy A if and only if you're behind.
The limited amount of money changes the game slightly: now there is an absorbing boundary condition at the bottom-- e.g., you go bankrupt (and thus can take no more moves) when you hit a score of, say, -10. (Of course, the game is set so everybody goes bankrupt if you play long enough, so this is only interesting if the game stops after K plays.) This penalized risk taking even more, and pushes you toward strategy B, holding back, and letting all the people fighting for first with Strategy A go bankrupt.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Listen to you equivocating asswipes.
Wait, wait, wait...
Kerry's new defense for action in Syria is that if we DON'T intervene, MORE extremists will be attracted to the cause.
LOLWUT?!
Old and Busted: Intervention Incites Extremism
New Hotness: Nonintervention Incites Extremism
BEYOND. PARODY.
> "The former chief designer of Nokia explains how the company's success and its corporate culture stopped it from taking risks" [...]
Adopting a Windows-only strategy wasn't taking a risk? Well, hmm. Maybe not. It practically guarantees single digit adoption. But I can't believe that this was Nokia's goal.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Not aiming high and taking risks is equivalent to staying the course, and is itself a risk that is often misunderstood.
If it's pronounced like I'm pronouncing it, they should make hydrogen bombs.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
iOS is an inferior product for functionality (specifically, customizability of the user interface).
But it is superior in its performance (specifically, non garbage-collected compiled code and GPU optimizations)
Was Delphi licenses :D
I knew a guy in the past 5 years who was learning Delphi as a C++ programmer because the project he was working on was written in it :)
They needed to apply their hardware engineers to creating an Android phone, and their software engineers to making a nice Android release for it.
Only one company (Samsung) is making significant profits selling hardware running Android. Nokia *might* succeed but the odds would be pretty long against them. Furthermore if they threw their hat into the Android camp they lose the most important factor in making a differentiated product. What makes the iPhone different is (mostly) the software. You could put android on iPhone hardware but then Apple's profit margins would shrink faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit". If you do not have a differentiated product you are by definition competing on price. I have to say Nokia probably took the best route available to them even though it hasn't worked out very well thus far. Throwing in with Microsoft wasn't a spectacular option but producing another me-too Android phone wasn't an attractive option either.
Who wouldn't like a hot-shit Android phone with the indestructability of a Nokia?
Explain to me how Nokia is going to fix the problem of shattered screens when no one else can. Nokia hardware was mostly fine but it's reputation for "indestructibility" is rather overstated. I used various Nokia phones exclusively for about 10 straight years. Their hardware was decent. Nothing that blew me away but mostly competently built. Their software sucked big time. Nokia was never good at software. Their interfaces were horrid and the compatibility with other devices (like PCs) was so bad as to be useless. If Nokia had any competence in interface design they did a very good job of hiding it.
Nokia was also one of the worst offenders when it came to feature checklist engineering. They would build in say a web browser or calendar so they could say they had one but it would be so bad as to be useless. Now they were hardly the only ones doing this pre-iphone/android but they certainly didn't extend any effort to make their phones actually usable for much besides phone calls.
I would have opted for the name "Yeskia"
The voice of the (bad) experience is not always a good advise.
As related to Microsoft, it's not like they've stagnated for a long time and then pop out the Windows Phone 7 and 8. They've a mobile OS on a smart phone since 2002 with CE/WinMobile (iPhone is out @ 2007). I'm sure there are plenty of people here checked and/or used them and their successor versions. People who touched those devices will tell you it sucks big time - slow, non-responsive, clunky. Even in 2006 phones/smartphones in that era cost $300 were the pricey ones. My take is: not that MS didn't innovate - just like Nokia, they simply didn't 'get it'. Come up with an idea that people actually wanted to use. $699 for a phone in 2007? Who would have guessed, and I'll bet Apple probably projected sales only be just like any other Apple products - niche, but it didn't turn out that way.
Newkia
Will be sued for the too similiar name in ... 3 ... 2 ... 1
I'm tired of hearing Apple has lost its innovative edge. Whenever that statement is made by someone, it immediately reveals their lack of knowledge about the company. When Steve Jobs was alive, Apple ranged between 3 and 7 years between new device categories. Here we are 3yrs and 5 months since the release of the iPad and people are crying that Apple can't come up with something new. We are at the low end of the range, so enough with the uninformed analysis already and lets see what comes out end of this year and through 2014! I'd also be rich if I had a dollar for every nut who said Apple was going to fail...been hearing that line since the 1990s.
My experience with most of the people who are more up in arms about what technology they own instead of what they're doing with the technology they own are that they're n00bs and the few that have technical skills are one-trick-ponies. Most of them think they're "geek" because they can root a phone. None of them have the skills to modify the source code so the device being open source to them means nothing. A few little neat hints for anyone who's never watches/read a tutorial about their phone and suddenly everyone thinks they're magic men.
It's like going up to the average Windows user and showing them Win-E, Win-D and Win-L. All of the sudden these people think you're some kind of Windows guru. That's how most of these fanboys come off to me. Ask them to do something creative or productive and you'll hear the crickets.
not only is apple's R&D growing, Apple's capital expenses are in the billions of $$$ every year.
None of which is a guarantee of future profits. Dollars invested in R&D do not have a guaranteed return on investment. Same with capital expenditures in many cases.
"Apple has arrived at a very safe place, it is responsible for something everybody loves, so it feels it has to keep it going."
Not quite. Apple is responsible for something many people love. Not me. I much prefer the features of Android to the point that I wouldn't consider an iPhone. iOS is an inferior product for functionality (specifically, customizability of the user interface) and it doesn't play well with non-Apple software and has excessively restrictive controls on what the user can do with their device. I have other issues with Google (their data use policies). There's room in my mind and wallet for a new player with better for the customer data use policies and an Android-like feature set.
Yeah its called BlackBerry.
Visit my Forums?
I guess the open-source experiment at Nokia was a failure. No money to be made. Programmers working on these open source software at Nokia thought they were the best and brightest people out there. Hahahahaha. Well, the truth is - they weren't. They were full of hubris.
Total worldwide sales is what I'm writing about. Challenge that with a number instead of a bit of misdirection. Cozy vendor deals with monopoly networks in portions of the US don't mean shit when compared with global sales.
There's a long recent history of Nokia management monkeying around with things, and infighting between the departments (for example, the Symbian folks successfully grabbed projects away from the Maemo folks and otherwise inhibited Nokia's attempts at developing any more future-proof alternatives). And it seems pretty obvious (was fairly obvious at the time, and is blindingly obvious now) that the Board hired Elop to prep for a Microsoft sale. At every level of management, it was just politics and a complete lack of faith in the engineering abilities down below.
I'm not guaranteeing that it would've all worked out fine without management interference, but both the scope and malignancy of the bureaucracy within Nokia is fairly well known at this point. And, in the rare cases when individual engineers would actually get a chance to directly contribute to something, it very often turned out quite well. Felipe Contreras, for example, a device adaptation engineer, thought that the N9 would benefit from a gesture where swiping down from the top would close an app. This fit really well with the N9/Harmattan swipe motif, but he couldn't convince the project management to assign it to be programmed in, so he just went and learned the language the UI/UX bits were written in, wrote it himself, and managed to get it silently included in the version that shipped with the N9. You had to know to add a config file in the right place with the right text in it. With the first update released, however, that gesture was enabled by default. With the UI/UX the way it is, swiping down to close something just makes intuitive sense and feels right, and it was just one engineer not even working directly on that part of the device that made it happen, and only really in that weird moment of Nokia's history when people found themselves working on a flagship device that management was now saying was no longer their flagship.
How many other ideas and features were strangled in their cribs by management? How many useless and misguided goals were set by that same management, monopolizing the time that entire departments had for things that any engineer on the ground could have told management was pointless? Certainly, I think, it was a primary reason for Nokia's inability to keep up.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
LG made $54 million on phones in the last quarter. That sounds pretty significant.
Samsung took 95% of all Android profits in 2013. That is $5.1 Billion out of total profits of $5.3 Billion. So yeah, $54 million is quite insignificant. LG's share of the profit is 2.5%. Everyone else combined made 2.7%. And somehow we are supposed to believe that Nokia somehow is going to displace Samsung from the top of the Android market segment? VERY doubtful.
Right. Everybody who counts fucks the cheerleaders.
What the hell has happened to Slashdot?
I was with you until the end. I think you're going a bit too conspiracy here, since the real 'conspiracy' is fairly prosaic and obvious. The Board hired Elop, the Microsoft veteran, to shape Nokia's phones and devices section into something Microsoft would want to buy . . . just another example in what you've enumerated about with upper management's misuse of Nokia as a personal piggy bank. They see the writing on the wall (of their own making, and they know they aren't going to change how they run it) and figure the best thing to do is hire Elop and aim for one last big payout.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
I work for a company that's a major supplier to Nokia (and RIM) and Nokia and RIM both suffered from the same problems: they got stars in their eyes over the potential number of handsets in the BRIC countries and they both firmly believed that their market positions were unassailable. We spent YEARS trying to convince the both of them that they'd lost the fox and that Apple was a serious problem for them, but neither wanted to listen.
Nokia, in particular, knew better than anyone else and wouldn't even entertain the idea that the mobile world was changing. (RIM got the message but WAAAY too late.) It wasn't that Nokia couldn't innovate, their product line is littered with really innovative handsets, it's that they had no real idea what people wanted in a smart phone and they still don't. Think about it: Nokia never really had a commercially successful smart phone. (Which isn't to say they didn't have some cool phones.)
To some degree this was a problem driven out of Finland. I know plenty of US based Nokia engineers who agreed privately with us but couldn't get traction at the home office. They ignored BlackBerry until it was obvious that they'd missed the boat and then they were late to market with a bunch of poorly integrated 'me too' products. They did the same thing with Apple. They stuck with the utterly useless Symbian long after it was apparent there was no chance for it ever to gain market traction. Then they got in bed with Microsoft.
Nokia's problem wasn't innovation (or lack thereof); they had plenty of that. Nokia's problems were bad management, the premature idea that the BRIC countries made what was happening in the US irrelevant, and a refusal to even consider that they didn't understand the smart phone market. In short: classic success failure.
As you say, it represents what people are willing to pay for the shares, but that value is based off guesses at what other people will pay for them, not on the state of the company itself.
Market cap is the latest sale price of the stock multiplied by the number of shares outstanding. It is a measure of what it would cost you to buy all the shares outstanding at the current market price for those shares. If anything market cap *understates* what it would actually cost to buy the company. Most acquisitions are at a premium to the current market cap.
Stocks are like trading cards, once they are out there they are generally only worth what other collectors will pay for them.
Everything is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Market cap is a fairly reliable proxy for what the current purchase price of the company would actually be. To buy a company you have to buy the stock. On a publicly traded company the price of that stock is a known quantity. You can make an offer for less but very few shareholders are likely to accept less than they can get on the open market.
Apple has stalled innovation.
The innovation for the next iPhone is - get this - purty colors. A colored phone which most iPhone users are immediately going to hide inside a custom case. I was hoping for a 1080p 5" screen option, IR blaster, 2GB RAM, and now that Steve Jobs is gone, an SD/microSD slot and perhaps even a user-replaceable/upgradable battery. Nope, the great innovation is colors, and possibly maybe a fingerprint reader. No NFC, no IR blaster, barely-better task and memory management, same crappy low-resolution hugeass-pixel screen. I know, it's just "rumors" at this point but past leaks have been pretty darn accurate in the past.
About three weeks ago I thought fuck it, I'm switching to Android and picked up a Galaxy S4 that day, and between Samsung Kies and Google, I was able to move over most of my data, including my playlists. I haven't been disappointed - all I miss, really, is Plants vs. Zombies 2, so I am keeping my iPhone 4 for the few games I can't find on the Google Play marketplace, and the videos I've purchased.
I might go back to the iPhone in the future, but Apple needs to seriously upgrade the iPhone to catch up with their competitors.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
They were the cutting edge for a long time and were making smartphones long before Android/Iphone were just wet dreams. The N95 had a 5MP camera, GPS and Acceleromter way before anyone else. Everyone wanted it. They got in bed with MS and got owned just like everyone else who has ever done business with microsoft. Nokia will never be what they were and they have nobody to blame for it but themselves. Another notch in the M$ bedpost.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Just because Apple isn't telling everyone what they are doing does not mean it isn't "innovating". Apple really hasn't ever come out with anything radically new in the first place. The iPod was just a amazingly better version of the MP3 players that had been out on the market. The iPhone was an amazingly better version of "SmartPhones" that were being made by Palm, Microsoft, maybe even Nokia. The iPad was an amazingly better version of what a tablet SHOULD be, and tablets had been around for about 10+ years.
So is Apple just going to sit on it's ass then? No. There is no indication at all they are. Even Mac OS X, which every "analyst" will say is probably Apple's least profitable item, and something they shouldn't be focused on, is getting some awesome features in 10.9. If they were truly sitting on their ass, why not take another year for 10.9? Why so soon?
I think a lot of these "arguments" boil down to that Apple makes ONE size of the iPhone. Everyone else makes 15 sizes. Yet making ONE size seems to work quite well for Apple. Samsung's strategy.....seems to be unraveling with it's current stock issues.
Will Apple make a bigger iPhone? I hope not. Will they maybe make something similar that is bigger? Who knows? But is that really a new market? Is that "innovating"?
I have no clue about what Apple is planning, but it's track record is the best in releasing new things. Except everyone wants that new thing they are working on last week and want to know about the next thing now. That isn't going to happen. Apple will release their next thing when it is done and is a shippable product. Not when it's some hacked up Eye Wear or a Watch with a 10 hour battery life.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
When instead of coming up with their own great idea, they all just copied the iPhone.
I agree entirely.
I've been an iPhone user since they first started supporting ActiveSync. I have nothing significant against Android. My only real annoyance with the platform is with vendors taking ages to release officially supported OS updates, but whatever. I have a Nexus 7 because I wanted a 7" tablet and I thought the iPad Mini was way overpriced for what it is... The Nexus is fine and capable. The iPhone is fine and capable. I really don't get what the big deal is.
I have friends who are HUGE Android fanboys and constantly gripe about how restrictive iOS is. When I ask them what it is that they do on their Androids that can't be done on an iPhone the only thing they can say is "Customize." Ask for specifics and they get real quiet. After years of iPhone use I really can't think of a time where I wanted to do something on my phone only to be let down due to some restrictive Apple policy. And honestly, as I have already played and finished Plants vs Zombies 2 on my iPhone while my friends gripe about when it will be released on Android I can't help but smile.
Palm faded and crashed yet before Nokia, very sorry, was superb, IMHO.
Cal
"to shape Nokia's phones and devices section into something Microsoft would want to buy "
well, isn't that what I said? ;) and how is it a conspiracy? I think that is going to their defense in court, that it wasn't a conspiracy but done wide in public and thus the smalltime investors should have been aware that it was going on...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
When I can toggle my wifi on IOS in 2 clicks, call me.
Until then, your posting and analogies are fanboy rants
- sent from my iPhone
Huh?
Nokia's market cap four years ago was $40B. Twelve years ago, it was $60B.
$7B is chump change in comparison. MS has written down entire acquisitions as worthless after spending almost as much.
Nokia was not some edgy web design garage startup trying to get acquired by one of the big boys. They WERE one of the big boys. There is no other way to describe this situation as a complete and utter failure of Nokia's management to cope with changing market conditions since 2007 and how they impacted the way Nokia did business: the migration of large portions of the revenue in the sector to smartphones, the death of Symbian, the rise of iOS and Android and their respective ecosystems.
This failure is not relative. It is absolute. What's hard to see is what MS actually gets out of this. The public rationale is nonsense. I thought it was for the patent portfolio, but that's excluded. The theory that it's to stave off impending bankruptcy, a switch to Android, or both makes a bit of sense. It might also be just so MS can exercise more control over how the market perceives WIndows Phone. They can conglomerate the financials for Nokia and Windows Phone into a larger group and cherry pick the numbers they like for release (the way they do with Skype, Xbox, and the Entertainment division.) This might stop reporting on poor Nokia device sales from reflecting badly on Windows Phone. Nokia's bankruptcy wouldn't have looked good for Windows Phone, either.
https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:NOK&sa=X&ei=jgcqUuaRJ8WE4gShyoHQBQ&ved=0CCsQ2AE
Because three clicks is just too much for you to bear?
Undoing Mod
Apple is very lucky that they created the first smartphone with mass-market appeal - otherwise the new guy would have completely wrecked their iPod business.
Well, I'm pretty sure "luck" doesn't enter into it. Firstly, while I'm no fanboy, Apple had already demonstrated their skill in taking the MP3 player from geek toy to user-friendly, desirable mass-market device, and that was at a time when they had no track record outside the computer industry (and nor did many computer companies). Apple- the computer manufacturer known for Macs- stole the portable music market from the once dominant Sony (who- to be fair- equally squandered their techncial lead and mindshare and deserved to lose it) and the established consumer electronics manufacturers.
So the fact that they- with no real previous mobile phone experience- were able to enter a market dominated by mobile phone companies (like Nokia) and *again* steal that market by popularising a paradigm shift suggests that it being pure "luck" is unlikely.
Secondly, it's been observed (and is common sense) that Apple would have known very well that a device like the iPhone would be likely to decimate sales of the iPod, which was around its peak at that time. But Apple would also have known that (just like the MP3 player) if they hadn't done it, someone else would- though perhaps later rather than sooner. So rather than have someone else eat their lunch, it made sense to do it themselves. (They may also have guessed that the smartphone market would have been even more lucrative and with potential for expansion).
It's to Apple's credit that they had the foresight to do the opposite of what most companies in their position would have, i.e. not released the iPhone for fear of damaging their current cash cow, sat on their laurels and only done something when it was too late, the market had shifted and the new leaders were companies that'd had no such entrenched interests to protect.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
My wife's iPhone refused to connect to my Nokia N9 via bluethooth so much for all manner of non-Apple branded devices!
I had everything from the NK702, 6210, 6310i, 7250i, 6630 and N95. The N95 was buggy as hell only fixed in the 8GB edition but then the N97 was a dog and so on. Nokia wanting paying users to be beta testers is what I feel killed them. Bit like I feel about the Pebble watch I bought that doesnt really work.
Scott Adams once divided markets into four quadrants, with the axes being "stupid" vs. "smart" and "rich" vs. "poor", advising people to go for the "stupid and rich" quadrant (poor, and they can't spend a lot of money on your products; smart, and it's a lot more work to convince people to buy your product).
The Nokia insider seems to really like that quadrant; as the article says:
Cellphones for people who really need the bearings for the buttons to be made from ruby.
Settings -> Airplane Mode: ON
2 taps, wi-fi disabled.
Or, if you just can't bear to have your other radios turned off, 3 taps:
Settings -> Wi-Fi -> Wi-Fi: OFF
wi-fi disabled. Same sequence in either case turns it on/off. Are you really whining about a third tap with your finger? Are Americans really that fat and out of shape that they can't manage more than 3 taps on a screen before getting winded?
- Sent from my iPhone
When I can toggle my wifi on IOS in 2 clicks, call me.
Until then, your posting and analogies are fanboy rants
- sent from my iPhone
IOS 7 has a new "Command Center" feature that you flick up from the bottom of the screen, that gives you one-click access to most of the hardware settings. Finally. Devices back to iPhone 4 will be supported by iOS 7. Should be available within the next week or two.
Apple stole their iphone design from Sony, proved in the court of law by Apple's own evidence and having Sony blueprints.
This "own evidence" you speak of was an Apple designer indulging in a fun side project where he created a mockup iPhone as he imagined it might look if it was designed by Sony instead of Apple. There were no "Sony blueprints".
Apple's iOS is based on BSD with an very dumb UI, nothing new there, it's kiosk level functionality and existed for decades.
Riiiight.
Apple's store is nothing more than a copy of a BSD or Linux distro's repository which have been around since the mid 90s.
The Big Lie technique doesn't work as well as you think it does.
So what exactly did Apple create when their entire product line is just repackaging existing products, software and off the shelf components made by other companies. Even the Mac is just a crippled PC clone these days.
Well, if you wanted to prove what a mindless Apple hate-drone post looks like, bravo sir! You have hit the usual notes. Congratulations on a pedestrian performance.
Nokia failed because they went with a Microsoft operating system instead of Android when they had the chance. And now they're in denial. It aint just a river in Egypt.
He does work for Vertu.
but all of our user testing pointed to the fact that no-one wanted touch phones.
Thats the problem. Jobs didn't give a fuck about what the users said they wanted. Users don't know what they want. What they want is the next shiny thing you put in front of their face.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Some of those issues are addressed in the marketplace if you count free sources like AOSP, xda-developers and cyanogenmod. With those, you can put a clean Android version on your phone with root access. Unfortunately, Android isn't designed to hide permissions information from the applications. They know if you've disabled a permission and most of them will simply crash if they don't have the permissions they want. Downgrading an app isn't possible through the store, but you can archive it either on your phone (e.g. with Titanium Backup) or on an external computer from which you can side-load once you have rooted your phone.
I'd also like an option for "Don't offer me any new versions of this app. I <3 <3 <3 it the way it is and want to keep it forever." and "Install new app alongside the existing installation instead of replacing it." The same goes for the OS, but with Android, there's a solution; with ClockWorkMod recovery or other similar bootloaders, you can save complete images of your phone's system, setup and installed apps so if you don't like the new system after you upgrade, you can downgrade your phone's system software and installs.
Most of those problems are the same in iOS, BTW.
Nokia was on top of the phone world at a different time. Apple won't fail like that due to the sheer popularity of the brand. There are better products out there than Apple's but their branding and aethetics are currently unmatched.
Apple innovates and they do something M$ never did.... emotionally affect its customers.
Apple could be matched comperitively if you could gather the right people together to match their straregy and do the things that they are unwilling to do.
Apple is far from perfect. Microsoft decided to buy hardware far later in the game. I've said this for years.
Nokia was on top of the phone world at a different time. Apple won't fail like that due to the sheer popularity of the brand. There are better products out there than Apple's but their branding and aethetics are currently unmatched. Apple innovates and they do something M$ never did.... emotionally affect its customers. Apple could be matched comperitively if you could gather the right people together to match their straregy and do the things that they are unwilling to do. Apple is far from perfect. Microsoft decided to buy hardware far later in the game. I've said this for years.
Actually there was growth most in types, including smartphones up to that point. The complaints were about the rate of growth. Elop changed that into a massive nosedive - all this can be found on easily googled charts so don't believe the lie of the post above readers.
Now Cid - exactly what is motivating you to lie so much in defence of a spectacular business failure and obvious corporate raid? Why are you standing up for someone that drove a company down to 2% of it's former market value in such a dishonest way?
He now sees the same warning signs emerging at Apple.
Does that mean a Microsoft buyout in Apple's future as well? Do. tell.
Someone posted on the "coolness" of Apple products, and I agree. Much of its sales has to be due to imagery, and to quality in the designs. I don't really disagree with that appeal, but I have always been dissuaded by price and I have been able to achieve and surpass in a couple of cases the functionality with Linux running on PC hardware that costs half as much or less. And I wasn't pleased when my Power PC Mac went obsolete. It is still running Mac OS X 10.4.
The other day this 10-year old PC that had been running Ubuntu 12.04.1 in 1/2 gig of ram failed. Wont boot, the BIOS probably failed and the board is so old, runing Pentium 64 bit, that is isn't worth replacing. So I had this even older Dell Celeron system lying around, and tried to run a couple of live Linux distros off its DVD ROM. I was able to get the latest Knoppix, ver. 7.0.4 to run albeit slowly. What shocked me was that I found out that the old machine which I bought used in 2001, had only 1/4 gig of ram.
There these thumb sized systems appearing that run off of low power chips designed for mobile that run Android or Linux. They can live inside mobile devices or in tiny set top formats; they can be docked on a monitor or affixed to it and replace desktop systems. These could kill Apple, or at least exert downward pressure on its price. iMac has the basic technology already but $1200 as opposed to $100 is pretty uncompelling.
Every BigCo management fears/hates employees who can/will think out-of-the-box. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias
Casteism
Luck or rather iLuck has a lot to do with Apple's success. After the iMac, they got lucky with the iPod. After that, boosted by Steve Jobs's own inexplicable appeal as the world's greatest hawker, the iPhone was a simple matter of latching on to the iThing minimalist meme. The iPad? A large iPhone that Amazon would have probably invented if Apple had not.
See how Apple managed to parlay the letter "i" into a religion? None of the iPod, the iPhone or the IPad product lines would have been iNormously successful if they had been named otherwise. Apple products named differently have met with far more modest success if at all, e.g. Apple TV, Airplay.
I have been thinking about this since you first asked me and I came up with an answer.
Nice to see someone actually taking some time to think about something rather than just shooting from the hip. And for the record even though I disagree with you in places below I think your response was a thoughtful one.
And that answer is to offer a slightly bulky phone with a classic Nokia look and smell.
Just my opinion but I think you likely are overestimating the amount of nostalgia for old Nokia phones. I had them for about 10 years straight and I don't miss them a bit. They were fine but they weren't particularly amazing bits of design and I don't really see anyone lusting for "classic phones" the way they do for classic cars. Plus going for nostalgia in such a relentlessly forward marching industry carries HUGE risk. It would be really easy for a competitor to make the argument "do you really want a 10 year old phone?" Blackberry continues to insist in the face of all the evidence otherwise that people want "classic" blackberry styling and a physical keyboard.
There is no way to completely eliminate the problem of shattered screens (it is glass after all) but there are ways to mitigate it. Doing so would require phone makers to design phones with less emphasis on thin/shiny and actually pad them a bit as well as put a raised bezel around the screen face. It is already known how to engineer a more durable phone. The problem is how do you engineer one that people will actually buy? No one has cracked that problem yet.
it's irrelevant if they build an Android phone, because if they do nothing they will serve the desires of the majority of their potential customer base as Android already includes acceptable checkbox apps
Great. Why should I buy a Nokia phone then instead of Samsung? The ONLY company making any profit on Android phones is Samsung (they have 95% profit-share of android phones in 2013) and from what I can tell there is no company in danger of displacing them. Samsung made around $5.1 Billion on Android. The next most profitable Android maker (HTC) made around $50 Million in profits. Samsung absolutely dominates the Android platform. I really don't see any way for Nokia to jump into the Android game at this point and win. They are WAY too far behind. Maybe if they had gotten on board right at the beginning but even then I doubt it. I think that the only company with a realistic chance to displace Samsung on Android is Google themselves.
Let me explain. Despite all the ballyhoo over Apple's hardware design, what makes people pay a premium for Apple products is NOT the hardware. Apple is fundamentally a software company. Steve Jobs himself has said so explicitly. (watch some of the Q&A interviews on youtube to find the clip) Their hardware, while nice and well designed, is not really much different from their competitors underneath and others copy their hardware designs almost as soon as they are released. You can run Windows on a Mac or Android on an iPhone. The underlying hardware is pretty much the same. Put Windows on a Mac and you'd be hard pressed to tell if the box was Apple or Dell without looking at the label. But the software is what makes Apple's devices different AND what makes people willing to pay extra for them. There is some variation between Android phones but the differences are of the same degree as between Windows PCs. If you buy a Dell or an HP there isn't really much difference. Same with buying a Samsung or a HTC phone. The differences are mostly cosmetic or relatively minor.
Without differentiated software Nokia has almost no chance of making any significant profit. By tying up with Microsoft they at least had a good chance to differentiate their product. Right now there are essentially 4 mobile platforms of consequence. Android, iOS, Blackberry and Windows. iOS and Blackberry are not options so the choice for Nokia was t
Most Apple people I know tell me how much they love their iPhone's default interface only because they didn't realize they could have half the screen devoted to the weather and a scrolling list of photos/videos instead.
I know some of you actually know what Android offers, but many iPhone users genuinely believe they were the first to get that notification tray and the new fingerprint feature.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I seriously doubt Samsung would be where they are today if Nokia had been competing with them properly in the Galaxy S era.
And your evidence for this hypothetical scenario is what exactly? Nokia and it's management haven't exactly proven to be visionaries in the smartphone market. Samsung is an extremely competent and well funded competitor and having Nokia in the mix would not make them less so. Why would Nokia succeed where Motorola, LG, HTC, Sony, and the rest have failed?