Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's Nokia Plans Come Into Better Focus
Forbes has an update on what sort of future Nokia faces, as Microsoft reveals a strategy for making sense of the acquisition:
[Microsoft EVP of devices Stephen] Elop laid out a framework for cost cuts in a memo to employees on July 17. Devices would focus on high and low cost Windows smartphones, suggesting a phasing out of feature phones and Android smartphones. Two business units, smart devices and mobile phones, would become one, thereby cutting overlap and overhead. Microsoft would reduce engineering in Beijing and San Diego and unwind engineering in Oulu, Finland. It would exit manufacturing in Komarom, Hungary; shift to lower cost areas like Manaus, Brazil and Reynosa, Mexico; and reduce manufacturing in Beijing and Dongguan, China. Also, CEO Satya Nadella gave hints about how Microsoft will make money on Nokia during Tuesday' conference call. Devices, he said, "go beyond" hardware and are about productivity. "I can take my Office Lens App, use the camera on the phone, take a picture of anything, and have it automatically OCR recognized and into OneNote in searchable fashion. There is a lot we can do with phones by broadly thinking about productivity."
In other words, the sale of a smartphone is a means to other sales.
It might work for enterprise users (I'm sure that's a /really/ big market!!) but lack of decent apps, or even popularly used apps is the nail in the coffin for me as far as their mobile Windows OS is concerned. The phone hardware was good, the OS completely lacked.
Such a shame.
Why does the OS lack when there's just a lack of apps? Seriously? The OS is fine.
It's just that a THIRD platform (after Android and iOS) has very little hope of getting a foot into the door. MS obviously hopes that it can change that in the long run by fusing Windows and WP as a platform. I think the gap is too large to make this work, but it's really neither the hardware nor the OS that is the actual problem here. Still, MS has more than once proven that it has the patience to turn things around (they all but missed the Internet once and a few years later IE was moving towards a monopoly) and they surely hope they can pull something like this off again.
I'm not very optimistic here, but the OS wars aren't over yet.
Windows mobile phone forays are dead, done, finito, kaputt and out of steam.
Windows Phone 7 has been out for almost 4 years and still barely holds 3% market share. Thats pretty awful by any measure, especially since the platform before it had much larger market share. They lost customers with current platform without gaining any new ones.
Windows Mobile was out 7 years and failed, and before that Microsoft failed with Pocket PC.
I am amazed they still happily beat the dead horse instead of putting effort into supporting the winning platforms. Android will be succeeded by something in the long run and until then i fail to see the business perspective of dragging a dead horse round the racetrack with a lawn mower trying to catch up with a Jumbojet. Why not just book a seat in the Jumbojet instead?
Personally im sure Nadella would like nothing better than to put a fork in Windows Phone, but entrenched forces inside Microsoft makes this very hard. It has to fail on its own dying a long agonizing death instead.
HTTP/1.1 400
> I like the part where they are magically going to make OCR work
I'm afraid you could have left it right there, with no mention of cell phones or their cameras. OCR, much like speech-to-text software, has plateaued and not noticeably improved in the last 10 years. It's became more available as software has become more powerful. But the underlying technologies have been quite stable. Despite flurries of new patents with every update to such software, the fundamental algorithms remain unchanged and have been stable for roughly 20 years.
Hollow out Nokia until its just a shell valuable only for its IP, transfer everything else worth keeping into Microsoft proper and discard the rest. Wouldn't be surprised if the "Nokia" brand gets sold onto to some Asian / Indian outfit in a few years hence.
Interestingly, the Finnish stub of Nokia that was left, is doing fine. They still have a feasible telecommunication networks business.
Microsoft's chess strategy seems to be to sacrifice all its pawns and its Queen, laying waste to its Bishops Knights and Rooks and trying to win the game with just its King left. Good luck with that one.
"thinking broadly about productivity" just means selling these things to business instead of the general public. Cobbling together a random conjecture about a common business technology, OCR, further serves to endow the commitment. Microsoft knows the only repeat customer for its services as the 21st century rolls along is going to be business.
But thinking that Nokia plays any part in this is rather odd. Microsofts purchase basically forced moody's hand to downgrade its bond status to junk only one year after the purchase. Windows phone was, again, a flop. Blackberry used Microsofts restructuring as a brilliant tactical strategy to make a comeback in the businessworld, when it should have been the other way around. So in the future most businesses will opt for blackberry in the field, and iPhone for the C-Levels. In response microsoft, as they have with Azure, will strap heavily discounted or free phones to business licenses which in turn will be purchased by management in an effort to maintain license discounts on what they do use; namely Windows. These phones will sit on IT workbenches and in random cubes until the batteries rot and the password is forgotten because what microsoft is offering is a solution to a problem that was solved almost a decade ago. Sales will increase, microsoft will pump their nokia stock until losses in other units become unsustainable again, and we'll all collectively groan as another wave of "restructuring" crashes to shore in an effort to convince investors the ship is still sailing.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Can someone explain to me how there hasn't been a class action lawsuit against Elop and Microsoft for his blatantly obvious tanking of Nokia intended to reduce the purchase price? How have shareholders not sued? Why aren't Nokia employees, who are about to get laid off en-masse, not contacted lawyers and sued? Seriously, this is something that was insanely obvious as soon as Elop joined Nokia - we were talking about it extensively on Slashdot - and it played out EXACTLY how we all predicted it would.
Where are the lawsuits?
Why does the OS lack when there's just a lack of apps? Seriously? The OS is fine.
No, it's not. If it were just a lack of apps being ported to it, that's one thing, but that isn't it.
The point of a smartphone (to some people such as myself) is to have a swiss army knife for information gathering. As a network admin, one of my things is being able to troubleshoot network problems. Android (and iOS as well, though I don't own an iPhone) allow for these kinds of features really well, and I can use apps like Fing and WiFi Analyzer. However the underlying OS code for those two apps cannot be done on either Windows RT or Windows Phone.
The same story can be said for a lot of things. There quite a number of WP apps where if you read where users are complaining about why the WP version of X app doesn't support Y feature that it also does on Android, and they blame the developer for being "lazy" but the truth is that WP doesn't support the underlying feature in most cases.