Thanks; that was an excellent essy from which I really learned much. BTW; I wasn't trying to suggest that the suggest he needs lawyers to make the structure legal. I'm suggesting he'll need them to let him know exactly how far he can go in completely screwing over the other classes of shareholders without getting too much SEC attention. Not that I think he needs me to tell him this.
So cash out now or wait while their options continue to lose value?
I very much doubt that leaving now will make it easier to cash out. Most of their options should have already "vested" but they may even have some very low strike price options which they were awarded but haven't yet vested. I guess that some of them might be subject to insider trading restrictions but even then they can schedule sales during their trading window.
Anyone seen an article about the details of Facebook's employee options plan?
In a real life military scenario, an exodus of several general will create mass confusion and drastic drop of morale amongst the soldiers
On the other hand, in the case of fb, even if 90% of the exec decide to leave, you think that will do anything to the fb users?
I think you have misunderstood the analogy. In this scenario the "soldiers" are the developers and marketing people working at Facebook who will be directionless and end up running around in circles as the complete incompetent psycho from their team who hates everyone gets put in charge because he's the only one who steps up immediately to fill the gap.
The "users" are the local population and their cattle who the army will eat and rape. They will run in fear but it may do them no good.
Most likely either x86 or ARM will be killed. There's no way that such a tiny ecosystem can support the level of fragmentation which two processor architectures with totally different power characteristics suggest.
Why, if that level of fragmentation is largely transparent to both the users and the developers?
Requires considerable coordination and effort to keep such a thing transparent. Microsoft's history (NT on the Alpha / Windows on Itanium e.g.) suggests that they don't succeed in sustaining this long term. Transparency will become much more difficult as they want to provide more and more native code.
The "totally different power characteristics" argument is also bogus. Did you miss Android phones running on x86 (Medfield), showing battery life pretty much in line with ARM? And Clover Field, which is specifically Intel's answer to ARM in tablets (Android and Win8 both).
Firstly, I'm not talking only about absolute power, but rather different emphasis. ARM are better in some areas and worse in others. This means that an algorythim which is good on ARM would be bad in Intel and vice versa. If an application wants to get the best out of the platform application power tuning is going to have to be done twice. Most often they aren't going to do that and the battery drain will end up worse.
Secondly, about Intel catching up with ARM. Sorry if I misspeak here; some references would be appreciated if I'm wrong but this seems to me to be future generations of Intel vs. current generations of ARM. It's possible from what I've been hearing that Intel is really about 1/2 a generation of chips ahead and will deliver those early enough to be competing with ARM, but I don't think that this is a sustainable long term advantage. Let's see. Intel has definitely proven the ability to dispose of one generation of RISC architecture chips in the Alpha and PA-RISC. Maybe they can eventually also overcome ARM.
Having said all that, it still wouldn't change my analysis. The Windows RT tablets on the ARM architecture are then providing pure fragmentation with no benefit. It will be possible to provide the same small/thin/cheap tablets from the Intel side and so the ARM tablets will be killed. Whatever limitations Microsoft wants to impose on the users of cheap tablets can be imposed from software.
It's called pre-announcing product, in order to disuade people from buying your competitors offerings.
You seem to be a time traveller though I'm not sure whether from the future or the past. When I live the surface 1 has not yet been released. This is about the annoucement of the surface 2 which is thereby completely gratuitiously Osborning the surface 1. The delivery of the Surface 1 has been announced but not completed and it is that which is messing over the OEMs.
I recall another similar article about a rewrite of MS Office, and what a mistake it was...
What the second essay is missing is that, if you followed Joel's advice which is - refactor - modularise - improve then by the time you get to the long term, your software will be almost as much re-written as in the first case but will do more. In fact it may have become two pieces of software; one which does the aim of your rewrite and another one which provides the compatibility features for peple who need the old feature set.
Why would anybody that is a legitimate scientist think that?
Because in serious science, being wrong is not a crime. In fact, the first person to state "we have no evidence for X, so we must assume it does not exist" often get's the credit for setting some student or other off to prove him wrong. Just remember, the true crime is being "not even wrong". Try to be wrong at least once a day; then you might learn something. The only condition is that you have to realise that you were wrong.
It's an interesting thought that you are totally right. If I see a quote in quotation marks without an attribution I immediately know that it's from Wikipedia. That is an amazing level of cultural power when you can start to change the rules of grammar and citation.
Remember, even in a private company, the CEO doesn't have full decision power. The board can effectively overrule him and he can't get rid of the people under him or fully control them without the board's support. A number of those people probably looked at Microsoft's history in mobile (Microsoft's market share has continually declined overall in mobile having previously been in double digits) and foresaw disaster.
Elop was setting out to destroy the power base of people who might try to push for backup second strategies. In doing that he was trying to force any sane members left on the board over to his side. I'd say he was successful in that. There seem to be two explanations going around for why he wanted to do that 1) he was crazy and believed that only complete commitment to Windows could save the company 2) he actively and deliberately wanted to destroy Nokia. As I see him killing off further products which could have bought him time and money (N9 / Meltimi) I get more and more convinced of 2).
By now, everybody knows that iPhone and iPad get refreshed in one year cycles. The only thing you don't know in advance is what, exactly, will change in the next version. But then you don't know this here, either.
Apple has been pretty consistent in ensuring that at least two devices into the past are supported. This means that even if you buy the previous version of an iPad around when the new one is launched, or even up to a year later, you can be pretty sure that you will be looked after for most of the lifetime of your device. One of the biggest problems with Android devices and the best reason to buy a Nexus is that only Google has been similarly reliable with future support. Microsoft, on the other hand has clearly shown it's hand with the Windows Phone 7 to 8 transition. The first buyers are considered paying beta testers who are expected to upgrade again.
We're going to hear arguments that that doesn't apply to Windows 8 which is the all new platform and has all the new Microsoft stuff. Whilst that might apply to Windows on the desktop, the chances are that on the tablet they will have to make quite radical changes. Most likely either x86 or ARM will be killed. There's no way that such a tiny ecosystem can support the level of fragmentation which two processor architectures with totally different power characteristics suggest. Worse, it's impossible to tell which; if Microsoft knew they would have already done so.
Ballmer has just Osborned the Surface tablet before it's even launched. We have no reason to think that Surface 2 apps will be compatible with Surface tablets and if they are, we know from experience that that wll hold back the Surface 2 considerably. Microsoft's publicity people will be desperate to control the debate and they have mod points. The only possible reaction? Warn your friends about how people who bought Windows Phone 7 were ripped off and tell them not to buy Windows 8; show them the difference between the apps on your iPhone or Android phone and theirs. Read at -1 when moderating.
I'd rather have one screwed-up asshole who gives back some of his ill-gained wealth than ten who clear their conscious through prayer or just by telling themselves they're good people.
The problem with this is that his donations and charity make him much more difficult to stop and put him beyond moral controls which would apply to others. Look at how Bill Gates uses charity to force schools to use Windows and gets seen as a philanthropist where his actions, otherwise, would be seen as illegally forcing forward a monopoly.
If you want to run anything other than the stock ROM, you're going to need to root the phone. Even a developer oriented phone such as the Galaxy Nexus requires that you root/unlock the boot loader to flash a new ROM.
Thanks for your comments. Based on this and other comments I will probably go for a Nexus 7 and put CM10 on it. I have no problem "rooting" the phone by an officially supported mechanism such as a bootloader. What I don't want to know about is using a security flaw to root things. That's something that can a) just go away at any time and b) is illegal in some places. If I got the phone for free I might consider that, but I'm never going to give money to someone who's forcing me to break the law.
Sure; except none of us actually know what our manufacturers are doing. Some of the "supported" phones seem to have been completely hacked together in the face of total resistance from the manufacturer whilst other phones (HTC??) seem to have co-operative manufacturers but just bad luck. If the someone from Cyanogenmod side would tell us which manufacturers were co-operating and helpful, even better if broken down by individual phone, then we would be able to write off and complain to the manufactures that aren't helping whilst buying from the other ones. As it is "we" outside the community have no clue whether they have been cooperative or not.
Okay, I want to buy a device for CyanogenMod. I don't want the hassle of jailbreaking and I want to know for sure that it will keep working even if I try an upgraded manufacturer's ROM. The official supported device list doesn't say anything. The install instructions all start with "now root your phone". How can I find out a list of recommended phones including information about how easy the install is?
At $200 + 20%, i.e you aren't talking $370 anymore but $250.
Remember that 20% is average margins taking into account R&D as well. Also, the low end phones tend to be more directly competitive with lower margins. This means that the margin on each incremental phone sale would normally be much more so the $200 price should be a safe estimate, if not too high. The N9 was, however, however, already developed making the R&D a sunk cost. That means that, when making the decision to essentially cancel it, the $200 price was what should have been taken into account.
1) Nokia refuses to make CDMA radios. I'd assume on a major rollout they wouldn't do that. If they did, yeah that will kill your US sales.
Nokia has in the past made CDMA chipsets. I think (though I'm not sure) that the only reason they don't make them much now is that the US operators don't want to deal with them. In any case, they had a fully paid up patent deal with Qualcomm a few years back so this is absolutely no problem to change.
2) Northern European aesthetic. This might be a problem, less of a problem at the $370 than at the $250. But certainly the N9 is way more attractive than Android.
No way for me to say. I like the N9. I think the Americans that saw it thought it was great.
3) US customers don't like Symbian (not applicable since different OS)
right.
4) Not enough American apps: this would apply but if they are selling tens of million of one handset this problem would disappear almost immediately
Right; plus they were reasonabl open source friendly which gave a huge library of code from which to build new applications fast. Also Nokia had designed a good migration story for non US apps aimed at Symbian to be portable to the US. However, this is actually a bit of a deeper problem. For example every stereo you buy comes ready to integrate with an iPhone. This is one of the strongest barriers which is making Windows Phone fail. I am not sure at all whether this barrier is one that can be overcome, however the N9 clearly had a better chance than the Windows strategy which has already been tried and failed with Windows Mobile.
5) Not cooperating with carrier strategy. Well right now the strategy is anyone but Apple.
In this case, Apple has already helped. The main problem was Nokia wanted to offer features, such as WiFi hotspot router and access to non-operator app stores the operators didn't want customers to have. Apple has proven that you have to offer these to be competitive so the operators will no longer push to stop them.
Overall, I agree with your analysis above. I am guessing that Microsoft saw the N9 as a serious trojan for Linux applications
The phone did actually go out with subsidies on some operators in minor countries. More importantly, China Mobile was absolutely desperate for this and it's was made public knowlege (look around the Jolla announcements) that they were willing to subsidise.
The US market is the big subsidy market so lets use the USA.
Nokia is an exception to that. They never played ball well with the US operators, so they gradually lost market share since the end of the '90s. I won't go into the detail of your calculation since I'm really not sure how that would play out in the US market.
So is your contention that Nokia could have made say 15m phones for the US market (that means both GSM and CDMA models) at $370 each in 2011 when the entire $370 is going to cover phone, warranty, basic, support...?
If the answer is "yes" then you are absolutely correct Elop is an idiot. If on the other hand in 2011 they would have needed more like $550 then you have a problem. The phone sells for $199 which means it goes head to head with the iPhone 4 during the holiday season and Apple's billion dollar a year marketing to the US base. And I don't see the N9 getting the volume for those customers.
Nokia's margin figures were around 20%. The N9 was at the top end of their margin, something that can be seen from the visible effect it had on their profit numbers, so probably the marginal cost per phone was below $200 (remember Nokia can make a profit on a phone for $30 - they have quite a number of models at that price in India).
Based on the actual sales, and simply moving them over to the high value large countries where it wasn't sold (Germany / UK / France etc) together with a proper China strategy, it could easily have sold in the 10s of millions. Probably hundreds of millions worldwide. I wouldn't want to speculate too much about the USA; Nokia has had problems there for a long time; but they had good reviews and I think they had had good response from operators and might have broken into the millions in the US without a problem. Outside the US, there are lots of customers worldwide who used to just automatically buy for the Nokia brand. They would have upgraded their Symbian phones unthinkingly to the new Nokia. Moving to Windows was so loud that even they realised that something had changed; checked what it was at the next visit to the phone shop; then started buying something else instead.
Remember the main criticism of the N9 was that it would take six months to come out with a companion model. That lack of confusing models and a simple consistent platform is exactly what is the iPhone's strength. It could have been a really major seller.
Nah he's the guy that takes the $300 when the airline tells him they overbooked and would he mind going on standby on another flight over the next couple days. He thinks he's getting a sweet deal, too. That airline is being so nice to him, giving him free stuff and everything...
There are lots of people that would be right that's the airline offer is a great deal. Maybe you took the cheapest ticket and $300 is actually a pretty good return. More likely, you get told an actual flight; you get given a hotel and you get to spend another day or two in your holiday destination that you couldn't afford otherwise. You may be a student travelling around the world not caring where or when you get to a place and $300 is an entire weeks budget. If people are happy what's the problem? If they aren't then they should just learn to say "no thanks".
What's key here is that, every time I see it, the airline is completely up front about what they offer. Everyone gets to make their own adult choice. In the case of ISPs, it's impossible for an ISP to offer a real "unlimited" subscription. They will always find that the price they can charge is below the cost because the other companies pretend to sell "unlimited" but in fact don't deliver. This undermines the customers percieved value for the real unlimited offers.
Assume the N9 comes out June 2011 at $550 ballpark comparable to the iPhone 4 though a bit cheaper. [...] How do you sell 100m of those N9s at that price point? I don't see it, so the the N9 is a great phone that sells at best a few million.
Why do I have to assme that?
Given no marketing and access to none of the major phone markets, the N9 actually sold in the millions.
Nokia had a vastly better in house manufacturing base than Apple able to completely undercut them
Nokia had a hugely bigger logistics chain than Apple with much cheaper component access
The operators were desperate to subsidise the N9 to create a credible an iPhone competitor; the price to customers would have been tens of dollars
The nokia N9 actually did became available at around $450; despite the fact that the price was alwas designed to maximise profit not sales.
We can speculate about alternate realities all we want. How about discussing something about the real world as it actually is?
Well; yes. Are you trying to suggest RIM would be better off if it was making a $800M loss every quarter rather than a modest profit?
>Nokia had a huge cash mountain (> 5Billion Dollars!!)
That doesn't mean anything really, without data on debt, assets, bonds etc.
Nokia is not some secret entity. It is a public listed company which reports it's earnings and assets to shareholders on a quarterly basis. You can find them directly linked from the front page of www.nokia.com That number takes into account debt, assets, bonds and a whole bunch more.
Symbian had to be dropped like a hot potato to save the company. The Nokia execs working on Symbian did everything they can to kill Meego/Maemo for their personal benefit thus making Nokia suffer hugely even before Elop was hired.
Resource investment in Symbian could quite reasonably be stopped, or at least scaled massively back. Just as Eliop proved he could do with Meltimi; this should have been done silently and without further comment. Symbian phones should have been sold for as long as they kept selling. The Osborne effect and the Ratner effects were well known before the "Eliop Effect" and were something every competent CEO knows to avoid. This would have bought Nokia another two years of profits. What they do with those two years is another question, but throwing them away needlessly was negligant bordering on criminal.
Nokia was desperate and need the cash plus a credible OS to run on their hardware.
Except; this was a lie.
Nokia was profitable!
Nokia had increasing sales! Including increasing sales of "smartphones"!!
Nokia had a huge cash mountain (> 5Billion Dollars!!)
If you had just taken Nokia's spare money, put it into a separate company and started building a mobile phone based on Android, recruiting people from scratch, you would have had a very good chance of getting into a major position in the market. It's well worth looking at some of the graphs which show how Nokia's Symbian sales only started going down after the "Eliop Effect" made everyone think they were a dead end.
His logic was good, but his facts were completely wrong. If you pick up a gun; decide for no apparent reason that it's a "wrong way round gun", and then shoot yourself, it's not your logic which is at fault. Grip on reality? Maybe? Sanity? Yes.
I will admit that; in a continent with a history like that of Franko's Spain or the Stasi (note how I can do this without even giving a single entry for someone to Godwin this:-) ) it seems a bit wierd. However, the key thing you have to know is that the government can subcontract privacy invasion to private bodies and does that (e.g. in the USA, the FBI are regularly allowed to access data from credit bureau's which they would never be able to gather themselves) but, at least in Europe, it's illegal for all your data to be transferred in the other direction.
This means that, ignoring standard incompetence, it's possible to legally protect yourself from private industry whilst allowing the government to have your data but the other way round is impossible.
This is before you go into the fact that the state is under democratic control in a number of European countries whilst there's nowhere in the world where corporations are under proper control.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Probably all of the above and most likely in that order.
Thanks; that was an excellent essy from which I really learned much. BTW; I wasn't trying to suggest that the suggest he needs lawyers to make the structure legal. I'm suggesting he'll need them to let him know exactly how far he can go in completely screwing over the other classes of shareholders without getting too much SEC attention. Not that I think he needs me to tell him this.
Can I just say "dear Mark; Class; you make Billy boy Gates look like a choir boy. Make sure you have some good lawyers".
How the hell does he get away with that.
So cash out now or wait while their options continue to lose value?
I very much doubt that leaving now will make it easier to cash out. Most of their options should have already "vested" but they may even have some very low strike price options which they were awarded but haven't yet vested. I guess that some of them might be subject to insider trading restrictions but even then they can schedule sales during their trading window.
Anyone seen an article about the details of Facebook's employee options plan?
Your analogy is flawed
In a real life military scenario, an exodus of several general will create mass confusion and drastic drop of morale amongst the soldiers
On the other hand, in the case of fb, even if 90% of the exec decide to leave, you think that will do anything to the fb users?
I think you have misunderstood the analogy. In this scenario the "soldiers" are the developers and marketing people working at Facebook who will be directionless and end up running around in circles as the complete incompetent psycho from their team who hates everyone gets put in charge because he's the only one who steps up immediately to fill the gap.
The "users" are the local population and their cattle who the army will eat and rape. They will run in fear but it may do them no good.
Most likely either x86 or ARM will be killed. There's no way that such a tiny ecosystem can support the level of fragmentation which two processor architectures with totally different power characteristics suggest.
Why, if that level of fragmentation is largely transparent to both the users and the developers?
Requires considerable coordination and effort to keep such a thing transparent. Microsoft's history (NT on the Alpha / Windows on Itanium e.g.) suggests that they don't succeed in sustaining this long term. Transparency will become much more difficult as they want to provide more and more native code.
The "totally different power characteristics" argument is also bogus. Did you miss Android phones running on x86 (Medfield), showing battery life pretty much in line with ARM? And Clover Field, which is specifically Intel's answer to ARM in tablets (Android and Win8 both).
Firstly, I'm not talking only about absolute power, but rather different emphasis. ARM are better in some areas and worse in others. This means that an algorythim which is good on ARM would be bad in Intel and vice versa. If an application wants to get the best out of the platform application power tuning is going to have to be done twice. Most often they aren't going to do that and the battery drain will end up worse.
Secondly, about Intel catching up with ARM. Sorry if I misspeak here; some references would be appreciated if I'm wrong but this seems to me to be future generations of Intel vs. current generations of ARM. It's possible from what I've been hearing that Intel is really about 1/2 a generation of chips ahead and will deliver those early enough to be competing with ARM, but I don't think that this is a sustainable long term advantage. Let's see. Intel has definitely proven the ability to dispose of one generation of RISC architecture chips in the Alpha and PA-RISC. Maybe they can eventually also overcome ARM.
Having said all that, it still wouldn't change my analysis. The Windows RT tablets on the ARM architecture are then providing pure fragmentation with no benefit. It will be possible to provide the same small/thin/cheap tablets from the Intel side and so the ARM tablets will be killed. Whatever limitations Microsoft wants to impose on the users of cheap tablets can be imposed from software.
It's called pre-announcing product, in order to disuade people from buying your competitors offerings.
You seem to be a time traveller though I'm not sure whether from the future or the past. When I live the surface 1 has not yet been released. This is about the annoucement of the surface 2 which is thereby completely gratuitiously Osborning the surface 1. The delivery of the Surface 1 has been announced but not completed and it is that which is messing over the OEMs.
Beware of the second system effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
Rewriting code can kill you in the short term. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
Or help you in the long term. http://notes-on-haskell.blogspot.com/2007/08/rewriting-software.html
I recall another similar article about a rewrite of MS Office, and what a mistake it was...
What the second essay is missing is that, if you followed Joel's advice which is - refactor - modularise - improve then by the time you get to the long term, your software will be almost as much re-written as in the first case but will do more. In fact it may have become two pieces of software; one which does the aim of your rewrite and another one which provides the compatibility features for peple who need the old feature set.
Why would anybody that is a legitimate scientist think that?
Because in serious science, being wrong is not a crime. In fact, the first person to state "we have no evidence for X, so we must assume it does not exist" often get's the credit for setting some student or other off to prove him wrong. Just remember, the true crime is being "not even wrong". Try to be wrong at least once a day; then you might learn something. The only condition is that you have to realise that you were wrong.
Hey dumbass! You didn't see the quotation marks?
It's an interesting thought that you are totally right. If I see a quote in quotation marks without an attribution I immediately know that it's from Wikipedia. That is an amazing level of cultural power when you can start to change the rules of grammar and citation.
I mean, what the fuck was the point of that?
Remember, even in a private company, the CEO doesn't have full decision power. The board can effectively overrule him and he can't get rid of the people under him or fully control them without the board's support. A number of those people probably looked at Microsoft's history in mobile (Microsoft's market share has continually declined overall in mobile having previously been in double digits) and foresaw disaster.
Elop was setting out to destroy the power base of people who might try to push for backup second strategies. In doing that he was trying to force any sane members left on the board over to his side. I'd say he was successful in that. There seem to be two explanations going around for why he wanted to do that 1) he was crazy and believed that only complete commitment to Windows could save the company 2) he actively and deliberately wanted to destroy Nokia. As I see him killing off further products which could have bought him time and money (N9 / Meltimi) I get more and more convinced of 2).
By now, everybody knows that iPhone and iPad get refreshed in one year cycles. The only thing you don't know in advance is what, exactly, will change in the next version. But then you don't know this here, either.
Apple has been pretty consistent in ensuring that at least two devices into the past are supported. This means that even if you buy the previous version of an iPad around when the new one is launched, or even up to a year later, you can be pretty sure that you will be looked after for most of the lifetime of your device. One of the biggest problems with Android devices and the best reason to buy a Nexus is that only Google has been similarly reliable with future support. Microsoft, on the other hand has clearly shown it's hand with the Windows Phone 7 to 8 transition. The first buyers are considered paying beta testers who are expected to upgrade again.
We're going to hear arguments that that doesn't apply to Windows 8 which is the all new platform and has all the new Microsoft stuff. Whilst that might apply to Windows on the desktop, the chances are that on the tablet they will have to make quite radical changes. Most likely either x86 or ARM will be killed. There's no way that such a tiny ecosystem can support the level of fragmentation which two processor architectures with totally different power characteristics suggest. Worse, it's impossible to tell which; if Microsoft knew they would have already done so.
Why is this being moderated Troll?
Ballmer has just Osborned the Surface tablet before it's even launched. We have no reason to think that Surface 2 apps will be compatible with Surface tablets and if they are, we know from experience that that wll hold back the Surface 2 considerably. Microsoft's publicity people will be desperate to control the debate and they have mod points. The only possible reaction? Warn your friends about how people who bought Windows Phone 7 were ripped off and tell them not to buy Windows 8; show them the difference between the apps on your iPhone or Android phone and theirs. Read at -1 when moderating.
I'd rather have one screwed-up asshole who gives back some of his ill-gained wealth than ten who clear their conscious through prayer or just by telling themselves they're good people.
The problem with this is that his donations and charity make him much more difficult to stop and put him beyond moral controls which would apply to others. Look at how Bill Gates uses charity to force schools to use Windows and gets seen as a philanthropist where his actions, otherwise, would be seen as illegally forcing forward a monopoly.
If you want to run anything other than the stock ROM, you're going to need to root the phone. Even a developer oriented phone such as the Galaxy Nexus requires that you root/unlock the boot loader to flash a new ROM.
Thanks for your comments. Based on this and other comments I will probably go for a Nexus 7 and put CM10 on it. I have no problem "rooting" the phone by an officially supported mechanism such as a bootloader. What I don't want to know about is using a security flaw to root things. That's something that can a) just go away at any time and b) is illegal in some places. If I got the phone for free I might consider that, but I'm never going to give money to someone who's forcing me to break the law.
Sure; except none of us actually know what our manufacturers are doing. Some of the "supported" phones seem to have been completely hacked together in the face of total resistance from the manufacturer whilst other phones (HTC??) seem to have co-operative manufacturers but just bad luck. If the someone from Cyanogenmod side would tell us which manufacturers were co-operating and helpful, even better if broken down by individual phone, then we would be able to write off and complain to the manufactures that aren't helping whilst buying from the other ones. As it is "we" outside the community have no clue whether they have been cooperative or not.
Okay, I want to buy a device for CyanogenMod. I don't want the hassle of jailbreaking and I want to know for sure that it will keep working even if I try an upgraded manufacturer's ROM. The official supported device list doesn't say anything. The install instructions all start with "now root your phone". How can I find out a list of recommended phones including information about how easy the install is?
At $200 + 20%, i.e you aren't talking $370 anymore but $250.
Remember that 20% is average margins taking into account R&D as well. Also, the low end phones tend to be more directly competitive with lower margins. This means that the margin on each incremental phone sale would normally be much more so the $200 price should be a safe estimate, if not too high. The N9 was, however, however, already developed making the R&D a sunk cost. That means that, when making the decision to essentially cancel it, the $200 price was what should have been taken into account.
1) Nokia refuses to make CDMA radios. I'd assume on a major rollout they wouldn't do that. If they did, yeah that will kill your US sales.
Nokia has in the past made CDMA chipsets. I think (though I'm not sure) that the only reason they don't make them much now is that the US operators don't want to deal with them. In any case, they had a fully paid up patent deal with Qualcomm a few years back so this is absolutely no problem to change.
2) Northern European aesthetic. This might be a problem, less of a problem at the $370 than at the $250. But certainly the N9 is way more attractive than Android.
No way for me to say. I like the N9. I think the Americans that saw it thought it was great.
3) US customers don't like Symbian (not applicable since different OS)
right.
4) Not enough American apps: this would apply but if they are selling tens of million of one handset this problem would disappear almost immediately
Right; plus they were reasonabl open source friendly which gave a huge library of code from which to build new applications fast. Also Nokia had designed a good migration story for non US apps aimed at Symbian to be portable to the US. However, this is actually a bit of a deeper problem. For example every stereo you buy comes ready to integrate with an iPhone. This is one of the strongest barriers which is making Windows Phone fail. I am not sure at all whether this barrier is one that can be overcome, however the N9 clearly had a better chance than the Windows strategy which has already been tried and failed with Windows Mobile.
5) Not cooperating with carrier strategy. Well right now the strategy is anyone but Apple.
In this case, Apple has already helped. The main problem was Nokia wanted to offer features, such as WiFi hotspot router and access to non-operator app stores the operators didn't want customers to have. Apple has proven that you have to offer these to be competitive so the operators will no longer push to stop them.
Overall, I agree with your analysis above. I am guessing that Microsoft saw the N9 as a serious trojan for Linux applications
I doubt that.
The phone did actually go out with subsidies on some operators in minor countries. More importantly, China Mobile was absolutely desperate for this and it's was made public knowlege (look around the Jolla announcements) that they were willing to subsidise.
The US market is the big subsidy market so lets use the USA.
Nokia is an exception to that. They never played ball well with the US operators, so they gradually lost market share since the end of the '90s. I won't go into the detail of your calculation since I'm really not sure how that would play out in the US market.
So is your contention that Nokia could have made say 15m phones for the US market (that means both GSM and CDMA models) at $370 each in 2011 when the entire $370 is going to cover phone, warranty, basic, support...?
If the answer is "yes" then you are absolutely correct Elop is an idiot. If on the other hand in 2011 they would have needed more like $550 then you have a problem. The phone sells for $199 which means it goes head to head with the iPhone 4 during the holiday season and Apple's billion dollar a year marketing to the US base. And I don't see the N9 getting the volume for those customers.
Nokia's margin figures were around 20%. The N9 was at the top end of their margin, something that can be seen from the visible effect it had on their profit numbers, so probably the marginal cost per phone was below $200 (remember Nokia can make a profit on a phone for $30 - they have quite a number of models at that price in India).
Based on the actual sales, and simply moving them over to the high value large countries where it wasn't sold (Germany / UK / France etc) together with a proper China strategy, it could easily have sold in the 10s of millions. Probably hundreds of millions worldwide. I wouldn't want to speculate too much about the USA; Nokia has had problems there for a long time; but they had good reviews and I think they had had good response from operators and might have broken into the millions in the US without a problem. Outside the US, there are lots of customers worldwide who used to just automatically buy for the Nokia brand. They would have upgraded their Symbian phones unthinkingly to the new Nokia. Moving to Windows was so loud that even they realised that something had changed; checked what it was at the next visit to the phone shop; then started buying something else instead.
Remember the main criticism of the N9 was that it would take six months to come out with a companion model. That lack of confusing models and a simple consistent platform is exactly what is the iPhone's strength. It could have been a really major seller.
Elop is an idiot.
Nah he's the guy that takes the $300 when the airline tells him they overbooked and would he mind going on standby on another flight over the next couple days. He thinks he's getting a sweet deal, too. That airline is being so nice to him, giving him free stuff and everything...
There are lots of people that would be right that's the airline offer is a great deal. Maybe you took the cheapest ticket and $300 is actually a pretty good return. More likely, you get told an actual flight; you get given a hotel and you get to spend another day or two in your holiday destination that you couldn't afford otherwise. You may be a student travelling around the world not caring where or when you get to a place and $300 is an entire weeks budget. If people are happy what's the problem? If they aren't then they should just learn to say "no thanks".
What's key here is that, every time I see it, the airline is completely up front about what they offer. Everyone gets to make their own adult choice. In the case of ISPs, it's impossible for an ISP to offer a real "unlimited" subscription. They will always find that the price they can charge is below the cost because the other companies pretend to sell "unlimited" but in fact don't deliver. This undermines the customers percieved value for the real unlimited offers.
Assume the N9 comes out June 2011 at $550 ballpark comparable to the iPhone 4 though a bit cheaper. [...] How do you sell 100m of those N9s at that price point? I don't see it, so the the N9 is a great phone that sells at best a few million.
Why do I have to assme that?
We can speculate about alternate realities all we want. How about discussing something about the real world as it actually is?
>Nokia was profitable!
True, like RIM was profitable last quarter.
Well; yes. Are you trying to suggest RIM would be better off if it was making a $800M loss every quarter rather than a modest profit?
>Nokia had a huge cash mountain (> 5Billion Dollars!!)
That doesn't mean anything really, without data on debt, assets, bonds etc.
Nokia is not some secret entity. It is a public listed company which reports it's earnings and assets to shareholders on a quarterly basis. You can find them directly linked from the front page of www.nokia.com That number takes into account debt, assets, bonds and a whole bunch more.
Symbian had to be dropped like a hot potato to save the company. The Nokia execs working on Symbian did everything they can to kill Meego/Maemo for their personal benefit thus making Nokia suffer hugely even before Elop was hired.
Resource investment in Symbian could quite reasonably be stopped, or at least scaled massively back. Just as Eliop proved he could do with Meltimi; this should have been done silently and without further comment. Symbian phones should have been sold for as long as they kept selling. The Osborne effect and the Ratner effects were well known before the "Eliop Effect" and were something every competent CEO knows to avoid. This would have bought Nokia another two years of profits. What they do with those two years is another question, but throwing them away needlessly was negligant bordering on criminal.
Nokia was desperate and need the cash plus a credible OS to run on their hardware.
Except; this was a lie.
If you had just taken Nokia's spare money, put it into a separate company and started building a mobile phone based on Android, recruiting people from scratch, you would have had a very good chance of getting into a major position in the market. It's well worth looking at some of the graphs which show how Nokia's Symbian sales only started going down after the "Eliop Effect" made everyone think they were a dead end.
His logic was good, but his facts were completely wrong. If you pick up a gun; decide for no apparent reason that it's a "wrong way round gun", and then shoot yourself, it's not your logic which is at fault. Grip on reality? Maybe? Sanity? Yes.
s/Franko/Franco/ ; sorry.
That's weird.
I will admit that; in a continent with a history like that of Franko's Spain or the Stasi (note how I can do this without even giving a single entry for someone to Godwin this :-) ) it seems a bit wierd. However, the key thing you have to know is that the government can subcontract privacy invasion to private bodies and does that (e.g. in the USA, the FBI are regularly allowed to access data from credit bureau's which they would never be able to gather themselves) but, at least in Europe, it's illegal for all your data to be transferred in the other direction.
This means that, ignoring standard incompetence, it's possible to legally protect yourself from private industry whilst allowing the government to have your data but the other way round is impossible.
This is before you go into the fact that the state is under democratic control in a number of European countries whilst there's nowhere in the world where corporations are under proper control.