Look; I don't really want to go on with this much longer; I completely respect your point about the N95 being a better selling phone. I will even, actually clearly admit that it was a better phone for a user trying to use it than the iPhone. I'd happily admit that the engineers designing the N95 did a better job at their brief than the engineers doing the iPhone. In fact; let's go further; I hated the first iPhone and would never have bought one. At the same time, even then I recognised and tried to talk several Nokia people through to understand the importantance of the iPhone. I always wanted an N95 and when I had one for some time was really happy with it. Where the N95 falls down is in it's aims and it's achievements. The engineers were given the wrong brief by their management.
"It's what computers have become."
That was the actual motto of the N95. Nokia described it as a "Multimedia computer". This was not some top end device for conservative business men. This was Nokia's management's attempt to be hip and define the market.
Both the N95 and the iPhone were trying to define a new category of portable internet/media devices. Key features that the iPhone achieved in this direction that the N95 never did include things like:
long term over the air upgradability - creating a true "installed base" of almost identical systems.
an immediate pointing device / touch screen - allowing rapid access to multiple options like in a WIMP based computer
a true feeling of not being a normal phone but something different
a proper multimedia library in iTunes.
a system formed free of operator interference
This may all seem like post justification and hindsight, but have a look at this iPhone article from Time, especially the last two points. These things were obvious to the media in 2007, let alone people intimately involved in new phone design. Even if the iPhone had sold only a few hundred examples, it would still have been more of a success in the real fight. The aim to define a completely new market, than the N95.
Oh well. If you still don't get what I'm going on about then there's no real hope of communicating. Have a good day.
You work for or previously worked for Nokia; right? The biggest failure of the N95 was that almost nobody from Nokia ever realised that it was a failure. Most outside people could see that. The N95 was not some minor side phone. The N95 was the flagship. It showed everything that Nokia was capable of at the moment that Apple was trying to show they had become irrelevant. It aimed to represent how Nokia was cool whilst everyone. In doing that the N95 showed everything that was wrong with Nokia's phones; for example:
Required special software to synchronize / load files on & off and do connectivity (PC suite).
Was not a fully independent first class citizen; e.g. you needed to have a computer to download maps
Had a design which, whilst good at launch, looked archaic immediately anyone saw an iPhone.
Was unable to run older Symbian applications causing effective market fragmentation
In the end the biggest failing was that the owner of an N95 would do endless feature comparisons showing that his device was better, but in the end the Apple people would swype accross their screen and just know they were better off. There just wasn't a single, obvious, visible cool thing about the N95 that was able to raise it above the iPhone. At the time the N95 was launched, Nokia was already two years into touch screen internet oriented devices such as the Nokia 770. The N95, or whatever Nokia's flagship phone at the time was to be called, should have been the Nokia's melding of the 770 with a phone and would have been ready to take on the iPhone.
The N95 was not a failure; it was a disaster. By allowing Apple to change the debate from hardware and features, where Nokia was strong, to software and user interface, where Apple was strong, It set up Nokia for every change and failure that was to come.
By a guy who thinks that Market share reflects on company survivability and that continuing sales growth is irrelevant. Interesting the way the market share graph in the original story has been cut out of the front page without any admission that this was done after it was shown to be complete junk. This is a person who makes crap labels on his axes so that you can't see a six month delay between effects he claims are simultaneous (the collapse of Nokia sales directly after they "Elope effect"ed themselves with burning platforms memo and the collapse of RIM sales after the Osborned themselves by announcing BB10). You are quoting him as evidence???!!
Repeat after me: Tomi is the only person to even nearly predict Nokia's market share. When Gartner and so on called tens of milions of Windows phones in 2012; when IDC predicted that Windows phone would be the second most popular Mobile OS; only Tommi correctly predicted Nokia's sales in signle figures of millions. Even if he's somewhat long winded sometimes, Tommi it seems to know a bunch of stuff you don't know.
N95 called to say hi and tell you how utterly ignorant you are...
The N95 was introduced in exactly the same year as Apple's iPhone. With Nokias better logistics and much better buying power the N95 had more sophisticated hardware and so could have done more than an iPhone; it had access to a better networks division than Apple and so could have added more value to the Networks (think about the failure of cooperation implied by the fact that Apple was the first company to deliver phone integrated voicemail even as Nokia Networks had been delivering voicemail for years). It had the backing of a much more experienced support team. The N95 was introduced by the company which had delivered the Nokia communicator with a large screen and office capable applications. The N95 was introduced six years after the large touchscreen prototype phones were shown by Nokia. It still completely failed to achieve anything like the success of the iPhone
I'm trying to work out how the N95 is representative of anything other than Nokia's complete failure of imagination and Balkanization under OPK.
To give OPK his due, the failure of the N95 relative to the iPhone was probably the thing which made him realize how completely he had screwed up Nokia's strategy and so effectively forced him to come to his senses and allow the Maemo and later Meego programs to go forward which subsequently produced the best mobile phones ever produced to date; the Nokia N950 and N9.
If Nokia switched to Android now, they would be admitting that their upcoming Windows 8-based products aren't good enough, but that their new Android-based phones are going to be fantastic.
Some things are just so obvious that there is no downside in admitting them. However, the way you do this is a bit subtle:
move Elop to a side role ("Windows Phone Future Chief Engineer"?) on grounds of "failure to execute"; keep him around and order him not to talk to anyone.
start developing an Android phone now. Make a deal with Google to keep this quiet
continue releasing all possible phones indefinitely; deny involvement in Android.
after it's ready; release your first Android phone in all markets except maybe the USA
continue to produce Windows phones, but don't push them an more than contracts oblige
when asked; state "We stil believe Windows phones are best suitable for certain limited geographical areas and specialit applications however, as has always been Nokia policy, we support multiple systems appropriate for each different group".
when Windows dies in the market place quitely stop producing Windows phones
There is no need to ever explicitly say that Nokia is stopping Windows.
Nokia cannot afford to go without the money injections from Microsoft, unless they give up on producing phones and turn into a pure patent-troll.
Nokia is spending more money on marketing and developing Windows Phones than it is getting from Microsoft. If it stopped Windows Phone and started Android tomorrow, Nokia's financial situation would improve and it would be able to last longer. They have about 3Bilion in cash (4 billion at last statement - 800M per quarter burn) and another 1.5 billion in available credit. If they stopped spending money on Windows completely they could survive on that for a fair while.
He was actually there when Nokia made all the decisions that got them in the mess they were even before
Bullshit. Ahonen left Nokia in 2001 which, coincidentally is about the last time that Nokia was showing excellent iPhone like marketing prototypes. The iPhone came out in 2007. The person you are looking for is the person who was CEO during the time the iPhone was developed and up until the point that Elop was installed.
Apart from that; Ahonen's speciality is the mobile phone market, not technical side, so you can expect him to see what is wrong with that side more than the technical side of the company; his emphasis on "channel, channel, channel" misses the bad effect that insisting on delivering many models with slight variations had, but at the same time it's completely reasonable for an established player. Apple had to work incredibly hard to get around Nokia's channel dominance and the fact that Symbian was still selling many more phones than the iPhone until Elop's brainfart / memo just shows how right that strategy was.
Ah, that's what you mean by "Microsoft is falling": you take shipments of two platforms with very different market dynamics, one of them aging, unpopular, and effectively discontinued,
Yes; that's exactly what we do. In the same way as we buch togeter sales of Android Gingerbread (2.3) with Android Jelly bean (4.1) even though the differences are almost bigger than the differences between Windows Mobile and Windows Phone. In both cases there are still phones being sold on the platforms.
Microsoft is expert in manipulating sales figures to seem that it is a success even when it isn't. We aren't going to be taken in.
Acutally, you both have already forgotten Symbian (Take a look at the the table!)
The symbian share is falling much faster than Nokia's WP 7 sales are growing.
This and Windows Mobile. Windows Phone is effectively an inheritor from both systems and should be inheriting the combined market share. It's rediculous to look at just Windows Phone's share alone ignoring the fact that there is already an established channel to market and set of shops and distributors which should be pushing the phones at the same rate as the models they are replacing.
They would Osborne themselves for the third time in three years -- which is admittedly world-class.
Osborning isn't about changing strategy. That's a perfectly reasonable response to realising you have a bad strategy. Osborning is about the boss of a company telling people about the new products which are to come before he has them ready to sell whilst making his old products sound worse than they are.
There are plenty of ways around Osborning. For example, you promise customers who buy now cheap upgrades later or you explain how your current systems will be compatible with your future systems or you explain limits in your future systems which mean that your current systems will need to keep going on. Even just promising to support your current systems for a year or two after your new systems become dominant in the market
To "Osborne" takes a kind of special incompetence that even Osborne himself didn't really show (the common understanding is a bit unfair on Mr Osborne). The "Elop Effect" on the other hand is to go beyond even that and to more or less deliberately set out to destoy your own products.
This has been marked as redundant, but it isn't. If you look at the 101 things wrong with Windows Phone list you will see that most of these things are not wrong with the iPhone. Most current Nokia customers will find transferring to an iPhone or Android phone easier than transferring to a Nokia Windows Phone. To a large extent this is because Windows Phone is lots worse than other systems (who ever heard of an alarm which doesn't work when you turn the phone off since the 1990s?) but it's also because Windows Phone is designed to match with the rest of Windows at the expense of the normal smartphone experience. This is the crucial thing which is killing Nokia; any knowledgable/experienced customer will be unhappy with Windows phone and Nokia's most valuable customers are the ones who have been buying a new Nokia phone at least once a year every year for the last ten or more years.
Even if Nokia does make a several million sales now, and that seems unlikely when you exclude phones stored in warehouses, the customers they are getting are the ones who just choose the "smartphone" with the lowest price. As these customers become more discriminating they will want to move to one of the more advanced smartphone platforms such as iOS.
[..] Nokia is most likely tied to microsoft contractually with significant fines on breakage, making for a nice poison pill for any microsoft's competitor [..]
Tommi Ahonen's argument is that these contracts are clearly actions of an agent of Microsoft and so those contracts could be invalidated. I'm not well exactly that would work, but it's definitely true that Microsoft has always been very arrogant in such matters just expecting to get away with things. There are quite a few things in Microsoft's operations which look very clever, but are actually very risky. People like Sendo and Lindows have managed to get a fair bit of money out of them.
One of the main things, for example, is that Microsoft always involves lawyers in any discussion of contract negotiations. This looks clever since it means that all such discussions are in theory "undiscoverable" and so not usable in courst. However, it also opens up Microsoft's lawyers to conspiracy in things such as destruction of evidence. If a sufficiently aggressive and clever attacker manages to threaten the MS lawyers with something which looks like jail time they will sing like Nightingales.
Probably someone who was willing to persue a really aggressive litigation strategy against Microsoft could get most of the cost of the Nokia purchase out of them in a legal settlement, free themselves of all sorts of legal restrain and get a very excellent deal on patent liability protection.
Around one side; via an optical network; you send a list of proposed trades which you might do. On the nutrino link you just send an execute/abort bit. You can reduce risk by splitting bigger trades into a number of smaller trades with the same execution time so that any given error costs less.
You can also duplicate the nutrino bit stream over the optical network so you can continually measure the bit error rate.
Obviously, schemes sending an integer (to chose one of many transactions) or using some form of redundant code to improve data integrity could improve this if you can afford the delay these will create.
You are right I guess; even now switching back to a "produce everything we can sell" strategy could save Nokia. The problem is that you clearly have to get rid of Elop to achieve this; the primary thing which is killing Nokia is things he has said, so everthing he ever did needs to be completely repudiated. Probably this needs a complete change of the board of directors and that can't be done without a buy out. The real question is: "why are the big shareholder's sleeping on the job?".
Your analysis seems pretty right but you've missed that breaking up Nokia can finance quite a bit of the cost of a bid.
As ever; Tommi Ahonen has about the best analysis about this. Beside the three you have named there are companies like LG or ZTE which could get quite a bit out of the "dumbphone" divisions. With Nokia's current strategy, where it's smart phones are barely selling outside Finland and the US, Nokia can't really get future value out of that division. Almost any company that can deliver Android, however, could use the dumbphone distribution network to get its self into the best position in most of the new upcoming smartphone markets.
One of the key things seems to me that a live buy of Nokia has to happen extremely soon so that Nokia still retains some experties outside the Windows phones and it looks like Steven Elop is trying to make that as difficult as possible.
There is a real reason why their PR people were out in force in response to Linuses recent commends and if I were investing, the fact that they failed to get traction with the community would mean I would be moving my money out of Nvidia.
He was introduced as a veteran of "World War Eleven".
Please please someone post this on YouTube and put up the link. It's like the joke about there being 10 kinds of people in the world; those that understand binary and those that don't.
You talk like there was one "Linux community" with one opinion on this matter. The Ubuntu guys may have had techical/interface design problems but they clearly set out to achieve what you are talking about and are still aiming for an easy to use desktop system. You should be able to find a community where your wants fit in. The question then is: how would you achieve that tecnically in a volunteer project?
The great thing about VOIP is it doesn't matter. You can install and run both clients at the same time and then just make sure you are visible in Jitsi as much as possible whilst being visible very rarely in Skype, and then only when you want something (sit there invisible, but turn on notifications so you see when friends without Jitsi come on line). From time to time suggest to people that it would be easier to get you if they had Jitsi. When you meet people show them how to set up Jitsi (or whichever other client you prefer) to work better than Skype.
No need to get political. The simple phrase "I want to have something I can rely on; I don't trust Microsoft not to mess me about later; remember how they killed off KIN / Windows Mobile 6 / Windows Mobile 7 / the desktop PC / efficient working in Office / flight simulator / plays for sure / etc. etc.". Preferably choose a Microsoft betrayal that cost you personally There are so many simple technical betrayals by Microsoft that you can start with those before going into the political. Even there, you should start with things like "because Microsoft chooses to support Chinese censorship" which are simple and clear to understand.
although the caesarian scars are a direct consequence of childbearing, a 'traditional' feminine role (not like it can be considered traditionally masculine, I suppose:) So showing off their scars in that respect basically shows 'look, I'm fertile, I've borne children', and they're in a location that's easy to cover up.
Agreed; but I definitely remember that before (e.g. 10/15 years ago?) it was something that would be more likely to be covered up and that people would be surprised if it was shown. I commented on it because it's definitely something that has changed in that time so I think it's probalby a good sign.
Are they as carefree about appendectomy or kidney transplant scars, I wonder?
Not going into details but at least one comes under that category and another is a set of serious scars after various bone operations in places you'd rather not have bone operations;-). Most of what I'm talking about is arm and leg scars. On the rest though I agree. Mostly people are getting more uptight and perfectionist. Dressing up is cool, but not every day.
I learned a while ago never to work for anyone that uses color-coded ID badges. MS is corporate paternalism at its worst.
What the hell? Even on Google "Microsoft color-coded badges" pulls up nothing (with or without hyphen). Could someone please expand on this? What do the different colours mean?
I avoid talking to my daughter about breasts because she is a juvenile on the onset of puberty, and she is completely uncomfortable with the concept of breasts.
I talk to my wife about breasts because she is an adult, and therefore completely comfortable with the concept of breasts.
You're acting like a 12 year old girl, rolling her eyes and telling everyone how "totally immature" they all are when they point out the elephant in the room.
I'm trying to work out what you disagree with me about. My point was that an adult, would use the word "breasts" here. I think I agree with your post 100%. Context is everything. In this case the context is body armour for soldiers so the context is pretty clearly "adult" in the normal, non pornographic meaning. The correct word to use is "breasts". Words like "tits" or "boobs" would be inappropriate, just as "big boobs" is inappropriate when Microsoft uses it - they have to deal with a diverse working environment, but wouldn't even be worthy of comment if used by a basement hacker. The phrase used "complex curvatures" is dubious because it isn't clear if it includes buttocks or not which is quite important in understanding the design problems they have. Being unclear makes the article less "professional".
For men, it's considered macho to have scars, for women, it's considered disfiguring. I didn't say that was fair, it's just the double standard that is in place.
I'm not so sure about that any more. Certainly my girl friends (american sense - not sexual sense) tend to show off their scars quite a bit; but that's more to do with shared extreme sport-accident culture and possibly cesarians etc. Girls in Europe definitely go in bikinis or topless on the beach after a cesarian no problem. Some of my friends are even pretty cool about some (pretty limited) facial damage up to and including slightly visible broken noses, though I bet anything ugly on the face would be a problem. I guess for "army girls" the situation would not be much different.
Judging by this most people would just put a video up on YouTube nowadays and be done. Hmm.
Oh, and assuming that his tag reflects reality also implies that yours does...so am I talking to a wall here? Maybe I should be using smaller words?
There are no words small enough to get through the stupidity of the bottom end of Slashdot posters. Don't take it personally, just laugh at the failure to accept their sad lives that their bitterness implies. Nothing quite like getting the trolls replying on your post to show you hit home somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Look; I don't really want to go on with this much longer; I completely respect your point about the N95 being a better selling phone. I will even, actually clearly admit that it was a better phone for a user trying to use it than the iPhone. I'd happily admit that the engineers designing the N95 did a better job at their brief than the engineers doing the iPhone. In fact; let's go further; I hated the first iPhone and would never have bought one. At the same time, even then I recognised and tried to talk several Nokia people through to understand the importantance of the iPhone. I always wanted an N95 and when I had one for some time was really happy with it. Where the N95 falls down is in it's aims and it's achievements. The engineers were given the wrong brief by their management.
That was the actual motto of the N95. Nokia described it as a "Multimedia computer". This was not some top end device for conservative business men. This was Nokia's management's attempt to be hip and define the market.
Both the N95 and the iPhone were trying to define a new category of portable internet/media devices. Key features that the iPhone achieved in this direction that the N95 never did include things like:
This may all seem like post justification and hindsight, but have a look at this iPhone article from Time, especially the last two points. These things were obvious to the media in 2007, let alone people intimately involved in new phone design. Even if the iPhone had sold only a few hundred examples, it would still have been more of a success in the real fight. The aim to define a completely new market, than the N95.
Oh well. If you still don't get what I'm going on about then there's no real hope of communicating. Have a good day.
Failure of n95? What the hell are you smoking?
You work for or previously worked for Nokia; right? The biggest failure of the N95 was that almost nobody from Nokia ever realised that it was a failure. Most outside people could see that. The N95 was not some minor side phone. The N95 was the flagship. It showed everything that Nokia was capable of at the moment that Apple was trying to show they had become irrelevant. It aimed to represent how Nokia was cool whilst everyone. In doing that the N95 showed everything that was wrong with Nokia's phones; for example:
In the end the biggest failing was that the owner of an N95 would do endless feature comparisons showing that his device was better, but in the end the Apple people would swype accross their screen and just know they were better off. There just wasn't a single, obvious, visible cool thing about the N95 that was able to raise it above the iPhone. At the time the N95 was launched, Nokia was already two years into touch screen internet oriented devices such as the Nokia 770. The N95, or whatever Nokia's flagship phone at the time was to be called, should have been the Nokia's melding of the 770 with a phone and would have been ready to take on the iPhone.
The N95 was not a failure; it was a disaster. By allowing Apple to change the debate from hardware and features, where Nokia was strong, to software and user interface, where Apple was strong, It set up Nokia for every change and failure that was to come.
By a guy who thinks that Market share reflects on company survivability and that continuing sales growth is irrelevant. Interesting the way the market share graph in the original story has been cut out of the front page without any admission that this was done after it was shown to be complete junk. This is a person who makes crap labels on his axes so that you can't see a six month delay between effects he claims are simultaneous (the collapse of Nokia sales directly after they "Elope effect"ed themselves with burning platforms memo and the collapse of RIM sales after the Osborned themselves by announcing BB10). You are quoting him as evidence???!!
Repeat after me: Tomi is the only person to even nearly predict Nokia's market share. When Gartner and so on called tens of milions of Windows phones in 2012; when IDC predicted that Windows phone would be the second most popular Mobile OS; only Tommi correctly predicted Nokia's sales in signle figures of millions. Even if he's somewhat long winded sometimes, Tommi it seems to know a bunch of stuff you don't know.
N95 called to say hi and tell you how utterly ignorant you are...
The N95 was introduced in exactly the same year as Apple's iPhone. With Nokias better logistics and much better buying power the N95 had more sophisticated hardware and so could have done more than an iPhone; it had access to a better networks division than Apple and so could have added more value to the Networks (think about the failure of cooperation implied by the fact that Apple was the first company to deliver phone integrated voicemail even as Nokia Networks had been delivering voicemail for years). It had the backing of a much more experienced support team. The N95 was introduced by the company which had delivered the Nokia communicator with a large screen and office capable applications. The N95 was introduced six years after the large touchscreen prototype phones were shown by Nokia. It still completely failed to achieve anything like the success of the iPhone
I'm trying to work out how the N95 is representative of anything other than Nokia's complete failure of imagination and Balkanization under OPK.
To give OPK his due, the failure of the N95 relative to the iPhone was probably the thing which made him realize how completely he had screwed up Nokia's strategy and so effectively forced him to come to his senses and allow the Maemo and later Meego programs to go forward which subsequently produced the best mobile phones ever produced to date; the Nokia N950 and N9.
If Nokia switched to Android now, they would be admitting that their upcoming Windows 8-based products aren't good enough, but that their new Android-based phones are going to be fantastic.
Some things are just so obvious that there is no downside in admitting them. However, the way you do this is a bit subtle:
There is no need to ever explicitly say that Nokia is stopping Windows.
Nokia cannot afford to go without the money injections from Microsoft, unless they give up on producing phones and turn into a pure patent-troll.
Nokia is spending more money on marketing and developing Windows Phones than it is getting from Microsoft. If it stopped Windows Phone and started Android tomorrow, Nokia's financial situation would improve and it would be able to last longer. They have about 3Bilion in cash (4 billion at last statement - 800M per quarter burn) and another 1.5 billion in available credit. If they stopped spending money on Windows completely they could survive on that for a fair while.
He was actually there when Nokia made all the decisions that got them in the mess they were even before
Bullshit. Ahonen left Nokia in 2001 which, coincidentally is about the last time that Nokia was showing excellent iPhone like marketing prototypes. The iPhone came out in 2007. The person you are looking for is the person who was CEO during the time the iPhone was developed and up until the point that Elop was installed.
Apart from that; Ahonen's speciality is the mobile phone market, not technical side, so you can expect him to see what is wrong with that side more than the technical side of the company; his emphasis on "channel, channel, channel" misses the bad effect that insisting on delivering many models with slight variations had, but at the same time it's completely reasonable for an established player. Apple had to work incredibly hard to get around Nokia's channel dominance and the fact that Symbian was still selling many more phones than the iPhone until Elop's brainfart / memo just shows how right that strategy was.
Ah, that's what you mean by "Microsoft is falling": you take shipments of two platforms with very different market dynamics, one of them aging, unpopular, and effectively discontinued,
Yes; that's exactly what we do. In the same way as we buch togeter sales of Android Gingerbread (2.3) with Android Jelly bean (4.1) even though the differences are almost bigger than the differences between Windows Mobile and Windows Phone. In both cases there are still phones being sold on the platforms.
Microsoft is expert in manipulating sales figures to seem that it is a success even when it isn't. We aren't going to be taken in.
Acutally, you both have already forgotten Symbian (Take a look at the the table!)
The symbian share is falling much faster than Nokia's WP 7 sales are growing.
This and Windows Mobile. Windows Phone is effectively an inheritor from both systems and should be inheriting the combined market share. It's rediculous to look at just Windows Phone's share alone ignoring the fact that there is already an established channel to market and set of shops and distributors which should be pushing the phones at the same rate as the models they are replacing.
They would Osborne themselves for the third time in three years -- which is admittedly world-class.
Osborning isn't about changing strategy. That's a perfectly reasonable response to realising you have a bad strategy. Osborning is about the boss of a company telling people about the new products which are to come before he has them ready to sell whilst making his old products sound worse than they are.
There are plenty of ways around Osborning. For example, you promise customers who buy now cheap upgrades later or you explain how your current systems will be compatible with your future systems or you explain limits in your future systems which mean that your current systems will need to keep going on. Even just promising to support your current systems for a year or two after your new systems become dominant in the market
To "Osborne" takes a kind of special incompetence that even Osborne himself didn't really show (the common understanding is a bit unfair on Mr Osborne). The "Elop Effect" on the other hand is to go beyond even that and to more or less deliberately set out to destoy your own products.
Nokia needs to get rid of Elop, possibly demoting him but keeping him around for his contract length, and then, quietly, change strategy and "smile at [Microsoft] while we pull the trigger".
This has been marked as redundant, but it isn't. If you look at the 101 things wrong with Windows Phone list you will see that most of these things are not wrong with the iPhone. Most current Nokia customers will find transferring to an iPhone or Android phone easier than transferring to a Nokia Windows Phone. To a large extent this is because Windows Phone is lots worse than other systems (who ever heard of an alarm which doesn't work when you turn the phone off since the 1990s?) but it's also because Windows Phone is designed to match with the rest of Windows at the expense of the normal smartphone experience. This is the crucial thing which is killing Nokia; any knowledgable/experienced customer will be unhappy with Windows phone and Nokia's most valuable customers are the ones who have been buying a new Nokia phone at least once a year every year for the last ten or more years.
Even if Nokia does make a several million sales now, and that seems unlikely when you exclude phones stored in warehouses, the customers they are getting are the ones who just choose the "smartphone" with the lowest price. As these customers become more discriminating they will want to move to one of the more advanced smartphone platforms such as iOS.
[..] Nokia is most likely tied to microsoft contractually with significant fines on breakage, making for a nice poison pill for any microsoft's competitor [..]
Tommi Ahonen's argument is that these contracts are clearly actions of an agent of Microsoft and so those contracts could be invalidated. I'm not well exactly that would work, but it's definitely true that Microsoft has always been very arrogant in such matters just expecting to get away with things. There are quite a few things in Microsoft's operations which look very clever, but are actually very risky. People like Sendo and Lindows have managed to get a fair bit of money out of them.
One of the main things, for example, is that Microsoft always involves lawyers in any discussion of contract negotiations. This looks clever since it means that all such discussions are in theory "undiscoverable" and so not usable in courst. However, it also opens up Microsoft's lawyers to conspiracy in things such as destruction of evidence. If a sufficiently aggressive and clever attacker manages to threaten the MS lawyers with something which looks like jail time they will sing like Nightingales.
Probably someone who was willing to persue a really aggressive litigation strategy against Microsoft could get most of the cost of the Nokia purchase out of them in a legal settlement, free themselves of all sorts of legal restrain and get a very excellent deal on patent liability protection.
Around one side; via an optical network; you send a list of proposed trades which you might do. On the nutrino link you just send an execute/abort bit. You can reduce risk by splitting bigger trades into a number of smaller trades with the same execution time so that any given error costs less.
You can also duplicate the nutrino bit stream over the optical network so you can continually measure the bit error rate.
Obviously, schemes sending an integer (to chose one of many transactions) or using some form of redundant code to improve data integrity could improve this if you can afford the delay these will create.
You are right I guess; even now switching back to a "produce everything we can sell" strategy could save Nokia. The problem is that you clearly have to get rid of Elop to achieve this; the primary thing which is killing Nokia is things he has said, so everthing he ever did needs to be completely repudiated. Probably this needs a complete change of the board of directors and that can't be done without a buy out. The real question is: "why are the big shareholder's sleeping on the job?".
. And now I have to wait for my 50 tabs to load one by one when I restart and switch to them, because of you people. Thanks.
Can I just say; this is about the biggest fix to Firefox in ages. I really like it. I'm glad the other poster gave you an option to avoid it too.
Your analysis seems pretty right but you've missed that breaking up Nokia can finance quite a bit of the cost of a bid.
As ever; Tommi Ahonen has about the best analysis about this. Beside the three you have named there are companies like LG or ZTE which could get quite a bit out of the "dumbphone" divisions. With Nokia's current strategy, where it's smart phones are barely selling outside Finland and the US, Nokia can't really get future value out of that division. Almost any company that can deliver Android, however, could use the dumbphone distribution network to get its self into the best position in most of the new upcoming smartphone markets.
One of the key things seems to me that a live buy of Nokia has to happen extremely soon so that Nokia still retains some experties outside the Windows phones and it looks like Steven Elop is trying to make that as difficult as possible.
. 90+% of Nvidia's customers don't use FOSS at all.
That may be true, for all I know or care but it's not for want of trying. As their traditional desktop market is dissapearing into irrelevance, with Apple having already decided to skip Nvidia they are desperate to get into the Android market and without that they are in deep trouble.
There is a real reason why their PR people were out in force in response to Linuses recent commends and if I were investing, the fact that they failed to get traction with the community would mean I would be moving my money out of Nvidia.
He was introduced as a veteran of "World War Eleven".
Please please someone post this on YouTube and put up the link. It's like the joke about there being 10 kinds of people in the world; those that understand binary and those that don't.
This.
I think that the various free GUI guys need to go to something like BDD so that they can at least understand what they are breaking.
Okay, thanksl the Mint people have finally convinced me. Linux Mint is going on at least one desktop this week.
You talk like there was one "Linux community" with one opinion on this matter. The Ubuntu guys may have had techical/interface design problems but they clearly set out to achieve what you are talking about and are still aiming for an easy to use desktop system. You should be able to find a community where your wants fit in. The question then is: how would you achieve that tecnically in a volunteer project?
The great thing about VOIP is it doesn't matter. You can install and run both clients at the same time and then just make sure you are visible in Jitsi as much as possible whilst being visible very rarely in Skype, and then only when you want something (sit there invisible, but turn on notifications so you see when friends without Jitsi come on line). From time to time suggest to people that it would be easier to get you if they had Jitsi. When you meet people show them how to set up Jitsi (or whichever other client you prefer) to work better than Skype.
No need to get political. The simple phrase "I want to have something I can rely on; I don't trust Microsoft not to mess me about later; remember how they killed off KIN / Windows Mobile 6 / Windows Mobile 7 / the desktop PC / efficient working in Office / flight simulator / plays for sure / etc. etc.". Preferably choose a Microsoft betrayal that cost you personally There are so many simple technical betrayals by Microsoft that you can start with those before going into the political. Even there, you should start with things like "because Microsoft chooses to support Chinese censorship" which are simple and clear to understand.
although the caesarian scars are a direct consequence of childbearing, a 'traditional' feminine role (not like it can be considered traditionally masculine, I suppose :) So showing off their scars in that respect basically shows 'look, I'm fertile, I've borne children', and they're in a location that's easy to cover up.
Agreed; but I definitely remember that before (e.g. 10/15 years ago?) it was something that would be more likely to be covered up and that people would be surprised if it was shown. I commented on it because it's definitely something that has changed in that time so I think it's probalby a good sign.
Are they as carefree about appendectomy or kidney transplant scars, I wonder?
Not going into details but at least one comes under that category and another is a set of serious scars after various bone operations in places you'd rather not have bone operations ;-). Most of what I'm talking about is arm and leg scars. On the rest though I agree. Mostly people are getting more uptight and perfectionist. Dressing up is cool, but not every day.
I learned a while ago never to work for anyone that uses color-coded ID badges. MS is corporate paternalism at its worst.
What the hell? Even on Google "Microsoft color-coded badges" pulls up nothing (with or without hyphen). Could someone please expand on this? What do the different colours mean?
I avoid talking to my daughter about breasts because she is a juvenile on the onset of puberty, and she is completely uncomfortable with the concept of breasts. I talk to my wife about breasts because she is an adult, and therefore completely comfortable with the concept of breasts.
You're acting like a 12 year old girl, rolling her eyes and telling everyone how "totally immature" they all are when they point out the elephant in the room.
I'm trying to work out what you disagree with me about. My point was that an adult, would use the word "breasts" here. I think I agree with your post 100%. Context is everything. In this case the context is body armour for soldiers so the context is pretty clearly "adult" in the normal, non pornographic meaning. The correct word to use is "breasts". Words like "tits" or "boobs" would be inappropriate, just as "big boobs" is inappropriate when Microsoft uses it - they have to deal with a diverse working environment, but wouldn't even be worthy of comment if used by a basement hacker. The phrase used "complex curvatures" is dubious because it isn't clear if it includes buttocks or not which is quite important in understanding the design problems they have. Being unclear makes the article less "professional".
For men, it's considered macho to have scars, for women, it's considered disfiguring. I didn't say that was fair, it's just the double standard that is in place.
I'm not so sure about that any more. Certainly my girl friends (american sense - not sexual sense) tend to show off their scars quite a bit; but that's more to do with shared extreme sport-accident culture and possibly cesarians etc. Girls in Europe definitely go in bikinis or topless on the beach after a cesarian no problem. Some of my friends are even pretty cool about some (pretty limited) facial damage up to and including slightly visible broken noses, though I bet anything ugly on the face would be a problem. I guess for "army girls" the situation would not be much different.
Judging by this most people would just put a video up on YouTube nowadays and be done. Hmm.
Oh, and assuming that his tag reflects reality also implies that yours does...so am I talking to a wall here? Maybe I should be using smaller words?
There are no words small enough to get through the stupidity of the bottom end of Slashdot posters. Don't take it personally, just laugh at the failure to accept their sad lives that their bitterness implies. Nothing quite like getting the trolls replying on your post to show you hit home somewhere.