Quattro, I like you. I was a Quattro guy too. Excel was definitely not my favorite.
As for the changes in IE from 1 to 4. I never used IE1, mostly I used Netscape and IE 4 was amazing. Active-X, channels and general push technology, Active Desktop, a GUI HTML editor. Give me that sort of upgrade and you can feel free to move menu items around!
I was already using Unixes by then though. I guess because I used Unixes regularly I always had to deal with multiple GUIs and never really had that kind of reaction.
I think there is no question both of them will gain marketshare on the desktop. Microsoft is aware of this. As they see it the alternative is to be knocked out of consumer all-together or temporarily give some share up to pull way ahead technologically. Either they are right or they are wrong but at least so far they seem willing to take a marketshare hit. Something they haven't been willing to do for a long time.
Or not. And if enough people choose "or not", Microsoft has to either backtrack, or make new and more appealing radical departures than the ones they did in 8. Or stop selling (whether or not they are still offering) desktop OS's altogether.
They've already made it clear they won't be selling a desktop OS. They believe there will such a thing as desktop OS 10 years from now. They see this move as something like the migration from DOS to Windows. DOS doesn't exist as a separate product and DOS apps and their style of working with the end user are essentially never used.
Windows 8 may represent the end of the desktop metaphor. I figure in honor of this... a link to the original commercials when this was a new idea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UtlOgkOGy4
We don't know yet if it sucks for users. We don't have applications that were designed from the ground up for ubiquitous computing. I think about something like Evernote with its phone / web / desktop interfaces and that is rather nice. It could very well be that this setup is the best.
OK do you have a source for the $200? Like I said, $200 is an earth changing number, it means that Nokia had a phone that could have easily #1 phone on one of the markets that they traditionally do worst in.
I think the Americans that saw it thought it was great.
Liking European style correlates strongly with social class, education and living on the coasts. Look where Ikea stores are located, and consider that warehouse style stores with low prices are way way more popular in middle America than on the coasts. So you are getting a biased feel by talking to American techies.
When you start talking about a national rollout this would be more of a problem though again I think it is not huge problem. Computer gadgets in general all have this correlation with class, education and liberalism. You can't reach who you can't reach but I think this problem is solvable for most Americans. Apple has offended middle America by explicitly appealing to liberals. And they are facing the a problem where they get backlash from their base when they try to reach out.
Linux has associations with Libertarianism and thus friends in the Tea Party (19% of the Americans that are most politically conservative). Its hard to imagine a European brand pitching itself this way, but assuming that Nokia could stomach a campaign with someone like Sarah Palin as a national spokesperson... I can think of some rather good appeals that would work strongly with middle America. For example show where Finland is on the map and mention that is a Lutheran country when advertising (and yes, I am being serious probably 60% of Americans don't know where Finland is). Nokia could make the aesthetic work to their favor but they can't ignore it. This is something any American ad agency could help with it doesn't require genius just attention.
. 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 assume you mean car stereo. As an American I don't see that at all. Most people who want these expensive sorts of attachments buy them in the aftermarket not from manufacturers. Blaupunkt I'm sure has a good relationship with Nokia and could roll out something instantly to work with the N9 and I believe they are the #1 selling aftermarket stereo company. Sell ten million phones and you can get the 3rd party attachments. Besides the N9 uses standard micro USB, so most attachments fit.
If you mean home stereo, like alarm clocks speakers, again micro USB is standard. Nokia even has their own line of these things which the electronics stores would be happy to sell. I don't see this as much of a problem. Its been a problem for Android because every single phone has different attachments so no phone is getting into the tens of millions to create an aftermarket. Again easy problem
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.
There are going to be things the carriers aren't going to want to offer. Don't offer those things. The WiFi router is a good example. Nokia Lumia comes with tethering shutoff by default for AT&T, AT&T turns it on remotely for subscribers who buy tethering. Heck, I had a Nokia phone about a dozen years ago when the switch to pay ringtones came through. Those went from free to an extra charge instantly via. an online software update. So I assume whatever problems Nokia had with not listening to the carriers are in the past. Even Apple loses battles on these issues. My Verizon iPhone had this shutoff and now Verizon wants the access to it buried under multiple layers of menus by default (with an icon for paying customers).
There might be a GNLUStep version of textmate but there will never be a generic Linux or Windows version. Too much of it is tied to the mac.
As far as line editors, I'd agree there is no reason for someone young to know them. Your namesake btw was also a big fan of line editors. edlin ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edlin ) was the standard editor on DOS for many years, again because it was scriptable it was useful. Though the bigger reason was that often Ansi / nansi drivers hadn't loaded so a full screen editor wouldn't work properly. Edlin was often quite useful in repairing a broken PC.
Most certainly they've had compelling products recently
Microsoft Universal Communicator Microsoft Dynamics Windows 7 which is widely liked SQL Server which over the last decade is now the dominant player in DW and BI etc...
in 2012 is strange which is why vim has editing modes
Not really. VIM is based on VI. VI was a full screen user interface for ex, which was a line editor. The VI commands are ex commands. (http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/ex.html ). EX was an extension of ED which is a line editor and a line editor needs to be modal. One of the things that nice about VIM, is that it is fully scriptable because within it still contains an old fashioned line editor.
At $200 + 20%, i.e you aren't talking $370 anymore but $250. You pick up a good chunk of the prepay market possible another 30m. At that rate not only do carriers advertise your phone everyone (no charge to Nokia) but they would be willing to do all sorts of incentives for customers like: phone free + first 2 months service free. You sell 50m in the USA easy. Or you kick the price back up to $370 sell 15m and use the $3b in extra revenue to build a first class US application platform.
As far as the carrier problems in the USA, I don't believe the problems are deep at all, they are surface I don't think they would carry over to the MeeGo brand. Here are the usual problems you tell me if you think Nokia wouldn't get around them:
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. 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. 3) US customers don't like Symbian (not applicable since different OS) 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 5) Not cooperating with carrier strategy. Well right now the strategy is anyone but Apple.
I have to hear some other people. But if you are right about $200 manufacturing cost for the N9... you are talking a phone that would beat Apple in their home country.
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
I doubt that. The US market is the big subsidy market so lets use the USA. $360 is about where they put the subsidy. No one is getting the $410 type subsidy from iPhone, desperate or not; Nokia customers haven't proven a willingness to overpay for their carrier related costs and accessories. Still if we assume that Nokia could have lived with $370 making it a free phone the carriers might have gone that high, they love free phones. And if it was free they might have eaten the marketing costs themselves as part of the package. 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.
Short-sightenness. They didn't see their strategy through. No Maemo/MeeGo phone had been released yet; and nothing had been built up yet. They were probably talking with Ballmer and Elop at that point as well, and getting a lot of FUD from those circles on why Maemo/MeeGo wouldn't go.
Unless Elop and Balmer are lying that's not possible. Elop approached Balmer after he realized the MeeGo strategy wasn't viable. Balmer may not have even known how unhappy Elop and the board were with MeeGo when the threw the cash in. Both sides were desperate.
As it was, the N9 and N900 when compared to top of the line Android and iPhones give them a go for their money.
Maybe. Physically I think its a bit behind in areas like CPU, and screen resolution. The N900 doesn't even have a capacitive touch screen. The problem was platform. But regardless at least strategically that's not where it needed to be. It needed to crush mid range Androids and be on par with bottom of the line iPhones; or it needed to be much better by 2011 to take them on. Had Nokia not lost 2 years screwing around and these phones come out in 2009 go after the top end. But what Nokia needed in 2011 would have been a path for Symbian customers.
People willing to buy a $600 phones weren't coming from Symbian. Again no one has ever said the N9 couldn't sell 10m phones, the question was whether it could sell 100m.
It would have been better for the Nokia to shoot a multiple OS strategy and let the market itself figure out which one to keep.
I agree. Probably Microsoft's cash made that impossible.
I think you should talk to the GNUStep people. They could use a full featured editor, the port will be much much easier to GNUStep than generic Linux....
If you look at the source, this is a program designed to compiled by XCode against the Cocoa libraries for use on a Mac (or possibly extended to an iOS device). This is platform specific, though I imagine it could get ported to http://www.gnustep.org/
On the smartphones, the nice thing for Nokia is that the average life of a smartphone is 11.5 mo. Until that number comes up long lived dumb phones are fine.
We agree that the N9 is a really cool phone with potential and that the Lumia was a phone that customers hate. I also will stipulate that with a promotional campaign Nokia could have sold 10m of the N9 easily. The question is all about how cheaply could they make 100m of them. Nokia seems to be building the Lumia 900 at about $450 each. I have no idea who they are spending that much given that this is over what Apple spends to build the iPhone 4S with considerably better hardware specs. But that seems to be the case.
If say $20b-22b would have gotten 100m of these made then the N9 is a the killer phone and the Symbian -> MeeGo strategy would have worked. If on the other hand this phone costs $40b-45b to make 100m then it wasn't viable. At that price the phone has to compete with the high end Androids, best Blackberry, and iPhone 4 and there the hardware specs to say nothing of the software just aren't on par. This really is the crucial question as to whether Elop had a "burning platform" or not. Heck at $250 my daughter's birthday present would be an N9, and this is coming from a 11 year Apple user who agrees with Elop, living in America, which is Nokia's weakest major market.
Jolla will have a good business at Nokia expense as a result.
Jolia can afford to sell a niche phone. Nokia can't the overhead is totally different. In Jolia moves 3m or 5m phones they will be thrilled and thrive while Nokia would go bankrupt.
Share value is not a metric of how successful a company is, but rather a metric on how willing others are to bet on the success of the company. You can be the most successful company in the world and have a zero share price; or the worst in the world and have a very high share price.
I agree share value isn't a great metric for viewing how successful a company is. It is however a useful metric for determining what the board thinks of the share value. If the stock is way below what the board thinks the company is worth they are going to be shopping for a buyer or taking the company private. If it is way over, the board is going to engage in equity financing. More or less the board of Nokia seems to agree with Elop's assessment of the situation, that there was no viable internal option. You can see this in the 2010 report: http://i.nokia.com/blob/view/-/263824/data/1/-/Request-Nokia-in-2010-pdf.pdf
For example 2008 to 2009 sales dropped 19% and profits decreased 76%. The board's analysis was
Our sales and profitability have been, and continue to be, driven to significant extent by our success in the traditional mobile device market. Increasingly, however, our sales and profitability depend on our success in the market for con- verged mobile devices. Our failure to effectively, timely and profitably adapt our business and operations to the developing requirements of the converged mobile device market could have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations, particularly our profitability, and our financial condition.
That wasn't Elop and that wasn't the burning platform memo. By 3rd quarter 2010 the board had made up their mind that the MeeGo strategy wasn't viable. This wasn't one guy. If they were wrong why where they so wrong?
And in all reality their Maemo/MeeGo devices outsell the Windows Phone devices when in the same markets.
Their Maemo/MeeGo devices don't sell nearly enough to sustain a company Nokia's size. If Nokia was a small company the N9 would have been awesome. Elop BTW agrees, that they might be able to get the N9 down to around $250 by 2014/2015 and then they do have a viable device. The problem was he didn't have enough money to last that long.
Certainly customers hate the Lumia and that hasn't worked out for Nokia yet, and may not work out. But the problem with MeeGo devices when we start talking about sustaining Nokia was the ability to produce something inexpensive enough to transition their Symbian base quickly enough. I've read Tomi's blog. Its an interesting blog. But he tends to think like a guy who works for Nokia not a control investor. The people who held Nokia's bonds didn't share Tomi's opinions about Nokia's prospects. Nokia was at $40 a share in late 2007 and at $15 a share when Elop came in. If there had been a MeeGo phone like the N9 when he showed up with a strategy to cut the cost of manufacture there never would have been an alliance with Microsoft.
Now don't get me wrong I think Tomi's criticism of the terrible job Elop did in managing the transition are spot on. But I don't have access to the T&C with Microsoft. I don't know that Microsoft, after the fiasco with LG, can afford to let Nokia sink and the strategy may always have been: heads Windows works out and the investors get profits from Windows, tails Windows 7 flounders and Microsoft buys Nokia the time it needs.
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
If the shareholders could have easily gotten equity out of Nokia there wouldn't have been a problem. But under the labor rules they had layoffs were going to cost the company a pretty penny. They couldn't get the money out.
Nokia was profitable! Nokia had increasing sales! Including increasing sales of "smartphones"!! Nokia had a huge cash mountain (> 5Billion Dollars!!)
Absolutely. Symbian was still doing well but.... 1) They had decreasing sales on the high end. 2) Margins were collapsing 3) Their Meego / Maemo strategy wasn't ready to go. It wasn't until 2011 they released the N9 and that phone is priced much to high for the hardware.
I don't think that Elop's facts were wrong. Assume the N9 comes out June 2011 at $550 ballpark comparable to the iPhone 4 though a bit cheaper. The Samsung Galaxy II is out. The 4S comes out 1 quarter later. 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. Now it does have the realistic potential to be a $250 phone by 2014 / 2015 and replace Symbian low end base all over the world. I just don't see how Nokia had 5 years, based on Symbian given how much staff / overhead they had.
Elop needs Balmer's cash. If you see some way to get around that, tell me the plan that works. How do they get people transition from Symbian to Meego during the 2010-2014 time frame without viable Meego / Maemo phones?
Microsoft has been rather inconsistent in their developer announcements for years. They've been changing their roadmaps frequently. I don't think it is unreasonable that people are starring to speculate.
Honestly I read his article in Business week where he outlined the logic. The whole thing makes sense. Nokia was desperate and need the cash plus a credible OS to run on their hardware. Balmer wanted the credibility Nokia bought him and had cash. It was a dangerous play but I don't buy it was corrupt. It makes a lot of sense for the board / shareholder's perspective where chewing up the equity and bankruptcy are roughly equivalent.
. Black-hat SEO. It would be trivially easy to get a site miscategorized, simply by changing the content after categorization (and it'd be simple to fool Yahoo's bots into thinking such changes are minimal.)
Yahoo gets notified and changes their category. Yes there are going to be ways to abuse the system but this is manual, it is trivial to fix.
Legal issues. You want Yahoo to reject certain sites from being categorized.
I agree there might be regulatory interest. And Yahoo would do what most companies do. Work with regulators and agree on a compliance strategy in exchange for some sort of subsidy or fee structure. Google hasn't been willing to do that, since they want their process to be secret but Yahoo's (in my hypothetical) is completely transparent. Heck they could ask the MPAA to appoint full time workers to be in the Yahoo building marking questionable sites.
Is this going to attract advertising worth that?
I think so. Google attracts a lot of advertising interest based on keywords. Being able to buy ads based on categories is even better (i.e. higher rate) potentially. With semi-static results I can buy position. Yes if Yahoo can get the marketshare they can easily afford to pay for this.
And, moreover, from Yahoo's point of view, that's a hell of a lot of money compared to the cost of writing a crawler/indexer. The top home page in the country is Google, the core of which is a search engine that probably cost a few tens of millions to write over ten years
No,no... Assume the software costs $0 to write. The cost for Google is having to read the entire internet every 30 days and run complex indexing on all of it. In other words substantial processing not on every site, but on every page of every site. That is a lot of money. Its in the same ballpark as the Yahoo index we are talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, AC you get it.
You should get an account.
Quattro, I like you. I was a Quattro guy too. Excel was definitely not my favorite.
As for the changes in IE from 1 to 4. I never used IE1, mostly I used Netscape and IE 4 was amazing. Active-X, channels and general push technology, Active Desktop, a GUI HTML editor. Give me that sort of upgrade and you can feel free to move menu items around!
I was already using Unixes by then though. I guess because I used Unixes regularly I always had to deal with multiple GUIs and never really had that kind of reaction.
I think there is no question both of them will gain marketshare on the desktop. Microsoft is aware of this. As they see it the alternative is to be knocked out of consumer all-together or temporarily give some share up to pull way ahead technologically. Either they are right or they are wrong but at least so far they seem willing to take a marketshare hit. Something they haven't been willing to do for a long time.
Or not. And if enough people choose "or not", Microsoft has to either backtrack, or make new and more appealing radical departures than the ones they did in 8. Or stop selling (whether or not they are still offering) desktop OS's altogether.
They've already made it clear they won't be selling a desktop OS. They believe there will such a thing as desktop OS 10 years from now. They see this move as something like the migration from DOS to Windows. DOS doesn't exist as a separate product and DOS apps and their style of working with the end user are essentially never used.
Windows 8 may represent the end of the desktop metaphor. I figure in honor of this... a link to the original commercials when this was a new idea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UtlOgkOGy4
We don't know yet if it sucks for users. We don't have applications that were designed from the ground up for ubiquitous computing. I think about something like Evernote with its phone / web / desktop interfaces and that is rather nice. It could very well be that this setup is the best.
OK do you have a source for the $200? Like I said, $200 is an earth changing number, it means that Nokia had a phone that could have easily #1 phone on one of the markets that they traditionally do worst in.
I think the Americans that saw it thought it was great.
Liking European style correlates strongly with social class, education and living on the coasts. Look where Ikea stores are located, and consider that warehouse style stores with low prices are way way more popular in middle America than on the coasts. So you are getting a biased feel by talking to American techies.
When you start talking about a national rollout this would be more of a problem though again I think it is not huge problem. Computer gadgets in general all have this correlation with class, education and liberalism. You can't reach who you can't reach but I think this problem is solvable for most Americans. Apple has offended middle America by explicitly appealing to liberals. And they are facing the a problem where they get backlash from their base when they try to reach out.
Linux has associations with Libertarianism and thus friends in the Tea Party (19% of the Americans that are most politically conservative). Its hard to imagine a European brand pitching itself this way, but assuming that Nokia could stomach a campaign with someone like Sarah Palin as a national spokesperson... I can think of some rather good appeals that would work strongly with middle America. For example show where Finland is on the map and mention that is a Lutheran country when advertising (and yes, I am being serious probably 60% of Americans don't know where Finland is). Nokia could make the aesthetic work to their favor but they can't ignore it. This is something any American ad agency could help with it doesn't require genius just attention.
. 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 assume you mean car stereo. As an American I don't see that at all. Most people who want these expensive sorts of attachments buy them in the aftermarket not from manufacturers. Blaupunkt I'm sure has a good relationship with Nokia and could roll out something instantly to work with the N9 and I believe they are the #1 selling aftermarket stereo company. Sell ten million phones and you can get the 3rd party attachments. Besides the N9 uses standard micro USB, so most attachments fit.
If you mean home stereo, like alarm clocks speakers, again micro USB is standard. Nokia even has their own line of these things which the electronics stores would be happy to sell. I don't see this as much of a problem. Its been a problem for Android because every single phone has different attachments so no phone is getting into the tens of millions to create an aftermarket. Again easy problem
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.
There are going to be things the carriers aren't going to want to offer. Don't offer those things. The WiFi router is a good example. Nokia Lumia comes with tethering shutoff by default for AT&T, AT&T turns it on remotely for subscribers who buy tethering. Heck, I had a Nokia phone about a dozen years ago when the switch to pay ringtones came through. Those went from free to an extra charge instantly via. an online software update. So I assume whatever problems Nokia had with not listening to the carriers are in the past. Even Apple loses battles on these issues. My Verizon iPhone had this shutoff and now Verizon wants the access to it buried under multiple layers of menus by default (with an icon for paying customers).
There might be a GNLUStep version of textmate but there will never be a generic Linux or Windows version. Too much of it is tied to the mac.
As far as line editors, I'd agree there is no reason for someone young to know them. Your namesake btw was also a big fan of line editors. edlin ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edlin ) was the standard editor on DOS for many years, again because it was scriptable it was useful. Though the bigger reason was that often Ansi / nansi drivers hadn't loaded so a full screen editor wouldn't work properly. Edlin was often quite useful in repairing a broken PC.
Most certainly they've had compelling products recently
Microsoft Universal Communicator
Microsoft Dynamics
Windows 7 which is widely liked
SQL Server which over the last decade is now the dominant player in DW and BI
etc...
in 2012 is strange which is why vim has editing modes
Not really. VIM is based on VI. VI was a full screen user interface for ex, which was a line editor. The VI commands are ex commands. (http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/ex.html ). EX was an extension of ED which is a line editor and a line editor needs to be modal. One of the things that nice about VIM, is that it is fully scriptable because within it still contains an old fashioned line editor.
At $200 + 20%, i.e you aren't talking $370 anymore but $250. You pick up a good chunk of the prepay market possible another 30m. At that rate not only do carriers advertise your phone everyone (no charge to Nokia) but they would be willing to do all sorts of incentives for customers like: phone free + first 2 months service free. You sell 50m in the USA easy. Or you kick the price back up to $370 sell 15m and use the $3b in extra revenue to build a first class US application platform.
As far as the carrier problems in the USA, I don't believe the problems are deep at all, they are surface I don't think they would carry over to the MeeGo brand. Here are the usual problems you tell me if you think Nokia wouldn't get around them:
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.
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.
3) US customers don't like Symbian (not applicable since different OS)
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
5) Not cooperating with carrier strategy. Well right now the strategy is anyone but Apple.
I have to hear some other people. But if you are right about $200 manufacturing cost for the N9... you are talking a phone that would beat Apple in their home country.
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
I doubt that. The US market is the big subsidy market so lets use the USA. $360 is about where they put the subsidy. No one is getting the $410 type subsidy from iPhone, desperate or not; Nokia customers haven't proven a willingness to overpay for their carrier related costs and accessories. Still if we assume that Nokia could have lived with $370 making it a free phone the carriers might have gone that high, they love free phones. And if it was free they might have eaten the marketing costs themselves as part of the package. 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.
Short-sightenness. They didn't see their strategy through. No Maemo/MeeGo phone had been released yet; and nothing had been built up yet. They were probably talking with Ballmer and Elop at that point as well, and getting a lot of FUD from those circles on why Maemo/MeeGo wouldn't go.
Unless Elop and Balmer are lying that's not possible. Elop approached Balmer after he realized the MeeGo strategy wasn't viable. Balmer may not have even known how unhappy Elop and the board were with MeeGo when the threw the cash in. Both sides were desperate.
As it was, the N9 and N900 when compared to top of the line Android and iPhones give them a go for their money.
Maybe. Physically I think its a bit behind in areas like CPU, and screen resolution. The N900 doesn't even have a capacitive touch screen. The problem was platform. But regardless at least strategically that's not where it needed to be. It needed to crush mid range Androids and be on par with bottom of the line iPhones; or it needed to be much better by 2011 to take them on. Had Nokia not lost 2 years screwing around and these phones come out in 2009 go after the top end. But what Nokia needed in 2011 would have been a path for Symbian customers.
People willing to buy a $600 phones weren't coming from Symbian. Again no one has ever said the N9 couldn't sell 10m phones, the question was whether it could sell 100m.
It would have been better for the Nokia to shoot a multiple OS strategy and let the market itself figure out which one to keep.
I agree. Probably Microsoft's cash made that impossible.
I think you should talk to the GNUStep people. They could use a full featured editor, the port will be much much easier to GNUStep than generic Linux....
If you look at the source, this is a program designed to compiled by XCode against the Cocoa libraries for use on a Mac (or possibly extended to an iOS device). This is platform specific, though I imagine it could get ported to http://www.gnustep.org/
Agreed on the market for cheap phones saturating.
On the smartphones, the nice thing for Nokia is that the average life of a smartphone is 11.5 mo. Until that number comes up long lived dumb phones are fine.
We agree that the N9 is a really cool phone with potential and that the Lumia was a phone that customers hate. I also will stipulate that with a promotional campaign Nokia could have sold 10m of the N9 easily. The question is all about how cheaply could they make 100m of them. Nokia seems to be building the Lumia 900 at about $450 each. I have no idea who they are spending that much given that this is over what Apple spends to build the iPhone 4S with considerably better hardware specs. But that seems to be the case.
If say $20b-22b would have gotten 100m of these made then the N9 is a the killer phone and the Symbian -> MeeGo strategy would have worked. If on the other hand this phone costs $40b-45b to make 100m then it wasn't viable. At that price the phone has to compete with the high end Androids, best Blackberry, and iPhone 4 and there the hardware specs to say nothing of the software just aren't on par. This really is the crucial question as to whether Elop had a "burning platform" or not. Heck at $250 my daughter's birthday present would be an N9, and this is coming from a 11 year Apple user who agrees with Elop, living in America, which is Nokia's weakest major market.
Jolla will have a good business at Nokia expense as a result.
Jolia can afford to sell a niche phone. Nokia can't the overhead is totally different. In Jolia moves 3m or 5m phones they will be thrilled and thrive while Nokia would go bankrupt.
Share value is not a metric of how successful a company is, but rather a metric on how willing others are to bet on the success of the company. You can be the most successful company in the world and have a zero share price; or the worst in the world and have a very high share price.
I agree share value isn't a great metric for viewing how successful a company is. It is however a useful metric for determining what the board thinks of the share value. If the stock is way below what the board thinks the company is worth they are going to be shopping for a buyer or taking the company private. If it is way over, the board is going to engage in equity financing. More or less the board of Nokia seems to agree with Elop's assessment of the situation, that there was no viable internal option. You can see this in the 2010 report: http://i.nokia.com/blob/view/-/263824/data/1/-/Request-Nokia-in-2010-pdf.pdf
For example 2008 to 2009 sales dropped 19% and profits decreased 76%. The board's analysis was
That wasn't Elop and that wasn't the burning platform memo. By 3rd quarter 2010 the board had made up their mind that the MeeGo strategy wasn't viable. This wasn't one guy. If they were wrong why where they so wrong?
And in all reality their Maemo/MeeGo devices outsell the Windows Phone devices when in the same markets.
Their Maemo/MeeGo devices don't sell nearly enough to sustain a company Nokia's size. If Nokia was a small company the N9 would have been awesome. Elop BTW agrees, that they might be able to get the N9 down to around $250 by 2014/2015 and then they do have a viable device. The problem was he didn't have enough money to last that long.
Certainly customers hate the Lumia and that hasn't worked out for Nokia yet, and may not work out. But the problem with MeeGo devices when we start talking about sustaining Nokia was the ability to produce something inexpensive enough to transition their Symbian base quickly enough. I've read Tomi's blog. Its an interesting blog. But he tends to think like a guy who works for Nokia not a control investor. The people who held Nokia's bonds didn't share Tomi's opinions about Nokia's prospects. Nokia was at $40 a share in late 2007 and at $15 a share when Elop came in. If there had been a MeeGo phone like the N9 when he showed up with a strategy to cut the cost of manufacture there never would have been an alliance with Microsoft.
Now don't get me wrong I think Tomi's criticism of the terrible job Elop did in managing the transition are spot on. But I don't have access to the T&C with Microsoft. I don't know that Microsoft, after the fiasco with LG, can afford to let Nokia sink and the strategy may always have been: heads Windows works out and the investors get profits from Windows, tails Windows 7 flounders and Microsoft buys Nokia the time it needs.
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
If the shareholders could have easily gotten equity out of Nokia there wouldn't have been a problem. But under the labor rules they had layoffs were going to cost the company a pretty penny. They couldn't get the money out.
Nokia was profitable!
Nokia had increasing sales! Including increasing sales of "smartphones"!!
Nokia had a huge cash mountain (> 5Billion Dollars!!)
Absolutely. Symbian was still doing well but....
1) They had decreasing sales on the high end.
2) Margins were collapsing
3) Their Meego / Maemo strategy wasn't ready to go. It wasn't until 2011 they released the N9 and that phone is priced much to high for the hardware.
I don't think that Elop's facts were wrong. Assume the N9 comes out June 2011 at $550 ballpark comparable to the iPhone 4 though a bit cheaper. The Samsung Galaxy II is out. The 4S comes out 1 quarter later. 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. Now it does have the realistic potential to be a $250 phone by 2014 / 2015 and replace Symbian low end base all over the world. I just don't see how Nokia had 5 years, based on Symbian given how much staff / overhead they had.
Elop needs Balmer's cash. If you see some way to get around that, tell me the plan that works. How do they get people transition from Symbian to Meego during the 2010-2014 time frame without viable Meego / Maemo phones?
According to Elop, Nokia was bleeding equity fast. He had to be shortsighted they didn't have enough money to last enough years to do it right.
Microsoft has been rather inconsistent in their developer announcements for years. They've been changing their roadmaps frequently. I don't think it is unreasonable that people are starring to speculate.
Honestly I read his article in Business week where he outlined the logic. The whole thing makes sense. Nokia was desperate and need the cash plus a credible OS to run on their hardware. Balmer wanted the credibility Nokia bought him and had cash. It was a dangerous play but I don't buy it was corrupt. It makes a lot of sense for the board / shareholder's perspective where chewing up the equity and bankruptcy are roughly equivalent.
If you are bored look at Haskell. There have been tremendous numbers of new ideas well beyond what was in Common LISP. Monadic methods for example.
. Black-hat SEO. It would be trivially easy to get a site miscategorized, simply by changing the content after categorization (and it'd be simple to fool Yahoo's bots into thinking such changes are minimal.)
Yahoo gets notified and changes their category. Yes there are going to be ways to abuse the system but this is manual, it is trivial to fix.
Legal issues. You want Yahoo to reject certain sites from being categorized.
I agree there might be regulatory interest. And Yahoo would do what most companies do. Work with regulators and agree on a compliance strategy in exchange for some sort of subsidy or fee structure. Google hasn't been willing to do that, since they want their process to be secret but Yahoo's (in my hypothetical) is completely transparent. Heck they could ask the MPAA to appoint full time workers to be in the Yahoo building marking questionable sites.
Is this going to attract advertising worth that?
I think so. Google attracts a lot of advertising interest based on keywords. Being able to buy ads based on categories is even better (i.e. higher rate) potentially. With semi-static results I can buy position. Yes if Yahoo can get the marketshare they can easily afford to pay for this.
And, moreover, from Yahoo's point of view, that's a hell of a lot of money compared to the cost of writing a crawler/indexer. The top home page in the country is Google, the core of which is a search engine that probably cost a few tens of millions to write over ten years
No,no... Assume the software costs $0 to write. The cost for Google is having to read the entire internet every 30 days and run complex indexing on all of it. In other words substantial processing not on every site, but on every page of every site. That is a lot of money. Its in the same ballpark as the Yahoo index we are talking about.
Exactly see my response above.