Stephen was supposed to fix the software engineering issues.:o(
And he did. The problem was, Nokia didn't have a workable culture of software engineering, with a possible exception in S40. Now the smartphone OS is in the hands of Microsoft, who, for all their faults, know how to develop and maintain software. Sure, they threw WP7 under the bus, but the changes appear to be worth it, and there is forward app compatibility, so at least the existing app ecosystem is preserved.
Well, my point is that 21MHz talked about being acquired by Google as somehow a bad thing.
It's not necessarily a bad thing. My point was, even the company recently acquired by Google had its reasons not to offer an upgrade from Gingerbread on some of their phones, even despite their earlier promise to do so.
Symbian was doing well, and I don't think his argument was that it was ultimately a winning strategy to ride Symbian. What he's making a point of is that Elop's "Burning Platforms" memo quickly killed Symbian, which was bringing in money for Nokia. People knew after that that there was no future in Symbian.
How foolish it was for Elop to trust his own employees not to leak the memo.
No, he should have kept them, and the shareholders, in the dark, and pretend Symbian is still relevant, despite whole departments getting shipped out to Accenture or otherwise closed down. That would have guaranteed public confidence and reinvigorated customers' affection for Symbian devices.
I remember my astonishment at seeing people very far from the geek stereotype using the N900. Granted, my daughter's school teacher is fairly tech-savvy... But there were also pretty girls, and there were middle-aged ladies who looked like first-generation immigrants.
What could it become... But things had already been bad with the development of N900, and they only went downhill with the N9.
I think mentioning HTC is very relevant, ignoring the shear scale on which Nokia has been destroyed by Elop in Months, for the third ecosystem [in reality sixth], to produce Windows Phones. Ironically one of HTC's strategy is to produce Windows phones too next year, and they cheaper than Nokia's offerings for equivalent models.
I'm trying to understand what you are trying to say, but I can't. There must be something, all those insightful mods couldn't be given "because it sounds right, and I don't care what the words mean", right? What "scale of destruction" are you talking about? Compared to the rate of decline (or, more significantly, loss of thrust) before Elop? HTC's foray into Windows Phone 8 is bound to be successful, it's only Nokia who can fail at that, or what?
Again, I'm not a competent armchair CEO and all that, but the current deal with first gen Lumia devices — full support for the duration of warranty/contract lifetime, update to WP7.8 in the pipeline, continuing updates for applications — does not seem exactly "trollface" to me. Hey, it's better than some of those Gingerbread users get.
they got Meego with the very innovative user interface of the N9, and when they got both ready to take over the world,
No, they couldn't take over the world with a somewhat polished, but deeply troubled product, officially obsoleted one and a half years before it was ready (the N9) and a platform that is not yet usable on any kind of target hardware (MeeGo as in the shared effort between Nokia and Intel).
Announced Meltemi
Huh? Could you point me to a public statement from Nokia regarding anything so named?
Even those efforts, with mostly open software, could had leveraged their hardware offer, if they published enough specification on their hardware to have drivers to enabling them for alternate operating systems (nitdroid, cyanogen mod port, webos, meego, etc), or even push forward the groups trying to giving new uses to their phones giving them the specs, help and support to do so.
Your idealism is infectious. Surely you can provide examples of mobile phone companies leveraging this kind of benefits from the community?
Sorry to be rude, but your whole post is typical armchair CEOism: it would have been easy for them to do this, that, or the other thing because I like those and I'm ignorant of pretty much everything else, how stupid of them it was to decide otherwise.
This is a quote from the January 26th 2012 by Tomi Ahonen
“Luckily I didn’t have to do the math for this, the nice people at All About Symbian had tracked the numbers (read through the comments) and calculated the limits, finding N9 sales to be between the level of 1.5 million and 2.0 million units in Q4.
Funny how nobody goes down to All About Symbian and references that, maybe because these numbers are nowhere to be found "in the comments". This is the problem with Tomi's data: almost all of them are "calculated" with no real explanation how.
I think it's clear now that Microsoft, as always, used a stopgap solution to make their followup successful. Winphone 7 was never going anywhere and the plan was always for Win8. Nokia fell into the EEE trap and was used to crack into the market to pave the way for Win8. Their carcass may still prove useful to MS down the road with their patents and such and also as an inroad to European and other world markets. This is yet another brilliant move by MS. I still find it hard to believe that companies partner with them knowing how it usually turns out. I guess the short term benefits are just too tempting. I expect to see Win8 phones from Microsoft. Wonder how that will play with Nokia? I'd say they are helpless.
Wow dude. You almost make it look as if Nokia is already bankrupt and is NOT the one finishing the sexiest Windows Phone 8 device (if not the sexiest smartphone overall) to come out in 2012. And Microsoft is already pushing its own Windows Phone 8 devices to compete with Nokia, so it's not just a rumor. But then I go out of the Slashdot bubble and the vision disappears.
Windows Phone 7 was, indeed, a stopgap solution. For Nokia as much as for Microsoft. And it actually made engineering sense to overhaul the hardware platform requirements for Windows Phone 8, because of the depth of the software changes. Legacy hardware, in principle, could have been supported with some extra effort, but my armchair CEO skills are insufficient to give a verdict on how easy would it have been for both companies. The existing Windows Phone users do not have it much worse than the users of Android phones stuck on Gingerbread. Who was the latest refusenik OEM again, Motorola Mobility? Their new owner company, what was it? Must be evil.
I've been actually missing a good Ahonen troll story. Lately even comments citing his long-winded ramblings have become rare. Not every story about Nokia gets one that is moderated sufficiently high. I've been almost afraid that he has lost credibility even among Linux zealots. That point-by-point debunking has been published that made the majority of people concerned about Nokia think rationally again. But no, this one has made it again, and how timely: just before Q3 results, and the start of Windows Phone 8 sales. Think of it: even if Tomi will be proven a total ass in the next few years, he will be a well-to-do ass, because of all your traffic generating ad revenue. Help him, he's trying really hard.
The difference is that Apple and Google stuff is also cool, works better, looks better, has less virusses/security holes, isn't as dumbed-down
LOLwhut? You are so biased against Microsoft that Mac OS and iOS look like paragons of user empowerment to you? With Google, it depends on the application/service. Haven't seen Chrome OS, but for example their web-based office tools offer much less functionality.
doesn't try and lock its users into wierd use cases,
No, having to use a particular desktop application (iTunes) to transfer media to the device is not weird at all.
doesn't crash/hang as much
Say, was it Windows 98 when you used Windows last time?
after getting Nokia to abandoning [small] teams of [highly] devoted Symbian developers
I'm laughing sardonically while reading this. You said you worked for Nokia, really? There were small teams in Nokia, but the Symbian/S60 organization was not one of them.
Sorry, I must have been on Nokia phones for too long. So you drop your phone and the glass is supposed to shatter? It never does for me.
All materials come with a tradeoff.
It must be scratch resistance for my Lumia phone. Its glass front has got one fairly pronounced scratch (an ideal arc, must have pivoted on something) and a few small ones. It doesn't bother me much, but it may be unbearable for some iPhone users.
I think the material debate is kind of absurd anyway, since hardly anyone goes caseless.
Here we go again. You have to use a case with your phone?
Oh, I dropped my phone again while writing this. Big freaking deal.
Like Nokia's immensely profitable presence in the third world - Nokias featurephones were doing the smartphone revolution everywhere but the West. They had a headstart and were pretty much guaranteed to sell billions, until Elop came around and said 'does not run Windows, scrap it'.
You don't know what are you talking about. Nobody scrapped Series 40, and it's now stronger than ever. But it's still given a run for its money by Samsung and Cheap Chinese Crap with Android crash-ported onto it. S60... did not really have a headstart in anything except how to deliver retarded smartphones late while feeding a cozy cottage industry of some 10000 people.
There's more exclusive stuff for Lumias, but the main reason is: why go with a half-assed Windows Phone from an OEM whose main efforts are on Android? That's even diregarding hardware design and the camera capabilities in Lumia 920.
I loved Nokia... from the tiny 8210, over the first “full computer” smartphone 7650, those with the full keyboard like the 6822, the whole early N series, and of course the glorious N900.
Did you love the N80, then? Fat, ugly as hell, with software that let the UX freeze for 15 seconds to display a damned application list. The N97 and N73 were even worse. There's a reason iPhone won, despite initially not having half the feature list of the N95.
But I *hate* everything about the MS Nokia "phones".
My main criterion in whether I want to use a phone is simple: "Does it make me furious while using it?" Symbian phones mostly did. The N900 was almost there, except the maps app was a disaster, and there was little in the way of third-party apps (not even the "no apps" situation with Windows Phone, usually pronounced by those who never looked into the WP marketplace), because they scared away developers by a platform switch to Qt. The N9 was unfinished, with annoying bugs that nobody was going to fix. Lumias are finally OK.
Unfortunately, that won't really matter to people as long as Google Maps are "good enough."
But they aren't, as anyone who tried to use them while roaming can attest. Hint: you'd better disable data in roaming except the times when it's absolutely necessary. Which is often, when you're trying to use something that tries to use caching as poor substitute for real offline maps.
Slashdot Mirror
Stephen was supposed to fix the software engineering issues. :o(
And he did. The problem was, Nokia didn't have a workable culture of software engineering, with a possible exception in S40.
Now the smartphone OS is in the hands of Microsoft, who, for all their faults, know how to develop and maintain software. Sure, they threw WP7 under the bus, but the changes appear to be worth it, and there is forward app compatibility, so at least the existing app ecosystem is preserved.
Nah, xkcd is down too.
Well, my point is that 21MHz talked about being acquired by Google as somehow a bad thing.
It's not necessarily a bad thing. My point was, even the company recently acquired by Google had its reasons not to offer an upgrade from Gingerbread on some of their phones, even despite their earlier promise to do so.
Symbian was doing well, and I don't think his argument was that it was ultimately a winning strategy to ride Symbian. What he's making a point of is that Elop's "Burning Platforms" memo quickly killed Symbian, which was bringing in money for Nokia. People knew after that that there was no future in Symbian.
How foolish it was for Elop to trust his own employees not to leak the memo.
No, he should have kept them, and the shareholders, in the dark, and pretend Symbian is still relevant, despite whole departments getting shipped out to Accenture or otherwise closed down. That would have guaranteed public confidence and reinvigorated customers' affection for Symbian devices.
Yeah, and all those new Gingerbread users probably don't give a shit that the OS in their cheap crappy phone is oh so two years old.
I remember my astonishment at seeing people very far from the geek stereotype using the N900. Granted, my daughter's school teacher is fairly tech-savvy... But there were also pretty girls, and there were middle-aged ladies who looked like first-generation immigrants.
What could it become... But things had already been bad with the development of N900, and they only went downhill with the N9.
I think mentioning HTC is very relevant, ignoring the shear scale on which Nokia has been destroyed by Elop in Months, for the third ecosystem [in reality sixth], to produce Windows Phones. Ironically one of HTC's strategy is to produce Windows phones too next year, and they cheaper than Nokia's offerings for equivalent models.
I'm trying to understand what you are trying to say, but I can't. There must be something, all those insightful mods couldn't be given "because it sounds right, and I don't care what the words mean", right?
What "scale of destruction" are you talking about? Compared to the rate of decline (or, more significantly, loss of thrust) before Elop?
HTC's foray into Windows Phone 8 is bound to be successful, it's only Nokia who can fail at that, or what?
Again, I'm not a competent armchair CEO and all that, but the current deal with first gen Lumia devices — full support for the duration of warranty/contract lifetime, update to WP7.8 in the pipeline, continuing updates for applications — does not seem exactly "trollface" to me. Hey, it's better than some of those Gingerbread users get.
The "calculation" is legalese for "you can't sue me, suckers".
It's also, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable from "I made it all up on the spot, but I won't admit to it."
They had Symbian, the next generation,
As in Belle. Meh.
they got Meego with the very innovative user interface of the N9, and when they got both ready to take over the world,
No, they couldn't take over the world with a somewhat polished, but deeply troubled product, officially obsoleted one and a half years before it was ready (the N9) and a platform that is not yet usable on any kind of target hardware (MeeGo as in the shared effort between Nokia and Intel).
Announced Meltemi
Huh? Could you point me to a public statement from Nokia regarding anything so named?
Even those efforts, with mostly open software, could had leveraged their hardware offer, if they published enough specification on their hardware to have drivers to enabling them for alternate operating systems (nitdroid, cyanogen mod port, webos, meego, etc), or even push forward the groups trying to giving new uses to their phones giving them the specs, help and support to do so.
Your idealism is infectious. Surely you can provide examples of mobile phone companies leveraging this kind of benefits from the community?
Sorry to be rude, but your whole post is typical armchair CEOism: it would have been easy for them to do this, that, or the other thing because I like those and I'm ignorant of pretty much everything else, how stupid of them it was to decide otherwise.
This is a quote from the January 26th 2012 by Tomi Ahonen
“Luckily I didn’t have to do the math for this, the nice people at All About Symbian had tracked the numbers (read through the comments) and calculated the limits, finding N9 sales to be between the level of 1.5 million and 2.0 million units in Q4.
Funny how nobody goes down to All About Symbian and references that, maybe because these numbers are nowhere to be found "in the comments".
This is the problem with Tomi's data: almost all of them are "calculated" with no real explanation how.
OK, you didn't read it yet, here you go: The story of MeeGo.
I think it's clear now that Microsoft, as always, used a stopgap solution to make their followup successful. Winphone 7 was never going anywhere and the plan was always for Win8. Nokia fell into the EEE trap and was used to crack into the market to pave the way for Win8. Their carcass may still prove useful to MS down the road with their patents and such and also as an inroad to European and other world markets. This is yet another brilliant move by MS. I still find it hard to believe that companies partner with them knowing how it usually turns out. I guess the short term benefits are just too tempting. I expect to see Win8 phones from Microsoft. Wonder how that will play with Nokia? I'd say they are helpless.
Wow dude. You almost make it look as if Nokia is already bankrupt and is NOT the one finishing the sexiest Windows Phone 8 device (if not the sexiest smartphone overall) to come out in 2012. And Microsoft is already pushing its own Windows Phone 8 devices to compete with Nokia, so it's not just a rumor. But then I go out of the Slashdot bubble and the vision disappears.
Windows Phone 7 was, indeed, a stopgap solution. For Nokia as much as for Microsoft. And it actually made engineering sense to overhaul the hardware platform requirements for Windows Phone 8, because of the depth of the software changes. Legacy hardware, in principle, could have been supported with some extra effort, but my armchair CEO skills are insufficient to give a verdict on how easy would it have been for both companies. The existing Windows Phone users do not have it much worse than the users of Android phones stuck on Gingerbread. Who was the latest refusenik OEM again, Motorola Mobility? Their new owner company, what was it? Must be evil.
I've been actually missing a good Ahonen troll story.
Lately even comments citing his long-winded ramblings have become rare. Not every story about Nokia gets one that is moderated sufficiently high. I've been almost afraid that he has lost credibility even among Linux zealots. That point-by-point debunking has been published that made the majority of people concerned about Nokia think rationally again. But no, this one has made it again, and how timely: just before Q3 results, and the start of Windows Phone 8 sales. Think of it: even if Tomi will be proven a total ass in the next few years, he will be a well-to-do ass, because of all your traffic generating ad revenue. Help him, he's trying really hard.
Ahonen is the single identifiable origin of this myth.
N9 will remain most critically acclaimed and one of the fastest-selling and anticipated models in the company's history.
... in nerd mythology. Nobody outside Nokia has seen the real sales figures, though.
Probably, because the world does not work like the neckbeards imagine it does.
The difference is that Apple and Google stuff is also cool, works better, looks better, has less virusses/security holes, isn't as dumbed-down
LOLwhut? You are so biased against Microsoft that Mac OS and iOS look like paragons of user empowerment to you?
With Google, it depends on the application/service. Haven't seen Chrome OS, but for example their web-based office tools offer much less functionality.
doesn't try and lock its users into wierd use cases,
No, having to use a particular desktop application (iTunes) to transfer media to the device is not weird at all.
doesn't crash/hang as much
Say, was it Windows 98 when you used Windows last time?
That's Nokian Tyres. Nokia spun them off long ago, and completely divested from them in early 2000s.
after getting Nokia to abandoning [small] teams of [highly] devoted Symbian developers
I'm laughing sardonically while reading this. You said you worked for Nokia, really?
There were small teams in Nokia, but the Symbian/S60 organization was not one of them.
Glass will shatter,
Sorry, I must have been on Nokia phones for too long. So you drop your phone and the glass is supposed to shatter? It never does for me.
All materials come with a tradeoff.
It must be scratch resistance for my Lumia phone. Its glass front has got one fairly pronounced scratch (an ideal arc, must have pivoted on something) and a few small ones. It doesn't bother me much, but it may be unbearable for some iPhone users.
I think the material debate is kind of absurd anyway, since hardly anyone goes caseless.
Here we go again. You have to use a case with your phone?
Oh, I dropped my phone again while writing this. Big freaking deal.
Like Nokia's immensely profitable presence in the third world - Nokias featurephones were doing the smartphone revolution everywhere but the West. They had a headstart and were pretty much guaranteed to sell billions, until Elop came around and said 'does not run Windows, scrap it'.
You don't know what are you talking about. Nobody scrapped Series 40, and it's now stronger than ever. But it's still given a run for its money by Samsung and Cheap Chinese Crap with Android crash-ported onto it. S60... did not really have a headstart in anything except how to deliver retarded smartphones late while feeding a cozy cottage industry of some 10000 people.
Why even bother with phones, then?
There's more exclusive stuff for Lumias, but the main reason is: why go with a half-assed Windows Phone from an OEM whose main efforts are on Android? That's even diregarding hardware design and the camera capabilities in Lumia 920.
I loved Nokia... from the tiny 8210, over the first “full computer” smartphone 7650, those with the full keyboard like the 6822, the whole early N series, and of course the glorious N900.
Did you love the N80, then? Fat, ugly as hell, with software that let the UX freeze for 15 seconds to display a damned application list. The N97 and N73 were even worse.
There's a reason iPhone won, despite initially not having half the feature list of the N95.
But I *hate* everything about the MS Nokia "phones".
My main criterion in whether I want to use a phone is simple: "Does it make me furious while using it?" Symbian phones mostly did. The N900 was almost there, except the maps app was a disaster, and there was little in the way of third-party apps (not even the "no apps" situation with Windows Phone, usually pronounced by those who never looked into the WP marketplace), because they scared away developers by a platform switch to Qt. The N9 was unfinished, with annoying bugs that nobody was going to fix. Lumias are finally OK.
Unfortunately, that won't really matter to people as long as Google Maps are "good enough."
But they aren't, as anyone who tried to use them while roaming can attest. Hint: you'd better disable data in roaming except the times when it's absolutely necessary. Which is often, when you're trying to use something that tries to use caching as poor substitute for real offline maps.