I'm not saying Nokia is at the top of its game now, but those things are worth something, and they can be improved, unless we all believe in made-up stories such as the "Elop effect" and market rejection of Lumia phones.
The N9 and its cousins without any marketing (promotions, discounts, etc.) sold at full price and outsold its Lumia brethren which had millions of dollars in marketing (promotions, discounts, etc.).
It's a myth made out of thin air and circular web references.
The Maemo/MeeGo OS also would have run on a lot cheaper devices than they can run the Windows Phone OS on.
Tall tales from the fandom, too. Earlier N9 prototypes had 512 MiB of RAM; they had to bump it to 1 GiB because the software couldn't be fit to run without endless swapping. Windows Phone 7 has no problem running on half a gig even now.
decades of building great phone hardware which then had to be scaled back because the OS didn't support current hardware
By "current hardware" you must mean multi-core CPUs, which Nokia hasn't yet put on any device? Neither did they go beyond 800x600 screens. The cameras in top-tier Lumias are pretty adequate. So, there was nothing to scale back.
and then 2 years after the deal a new version is forced on them which is incompatible. That's great for the hardware designers, great for their global logistics network, great for their operator and sales channels.
It's not great, but neither it is a big issue. Not all users are novelty junkies, and WP7 devices don't suddenly stop being useful because there's a new version out. Ask the users of all the dirt-cheap Gingerbread phones that are pumping up Android sales statistics.
FYI, it was a poor choice because the OS sucked, was outdated and already had a shrinking market share after many years on the market.
I see you are confused about Windows Phone vs Windows Mobile. The rest of your comment does not look well-informed either.
Hey, you may be right: who needs the decades of know-how in building great phone hardware, the global logistical network, the long-held relationships with operators and sales channels... This all has been eliminated in a poof of universal Windows Phone hate ('cause everybody thinks about it exactly like you do), where Symbian was not a problem at all.
It works fine on my Fedora installation. It replaced something that stood in the way of efficient boot sequences (grep for "sleep" in initscripts if you have them, look at the high PIDs given to your actually useful processes once the myriad little commands and shell scripts had to run on boot), and is designed much better than the event-driven, shell-using Upstart.
Some people (at least, presumably, the developers) will use it on a tablet or some other touchscreen device. I have a Lenovo IdeaPad convertible netbook laying around, for one. Otherwise, this is bad because?..
There were enough people modding your post insightful, so I gather that even the intent of adding touch support to the otherwise desktop-oriented environment (as TFA clearly says) is a total disaster. I don't know why, though.
Why? Because the GNOME devs are going to start tightly coupling the desktop to things like init process and a file system layout.
As long as they use systemd and the FHS layout, I'm fine with that. No, I don't care about Ubuntu or various sysvinit holdouts. The sooner GNOME and Ubuntu diverge in their user bases, the better.
I know people are not supposed to RTFA or even RTFSummary on/., neither should the moderators, but your comment is so clueless that I don't know where to begin.
Is your saying "I'm in the market" just a way to feel significant about yourself, or are you actually willing to pay some money for that? GNOME is, principally, a volunteer effort distributed for free.
All of those Gingerbread phones will run new applications just dandy, even those written with ICS or Jelly Bean in mind, in most cases. No Windows 8 Phone applications will run on Windows 7 Phone, even on 7.8.
Not true: if you write against the managed APIs available on WP 7.8, your application should run on WP8 (probably with some trivial changes in the build). It's essentially the same as writing to Gingerbread as the greatest common denominator of all Android devices you target.
The real problem is going to be that you can do so much more with WP8, and be able to use your existing C++ code in many cases. But that should not deter Nokia, they have already committed to providing a sizable set of apps for WP7. Perhaps Microsoft will not stop targeting WP7 in all their application development too soon, either. There are plenty of applications that can be implemented without any new WP8 APIs (to get back to your Gingerbread argument again).
Fade it out and in gradually instead of shouting "We're done with it!" to "encourage" the customers and throwing everything you've got on an unproven platform with no sales?
That's what Nokia actually did, memos leaked by disloyal employees notwithstanding. Did you notice Symbian had an exit strategy, a few updates (as did the N9), and there even is one new "champion" device out with it? Or, do you suggest Nokia's top management should have kept an about face for everybody including their own staff, long after they've chosen the actual strategy? That smells bad PR and shareholder lawsuits too heavily to me.
Nokia got fucked over with WP7 royally. That was hilarious how right after the "It's out of beta" marketing campaign first come bugs that make them give out Lumias for free and then comes announcement that it will be deprecated in half a year.
Contrary to what novelty junkies on geek websites may think, Lumias will be just as useful for their users in half a year as they are now, and they will get some of the UI improvements. They will be fully supported by customer care, and very likely, there will even be new applications and updates, at least from Nokia. You can have a decent phone now, or wait for a better one later, what's so bad about it? Sure, Apple does not do updates like that (ask Siri, hehe), but many Android manufacturers are not better, and hardly anybody cares. Is Jelly Bean going to come to all those months-old Gingerbread phones, or will they be "deprecated in half a year"? Same about Samsung Galaxy S III?
Thanks for the funny comment. Is this really the year of Linux on the desktop, and the installations of KDE threaten the market position of Windows?
Oracle bought Sun and then changed the license to Open Office. Whereas Open Office had been gaining acceptance and support, Oracle's modification of the license changed halted the inertia Open Office had been gaining.
At no percentage increase in sales does it become a real deal, it's all about hard numbers and percentages of the overall market, and ms are failing badly on both counts compared to both android and ios.
Accordingly to the same article, it's grown to about 3.2% of the overall market. At which percentage you stop consider an OS "failing"? Is Linux "failing" on the desktop for decades now?
Speaking of which: has Elop implemented stack-ranking at Nokia?
No. He did introduce principles whereby for each activity there has to be one person ultimately accountable for it, not five different managers who absolutely don't have their ass on the line for anything, like it was before. No, it's not Nokia culture circa 2006; and no, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Yes windows phone 7 is growing, while windows mobile is dropping fast (faster than wp7 is rising by all accounts), giving microsoft a net loss.
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, and lump them together to arrive at a trend that is utterly meaningless for the long term. So when Windows Mobile dies its long-deserved death and provided Windows Phone is still growing, can we get back to your comment and agree that you were wrong?
Also it's easy to have high percentage point increases when your market share is trivially low, in absolute market share or shipment numbers they are still laughably far behind ios and android.
I had a 500% increase in phone sales this year... Last year i sold 1 used handset to a friend, this year i sold 5 old handsets that i found in a drawer on ebay and at a junk sale.
We are already talking about some millions of new users, but I'll bite: at what percentage figure it becomes a real deal?
Even worse, as soon as Qt for Android is 100% complete, why should developers develop solely for Windows phones when they can make profit from Android and maybe iOS as well?
I thought their greatest problem with Windows Phone is that hardly anybody develops solely for this platform now, and attracting some of the established iOS/Android developers with easier porting paths would be a win?
Really, stop blowing issues out of proportion. Microsoft is unlikely to be much concerned about Qt, and even if they are, they are probably smart enough to know that it cannot be shut down by corporate shenanigans.
In reality, they went from 1mil to 5mil in the same time frame as Android rising from 100mil to 150.
It's more instructive to compare with the growth of Android at the time when it was at its 1 million.
Oh, and it's surely a grand success for Nokia, even if you count all Symbian and WinPhones as sold by Nokia (which is very nearly so), they went from 19mil smartphones sold to 11mil.
Yes, it's hard to ramp up with a new and unproven smartphone platform when your old one is failing on the market. Any other insights here? The OP asserts that Microsoft is failing with Windows Phone, I challenged that statement.
The existence of Qt is hardly relevant for Microsoft. If anything, it allows more software to be portable to Windows, and soon to Windows Phone as well, especially if Qt will be ported to WinRT APIs.
So then, WP8 removes the obstacle that WP7 had. You should be able to port your C++ logic, unless you have intertwined it too tightly with the UI code (and if you already have ports for Mac/iOS/Android, you have learned not to do that).
The point is the HW exists and is real, it's not just some lab prototype with 18 more months of work before being barely usable
But this is what N950 was: it needed months of work before it was usable with its hardware keyboard. These months were instead spent to polish the software towards the N9.
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I'm not saying Nokia is at the top of its game now, but those things are worth something, and they can be improved, unless we all believe in made-up stories such as the "Elop effect" and market rejection of Lumia phones.
The N9 and its cousins without any marketing (promotions, discounts, etc.) sold at full price and outsold its Lumia brethren which had millions of dollars in marketing (promotions, discounts, etc.).
It's a myth made out of thin air and circular web references.
The Maemo/MeeGo OS also would have run on a lot cheaper devices than they can run the Windows Phone OS on.
Tall tales from the fandom, too. Earlier N9 prototypes had 512 MiB of RAM; they had to bump it to 1 GiB because the software couldn't be fit to run without endless swapping. Windows Phone 7 has no problem running on half a gig even now.
decades of building great phone hardware which then had to be scaled back because the OS didn't support current hardware
By "current hardware" you must mean multi-core CPUs, which Nokia hasn't yet put on any device? Neither did they go beyond 800x600 screens. The cameras in top-tier Lumias are pretty adequate. So, there was nothing to scale back.
and then 2 years after the deal a new version is forced on them which is incompatible. That's great for the hardware designers, great for their global logistics network, great for their operator and sales channels.
It's not great, but neither it is a big issue. Not all users are novelty junkies, and WP7 devices don't suddenly stop being useful because there's a new version out. Ask the users of all the dirt-cheap Gingerbread phones that are pumping up Android sales statistics.
FYI, it was a poor choice because the OS sucked, was outdated and already had a shrinking market share after many years on the market.
I see you are confused about Windows Phone vs Windows Mobile. The rest of your comment does not look well-informed either.
Hey, you may be right: who needs the decades of know-how in building great phone hardware, the global logistical network, the long-held relationships with operators and sales channels... This all has been eliminated in a poof of universal Windows Phone hate ('cause everybody thinks about it exactly like you do), where Symbian was not a problem at all.
It works fine on my Fedora installation. It replaced something that stood in the way of efficient boot sequences (grep for "sleep" in initscripts if you have them, look at the high PIDs given to your actually useful processes once the myriad little commands and shell scripts had to run on boot), and is designed much better than the event-driven, shell-using Upstart.
Some people (at least, presumably, the developers) will use it on a tablet or some other touchscreen device. I have a Lenovo IdeaPad convertible netbook laying around, for one. Otherwise, this is bad because?..
There were enough people modding your post insightful, so I gather that even the intent of adding touch support to the otherwise desktop-oriented environment (as TFA clearly says) is a total disaster. I don't know why, though.
Why? Because the GNOME devs are going to start tightly coupling the desktop to things like init process and a file system layout.
As long as they use systemd and the FHS layout, I'm fine with that. No, I don't care about Ubuntu or various sysvinit holdouts. The sooner GNOME and Ubuntu diverge in their user bases, the better.
I know people are not supposed to RTFA or even RTFSummary on /., neither should the moderators, but your comment is so clueless that I don't know where to begin.
Is your saying "I'm in the market" just a way to feel significant about yourself, or are you actually willing to pay some money for that?
GNOME is, principally, a volunteer effort distributed for free.
Yes. You're free to go away, though.
All of those Gingerbread phones will run new applications just dandy, even those written with ICS or Jelly Bean in mind, in most cases. No Windows 8 Phone applications will run on Windows 7 Phone, even on 7.8.
Not true: if you write against the managed APIs available on WP 7.8, your application should run on WP8 (probably with some trivial changes in the build). It's essentially the same as writing to Gingerbread as the greatest common denominator of all Android devices you target.
The real problem is going to be that you can do so much more with WP8, and be able to use your existing C++ code in many cases. But that should not deter Nokia, they have already committed to providing a sizable set of apps for WP7. Perhaps Microsoft will not stop targeting WP7 in all their application development too soon, either. There are plenty of applications that can be implemented without any new WP8 APIs (to get back to your Gingerbread argument again).
Fade it out and in gradually instead of shouting "We're done with it!" to "encourage" the customers and throwing everything you've got on an unproven platform with no sales?
That's what Nokia actually did, memos leaked by disloyal employees notwithstanding. Did you notice Symbian had an exit strategy, a few updates (as did the N9), and there even is one new "champion" device out with it? Or, do you suggest Nokia's top management should have kept an about face for everybody including their own staff, long after they've chosen the actual strategy? That smells bad PR and shareholder lawsuits too heavily to me.
Nokia got fucked over with WP7 royally. That was hilarious how right after the "It's out of beta" marketing campaign first come bugs that make them give out Lumias for free and then comes announcement that it will be deprecated in half a year.
Contrary to what novelty junkies on geek websites may think, Lumias will be just as useful for their users in half a year as they are now, and they will get some of the UI improvements. They will be fully supported by customer care, and very likely, there will even be new applications and updates, at least from Nokia. You can have a decent phone now, or wait for a better one later, what's so bad about it? Sure, Apple does not do updates like that (ask Siri, hehe), but many Android manufacturers are not better, and hardly anybody cares. Is Jelly Bean going to come to all those months-old Gingerbread phones, or will they be "deprecated in half a year"? Same about Samsung Galaxy S III?
Repeat after me: Tomi Ahonen is a kook.
Thanks for the funny comment. Is this really the year of Linux on the desktop, and the installations of KDE threaten the market position of Windows?
Oracle bought Sun and then changed the license to Open Office. Whereas Open Office had been gaining acceptance and support, Oracle's modification of the license changed halted the inertia Open Office had been gaining.
Oh that succeeded wonderfully, didn't it?
At no percentage increase in sales does it become a real deal, it's all about hard numbers and percentages of the overall market, and ms are failing badly on both counts compared to both android and ios.
Accordingly to the same article, it's grown to about 3.2% of the overall market. At which percentage you stop consider an OS "failing"? Is Linux "failing" on the desktop for decades now?
Speaking of which: has Elop implemented stack-ranking at Nokia?
No. He did introduce principles whereby for each activity there has to be one person ultimately accountable for it, not five different managers who absolutely don't have their ass on the line for anything, like it was before. No, it's not Nokia culture circa 2006; and no, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Yes windows phone 7 is growing, while windows mobile is dropping fast (faster than wp7 is rising by all accounts), giving microsoft a net loss.
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, and lump them together to arrive at a trend that is utterly meaningless for the long term.
So when Windows Mobile dies its long-deserved death and provided Windows Phone is still growing, can we get back to your comment and agree that you were wrong?
Also it's easy to have high percentage point increases when your market share is trivially low, in absolute market share or shipment numbers they are still laughably far behind ios and android.
I had a 500% increase in phone sales this year... Last year i sold 1 used handset to a friend, this year i sold 5 old handsets that i found in a drawer on ebay and at a junk sale.
We are already talking about some millions of new users, but I'll bite: at what percentage figure it becomes a real deal?
Even worse, as soon as Qt for Android is 100% complete, why should developers develop solely for Windows phones when they can make profit from Android and maybe iOS as well?
I thought their greatest problem with Windows Phone is that hardly anybody develops solely for this platform now, and attracting some of the established iOS/Android developers with easier porting paths would be a win?
Really, stop blowing issues out of proportion. Microsoft is unlikely to be much concerned about Qt, and even if they are, they are probably smart enough to know that it cannot be shut down by corporate shenanigans.
In reality, they went from 1mil to 5mil in the same time frame as Android rising from 100mil to 150.
It's more instructive to compare with the growth of Android at the time when it was at its 1 million.
Oh, and it's surely a grand success for Nokia, even if you count all Symbian and WinPhones as sold by Nokia (which is very nearly so), they went from 19mil smartphones sold to 11mil.
Yes, it's hard to ramp up with a new and unproven smartphone platform when your old one is failing on the market. Any other insights here?
The OP asserts that Microsoft is failing with Windows Phone, I challenged that statement.
The existence of Qt is hardly relevant for Microsoft.
If anything, it allows more software to be portable to Windows, and soon to Windows Phone as well, especially if Qt will be ported to WinRT APIs.
If growing 277% in a year is "falling", what do you consider a success?
Somehow there's a great incentive to solve things diplomatically when the alternative is Mutual Assured Destruction.
So then, WP8 removes the obstacle that WP7 had. You should be able to port your C++ logic, unless you have intertwined it too tightly with the UI code (and if you already have ports for Mac/iOS/Android, you have learned not to do that).
The point is the HW exists and is real, it's not just some lab prototype with 18 more months of work before being barely usable
But this is what N950 was: it needed months of work before it was usable with its hardware keyboard. These months were instead spent to polish the software towards the N9.