The Future Of Nokia?

[rsambuca]

I don't know much about the intricacies of Symbian, Meego, and Maego, but I am afraid your logic doesn't make any sense here Stampeder.

Market sales, or a lack thereof, are not necessarily a direct indicator of whether or not a product is "a piece of junk". There have been many decent products in the past that have died from lack of market sales. A lack of market sales doesn't "prove" anything as to a product's quality.

[TorontoColin]

Originally Posted by stampeder

Almost all of the 122 (and counting) things that Windows Phone 7 cannot do in comparison to Symbian, Meego, and Maemo are likewise common, routine things that iOS5 and ICS can do.

Are there no things that WP7 can do that those other systems can't? Off the top of my head, I'd place a substantial bet that the breadth and depth of games on WP7 is much higher than Symbian, Meego, or Maemo, which is something that average consumers care about.

Also, while some things on that list are real issues, some are subjective at best (ie "Very limited customization option" and "Tiles are fixed size and for many functions is a waste of space."). Many more of them will be fixed with WP7.8 or WP8.

However, this thread started as the future of Nokia. The merits of Maemo and Meego are irrelevant because Nokia can't go back to them. They could build a new in-house OS, but it might be years before it's ready. Other than that, the only options I see are WP8 or Android. If you don't think they should build WP8 devices, do you see an option other than Android?

[Arthur Dent]

Originally Posted by stampeder

Symbian, Meego, Maemo, iOS, ICS: good stuff
WP7: not so good

I can't argue with the sales numbers, and I actually agree with the "goodness" ranking of WP7 behind iOS and Google. The only thing we disagree on until now is that the first three mentioned OSs are already history, and for a reason which has already been explained in this thread.

Consumers are avoiding Lumia like the plague.

Now, by picking this favourite and repeated to infinity quote from Tomi's blogs, you are not countering my "character assasintaion" rant against him even the slightest bit.

[stampeder]

rsambuca, my logic is not hard to understand when you check that what I've been saying is that the mobile phone owners who have been using Symbian, Maemo, and Meego can factually see a large list of things that Lumia on WP7 cannot do. Most of the things on the list are routinely done by iOS and ICS too. The market sales numbers do not lie. As the old joke goes, they're staying away in droves.

Remember that this thread is about the future of Nokia, so regardless of how anyone here feels about Lumia or WP the fact is that the financial situation caused by the Microsoft / Elop / WP adoption has been disastrous.

If someone really wants a Windows Phone they should go ahead and buy one. If they have previously been a user of a recent Symbian, Maemo, Meego, iPhone, or Galaxy they will wonder how or why some basic features that we take for granted are missing. If someone doesn't think the items on the infamous List of 122 Things are important then that's their own opinion but it doesn't explain anything. The people who stay away from WP in droves are saying everything we need to know about why Lumia has failed - people do not want it when there are so many better products on the market.

TorontoColin, Nokia's future if/when WP is ditched will pivot on the QT toolkit. It can be ported to any UNIX-style OS on the planet, so Nokia can bolt it onto Meego/Tizen, Android, or the QNX real time OS, which is allegedly to be the underpinnings of Blackberry's next OS. Heck they could even swing a deal with Apple whereby Nokia bolts QT onto iOS for their own use and in return Apple does not have to pay Nokia about $13 per iPhone handset in royalty payments anymore. These are just some of the possibilities due to their possessing something as powerful as the QT toolkit. As for the hardware it would run on, Nokia factories sit idle while the Taiwanese company builds Lumia, and traditional parts suppliers are hungry to get going again.

[TorontoColin]

While I agree that WP7 has to be considered a significant disappointment for Nokia, to be fair we don't really know how much the sales figures reflect consumers disliking WP7, and how much they reflect consumers liking Android and iOS. There's hardly any guarantee that Meego would have been much more successful at staving off Android's explosive growth outside of North America. I'd accept that it couldn't have been much worse though.

Does Nokia still even have access to Tizen, or would they need to license it from Samsung? I can pretty much promise you that Apple isn't licensing iOS (they can afford the $13/handset). QNX is now owned by RIM, and I can't see them licensing it before they can even get it on shelves on their own hardware.

Android seems the most logical candidate, but is Nokia capable of customizing Android to the point where they would no longer be a "me too" Android vendor (sort of like Amazon), and still remain competitive with the other Android OEMs who are running something closer to stock? That just seems like it would require a lot of time, and time is probably not on their side.

[stampeder]

Does Nokia still even have access to Tizen, or would they need to license it from Samsung?

Meego lives on as Tizen using Samsung's own improvements, but also the original Intel-Nokia Meego lives on with a Finnish startup that just signed a big sales deal with a Chinese carrier. As Tomi Ahonen pointed out, Meego was in very strong demand from carriers there. What a colossal market to get into. So yes, Meego lives on. Meltemi could be cranked up quite fast. Unfortunately many great employees are no longer with Nokia thanks to the WP/Lumia adoption, so it remains to be seen how or whether Nokia could spend its way out of the present disaster. The options are:

• Keep going in the same direction under Elop with Windows Phone
• Cancel some or all of the Lumia and WP projects
• Establish or re-establish Meego or other OS as base platform for QT tookit
• Exit the mobile phone business
• Become the object of a corporate purchase or takeover
• Die away completely

[TorontoColin]

Yeah, Jolla. They're doing some interesting work.

I don't think Nokia (or any other major western world company) would get along too well working on a smartphone OS for the Chinese market. I imagine the Chinese government gets involved, and wants an element of control. If that meant compromising the quality of the OS, I can't see Nokia buying in. A small company like Jolla seems much easier for the Chinese government to potentially push around.

I'm sure Meltemi could be resumed, but that could happen regardless of whether Nokia continues with Windows Phone or not.

Canceling all the Lumia devices would be suicide for Nokia right now. Starting with a new smartphone OS would likely take as much as a year to launch it on devices. They need to be selling something in the meantime, as they transition elsewhere.

Assuming they stay independent and in the smartphone game, and they do choose to abandon Windows Phone, I see Meego and Android as their only two real options, although I'm sure there are other potential routes for them that we would never even consider. Starting from scratch on a brand new OS seems like it would set them back too far.

Personally, I think the smartest plan would be to keep making Windows Phone 8 handsets, while also developing a secondary OS (be it Meego, Android, or something else). Unless they simply lack the resources, I see diversifying as their best bet.

[hugh]

Nokia's Bad Call on Smartphones

Says much of what has been said. Nokia had the lead in the late 1990's and early part of last decade but blew it. Once again, many of the bad business decisions pre-dated Elop by years.

Back on topic. IMO, the Future of Nokia, like RIM, is black. My guess is that Nokia and RIM will be the DEC, Wang and Osbourne Computer Corporations of the 21st Century - leaders who lost their way.

[redzone]

i still think nokia can come back. sales for the new phones has doubled from quarter to quarter. when win phone 8 hits they can make a preety good leap once microsoft starts showing off the windows 8 / phone 8 / tablet 8 interconnectivity.

[stampeder]

The woes at the Finnish mobile phone company Nokia continue to mount, with further losses in its main division in the second quarter of 2012, and a €220m (£170m) write-off on unsold stock of its smartphones.

But the ailing group's shares jumped by 10% to €1.50 as financial analysts said the losses were less grim than expected, and the firm had done better in the low-end "feature phone" market.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...ff-smartphones

Nokia's sales in the U.S. smartphone market dropped from 4 million (mostly Symbian) in the previous year to ~600,000 (Lumia WP) this latest year.

[stampeder]

Originally Posted by Hugh

Nokia's Bad Call on Smartphones

Says much of what has been said. Nokia had the lead in the late 1990's and early part of last decade but blew it. Once again, many of the bad business decisions pre-dated Elop by years.

Frank was coming up with some amazing design studies and he came up to Vancouver several times to brief the product creation people about them. He is a great guy, but some problems would arise from many of those concepts:

• the hardware was not yet available in-house (meaning anywhere in the world) to actually create it
• the software development time and cost could not be justified by the marketing gurus as many other projects were juggled
• sales and marketing people would hear rumours from within the company about such dream machines and figuratively start "selling" them to clients, messing with corporate plans ("You mean you won't have biometric monitoring or heads up displays by next quarter? Uh-oh... I have some urgent calls to make!")
• just like today, too much uncertainty with cutting edge stuff

An example of these problems is the Palm Pilot, which was immensely popular back in the day yet required that biz suit people had to have a phone in one pocket and their Palm Pilot in another, so naturally the idea arose for Nokia to create a Palm Pilot-based mobile phone. The prototypes were waaaaay cool for their time, but once Nokia got a look at Palm's software code they pushed it away like someone getting a plate of raw squid that they had not ordered. Nokia could have set up it's own Palm Pilot competitor but they went with the Communicator lines and other products instead, which were successful. You would not believe the wow-factor of the many prototypes over the years that reached dead ends. That's how and why Nokia was able to out-innovate Panasonic, Siemens, Philips, Ericcson, and a slew of other companies that got out of the mobile phone game.

I'm just clarifying that the R&D budget and burn rate in Nokia was colossal, which was one of the keys to Nokia's success in creating products that were almost always the benchmarks of the industry in design and sales. For all the projects which never made it out of prototype that Frank laments about, there were the diamonds that did.

Now Nokia has squandered all that.

[JohnnyCanuck]

I think the fundamental flaw in all of the logic criticizing Nokia for the WP7 decision is this:

Originally Posted by stampeder

Nokia's sales in the U.S. smartphone market dropped from 4 million (mostly Symbian) in the previous year to ~600,000 (Lumia WP) this latest year.

It assumes that Nokia sales would have continued at a similar clip had they not adopted WP7. There is no evidence of that. Further, one just has to look at RIM to see what happens when you lose the interest of consumers. I might be one of the few who think RIM might be able to recapture significant market share (a debate for a different thread), but the adoption of WP7 by Nokia should not be viewed through the lens of sales for one particular calendar year, but about the long-term prospects for the company.

Symbian/Meego = death spiral. Likely no more popular than BB7, without the enterprise infrastructure to mitigate some of the lost market share. WP7/7.5/8 = a possible resurgent place in the market as the lead hardware manufacturer for a platform that holds some promise. MS has some significant advantages over Google and Apple as more and more disparate market niches become integrated. The decision may not save Nokia, but it certainly can be defended. Without adopting WP as a platform, Nokia was likely done for (setting aside Android as the other possibility).

[stampeder]

In your opinion does it really come down to only Microsoft being able to create a successful alternative to iOS and Android, while Nokia, RIM, et al cannot?

The idea that Nokia would be "likely done" without Microsoft / Elop / Windows Phone is myth-making.

[NeilN]

Apple, Microsoft, and Google all have advantages Nokia does not.

Apple - First to market with new generation of mobile devices resulting in huge consumer and developer awareness.

Microsoft - Massively popular Windows ecosytem that can directly hook into their mobile OS.

Google - Well established services like mapping and email that are offered in a free OS to hardware manufacturers

[TorontoColin]

Originally Posted by stampeder

The idea that Nokia would be "likely done" without Microsoft / Elop / Windows Phone is myth-making.

True, but so is the idea that they would have been fine staying the course without Windows Phone. Consumers might have flocked to Android anyway.