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The Future Of Nokia?

12K views 93 replies 17 participants last post by  stampeder 
#1 ·
Anyone want to guess on the future of Nokia after the complete and utter disaster that the Microsoft Windows Phone-based Lumia line has been?
 
#2 ·
They bet the farm on Microsoft mobile. That alone means that they failed the management fitness test, and they deserve to fail.

But will they fail? I think it will take a long time, but they will fade slowly. Of course, the one wildcard here is Windows Phone 8. I am cautiously optimistic that this might be the first decent product to come out of Microsoft in a decade. The only question, is whether or not Microsoft has even a shred of reputation left to allow this product make it in the marketplace.
 
#3 ·
If they were going to fail, it would have happened a long time ago, and should have happened after the failure of the N-Gage. The fact is, they make an excellent device and if they fail, it won't be because of microsoft or sybian. How has Microsoft's involvement been a disaster? It's not like Nokia decided to step away from android to concentrate on wp7/8.
 
#4 ·
complete and utter disaster
Now its just a disaster. When they go out of business or get bought out (which I suspect they will in the next 12 to 18 months) then it will be complete. ;)

My two cents, Nokia was bleeding market share before WP came along suggesting the really big mistakes were made between 2006 and 2010.
 
#5 · (Edited)
The Myth

Nokia was not bleeding any market share prior to Elop's arrival from Microsoft and his subsequent conversion of the company to a Windows Phone maker. The complete and utter disaster is all his doing:

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/.a/6a00e0097e337c8833017743174241970d-pi

The blue line shows that Nokia's smartphone unit alone had just reported a Nokia-record profit and on an annualized basis would bring Nokia's profits into the Fortune Global 100. That's before adding additional profits from Nokia's other mobile phone units. Elop, Microsoft, and Windows Phone ruined it all.

The graph comes from Tomi Ahonen's blog.
 
#8 ·
The blue line shows that Nokia's smartphone unit alone had just reported a Nokia-record profit and on an annualized basis would bring Nokia's profits into the Fortune Global 100.
But do you really believe that without any changes, they would have kept on climbing? That consumers would still be buying Symbian devices in record numbers? RIM was once making record profits and selling record numbers of devices, but they failed to see what so many of us outsiders saw; their OS wouldn't hold up against Android and iOS and they needed to adjust for the future market.

Nokia tried to do what RIM failed at. They recognized that Symbian couldn't compete long term (and there's no question that they were right). They could have gone with their own solution (Meego) like RIM is attempting, but I don't see any real reason to believe they would have achieved substantially more success that way. They could have transitioned to Android, and become another hardware player in a very, very crowded Android market, and while that might have been the safer bet, the potential ceiling as another Android OEM was much lower than the potential ceiling of the premier WP7 OEM was.

I don't know that WP7 was the best bet, but I certainly don't see any others that were obviously better. Personally, I probably would have tried to work on multiple platforms (build phones for WP7, Android, and Meego) but I don't know if Nokia was even in a position to try that. I think anything was better than just riding it out with Symbian though.

Of course, the one wildcard here is Windows Phone 8. I am cautiously optimistic that this might be the first decent product to come out of Microsoft in a decade.
I'm going to go ahead and assume you mean the first decent product to come out of Microsoft Mobile in a decade. Even still, WP7/7.5 was generally critically well received. On its own merit, it is a pretty good platform. The fact that it never grabbed much market share was partially due to its significantly delayed arrival, and partly due to the difficulties of cracking the smartphone OS market these days.
 
#6 ·
As per the Nokia (Canada) web site, out of eight available smartphones the Lumia 610/710/800/900 are windows phones. The other four are Symbian phones - so at least in this country, Nokia is not a purely Windows phone manufacturer.

Prior to Elop's hiring*, have you or anyone else even considered getting a Nokia as smartphone? It's not like they were a major smartphone player before either. At least not here.

So what's left? Fire Elop and dissolve the MS relationship to go full steam with Symbian? Drop Symbian and start making Android phones just to go head to head with Samsung and HTC?

I'm attaching a chart with some trending. Nokia was massive before Samsung and iPhone exploded.

*I'm not an Elop apologist by the way.

 
#9 ·
Nokia was not bleeding any market share prior to Elop's arrival from Microsoft and his subsequent conversion of the company to a Windows Phone maker. The complete and utter disaster is all his doing:
Market Share was bleeding well before Elop arrived. Nokia announced the all Windows Phone in Q1 2011.

from wikipedia


In addition, the following is a typical quote from a Reuters Article when Elop was hired

"They have had problems for a long time and have been behind the curve on trends for the past few years. I think it could be good to get new influences, thoughts and ideas," said Inge Heydorn, fund manager at Sentat Asset Management.

When Elop announced the changed, I said

The reality is that Nokia is bleeding badly. The Smartphone market has taken off and they are down and out.

It was Android or WP. Nokia considered Android and rejected it as being me too.

Not sure Nokia had much of a choice.
I said "bleeding badly" back then because that was what Gartner and all the research firms were reporting in their market share stats.

To say that Nokia wasn't dropping like crazy when Elop came in is simply not true.
 
#10 ·
ive played with the current nokias and they are sexy phones.

i mean for 50 bucks they are a STEAL when it comes to what they can do.

if windows phone had all the features of android id be interested especially with windows 8 coming out.

the integration looks like it will be good to keep nokia alive.

I dought they will ever regain market champ though no matter what they did.
 
#11 ·
To answer the "Future of Nokia" question -- I will come at from a pure "investment" standpoint.

The same can be said of RIMM at the present time (imo).

Right now, it does not matter how good any of their products are -- the market (equity market) is saying that both companies are going to be "restructured". This may involve a buyout, merger, patent sale after Chapter 7 or 11 (Chapter 15 Cross border BK after Creditor Protection).

If you follow the market, you know that niether the SEC nor IROC in Canada care about the "little investor".

Illegal Naked Shorts and CDS (credit default swaps) by many of our fine banking instituations have predicted the outcomes long ago.

Go look at "fails to deliver". (www.failstodeliver.com). On a daily basis every legitimate regulatory rule is being broken. And the little guy investor for either NOK or RIMM is being had.

Simply put, the market is telling you that neither company (in the short-term) is going to produce a viable product. And both companies are going to be re-structured.

The market is telling you to stay away at all costs.
 
#12 ·
i haven't used a Nokia phone in ages, but I can definitely say I have never owned a "bad one". They have always been rock solid performers.
i.e. radio/phone first, fluff second.
I do hope they can remain competitive, for no other reason than to keep everyone else honest.
 
#13 ·
hugh said:
Market Share was bleeding well before Elop arrived.
(Voice of Yosemite Sam) Whoa, whoa... WHOA!!! That chart of yours has some glaring problems as relates to Nokia:
  1. It is only about OS market share, so while you see Symbian on there you do not see Nokia. Why? Because in fact Symbian was used far and wide by mobile phone manufacturers for many years until the royalty-free Android came along, at which point the sensible companies stopped paying for Symbian. See how their curves mirror each other almost perfectly, Symbian down, Android up? This left just Nokia and I think NTT DoCoMo as about the only Symbian users. Thus, that chart is not revealing about Nokia's financial health.
  2. The chart I posted is about corporate market share based on profit, using Elop's own numbers and those of Apple and Samsung, and it shows in graphic detail just how positive things were prior to Elop's arrival and how dreadful the Microsoft link has been for Nokia since he dropped the "burning platform" nuke.
  3. All arguments about Nokia's financial health must be based on the complete, global entity and it's various mobile phone product lines and markets, so even while Nokia was enjoying good profits from their smartphone line they were also doing just great in their other mobile lines. I suspect that some of the analysts you and others cite might not have been doing that. While Nokia had almost the whole world sewn up we all know that Nokia's presence in the U.S. market was poor. Not that it mattered much because the potential U.S. market didn't hold a candle to the huge international market numbers that were being seen and projected.
Like most myths this one about Nokia bleeding market share prior to Elop's arrival will probably never die.
 
#14 ·
Like most myths this one about Nokia bleeding market share prior to Elop's arrival will probably never die.
Well, do you have any evidence to suggest this was not the case? Everyone knew that Nokia needed to move away from Symbian because it isn't a modern OS in the context of iOS/Android/Windows Phone 7. Heck, even RIM's Blackberry OS was technically ahead of Symbian.

Building your own software platform is very difficult if you don't have much lead time, so Nokia needed to pick some other software to use/license. Windows Phone 7 allows Nokia differentiate themselves in many positive ways when compared Android and iOS (and, yes, negative ways too) - but in their view that was much better than picking Android.

If Nokia had picked Android, Android would have likely become even more dominant than it is already, and then Nokia would certainly be "just another Android vendor", of which there are dozens. At least with Windows Phone Nokia phones are less of a commodity.
 
#15 ·
so Nokia needed to pick some other software to use/license
Nokia, prior to Elop, did not need to pick any OS. It had Symbian, which was not the problematic OS that some folks seem to imply as it was being greatly improved by the QT toolkit. Nokia had Maemo, it's proven Linux platform, for small form factor computers. Nokia had Meego, which it was co-developing with Intel to eventually augment and replace Symbian on smartphones, and which now lives on as Samsung's Tizen. Nokia had Meltemi, which was a Linux OS for dumbphones that would replace the S40 OS. Everything was fine, and the products kept improving as did Nokia's profits. The idea of Nokia paying another company whopping royalties on each phone was and is absurd.

Nokia did not need Microsoft and did not need Windows Phone OS. The dismal state of Nokia today is all the proof that we need.
 
#19 ·
Nokia, prior to Elop, did not need to pick any OS. It had Symbian, which was not the problematic OS that some folks seem to imply as it was being greatly improved by the QT toolkit. Nokia had Maemo, it's proven Linux platform, for small form factor computers. Nokia had Meego, which it was co-developing with Intel to eventually augment and replace Symbian on smartphones, and which now lives on as Samsung's Tizen. Nokia had Meltemi, which was a Linux OS for dumbphones that would replace the S40 OS.
Symbian was on its way out, and needed to be replaced quickly. Sony Ericsson, for example, didn't abandon Symbian just because Android was free, they abandoned it because Android was better and more popular. If Symbian had been worth supporting, SE could have continued producing devices for both OS. Clearly, from their point of view, there was no business case for staying with Symbian.

As far as I know, Nokia released Maemo on just two devices, neither of which were significant commercial successes, before transitioning Maemo to Meego (via the merge with Moblin) well before the Microsoft partnership.

Meego looked very promising, but it had two huge flaws. First of all, it wasn't ready. Nokia could have waited, but then they might have ended up like RIM; losing market share while they wait for a saviour that might come too late. Second of all, there was no established ecosystem or community, and no guarantee that Symbian users would adopt the platform. No matter how good it was, there was no guarantee anyone would buy it. Just look at WebOS; a fantastic product that just couldn't crack the marketplace. WP7 wasn't huge, but at least the OS was ready to go and had somewhat of an established developer and supporter community.

I don't see what's stopping them from continuing with dumbphones and Meltemi, except that the dumbphone market is shrinking fast and it will be very difficult to continue turning a profit there.

I saw them as having three options. They could wait for Meego, choose Android, or choose WP7. For all the disaster WP7 seems to have brought, Meego was just as risky and could have been far worse. Android might have been a safer bet, but they would have a hard time dethroning Samsung as the lead Android OEM and would likely be mired with HTC, LG, Motorola, and Sony in the middle ranks of Android OEMs.
 
#17 ·
stampeder, forget about this Tomi Ahonen guy and his blog. He was fired from Nokia long time ago for a reason. Everybody else in the world is saying that Symbian sucked, sucks, was and is a dead end. The other Nokia OS experiments might have succeeded, if iOS was released in 2017, instead of 2007.
 
#18 ·
stampeder said:
Nokia did not need Microsoft and did not need Windows Phone OS. The dismal state of Nokia today is all the proof that we need.
What does that prove, precisely? It doesn't prove that Nokia had better options available with their own software stack.

stampeder said:
It had Symbian, which was not the problematic OS that some folks seem to imply as it was being greatly improved by the QT toolkit.
This does not align with the impressions of Symbian from the tech press, and it doesn't align with my experiences trying out a Symbian handset. Symbian was way behind the technology in iOS, and Nokia needed to make a major change.

stampeder said:
Nokia had Maemo, it's proven Linux platform, for small form factor computers.
Interesting. I've had conversations with a friend of mine who worked on Maemo in 2010-2011 (he previously worked at Canonical), and from what he told me, Maemo was a mess and pointed to its security implementation as something that was overly complex (poorly designed), and said that the entire project lacked momentum.

But I'll ask anyway: what about Maemo was "proven"? For a product that never really made it to market, it is anything but proven. When one says that a software product is "proven", that typically means that it has been battle tested and is a known quantity. For instance, Windows (the desktop OS) is "proven" and Linux/UNIX/Windows servers are "proven". Lots of people use them every day, and they perform the task well.

An example of something that isn't proven is Android on tablets. Google is looking to change that with their Nexus 7.

stampeder said:
Everything was fine, and the products kept improving as did Nokia's profits.
Profits are not what you'd call a leading indicator of trouble. When a financial quarter of profits are reported you're looking at the past.
 
#20 · (Edited)
Who is Tomi Ahonen? Read and watch...

Arthur Dent said:
stampeder, forget about this Tomi Ahonen guy and his blog
That's the funniest thing I've read in a long time! :D

Forbes 3 January 2012: "Who are the top 10 power influencers in mobile? Number 1 belongs to ex-Nokia executive Tomi Ahonen, whose blog Communities-Dominate.blogs.com is a fixture on the mobile scene, largely because of Ahonen's comprehensive knowledge of the mobile ecosystem."
Tomi T Ahonen - Author, Consultant and Motivational Speaker - Author of twelve bestselling books on mobile, already
into multiple printings and translated into several languages, Tomi's books and theories are quoted in over 120 published
books by his peers. The former Nokia executive lectures at short courses at Oxford University and is regularly quoted in
the press in over 400 articles published in over two dozen languages on all six inhabited continents. Tomi is often seen on
TV talking about mobile and digital trends and has been seen at over 250 conferences on over 80 cities in over 50 countries
and attended by a cumulative audience of over 100,000 people. His reference list includes most major tech companies in the
Fortune 500 including Axiata, BT, China Mobile, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, LG, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo,
Orange, RIM, SK Telecom, Telenor, TeliaSonera, Tigo and Vodafone, etc.
He is an exceptionally intelligent, well informed analyst and has a terrific sense of humour too. Check this out:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swvRYB76Y1I

So Arthur Dent you want me to forget about him and the books of his I've read over the years as part of my career and the time he spoke to us at our site and the videos I've watched. Presumably that is because you dislike his message? I simply cannot debate anything about the mobile phone industry with you if you would go so far as to completely reject such an elite analyst. :)

Here is the link to his blog, and I highly, highly recommend that anyone who seriously wants to discuss the mobile phone industry should spend a few days in there: http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/
 
#21 ·
Nokia's Plan B OSes

Symbian with the QT toolkit was suitable to carry Nokia until the following options were ready for prime time, so if Plan B (ditching the Plan A Lumia burning platform) comes to pass there are options to Android:

Maemo was available commercially on several devices sold mostly in Europe and quickly developed a cult following, especially with the forever-in-prototype N900. It was ready for prime time, my friends, and I use it every day on my N900. :)

Meego was also ready for prime time, so when it hit the market it won awards over iOS and Android. It is Samsung's ace-in-the-hole now in case any issues with Android should arise for them.

Meltemi was 2 months away from release when it was cancelled by Elop. 2 months! It was for dumbphones, and it was excellent.

Nokia did not need Microsoft or Windows Phone, and despite what people say in disagreement with my assessment the reality of the situation speaks for itself - Microsoft, Stephen Elop, and Windows Phone have been a disaster for Nokia and it is as plain as day.
 
#24 ·
Maemo was available commercially on several devices sold mostly in Europe and quickly developed a cult following, especially with the forever-in-prototype N900. It was ready for prime time, my friends, and I use it every day on my N900. :)
Unless I've missed one, there were only two Maemo devices ever released by Nokia; the N900 and the N9. Neither experienced significant commercial success, and the decision to merge Maemo into what would become Meego was made long before Elop took over because the previous Nokia administration believed it couldn't compete.

This part is purely subjective, but in my experience Maemo was well beyond anything the average user was going to embrace. People sometimes complain that Android is too complicated and "techy" for the average person. Maemo, in my opinion, made Android look like a child's plaything.

Meego was also ready for prime time, so when it hit the market it won awards over iOS and Android. It is Samsung's ace-in-the-hole now in case any issues with Android should arise for them.
Meego was not ready when the decision was made to partner with Microsoft. Nokia wasn't sure what the final OS would look like, and they had no hardware ready to run it. Waiting for Meego would have set them back months for a platform that might have been far worse. Even given the critical success it achieved; critical success does not necessarily translate to commercial success (just look at WebOS). There are other factors at play here.

Meltemi was 2 months away from release when it was cancelled by Elop. 2 months! It was for dumbphones, and it was excellent.
Two things with dumbphones. First, almost nobody who buys dumbphones actually cares how good the OS is (or they would be buying smartphones). Second, the market and profit margins for dumbphones are shrinking rapidly. That's a dying business.

Microsoft, Stephen Elop, and Windows Phone have been a disaster for Nokia and it is as plain as day.
That may be true, but as far as I'm concerned Nokia was heading for disaster before Elop and Microsoft entered the picture.
 
#22 ·
stampeder said:
So audacity you want me to forget about him and the books of his I've read over the years as part of my career and the time he spoke to us at our site and the videos I've watched. Presumably that is because you dislike his message? I simply cannot debate anything about the mobile phone industry with you if you would go so far as to completely reject such an elite analyst.
I think you mean Arthur Dent. But go ahead and blame me for someone else's post. Please, go ahead.

But I'd be much more interested in your posts if you actually come up with a good rebuttal of the points I made. Specifically:

1. Nokia's home-grown OSes were either ageing poorly, or not ready to take over.

2. Nokia's Maemo/Meego work was not "proven", and I'm curious what your definition of proven is - it certainly isn't what most people consider "proven" to be. Those operating systems were only on fringe devices and were never widly available. I don't think a single N9 was even sold commercially in America (North or South).

3. When a financial quarter of profits are reported you're looking at the past. Your attempt to use it as a leading indicator to say that Nokia was a-ok before Elop came in was looking at historical data and claiming the future was great!
 
#23 ·
Symbian is dying and cult followings mean zero to a corporation. Nokia can either jump into the fray with Android and try to compete with Samsung or stick with Microsoft and make a go with the Windows Phone o/s.

There is nothing else.

I like the Lumia with WP7. For a single core processor it's amazingly smooth and polished.
 
#25 ·
Unless I've missed one, there were only two Maemo devices ever released by Nokia; the N900 and the N9
You missed a couple of very popular Internet tablets along the way, but hey, they were European only. As for being released, Maemo was. Also it actually can be brought to bear as part of a Plan B if necessary, which was my point. Facts are facts.
 
#27 · (Edited)
Nokia's future is doomed unless Elop/Microsoft are ditched

I'm seeing a few people here slagging Nokia's pre-Microsoft products based on... um... beats me... maybe what "tech journalists" might have said???? Maybe Gartner, Forrester, etc. etc.... Who knows? Where exactly is this coming from? If the answer is "well everyone obviously knows it" then that's not good enough. If the answer is truly "because my Microsoft evangelist told me" then say hello to my old friends for me... I miss our long discussions over beers way back when... (see my Linkedin friends) ;)

Facts are facts, and when you see with your own eyes the profit chart based on data released under Elop's watch it is abundantly clear that Nokia was doing great beforehand and was subsequently wrecked. Heads must roll.
Meego was not ready when the decision was made to partner with Microsoft.
Wow, the award-winning N9 Meego phones were just a dream? The Nokia phones that allowed Nokia devotees to do everything they were used to doing but with such a great interface that it was voted better than Android and iPhone? Elop has refused to let the N9 be sold commonly, but sure enough they took the N9's outward appearance and made the latest Lumias look like that. :D

I also want to deal with the misguided notion that Windows Phone is/was somehow more "ready" than any of the in-house Nokia OSes I've mentioned. There are so many things that the in-House OSes can do that Windows Phone cannot that it is laughable. Further, the field failure rate of the non-Nokia-built Lumia phones is higher than anything Nokia has ever produced on it's own. It is an embarrassment.

Want to know why lifelong Nokia devotees won't touch a Lumia phone with a ten foot pole? Because it ruins everything they used to do. Sales of Lumia amongst those people are almost nil, which you can see for yourself.

Move on folks, the show's over, nothing left to see here, no contest between Nokia's own OSes and Microsoft Windows Phone, which is driving Nokia to it's destruction.
Second, the market and profit margins for dumbphones are shrinking rapidly. That's a dying business.
Nokia has made and could continue to make huge profits in that market segment. Here in North America there is a certain hubris that seems to make analysts blind to the obvious because it is not happening in their own back yard. Nokia had a hammer lock on dumbphones (an increasing international market for which Nokia's expenses to fill the market have been very low for high profit) and Elop killed it. Dead. No Windows Phone can ever operate in the dumbphone marketplace, so now Elop has totally given away Nokia's tried and true profit centre. Did you know that in many developing countries that have little or no land line system per se a mobile phone is actually called a Nokia in common parlance? Elop kissed all that goodbye. These are markets involving the majority of the people on this planet and he killed it. People in those markets have neither the money nor the interest in smartphones - they want their trusty, reliable Nokia, and each time they buy one Nokia chalked up a profit for relatively little cost. That's how you make a profit in almost any situation. Under Elop it is clear that Nokia cannot make a profit under any circumstances.
That may be true, but as far as I'm concerned Nokia was heading for disaster before Elop and Microsoft entered the picture.
Against sober analysis of the evidence, it would seem.
 
#29 ·
I'm seeing a few people here slagging Nokia's pre-Microsoft products based on... um... beats me...
Personally, from my experience using Symbian (on a Nokia 5230) and, briefly, Maemo on an N900. I have no experience with Meego, though I've heard good things, or Meltemi, on which I have no opinion of the OS itself.

under Elop's watch it is abundantly clear that Nokia was doing great beforehand and was subsequently wrecked.
I don't think anyone is arguing that they were doing poorly before. Rather, that it was extremely unlikely that they could maintain their success continuing with Symbian for much longer.

Wow, the award-winning N9 Meego phones were just a dream?
I could be wrong on my timeline. To be perfectly honest I never followed Meego too closely, as it never seemed likely to reach North America. However (if I remember correctly), the Microsoft partnership was announced in February of last year, while the N9 didn't make it to market until September or October, 8 or 9 months later, and around the same time as the first Lumia devices. It wasn't even announced until June of 2011, four months after the Microsoft partnership was announced.

Thus, when the decision to partner with Microsoft was made, Meego was not yet ready. Without being able to actually see the OS in action, Nokia's executives couldn't have known how good it would be. They could have waited, but there was no guarantee Meego would have been ready to ship on devices by the end of 2011, and there was no guarantee it would have been well received. Had they waited, they might have ended up like RIM, constantly missing deadlines on a product with no guarantees it would be better than Windows Phone, while losing their supporters to Android and iOS.

Again, I'm not saying that waiting on Meego wasn't a viable option. I'm just saying that it wasn't without substantial risk. Now that we know what Meego is and we've see how the Lumia devices sell, Meego looks a lot better. But we (and Nokia) didn't have that information in February of 2011. It wasn't nearly as evident back then.

I also want to deal with the misguided notion that Windows Phone is/was somehow more "ready" than any of the in-house Nokia OSes I've mentioned. There are so many things that the in-House OSes can do that Windows Phone cannot that it is laughable.
Are these things that the average consumer would make use of? People like you and I represent a very, very small section of the market Nokia needs to capture. The average consumer wants things simple and straightforward.

Nokia had a hammer lock on dumbphones
With sub-$100 (outright) Android phones and a rapidly growing demand for smartphone use (even in developing nations) how much longer do you think that's going to last? It's a dying market, in my opinion.
 
#28 ·
Stampeder, I don't see how his engineering and writing career is any relevant to the fact that he is blatantly wrong about the Nokia strategy. It happens even to the greatest minds. If Steve Jobs had been removed from Apple in 2004, thus having the spare time Tomi enjoyed, he probably would have written blogs enough to fill a city library (the way Tomi has) about how iTunes should be for Mac OS only, that third party apps should not be allowed on the iPhone, and other epic misjudgements he made. But he had the right instinct that helped him correct his views. Tomi has none of that. Opinionated and bitter to infinity. On top of that he is an engineer. Like Steve Wozniak, and we know what vision he had about the Apple 1 computer. Good engineers are priceless, but in their domain only. The more talanted they are, the more likely they are to miss the humour in a sentence of the type: "Grandma, it's easy - you just need to fix the metadata and zip the jpegs before emailing them". ;)
Anyway, my point is that even if Tomi had saved a ship full of children from sinking, Symbian still would have sucked and would have had no future.
 
#33 · (Edited)
Arthur Dent, enough of the character assassination. The industry's leading analyst and Oxford lecturer doesn't require anyone to defend him, nor do I, but you are not helping make whatever point you are trying to make about Nokia's future.

Regarding Maemo, Meego, and Meltemi, they were in active development and were absolutely stable. Windows Phone was/is not. Also TorontoColin the phone on which you have based your Symbian opinion is not at all representative of the latest state with the QT toolkit. I would say what you experienced was like an XP user critiquing Windows 7 SP1 without ever having used it.

How does Windows Phone disappoint Symbian -> Meego users, you ask? Check out this link to a search for the famous "101 Reasons Not To Buy Windows Phone 7.5" list (list of major and minor features and capabilities that Symbian, Meego, iOS, etc. have that WP7.5 does not - it is now up to 121 reasons, BTW):

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=101+Reasons+Not+To+Buy+Windows+Phone+7.5

Nevertheless Symbian was not the OS that was going to carry Nokia into the future and I've been clear to state that. The improved Symbian was going to provide an overlap for Meego-based smartphones/featurephones and Meltemi dumbphones. For some reason it seems like some of the writers in this thread can't grok what I've said and keep going on about Symbian not having a future when it clearly did - albeit in an expected ramped-down mode towards Meego.

Also let's be clear that Android is not a dumbphone, nor do dumbphone buyers the world over want such a phone. That is the state of dumbphones in the developing world, in which >=3G networks do not exist or are simply unaffordable. Nokia made great profits in those markets but now Elop has completely erased any such possibility. I imagine one or more of the Chinese dumbphone manufacturers are swooping in these days.

I don't really feel like I have the desire or energy to keep trying to clarify all this and I don't wish to be repetitive so I accept if some people disagree with me but I hold my views as strongly as cast iron about the need for Nokia to get rid of their Microsoft / Elop / Windows Phone as soon as possible.

cheers
 
#35 ·
I don't really feel like I have the desire or energy to keep trying to clarify all this and I don't wish to be repetitive so I accept if some people disagree with me but I hold my views as strongly as cast iron about the need for Nokia to get rid of their Microsoft / Elop / Windows Phone as soon as possible.

cheers
That is not exactly fair position, because you can never be proven wrong. Symbian, Maemo, Meego, etc. - dead and gone, can't come back, with or without Elop. Arguments of the type "what if something in the past happened one way or another" are generally pointless. Depending on what happens next, Tomi's next volume of blogs will be issued under the title "How Elop Killed Nokia" or "How Nokia Survived Elop's Assassination Attempt".

Since you brought up "character assasination", I tried to refrain from that until now, but, what the hell, since I'm already accused, let me at least be guilty:
Reading his blogs I can't help but think that this guy is losing it. Whatever his glorious past. He is hinting at international conspiracies, started and perpetrated by "American shareholders", who have set out to destroy the world's engineering leader Nokia. Can't be because of financial gains, because they are losing billions in the process, therefore it must be out of envy and spite. Those other smaller "American shareholders" who are not inherently evil, just couldn't feel the magical market potential of the superbly engineered Nokia products (Tomi does feel it), and thus unknowingly helped the evil forces from Wall Street do their dirty deed. They instated their Trojan horse Elop with the help of a handful of traitors, and evil won. But it's never too late for revolution, so, forces of good from all countries, unite! The only thing missing are a few vampires and Tomi will be a teen fiction sensation.

OK, now it feels better! Guilty as charged! :)
 
#34 ·
Windows Phone was already out on several devices from other manufacturers, so I'm not sure how you can call it unstable. It has bugs, but so does every OS. Windows Phone was at least a known quantity. Meego was still months away from potential launch. If it had been ready it would have already been on sale.

As for dumbphones, how long do you think countries won't have 3G networks? I'd bet that in two years the ones without 3G will be a small minority. And with or without 3G, when Android devices drop below $50, it will take a huge hit out of the dumbphone market. This is a prime example of the world changing and Nokia needing to stay ahead of the curve.
 
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