[french toast]

Thats naive to say the least, the fact that Microsoft have their foot in the door with their man running the company, their software running the show....you don't think that gives them a massive advantage?

Also Google wouldn't be allowed to buy Nokia.

[wco81]

Well the Nokia board may approve a sale to MS but if someone else bids higher are they going to ignore that?

Why would the DOJ and the EU favor MS over Google as the buyer or vice versa?

[lefizz]

Cos Google own Motorola?

[french toast]

Originally Posted by lefizz

Cos Google own Motorola?

Bravo! Also your thinking about things in pure monetary terms, the "special relationship" or intertwined engineering know how of both companies have built up and of course the fact that another complete turn around would bankrupt Nokia means that Microsoft at this stage would actually be the most sensible buyer, I doubt anyone else has the kind of free money kicking around Microsoft has, who also has the industry know how/ip /cash to turn Nokia around.

As stated before it's almost too late to do a u turn on operating systems, so wp it is then and also highly unlikely Microsoft would allow another company to outbid it for risk of throwing its own company down the drain should it lose its best mobile platform.

That's with out elop, likely many other pro Microsoft employees brought in and likely aggressive board room sweep stakes Microsoft is known for (yahoo).

[silent_guy]

Pando Daily has an interesting take on the financial situation of Nokia:

At its peak in the early and mid 2000s, the company fell victim to its own hubris. It began thinking of itself as an unassailable winner of the future, as a mature company that didn’t need to invest in the next big thing. Rather than spend its resources on building a next-generation software ecosystem—an OS that depended on novel interfaces and sensors, that allowed for outside development, that offered a brilliant user experience—the company “managed down” its cash by paying huge dividends and buying back its shares. Between 2003 and 2008, while Apple launched the iPhone and Google perfected its Android strategy, Nokia spent 27 billion euros just on dividends and repurchases.

Ouch. Such a bucket of money would have been really useful today.

[rpg.314]

Originally Posted by wco81

Why would the DOJ and the EU favor MS over Google as the buyer or vice versa?

Why would Google buy a dead end like Nokia? Patents? Isn't Motorola enough?

[ToTTenTranz]

Originally Posted by silent_guy

Pando Daily has an interesting take on the financial situation of Nokia:

Ouch. Such a bucket of money would have been really useful today.

I think it's actually the most shallow article I've seen about this subject.

He actually thinks the burning platform memo was a good thing, he thinks Elop is doing great and the only reason Nokia is going down is because of something like bad luck, because the Lumias are great phones and they sell good in North America.



In short, he's just spewing everything Elop says in press releases and shareholders conferences.

[french toast]

Agree, it's a monumental travesty this has happened to Nokia
also Google couldn't buy Nokia outright as it's anti competitive bit they might be able to bid for the patents if they ever went up.

Nokia's patents are gold and Mich better than Motorola's, they would have been even better had they been like apple and not made industry standards out of almost every smartphone tech we now take for granted and locked them down... another thing many apple owners take for granted as they sneer at Nokia.

Sad.

[rpg.314]

Originally Posted by ToTTenTranz

He actually thinks the burning platform memo was a good thing,

The memo was the right thing to do. It was just too late. It should have been sent out the day iPhone was outed.

[silent_guy]

Originally Posted by ToTTenTranz

He actually thinks the burning platform memo was a good thing, he thinks Elop is doing great and the only reason Nokia is going down is because of something like bad luck, because the Lumias are great phones and they sell good in North America..

Totz, we know your opinion on that, no need to repeat it. What I didn't know was that Nokia pissed away $27B and finds itself now in dire need of cash.

[french toast]

Originally Posted by rpg.314

The memo was the right thing to do. It was just too late. It should have been sent out the day iPhone was outed.

The memo was a disaster and shouldn't of been sent at any time.
They finally had the right set up before elop came, it was just taking a bit of time and board panicked.
I do like windows phone 7 and think it was a good idea bringing it on board as a media centric os for the Weston markets, but it should have been slow integration not what happened.

Elop has turned a very poor situation into a near company ending disaster.

[french toast]

Originally Posted by silent_guy

Totz, we know your opinion on that, no need to repeat it. What I didn't know was that Nokia pissed away $27B and finds itself now in dire need of cash.

That is another interesting point that I also didn't know about, basically whilst Steve jobs stopped all dividends to pile up a mahussive war chest, Nokia share holders were on the gravy train.

Also don't forget Nokia had the highest r&d spend out of all major tech companies totalling billions that cooking up wacky designs in espoo and you can see where Nokia fell down.

The fact Nokia went industry standard and open instead of going proprietary worth their technologies, as well as there laid back arrogant approach when apple entered the market, they could have stopped apple dead in its tracks if it had wanted to....but didn't??

[lefizz]

Their basic thinking when the iPhone arrived seemed to be as follows. OK its a smartphone and smartphones are 15% of our bussines if they take 10% of that market whocares. They didn't predict the huge explosion in that market, the way it would completely destroy the feature phone market via competition from high end through to low end android phones from the likes of ZTE.

The basics are simple the whole market reacted very quickly to the threat of apple and Nokia twiddledd there thumbs while Rome burnt. Its similar to the UK bike market in the 60s when the Japanese took over. Customers react quickly to the emergance of clearly better products , so had you or you will evaporate.

[french toast]

Well said, British leyland being another example, as was Liverpool football club.

Nokia were sitting back feet up sneering at apple thinking they were no threat to their dominance, Nokia was still thinking of smartphone being a swiss army knife..the more features crammed in the better...most were well ahead of there time, and iphone had no features at all, apart from a nice hi res touch screen and a music player..oh it could take calls.

Nokia responded with a very average n96..decent packing lots of features but jack of all trades whilst good at nothing.
The real horror was the 3g...an app store, 3g speeds a gyroscope and an mbx lite graphics to use it with..

Nokia took ages to assemble a competitor..the now woefull n97...which was released something like 6 months after it was announced...it was a buggy slow mess, and it went up against 3gs ..which was in another stratosphere.

[Florin]

Lumia 900 US sales fading

Despite a mountain of hype and support behind it, Nokia's Lumia 900 was no blockbuster.

Recent data and comments suggest the phone performed well, but not great. After a strong start, sales petered. While AT&T was initially enthusiastic about the Lumia 900, it isn't saying much about the phone now.

[Mize]

The N9 (MeeGo) is significantly superior to the Lumia 900 and sales were strong, especially considering that buyers knew it was DOA. If Elop hadn't killed it and had let Symbian alone then the slow start for WP on Nokia wouldn't even be newsworthy and Nokia would likely be making money today as they were before Elop.

[blakjedi]

Originally Posted by Mize

The N9 (MeeGo) is significantly superior to the Lumia 900 and sales were strong, especially considering that buyers knew it was DOA. If Elop hadn't killed it and had let Symbian alone then the slow start for WP on Nokia wouldn't even be newsworthy and Nokia would likely be making money today as they were before Elop.

You're probably right. but no one in the US cares about Meego... no matter what anyone says.. on the other hand everyone who I know who has used the Lumia 900 LOVES IT...

I used it for the first time last week with some friends while in Seattle.. I was HOOKED...

Android is a visually and technically mess.. I use a HTC EVO 4G with every kind of custom ROM and it still sucks... iOS is the BMW of phones... beautiful, powerful, exciting, but soulless... but after seeing that Lumia and looking up information on WP8, I'm almost sure that I'm jumping ship to a Windows Phone this fall... unless the i5 is truly amazing...

I think the slickness and fluidity of the current WP7.5 UI is unmatched. The ZUNE HD/Music app is all Silverlight and has no equal... The browser works the way they should all work, etc...

I scoffed at WP before but not anymore...

[ToTTenTranz]

Originally Posted by blakjedi

You're probably right. but no one in the US cares about Meego... no matter what anyone says.. on the other hand everyone who I know who has used the Lumia 900 LOVES IT...

I used it for the first time last week with some friends while in Seattle.. I was HOOKED...

Android is a visually and technically mess.. I use a HTC EVO 4G with every kind of custom ROM and it still sucks... iOS is the BMW of phones... beautiful, powerful, exciting, but soulless... but after seeing that Lumia and looking up information on WP8, I'm almost sure that I'm jumping ship to a Windows Phone this fall... unless the i5 is truly amazing...

I think the slickness and fluidity of the current WP7.5 UI is unmatched. The ZUNE HD/Music app is all Silverlight and has no equal... The browser works the way they should all work, etc...

I scoffed at WP before but not anymore...

Yes, everyone thinks WP7 is pretty at first glance.
The problems come when you try to do something functional/smartphone-ish and you'll understand how shallow and close to a dumbphone it actually is.

If everyone "LOVED" the Lumia 900 in the US, given it was marketed to death and priced close to nothing, it would've sold alot better than it did.

[french toast]

I wish meego had the full backing of Nokia, buy now it could have been the 3rd eco system, it was essentially a built from the ground up new android

It lacked widgets and multiple home screens that I love about android, I like the ability to change launchers.

What I don't like is the amount of shit manufacturers and carriers bung into the phone to bog it down, that and the ui overskinning which has nothing to do with the consumer, which is now used as a cover to force consumers into new products, as they now wait anything up to 7 months for a software upgrade....even then it usually carries the last variant of that software skin. Rip off.

My galaxy s3 sometimes stutters on a rare occasion, but then it does run a behemoth soc so really it shouldn't.

I can see me switching over to a Nokia wp8 device in future. I would lose the customisation and choice I get with android, but I would also swap it's failings, full software updates in a couple of weeks, lightening fast ui with nice transitions, social media built right into the os instead of having separate apps hogging battery, no fragmentation, and likely a hell of a lot less processes in the background starting up and running all by them selfs ...again ruining the fluidity and battery life, never mind data protection.

But I'm not going backwards, I want all the power, same or bigger battery, same screen, memory and graphics.

And I want all that in a chassis no thicker than this gs3...after holding this razor thin phone I couldn't lug around a heavier thick plastic brick with smaller battery, no matter how many nails you can hammer in with it.

And I want some more customisation options with wp8, full flash support and the ability to have at least 4 full apps running in background, as well as some decent apps.

[Florin]

Elop now needs to travel with security guards

Ah such is life. One day you're firing 10,000 people along with 3 execs, instead of the 1 person that should've been kicked to the curb, and the next you need to hire 2 new people.

[Snyder]

Originally Posted by rpg.314

The memo was the right thing to do. It was just too late. It should have been sent out the day iPhone was outed.

You mean declaring your current products bad and obsolete with a possible replacement even farther away, nay, not even on the horizon? Yeah, makes sense.

[Mize]

Originally Posted by blakjedi

You're probably right. but no one in the US cares about Meego... no matter what anyone says.. on the other hand everyone who I know who has used the Lumia 900 LOVES IT...

I used it for the first time last week with some friends while in Seattle.. I was HOOKED...

Android is a visually and technically mess.. I use a HTC EVO 4G with every kind of custom ROM and it still sucks... iOS is the BMW of phones... beautiful, powerful, exciting, but soulless... but after seeing that Lumia and looking up information on WP8, I'm almost sure that I'm jumping ship to a Windows Phone this fall... unless the i5 is truly amazing...

I think the slickness and fluidity of the current WP7.5 UI is unmatched. The ZUNE HD/Music app is all Silverlight and has no equal... The browser works the way they should all work, etc...

I scoffed at WP before but not anymore...

Its beauty is skin deep. It's a very, very pretty feature phone. Just try to connect it over usb and download a powerpoint or try to download a torrent in the background whilst still doing email, or try to send a photo to a friend over bluetooth, or try to multitask, etc. etc. etc.

WP8 might have the slickness of the feature phone OS WP7.5 and it might also add some smartphone features as well. Then again it won't run on the current generation of hardware either...

[french toast]

^^well put^^

[ToTTenTranz]

Microsoft just announced their own Windows 8 tablet.

Their own Windows 8 tablet means it's not made by, or even with, Nokia.

Funny, I thought Microsoft would discard Nokia eventually.. but I didn't think it would be so early in the game.
I guess it's not good for the business to hold hands with a dying company.



At practically the same time, Nokia put up a dedicated webpage in their U.S. site for the PureView 808.
Too little, too late?

[Mize]

I should have posted it here but when the rumors of an Ms tablet started yesterday I bet the would shaft Nokia...and they did.