Nokia's Present & Future
- Thread starter Arun
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What's with you? Just because there is a bigger market doesn't mean you ignore others when developing products. Oh, and NTT Docomo has a 1700 MHz band too.
I'm not arguing about who has the largest installed base. I'm arguing about the incremental cost to sell to 34M+ subscribers. If it costs $3 to add support for China Mobile (which, by the way also has regular GSM bands as I use them) and $0.01 for T-mobile then make the business decision. Now I don't know what it costs, but that was my question.
You don't know the cost.
...but you know it's too high.
okIf it's zero (and it may be damn close for the nokia radio) any sales are infinite ROI. And how long before T-mobile goes PCS?
It's guaranteed not to be zero: if not because of increased component cost then because of engineering effort. Kinda obvious no?Mize said:You don't know the cost.
...but you know it's too high.
If it's zero (and it may be damn close for the nokia radio) any sales are infinite ROI. And how long before T-mobile goes PCS?
By using your kind of reasoning, I'm sure it's fair to say that Elop switched from a relatively marginal group of developers to the largest in the world.
("Developers, developers, developers...")I've programmed in QT. It's, well, cute. Good enough for multi-platform desktop applications if you don't mind that ever so slight quirks make it fell a bit awkward compared to pure native programs. And the mobile version had the necessary set of basic tools and widgets, but just like early Android, it didn't stand a chance against the slickness, smoothness, uniformity, and high-level powered functionality of UIKit. Developers like to program on a platform they love, despite the fact that there were initially actively shoo'ed away. Nokia never had that appeal.
I don't doubt that a couple of them must have been able to make a good living out of it.
Yet it was true. It just wasn't blatantly obvious. A rising tide lifts all boats, which allowed Nokia hold it things up for a while. But the trend had been there all along.
You mean their record mobile profits of ~1900M euros of 2008Q1, right? The ones that were at 831M in 2010Q1? And 700M in 2011Q1? (google.com, you should try it sometime.)
I believe you're talking about feature checklist dysfunction. Doing many things so so instead of doing a few things exceptionally well.
During the early days of the first iPhone (remember: didn't even have an app store), I tried browsing the web on the high-end Nokia of the day. It worked. Sort of. But was it a pleasant experience? Hell no. That was Nokia. By the time they realized checklists were not enough, they had already lost the mindshare.
Nokia missed the boat. Somebody else came along, showed the world how a user friendly smart phone could really be made. Even the best possible execution won't help you if you're starting way behind.
So you don't think a pentaband radio already exists? Or you think Meizo, Huwei and Nokia designed their own?
Here's one:
http://www.roundsolutions.com/shop/...Module/Emdbedded-3G-UMTS-HSPA-LGA-Module.html
There goes your NRE.
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You realize you've contradicted yourself, right? By definition Apple was way behind.
A good read:
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/nok...oking-the-mighty-finn-50007750/?tag=mncol;txt
Nokia had no doubt floundered, but they had good stuff in the works. Elop then destroyed the company in a matter of weeks by killing their cash cow and abandoning their internal work that might well have made them more than another HTC with only one OS.
Apple was behind in selling phones. But anyone can build one: just slap a couple of Mediatek chips on a PCB and design a piece of plastic around it. Hundreds of Chinese companies were already doing it. Apple was way ahead in having the components to build a user friendly computer. And even when they released it, most competitors initially didn't realize it. It was only half RDF when Jobs claimed, in 2007, that they were 5 years ahead of everybody else. Google was the first to realize the problem and redesigned major parts of their work in progress, with the benefit of having the DNA of a fast moving Silicon Valley company. Nokia was not so lucky and had the additional burden of having to manage transitioning away from an existing product line.Mize said:
Elop accelerated the demise of Nokia, but there is little doubt in my mind that it would have happened anyway. RIM did not dramatically dump their aging OS, yet they are collapsing just the same.
Honestly, it has nothing to do with extortion, since other smaller regional CDMA carriers have gotten the iPhone. Apple does not want to build a special phone for only 33 million potential subscribers. And for people who think that the "Verizon" iPhone was special, Apple has offered it to several regional carriers in the US, and it's hugely important in China where there are over 600 million wireless subscribers. That's double the number of iPhone sold since 2007.
Of course they don't design their own. But if you put it on your PCB you still need to test and qualify it. That's the NRE.Mize said:
Alright fine, f*ck it and the 34 million handsets/year you might sell to T-mobile or EUers who travel to the US.
So why aren't there more quad-band UMTS phones?
You know, you guys are a LOT smarter than HTC, Samsung & LG. All of them are stupid enough to make UMTS 1700 phones and they're even releasing *new* phones like the HTC One S or Sammy Galaxy S Blaze for 1700 UMTS. They should read this thread so they don't make such dumb mistakes!
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By using your kind of reasoning, I'm sure it's fair to say that Elop switched from a relatively marginal group of developers to the largest in the world.
No, it's the other way around.
(I didn't get the joke, honestly..)
You mean it's easier to program using a SDK that's designed for 2 hardware variations per year than one designed for millions of hardware variations?
And what's the point with the iOS comparison? iOS is a closed platform. Again: whatever strategy/implementation works for apple's products will work with apple. Most of the stupidest decisions that have been made in the mobile world were exactly the ones that tried to copy apple's methods in an ecossystem where it obviously wouldn't work.
Not to mention that programming native for mobiles in mid/long-term during an era where marketshare and installed user bases take drastic disruptions every 2 years is pretty much cancerogenous IMO, but that's a whole other story.
Haha, a couple..
This is during the transition from own website distribution to OVI Store distribution, so don't forget that during this time many developers were still doing money out of their own distribution channels.
Trend?
Nokia delayed the launch of Symbian^3 models with updated hardware, features and UI for a whole damn year and you'd need an article to tell you why the sales fell before the launch of S^3 models?
That's not analyst material, that's it's so obvious because it's stamped in his face material..
Yes, and we can also see from your post that google can be pretty much useless if you don't know what you're looking for.
The discussion has always been about the symbian+meego -> WP7 transition (you don't even need google to verify that, you only need to take a few pages back in this very same thread). We were talking about smartphones:
The smartphone division (S60 and up) was doing record profits in the Q4 2010. The record profits of 2008 were due to the feature/dumb phones.
I mean, you could argue that if Nokia was doing most of their money out of feature phones in 2008, they should've kept doing those and never enter the smartphone business, but then most people would laugh at you. So please, don't...
Oh look, yet another i-love-my-iphone-so-much-i-should-just-marry-it blog entry.
Wow, this 2-year-old ultra-biased opinion is so relevant and important for this discussion.
Not.
Nonetheless, why won't you tell me which of the items in the "feature checklist" worked "so so" in Symbian^3 devices back in Q4 2010?
I'd like to know more about all that experience you've had with a S^3/Anna/Belle device in order to form that opinion.
Only because what it seems is that you've had none...
Yeah Nokia was already doomed in 2011 because you didn't like the browsing experience in a S60v5 device back in 2007.
Spectacular reasoning.
Starting way behind in what?
Installed user base? Nope.
Marketshare? Nope.
Mindshare? Oh please, american tech-news mindshare isn't global mindshare. Symbian owned Japan's mindshare way more than iOS for many years after the iphone's release, for example.
User experience? Not from what I saw in the N9 reviews, or even the more recent Belle reviews.
As far as I can tell, you're simply repeating the gizmodo theories about how all Nokia devices were crap because they weren't an almighty iphone, nor trying to copy one.
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Huh? All I said was that adding a feature has a cost. That's all. And why add it if there's no immediate need. LG and HTC need whatever small competitive benefit they can get so it makes sense for them.Mize said:
But it's less of an issue if you already have a hard time supplying your existing markets.
A good read? LOL yeah. The fact that they were thinking Symbian as a cashcow that couldnt be derailed by something better was the problem. He seems actually proud about shipping shit products that just sold because no competition.
So armchair analysis is just great to hear from the guy actually was responsible for shipping the great N97. These ex-Nokia execs seem just terrible every time on media.
You clearly don't run a business. I have owned and run businesses for 14 years and the term "cash cow" is often used for a dead product that is generating cash because it is entrenched. You milk it until it dies or until you've used that cash to invest in and launch your next successful product.
You really don't seem to understand that Nokia was making huge sales and generating good cashflow no matter how shitty Symbian was. So if you came in and wanted to move wholesale to WP7 the common sense business move is to develop WP7 product whilst still milking your cash cow. Elop didn't do that. He announced to the world that the company's current products - and a whole bunch that were to launch in the months ahead - were dead. By doing that he essentially shot his cash cow in the head with no other source of milk until he could develop, launch and succeed with his new plan.
This has nothing to do with whether or not Symbian was good - it has to do with a remarkably bad business decision.
