french toast
Veteran
Windows phone is slowly getting some traction,
http://m.gsmarena.com/android_domin...untries_with_more_than_70_usage-news-6300.php
http://m.gsmarena.com/android_domin...untries_with_more_than_70_usage-news-6300.php
Nokia's Present & Future
- Thread starter Arun
- Start date
Symbian decreases more than WP increases, which doesn't look good for Nokia.
Their failure to gain any traction in the US isnt helping either
http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Pr...st&ns_linkname=link_name&ns_fee=0&piCId=77724
WP lost marketshare in the US recently
Well I don't think letting WP7 costumers with a dead platform was a nice thing to do when MSFT as Apple should differentiate it self from the crown of Android providers with long term support...
They corporate have them to slap people that liked their products in the face... not everybody is christian...
They corporate have them to slap people that liked their products in the face... not everybody is christian...
Unrelated, but I picked up a Blackberry Q10 to complement my Nexus 4 and I have to say I really do love a physical keyboard and not having the retroactively correct SMS messages that were sabotaged by various auto-corrects. App selection is poor until you learn how to sideload Android apps and then it's pretty decent. The BB10 HMI is also refreshing (swipe based) compared to the tappity-tap-tap of Android and iOS. I'm going to try my next few trips with the Q10 only and see how it fares. Here's hoping that Blackberry's good financial and cash position keeps them alive long enough to get back on their feet. Would hate to see the market relegated to iOS + Android forever.
D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
I don't mean to get picky on you, but you've been posting news with similar punchlines for a while and yet all we see objectively is Nokia getting less marketshare (due to symbian and asha's downfall), less money, less assets and less employees, along with news of shareholders criticizing the company's management and possible purchases being void because of its terrible condition.
I'm not saying you should stop posting news, just that I'd be more cautious before throwing flashy punchlines. This isn't a sensationalist blog.
french toast
Veteran
Im not including symbian precisely as it is not in the long term vision of the company and is getting phased out, also symbian belongs to budget phones and so if other smartphone manufacturers are anything to go by, margins are small with Symbian.
Plus you ignor my main point which is windows phone shows growth in most markets across the world, that points to traction.
Nokia is by far the major wp supplier with something like 85% shipments so I dont see how you can interpret this news as bad for nokia.
We know your an skool nokia loyalist, just dont get too cheer leader ish
Mintmaster
Veteran
Maybe you should spend more time looking at your own predictions:
That prediction fell flat on its face. Blackberry isn't doing very well by clinging onto a dying platform, so why do you think Nokia would do better with Symbian?
Even with Android, Nokia couldn't be anything but a bit player entering it so late in the game. LG, HTC, etc went Android from the get-go and are struggling despite manufacturing in an environment with lower production costs than Nokia could dream of, and their troubles are just getting started with Huawei, ZTE, etc sucking margins down even further. Samsung is taking 95% of the profits on the Android side, and Nokia had zero chance of ousting them from the top spot by switching in 2011.
Elop made the right decision. Anything else, and Nokia collapses even faster.
No offense, but stating that as some sort of provable or even arguable fact is ludicrous. One cannot begin to know what might have happened had Elop let Symbian die slowly while bringing on WP and MeeGo as the Nokia "back pocket" alternative (like Tizen for Samsung). You may *believe* that any other approach would have been worse, but you can't even begin to substantiate it with anything more than utter speculation.
do I understand correctly that you are claiming that:
- Scrapping the integrated approach to switching to the new platforms (using QT for apps for current and future platforms)
- Scrapping a future-proof in-house developed OS that was reasonably well developed after years of evolution (Maemo's first official release was in 2005) in favor of an externally developed OS, MS Windows Phone that had a completely empty record of success up to that point (Windows Mobile 6 and previous versions were universally regarded as horrible)
- Announcing that Symbian was end-of-life when this OS comprised the majority of sales for Nokia
were all actually the right decision?
Actually he said that was the ONLY right decision - anything else would have been worse.
Mintmaster
Veteran
I didn't intend to, though I can see how it came off that way. The point is that there is there is near zero certainty that Elop made the wrong decision.
The problem with that strategy is that they don't get MS's support payments, nor do they claim the #1 position for that OS. I highly doubt that the removal of Symbian from Nokia's high end devices hurt their sales much at all. Symbian's marketshare came overwhelmingly from lower end devices, and at the time apps didn't matter there. In 2009, Apple had 99.4% of app sales, despite Symbian having ~50% smartphone share. No devs cared for it, so the only people buying phones with Symbian were those that didn't care about apps, which was a declining demographic.
Look at the data:
Can you honestly say it looks like Elop accelerated Symbian's decline at all?
Widespread app development is a critical part to long term success. Apple had the first mover advantage (and for a long time it was gargantuan, given their relatively affluent user base), but wanted to remain a high end, high margin company. Google swooped in with a free product in a timely manner. These two could've been the only two significant players in the market, with nobody else offering any meaningful advantage and devs having no reason to care about other platforms.
The only reason MS had a chance to be a third player was their unified Win8 kernel/UI strategy. Devs have a solid incentive to make apps for all types of devices running Windows - laptops, tablets, and smartphones (and MS is throwing cash their way as well). BB and Symbian, MeeGo, Tizen, etc all had zero or nearly zero share of app sales in 2010 (hell, even Android was only at 10%, despite the OS marketshare being decent), and didn't have this trojan horse that MS does, so devs had little incentive to develop for them and that won't change in the future.
Android and WP were Nokia's only choices. Nokia wanted to take a gamble to stand out from the crowd, and MS paid them to do it. I can't say definitively that WP was the better choice over Android, as maybe Nokia could pull of a hardware or marketing miracle that LG/HTC/Sony/Motorola couldn't in their bid to unseat Samsung; however, I can say there is little to support the notion that Symbian/Meego had any chance in hell.
Last edited by a moderator:
http://bgr.com/2013/07/03/nokia-handset-unit-sale-analysis/#more-781539
Ouch. Wall Street is now convinced Nokia will sell its handset business. Was that part of Elop's strategy too?
Ouch. Wall Street is now convinced Nokia will sell its handset business. Was that part of Elop's strategy too?
I didn't intend to, though I can see how it came off that way. The point is that there is there is near zero certainty that Elop made the wrong decision.
The problem with that strategy is that they don't get MS's support payments, nor do they claim the #1 position for that OS. I highly doubt that the removal of Symbian from Nokia's high end devices hurt their sales much at all. Symbian's marketshare came overwhelmingly from lower end devices, and at the time apps didn't matter there. In 2009, Apple had 99.4% of app sales, despite Symbian having ~50% smartphone share. No devs cared for it, so the only people buying phones with Symbian were those that didn't care about apps, which was a declining demographic.
Look at the data:
Can you honestly say it looks like Elop accelerated Symbian's decline at all?
Widespread app development is a critical part to long term success. Apple had the first mover advantage (and for a long time it was gargantuan, given their relatively affluent user base), but wanted to remain a high end, high margin company. Google swooped in with a free product in a timely manner. These two could've been the only two significant players in the market, with nobody else offering any meaningful advantage and devs having no reason to care about other platforms.
The only reason MS had a chance to be a third player was their unified Win8 kernel/UI strategy. Devs have a solid incentive to make apps for all types of devices running Windows - laptops, tablets, and smartphones (and MS is throwing cash their way as well). BB and Symbian, MeeGo, Tizen, etc all had zero or nearly zero share of app sales in 2010 (hell, even Android was only at 10%, despite the OS marketshare being decent), and didn't have this trojan horse that MS does, so devs had little incentive to develop for them and that won't change in the future.
Android and WP were Nokia's only choices. Nokia wanted to take a gamble to stand out from the crowd, and MS paid them to do it. I can't say definitively that WP was the better choice over Android, as maybe Nokia could pull of a hardware or marketing miracle that LG/HTC/Sony/Motorola couldn't in their bid to unseat Samsung; however, I can say there is little to support the notion that Symbian/Meego had any chance in hell.
But you do realise that MS could afford to gamble and lose with this strategy, considering the huge cash reserves they have.
Nokia didn't have this option, and they've chosen a solution that, even if it works (Windows 8 app development for Metro isn't really taking off so far), they might not live to see the day.
As for the decline in revenue/profits for Nokia, it's hard to conclude anything as we'll never know. Personally I do think they had a chance with Maemo/Meego and the integrated platform approach with QT.
Mintmaster
Veteran
Doesn't matter. They had near zero share of app sales, and devs had no incentive to develop for it.
It's freaking MS, and they were commiting to this kernel across the entire windows market.
You can't even superficially make the case that this had much of an impact on sales. Look at the chart above. They were already heading down well before, and didn't go down any faster afterwards.
Mintmaster
Veteran
If Nokia sells its handset division due to lack of cash, you can be guaranteed that it would have done so sooner if it never got in bed with MS for $250M per quarter.
MS has been giving large payments to Nokia, so they may have not lived even to this day without MS. Only with Nokia's success will MS get that investment back in the future.
You two are running under the assumption that Nokia's sales would not only have been better with Maemo/Symbian/Meego, but also big enough to shoot profit above what MS is paying them. On top of that, dZeus, you're implying that Meego would have better app traction than WP/W8, when Maemo/Symbian already failed to get anything at all when it had 40%+ market share?!?
That is ludicrous. Look at the data. It was a sinking ship.
The data don't include a strategy to turn the ship based on levering existing platforms (with hundreds of millions of handsets sold), but rather to switch to an unproven platform with 0 presence.
I wouldn't be surprised if levering the existing platforms for cross-platform app development (using QT) would have attracted more developers. Of course, that's talking in hind-sight; Microsoft's strategy might have sounded attractive at the point when the decision was made by Elop.
Personally I'm mostly disappointed to see what happened to Maemo/Meego, which might bias my judgement regarding Nokia/Elop/MS.
