7 ms·

It's amazing how hyperbolic people are being about this, presumably out of blind Microsoft hatred. Pretty much everyone agreed that Nokia's Symbian/MeeGo strat

by halo 16y ago

It's amazing how hyperbolic people are being about this, presumably out of blind Microsoft hatred. Pretty much everyone agreed that Nokia's Symbian/MeeGo strategy was a failure, that Nokia were quickly losing marketshare and that they needed a new OS. The only options were Android and Windows Phone 7. WebOS would have been a better fit than either, but that option had already been and gone. I think there are compelling reasons why Nokia would choose WP7 over Android. There is a competitive advantage in being the flagship manufacturer of a platform, they won't have to play catchup against much more established competitors, or have to directly compete with cheap Chinese phones from companies like ZTE in the low-end. That's without going into the favourable terms that Microsoft no doubt offered.

enjo 16y ago
I'm not sure everyone here fully appreciates just how bad things are at Nokia. It's been a LONG time coming. Their software development structure, from top-to-bottom, is just awful. You can see it in Symbian (which was developed independently but with much the same issue). I have to tread lightly here, as I don't want to get anybody in trouble... but I can assure you that the new CEO is doing very much the right thing. Software development is not a core competency (or even a competency) at that company. It's just not. I'm not surprised that about half of tampere left, they are going to be hard hit by this. They should be.. the quality of the work just hasn't cut it. Their best hope to survive today is to tie themselves to a much healthier eco-system. I would have thought Android to be the very logical choice... but the Microsoft move certainly makes sense.
- pavlov 16y ago
  Software development is not a core competency (or even a competency) at that company. It's just not. I'm not surprised that about half of tampere left, they are going to be hard hit by this. They should be.. the quality of the work just hasn't cut it. That's the honest truth. When Nokia opened the Symbian code three years ago, it offered a peek into their software development process... And it wasn't a pretty sight. I used to spend a fair bit of idle time browsing through the Symbian Foundation wikis and forums (all now offline). It seemed that there were basically two kinds of people working on the operating system. The guys in England, who used to work for Symbian Ltd, were pretty smart but arrogant; in old-school programmer style, they were only concerned with managing some extremely narrow domain and couldn't take any criticism. Then there were the Finns at Nokia, who were either completely uninterested and oblivious to the world around them, or just obviously incompetent at the job they'd been given. An example of the latter was the "Direct UI" proposal in 2009. It was supposed to outline a completely new touch UI paradigm to ship in Symbian^4. All there was was a few pages in broken English that essentially said "it should be like iPhone because touching stuff is cool". Unsurprisingly, Symbian^4 was canned last October after years of development. I'd like to know who had made the decision to put the same people who had mismanaged the previous S60 user interface in charge of creating the replacement... But that's how it went at Nokia. No one ever lost their job for screwing up the software -- until now.
marshray 16y ago
There's certainly some Microsoft anti-love going on here, but it's also not exactly unfounded or irrelevant. After all, they were supposedly competitors in the cell phone OS market before this move and now it appears that Nokia has psychologically completely caved to Microsoft. This is not going to go over well in Finland's politics is what I was saying. If this move costs thousands of white-collar jobs, this guy may end up being as popular in Finland as Julian Assange is in Washington DC.
DanI-S 16y ago
People also seem to have forgotten that the bulk of Nokia's sales don't come from smartphones. All they're doing here is replacing the OS of their 'flagship' lineup. Since Nokia smartphones have barely entered into the consciousness of the wealthy Western consumers who have been buying Apple/Android in the last few years, this /has/ to be an improvement.
- movingahead 16y ago
  That depends on how you define a smartphone. Chinese manufacturers as well as Samsung have pushed price of Android phones down to around $150 - unlocked. Samsung's Android phones are not crap. At that price point, it steals the show because the competing Symbian phones were not at all good. Just compare the FB app for Android and that for Nokia. Smartphones will keep getting pushed to lower price-points. Also, they might be offered at cheap rates with 3G data plans. India - one of Nokia's biggest markets just finalized 3G spectrum allocation and there are rumors that operators here will start subsidizing smartphones with fixed data contracts. Nokia denmocratised mobile phones. It won't want to miss out when smartphones become democratised.
  - DanI-S 16y ago
    Certainly true - but arguably, cheap Windows machines democratized personal computing. I wouldn't discount Nokia's future in the developing world because of Microsoft's involvement.
intdev 16y ago
I am surprised that not many people are excited about this deal. I have only heard good things about WP7 so far and things will definitely improve as the platform matures. I don't understand why people have already labeled it as a failed platform. People are also saying that the deal is only beneficial to Microsoft. The two real choices Nokia had were Android and WP7. WP7 seems like a more sensible choice to me. Sure they will have to sacrifice things, but they might gain overall. I think Microsoft and Nokia together make a killer combination that is going to help both these companies to bounce back in the mobile arena.
joe_the_user 16y ago
Maybe there were compelling technical reasons and good licensing terms that lead Nokia to choose WP7 over Android. But if a person is leading a company, they might perhaps consider the psychological impact of their decisions along side with technical and market factors. I mean, his job is to make money - not to make decisions that "would have worked if it hadn't been for those pesky workers" (unless the intent was to gut the company from the get-go - though I doubt that would leave more money in the end either). Desperate measures were needed. But I don't think I'm alone in feeling depressed that the desperate measures seem involve a move back toward proprietary systems (even if my only involvement with Nokia has been using the excellent QT library). If, assuming, your aim to get some value out of a company - get some value out of the technical teams that exist in the company, one assumes that one needs to keep the morale of that company at a certain level. And giving the impression that you're gutting everything the company stood-for seems like a not-terribly-effective approach here even if Nokia's internal process was broken. If you're the underdog, being able to claim you are "fighting for good" is psychologically useful. If Nokia had gone with android, one might be able to believe they'd bring some open source "chops" to the table. Again, my experience is programmers are willing to work to fix a broken - if they feel like the company if offering them loyalty. Obviously, today's announcement didn't make Nokia's workers feel that was happening. Nokia's stock dropped a bit after this, btw. Better link to the story also: http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Microsoft-is-the-plague-Nokia-stock-drops-14-as-1000-employees-walk-out/1297448140 http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Microsoft-is-the-p...
TheCondor 16y ago
No doubt there is plenty of MS hatred... I guess my question is maybe a little different, if Nokia is in that much trouble, then isn't WP7 a gamble? Its not just flying off the shelf where Android on the other hand is. Two losers don't usually make a winner. I don't know, seems like Google is all in with Android, they've got a pipeline, they've established themselves and proven themselves and they are legitimately competing with iPhone. Now if they think WP7 is the future and it's going to take the market away from iPhone and Android then it makes sense, but I don't know that anyone really thinks that, it might carve out a niche but it's not going to beat the other guys. There are now iPhone, Android, RIM, WebOS and WP7 in the smart phone market, seems like a lot to me.
- ma2rten 16y ago
  I think it's actually the other way around, moving to Android would be the bigger gamble. What would differentiate Nokia from any other company that develops phones for Android?
  - linuxhansl 16y ago
    Nokia could go back and focus on great hardware.
martinshen 16y ago
What I don't understand is how it took over 1000 people to screw up modding Symbian (which has been around forever) into a usable interface. This platform should have been more quickly developed because at the end of the day, Symbian just needed a beautiful skin.

by halo 16y ago

enjo 16y ago

I'm not sure everyone here fully appreciates just how bad things are at Nokia. It's been a LONG time coming. Their software development structure, from top-to-bottom, is just awful. You can see it in Symbian (which was developed independently but with much the same issue). I have to tread lightly here, as I don't want to get anybody in trouble... but I can assure you that the new CEO is doing very much the right thing. Software development is not a core competency (or even a competency) at that company. It's just not. I'm not surprised that about half of tampere left, they are going to be hard hit by this. They should be.. the quality of the work just hasn't cut it. Their best hope to survive today is to tie themselves to a much healthier eco-system. I would have thought Android to be the very logical choice... but the Microsoft move certainly makes sense.

pavlov 16y ago
Software development is not a core competency (or even a competency) at that company. It's just not. I'm not surprised that about half of tampere left, they are going to be hard hit by this. They should be.. the quality of the work just hasn't cut it. That's the honest truth. When Nokia opened the Symbian code three years ago, it offered a peek into their software development process... And it wasn't a pretty sight. I used to spend a fair bit of idle time browsing through the Symbian Foundation wikis and forums (all now offline). It seemed that there were basically two kinds of people working on the operating system. The guys in England, who used to work for Symbian Ltd, were pretty smart but arrogant; in old-school programmer style, they were only concerned with managing some extremely narrow domain and couldn't take any criticism. Then there were the Finns at Nokia, who were either completely uninterested and oblivious to the world around them, or just obviously incompetent at the job they'd been given. An example of the latter was the "Direct UI" proposal in 2009. It was supposed to outline a completely new touch UI paradigm to ship in Symbian^4. All there was was a few pages in broken English that essentially said "it should be like iPhone because touching stuff is cool". Unsurprisingly, Symbian^4 was canned last October after years of development. I'd like to know who had made the decision to put the same people who had mismanaged the previous S60 user interface in charge of creating the replacement... But that's how it went at Nokia. No one ever lost their job for screwing up the software -- until now.

marshray 16y ago

There's certainly some Microsoft anti-love going on here, but it's also not exactly unfounded or irrelevant. After all, they were supposedly competitors in the cell phone OS market before this move and now it appears that Nokia has psychologically completely caved to Microsoft. This is not going to go over well in Finland's politics is what I was saying. If this move costs thousands of white-collar jobs, this guy may end up being as popular in Finland as Julian Assange is in Washington DC.

DanI-S 16y ago

People also seem to have forgotten that the bulk of Nokia's sales don't come from smartphones. All they're doing here is replacing the OS of their 'flagship' lineup. Since Nokia smartphones have barely entered into the consciousness of the wealthy Western consumers who have been buying Apple/Android in the last few years, this /has/ to be an improvement.

movingahead 16y ago
That depends on how you define a smartphone. Chinese manufacturers as well as Samsung have pushed price of Android phones down to around $150 - unlocked. Samsung's Android phones are not crap. At that price point, it steals the show because the competing Symbian phones were not at all good. Just compare the FB app for Android and that for Nokia. Smartphones will keep getting pushed to lower price-points. Also, they might be offered at cheap rates with 3G data plans. India - one of Nokia's biggest markets just finalized 3G spectrum allocation and there are rumors that operators here will start subsidizing smartphones with fixed data contracts. Nokia denmocratised mobile phones. It won't want to miss out when smartphones become democratised.
- DanI-S 16y ago
  Certainly true - but arguably, cheap Windows machines democratized personal computing. I wouldn't discount Nokia's future in the developing world because of Microsoft's involvement.

intdev 16y ago

I am surprised that not many people are excited about this deal. I have only heard good things about WP7 so far and things will definitely improve as the platform matures. I don't understand why people have already labeled it as a failed platform. People are also saying that the deal is only beneficial to Microsoft. The two real choices Nokia had were Android and WP7. WP7 seems like a more sensible choice to me. Sure they will have to sacrifice things, but they might gain overall. I think Microsoft and Nokia together make a killer combination that is going to help both these companies to bounce back in the mobile arena.

joe_the_user 16y ago

Maybe there were compelling technical reasons and good licensing terms that lead Nokia to choose WP7 over Android. But if a person is leading a company, they might perhaps consider the psychological impact of their decisions along side with technical and market factors. I mean, his job is to make money - not to make decisions that "would have worked if it hadn't been for those pesky workers" (unless the intent was to gut the company from the get-go - though I doubt that would leave more money in the end either). Desperate measures were needed. But I don't think I'm alone in feeling depressed that the desperate measures seem involve a move back toward proprietary systems (even if my only involvement with Nokia has been using the excellent QT library). If, assuming, your aim to get some value out of a company - get some value out of the technical teams that exist in the company, one assumes that one needs to keep the morale of that company at a certain level. And giving the impression that you're gutting everything the company stood-for seems like a not-terribly-effective approach here even if Nokia's internal process was broken. If you're the underdog, being able to claim you are "fighting for good" is psychologically useful. If Nokia had gone with android, one might be able to believe they'd bring some open source "chops" to the table. Again, my experience is programmers are willing to work to fix a broken - if they feel like the company if offering them loyalty. Obviously, today's announcement didn't make Nokia's workers feel that was happening. Nokia's stock dropped a bit after this, btw. Better link to the story also: http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Microsoft-is-the-plague-Nokia-stock-drops-14-as-1000-employees-walk-out/1297448140 http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Microsoft-is-the-p...

TheCondor 16y ago

No doubt there is plenty of MS hatred... I guess my question is maybe a little different, if Nokia is in that much trouble, then isn't WP7 a gamble? Its not just flying off the shelf where Android on the other hand is. Two losers don't usually make a winner. I don't know, seems like Google is all in with Android, they've got a pipeline, they've established themselves and proven themselves and they are legitimately competing with iPhone. Now if they think WP7 is the future and it's going to take the market away from iPhone and Android then it makes sense, but I don't know that anyone really thinks that, it might carve out a niche but it's not going to beat the other guys. There are now iPhone, Android, RIM, WebOS and WP7 in the smart phone market, seems like a lot to me.

ma2rten 16y ago
I think it's actually the other way around, moving to Android would be the bigger gamble. What would differentiate Nokia from any other company that develops phones for Android?
- linuxhansl 16y ago
  Nokia could go back and focus on great hardware.

martinshen 16y ago

What I don't understand is how it took over 1000 people to screw up modding Symbian (which has been around forever) into a usable interface. This platform should have been more quickly developed because at the end of the day, Symbian just needed a beautiful skin.