4 ms·

It's prett easy to hate on this analyst and his strident, obsessive tone, but he's right on the money. Nokias financials have gone from fine to apocalyptic in s

by jpxxx 14y ago

It's prett easy to hate on this analyst and his strident, obsessive tone, but he's right on the money. Nokias financials have gone from fine to apocalyptic in short order and they are now burning cash at a crazy clip with no evidence of any competitive products in the pipeline. They have months left, not years, and no amount of 'mindshare' is going to pay their bills in the new era.

megaman821 14y ago
This just seem like blind hate. I don't know if the 920 will do well but how is it not competitive? Nokia's mistake was a year or so ago in picking Windows Phone over Android, it was five years ago just sitting on their lead and not coming out with innovative products.
- jpxxx 14y ago
  Its not hate. I've used Lumias and they're just fine. The design is certainly a wonderful breath of fresh air. But their new flagship is still two months out, its not even priced yet, has poor carrier support (domestic AND global), a fourth(?) place app market, and fourth place consumer mindshare. It also represents a partial reboot of the Windows Mobile 7 platform, with all that entails. There are so many more things that need to go right just beyond the handset for it to be a competitor, and they're not going right.
thirdsun 14y ago
Regardless of anyone's opinion on Windows Phone, the Lumia 920 should be a pretty competitive phone. Furthermore I always had the impression that owners of Lumia 800 & 900 devices were very happy with. It remains to be seen how successful the 920 will be but saying Nokia hasn't anything in the pipeline seems far from accurate.
- empire29 14y ago
  In this day and age it seems like the phone's ecosystem is even a stronger driving force than the quality of the phone itself. While the Lumia 8xx and 9xx are very nice devices (and I even think Win Phone 7/8 is a very nice OS), I wouldn't purchase a Lumia solely on what I perceived to be a young and unproven ecosystem around the OS. All I hear is Win Phone 7/8 (3rd party) apps are limited in variety and and quality. Its a very hard sell when iOS and Android have such an expansive catalog of (quality) apps. Phones these days are about the software -- good HW is table stakes.
  - MBCook 14y ago
    That's where I think I'd be. Even if you ignore my investment in iOS apps over the last few years, I'd much rather go with Android because I know the platform is alive. One of the other developers I work with bought a Windows 7.5 phone (used). He actually really likes the interface and says it works quite well. But he's looking to buy a used iPhone to replace it because there are so few apps available. That was the same thing that drove both my siblings off their Palm Pres - the app store was empty, with the exception of a few "demo" apps like Connect-4. Windows Phone 7.5 is doing much better than that, but it's a dead phone anyway with Windows Phone 8 coming out in the next month or so.
- Kliment 14y ago
  My father bought a Lumia phone. He's been anything but happy with it. The fonts are too small to read numbers off the screen from the phonebook, and cannot be zoomed. The menu structure is confusing. We had to get some images and videos from the phone to a computer and it was an incredible pain. It would not work as a mass storage device, the only options were to upload stuff to microsoft's cloud offering, email them or sync them to the computer. We had to download hundreds of megs of Zune crapware to talk to it from A computer. It didn't work at all on a mac or on his windows 7 computer - it wouldn't talk to the phone at all. In the end we could get it to show up in an XP virtual machine running under Linux. The email and upload options did not work because the videos were above some unspecified size limit. The sync option did eventually work, but took 6 hours to transfer several gigs of video, and showed no progress bar. Nightmare experience. The video and audio quality of the recordings was wonderful, but everything else about the device sucked.
  - joenathan 14y ago
    That is the first time I've heard someone call the Zune software crapware, it's a godsend compared to the mess that is iTunes.
    - tsotha 14y ago
      I've never used Zune, but iTunes has always bothered me. I get that people took to it because you could buy new music and get it to your phone from the same application. But I've always considered the interface to be a cross between the worst web page on the web and the worst native app. What the hell were they thinking?
      - joenathan 14y ago
        It's especially a nightmare on Windows with all the extra services it installs that start with up with the OS. Does anyone actually use Bonjour? The automatic updates that decide to install Safari & Quicktime, it runs like molasses even on the latest and greatest hardware, you also seem to have to resign-in to your apple account every time the software even thinks about doing anything. One of the worst offenses is it won't monitor folders for new music, if you decide to acquire music outside of iTunes you have to manually tell it to rescan for music each time. iTunes is an offense against humankind and will probably be what starts WWIII.
- mtgx 14y ago
  But you can't sell the Lumia 920 without WP8, so you can't separate like that in your theory. Either WP8 is a benefit or a hindrance. There's no other way but those 2. I think this was Nokia's biggest mistake, that they tied themselves to Microsoft, and they really didn't have to do it, as they had the bargaining chips when Microsoft came to them. But I guess with a former Microsoft CEO, it must've been pretty hard to consider any other options but Microsoft.
  - ryanmolden 14y ago
    He was a business division president not the CEO. Ballmer is the CEO. Actually, iirc, he was the business division president for Office, so he didn't even have a history with the phone division. I suspect his move was due less to some undying loyalty to Microsoft and more to him deciding it was his best option (one may disagree, but we also aren't aware of the other options/limitations/incentives in place when the decision was made, so we are just arm-chair quarterbacking).

by jpxxx 14y ago

megaman821 14y ago

This just seem like blind hate. I don't know if the 920 will do well but how is it not competitive? Nokia's mistake was a year or so ago in picking Windows Phone over Android, it was five years ago just sitting on their lead and not coming out with innovative products.

jpxxx 14y ago
Its not hate. I've used Lumias and they're just fine. The design is certainly a wonderful breath of fresh air. But their new flagship is still two months out, its not even priced yet, has poor carrier support (domestic AND global), a fourth(?) place app market, and fourth place consumer mindshare. It also represents a partial reboot of the Windows Mobile 7 platform, with all that entails. There are so many more things that need to go right just beyond the handset for it to be a competitor, and they're not going right.

thirdsun 14y ago

Regardless of anyone's opinion on Windows Phone, the Lumia 920 should be a pretty competitive phone. Furthermore I always had the impression that owners of Lumia 800 & 900 devices were very happy with. It remains to be seen how successful the 920 will be but saying Nokia hasn't anything in the pipeline seems far from accurate.

empire29 14y ago
In this day and age it seems like the phone's ecosystem is even a stronger driving force than the quality of the phone itself. While the Lumia 8xx and 9xx are very nice devices (and I even think Win Phone 7/8 is a very nice OS), I wouldn't purchase a Lumia solely on what I perceived to be a young and unproven ecosystem around the OS. All I hear is Win Phone 7/8 (3rd party) apps are limited in variety and and quality. Its a very hard sell when iOS and Android have such an expansive catalog of (quality) apps. Phones these days are about the software -- good HW is table stakes.
- MBCook 14y ago
  That's where I think I'd be. Even if you ignore my investment in iOS apps over the last few years, I'd much rather go with Android because I know the platform is alive. One of the other developers I work with bought a Windows 7.5 phone (used). He actually really likes the interface and says it works quite well. But he's looking to buy a used iPhone to replace it because there are so few apps available. That was the same thing that drove both my siblings off their Palm Pres - the app store was empty, with the exception of a few "demo" apps like Connect-4. Windows Phone 7.5 is doing much better than that, but it's a dead phone anyway with Windows Phone 8 coming out in the next month or so.
Kliment 14y ago
My father bought a Lumia phone. He's been anything but happy with it. The fonts are too small to read numbers off the screen from the phonebook, and cannot be zoomed. The menu structure is confusing. We had to get some images and videos from the phone to a computer and it was an incredible pain. It would not work as a mass storage device, the only options were to upload stuff to microsoft's cloud offering, email them or sync them to the computer. We had to download hundreds of megs of Zune crapware to talk to it from A computer. It didn't work at all on a mac or on his windows 7 computer - it wouldn't talk to the phone at all. In the end we could get it to show up in an XP virtual machine running under Linux. The email and upload options did not work because the videos were above some unspecified size limit. The sync option did eventually work, but took 6 hours to transfer several gigs of video, and showed no progress bar. Nightmare experience. The video and audio quality of the recordings was wonderful, but everything else about the device sucked.
- joenathan 14y ago
  That is the first time I've heard someone call the Zune software crapware, it's a godsend compared to the mess that is iTunes.
  - tsotha 14y ago
    I've never used Zune, but iTunes has always bothered me. I get that people took to it because you could buy new music and get it to your phone from the same application. But I've always considered the interface to be a cross between the worst web page on the web and the worst native app. What the hell were they thinking?
    - joenathan 14y ago
      It's especially a nightmare on Windows with all the extra services it installs that start with up with the OS. Does anyone actually use Bonjour? The automatic updates that decide to install Safari & Quicktime, it runs like molasses even on the latest and greatest hardware, you also seem to have to resign-in to your apple account every time the software even thinks about doing anything. One of the worst offenses is it won't monitor folders for new music, if you decide to acquire music outside of iTunes you have to manually tell it to rescan for music each time. iTunes is an offense against humankind and will probably be what starts WWIII.
mtgx 14y ago
But you can't sell the Lumia 920 without WP8, so you can't separate like that in your theory. Either WP8 is a benefit or a hindrance. There's no other way but those 2. I think this was Nokia's biggest mistake, that they tied themselves to Microsoft, and they really didn't have to do it, as they had the bargaining chips when Microsoft came to them. But I guess with a former Microsoft CEO, it must've been pretty hard to consider any other options but Microsoft.
- ryanmolden 14y ago
  He was a business division president not the CEO. Ballmer is the CEO. Actually, iirc, he was the business division president for Office, so he didn't even have a history with the phone division. I suspect his move was due less to some undying loyalty to Microsoft and more to him deciding it was his best option (one may disagree, but we also aren't aware of the other options/limitations/incentives in place when the decision was made, so we are just arm-chair quarterbacking).