Submitted by “I think that the advantages to Nokia are clear. Given the scant details revealed so far – perhaps no surprise given that nothing has been formalized just yet – Microsoft is the company in the more difficult position, and it has a lot of questions to answer.”
Many Nokia employees are pretty upset about this deal and don’t consider it being good for Finland and Nokia. If anyone is loosing on it – it’s Nokia who slows Meego and Symbian development because of it, and not Microsoft whose mobile market is miniscule in their total income.
Here is a nice historic overview of similar “strategic” deals and how they ended (:
http://www.asymco.com/2011/02/11/in-memoriam-microsofts-previous-st…
While still giving some hope for this MS-Nokia cooperation, I’d agree that the article is not well written, and Finland will definitely lose, at least in the short term.
Nokia is hosting 2500 Symbian employees – if the reports are correct. Since Symbian OS will be on “maintenance only” mode, I’d obvious that most of these people will be let go.
In the future, it might make business better for Nokia, opening up jobs, but it’s too early to tell.
Finland will lose for the long term as well. If Nokia is successful, then it means that they have effectively outsourced their software development (and thousands of jobs and sub-contracts) to Microsoft. If Nokia fails, then they lose even more jobs.
By the same token, this could be seen as a market correction. Nokia was clearly not being run effectively and a bit of a crash was inevitable. We went through something very similar in Canada, when Nortel came crashing down. Prior to their decline, Nortel / Northern Telecom was basically a Canadian blue chip company, so aside from the thousands of job losses, it had a devastating impact on the pensions and retirement funds for tens of thousands of people.
Oh, did I mention Nortel entered into a strategic partnership with Microsoft that was going to change the landscape of unified communications? You know, just before they tanked? But I digress…
It’s amazing that people still care about Symbian.
I have no doubt there’s going to be a haiku/symbian project a few years after it’s death. The only problem is Amiga was good at what they did while Symbian got left behind.
I guess Symbian developers are aught to care about it
Wouldn’t you if you’ll be one of them?
It seems that a MeeGo powered handset was ready:
“This was not done as response to ‘burning platforms’ haha. It Stephen Elop did indeed discover a fire on the oil rig platform that is Nokia, he was not looking to shut the fire, it was Stephen Elop’s own actions that poured gasoline to those burning flames – he wanted MeeGo out of the way – imagine the outrage, if MeeGo had been released on schedule in October 2010, the first handset released for the best Q4 Christmas sales period, and as this would have been significantly newer a phone, ie a better handset than the N8 – and on the better software, it could have easily outsold Microsoft’s Phone 7 haha.. that would have been a horrible PR nightmare, why kill the new ‘great” MeeGo OS and replace it with Microsoft’s ‘worse’ Phone 7 OS. That would have created huge outcries. But Stephen Elop knew what he needed to do, and to bring in Microsoft, he had to kill off MeeGo right away, so we never saw what it could do.”
Taken from Tomi’s blog:
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/02/nokia-autopsy-…
So the Nokia fanboys are saying that this was a great deal for Microsoft and Nokia got screwed, while the Microsoft fanboys are saying that Nokia got the best part of the deal. I’ve seen more people writing about the first scenario, than the second though.
Of course so far the only thing to come out the deal is a tanking stock price for Nokia.
Stock prices fell because Nokia finally admitted flat-out it’s in deep shit – not because they made a deal with Microsoft.
Don’t put so much faith in legalised gambli– the stock market.
Edited 2011-02-14 23:33 UTC
Really ?
So the beating their stock got these past couple trading sessions has nothing to do with them announcing the EOL for the very cash cow (Symbian OS based phones) that accounts for about 30% of their revenue and proclaiming that they plan to sell 150 million of this very same devices in the next couple of years before killing it completely. Nope that could not have possibly played a role. Who would not want to buy these wonderful devices!
Of course the fact that they engendered so much ill will amongst a lot of the developers for their now defunct platform by reneging on the migration path they were promising them as recently as several weeks back has absolutely nothing to do with it either! Nope. Those developers really love to be screwed and they will buy yet another lie err promise from this very same people of riches to be had in the new “ecosystem” they are going to help foster.
Nope! None of these things played any role in their current predicament. It happened only because the market was so shocked by an a leaked internal memo that confirmed what was already known! Yep that is what hurt them! Told the world what the world already knew! Yeah, eh uh…
At this rate discussing the fact that Nokia has exactly zero leverage if this deal were to bear some fruit or nothing to fall back on if it were to fail would simply be a pointless exercise. We should all buy the spin management fed us the past couple of days, simply because you like WP7!
Funny. I thought the very reason this type of ordeals are a common occurrence in the corporate world was to appease the very people you tell us not to “put so much faith” on ?
An obvious side benefit of Microsoft is hindering of Meego development and especially adoption. Potential advance of real Linux on Mobile (as well as Qt) threatens to backfire Microsoft on desktop too. Even if WP7 with Nokia wouldn’t succeed at all, MS still gains taking out Nokia as a major manufacturer of Meego handsets for whatever time. Even though Intel is committed to stay with Meego, there are no handsets manufacturers so far who replaced Nokia’s role in the project.
Edited 2011-02-14 23:44 UTC
True, esp. that MeeGo was (in contrast to Android) a real desktop os with switchable UI.
Speaking as a fan of neither, I’d have to agree with the former group. On the face of it, Microsoft don’t have anything to lose in this situation – at worst, WP7 continues in it’s current position as a distant runner-up to the Android and iPhone platforms.
For Nokia, it’s much more serious – they’re pretty much betting their future on this. If it works, their new phones make them a player in the smartphone market. If not? Well, with smartphones rapidly moving down into even the budget market, they’re pretty doomed if this fails.
Well the biggest danger is that they scare away their other hardware partners. Why should HTC put more effort into wp7 when Nokia is getting all sorts of privileged access. This would cause wp7 to stall until Nokia actually ships a phone.
I still think Nokia has the bigger risk here, I’m simply don’t think the risk scenarios for Microsoft proposed in this article are as serious as the article makes them sound. Except for the other oems abandon them one, they just don’t sound that bad.
All this talk about Android choice been unfit because Nokia would have to compete with lower end models is simple and pure rubbish. Nokia is a well-know brand and, if the cost difference does not reach a ridicule level, people will opt for a brand they know. Also, as can be seen on sales of the top models, there are space for known brands to sell sophisticated/differentiated models. Motorola, Samsung, HTC and Sony-Ericsson all sell top models where they have a larger margin.
Some of other the arguments can be true or not, only the time will tell (as Nokia picking WP7 to buy time and divide the market).
Anyway, the thing that make me sick is the whole thing about Qt be sidestepped. Had the management any balls or a minimum of wisdom, they would never agree with this imposition. Go to qt.nokia.com and read by yourself, developers, you know, the kind of people you should treat very well to construct a community around, are starting to revolt. This is a thing Microsoft never did, or, when happened, as with Visual Basic, they on no time corrected their direction.
When I see people praising this or that programming language, I have to contain myself, it is ridiculous. Apart from some differences here and there, any modern language can be understood by a regular developer really fast. And with a little more time, a new development environment feel comfortable. The place that is really expensive is the time spent to get used to the libraries, all other things pale against it. And Nokia were promoting Qt as a savior on that until a couple of days ago. People did the investment and now what? They feel they were deceived.
Phones only last 2-3 years so many people will only want a very cheap phone.
Java smartphones, such as the Sciphone i68 clones, cost about $30 in China.
An iPhone costs more than 5x as much as a basic Android phone. The Star A3000 cost less than $100 in China. It will probably cost about $50 in a year. The profit margin will be no more than $5 per unit.
The fastest sales growth will be in developing countries where cost is major issue.
Most of the Samsung models are just rebranded Chinese generic phones. The only real difference is a 20 cent plastic case with a Samsung logo.
How and when did MS correct its direction with VB? I always thought throwing VB6 to the wolves was a little strange, since it was a strong product with a strong ecosystem, but MS never reversed that decision. VB.NET is a very different beast.
Actually, I can think of many developer tools MS dropped over the years. Since we’re on the topic of phones, consider the developer story moving from Windows Mobile 6.5 (build your own WinCE app however you want) to Windows Phone 7 (silverlight or silverlight.) Existing developers (admittedly few) ended up drawing the short straw.
IMHO, I find the whole thing suspect. Nokia could have dominated Android in a way the other manufacturers couldn’t, because Nokia could have done it without relying on Google.
Nokia already has its own mapping service, a music store and a software store. It could have ported Qt to Android, and used it to create their own signature interface. They wouldn’t necessarily have needed the google branded services, and they could have supported Davlik and encouraged existing Android devs to submit their apps to the Ovi store as well, similar to what Amazon is planning to do. Their brand name is strong enough that it could have competed with the Google Experience branding. Though they likely wouldn’t have had to work around Google too aggressively, it sounds like Google was already eager to have them on board.
That could still have given them the strategy they were looking at for Qt, bridging developers from Symbian.
As for the race to the bottom theory, Nokia again could have had an edge there. Even their cheapest phones have a much better fit-and-feel then their competitors. Hardware design is what Nokia excels at.
Still, the die has been cast so I guess we’ll have to see. If nothing else, this should be a good thing for the Android camp, because it will spur the manufacturers to start driving harder to try and capture more of Nokia’s share while they sit in limbo preparing their WP7 products.
Taken from Tomi’s comment at his blog:
^aEURoeOn the decision, interesting! I understood that the Microsoft negotiations were happening in November and clearly there are already prototype forms for new phones, you don^aEURTMt make those in one day. So this was more a final ^aEUR~go/no-go^aEURTM vote, and the Board was asking for unanimous support haha. I would think more it was a commitment, either you vote with this plan and stay with Nokia, or if you vote against it, you^aEURTMre gone from the Board. I am pretty sure the concept that MeeGo was dead, was approved on the hiring of Elop, else he couldn^aEURTMt have done the dirty tricks to it earlier (delays etc) that forced Ari Jaaksi to resign in disgust.^aEUR
Full comment here:
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/02/nokia-autopsy-…
Do you think Nokia is owned by Finnish farmers?
Nine of the top 10 Nokia shareholders are pension funds. The other is a bank.
Around 90% of shares are owned by non-Finns.
The are interested in profits not Finnish jobs.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/02/nokia-adopts-windows-ph…
Why aren’t you capable of doing so?
Because that is the regular announcement on which we had our own? Did you submit it? Or are you just being a dick?
I’ll leave myself the privilege to not answer that directly.
Instead check out the analysis of a guy who seems to really care for Nokia.
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/02/when-things-ge…