“There’s just one problem, though: the ‘nine young investors’ don’t really exist – according to the last tweet on the @NokiaPlanB Twitter account, it was all a hoax perpetuated by ‘one very bored engineer who really likes his iPhone’. Ouch.”
“There’s just one problem, though: the ‘nine young investors’ don’t really exist – according to the last tweet on the @NokiaPlanB Twitter account, it was all a hoax perpetuated by ‘one very bored engineer who really likes his iPhone’. Ouch.”
The -25% fall of Nokia shares is real though.
For posterity: http://nokiaplans.com/
Yeah, they are getting hammered big time. This was a stupid move regardless.
BTW, The new Nokia CEO is apparently one of the top ten largest single stockholders of Microsoft shares (I think he weights int a # 7). So he has probably more incentive to care about Microsoft’s performance than he may have regarding Nokia. Under that context his push for WP7 makes total sense, since Microsoft has much more to gain for such a move than Nokia does.
If I were an actual Nokia stock holder, I’d be asking a lot of questions to the board of that company right about now. That is a very serious conflict of interest for the CEO to have, esp. since Microsoft is still a direct competitor of Nokia.
Basically Microsoft may get away with taking over Nokia without spending a single dime. Which is why the two stock prices are having such a diverging behavior right now (not that the market is a good metric for anything).
Edited 2011-02-16 23:48 UTC
Indeed it is.
Additionally, considering that no Windows phones are going to ship on Nokia phones until next year at least, Symbian market share is declining fast and it is simply being put on life support one wonders what is going to be left when this much vaunted ‘strategy’ actually starts doing something.
Exactly… But I guess the plan is they will get at least a year into this strategy before the results of their marketshare, etc, are revealed, at which point their MeeGo development has been sabotaged and going with WP7 is the route of least resistance. Kind of like `we started these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so now we CAN`T just withdraw, it would be admitting failure and that is un-American`.
I hope EU investigates this Elop for conflict of interest, Nokia received funds from EU on understanding they were developing QT as a European mobile app-framework. Then again, they get away with taking German subsidies to only close-shop and relocate to Romania.
So what?
Markets don’t act rationally. They grossly overvalue or undervalue on a whim.
I’m a developer who started programming in Basic on my Amstrad CPC 464 when I was 10. Since that time I’ve been programming in QBasic on the PC, Pascal in various flavors, C, assembler (I read a few pages in the pentium opcode reference every night to work out optimal pipelining for different instructions). C++, and the big game changer Watcom C++ 10 with dos4gw and 32bit flat address space, which changed everything. Some Delphi (Pascal again), a tiny bit of VB, a little bit of Java, sadly lots of Javascript, ML in university (I know I should like functional programming I just can’t get my head around it). Vertex and pixel shaders all the back to the first OpenGL extension, lots of obscure languages just for fun, and finally C# and C++/CLI.
Along the way I have created tons of libraries myself and used tons of different libraries/frameworks/apis, like Win32, MFC, QT (way back), Apache XML DOM, FreeImage, FreeType, OpenGL, DirectX, I also programmed to my Voodoo 3d board, and too many other libraries to mention.
That was quite a long intro, but the purpose was to show that I’ve been around the block, so when I claim, that for me personally, the .Net platform is by far the best environment I have ever worked in, it is not an uninformed opinion. In general I would say that my productivity doubled, simply because every library you could ever wish for exists for this platform and because they are so consistent. But what I love most about .Net, or CLR actually, is just that, it is a Common Language Runtime and I can code in C# or C++ as needed and mix and match as I please. I can integrate with IronPyhton or JScript for easy scripting support or start learning F# and it is all within the same well known platform.
There are very good reasons for liking .Net and even if you don’t like Microsoft as a company you can’t deny that they have the ultimate development platform. .Net even comes in a few different flavors for embedded programming, there is something for everyone.
On top of all that I current own an LG Optimus 7 and it is great. It runs like a champion and is just a supremely smooth enjoyable thing. I can’t wait to get started developing for it and I bet that many many other .Net developer feel the same way. You can take all your skills and knowhow and utilize it almost directly for developing for WP7. The potential is huge.
So to conclude, I believe that Nokia have made an extremely good decision, they get an extremely capable platform and potentially the biggest developer crowd, how is that not a win??
Cheers
What I don’t understand is: why should I create code for just one platform ?
When I can use something like phonegap which runs on pretty much any mobile and I can use JS/CSS/HTML to build my app. I can upload it to all the appstores. And reuse a lot of that code on the server (nodejs) and on my website.
Why get stuck in just one environment ?
Let’s say I make a small casual game.
I have a website where people can play it online which is ad supported, it has a few buttons for each mobile-device-environment where people can purchase a touchscreen-optimised version for their smartphone/other internet device (like ipad).
All I need to do is make use of the HTML5-cache-manifest and session- and localstorage and get approved by the appstore maintainer ones (1!) and updates are automatically downloaded from the same site where the game is running.
Facebook made the same decision for their app.
Edited 2011-02-17 11:31 UTC
Because the environment is bloody good.
I had to go back to doing some PHP code for my personal website … and boy did I miss using .NET and Visual Studio. I was pretty much ended up manually hacking with VIM on the box.
Even just doing HTML, CSS and JS is vastly easier than any other IDE I have ever used.
I’m glad you like it. I just don’t want to get caught in a vendor-only (like Microsoft-only) environment ever again.
You that IE6 problem people talk about ? That is exactly the same problem. I’m Not interrested.
The game with Microsoft and others is called vendor lockin, I’m not playing.
Edited 2011-02-17 12:00 UTC
IE6 gained soo much market share because there wasn’t a better free alternative at the time. Mozilla Suit sucked and didn’t work properly, NetScape was slower. It wasn’t until 3 years after IE6’s release that a better browser for nothing turned up.
It doesn’t matter what platform you develop on you will be locked into that platform in some way. Write for QT, you end up being locked into QT in some way, if you write your software in PHP you will be locked into PHP (facebook is an example of this and they had to develop HipHop to solve performance issues).
So my software is locked into the .NET platform which has been backwards compatible for the last 7 years and is going to remain like for the foreseeable future … I don’t see that as a big deal personally.
Edited 2011-02-17 13:24 UTC
There is technologic lock-in: you have to make choices because you cannot do everything (such as have code run everywhere without modification).
And then there is vendor lock-in, where the owner abuses his position. One such example is Apple changing the (vague) rules of their app store at whim; another one is… Microsoft banning GPL from their app store:
http://i.imgur.com/fQraD.png
Vendor Lock in or Tech lock in …. does it really matter which?
I have had tech lock-in on (DEAD) Opensource projects that have been as problematic as vendor lock-in with a proprietry CMS. I am one man out of a team of two … I can’t spend time reading the source … I need docs … if there are no docs … I am in a world of hurt.
The best you can do is try to separate you application logic out well and document it well enough that if you need to change platforms you can reimplement without too much effort.
I have done this with some of my applications I have written, I migrated a web service and web app from ASP.NET MVC / SQL Server to Ruby/PostGres without any hassle at all. (Work wanted the .NET version, I wanted to produce for myself a OS agnostic version). The only problem was reimplementing when I had used LINQ … which looks like an SQL query anyway.
.Net isn’t going anywhere for at least 2020, and work pay for my copy of Windows and Visual Studio. So what have I got to lose from staying with .NET exactly??
The thing is that we are in the best position ever as a dev whatever platform you choose. We have an easy way of communicating (JSON, XML and it variants) which is supported by every major programming language. Every major smart phone and operating system have very capable browsers … we have frameworks with good IDE’s (whatever language), which are usually ported to other languages.
And yet people of talking about vendor lock-in … WTF?? Separate your logic and Document your code and just reimplement (which you would have to do if another Opensource framework, iOS, WP7, Android, WebOS etc etc dissapeared off the face of the Earth tomorrow).
I really don’t see what all the fuss is about.
I have problems with things such as flash, since they are essentially polluting a OS agnostic medium (the web) with something that is tied to which OS you are using.
Yep, but .Net is tied to the Windows platform while Qt (or PHP for that matter) is not. You don’t get just tied to the framework (which is to be expected since you get used to it, learn it’s quirks and build your workflow around it) but to an OS that happens to be developed by the very same dev of the framework.
With Qt you get locked into a development team whose future funding is questionable.
And if you think the community can do as much as a sponsored team….no. Qt has excelled past GTK because it has a team of paid developers. Without funding it would stagnate.
Qt also has a few remaining issues with native integration in Windows and OSX that need to be worked out. If funding stays at current levels in a few years you will see a lot more interest from Windows developers.
With Qt you get the source code, and you can study it, modify it, improve it, distribute it, etc, or contract someone to do it for you. You are not locked
You do this in any language and OS … I work very differently when I was working using a Linux with the LAMP stack, to using Windows with Appserv (WAMP basically) installed. With Linux I very much relied on using VIM in a terminal … and in Windows I used editplus and graphical mysql client.
It is a non-issue. A good dev is always a good dev … the best Dev I knew sat one of Designers computer and didn’t know anything about Flash and its scripting … and within half and hour had solved the problem and finished the website for the designer.
Similarly every friday I get called from email marketing … I know nothing about their email campaign software or how to do HTML emails … however using my existing web dev skills I was able to solve their problem … in about 10 minutes, it is usually dreamweaver putting in crap markup.
Visual Studio’s and .NET benefits far outweight the fact that it is Windows only … it is nice being here, I can develop with ease for Web, Desktop, Phone, Xbox and some embedded devices (like netduino) without having to spend a lot of time learning new concepts … If the worst comes to the worst … I have good OO skills and database skills and I can transition if the job market in my area changes.
I am not against other frameworks, languages etc … they all bring ideas to the table and generally get absorbed into other frameworks and languages … i.e. ASP.NET MVC is basically Ruby on Rails … I love it … I cringe when Writing ASP.NET web forms.
I am not against other OSes (I buy my OpenBSD CDs and T-shirts etc, I also have a paid for copy of Redhat 9) … what I don’t like is people not looking realistically and pragmatically at a platform/framework/language/hardware.
My personal website is LAMP based because that was the cheapest hosting and I only needed 4 pages with realtively simple scripting …
My price comparison site I am building is a ASP.NET webforms beast … with a WCF webservice … because I have good debugging in VS and I knew Webforms when I started writing it.
I’ve been through .Net and Visual Studio for web applications, and God, is it tedious. That’s why we all moved to Ruby and Rails where I work.
The most tedious part of any .Net application is the deployment though. It’s bloody awful.
I couldn’t agree more actually. ASP.Net Forms, which is what I assume you are referring to, was just a major blunder from MS. Trying to make a desktop development model work over http, with the ugly hack that view state is, was a seriously bad idea.
MVC however is what the MS web kids are using these days and it is sooooooo much better.
With a ASP.NET Website you just upload the files … and they are recompiled on the fly … are you serious?
I never needed to deploy more than a couple of versions of a ASP.NET webapp but I googled it …
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f735abw9.aspx
Oh … a few lines of in the command prompt … fuck me must be mind bending.
There’s more to deployment than just uploading some files. Compared to using Capistrano and SSH with keys for authentication this is from the dark ages. xcopy….. Pffffff.
Don’t even get me started on a more desktop oriented application……
I wasn’t out to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do. You can do exactly as you please and if your are happy with it, then good for you. It even looks like someone is working on making PhoneGap support WP7, so soon you’ll have one extra platform to deploy to.
My problem is basically this: Someone on the internet is wrong! In this case it actually seems that most of the internet is wrong. All over the place I read misinformed articles, where people think that WP7 is WinMobile in disguise, or that MS is gonna usurp Nokia and take over it’s mobile division, etc. ad nauseum.
If people bothered to inform themselves, they would know that WP7 is a brand spanking new platform, with absolutely no ties to WinMo (a fact that people are also comlaining about btw). And I really hope that MS will keep away from the hardware business, I even think that they should let different hardware manufactures produce x-boxes and just provide minimum specs and software.
As an old-school developer, then whole web thing doesn’t really interest me, not that I don’t do web development, but I just don’t find the platform very interesting or satisfying, and no, HTML5 is not going to change that. When I can run C++ or C# in a browser, then I’ll be happy, but dynamically typed languages (javascript and friends) pisses me off. This also means that very few web oriented companies, google, facebook, others, have my interest. Sure they solve interesting tasks like running 100.000+++ servers and probably do some fun algorithm stuff, but their focus is just too narrow.
Hardware really doesn’t interest me at all, which also means that Apple, as the hardware company it is, doesn’t interest me at all. They make nice products, but that is it.
I dislike many of the business decisions that MS makes as much as everybody else, but on the other hand I love them for being such a truly amazing software company. I absolutely love the work that they are doing a MS Research, it is amazing what they let them work on: AI, protein folding, compiler research, algorithms, just to name a few CS related things, but there is also a lot of quite esoteric stuff going on. It may not be in the name of science, but very few companies are doing anything like it.
I think I got side tracked there. Hmmm…
Cheers.
P.s. Since this is OSAlert I just wanted to mention that I’ve tried other OSes than windows. I was a huge fan of OS/2 Warp. I have tried Linux many times, but it always ended in frustration (this was before Ubuntu, I hear things are better now). Of course I used dos back in the day and I also spent some time on old Macs (I need 2 mouse buttons!!!)
I’m sure R&D departments do a lot of interresting work, but I don’t think Microsoft has profited much from it.
Because which core product have they created them selfs instead of buying a company or needing to get people from outside the company ?
DOS was bought, Excel and Visio are bought, Windows NT was made by people who came from outside of the company, SQL-server was bought and so on.
I’m probably just biased, my work sometimes entails dealing with the internals of Microsoft software or data generated by Microsoft software. And it never is pretty.
Research almost never result in actual products, but rather in technologies, which can then be utilized to create products or make existing products better. Recent examples of research which have real world applications is the static code analysis tools, which forms the basis of code contracts i C#, F# and monads, Rx and async processing, the new screens for the Surface project and lots more.
Edited 2011-02-17 20:00 UTC
I meant core-products, I mean who ever bought Surface anyway ? And actually uses it ?
I’ll shut up now.
All you’ve told me there is that Nokia had to create a better platform for developers. They were doing it with Qt, but it was happening too slowly. Mind you, they’re going to have to wait yet another year for this much vaunted platform to even appear and then wait until it gains some traction.
I do not think anyone is arguing that the .Net platform is not a good platform. I program in Qt daily and while Qt is great C++ really isn’t. QML however is great and I believe is great tool to build mobile phone applications with.
The future of phones is however commoditization. This will mean that the phones themselves will over time become commodities as PCs more or less are now. The added value will be in the software running on the phones and the services provided on the phone ecosystem. Apple understands this as can be seen on their relentless focus on their App store, iTunes etc.
Nokia did not just announce that they will ship phones with WM7, they actually deprecated their current platforms killing them and their application store instantly. This is something you should never openly announce until you have an actual shipping alternative and a migration path for developers to follow, as Qt was giving developers from Symbian to Meego. Also, the first WM7 phone will probably not come out until late 2011 or early 2012, leaving two whole years for Nokia to survive without a primary platform at all.
In the long term they are cutting costs and basically outsourcing their entire software development to Microsoft and their hardware production to China. This will have dire consequences for all the people working in Finland. They should have focused on retaining the R&D for software and hardware and the talented engineers in Finland. Nokia will become an empty shell of its former self. Every talented engineer will leave and seek opportunities elsewhere.
Also the Nokia management was the major factor in bringing Nokia into its current predicament. Is the management being reorganized at all? At least Nokia’s lack of focus is being addressed. Hopefully they will not try to change platforms yet again in the future.
So how will Nokia earn money in the future? Will they get a big piece of the WP7/8/9 application store pie? “In Microsoft we trust” is an adage which has been proven false multiple times.
No, but plenty of people are arguing that WP7 is a bad choice, but I’m not sure that Nokia had other viable alternatives.
Symbian is apparently not a very attractive platform and it has failed to deliver a proper user experience.
MeeGo is still not ready for prime time and it is uncertain when it will be ready. Betting on it could be dangerous.
iOS is of course not an option.
Choosing Android would give them a popular platform, but they would be just as much at the mercy of Google as all the other Android vendors currently are. Also maybe they feel, as many people suggest, that it would make them just another Android company.
WP7 is new, but has already established itself as a good platform and with the announces that MS just made, which Nokia have surely known about, it looks to be competitive with iOs and Android, feature wise, before the end of the year.
So I find that Nokias choice makes perfect sense.
I do however agree that they could have handled the annoucement better. It looks like Symbian is still going to be the basis for the lower end phones, so scaring off developers is probably not a good idea.
According to some, the platform was ready last year as it was harmattan/meego. What nokia feared was that there wouldn’t be any apps ready for it. They also had no confidence in their ability to attract talent to the platform (despite the ready willingness of thousands of Qt developers and a couple of companies).
They chose the easy way out by leaving MS to do the hard work of attracting developers. They could have chosen to scrap it out with meego.
But now they are at the mercy of MS. Not only is the development environment completely closed, but they also have to pay to have access to the OS.
They said that they didn’t want become a commodity hardware maker but inevitably that is what they will have to become even with WP7 in order to compete on price against android phones. Unless of course MS find some way to justify any premium one would pay for WP7 phones.
Indeed. I still fail to see what they are going to use to replace symbian. They can’t stick WP7 on lower end phones and S40 sucks. If they do stick WP7 on cheap phones then they also lose any premium appeal they need if they don’t want to become a commodity hardware maker.
I don’t think there is an easy way out. At this point every option is a major risk.
I really doubt they have to pay for the OS. I read somewhere that MS is charging cell companies $10-15 per license.
Nokia is not at the mercy of MS, they can always switch to something else. It’s an underdog team-up, Nokia needs MS and MS needs Nokia.
It’s highly unlikely that they could have turned MeeGo into a premium platform to escape the upcoming margin war. They are known for quality hardware, cutting R&D costs and relying on their brand along with a lucrative deal from MS is the best way to go.
According to Ars there is still some way to go: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/02/hands-on-with-intel…
But why shouldn’t they choose the easy way when their platform is burning
You don’t make sticking with MeeGo sound like an attractive option.
I have to admit though, that my knowledge of MeeGo is quite limited, so I may be mistaken about its readiness. Also if Intel keeps backing it then it may still have a future.
True, but MS has also, in all its years, done one thing consistently right. It has stuck by its developers and the companies producing hardware for its platform. I don’t think Nokia is in danger of being screwed by MS. MS is tough when it comes to competitors, but Nokia isn’t a competitor.
My biggest current concern is the lack of side loading for applications. The iPhone has shown that people will not put up with this, so I fail to understand why MS chose the same route. I hope the “promises” they made related to the WP7 Chevron thing holds true, otherwise I’ll probably get an Android next time.
You’re not alone, I like Microsoft software in general. Perhaps its generational but I’ve been programming since the days of the IBM green card (HCF – was my favorite op code – Halt and Catch Fire). IMHO C# seems to me the most well designed practical modern language around. So I’ll stick to C# with C for getting to the metal.
It might be the case that the Nokia board brought Elop in with the specific objective of moving them to Microsoft’s OS platform. If this is the case then there’s no conflict of interest.
It’s easier to bash Microsoft, didn’t you know that?
Sure it is: they have worked hard all through these years to build that reputation.
It’s also easier to go for the easiest explanation.
This is exactly what happened. Nokia approached MS and Google. MS made a more compelling case and Nokia accepted.
I expect Nokia to massively cut staff numbers and close facilities over the next 2-3 years.
I thought I had seen an article about how they already fired 6000 Symbian developers at Nokia, but it was just a prediction of people at Nokia in an FT-article.
It’s rumored they also went to RIM.
want to share another satirical hoax. Its so elaborate I first believed it then I read *”satire” in a articles footnote.
http://www.msqt.org/
This one is a different subject, but similair:
http://www.supersimplestorageservice.com/