If Nokia doesn't get a chapter in future updates to "X years of high tech marketing disasters", I'll be disappointed. Jumping onto a sinking platform from a burning one isn't a big improvement.
With Android, they would have had a lot more freedom and, most likely, some more leverage in terms of innovating and differentiating themselves.
Indeed. A decent version of Android (for example, one without Sense) running on awesome hardware would be nice to have. I've yet to see anybody come even close to Apple in terms of hardware.
And at this point, apps are a pretty big differentiator between iOS/Android and everything else. WP7 is going to struggle in that department.
Ah well. Only a few months back everyone said the same about android ("What? But the appstore has like 1000 times more apps, android is not going to take of").
Keep in mind that you have the two biggest players in the world in operating systems (MS) and mobile phones (Nokia) collaborating. They have money, and as always MS will just throw money at the problem for years to make the products more appealing.
I don't know if they will succeed and have my doubts (huge, inflexible companies). But if those two big players won't succeed, then i can't imagine who will. Certainly not RIM, Palm/HP or Samsung.
MS has been throwing money at phones for years and going nowhere.
Most of what makes Nokia 'big' in terms of phones are all the commodity ones they sell. They could have worked on slimmer versions of Android to taper their line down into that market, but that won't be possible with WP7.
Nokia certainly won't up and die tomorrow, but I think it's not really a winning strategy, long term.
I was talking about mobile phones, not games. It's superfluous to say that there are many differences, many of which do not play to MS's favor in the phone market.
And you responded to my post where i didn't mention MS throwing money at phones but throwing money in every direction they think to have problems. Maybe, just maybe, they just start to realize the importance of mobile. I think you can't compare Microsofts engagement in the mobile world in the times before WinMob7. Either they realize now to put _a lot_ of effort in it (money/resources) or they will never catch up. Whatever they invested in the years before the iPhone clearly wasn't enough.
edit: It is also said that MS offered Nokia several hundred millions of dollars multiple times to make this switch.
I had worked in Motorola, our own Linux platform had been in the work for years to never see the light (but for some minor products). So Motorola rushed back to Symbian (!) while the market share was already plummeting.
Then came the cuts, which closed all software centers in Europe (mine included), when finally someone saw Android as the last ship.
And once HP bought webos, it's now as the hot new thing in the press.
Sometimes it's not about the technology, it's about the company. Meego was just a year away from being an awesome mobile OS. It, and it's predecessor Maemo, have been just a year away from saving Nokia since 2008.
No, unfortunately it's not going to happen. A few days ago Reuters reported that Nokia slashed the first MeeGo device before it even hit production.
My guess is that dropping the project comes as a result of signing this deal with Microsoft. Nokia seems to have opted for Windows Phone instead of MeeGo.
I was kind of holding out for that to replace my 3GS I guess. I don't really like Symbian, and I was hoping for a solid, well engineered phone with a real keyboard for a change.
This will be interesting in terms of hardware. Windows Phone 7 has some steep system requirements. Will Nokia's existing phones even be able to accommodate it?
The N8 has a 680MHz ARM, 256 MB Ram and hardware accelerated OpenGL-ES 2.0. If they can write a DirectX driver for the GPU, then that should be good enough.
The really interesting question is if they'll do something interesting enough to differentiate themselves from their field. Given how dull the current lineup of Windows 7 phones is, they might have some real opportunities.
Fair enough. The N9 will ship with a 1GHz processor, if rumors are to be believed, So I'm guessing that will their first Windows 7 platform, unless they're building something W7 specific from the ground up.
That and the fact WP7 still doesn't support less than WVGA screens really makes me question how Nokia is going to compete at the low end with WP7. Honestly I think a big part of the threat to them is not even the "smartphone" market but rather that their low to mid range phones where all their volume comes from are going to get knocked out by Android.
They might have to start putting decent processors in their phones.
Besides its other problems, I'm sure people wouldn't hate Symbian so much if it was just snappy. Symbian phones just seem to have that quarter-second time constant on everything they do. I'm sure there are architectural reasons, but Nokia haven't helped by putting undercooked processors in all their 'smart' phones.
August 6, 1997: Microsoft invests $150 million in Apple, guaranteeing that they would make Mac Office until 2002. Litigation between the companies was settled, and Apple agreed to make IE the preferred browser on Macs for awhile. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-202143.html
You might still have some kind of a point because Apple didn't adopt a Microsoft operating system their 1997 deal. But you still need to rephrase your statement if you want to be accurate.
Partnerships don't save bad companies. SGI and Palm were running into the ground on their own accord.
Yea, I want to make it clear that I'm not blaming MS for the failures of SGI or Palm, just pointing out the symmetry of failing companies grasping at the Microsoft straw and gaining nothing.
I was going to point that one out too. However, I think its success had more to do with Steve Jobs having returned to the helm than anything else. Perhaps they would have been ok without the MS deal, too.
I think dagw's point mostly stands, with Apple being somewhat of an anomaly.
Thinking out loud: Steve Jobs has always been a "man with a plan", and so his deal with MS was one step along the road to recovery, whereas a lot of the other MS deals have been companies that, lacking a coherent plan, started thrashing around grabbing at anything to stay afloat.
Can you name one that isn't Apple? (that's the only one anyone has mentioned so far). Because, I think that Microsoft actually made out better in that deal - they didn't get broken up in antitrust.
Also, Apple really didn't get a 'partner' in Microsoft. Microsoft didn't need them from a technology point of view. They needed them to survive for legal reasons.
Essentially, Apple got an agreement that Microsoft would support the Mac for Office. That was the major coup because that meant that the Mac would be able to keep being seen as a legitimate business computer.
I think that the money was pretty minor in the deal (but I can't remember Apple's cash flow at that point in time).
Intel: Sure, they had clashes over the decades (especially over Intel's forays into software, which Microsoft pushed damn hard to kill, and over NT ports to other ISAs), but these are exceptions.
"Citrix's relationship with Microsoft was key to the company's growth. Microsoft's Windows was exceedingly popular, and Citrix allowed network users to run Windows, even if they used Macintosh computers, which had a completely different operating system. The two companies were deeply intertwined. Iacobucci had known Bill Gates for years, Microsoft was a major investor in Citrix, and much of Citrix's growth was due to the demand for access to Windows. But Microsoft shocked Citrix in 1997 when it announced that it was considering building its own version of Windows networking technology, supplanting Citrix with a home-grown Microsoft product. Citrix's stock plummeted on this news, as it did not seem possible for Citrix to survive without Microsoft. Yet in some ways, Microsoft's new plan didn't make sense. At that point, no one besides Citrix made anything like what Citrix made, so there was no chance of Microsoft licensing the technology from another company. And it would take Microsoft some time to develop a comparable program, probably years. Iacobucci flew to Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, with a crew of advisors and negotiators and prepared for a long stay. The Citrix team camped out in a suite of apartments and hammered out an agreement with Microsoft over a period of months. Finally Citrix announced that it had signed a new licensing agreement with Microsoft, promising Citrix $75 million immediately, and another $100 million spread over several years. Microsoft would endorse Citrix's Windows networking systems for five more years."
Just because a partner is strong doesn't mean they're not a partner.
1. Choose Android and be delegated to one of the hardware supplier amongst HTC, Samsung etc (not necessary the preferred one).
2. Stick with Symbian, Meego and be slower and further down road (Users don't care about the OS. Just whether it works. I would argue that developing OS internally is just playing catching up with minimal hope of overtaking the others significantly)
3. Try Microsoft and hopes the strengths compliment one another (not-too-bad windows phone 7).
I don't envy Nokia. It's a tough choice. Effectively, they are trying to move into a field just disrupted by Apple and competing on a sustaining basis. Doesn't bode well but what other alternatives do they have?
Do we know enough about the terms of the partnership to know that? MS is certainly capable of screwing over their existing hardware partners (see also: PlaysForSure) My hunch is that Nokia wouldn't have gone for the deal if they're just going to be another mere supplier.
My impression is that nobody but an ex-Microsoft employee would even consider such idea.
This partnership benefits Microsoft's executives in the mobile division, who will have their vindication in a major phone maker going with their platform instead of Android. Their bonuses will be outlandish this year. It hardly benefits Nokia, who is betting the company on an unknown platform nobody else is betting on.
A friend of mine usually said that when you see two lines in the bank, one being much shorter than the other, you can bet the short one is the wrong line for you.
I should have split my comment - I didn't really mean to imply that the reason his time was quite short was because I don't think he performed at the same level of Sinofsky.
To be clear (and fair to Elop), whether or not he was effective at his role wasn't very clear to me. What I can say is this:
* His time at Microsoft was quite short. While he may have a monetary incentive for this deal, I doubt he has any cultural ties to "go Microsoft"
* His impact on MS was (to me, anyway) minimal. He seemed to be in charge of keeping the ship going in a straight line, without the pressure of changing direction. There definitely wasn't anything like what is going on at Nokia to "test his mettle", so to speak.
don't they already have major manufacturers producing wp7 phones? I am quite sure I have seen a commercial showing a samsung phone with WP7 installed (and android as a second option)
"A friend of mine usually said that when you see two lines in the bank, one being much shorter than the other, you can bet the short one is the wrong line for you."
a bit OT but worth it nonetheless:
my father always sas than whenever there is bureaucracy involved (i.e. the DMV, embassies, other government departments, etc.) one should choose the shortest line - it means that the clerk in place there is probably the most efficient and less inclined to play "power games" with you.
Served me right on several occasions.
I have missed several trains because of this, the ticket box with the shortest line was usually the one when some clueless grandma sieged the cashier with endless stream of questions about the ticket and travel directions and who knows what, with only few last remaining people, who have invested so much of their time that they couldn't justify leaving for another, longer, queue line.
Yeah, I've encountered those as well. "Hi, I'd like to go to Madrid, from Copenhagen, utilizing only local trains, and going through Vienna - can you tell me the connections?"
Right, and even if they get a sweet deal from Microsoft, they are still betting on an unknown with much of their success dependent on Microsoft.
In Android, they'd build on a known platform with success or failure in their own hands. Don't like what Google is doing in the future? They'd have options without abandoning the platform. Hell, they could let Google develop the core, port Qt, use Bing maps and search, and Amazon Appstore.
IIRC Microsoft invested in Apple at their low point, and also agreed to continue to support their Office suite on Apple computers. I would call that a partnership.
Yeah, others mentioned this lower in the thread. I'm not so sure that this would be a good example of a partnership, because Microsoft didn't really get much from Apple.
Apple got back some legitimacy as a platform. I remember betting at the time that they'd be out of business before 2000 (this was before the return of Jobs). Microsoft gave them the ability to say, we're going to be around for a while, and our customers are going to be able to get work done.
What Microsoft gained (aside from a good return on investment) was something that they could point to when negotiating with the DOJ. A strong Apple was absolutely required for Microsoft to remain intact. So what Microsoft really got wasn't a partner, but a competitor.
Microsoft also got a patent cross-licensing deal with Apple, IE shipping as the default browser on Macs (a blow against Netscape), and a settlement on some messy lawsuits.
(I imagine a lot of lawyers got paid, too... what a mess!)
> What Microsoft gained (aside from a good return on investment) was something that they could point to when negotiating with the DOJ. A strong Apple was absolutely required for Microsoft to remain intact. So what Microsoft really got wasn't a partner, but a competitor.
Yeah, it was a sort of cynical "partnership". I think your analysis is bang-on.
HTC, once known as High Tech Computer,
is a Taiwanese company that began making
phone sets using Microsoft software in
2002. By 2005, it had grown to sales
of $2.2 billion, double that of the year
before, making it the fastest growing
tech company that year according to
BusinessWeek.
HTC grew by jumping on bandwagons. Windows Mobile 6 was the product with an established market.
Furthermore, Microsoft engaged HTC in many matters of industrial design, and all these competencies allowed them to effectively move from being a PC company to a mobile phone company.
The situation for Nokia is somewhat different. MS is no longer the dominant platform in the mobile space.
However, MS still has the advantage of outlook/exchange being the dominant enterprise email solution. If MS can do a good job of integrating features like Sharepoint into WP7, then it has a strong position to defend.
I basically agree. Look at the deal from MSFT's perspective:
1. They are desperate to get (back) into the mobile OS market. For a company that is built on OS dominance this is an existential crisis... much more than Google Search ever could be.
2. Everything they have tried so far has failed, badly. How many W7 phones have you seen in the wild?
3. Hooking up with partner like Nokia (remember: still the largest phone manufacturer, albeit mostly not smartphones) is probably the only credible move MSFT can make that may reverse this.
This implies that the deal probably is costing MSFT dearly. They needed Nokia, and Nokia knew it.
Remember: Microsoft still has more money than god. We've seen with Xbox that they're willing to use that cash to muscle into markets with entrenched players. If they want it bad enough they can be a force... imagine if they subsidize the hardware enough to make the phones almost free, buy several of the top indie iOS developers, and buy a pact with companies like EA to make new titles W7 exclusive at launch.
There's no reason to think they'll WIN.. after all, Apple and Google are hardly paupers. I'm just saying that it could get real interesting.
Or maybe it won't. MSFT might continue to make no headway in the market and Nokia will just end up going down the tubes.
Don't forget MS still controls an army of developers, and is mobilising a lot of resources to help transfer skills from winforms/asp.net to win 7 mobile development. There will be plenty of apps development for w7 as long as the platform can reach some type of critical mass.
Android is for a large deal open source. That would enable Nokia to continue their Meego strategy, along with Qt. They don't need to develop the API and core sets, but can focus on the apps (higher level). That means either laying off a whole bunch of devvers, or moving them to app development.
Also, linux can use some decent developed UI toolkits. Nokia easily can cut a deal with Google for Android store revenue sharing. Especially if Microsoft is in the market, too for alliance candidates.
Choosing Android makes actually quite a lot of sense to me, from a Nokia POV.
I think an important point is also that Nokia isn't abandoning MeeGo and their own OSes. Those I imagine will play a significant role in the future (again).
Hold on. Nokia does a ridiculous amount of research into cell phone technology. I agree it's a side project now, but do you think they seriously are "abandoning" it? Where have you heard that? I don't think Nokia would completely throw away that much good work...
They are not and will not be pushing it as their primary platform. It will remain as a research project as it has been. In my book that means abandoning; there won't be any "ecosystem" for it.
Am i the only person here who finds this really exciting?Windows 7 is probably the best piece of software I have ever used, and yes I have a MacBook pro and an iPhone so I'm not some fanboy. So the world's best OS is about to be put on some of the best mobile hardware available, with two juggernaut companies putting their very survival on the line. I am so glad the market is getting shaken up like this, no matter what happens the consumers will be the ultimate winners of such brutal competition. Android can no longer coast on being the only good alternative to iOS.
Windows 7 isn't Windows Mobile 7, is it? The latter has been a full rewrite, so in many ways, it's completely different from everything else they have.
Not that it couldn't be good, just that you cannot automatically think that it is from Windows 7's qualities.
I didn't know that, but in no way does it really dampen my enthusiasm. To me, Win7 proved Microsoft was still King of OS's, so I can't wait to see their upcoming flagship mobile product. I am sure they will take the lessons of Android and iOS to heart with the first major launch of this partnership. This is a huge opportunity for both companies to take the mobile world by storm. Color me disappointed if this fails, but I think it has more potential to shake up the industry than anything else announced so far thus year.
Good catch. Windows has never been the king of OS's ever. They've been spectacular at marketing to Corporations, etc., but their OS's have always been "within range" or worse than the alternatives.
I heartily agree with you on this point. I was quite suprised to see the lack of enthusiasm on this announcement.
I'm someone thats used a Mac quite extensively over the past year, and i have an iPhone too. Yet, i've just gone back to a Windows machine. Windows 7. Its a damn good OS, and you are right.
I hope they can find a way of bringing that goodness to their mobile platform. Lots of nice little surprises in Windows 7, so im hoping we'll see that in the Mobile OS when it matures a little more.
Everyone said the XBOX was going to be a disaster, and regardless of HOW MS did it, they STILL did it.
MS is perfectly capable of winning when it really, really wants too.
Will many developers seriously considering WP7, just for the ease of migration, and Nokia's logistics; executed properly this COULD be a win win.
As a platform, WP7 is great (mostly). The problem is that there is a dearth of quality apps. I installed the Youtube app, and it's just a wrapper for their mobile page! Really?
> Am i the only person here who finds this really exciting?
Microsoft execs from the mobile division will have huge bonuses this year. They must be very excited.
> Windows 7 is probably the best piece of software I have ever used
I had to force myself not to laugh. What have you been using, pal?
> and yes I have a MacBook pro and an iPhone
Seriously, what's so good about Windows 7?
> so I'm not some fanboy
Nobody accused you of being one, yet.
> with two juggernaut companies putting their very survival on the line
Only Nokia is dying. Microsoft will go on for at least a couple decades before it hits the ground.
> no matter what happens the consumers will be the ultimate winners of such brutal competition
We will have the same number of competing platforms (Nokia won't be the only one selling WP7) at the cost of losing one stellar hardware supplier. No. That won't be good.
The thing is, with Android, when Samsung makes something good to it, everybody benefits, LG, Motorola, the Apache Harmony folks and it trickles all the way to Red Hat, IBM and even Oracle. Even Microsoft, because a lot of their stack is BSD-ish and Microsoft can incorporate it, no questions asked, into whatever products they want. If Nokia ever succeeds in making something that kind of makes WinMo7 suck less (I gather it's a somewhat decent platform) Microsoft stands to benefit the most.
You could see that coming from a CEO that comes from MS, Nokia is desperate to not lose their phone position and MS desperate to losing the new desktop as all paradigms sift, losing OS control and people using Office(there was a time everybody used Wordperfect, people started using word as it was ready for windows before Wordperfect).
MS could design phones this way to compete with Apple, and Nokia could use the MS experience in OS.
I don't think is a good idea to partner with MS, companies that do tend to be screwed sooner or later, MS always winning.
Nokia reminds me more and more of SGI,I remember when MS windows NT was their salvation, I wish I'm wrong.
I don't think is a good idea to partner with MS, companies that do tend to be screwed sooner or later, MS always winning.
You do realize that MS stopped "always winning" almost a decade ago?
SGI sank because they couldn't or wouldn't follow the market, which didn't need to pay $30,000 for hardware-accelerated 3D anymore once anyone could just drop in a 3D card into their commodity PCs. Lots of people (Mark Kilgard, for example) left SGI directly for Nvidia and other companies.
Hindsight is 20/20, but the one thing they could have done to save themselves would have been to ship an awesome 3D card for commodity PCs around the time 3dfx was influential (1997). They could have done hardware geometry acceleration two or three years before Nvidia did it with the first GeForce.
"I placed an order for a loaded system ($11k) from their web site two months ago. It still hasn't arrived (bad impression), but SGI did bring a loaner system by for us to work with.
The system tower is better than standard pc fare, but I still think Apple's new G3 has the best designed computer case.
...
For single pass, top quality rendering (32 bit framebuffer, 32 bit depth buffer, 32 bit trilinear textures, high res screen), the SGI has a higher fill rate than any other card we have ever tested on a pc, but not by too wide of a margin.
If your application can take advantage of multitexture, a TNT or rage128 will deliver slightly greater fill performance. It is likely that the next speed bump of both chips will be just plain faster than the SGI on all fill modes." (emphasis mine)
Too little, too late.
Edit: It's sad, really. Although I haven't booted it in years, I still have a purple Indigo2 in my closet, so I know exactly what it is that died.
SGI could have done the smart thing in 1993 and targeted consumers/small business. In 1993 they released the indy which was a low end workstation. It had everything your imac has today, video camera, chat file sharing, etc. Indigo magic was pretty usable even for today. All the desktop was vector based (vector icons, etc).
In effect, they had everything OSX has today. But instead they focused on the high end niche market and got eaten from below.
Do I think this is a good move for nokia? History sides very much with NO! Which is a shame, nokia always made good hardware, but perhaps far too much of it with too little support.
RAM prices were the major reason that SGI couldn't make IRIX run decently on a machine targeted at consumers or small businesses.
In 1993, 32mb of RAM was damn expensive (I know because I had a 32mb 486/66 machine in 1993. The thing cost $10,000!) And there were delays in IRIX releases because the cheapest Indy configuration didn't have enough RAM.
In fact, RAM prices were also a major factor in Windows NT not going mainstream until about 2000. People just couldn't afford machines that would run modern operating systems well until around 1995, and it took a few more years to sort out the software issues (drivers, backward compatibility with existing software) surrounding the compromises people used until then.
I remember when windows 95 came out, all everyone talked about was affording more ram. Even the normal people. Still
with a little bit of effort they could have made it usable in 8-12meg. I think.
Then they had a second chance at the market with the SGI O2. Can you imagine walking into a best buy and seeing that next to windows95? Built in webcam, video recording, etc. It ran fine on 32-64 megs ram which in '96 was the norm.
I should mention, that NeXT also had the technology to make things happen. And they made it happen, a few years later....
Sure, IRIX could run in 8-12 mb if you turn off X. But that means no graphics and no browser. I don't mean to be rude, but have you ever actually used an SGI?
"At the beginning of its life, the Indy came standard with 16MB of RAM. IRIX 5.1, the first OS for the Indy, was the Windows NT 4.0 of Unices, magically able to, performance-wise, transform an R4000PC Indy with 16MB of RAM (the standard configuration) into a 386SX with a weird blue box.
SGI realized this and quickly upped the box to 32MB, at considerable cost. (As you may recall, 16MB of parity 70ns RAM was hardly cheap in 1993-1995.) Subsequent IRIX releases made huge improvements in memory usage."
But not enough improvements in time to beat back the PC, of course.
"The Indy packs a decent amount of power into a very small (16"x14"x3"), simple, and elegant package. The chassis is just three parts: The "tray," which is sheet metal; the power supply; and the skin, which is a one-piece plastic cover with a thin sheet of metal covering the bottom of it to meet FCC compliance. The steel tray occupies the entire depth of the Indy, but not the entire width; four inches or so of the left side belong to the power supply, which occupies the entire depth of the tray and is a separate box. The whole unit is, although well-built, very economical and, dare I say, cheap. Speaking as someone who has had an opened-up broken Indy sitting on his basement floor, this is not a machine that screams "I cost $10,000." It's obvious SGI made a darn nice profit off these buggers."
A good chunk of my career was based on SGI's until 2002ish.
I started on an iris professional if that helps. I still smile when I think of SGI's c++ compiler - it had real error messages unlike gcc up until a few years ago.
SGi hardware was priced high for two reasons 1) The market (government, industry) would bear the price and 2) small market size. Fix market size and the price can come down - leaving your indigo/indigo2/crimsons' for the govt/oil/entreatment industry.
With proper application of brain juice, switching to IDE drives, etc you could have shaved and optimized enough to get an indy or O2 usable for the mass market. Add back the memory intensive things as time goes on.
Then add in some small business file/email/etc server (challenge s) and you're ready to take on the business market.
At work in roughly 1990 I had a maxed-out Sun 4/330 with 96MB of RAM - that was quite an expensive box for one user. Someone actually flew up from London to Edinburgh to install the RAM. :-)
Yes, this is confirmation of the demise of meego and qt (in the phone space at least), which is sad and disappointing.
But Nokia is in a very different position to SGi and is doing this deal for different reasons. Nokia urgently needs a decent OS - Symbian is the main reason Nokia has such a weak market position in smartphones. You can debate the merits of WP7 but its better than Symbian.
The next issue is apps and ecosystem. This might not work out, but a Nokia-supported WP7 market place has some chance of reaching critical mass and fighting it out with RIM and HP for third position after itunes and android.
What happened to MeeGo? Can anyone tell me why Nokia couldn't ship MeeGo phones sooner?
It was in a seemingly-near-finished state a year ago. I thought it was really promising - I even ran the netbook release full-time on my netbook for a while. It was recognisably a linux distro, with a beautifully shiny UI and some convenient social features. Nokia had already shipped several linux devices such as the N900, yet suddenly they become unable to get something out of the door. Does anyone know what really held them up?
Before: At least some kind of vision, build around Qt and multiple platforms
After: A little bit of dying Symbian, some open source development around Meego, some Windows phones in distant future
Guess this won't help in selling those Symbian E7 phones to companies.
I have a feeling that Vanjoki knew what was coming and gave his peeing statement in order to have his opinion on the record.
Firstly, tying one company struggling to keep afloat to another struggling to take off (in this domain at least) is hardly the obvious ideal strategy.
Secondly, they're about to go onto what, their fourth platform strategy without large-scale wider support? And they expect to retain developer support and internal morale?
Thirdly, coming so soon after the news that Dalvik's porting to their previous preferred platform looked to enable broad compatibility with one of the major software bases to their platform, what's the point in this - they're moving to largely unsupported platform that's less compatible with alternatives than where they were.
This feels like the move of a new top dog who doesn't fully understand the situation but wants to be seen to be doing something, and so has called his old friends. Bad, bad, bad idea.
Not so smart move for Nokia, but this move could be good for WP7.
With Nokia MS could get some market share. But for Nokia it's dumb. They are betting on not so feature rich platform with very small market share, with small (comparing to competitors) number of third party applications. And what it worst this is closed platform controlled by other company.
Is it funny that I now think that HP buying Palm was the best business moves made last year?
I one fell swoop HP got exclusive rights to a legit smartphone platform where they wouldn't be beholden to any other company. No longer would HP be reliant on Microsoft in mobile.
Now, Nokia is going the opposite direction. Sure, Nokia has some important assets to leverage in this partnership. But make no mistake, this is a deal with the devil.
I can't help but feel this was all arranged, with or without the full knowledge of the Nokia board, when Elop moved over.
It's a little sad for me, personally. I can't say with confidence that this isn't a good move for Nokia among the general populace but I've, finally, given up on them.
Goodbye. We'll always have the 2110 and the summer of 1994!
Aww, I bought a 2010 in the summer of 1995, and have been using Nokia phones ever since. Next one is going to be something with Android probably, too bad it couldn't have been a Nokia as well.
The line in the announcement about pushing these devices into new pricepoints actually gives me some hope for the marriage. IMO, the next phase of the smartphone race will not be about having the hottest high-end smartphone - I think the winner will be the one that can make a smartphone platform pervasive on entry-level phones.
If Nokia and MS get WP7 on every entry level Nokia, they might be able to disrupt the high end players and bring quality to the low end that Chinese competition will haage trouble matching.
Nokia says they will still run symbian on entry level phones. Increasingly these will compete with cheap android phones like huawei ideos. Nokia's advantage will be battery life, but the android phones will have the features that consumers want.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadIf Nokia doesn't get a chapter in future updates to "X years of high tech marketing disasters", I'll be disappointed. Jumping onto a sinking platform from a burning one isn't a big improvement.
With Android, they would have had a lot more freedom and, most likely, some more leverage in terms of innovating and differentiating themselves.
And at this point, apps are a pretty big differentiator between iOS/Android and everything else. WP7 is going to struggle in that department.
Keep in mind that you have the two biggest players in the world in operating systems (MS) and mobile phones (Nokia) collaborating. They have money, and as always MS will just throw money at the problem for years to make the products more appealing.
I don't know if they will succeed and have my doubts (huge, inflexible companies). But if those two big players won't succeed, then i can't imagine who will. Certainly not RIM, Palm/HP or Samsung.
Most of what makes Nokia 'big' in terms of phones are all the commodity ones they sell. They could have worked on slimmer versions of Android to taper their line down into that market, but that won't be possible with WP7.
Nokia certainly won't up and die tomorrow, but I think it's not really a winning strategy, long term.
edit: It is also said that MS offered Nokia several hundred millions of dollars multiple times to make this switch.
Which is another similarity to Nokia, come to think of it.
Then came the cuts, which closed all software centers in Europe (mine included), when finally someone saw Android as the last ship.
Sometimes it's not about the technology, it's about the company. Meego was just a year away from being an awesome mobile OS. It, and it's predecessor Maemo, have been just a year away from saving Nokia since 2008.
My guess is that dropping the project comes as a result of signing this deal with Microsoft. Nokia seems to have opted for Windows Phone instead of MeeGo.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/09/nokia-meego-idUSLD...
I was kind of holding out for that to replace my 3GS I guess. I don't really like Symbian, and I was hoping for a solid, well engineered phone with a real keyboard for a change.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/11/nokia-meego-not-dead-stil...
The really interesting question is if they'll do something interesting enough to differentiate themselves from their field. Given how dull the current lineup of Windows 7 phones is, they might have some real opportunities.
Besides its other problems, I'm sure people wouldn't hate Symbian so much if it was just snappy. Symbian phones just seem to have that quarter-second time constant on everything they do. I'm sure there are architectural reasons, but Nokia haven't helped by putting undercooked processors in all their 'smart' phones.
August 6, 1997: Microsoft invests $150 million in Apple, guaranteeing that they would make Mac Office until 2002. Litigation between the companies was settled, and Apple agreed to make IE the preferred browser on Macs for awhile. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-202143.html
You might still have some kind of a point because Apple didn't adopt a Microsoft operating system their 1997 deal. But you still need to rephrase your statement if you want to be accurate.
Partnerships don't save bad companies. SGI and Palm were running into the ground on their own accord.
I think dagw's point mostly stands, with Apple being somewhat of an anomaly.
Thinking out loud: Steve Jobs has always been a "man with a plan", and so his deal with MS was one step along the road to recovery, whereas a lot of the other MS deals have been companies that, lacking a coherent plan, started thrashing around grabbing at anything to stay afloat.
Also, Apple really didn't get a 'partner' in Microsoft. Microsoft didn't need them from a technology point of view. They needed them to survive for legal reasons.
Essentially, Apple got an agreement that Microsoft would support the Mac for Office. That was the major coup because that meant that the Mac would be able to keep being seen as a legitimate business computer.
I think that the money was pretty minor in the deal (but I can't remember Apple's cash flow at that point in time).
Intel: Sure, they had clashes over the decades (especially over Intel's forays into software, which Microsoft pushed damn hard to kill, and over NT ports to other ISAs), but these are exceptions.
Citrix: (From the fourth reference listed by https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Citrix_System...)
"Citrix's relationship with Microsoft was key to the company's growth. Microsoft's Windows was exceedingly popular, and Citrix allowed network users to run Windows, even if they used Macintosh computers, which had a completely different operating system. The two companies were deeply intertwined. Iacobucci had known Bill Gates for years, Microsoft was a major investor in Citrix, and much of Citrix's growth was due to the demand for access to Windows. But Microsoft shocked Citrix in 1997 when it announced that it was considering building its own version of Windows networking technology, supplanting Citrix with a home-grown Microsoft product. Citrix's stock plummeted on this news, as it did not seem possible for Citrix to survive without Microsoft. Yet in some ways, Microsoft's new plan didn't make sense. At that point, no one besides Citrix made anything like what Citrix made, so there was no chance of Microsoft licensing the technology from another company. And it would take Microsoft some time to develop a comparable program, probably years. Iacobucci flew to Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, with a crew of advisors and negotiators and prepared for a long stay. The Citrix team camped out in a suite of apartments and hammered out an agreement with Microsoft over a period of months. Finally Citrix announced that it had signed a new licensing agreement with Microsoft, promising Citrix $75 million immediately, and another $100 million spread over several years. Microsoft would endorse Citrix's Windows networking systems for five more years."
Just because a partner is strong doesn't mean they're not a partner.
oh... wait...
1. Choose Android and be delegated to one of the hardware supplier amongst HTC, Samsung etc (not necessary the preferred one).
2. Stick with Symbian, Meego and be slower and further down road (Users don't care about the OS. Just whether it works. I would argue that developing OS internally is just playing catching up with minimal hope of overtaking the others significantly)
3. Try Microsoft and hopes the strengths compliment one another (not-too-bad windows phone 7).
I don't envy Nokia. It's a tough choice. Effectively, they are trying to move into a field just disrupted by Apple and competing on a sustaining basis. Doesn't bode well but what other alternatives do they have?
This partnership benefits Microsoft's executives in the mobile division, who will have their vindication in a major phone maker going with their platform instead of Android. Their bonuses will be outlandish this year. It hardly benefits Nokia, who is betting the company on an unknown platform nobody else is betting on.
A friend of mine usually said that when you see two lines in the bank, one being much shorter than the other, you can bet the short one is the wrong line for you.
Well.. Stranger things have happened.
To be clear (and fair to Elop), whether or not he was effective at his role wasn't very clear to me. What I can say is this:
* His time at Microsoft was quite short. While he may have a monetary incentive for this deal, I doubt he has any cultural ties to "go Microsoft"
* His impact on MS was (to me, anyway) minimal. He seemed to be in charge of keeping the ship going in a straight line, without the pressure of changing direction. There definitely wasn't anything like what is going on at Nokia to "test his mettle", so to speak.
Contrast this to something that Sinofsky did: http://www.cornell.edu/about/wired/
a bit OT but worth it nonetheless: my father always sas than whenever there is bureaucracy involved (i.e. the DMV, embassies, other government departments, etc.) one should choose the shortest line - it means that the clerk in place there is probably the most efficient and less inclined to play "power games" with you. Served me right on several occasions.
In Android, they'd build on a known platform with success or failure in their own hands. Don't like what Google is doing in the future? They'd have options without abandoning the platform. Hell, they could let Google develop the core, port Qt, use Bing maps and search, and Amazon Appstore.
I agree, though that this something that is only done by a desperate company with few choices.
Apple got back some legitimacy as a platform. I remember betting at the time that they'd be out of business before 2000 (this was before the return of Jobs). Microsoft gave them the ability to say, we're going to be around for a while, and our customers are going to be able to get work done.
What Microsoft gained (aside from a good return on investment) was something that they could point to when negotiating with the DOJ. A strong Apple was absolutely required for Microsoft to remain intact. So what Microsoft really got wasn't a partner, but a competitor.
Microsoft also got a patent cross-licensing deal with Apple, IE shipping as the default browser on Macs (a blow against Netscape), and a settlement on some messy lawsuits.
(I imagine a lot of lawyers got paid, too... what a mess!)
Yeah, it was a sort of cynical "partnership". I think your analysis is bang-on.
Well, aside from quietly forgetting about the stolen Quicktime source code: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company
Microsoft, of course! What a silly question! Why else would they partner with someone?
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/02/18/microsoft-htc-has-m...
Furthermore, Microsoft engaged HTC in many matters of industrial design, and all these competencies allowed them to effectively move from being a PC company to a mobile phone company.
The situation for Nokia is somewhat different. MS is no longer the dominant platform in the mobile space.
However, MS still has the advantage of outlook/exchange being the dominant enterprise email solution. If MS can do a good job of integrating features like Sharepoint into WP7, then it has a strong position to defend.
1. They are desperate to get (back) into the mobile OS market. For a company that is built on OS dominance this is an existential crisis... much more than Google Search ever could be.
2. Everything they have tried so far has failed, badly. How many W7 phones have you seen in the wild?
3. Hooking up with partner like Nokia (remember: still the largest phone manufacturer, albeit mostly not smartphones) is probably the only credible move MSFT can make that may reverse this.
This implies that the deal probably is costing MSFT dearly. They needed Nokia, and Nokia knew it.
Remember: Microsoft still has more money than god. We've seen with Xbox that they're willing to use that cash to muscle into markets with entrenched players. If they want it bad enough they can be a force... imagine if they subsidize the hardware enough to make the phones almost free, buy several of the top indie iOS developers, and buy a pact with companies like EA to make new titles W7 exclusive at launch.
There's no reason to think they'll WIN.. after all, Apple and Google are hardly paupers. I'm just saying that it could get real interesting.
Or maybe it won't. MSFT might continue to make no headway in the market and Nokia will just end up going down the tubes.
They could attract developers by doing the one thing that nobody else wants to do: ship the phones with the compiler onboard! :)
This would disrupt things immensely - imagine if, all you had to do to build an app for your phone, was connect to it over a web browser, or so on ..
Also, linux can use some decent developed UI toolkits. Nokia easily can cut a deal with Google for Android store revenue sharing. Especially if Microsoft is in the market, too for alliance candidates.
Choosing Android makes actually quite a lot of sense to me, from a Nokia POV.
Not that it couldn't be good, just that you cannot automatically think that it is from Windows 7's qualities.
No fanboy, you say...
I'm someone thats used a Mac quite extensively over the past year, and i have an iPhone too. Yet, i've just gone back to a Windows machine. Windows 7. Its a damn good OS, and you are right.
I hope they can find a way of bringing that goodness to their mobile platform. Lots of nice little surprises in Windows 7, so im hoping we'll see that in the Mobile OS when it matures a little more.
Everyone said the XBOX was going to be a disaster, and regardless of HOW MS did it, they STILL did it.
MS is perfectly capable of winning when it really, really wants too.
Will many developers seriously considering WP7, just for the ease of migration, and Nokia's logistics; executed properly this COULD be a win win.
[NB I rather like Visual Studio, but I don't think I'd do OS development using it]
[Edit - if there any current or ex Microsoft people who could answer this I'd love to know about the set of tools actually used to develop Windows]
This is the Microsoft. The company with an almost fanatical commitment to dogfooding.
I think this is the cool part. Pulling everything together so that it all works must be a monumental engineering task.
Microsoft execs from the mobile division will have huge bonuses this year. They must be very excited.
> Windows 7 is probably the best piece of software I have ever used
I had to force myself not to laugh. What have you been using, pal?
> and yes I have a MacBook pro and an iPhone
Seriously, what's so good about Windows 7?
> so I'm not some fanboy
Nobody accused you of being one, yet.
> with two juggernaut companies putting their very survival on the line
Only Nokia is dying. Microsoft will go on for at least a couple decades before it hits the ground.
> no matter what happens the consumers will be the ultimate winners of such brutal competition
We will have the same number of competing platforms (Nokia won't be the only one selling WP7) at the cost of losing one stellar hardware supplier. No. That won't be good.
The thing is, with Android, when Samsung makes something good to it, everybody benefits, LG, Motorola, the Apache Harmony folks and it trickles all the way to Red Hat, IBM and even Oracle. Even Microsoft, because a lot of their stack is BSD-ish and Microsoft can incorporate it, no questions asked, into whatever products they want. If Nokia ever succeeds in making something that kind of makes WinMo7 suck less (I gather it's a somewhat decent platform) Microsoft stands to benefit the most.
Can't speak for OP, but it's the first windows version that 'just works' :) And that means a lot when you have to use windows.
Many people have to use a windows desktop. But the situation is different on the phone.
1) Maybe you should use more software (not that W7 is bad, but I wouldn't say it's the best evar)
2) Windows Phone 7 isn't Windows 7, not even close.
You could see that coming from a CEO that comes from MS, Nokia is desperate to not lose their phone position and MS desperate to losing the new desktop as all paradigms sift, losing OS control and people using Office(there was a time everybody used Wordperfect, people started using word as it was ready for windows before Wordperfect).
MS could design phones this way to compete with Apple, and Nokia could use the MS experience in OS.
I don't think is a good idea to partner with MS, companies that do tend to be screwed sooner or later, MS always winning.
Nokia reminds me more and more of SGI,I remember when MS windows NT was their salvation, I wish I'm wrong.
You do realize that MS stopped "always winning" almost a decade ago?
SGI sank because they couldn't or wouldn't follow the market, which didn't need to pay $30,000 for hardware-accelerated 3D anymore once anyone could just drop in a 3D card into their commodity PCs. Lots of people (Mark Kilgard, for example) left SGI directly for Nvidia and other companies.
Hindsight is 20/20, but the one thing they could have done to save themselves would have been to ship an awesome 3D card for commodity PCs around the time 3dfx was influential (1997). They could have done hardware geometry acceleration two or three years before Nvidia did it with the first GeForce.
Carmack wrote this about SGI's NT workstation in 1999: http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/johnc_plan_1999.html...
"I placed an order for a loaded system ($11k) from their web site two months ago. It still hasn't arrived (bad impression), but SGI did bring a loaner system by for us to work with.
The system tower is better than standard pc fare, but I still think Apple's new G3 has the best designed computer case.
...
For single pass, top quality rendering (32 bit framebuffer, 32 bit depth buffer, 32 bit trilinear textures, high res screen), the SGI has a higher fill rate than any other card we have ever tested on a pc, but not by too wide of a margin.
If your application can take advantage of multitexture, a TNT or rage128 will deliver slightly greater fill performance. It is likely that the next speed bump of both chips will be just plain faster than the SGI on all fill modes." (emphasis mine)
Too little, too late.
Edit: It's sad, really. Although I haven't booted it in years, I still have a purple Indigo2 in my closet, so I know exactly what it is that died.
In effect, they had everything OSX has today. But instead they focused on the high end niche market and got eaten from below.
Do I think this is a good move for nokia? History sides very much with NO! Which is a shame, nokia always made good hardware, but perhaps far too much of it with too little support.
In 1993, 32mb of RAM was damn expensive (I know because I had a 32mb 486/66 machine in 1993. The thing cost $10,000!) And there were delays in IRIX releases because the cheapest Indy configuration didn't have enough RAM.
In fact, RAM prices were also a major factor in Windows NT not going mainstream until about 2000. People just couldn't afford machines that would run modern operating systems well until around 1995, and it took a few more years to sort out the software issues (drivers, backward compatibility with existing software) surrounding the compromises people used until then.
Then they had a second chance at the market with the SGI O2. Can you imagine walking into a best buy and seeing that next to windows95? Built in webcam, video recording, etc. It ran fine on 32-64 megs ram which in '96 was the norm.
I should mention, that NeXT also had the technology to make things happen. And they made it happen, a few years later....
In 1996, the O2 started at about $6000, and listed for more: http://cgi.amazing.com/internet/faq-6.0.html
As for the Indy, see http://www.siliconbunny.com/mirrors/www.tc.umn.edu/dols0011/...
"At the beginning of its life, the Indy came standard with 16MB of RAM. IRIX 5.1, the first OS for the Indy, was the Windows NT 4.0 of Unices, magically able to, performance-wise, transform an R4000PC Indy with 16MB of RAM (the standard configuration) into a 386SX with a weird blue box.
SGI realized this and quickly upped the box to 32MB, at considerable cost. (As you may recall, 16MB of parity 70ns RAM was hardly cheap in 1993-1995.) Subsequent IRIX releases made huge improvements in memory usage."
But not enough improvements in time to beat back the PC, of course.
"The Indy packs a decent amount of power into a very small (16"x14"x3"), simple, and elegant package. The chassis is just three parts: The "tray," which is sheet metal; the power supply; and the skin, which is a one-piece plastic cover with a thin sheet of metal covering the bottom of it to meet FCC compliance. The steel tray occupies the entire depth of the Indy, but not the entire width; four inches or so of the left side belong to the power supply, which occupies the entire depth of the tray and is a separate box. The whole unit is, although well-built, very economical and, dare I say, cheap. Speaking as someone who has had an opened-up broken Indy sitting on his basement floor, this is not a machine that screams "I cost $10,000." It's obvious SGI made a darn nice profit off these buggers."
SGi hardware was priced high for two reasons 1) The market (government, industry) would bear the price and 2) small market size. Fix market size and the price can come down - leaving your indigo/indigo2/crimsons' for the govt/oil/entreatment industry.
With proper application of brain juice, switching to IDE drives, etc you could have shaved and optimized enough to get an indy or O2 usable for the mass market. Add back the memory intensive things as time goes on. Then add in some small business file/email/etc server (challenge s) and you're ready to take on the business market.
But Nokia is in a very different position to SGi and is doing this deal for different reasons. Nokia urgently needs a decent OS - Symbian is the main reason Nokia has such a weak market position in smartphones. You can debate the merits of WP7 but its better than Symbian.
The next issue is apps and ecosystem. This might not work out, but a Nokia-supported WP7 market place has some chance of reaching critical mass and fighting it out with RIM and HP for third position after itunes and android.
It was in a seemingly-near-finished state a year ago. I thought it was really promising - I even ran the netbook release full-time on my netbook for a while. It was recognisably a linux distro, with a beautifully shiny UI and some convenient social features. Nokia had already shipped several linux devices such as the N900, yet suddenly they become unable to get something out of the door. Does anyone know what really held them up?
both sides are ready to contribute greatly to increase the tablet market share,
hint - creating and editing Excel files and Word files by mobile phones in the future
I was hoping to see an Android phone made by Nokia.
Guess this won't help in selling those Symbian E7 phones to companies.
I have a feeling that Vanjoki knew what was coming and gave his peeing statement in order to have his opinion on the record.
Firstly, tying one company struggling to keep afloat to another struggling to take off (in this domain at least) is hardly the obvious ideal strategy.
Secondly, they're about to go onto what, their fourth platform strategy without large-scale wider support? And they expect to retain developer support and internal morale?
Thirdly, coming so soon after the news that Dalvik's porting to their previous preferred platform looked to enable broad compatibility with one of the major software bases to their platform, what's the point in this - they're moving to largely unsupported platform that's less compatible with alternatives than where they were.
This feels like the move of a new top dog who doesn't fully understand the situation but wants to be seen to be doing something, and so has called his old friends. Bad, bad, bad idea.
Why not fork Android?
I one fell swoop HP got exclusive rights to a legit smartphone platform where they wouldn't be beholden to any other company. No longer would HP be reliant on Microsoft in mobile.
Now, Nokia is going the opposite direction. Sure, Nokia has some important assets to leverage in this partnership. But make no mistake, this is a deal with the devil.
I wonder what this means for Qt?
However I don't find this deal too bad for Nokia, we don't know the exact terms behind it.
Now the smartphone OS market is getting more and more interesting =).
It's a little sad for me, personally. I can't say with confidence that this isn't a good move for Nokia among the general populace but I've, finally, given up on them.
Goodbye. We'll always have the 2110 and the summer of 1994!
Does this mean that Bing Maps is getting axed?
If Nokia and MS get WP7 on every entry level Nokia, they might be able to disrupt the high end players and bring quality to the low end that Chinese competition will haage trouble matching.