"Shipments of Symbian devices are declining faster than we anticipated"
Why management thought that consumers considering a Nokia smartphone (perhaps generously?) over a bevy of competitors would pull the trigger instead of waiting until a Windows8 phone is ready.
Why would Windows Phone 8 make any difference? I don't think announcing they will go WP7 is what killed their Symbian market. It would've died anyway. They've lost more than half their market share in China last year alone. Android has a market share of almost 70% in China now:
I don't think his claim was predicated on the success of Android in China, but rather upon the general success of OEMs shipping Android phones. It has users and an ecosystem which WP7, interesting though it is, can't claim.
Many people would have lept at a Nokia smartphone running Android, given the consumer goodwill they've built up over the years. Few seem willing to do so for Nokias running WP7. Android was a proven platform with wide adoption when they announced their support for WP7; their decision to hitch their wagon to MS can only be seen as a grave mistake.
Maybe things will turn around, but it doesn't look likely at this point.
By going with android Nokia would have sold phones and definitely would have seen their overall unit sales increase. As we've seen of late, google itself makes almost nothing per mobile phone sold. That means any revenue/profit made off selling android units are split between the handset manufacturer and the carrier.
Instead of having a good chunk of that massive growth to 70%, they chose WP7 which lost them marketshare, and still have to split any money made with the carrier AND MS.
I don't see how this is currently a win for them atall.
It's not even Windows8 phone - they didn't have the N900 or a single other WP7-capable device when they declared Symbian to be a burning platform to be jumped off. Then they killed Meego and effectively disowned the N9.
They abandoned their suppliers, retailers and customers without any meaningful avenue for transition/upgrade.
What did they possibly expect from that disastrously stupid announcement Feb '11?
3. Maybe people are buying now because they actually bought into all the marketing hype. I mean Nokia rented Times Square, so someone probably found that compelling.
The full impact of a recession for a couple of quarters is usually not felt until several years later.
What we're seeing with Nokia, BestBuy etc. is the companies that didn't adapt facing extinction. It should be happening to more - but they're being propped up artificially - that can't be sustained indefinitely.
If you think the valuation for Instagram was wild - look at their metric trends against these monoliths.
"but Instagram don't make anything" - in the western world we don't really need to consume physical products so much any more - I've got 5+ TVs in the house and 3 fridges - our consumption is moving to non-physical products.
Nokia did adapt, it made one hell of a move backed by lots of Microsoft and AT&T cash for promotions and had /has a special relationship with Microsoft. Their native OS was no where near ready and being another Android phone maker wasn't appealing (Other than Samsung, is anyone else making money on Android?).
Other than Samsung, is anyone else making money on Android?
HTC? Somehow the myth that HTC is losing money has become a meme, when actually HTC is doing gangbusters, just not as handsomely as they did before Samsung started soaking up Apple-like profits. I suspect HTC will do quite well on the backs of the One X and One S.
Motorola would have long been a gravestone if not for Android. So would have SE and LG.
Most reviews of the last Symbian phone saw it as a quickly evolving, credible device. Elop seemed to give up right when it was coming to fruition.
You are right on HTC, they still made a respectable profit last quarter ($150mm.) A couple of their earnings warnings must have started the meme, I fell for it http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57410404-94/htc-earnings-sa... It remains to be seen if earnings hold up though, as they are essentially just another phone make for Google.
Elop could have done a few Android lines to hold the decline while working on the Symbian at the same time, I agree. But then any promotion and development would have been borne by Nokia. Granted they'd own Symbian but it's worth would have been questionable (see WebOS as one possibility.)
If it doesn't work people will question the wisdom but, IMO, going with Windows was a good bet given the circumstances. I am rooting for them and for lots of Android and WebOS forks.
I like Nokia, I like their products and the fact that they did a totally new design for Lumnia, when cloning is fashionable today. If you look around Youtube you will see videos of their phone surviving falls, run over by cars, submerging in water etc.
If they fail with MS, which seems to be it's fate, in retrospect it would have been a bad bet.
They chose the easier route, given that Windows Phone 7 wasn't ready for prime time either, and sat out of an emerging handset segment for years and for this they will pay dearly. They have to build themselves as a brand in the new smartphone market, a game that seems to be already taken. IMHO, short of a major innovation from Nokia in the near future, their smartphone business will go the way of the Blackberry; I have no idea is they will still want to keeps their low end models after the dust settles.
Nokia quite simply didn't have the technology to compete -- Symbian isn't up to the task their Linux offerings needed to be solid about 4 years ago to be relevant now. I'm not sure they sat out, they just didn't get it to together.
I think if they fail with MS, they would have failed with every other option as well. MS is the best option but it is perhaps much too late.
I have recently used a N9 phone running Meego for a couple of hours and it was a real pleasure. In many regards it's better than Android has been until recently. It's snappy and looks well finished although look-wise there's work to make it compelling.
It's not really fair to give any real feedback on such a short utilization span but I wouldn't say the OS is "nowhere near ready".
Had they spent the same effort on Meego rather than on integrating the Windows OS, they would have a very, very good OS.
With Qt, they would also have very good technical fundation for developpers. Love or hate it, Qt programmers are very loyal to the library and praise it. With its ease of use, it could have been a developper-frendly platform.
I'd write a Qt app over a Dalvic-Java or Obj-C one anyday.
What I'd like to note on this story is that most tech writers feared that if Nokia didn't take this path, they would be shamed and welcomed their move. Now, given the sales both Microsoft and Nokia are shamed for taking this path.
I agree. I've been using the N9 since its release and I think Meego is very close to being consumer-ready. Great UI, fast, stable, great built-in software. Some built-in software lacks some features, it doesn't quite have the tweakability Maemo had and there are a few bugs and shortcomings here and there. But considering the small market the N9 was deployed in, one can only wonder what it could have been if it had gotten more attention from Nokia.
I was an N900 user before that. I hoped Nokia would be a shining beacon in the mobile space, with an open operating system and a more GNU/Linux software stack than just the kernel. But those hopes were shattered by Elop's turn. I guess Microsoft will continue to drive Nokia's market price further into the ground so they can buy them for a few pennies.
Isn't the problem more "but Instagram don't sell anything".
Bestbuy and Nokia are facing very different problems. For Nokia, the market's there and even speeding up because of tight upgrade schedule, it's just they failed to move on smart phones for too long and are playing catchup. For Bestbuy, computers, routers, printers, etc. are reaching saturation and the things that aren't, the iPads and Kindles, their margins will be razor thin because people are buying the brand, not the generic product. Maybe I'm wrong, but if you were Apple would you give Bestbuy anything more than scraps?
"No one could have predicted..." Classic head-in-the-sand, barely-reactive executive "leadership".
Is this what Microsoft and the Nokia BoD planned when they hired Elop, who scrapped Meego and their N9 (now N900 running WP7) and wiped out their entire existing "burning platform" revenue stream from Symbian?
This was all planned - it's not a disaster. The problem is, the plans may have been too successful.
May be the plan was just "get a competitor out of the way." Whether they end up buying them or putting them out of business and purchasing all their patents doesn't matter. Though, hopefully for Microsoft, someone else doesn't beat them out on the latter.
"Nokia's challenges have been exacerbated by rampant competition - notably from Apple and Samsung who are extracting a disproportionate amount of margin from the industry at present,"
Disproportionately high or low ? I guess what they are saying is that smartphone profitability is falling due to lower margins.
MS/Nokia are in huge trouble, especialy after seeing that report that google makes almost no money off smartphones. It seems the only way for Nokia/MS to really compete with google is to also make no money. Sounds like Nokia is now in the wrong business.
"competition" - that's the solution then.
Once RIM have managed to destroy themselves in the corporate world you are left with the choice of buy Microsoft
MSFT's only hope in mobile, and their only reason for going there is to be the standard business solution - the only one that works with MS-exchange, MS-domain-emperor(or whatever it's called today) and MS-office cloud.
Once you ensure that corporates/government only allow MS mobile devices onto their networks you have a pretty nice market sewn up. And one that doesn't care about price and buys new kit regularly
The only tricky bit is persuading all those corporate and government customers that they haven't had a perfectly workable blackberry solution for years, and that they shouldn't save money by allowing workers to use their own iPhones.
You're thinking in terms of a 2005 business model.
Even government organizations are buying lots of iPhones, even though Apple is an obnoxious vendor for those organizations to deal with.
Microsoft sells stuff these days by bundling product licensing. So unless Apple does something really dumb, you're not going to see enterprises mandating anything Microsoft mobile other than ActiveSync anytime soon.
ehh, Microsoft will fall back on the old tried and true: Change apis for each successive version of Exchange, and make minor api changes during patches - just enough to cause Apple products to work inconsistently, and make sure Windows Phone X stays up to date with the changes. Corporations are too stupid as a group to see what's being done to them, so they will drop Apple like yesterday's news and join the Microsoft death-cult.
Or they could just change the license terms banning any non-ms product from connecting, for 'security reasons'
The only reason not to is a DoJ monopoly investigation - and Apple would have a task persuading the government that they are the victims of monopolies in the smartphone world!
Good luck telling corporate users that just a few years after you've allowed iPhones and/or Android phones as their devices on your exchange server, you're going to ban them.
It was easier for things like this to happen back when everyone was carrying a company-issue blackberry (because blackberries were too expensive for most consumers.)
These days, companies are increasingly just letting their employees connect personal devices onto their exchange servers (with policy management) and enjoying the savings from not having to pay for the device, data, or both. I can't see either group (companies and employees) being happy about reversing this trend.
I wonder what the implications would be for Qt and KDE. I know Microsoft has made some Linux commits in the past (in regards to its own interests), but I can't imagine how it would justify actively developing a product which has no place on Windows Phone (yet?) and only serves to weaken Windows' stranglehold on the desktop.
Yep, I'm familiar with that, but licensing isn't what I'm concerned about (LGPL is pretty permissive as-is; this agreement was mostly relevant in the days of Trolltech when Qt was GPL/commercial).
My main concern is that, despite the open governance, to my knowledge the development and direction of Qt is still primarily driven by employees of Nokia. I'm sure Qt would still do a fine job of existing and evolving under the leadership of KDE contributors, but it would nevertheless be a major blow to the framework to see so much talent whisked away at this critical time.
1. Android would be short term profits. Let's just take Chinese market. China has 70% Android. Now, I am coming to the market and building a new Android phone. It's awesome and everything but how do I stand apart from HTC, Samsung, Moto and low cost options like ZTE? Imagine a Lumia running Android. Would I be able to beat HTC and Moto and Samsung with that?
2. I guess we will start seeing the Nokia MS partnership success going forward when Nokia really has a chance of adding value to MS products.
I agree that Nokia took on the insane task of reviving themselves as well as MS. But if they can get some sort of adoption with WP7, they can continue to survive and add value to the ecosystem going forward with WP8. They have to continue on life support until their true strategy kicks in to place.
> I guess we will start seeing the Nokia MS partnership success going forward when Nokia really has a chance of adding value to MS products.
I doubt that. The biggest change was that the mobile devices turned from devices (that people buy and use, but rarely get 3rd-party software for) into platforms (that people buy to have access to 3rd-party software). The big difference is that there are not that much positive externalities for market share for devices, but positive network effects absolutely determine the platform market.
That's why Windows rules the desktop, and that is why Android will do so in the handset. I predict that all competitors will effectively be dead in 2 years, and only Android and iOS remain.
what's funny is that MS is probably making more off the Android market than the WinPhone market - all they have to do is threaten a patent lawsuit, and suddenly they're making a couple of dollars for every Android phone a vendor makes.
The argument against Android has always been that manufacturers using it have no power over their users. By that, I mean that customers could pick up another brand and it would still be Android. I remember reading some tech sites opinions on the Nokia-WP7 strategy and how the benefit was that it would give Nokia that edge that separates it from being just another manufacturer.
But if Nokia is successful and WP dominates, what's to stop everyone else from using WP as well? I guess skinning it, which is one of Nokia's rights in the Nokia-Microsoft deal, but that's like what HTC is doing with Sense and Samsung with TouchWiz. It's not as if a skin will really give you an edge.
The only real way to have won is to have your own OS and to be in control it. Meego might have worked better for Nokia than WP7 long-term since Nokia could influence the direction Meego was going in.
I wonder how much of this is related to the bug and subsequent price drop for the Lumia 900. I was hoping for this phone to become a successful competitor to Android in the lower-end smartphone market.
This will make Nokia even cheaper when Microsoft decides to buy them. This whole scenario reminds me of an old editorial cartoon which lampooned two companies (HP maybe?) as two sinking ships tossing a rope to each other.
I don't know how much market share Apple has in India or the more prosperous African countries, but without selling any kind of low-priced/low-tech phone Apple doesn't compete at all with Nokia or Samsung in that market segment. I wonder if Nokia is talking about lower sales specifically in the smartphone segment or lower sales due to "competition" in other segments as well.
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[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 77.7 ms ] threadWhy management thought that consumers considering a Nokia smartphone (perhaps generously?) over a bevy of competitors would pull the trigger instead of waiting until a Windows8 phone is ready.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/10/net-us-android-app...
Just because Andriod has gained a huge market share in China does not imply Nokia would have sold a lot of phones if they have gone with Andriod.
Many people would have lept at a Nokia smartphone running Android, given the consumer goodwill they've built up over the years. Few seem willing to do so for Nokias running WP7. Android was a proven platform with wide adoption when they announced their support for WP7; their decision to hitch their wagon to MS can only be seen as a grave mistake.
Maybe things will turn around, but it doesn't look likely at this point.
Instead of having a good chunk of that massive growth to 70%, they chose WP7 which lost them marketshare, and still have to split any money made with the carrier AND MS.
I don't see how this is currently a win for them atall.
They abandoned their suppliers, retailers and customers without any meaningful avenue for transition/upgrade.
What did they possibly expect from that disastrously stupid announcement Feb '11?
2. It's cheap. In fact you can buy a Lumia for free, since it's $200 - $100 promo - $100 rebate for a data glitch. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/04/nokia-to-give-lu...
3. Maybe people are buying now because they actually bought into all the marketing hype. I mean Nokia rented Times Square, so someone probably found that compelling.
What we're seeing with Nokia, BestBuy etc. is the companies that didn't adapt facing extinction. It should be happening to more - but they're being propped up artificially - that can't be sustained indefinitely.
If you think the valuation for Instagram was wild - look at their metric trends against these monoliths.
"but Instagram don't make anything" - in the western world we don't really need to consume physical products so much any more - I've got 5+ TVs in the house and 3 fridges - our consumption is moving to non-physical products.
Sometimes, it just doesn't work out.
HTC? Somehow the myth that HTC is losing money has become a meme, when actually HTC is doing gangbusters, just not as handsomely as they did before Samsung started soaking up Apple-like profits. I suspect HTC will do quite well on the backs of the One X and One S.
Motorola would have long been a gravestone if not for Android. So would have SE and LG.
Most reviews of the last Symbian phone saw it as a quickly evolving, credible device. Elop seemed to give up right when it was coming to fruition.
Elop could have done a few Android lines to hold the decline while working on the Symbian at the same time, I agree. But then any promotion and development would have been borne by Nokia. Granted they'd own Symbian but it's worth would have been questionable (see WebOS as one possibility.)
If it doesn't work people will question the wisdom but, IMO, going with Windows was a good bet given the circumstances. I am rooting for them and for lots of Android and WebOS forks.
I like Nokia, I like their products and the fact that they did a totally new design for Lumnia, when cloning is fashionable today. If you look around Youtube you will see videos of their phone surviving falls, run over by cars, submerging in water etc.
They chose the easier route, given that Windows Phone 7 wasn't ready for prime time either, and sat out of an emerging handset segment for years and for this they will pay dearly. They have to build themselves as a brand in the new smartphone market, a game that seems to be already taken. IMHO, short of a major innovation from Nokia in the near future, their smartphone business will go the way of the Blackberry; I have no idea is they will still want to keeps their low end models after the dust settles.
I think if they fail with MS, they would have failed with every other option as well. MS is the best option but it is perhaps much too late.
By that, I suppose you mean Meego.
I have recently used a N9 phone running Meego for a couple of hours and it was a real pleasure. In many regards it's better than Android has been until recently. It's snappy and looks well finished although look-wise there's work to make it compelling.
It's not really fair to give any real feedback on such a short utilization span but I wouldn't say the OS is "nowhere near ready".
Had they spent the same effort on Meego rather than on integrating the Windows OS, they would have a very, very good OS.
With Qt, they would also have very good technical fundation for developpers. Love or hate it, Qt programmers are very loyal to the library and praise it. With its ease of use, it could have been a developper-frendly platform.
I'd write a Qt app over a Dalvic-Java or Obj-C one anyday.
What I'd like to note on this story is that most tech writers feared that if Nokia didn't take this path, they would be shamed and welcomed their move. Now, given the sales both Microsoft and Nokia are shamed for taking this path.
I was an N900 user before that. I hoped Nokia would be a shining beacon in the mobile space, with an open operating system and a more GNU/Linux software stack than just the kernel. But those hopes were shattered by Elop's turn. I guess Microsoft will continue to drive Nokia's market price further into the ground so they can buy them for a few pennies.
Bestbuy and Nokia are facing very different problems. For Nokia, the market's there and even speeding up because of tight upgrade schedule, it's just they failed to move on smart phones for too long and are playing catchup. For Bestbuy, computers, routers, printers, etc. are reaching saturation and the things that aren't, the iPads and Kindles, their margins will be razor thin because people are buying the brand, not the generic product. Maybe I'm wrong, but if you were Apple would you give Bestbuy anything more than scraps?
Is this what Microsoft and the Nokia BoD planned when they hired Elop, who scrapped Meego and their N9 (now N900 running WP7) and wiped out their entire existing "burning platform" revenue stream from Symbian?
This was all planned - it's not a disaster. The problem is, the plans may have been too successful.
Disproportionately high or low ? I guess what they are saying is that smartphone profitability is falling due to lower margins.
MS/Nokia are in huge trouble, especialy after seeing that report that google makes almost no money off smartphones. It seems the only way for Nokia/MS to really compete with google is to also make no money. Sounds like Nokia is now in the wrong business.
MSFT's only hope in mobile, and their only reason for going there is to be the standard business solution - the only one that works with MS-exchange, MS-domain-emperor(or whatever it's called today) and MS-office cloud.
Once you ensure that corporates/government only allow MS mobile devices onto their networks you have a pretty nice market sewn up. And one that doesn't care about price and buys new kit regularly
The only tricky bit is persuading all those corporate and government customers that they haven't had a perfectly workable blackberry solution for years, and that they shouldn't save money by allowing workers to use their own iPhones.
Even government organizations are buying lots of iPhones, even though Apple is an obnoxious vendor for those organizations to deal with.
Microsoft sells stuff these days by bundling product licensing. So unless Apple does something really dumb, you're not going to see enterprises mandating anything Microsoft mobile other than ActiveSync anytime soon.
The only reason not to is a DoJ monopoly investigation - and Apple would have a task persuading the government that they are the victims of monopolies in the smartphone world!
It was easier for things like this to happen back when everyone was carrying a company-issue blackberry (because blackberries were too expensive for most consumers.)
These days, companies are increasingly just letting their employees connect personal devices onto their exchange servers (with policy management) and enjoying the savings from not having to pay for the device, data, or both. I can't see either group (companies and employees) being happy about reversing this trend.
In the Microsoft -Nokia agreement Microsoft wins disproportionately and Nokia loses even if it wins.
If Nokia wins e.g with tablets, other companies will use Windows, if it loses stock price goes down and Microsoft buys it(now officially) for cheap.
Elop looked and looks like a MS insider designed for the transition from Nokia to Microsoft subsidiary.
Funny how Samsumg and Apple margins are "disproportionate" when Nokia used to carry those margins with their high quality phones.
I wonder what the implications would be for Qt and KDE. I know Microsoft has made some Linux commits in the past (in regards to its own interests), but I can't imagine how it would justify actively developing a product which has no place on Windows Phone (yet?) and only serves to weaken Windows' stranglehold on the desktop.
My main concern is that, despite the open governance, to my knowledge the development and direction of Qt is still primarily driven by employees of Nokia. I'm sure Qt would still do a fine job of existing and evolving under the leadership of KDE contributors, but it would nevertheless be a major blow to the framework to see so much talent whisked away at this critical time.
2. I guess we will start seeing the Nokia MS partnership success going forward when Nokia really has a chance of adding value to MS products.
I agree that Nokia took on the insane task of reviving themselves as well as MS. But if they can get some sort of adoption with WP7, they can continue to survive and add value to the ecosystem going forward with WP8. They have to continue on life support until their true strategy kicks in to place.
I doubt that. The biggest change was that the mobile devices turned from devices (that people buy and use, but rarely get 3rd-party software for) into platforms (that people buy to have access to 3rd-party software). The big difference is that there are not that much positive externalities for market share for devices, but positive network effects absolutely determine the platform market.
That's why Windows rules the desktop, and that is why Android will do so in the handset. I predict that all competitors will effectively be dead in 2 years, and only Android and iOS remain.
But if Nokia is successful and WP dominates, what's to stop everyone else from using WP as well? I guess skinning it, which is one of Nokia's rights in the Nokia-Microsoft deal, but that's like what HTC is doing with Sense and Samsung with TouchWiz. It's not as if a skin will really give you an edge.
The only real way to have won is to have your own OS and to be in control it. Meego might have worked better for Nokia than WP7 long-term since Nokia could influence the direction Meego was going in.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/04/09/the-very-s...
Most stores closed on Easter Sunday and recordings talking about the iPhone 4S. I would say Nokia is done.