Nokia...going, going...not quite gone!

Robbo said:
Nokia and WP7 will save each other if they get this right. You'll see.

As people will continue to point out, most people have phones on contracts and aren't really bothered about changing phone all the time, so it's a very tough market, especially for software that does indeed need improvements.
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maybe, but I'm not convinced...by the time Nokia gets here the OS will be obsolete at this rate! Plus with long contracts most people won't be tempted to jump across to a new OS. Most people I know who were Nokia fans are now on HTC and/or Android
 
I know..but it's quite sad really isn't it. WP7 *should* be selling much better, Nokia *should* be doing better....Bada consist of a handful of phones that look very similiar, and it's doing much better!
 
3dcandy said:
I know..but it's quite sad really isn't it. WP7 *should* be selling much better, Nokia *should* be doing better....Bada consist of a handful of phones that look very similiar, and it's doing much better!
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It hasn't really been marketed very well though, I've never seen any advertising for it anywhere except one advert on TV by Orange which made it look good but it's simply not enough.

I think when the Nokia phone is out with Mango, they'll really go to town with advertising and it will be make or break time. I think (and hope) it will make it.
 
3dcandy said:
Also sales aren't everything when you can't get a decent margin...and Nokia are really hurting there. As I said way back in this thread, Nokias losses are huge, and look like they are going to get bigger before they recover. It really, really is looking back for Nokia as we know it...
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Well, I don't know if sales are EVERYTHING but they're worth a lot more than you think. It doesn't matter if they make a pittance on each handset: if they've got the dumbphone market sewn up with 90% of market share in some countries, then when those people eventually decide to shift to a smartphone, a Nokia one is the first one they'll look for! And those people, in markets where people still mostly buy dumbphones, are far more important than you or me: developed markets are becoming saturated - another few years and everyone who wants a smartphone will have one, and the only new sales will be once every year or three when you upgrade! Developing countries, where Nokia have a massive market dominance with those cheap dumbphones, are the next golden goose!

Also, it's more than just about the phones in places like that. I remember reading recently about some bank in Nigeria who partnered up with a mobile network to set up mobile phone banking via text message. You can do it on a primitive dumbphone from 1995 and if you live in a village 20 miles from the nearest retail bank branch it's a lifesaver. Well, guess who gets paid a little bit of money by the bank in exchange for every single phone sold that has the banking software built into it?

To be fair, Microsoft have given Nokia a lot of leeway to put WP7 on lower-end models, so they can continue to pursue those markets, but with them paying £30 per phone sold to MS the very lowest end of the market, which is where they build the most brand loyalty, will be impossible to tap! They'll have to continue selling Symbian dumbphones to those people, whereas, if they had gone with Meego, they could have put that on the lower-end phones as well (it's Linux, so it's free), and provided a consistent ecosystem from the very lowest-end handsets to the top-of-the-range superphones.
 
englishpremier said:
All these articles look at the market share of "new" smartphone. Not the actual market share.

For example there could be close to 1bn (made up figure) Nokia smartphone users at the moment. even is nokia sell none and Android and Apple shift 100m units a year, that would still take close to 10 years before they been Nokia's market share.

I know that's not really what we're discussing, but it's worth baring in mind.
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Yeah very true, the number of people who already have Symbian handsets is massive. That was another bonus for Meego: the Qt development environment meant you could write an app for it and it would work seamlessly with Symbian as well. That's A LOT of potential customers!

And remember, Meego wasn't just for phones, there's lots of companies (including Intel, who are pushing it very hard - it's their only bet to get x86 CPUs onto phones and tablets!) who are working on releasing netbooks and tablets running Meego as well, so if you made a simple mobile phone game for the N9, all you need to do is stick it on Intel's AppUp store and it'll make its way to millions of bigger machines as well!

And as if that weren't enough, Qt apps will also run on Windows, MacOS and full Linux, and they've just announced official support for QNX as well (so they'll also run on Playbooks and future RIM phones). And, of course, on Maemo, for those poor neglected N900 users!:p There's also unofficlal projects trying to get it to run on iOS and WebOS! Hell, I read it'll even run on WM5/6! (no idea how well though)

It just goes to show how self-contradictory and disingenuous Elop was. If this was a war of "ecosystems" as you called it, why jump onto a platform with only a handful of estalished users, instead of sticking with Qt and tapping into an already established market of tens of millions of Symbian users as well as hundreds of millions of users of other OS including the most popular desktop ones!! If you're a developer, would you rather write for WP7, or, with a single stroke, release your app for Meego, Symbian, QNX, and, through AppUp, Windows, Mac, and Meego laptops and tablets?

And even if I'm wrong on Qt and it wouldn't be as easy as that, there's still good reasons to stick with Meego in the form of Alien Dalvik, which will let Meego phones run any Android app like magic! Works on the Playbook already. Why not launch a phone with a pre-existing application library of millions of apps instead of having to beg, cajole and bribe devs to write for WP7?

I'm not dissing WP7 here, I actually kind of like it, I'm just questioning Elop's reasons for going with WP7 when he was already sitting on the slickest, smoothest, most powerful mobile OS today in the form of Meego, and, through QT, could have plugged it into an established ecosystem of millions of apps and tens of millions of Symbian and other existing users!

I've read the Iliad, and I know how this story ends.

EDIT: on Dalvik: http://www.slashgear.com/nokia-n9-android-app-support-promised-with-alien-dalvik-22160809/
 
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manveruppd said:
Well, I don't know if sales are EVERYTHING but they're worth a lot more than you think. It doesn't matter if they make a pittance on each handset: if they've got the dumbphone market sewn up with 90% of market share in some countries, then when those people eventually decide to shift to a smartphone, a Nokia one is the first one they'll look for! And those people, in markets where people still mostly buy dumbphones, are far more important than you or me: developed markets are becoming saturated - another few years and everyone who wants a smartphone will have one, and the only new sales will be once every year or three when you upgrade! Developing countries, where Nokia have a massive market dominance with those cheap dumbphones, are the next golden goose!

Also, it's more than just about the phones in places like that. I remember reading recently about some bank in Nigeria who partnered up with a mobile network to set up mobile phone banking via text message. You can do it on a primitive dumbphone from 1995 and if you live in a village 20 miles from the nearest retail bank branch it's a lifesaver. Well, guess who gets paid a little bit of money by the bank in exchange for every single phone sold that has the banking software built into it?

To be fair, Microsoft have given Nokia a lot of leeway to put WP7 on lower-end models, so they can continue to pursue those markets, but with them paying £30 per phone sold to MS the very lowest end of the market, which is where they build the most brand loyalty, will be impossible to tap! They'll have to continue selling Symbian dumbphones to those people, whereas, if they had gone with Meego, they could have put that on the lower-end phones as well (it's Linux, so it's free), and provided a consistent ecosystem from the very lowest-end handsets to the top-of-the-range superphones.
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That's very well but Nokia's problem is that sales are tanking in developing places and Samsung is taking up the majority of the slack. They've gone from like 80% market share to 20% in a QUARTER! I'd imagine that they'd be in single digits next quarter and will result in an actual sales drop of approx 100 million. Yes, they're gonna lose 100 million sales in 3 months. No company, however big can sustain that kind of loss of sales, and with the losses it will incur they'll be gone sharpish!
 
3dcandy said:
That's very well but Nokia's problem is that sales are tanking in developing places and Samsung is taking up the majority of the slack. They've gone from like 80% market share to 20% in a QUARTER! I'd imagine that they'd be in single digits next quarter and will result in an actual sales drop of approx 100 million. Yes, they're gonna lose 100 million sales in 3 months. No company, however big can sustain that kind of loss of sales, and with the losses it will incur they'll be gone sharpish!
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Yeah but that's because of the announcement that they're done with Symbian 4 months ago. People don't want to buy into a dead platform with no development future.

They still would've had to phase Symbian out in a year or two anyway to switch to Meego, but at least then people would know that all the apps they bought for their Symbian phones would still work on Meego - that's a big incentive to stay with Nokia! (I mean if you had £200 worth of iPhone apps would you easily move to Android?)
 
Well that's pretty obvious isn't it, and the root of the problem. As I've said countless times, I was in the market for a new phone and no-one pushed Nokia or recommended them at all. Couple people I spoke to said they were dead already and didn't really expect them to sell once WP7 came along either. In fact most were very dismissive of WP7 and it was even called crap and rubbish a few times. It's turning into the suicide of a once great company...
 
3dcandy said:
Well that's pretty obvious isn't it, and the root of the problem. As I've said countless times, I was in the market for a new phone and no-one pushed Nokia or recommended them at all. Couple people I spoke to said they were dead already and didn't really expect them to sell once WP7 came along either. In fact most were very dismissive of WP7 and it was even called crap and rubbish a few times. It's turning into the suicide of a once great company...
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People that say Nokia are "dead already" don't know what they are talking about. I agree they have some issues when it comes to the high end phone market but they are certainly not dead.

Most professional people actually like WP7 as I've said before, sure, not everyone is going to like it. Not everyone likes Android, not everyone likes iOS, but there is certainly nothing wrong with WP7 once they get the (admittedly slow coming) Mango update out.

And as I've said before too, you'll sell phones on a big scale to the 'dumb' general public, they make for the majority of the sales numbers, so the advertising has to be excellent (just look at Apple for proof of this). So far it has been nearly non-existent.
 
Yes Robbo - not disputing anything you say...BUT when you're in the market and the people tasked with selling you a phone aren't interested in and brand a believe it to be dead, would a dumb member of the public still buy it? Like I've said, people I know who have had Nokia for last 10 years plus have all moved to something else...I don't know anyone who has bought a Nokia recently, I don't know anyone who's looking at getting a WP7 phone or has actually expressed an interest...
 
That comes down to two things, whether or not the general public think Nokia are dead (I suspect the majority don't have a clue :p) and how well everything is advertised and recommended by professional publications.

I think on the face of it all, the general public have a lot of faith in Nokia and Microsoft.
 
flibbage0 said:
Well most teenagers think Nokia are dead.

Pretty sure they make up quite a big chunk of the smartphone user market.
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What are you basing that on? What your friends all say?

Even if that was the general perception, Nokia can still turn it around. They've made some very big (and very expensive) mistakes though, it does genuinely confuse me. If I was in charge of Nokia they would be raking it in :p
 
Robbo - I think you're kinda missing the point here. Friends, work colleagues etc. have a great say in what people buy! Have you seen this great app/phone etc. Look at my Sensation/Galaxy S II/iPhone. Kids are getting Blackberry's because their mates have BBM and it's free. Facebook free messaging app is here for android and ios. I don't see many people touting their new Nokia or WP7 phone and saying it's great. Perception is Nokia are rubbish and out of date. Older people don't buy smartphones in general and go with the advice given or get kids cast offs. Nokia have a huge, if possibly impossible job to turn this around. Yes if they advertise it like crazy it could get some traction, but being hammered by even Bada makes me wonder if it's game over already. I can only really see 3 main OS's and that, at the moment means iOS, Android and Blackberry. Several smaller ones might be ok, but even Bada has under 2% of sales. WP7 updates are so behind already I'm wondering what's going on. I don't want to see Nokia fail...but they're already at least 2 thirds of the way down that path...
 
I'm not missing the point, I'm just saying people are far to keen to write them off when they have the backing and full support of one of the biggest companies in the world, and they are still very much a popular household name.

Microsoft wouldn't be ploughing money into this if they thought Nokia were already dead, not a chance. Nokia have certainly shot themselves in the foot over the past few years though, certainly.

And WP7 aside, Nokia still have a huge market share.
 
WP7 is far from rubbish!!! It's just that anything branded as "Windows" doesn't have the "cool factor" so the spotty 17-year-olds you talked to in CPW turned their greasy noses up at it.

In fact it's a decent operating system, stable, fast, LOVE the UI, and the whole platform seems to be a half-decent compromise between the monolithic fascism of Apple's walled garden and the fragmented quagmire of hardware fragmentation and custom bloatware UIs that Android phones get burdened with.

All I'm saying is Nokia had a much better OS than WP7 in its own house. One that was royalty-free to lisence, far more flexible and powerful than any of the others, and which had the support of Intel (possibly the most powerful technology firm in the world!) and of a huge and experenced Linux deve community, as well as a piece of software engineering magic in the form of Qt that would've allowed Meego apps to tap into the huge established Symbian customer base.

But Elop decided it couldn't make it work! They decided it wasn't good enough and they weren't developing it fast enough and they didn't have the ecosystem or services, so what do they do? They decide to adopt a brand new OS with expensive royalties, a tiny userbase and a thinly-populated app store! Does that make sense? PARTICULARLY considering they were still (up until the "burning platform" memo) the top vendor of both smartphones and dumbphones in the world? Who quits the race while still in the lead, unless there was some other incentive there?

And now that the N9 is getting rave reviews (even by people like Engadget who were previously pessimistic about its prospects - it even got a post on BoingBoing who almost never make a post just to say "look at this great-looking new phone!"), Elop is in a pickle, cause his dissemblence is being exposed: Meego makes WP7 look like last year's OS. His burning platform turned out to be just a small butane burner on which aromatic coffee was brewing and delicious marshmallows were burning, so what's a poor little Trojan Horse to do? Just don't let anyone have an N9! Not going to be in the UK, not going to be in the US, not going to be in Germany... I will put £100 down right now as a bet that in a year there'll be a press release from Nokia calling the N9 a commercial failure and saying that Meego will now be abandoned completely! Wow, really? You kept it out of the 3 biggest markets and it turned out a financial failure? How did that happen!!

Sorry, I'm ranting, but that's because if I had any shares in Nokia I would be unbelievably angry about this. Elop caused a market leader to capitulate on the game they themselves invented while they were still in first place! They've lost invaluable in-house expertise with all the downsizing, and have basically relegated themselves to a 2nd-tier OEM for Microsoft.

I don't know if the ultimate goal was to drive the share price down far enough for Microsoft to buy them - I'm not sure MS would gain anything from owning Nokia outright. But they basically already "own" them because Nokia are up **** creek without a paddle. They HAD a paddle in the form of Symbian, but Elop threw it overboard. They also had a perfectly good diesel-powered outboard motor, but Elop decided they couldn't afford to wait another 6 months until it was finished. So now they're just sitting their in their canoe, with the WP7-branded new paddle, being charged $50 per stroke every time they dip it in the water.
 
flibbage0 said:
Well most teenagers think Nokia are dead.

Pretty sure they make up quite a big chunk of the smartphone user market.
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Most teenagers use Blackberrys so your argument is somewhat flawed given whats going on at RIM.

And i would debate that they make up a big chunck - most teenagers dont have the disposable income to buy into long contracts on expensive phones - i know i didnt back then!

One key point is that average joe public doesnt even know what OS runs on what phone. Two friends of mine were chatting about how alike their phones were (one HTC and one Samsung) before i pointed out they both run Android...they both looked blankly at me - granted they were both female but the point remains.

If Nokia and MS throw enough backing behind WP7 when Nokia launches i think it will be a success. Not easy but with their combined clout its possible.
 
also Nokia have not even released a WP7 device yet! And since announcing they would be making WP7 devices they have binned off symbian and relegated Meego even further. its kinda obvious this was going to happen and market share / sales were going to take a pounding - a cant believe nokia thought otherwise.

it does make it a bit of an 'all eggs in one basket' scenario mind...the first nokia WP needs to be pretty special or it could be the beginning of the end.
 
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