“Now that the dust has settled after Stephen Elop’s big announcement on the 11th February 2011, many have come to realise that actually Nokia’s move towards a a new Ecosystem is not as bad as what they thought. […] But what does all this mean for the Nokia Developers? When the proposed partnership with Microsoft was announced, many felt betrayed and worried about their future, but after having heard and assisted a number of workshops at the Nokia Developer Day at this years Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, earlier this month, their outlook towards the new ecosystem has taken a 180 degree turn and are now looking at the proposed partnership with a lot more enthusiasm, recognising the potential it will bring them in the coming months.”
“their outlook towards the new ecosystem has taken a 360 degree turn” A 360 degree turn means that you end up in the same place where you started. You meant a 180 degree turn
“their outlook towards the new ecosystem has taken a 360 degree turn”
No this is correct. They have ended up where they started but with a phase delay…
That’s just pure marketing speak, nothing factual.
Obviously if we only listened to Microsoft announcements, we’d think Microsoft is the best company under the Sun. Market share numbers, however, paint a very different picture. Also, that last part about iOS and Android is just pure enthusiastic speculation.
In all I find the article just a piece of biased propaganda with very little factual substance (including the video, which is just pure marketing-style “customer testimony” stuff).
Couldn’t be bothered to watch the video, but I assume they trimmed all the negative or rational commenters from the scene…
RIP Nokia…
Indeed. The reality is WP7 is still being outsold by its predecessor, never mind competing platforms.
Mac OS X was outsold for months on end by Mac OS 9.
That’s not really a fair comparison.
Apple had somewhat lost their way in pushing their products to the home user. Thus Mac’s were primarily used in the creative industry rather than as a home computing platform. So the majority of sales wouldn’t have been from home users wanting the next best thing – it would have been from users dependant on their computer. If you compare this trend with Windows, then you’ll see that XP outsold Me / 2000 in it’s launch, which in turn was outsold by Vista and now by 7 – as there are/were enough “casual” PC users per business user to promote the sales of the new technology.
In fact I worked for the IT department of a publishing house around the time OS X was released and some workstations where still running OS8 let alone 9 / X for that very reason. It’s also the same as how all the workstations in my current job are still running XP despite most homes now running Vista and Win7 (though as I said before, the ratio of home vs business user for Windows is greater than was for Macs back in 2000).
Also lets not forget that mobile phones, have a much shorter life than desktop / laptop computer – to the point when phones are often regarded as disposable toys – and are often bought based on what’s shiney and new rather than what’s proven to be dependable.
I don’t think I’ve explained this very well but I hope you get my point.
How is that, that a cell phone frequently costing as much as a decent laptop is treated as a disposable 15 mniutes play toy, and the laptop isn’t?
Edited 2011-02-28 18:11 UTC
Size of the package *ahem*
I asked about consumer perception of durability more that a feature parity.
Somehow consumers were convinced that a luxry good the smarthone definately is could be easily disposed like a say, mp3 player. The acceptance for poor durability regardless of the price point follows.
As I’d already said, it’s simply because most smart phone owners don’t buy their phone like they buy their MP3 player not laptop. But get it “free” on a contract or as a “hand me down” from a friend who’s on a contract.
Obviously they/I still pay for the phone as the networks cover their cost with their phone tarif. However the perception of getting something for free is still there and thus the item is treated as desposable
First off, I don’t know where you live but in the UK you can’t buy decent laptops for the same price as even a top end smart phone.
However, to address your question, quite simply because phone contracts disperse the cost of handsets over a 12 to 24 month period. Thus the cost of a handset becomes almost transparent. Add to that moving to a new contract (even with the same network provider) is always sold as an “upgrade” because you receive a new “free” handset (which again is absorbed in the cost of the network usage).
Plus those that buy their smart phones outright buy cheaper ones (as they’re after a cheaper alternative to expensive contracts) and all the rest likely have “hand me downs” from friends / relatives so don’t pay much if anything at all.
Thus the cost people spend up front for phones does not even come close to the cost people spend up front for new computers.
I don’t know about the English, Irish or Welsh, but I’m sure no true Scotsman would buy anything less than a decent laptop. That’s for sure.
The situation isn’t exactly analogous. Apple grew its market share because they were able to deliver something Microsoft couldn’t, a nicely packaged hardware+software bundle that worked out of the box and had a great user experience. However, Android handset makers are able to customize the OS (and, arguably, to a much larger degree than to which Nokia will be allowed to customize WP7), and therefore do not suffer from the disadvantage that PC OEMs have.
yeah.. Osx 10.0 was horrible. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. That comparison is an insult to windows phone 7 in its current state.
A better one might be that apple II’s out sold the first macs for a while.
Agreed.
http://twitter.com/valhalla101
The video was posted by Nokia Forum, of course it’s biased, they showed opinions of people that said Nokia N8 was the best device ever.
If you want to know how people really feel, dive into the comments on conversations.nokia.com, or take a gander at maemo.org. It’s blatantly obvious that Nokia’s existing developer base is livid, and Nokia’s existing customer base is pretty fed up, too.
Largely, the only developers excited about this are people that weren’t part of Nokia’s developer ecosystem to begin with. Likewise, most of the consumers that are excited about this have no sense of brand loyalty to Nokia. That may get some new users that happen to be interested in WP7, but they sure as hell aren’t going to look at Nokia any differently than any other Microsoft OEM.
This is just damage control by Nokia. To think this has anything to do with how the people working there feel (positive or negative) is a bit naive.
(why is the title an editable field when you cant actually edit it?)
Edited 2011-02-28 16:28 UTC
I always had Nokia phones and I was quite happy with them. I think the decision to use WP7 on their future phones was a big mistake for Nokia. If WP7 will be a success, Nokia will be totally depend on Microsoft, but Microsoft will not depend on Nokia and I really doubt Microsoft cares much for Nokia as a company. Just have a look at how the Microsoft-IBM cooperation turned out. If WP7 will not be a success, Nokia will be doomed anyway. I don’t know if the alternatives (MeeGo, Android) would have been better, but at least they would not became dependent on Microsoft, which ruined a lot of companies before.
and Microsoft relationships also helped a lot of companies .. like basically every Windows OEM. Lol.
Or the thousands of small businesses who’ve invested in Microsoft’s platform to reap the benefits and get dirt cheap equipment/tools.
People just seem to focus on some high profile sour deals, but partnerships with MSFT happen and are successful every day of the year.
Nokia will not only make money off of WP7 handsets THEY sell, they will make money in licensing fees from WP7 devices OTHER OEMs sell since they will be also selling their services. That’s significant value add.
They’d be just another OEM had they gone with Android. Let’s be real, almost every OEM customization done to Android is fucking terrible. That’s crappification, not differentiation.
Different kind of “partnership”. MS has a history of bad partnerships, the kind that Nokia has now entered into. well, bad for the non-MS party, that is.
And now they’ll probably end up just another OEM anyway, especially if WP7 becomes a success and other companies also wants it. It’s pretty damn unlikely that Nokia will be favored then.
The argument is that given the choices, Windows Phone 7 was seen as the best one. I think that’s pretty much true.
They could have gone it alone (MeeGo) but that’s a significant question mark. Could they have readied it in time? Pushed a competent developer ecosystem? Brought devices to market? At the end of the day what would differentiate it from Android, iOS, webOS, or Windows Phone 7?
Is the fact that its more “open” than Android going to translate into more handsets sold? Does the end user even know what that is?
The amount of question marks in the idea was staggering, not to mention based off of what Intel showed of MeeGo at Barcelona, very little development actually occured in a years time. The OS seemed woefully off track (Remember Microsoft went from reset to market with Windows Phone 7 in 18 months).
I think the arguments about Nokia becoming just another OEM are overblown. First off, if the units being moved have a Nokia logo on them, I doubt very much Nokia cares that it doesnt make the OS. In addition, if they get licensing fees from Samsung, HTC, etc. selling Windows Phone, then that’s even better. That’s a lot of bank.
Basically the only assumption they have to make, is that WP7 will eventually be successful. I’d say given the trajectory (marketing, developer ecosystem increase rate, and satisfaction reports) that its not too unrealistic to expect Windows Phone 7 to achieve some form of success relative to Android and iOS, especially moreso than webOS.
I think given what they knew, WP7 was the best decision Nokia could have made. Definitely better than Android in my opinion.
Nokia’s principal problem was horrendous mismanagement of their software. They had a working next-gen OS (Maemo) long before Google or Apple did – sure it was flaky, but they had almost 2 years before the first iPhone even came out (remember the Nokia 770 came out in November 2005). The Nokia N900 was a great phone for its time in 2009. And instead of incremental upgrades on it (by developing MeeGo on the side and using Maemo as the main OS, possibly incorporating backported Qt support from MeeGo to Maemo – not that hard to do) they decided to go the software revolution route, which works out in the rarest of cases. WP7 is one of those revolutions and we still have to see it succeed. I’m not claiming it won’t, eventually – Microsoft has always used its enormous reserves to allow them to try multiple times over, until they get it right.
The “open” aspect isn’t what the end user will care about. What they will, however, care about, is having the power of a full PC in their pocket (needs proper marketing, of course). Android, iOS and WP7 are all specialized phone operating systems. They use specialized toolkits, specialized development environments and provide only a limited set of tools. If your idea doesn’t fit in their development paradigm, though luck. The power of full operating systems is that they don’t provide too many assumptions – you can do anything you like with them.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and provide my personal idea of what Maemo could have become using its more “open” nature than Android. Since it’s much easier to port desktop software to it (than to, say, Android), why not build a Maemo device capable of Bluetooth peripheral attachments and HDMI (or possibly wireless) video output. You no longer have to drag that netbook around – it’s just shrunk to the size of your pocket.
Here’s where crappy middle management gets you – pour as many resources into a project as you like, with bad management you might as well have burned the money in a furnace.
I agree wholeheartedly (and don’t know why you were downranked). However, say you’re Elop coming in to find this mess, what is the sanest choice for you? Try to get MeeGo on track which would probably take even longer given the state of things, or adopt Windows Phone 7?
Elop made a decision in the best interest of Elop, not Nokia shareholders. There is little short-term or mid-term gain for Nokia’s profitability. The complete incompetence shown by Elop and his team announcing this partnership (“all-in”) has basically prematurely ended the revenue stream of existing Nokia devices on the market in exchange for creating 0/zero/none excitement about a non-existent future product. No one will buy a new gadget that is known to be end-of-life. They f*cked that up royally and took down those of us who invested many years in Nokia ecosystem.
Long-term success of WP7 is even a riskier proposition than Meego ever was. No one who is thinking of buying a new smartphone will consider a WP7 phone over an iOS/Android/Blackberry device for at least several product iterations if ever.
The next shareholder’s meeting is going to be pretty fun. Directors are going to either be shown the door, invited to resign, or Nokia as a EU technology company ceases to exist. Pretty much the bottom line.
Oh yeah, Symbian, which sells as much volume as Android does in its entirety, is going to, over night, just fall off of the map because of a partnership with Microsoft. Keep dreaming.
In fact, given Symbian’s current trajectory, it is likely they’ll meet their sales figure before finally sunsetting the Symbian platform.
And Nokia has had like 10 articles on OSNews in the past month, several articles in the tech blogosphere, and mentioned in various major news networks. Yeah, to say they created no buzz is dishonest.
By all indications, Windows Phone 7 met the expectations of both carriers and most OEMs, so I don’t think its a reach to expect this kind of momentum to continue with more investment.
They have a growing developer ecosystem, which is growing on par with the Android ecosystem, and outpacing the iOS ecosystem in momentum.
Oh come on. WP7 is officially in the conversation now. There is awareness, and it will only grow. You need to look no further than when Android was but a whisper in people’s ears in the form of the G1. Things can change, very quickly. After all, the iPhone only arrived in 2006.
It always amuses me when people swear up and down they understand the corporate apparatus
. Nokia has chosen a new direction, its only direction, and sometimes true greatness requires pragmatism and pioneering. Look for the best way forward, and in this case, the best way forward happens to come from Redmond.
The flaw in your logic here is that Microsoft was behind here every single time. The real killer for Microsoft is that applications were appearing for the iPhone and now for Android giving them a strong installed base and inertia. The difference with Android is that it had greater supply with different phones being able to run it, but it’s still taken a long time for Android’s application base to catch up to iOS.
Microsoft are not going to get another chance and simply bulldoze their way in I’m afraid.
RPTFL. Becoming an OEM for Microsoft when they have miniscule market share is not exactly pionerring.
Saying that won’t make it true I’m afraid. You haven’t painted a very compelling case at all, and in many ways have outright contradicted yourself.
TBH that is exactly what pioneering is. I do believe that most pioneers end up dead, especially when they go pioneering off a cliff…
Pretty much everyone who I know in real life when they heard “Windows Phone 7” and “Nokia” .. they thought “Win”.
Most people I know love that Nokia’s hardware is bombproof, but that the software on anything that isn’t a basic phone is something to be desired.
Microsoft have something that Nokia needed, a fully working shiny polish product … a complete Smart Phone OS … Microsoft needed their OS on Phones.
Nokia IMO would have been stupid to try to put more cash into a platform that was going nowhere and way behind iOS and Android … whereas in terms of features Windows Phone 7 is probably only a generation behind if that.
pretty much everyone I know in real life when they heard “Windows Phone 7” and “Nokia” .. they thought “Fail”.
Neither point works very well as an anecdote..
It is bombproof because they didn’t need top of the range socs. Not saying their hardware design isn’t superlative but using less demanding internals gave them more flexibility when it came to the physical structure of the phone.
Somehow I doubt that any windows 7 phone they put out will be any less fragile than your average smartphone.
The thing is the only people that I know are mega against it are floss zealots on the internet. Normals don’t give fuck and will wait and see if the phones are any good or not … pretty much the same when Android hit the market.
Well at least it based on some facts whereas most of the stories on the Nokia/Microsoft deal are either FLOSS zealots getting all riled up … are insance speculation. Any rational view point that goes along the lines “Microsoft needed it on some hardware, and Nokia needed an OS” … seems to be attacked without mercy … or just ignored.
Fair point … but Nokia are known for good phone design even on their low end phones. S
My HTC Desire is built pretty well, It live in my work bag that has all my tools for my push bike, a spanner, allen keys etc … screen hasn’t been scratched (I don’t bother with a case) and there are a few superficial marks on the case … I don’t think they are any less robust than regular phones.
Alas, I’m afraid it is not just ‘zealots’ who are disillusioned with Nokia.
The ‘normals’ as you call them have contributed to Nokia’s freefall in market share because they see the iPhone and Android devices that Nokia don’t have anything like. The raw numbers don’t lie. C’est la vie.
Trying to get late to the game with a completely different platform in view of the inertia of iOS and Android with their app stores, and waiting until next year to do it, just isn’t going to work. You don’t need t be Einstein to see that.
Why? RIM control their platform. They’re thinking of adding Android platform support and are in control of their own destiny. WebOS is still around. The application inertia of iOS and Android is what is going to keep WP out in the cold and ensure Nokia’s final demise.
You have to look at the reasons behind Nokia’s platforms going nowhere, and the fault isn’t with the platforms or with competitors but with their own incompetence.
Tough call, I must agree, and I’m not disputing that Elop did what’s best for Nokia, only time will tell. However I don’t think that there are only 3 choices: MeeGo, WP7 and Android. I’d personally vote for a fourth: revive Maemo and upgrade it. Maemo is and was for a long time a finished product. The framework stack is sufficiently similar to allow a gradual transition to MeeGo, Qt can be incorporated as a second toolkit, and when the transition to MeeGo starts, Gtk can still be ported to MeeGo for backwards compatibility. Heck, no need to even port it yourself – keep both projects open and the community will gladly do it for you. Don’t keep a tight grip on every aspect of your platform, let people take it where they want to see it. Maemo had (and still partly has) a very vibrant community of interested and skilled individuals. Even though Google plays the open source tune, they are still a pretty much closed-source shop. At least Microsoft and Apple don’t pretend. Dropping this kind of bombshell announcement would whip up interest around your platform like crazy.
I’d say one of the primary reasons Nokia bought Qt in the first place is because GTK sucks. They tried for years to mobilize it with Hildon and couldn’t do it…
At this point Meego handset is far more capable than a zombfied corpse that is maemo and gtk (Hildon), those were fine 2 years ago, not so now..
Note that you’re also saying that debian could transform into fedora quite easily; As much as I like debian there is no way this is going happen smoothly. The point is moot as it has already happened.
Can’t dispute this point, as I’m not intimately familiar with Gtk’s architecture, so I can’t judge whether adding extensions for small screens would really be very difficult.
I haven’t used MeeGo recently, only watched videos of release 1.1 on testing platforms from about 3-4 months back and it still looked pretty crude. I have, however, a few experiences with Maemo and I’d hardly described it as a zombified corpse, though again, I’m not intimately familiar with the details of the platform, so I can’t comment on whether there are significant architectural hurdles to overcome. Can you please point me to some concrete objections to Maemo’s architecture?
I said no such thing. What I did say was that the framework stacks should be sufficiently similar. To illustrate my point: Gtk, Qt and a whole bunch of other frameworks (libraries) run just fine on both Fedora and Debian (and nearly any other distro, for that matter). Obviously not everything could be ported, e.g. software that messes around with distro-specific bits of the OS. However, well written software should not be that difficult to run nearly unmodified in either environment.
Can Not (it is fundamentally the same as Meego). There isn’t a major problem with its arch other than the fact that it is old and unmaintained and incompatible with the modern meego specs.For application development it is fine, but as a finished and hardened product, No.
Is there even system wide support for rotation, a modern kernel, recent X?
There is the current Qt mobility and Multimedia framework which abstracts things away. Power considerations, space considerations that are magnitudes worse in mobile environments. Then you have people using lower level frameworks that bring issues when using higher level frameworks. Fundamentally things will run on both, but there is breakage between distros especially at lower level userspace.
There is also a serious issue having two frameworks and telling developers “here start with this, it is old and unmaintained and just wait for the new hotness to come in bits and pieces” or “here use this, we will be replacing it soon so watch out”. This has the potential to create huge fragmentation, magnitudes worse than what is seen in android. Ultimately they aren’t aiming for an n900 where most of the community are developers, they want a consistent product or none at all.
Edited 2011-03-01 12:19 UTC
I agree that it is unmaintained, but “old” is a very relative word. Debian can easily bridge package version gaps far larger than ~1 year.
Please, do provide specific examples. My experience is that I’ve ported many years old and unmaintained software to newer systems with a mere recompile (if the binary didn’t just work out of the box anyway), even between fundamentally different operating systems (Linux, Solaris, Windows, etc.). If you plan ahead and don’t tie yourself to too many platform specific features, porting becomes relatively trivial.
Well, depends on what you consider to be “soon” and Gtk support can clearly be marked as legacy and/or deprecated, much in the same way Apple had supported Carbon on OSX, even though Cocoa was the right way to do it. Clearly it can be done.
Also I have a particular problem with the “we want customers, not developers” attitude that many companies exhibit. They assume they are in it alone and that they ship a closed and boxed product that you throw away after having used it more or less without modification. This was true for dumb and feature phones, but not at all for smart phones. With smart phones, people don’t just want the “out of the box” experience, they download software, modify settings and often do crazy things with their hardware. That’s the difference between platform and ecosystem. The aforementioned attitude is exactly what got Nokia into this mess.
Init Systems and Package Management Come to mind..
The problem is that application developers would have to start out with a gtk api then have Qt apis. So some apps would be using gtk libs and others Qt libs. And then you have both libs loaded on a memory and power constrained device
Problem is that to get the best developer output you have to provide them with a sane base to work with. This means no deprecated apis at the start of a products lifetime (that is absolutely insane but it is what you’re proposing), no conflicting apis or two apis to do the exact same thing, sensible apis, a sane development environment, decent documentation. Qt has all of those things, keeping gtk in the forefront would have just muddied the waters.
Nokia solved that problem on the N900 by providing a swap partition. Android and iOS solve that problem by not multitasking.
You have to devote flash space towards swap. I also question the wisdom of having swap on flash. As long swap is not used a lot then it is ok but otherwise…
I disagree.
They went with MeeGo to reduce costs and create synergies with Intel, not because it is architecturally superior or anything like that. Maemo is far more capable than what you think. QT is far more integrated than GTK, has better tools and does a lot more stuff. GTK is more modular, more simple and does what it does right. GTK has a proper at-spi binding.
The Android/iOS mindset is that one toolkit is enough for anybody. Simplicity is better than features, etc.
This is total non-sense. Less toolkit is more complexity and less features. MeeGo will have dalvik ported and bridge the gap that Android created with their additional toolkit.
Nokia made many technology bets that turned out to be not very wise. The biggest problem is that there did not seem to be a single person with a vision for where Nokia needed to be in say a year or two. Besides, Qt, was not the wisest choice either. Google decided to go with a Java derivative, Apple went with Objective C, and Microsoft with Silverlight. I think Nokia would have been wiser if they had licensed .NET from Microsoft to run on top of Linux or any other OS.
The biggest problem is that Nokia was fixated on the manufacturing process, and their global reach, and they
If Elop couldn’t get the company into shape with it’s own platform he shouldn’t have been given the job.
Given that they’ll be waiting around twiddling their thumbs for over a year while Windows phones appear they’re already dead.
Answer a few market place facts. Everyone else making WP7 devices is also Making Android. So competitors will make profit no matter what OS makes it. Nokia is bound basically to 1 OS. Not healthy really.
Android devices will start turning up Dual OS. Android for general usage. Ubuntu or some other arm based Linux for when docked. WP7 phones currently don’t have a docked mode.
Now you might say Windows 8. Phones are cost picky. The battle field is altering. MS bottom line will also have to alter.
How is Nokia going to play well in this upcoming market.
Feature Phones that are most of Nokia market is a dieing breed. Reason Android Smart Phones are turning up at the same price.
Nokia will be needing to make themselves new market.
The difference is in Nokia licensing their Ovi Maps and other technology to carriers, which is a revenue stream outside of direct WP7 sales.
However, Symbian wont just disappear, and they’ve actively said they’re continuing to use MeeGo as an experimental OS, so whatever comes at that will fuel the next major landscape change in the industry.
I really think this is a gimmick, I personally just can’t see how well this will be received. However, saying that it is coming to Android(as in not here yet, except for what has been reviewed as crappy Atrix implementation), and chiding WP7 for not having it yet is somewhat of a double standard.
The key is to upscale feature phone customers to smart phones, and that is achieved by pushing Windows Phone 7 to the mid range. Given the fact that Windows Phone 7 runs smoother using older generation Snapdragons than these new flashy dual core snapdragons and Tegras, I don’t think it should be too much of a problem.
Hey, this is by no means assured. They will have to try, but this was their best way forward.
Problem here. MeeGo is to the point it needs real world devices. There is only so much you can test in a emulator. Also no one makes apps for a OS without hardware. Others will have to take that lead. Android progress is partly due to early access to hardware.
Android appstore income percentage goes to the carrier. Ovi really changes nothing here.
And Symbian that is mostly Feature Phones. Is disappearing. At about 1 percent per month. So 4 years to completely disappear if that speed does not change. Some markets are showing faster disappearing rates.
Of course current forms appear gimmick. I will give you that. Issue here you saw it on duel core chips lacking cpu speed. Quad and greater number of cores is coming to arm chips in phones before end of year.
Its not only in Atrix by the way its in the Xoom as well. Xoom devices have been reviewing better for the dual mode. Xoom devices are a little more powerful than Atrix ones.
Also Atrix picked a really bad browser. Firefox is not known for performing on Linux. Chrome or Chromium would have given a lot better showing. There is a issue with sqlite that Firefox uses to store its data and the file systems in Linux. That causes a major performance hit on firefox.
Problem again dual core is going to be old hat by end of year. Also there is a problem. The dual core faster chips use less power than the older single core generation Snapdragon chips. So battery life you are going to lose using the older generation Snapdragon chips. Yes poor quality phones maybe will use the older generation Snapdragon chips. Even the new quad core designs use less than lot of current dual core chips. Arm adding extra cores really does not add a power hit.
Really Windows Phone 7 due to its CE roots will run into trouble on the duel and quad cores were the power effectiveness is. Lot of work has been done to the Linux kernel prepping it for this event.
Issue is there is no short cut out of work. In fact Nokia has chosen a OS that will need lots of work to get it ready on current day best of breed hardware.
There is a lack of valid arguments for WP7.
Best one really for WP7 is that its interface is design for the old with large buttons for people with vision trouble.
WP7 and Android really target two different market segments.
Really they are not trying there best and that is where problems are coming from.
Perhaps in the short term. The problem though is that this does NOT solve Nokia’s core problem: that they can’t deliver on time. If you can’t deliver on time, you can’t deliver on time. Changing phones isn’t going to change that. It’s a management problem and I’m still to see any management shakedown at Nokia.
If I was cynical I’d say this deal sounds like Elop realized how screwed Nokia really was and thought the best he could do was to make his MS stock go up.
This is the argument I see a lot on American tech blogs. I don’t get it. The choice was WP7 or Android, that is what you think? Why? Symbian is the best selling OS.
Android has had the biggest growth recently and outsold Symbian, right. People look at the chart and don’t understand what it means. People buy devices, they don’t buy OSes. 2 years ago, there was a few Android devices. Last year, every big manufacturer had a Android device, except Nokia, RIM and Apple. Every other manufacturer ditched Symbian and started producing Android devices instead. In that context, Android took market share from Symbian, no surprise here. Now look at how manufacturers producing Android phones instead of Symbian performed. Surprise: they shrunk. Motorola, LG and SE sold less devices in 2010 than in 2009. Nokia has had the biggest smartphone growth of all the manufacturers. Symbian grew faster than iOS and RIM. WP7 shrunk. Symbian is the 2nd fastest growing OS behind Android, and that is with less devices. Android grew from converting Symbian devices and shrunk the number of devices sold.
Only HTC and Samsung sold more devices in 2010. Samsung also sold Bada so there is no evidence that they sold more Android device than their previous Symbian line. Only HTC benefinted from Android.
Problem. Bada and Android are not independent OS’s. They share the same Linux core. So Bada is not a extra cost that much to Samsung. Same chipsets drive both same core drivers as well on the most part.
Total Bada and Android Samsung sold more phones than they did with Symbian by a large margin.
HTC was not a very major player in direct sales before Android in fact HTC was making devices for other makers. Some of the conversion to HTC is that HTC cut out the middle man.
HTC is the new wild card. Lowering markups. Samsung also responded correctly and has been rewarded with larger numbers of sales.
As in any market reshape there are winners and there are loses. Symbian. Is losing.
Symbian is loosing because Nokia got schizophrenic and committed suicide.
Nokia was winning and Symbian was the 2nd fastest growing OS despite loosing manufacturer support. Now Android will stabilize as there are no new manufacturer planning to switch, and Symbian would have become the fastest growing OS again.
Symbian lost because Nokia killed it along with itself.
Stop fooling yourself. There are still many more manufacturers to come. Some of the prior china fake makers of Nokia and the like devices are moving over to making legal devices. Really like HTC producers that were hidden in the shadows.
Symbian lost for many reasons. Motorola in a lot of markets was the second most dominate for a long time as well. And they were selling Linux based devices not Symbian. Motorola has also taken a shock to the core from the changes in market place going on.
Big thing you are overlooking. The reduced number of phones sold is a side effect of Smart phones becoming more dominate. Yes its a defect. Most Smart phone OS still don’t contain ideal tools to migrate all user setting and apps from one phone to another.
What was going on with Symbian was a person would get a new phone contract and buy another phone to look cool an new. Phones like Android and iphone you have hours if not days to get the new phone felling like the old one.
Yes Android and iphone is making the phone market smaller. As Android and iphone numbers keep on expanding less sales. The 3 to 4 year phone could become common. Compared to the prior 2 year or less phone.
So even once Android has no more makers to take up. The phone market is not going to be the same ever again.
You should stop fooling yourself too. The market is not the same as 2 years ago but 2 years ago it was not the same as 2 years earlier and it won’t be the same 2 years ahead. The mobile phones are at constant revolution. There is no way a mobile phone can last 3 years and not look outdated. This is because we are still in the stone age of the mobile phones. All phones suck, all of them. You think your shiny touch screen is cool but in 2 years you will laugh at yourself for buying such a brick that you had to plug everyday just to make phone calls.
Remember PC people might laugh at the brick they own but it will cost more time to migrate off it. So a lot of people keep PC’s until they are no functional.
Keeping phones until they fail is not what the phone makers are use to. Lower sales are going to come.
The migrate cost is a nasty effect smart phones introduce. Lot of work has to be done yet.
There is a big difference between PC and smartphones.
I have a 6 years old PC. It looks, act and feel like a PC I bought yesterday. It could run Windows 7 just as well as the latest high end PC in the store. There is no practical difference. The PC is mature. Windows evolves once every decade and they just add some eye candy. There is only one OS. OK, there are a lot of alternatives to Windows but they are all the same. What is the difference between Ubuntu and Windows these days? We are pretty far from the days of the Amiga and constant revolution.
Now the smartphone market is another story. I have a 6 month old smartphone and it looks old and dusty. I can go to a shop and select a range of tens of phones that are all totally different and better. There are several OSes, all with their good and bad but they are all in their infancy. They add feature after feature and they still suck. 3G is too slow. Look at the carriers, they all suck too. The networks are slow, the price is abusive, etc. In my country (France) we are waiting for a new carrier (free) that will enter the market in 2012. That will be a complete revolution that will probably spread to Europe and the world. The day they enter the market the all price will drop by half. And this is just the start. The smartphones as we know them today suck too much to last 2 years.
Bada can be retargetted to be a an UI layer on Linux or Samsung proprietary RTOS, as far as I know, Samsung haven’t introduced Linux bada phones yet.
That’s the tech review perception but generally HTC did quite a good job and (IMO) improved android screen usability.
Whereas Motoblur approach to contact info aggregation was most innovative of the competiotion (within and outside of android world).
You assume, that MS will share WP7 royalities with Nokia. I read Elop stated that Nokia will pay MS for WP7 licences preety much as every other oem.
Other (uncertain) assumption is that Nokia will sometime get share of app market.
Given that MS will run the party I higly doubt this would be sustainable. They will surely find a way around it.
Note that in successfull MS partnerships were the successfull partner was always an upstart that has little to loose, rarely and established industry player.
Dude, Microsoft’s whole mobile adventure has been one long disaster.
Windows Phone has no market share next to iOS and Android, Nokia’s market share is sinking like a brick and fewer and fewer people want their ‘services’.
By the time Windows Phone appears on their devices next year Nokia will be killed off completely and Microsoft won’t have the installed base they thought they were going to get. Microsoft will then move on to the next disaster.
I wonder why PC OEMs don’t just view themselves like that when pre-installing Windows…… You can’t have it all ways with your comparisons I’m afraid.
With Android what they’ve got is a mobile OS with meaningful market share that they have access to the code for. If push comes to shove then Nokia can branch off their own market place and all developers will need to do is submit the same code and applications to Nokia’s store as they do to Google’s.
With WP they’ve got an OS with no market share, few applications written that no one wants that won’t see the light of day for another year that they have zero code control over.
The ‘least worst option’ was obvious.
Sygic is the best navigation program for Nokia phones. It´s a C (or C++ i don’t know) and it works in Symbian, Maemo, Android and iPhone. If WP7 only supports .Net/Silverlight it won’t work
Microsoft is on the record saying that native development will come to Windows Phone 7.
Link if so this is a backflip. Windows Phone 7 was ment to push .net. If native development comes so will qt. So no point bothering building applications for Windows Phone 7 or if ever.
I would have thought that forcing developers to migrate from C/C++ (or Java) to .NET (and it’s associated environment) would be an enormous barrier for existing Nokia/Symbian developers.
IMHO, It would be an easier jump (in terms of culture shock) to Android, or even business-focused BlackBerry.
Maybe I’m missing something … But don’t you require VisualStudio to develop for this mobile platform? It seems like a massive change!
What is the migration path here? This question alone would colour my opinion on the new Nokia-Microsoft partnership.
There is a free version for phones, I think. However great Visual studio is (it is the best Mega IDE out there) I still much preferred the elegance of Qt Creator. I Haven’t used eclipse much but everybody around me tells me eclipse sucks.
I would say however that It is easier for a C++ dev to go to Java or C# (especially) than the other way. However very low level c++ developers will feel very constrained by managed runtimes.
No Migration path. Start from scratch…
Edited 2011-03-01 00:07 UTC
Eclipse sucks. Big time. But at least you can code Qt for Android using Qt Creator.
I really doubt MS will let this happen on WP7
Edited 2011-03-01 01:14 UTC
Eclipse sucks. Big time.
Offtopic but have no idea, where people take these claims. I’ve used Eclipse like 5-6 years already and also tried others but always returned to Eclipse. Well probably because I don’t need much from IDE and could be happy with VIM or Notepad++ and commandline compiler. The most important aspect of an editor/IDE is that it should not get on my way and should not help me too much. Many IDE’s and environments try to be too careful and elliminate the possibility to produce broken code (even if the development is in the middle and I just want to try out a small part of the program so the rest can be broken). All I need is just some background compiler that shows I have not imported particular dependency into my code.
My main complaints are:
* It’s slow and clunky
* Lots of bugs (many NPEs)
* It tries to do *everything*, the result being that the most common options are always buried in 30 item context menus.
* It’s really slow.
* I still haven’t worked out how the whole workspaces thing is supposed to work. It seems like you are forced to put your projects in a certain place, and it’s impossible to import an existing project – and if you try to do ‘create from existing code’, it will complain that there is already a project with that name!
* The interface is insanely cluttered.
* Did I mention it is really slow?
Of course it has a couple of nice features, such as really good auto-complete, auto-format & refactoring tools.
Netbeans is quite a lot better, but still quite slow.
IDEA seems to be the best Java IDE. And I think it has nice Android support now, although I’ve not used it much.
But either way, Qt Creator blows them all out of the water. It’s just so elegant and simple!
You need to give Eclipse quite a lot of memory, 512 MB minimum, 1GB recommended and it flies! This means that your workstation should have 2 GB RAM or more if you want to run some embedded servers or what all.
About NPE-s, I dont know what kind of experimental plugins you run, I haven’t seen NPE from Eclipse a long long long time if at all.
The project import is PITA, I agree! Haven’t worked that thoroughly out myself so that I could use it comfortably. But checkout from SVN/CVS/you name it works well enough so I use that strategy. Also I can assure you that importing from filesystem is possible however might need some trial and error.
The GUI concept requires a bit getting used to so if coming from somewhere else, then yes, it might be hard. Tries IDEA less than a month ago and it really frustrated me – first it complained about my coding style, then It has very weird scrollbar thing for code area which really obstructs the emblems marking places requiring attention. Also the SVN integration is poor, as IDEA uses colored filenames for showing file status which was quite hard to see on some screens. There are layered icons, why not use those.
Anyway seems that as alternatives are free, it is about individual taste and preference. as I am development manager in a software firm, tried to standardise java development environment and failed, as everybody have learned to love their tool of choice and would be very unhappy if forced to use different tool
Thats why I like MS world. You have Visual Studio, like it or not.
I figured as much.
It could be said then, that for existing Nokia phone developers, there really isn’t much difference if they were to stick with Nokia, or if they jump ship – they are probably learning a new system (or “environment”) from scratch either way.
I suspect Nokia are hoping they will attract as many new developers (or more?) than they lose. It’s an impressive gamble.
The question then of “What’s the opinion of Nokia Developers about the Nokiasoft Partnership” probably doesn’t seem so important to those in charge of Nokia right now, since they figured they were going down in flames anyhow.
Edited 2011-03-01 06:31 UTC
I can confirm that there is a free version of Visual Studio specifically for WP7 development. I downloaded and went through the painfully long installation. I haven’t used it but (unless there was an option that evaded me), you can’t even make a Hello World C++ program with it. It is a special Visual Studio edition.
C# is the only supported language.
Yes indeed. I realized that as I was trying to compile wxWidgets and Code::Blocks with gcc 4.5.1 in mingw and mingw+gcc4.5.1 has that stupid bug that makes it incapable of linking a dll with reasonable memory consumption, the only option left for me is to install VS2008.
Most users don’t care about their phone OS. They are only interested in style, price and features.
I would also add that modern phone OSes are total resource hogs.