Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Maemo does predate iOS. Apple's public announcement of the first iPhone took place one week after the N800 Internet Tablet became available for purchase in stores. The 770 Internet Tablet had already been available for more than a year, and another five months would pass before the iPhone made its grand appearance on AT&T's shelves.

If you're interested, you can read one of the threads on this forum that discussed the iPhone's announcement.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Good points here.

Just one thing to clarify: There's no WM7 or WM8. Windows Mobile 6 is the last of the WM family.

Windows Phone 7 is not exactly a successor of WM6, as it cannot run unsigned CAB that are widely available for WM phones. WP7 is effectively breaking the ecosystem that the developers of WM have been building for years.

Elop is a shameless lair when he used ecosystem as an excuse to kill Symbian. There's is no significant ecosystem in WP7 to justify the replacement of Symbian.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

You mean 3 OSes? WP7, Android and MeeGo? Or are you advocating dropping MeeGo? Nokia doesn't have resources now to be able to do 3 OSes. They could barely do Symbian and MeeGo, and you think they can take on two new OSes? No way.

Even in your analysis Symbian was going to go away. Why is delaying the inevitable a good idea? They need to focus not spread themselves out.

What future did Symbian really have? Besides catching up to where iOS / Android is today, where is it going?

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Mhm... From what I see here, it's Android and iOS that have to catch up. Symbian is still ahead.

The problem with Symbian is that it was were it is now in 2007 and never moved an inch since then, while all the other competitors moved closer. Android seems to be almost there, iOS might never be as Apple doesn't target that particular market. Still, it's evolving.

The point is that yes, you could go further with Symbian if you'd bet on its strengths, not change direction and try to go the other route. And this is exactly what worries me: They obviously want to go the other route, away from the smartphone market. WP seems closer to iOS than it is to Android. Bad.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Deja vu - Nokia's WP strategy and its merits have been discussed on many forums previously - including tmo. What's changed is that we got Elop's PR piece in business week, and Nokia's profit warning for Q2.

Here are some facts:

• Nokia's share price is in a downward trajectory that started 2007 reflecting lower and lower expectations for Nokia's performance.
• Since Elop's burning platform memo and WP strategy Nokia shares lost another 40%.
• According to Elop Nokia Windows phones will be available in relevant numbers in 2012.
• Nokia says they will (try to) sell Symbian phones for a long time after Windows phones are released.

Now my opinion:
There are two major factors to make a company thrive:

• Do the right things (here sits strategy)
• Do them right (here sits execution)

Do the right things:
AFAIK Nokia was on a path to put in Maemo / Meego on the high end, Symbian in the middle (going downwards), and S40 for cheap feature phones. The first two tiers would be glued together by Qt, which would be the platform for Nokia's ecosystem. This was also Elop's announced strategy as I understood it until Feb 2011.
In Feb 2011 Elop did two things: He publicly announced that Symbian is inferior and dead, and Nokia will put all eggs into a partnership with MS.
I happen to believe that the strategy until Feb 2011 was the right one, and Elop's wedding with MS will leave Nokia without the chance for an ecosystem of their own.

Do the things right:
There is no sugar coating, Nokia did very few things right, at least since 2007. Wrong product decisions, unacceptable delays (N8 one year late, no acceptable browser on S3 until the update, N900 release with "Ovi maps" but without any usable map functionality, MeeGo announcement delaying Maemo updates, etc, etc).
However, even if the WP strategy is correct, the numbers now show that the transition away from Symbian is managed extremely poorly. Who in his right mind will spend $600 on an E7 when the CEO of the company offering the phone says that Symbian is inferior and obsolete? Fine, there is the argument that the end user does not know or care, the carriers do know, as do many sales people in the phone shops. And steer people to "superior" Android and iOS.

One way to execute the transition better would have been to announce WP for selected markets (especially North America where Nokia is not present), but continue selling Symbian phones in as high as possible numbers ("WP is really good for our U.S. customers, but the unrivaled functionality of our Symbian phones, the best in class battery live, and super features like our Zeiss cameras and multimedia connectivity makes us certain that our Symbian phones are very desirable devices, blah blah blah..."

This brings me to my conclusion:

Elop's WP strategy will be good for MS because they will sell more Windows Phones than they do today (a measly 1.6 mio WP7 in Q1), but devastating for Nokia as WP will not reach anything close to 27 million smart phones per quarter as Nokia's Symbian phones sold in Q1 2011.

Nokia's execution on a corporate level did not improve since Elop took office (might not be Elop's fault as changes in organizations take time, regrettably), however execution on the executive level (transition away from Symbian) is horrendous as the profit warnings show. And this is Elop's responsibility.

If Elop is able to fix Nokia's execution problem, Nokia might be very well doing the wrong things very well.

Not a good perspective from Nokia's point of view.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

If ecosystem is what Nokia striving for, then Symbian should not be given up so soon. However, Elop is obviously lying, when he chose WP7 over Symbian. Any other platform, be it iOS, Android or WebOS etc. has better ecosystem.

Nokia strategy was not using Symbian to compete head-on with iOS or Android, in fact Symbian was heading to the right direction to transit. Was.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

That strategy sounded good to me too. However, since February 11, I've read accounts from several (claimed) former Symbian system developers that the Symbian code is too crufty and brittle for the plan to have worked. According to these write ups, it is unimaginably difficult to get Qt work reliably and efficiently on Symbian. Every Symbian phone was a separate weight around the neck of the planned Qt ecosystem and every minor upgrade of Qt.

Perhaps that's all lies, but it's given me something to think about.

Such a phased transition, particularly if combined with massive managment and organizational shake ups, certainly sounds safer. From here, it appears Elop used the fire from his burning platform to torch some massive bridges.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

*music* we don't need no kia, let the mother platform burn...

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

What has been underestimated in every blog and analysis is the difficult state Symbian is in, combined with lack of a top notch software engineering team at Nokia. This is seen as lack of execution, but the real problem is much more severe. The end result is strategic decisions that are not rooted in reality.

Elop did what he had to do, and probably was told to do by his employers.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Hmm, for me solution would be rather to streamline Symbian offerings to 3-4 models per year running on very similar hardware. Apart from making things easier on software development it would drastically simplify hardware logistics and probably cut prices of components.

S3 was released 7 months ago and Nokia released in that time 7 smartphones. Each one with different specs.

Apple supposedly buys hardware even tens of percents cheaper than Nokia due to standardization of hardware across iPhone, iPod and even iPad lines.