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.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

I think the biggest incentive to make this transition was the tie-in, and the upfront payments being made to Nokia to make the move to WP7. Symbian had no future because it had a tarnished reputation and lost credibility. With poor user perception, it would continue to decline and at best the updates would only slow the people leaving it. Nokia gains much more when it ties in with Microsoft ad's, it's own store, mapping, and other revenue sharing deals. It is the reason why Elop is saying he would love to see his WP7 competition also succeed because Nokia stands to make money from them as well without worrying that they will be stealing each others customers as in all likelihood the customer was a potential Android or iOS customer.

The decision to publicly announce the death of Symbian is up for debate. But as a consumer I am more happier for it because I know how long I can expect a Symbian phone to be supported, and I would purchase based on my feelings toward Symbian. Nokia is being honest and direct, no misinformation it is from the horses mouth. Now for them to expect to still sell 150 million Symbian phones is a bit far reaching maybe more like 80 million. But they will trim costs both in R&D and support, and remove a lot of employees ... so in 2013 they will be in a growth trajectory. Nokia of yesterday, today, and tomorrow are all different. Nokia today sees Symbian as an OS which is too costly to maintain, is an anchor, and has the clock run out on it. I think a lot people make the mistake at looking at Symbian in the perspective of Nokia's yesterday as if it had time to changed and molded but still garnering wide user fanfare. That is not the case anymore nor will it be for Nokia's tomorrow as it does not handle converging products at all. I too loved the OPK plan, but I loved that plan before it became Nokia strategy too late in the game. Late 2008 people were asking for such a strategy, they only came to it when it was too late. Staying the course with a plan that was not implemented fast enough was the problem Elop had, and WP7 was the remedy. Staying the course was the alternate option, but it had way more uncertainty and costs that would burden Nokia even more so. I think Elop is an ambitious guy, he does not want to be the guy who destroyed Nokia by bankrupting them nor does he want to be the guy who infamously handed the reigns of Nokia to MS. I think he wants to have the best CV/ Resume and state that he turned around Nokia from the brinks, he is a guy who dived head first into a company with massive challenges leaving the comfortably successful Microsoft Office division. He seems to thrive in a challenging position, he seems to communicate effectively and confidently. He can talk with employees and share some grievances that consumers have. He is the first non Nokia establishment CEO and flak is going his way like he is the anti-christ. I think people should calm down on him and think about how Nokia is being talked about, OPK wasn't getting that many criticism from this board based on his dithering incompetence ... it just goes to show people would rather keep the status quo by holding on to nostalgia of years gone rather than focus on the current situation.

To charge $600 on a slow Symbian E7 was ludicrous before the announcement of Symbian's death and was already a spoiler. One more reason does not make a difference. Besides the phone will be supported for 1 year plus the OS will live for another 5 years and so I would not be holding on to a phone from 2011 come 2016 that is for sure.

As far as strategy and execution are concerned I am also wary of Nokia's current predicament. With all eggs in the WP7 basket and Symbian thrown to the gutter like a cancer and MeeGo thrown into a skunkworks type of environment Nokia has to hit a homerun with WP7 and nothing short of that. They can't bleed for too long as they spent enough years bleeding already, but I wouldn't be too concerned at the stock price because as bad is it is Nokia won't go bankrupt someone will buy it or it will succeed with this strategy. Their still is value in the Nokia stock, so long as they execute this strategy going forward. The way to look at it is that with every new WP7 customer Nokia stands to win on services, and with every Nokia WP7 device sold it stands to win a customer from Android or iOS. Also keep in mind that Nokia was not making much through services from Symbian as it stands to make from WP7. The true number to watch for is the net added customer revenue. This is the number of people Nokia gains through WP7 services subtracting those it has lost from the Symbian side of services while keeping in mind that it would not be a 1:1 worth ratio. If this number is a plus then things are going well, if not then their is trouble to come.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Why, because Symbian has been around for a long time, but let's not ignore the facts of the situation.

Before Elop the plan for MeeGo and S^3/4 was QT. That was the new ecosystem. You think write once and run anywhere is easy? Ask Sun how that worked out for them. There is no way an ecosystem that still in the development stages could possibly be more advanced than Android / iOS who are firmly in the market.

Where QT goes is still TBD but the challenge for Nokia was, not only are they building two operating systems but also an additional abstraction layer for apps on top of both. I think it was just too much for them to handle given the competitive landscape. They couldn't develop it fast enough.

evolve or perish right? I still contend that what Nokia is looking for is not just a mobile OS but also a strong tablet one and Symbian does nothing for them there.

Their problem was that they were preparing both Symbian and QT for a competitive market was ultimately too much for them to do. At least that's what it seems like.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

I don't disagree that its been a difficult transition. He chose the "ripping of the bandaid" approach. Whether or not it was the right way to go about it remains to be seen. There will be short term loss but you have to take a bit of a longer view on this one.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Unless Nokia can expect MS to inject more money over time, there's no revenue growth from this decision. The cash is like a band aid, not long term thinking.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

If Nokia doesn't have the resources to maintain 3 OS's, then yes, they need to choose something to drop. WP7 and Android wouldn't require the same OS resources as Symbian and MeeGo, as they're being developed by MS and Google. WP7 and Android would be porting and maintenance.

I, personally, see Symbian as something intermediate for cheaper phones, which WP7 doesn't include. How does Nokia plan to address that issue, keep S40 forever? Move Symbian down to cheaper phones over time. No need to kill it... and your current source of revenue.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Except that I don't see what the long-term benefits of killing your own ecosystem and building up Microsoft's ecosystem. That is, unless you want to be HTC.

Combine this with the slow develoment of MeeGo, you wonder if there will be any customers left once it is ready for prime time.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

I'm not happy about WONTFIXes at all, but that's a gross oversimplification and mis-characterization.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

That's exactly what many Nokia employees kept clamoring for, self included, but OPK refused. I'll cut Elop slack for inheriting that.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

On the upside for Microsoft, maaaaaan Nokia is getting cheaper to buy up. Going back to the car analogy, though, I'm pretty sure Nokia is worth more as parts than as the jalopy of a clunker it represents today.

I disagree. It's andemic to a culture that prefers to keeping closed-source close to the chest just enough so that the open-source hungry heathens will continue to purchase the next piece of hardware with the new OS on promises alone (promises of being better, being more open, etc.). You see it as a gross simplification, I see it as the consumer's biggest frustration. Even the ones that never came to ITT/TMO in all this time were frustrated that things were never fixed (i.e. family and friends I've known that bought their N8x0's because I had one.. and then suffered along with me and kept asking for fixes/improvments. To which--I had to relay the WONTFIXES and FIXED IN FREMANTLE and similar messages. They were more than simply annoyed. So was I, eventually.).

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

AT&T CEO "Windows Phone 7 Not Selling as Well as Hoped"...

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

I have thinked about this for a while and now I have finally come up with an opinion.

This only confirms that the management in Nokia are just bunch of floating trunks in the river.

Is it better to expect an end of the world or something like meego making everything better again just because it is cool?

1. Maemo should have gotten at least double the attention already in 2008
2. They didn't have any convincing device strategy with meego
3. because of the major revision with m6->meego, timetables were too optimistically done

I sure hope they learn something from the point number 1, but sadly it seems that they want only jump into old apps bandwagon and keep meego in breathing machine just for fun/hobby.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

No, because if you check the facts, Symbian can do a lot more than Android or iOS... Starting from Multitasking to the ease of file access (and therefore: file exchange) and support for the most unusual telephony functions etc etc

The Qt thing comes on top and isn't (so far) a critical part of what Symbian "can do". Symbian has a good ecosystem even without Qt.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

"ComScore published its latest market share results for American smartphone sales, with Microsoft's share having dropped 25% since the introduction of Windows Phone 7 in November 2010."

Putting Nokia together with Microsoft on this is like an ugly date (the kind you would think would make up for the bad looks) that instead has all the personality and character flaws too.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Well, right now Nokia doesn't have any core OS software team. WP is done by MS and Symbian is done by Accenture. This leaves Nokia with Maemo/MeeGo and S40. Why they even bother with S40 is a mystery since there are several light weight OS'es available that will do the job just fine. But then again, S40 has always been a good OS, so maybe a change will not be worth it.

Samsung, as the second largest, does not have a OS on its own. Bada is the closest thing, but is based around a commercially available Nucleus core.

Nokia still got Maemo. If they manage to release devices based on that I will be happy. But I don't see it happening, I don't see the purpose, there is limited synergy with WP with such a venture. The obvious way would be to use a small team at MS to do this using WP.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

People is waiting for Nokia WP7 mobiles ???

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Just fyi., S40 is an application layer for the underly ISA, or informally known as Nokia OS. Since it is not licensed to anyone other company so it isn't has a trademarked name like Symbian does.

So technically speaking Nokia still has a flagship OS....to compete with all those low-end but function-rich China brands phones. :D

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Also, Bada s.u.c.k.s

I'm kinda forced to do some porting work to bada and it ends up being almost a rewrite. Good luck attracting lots of apps to that crap.

At least maemo/meego offers the ease of porting....

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Kinda forcing them seems to work well ;) The point is that Bada connot be ignored. Besides, Bada is straight forward, what exactly are you porting from?

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

You got to be kidding....

It is not posix compliant, there is no stdlib, all system interfaces are custom (deeply) nested C++ namespaces, etc.... Same s.h.i.t as Nintendo does, btw, it seems to have been invented by the same idiot, just changed the names and order of arguments.

Can't tell what I'm porting, sorry

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

It's still straigh forward to code for Bada though. I meant what OS are you porting from?

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

With all these arguments for WP7 (especially the financial argument), it still makes me sad to see Qt go down the drain...
While they might not have had enough ressources to support 3 operating systems, they could have supported Qt on all platforms they use. They could have made Qt run on Android (somebody already ported it somehow) or insist on porting it to WP7 when talking to Microsoft about WP7 adoption.
To have their (Elop's) desired position in which they stand out form the other phone makers through a non mass-market OS. (Even ZTE will sell WP7 - that makes Elop's main argument against Android just wrong).

With all the knowledge they had acquired with Trolltech (relatively small company that managed to support Qt on Windows, Linux and OSX) they could easily have made Qt support for MeeGo, Symbian, Android and WP7 possible additionally.

That would mean, code one program and have at least it's interface run everywhere important (except iOS of course).
They could have had their Ovi/Nokia Services on almost every computer and smartphone, also sell software then, and make the transition to a software company.

Anyway... I don't actually care as much for Nokia now as I care for Qt. So sad.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Looks like you can get the E7 now for $350 (after going through a few hoops) from Nokia US. Isn't this their current flag ship?

http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthr...id=0&t=2995111

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

I hate to say this, but the E7 is the living representation of Nokias failure. It is a good device, best quality hardware there is, it is fast and excellent to use - but: Way too low resolution on the screen, EDoF instead of autofocus (EDoF is great, but NOT on a communicator), too small battery, no external sd card. All this would be OK for a device at 300 $ and for a device that wasn't marketed as a "communicator". As a communicator you expect much more, at that price you expect much more (communicator or not). To be honest I don't think it is marketed as a communicator, but as the device inheriting the communicator properties or something like that.

At 350$ though, it is good value for the money. It will last for ages, and will do the job just fine, better than most Android devices, and will do more stuff than any iPhone.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

With due respect to the Capt'n, I'm re-posting this here since it's relevant...

As I was saying... Nokia is going to the dance with Balmer. Not only is that an ugly date, it doesn't even make up for it with a good personality. NOKIA+WP7 isn't a strategy, it's a suicide note.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Hehehehe in the tags I'm mentioned:

"mojo = tl;dr"

It feels good to recognized.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

The problem for Nokia is that the U.S. trend shown in the graph is increasingly true globally. Except the fact that Symbian was at the top coming down fast and Windows mobile irrelevant anyway.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Congratulations, your own words answer your own question!

You asked for a definition of "has in some ways taken over the top".

"define "Apple has in some ways taken over at the top" please?

"the only thing apple has managed to do (and wit great success) is make a feature phone extremely usable, and thus, make people believe that it's "smart".

Yep, that's my definition! I see you agree!

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

Congrats! Welcome to the club. :) I sometimes still like using the Negatron Dan name that someone called me in tags before. I sometimes even put that tag on threads myself where I'm being down on Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo... since it's only fitting. Besides, I really, really like the Decepticons. My Honda Del Sol has a chrome decepticon logo on the rear, for example.

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

To whit, I respond:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU

Re: Elops oh s**t moment for Meego
 

One result of this is the Osbourne effect. The Guardian discussed it here today.