How can you look at what's happened to NOKIA versus what's happened to Samsung over the last two years and say Elop did the right thing? It's patently nonsense. He didn't have to publicly deprecate Symbian and MeeGo and he didn't have to exclusively adopt a PROVEN FAILURE of an OS. The resulting crash was inevitable.

Samsung must have spent the last two years laughing their socks off at NOKIA's meltdown at the hands of Microsoft's Trojan horse.



The UI was not part of Symbian, it was a layer on top. Most of the things Symbian gets criticised for are not actually part of Symbian.

Qt and QML would have made revising/updating/customising a UI a much quicker and easier process. NOKIA's pre-Elop plan was much more sensible and much more likely to succeed than Elop's absurd Windows Phone fiasco.

Incidentally Metro (or whatever it's called now) doesn't seem to be a particularly popular UI does it? There's nothing NOKIA can do about their 'Taleban' UI now, they're no longer in control of such things thanks to Elop.



Pre-Elop NOKIA were a profitable company with growing sales and a sensible path to the future even if they were travelling along it too slowly.

The catastrophic mess we see now is entirely Elop's doing.

History is clearly your weakness. Root causes require historical, not HYSTERICAL analysis.

Feel free to be specific about what I got wrong. Including citations to real data would be helpful to make sure I don't make the same mistake again.



While we're pointing out each other's weaknesses here's a few of yours I've noticed:

Your analysis of the past is based on a past you've never provided any citations or supporting data for.

Your technical knowledge is somewhat lacking, you thought Symbian was Linux for example.

Your predictions of success for Windows Phone 7 proved rather inaccurate.

You're not very good at spotting winning devices, you said you couldn't understand why people bought the Galaxy S3 but you thought the original Lumias were what everybody wanted.

Pfft... Lumiaman has switched tactics. WP9 will be the turnaround for Windows Phone and Nokia. Only odd numbers are successful for Microsoft. Windows 95, Windows XP (2003), Windows 7, Windows Phone 9.

Just wait for it... wait for it.

There are plenty of links all over the universe from ex Symbian and ex Meego people documenting the fall of Nokia prior to ELOP. So stop blaming ELOP and stop the per-ELOP nostalgia. You remind me of Russian ex-communists who waxed about this or that and blamed everything on Gorbachev. The empires were in decline for years prior to their current state.

With regards to your other off the mark comments, I am a Nokia lover, as I love the design as much as the UI. So for me, any Samsung crap is crap. Plus android is a pure iPhone imitation. Why not go for the original than? WP8 is trying to be a bit different. So I bet on what I like and what I buy. Lumia device are for the masses, but it arrived late. As I said above, you need revolutionary product to break thru. I just don't see it on the horizon.

@Lumiaman

For a brief moment it appeared the cold light of reality had started to enter into some of your later posts, I thought that finally you had started to accept reality, then true to type you regressed.

Quote: "There are plenty of links all over the universe from ex Symbian and ex Meego people documenting the fall of Nokia prior to ELOP."

Where?

http://www.kitguru.net/software/oper...ar-than-vista/

rgds

Another troll who doesnt know how to use Google....keep living in the Elop hate bubble......it will really help with your future endeavours.......


Nokia’s Big Misstep

So where did it all go wrong for Nokia? The cause of the company’s decline looks very simple with hindsight: Nokia should have moved off its smartphone platform Symbian and onto its next-generation platform, MeeGo, much sooner than it did. Years sooner.

By the time Nokia released its first MeeGo-powered smartphone – the N9, in 2011 — it was far too late to compete with Android and iOS. In any case, by that point Nokia had already publically committed to Microsoft and in starting down the Windows Phone path, Elop made the decision to abandon in-house alternatives such as MeeGo – meaning the N9 was effectively DOA.nokia-n9

“Nokia needed to have MeeGo ready to go into the market two years or even now perhaps three years ago,” says Leach. “They needed to be on their new platform probably round about 2008, 2009. If you think 2008 was just when Android entered the market, it was just a year after iPhone was finding its feet. Nokia really needed to be there at that point with its platform for growth — offering some kind of computing experience on the device.”

Leach describes the mindset he encountered when working at Symbian, between 1999 and 2004. “Symbian was always very phone-centric,” he tells TechCrunch. “In my own experience of being at Symbian working with Nokia there was always a frustration of [Nokia saying] ‘it’s got to be a phone first, it’s a phone, phones sell.’ And we’d be saying ‘there is different stuff you can do, you can adopt more of these kind of computing paradigms’ — and they really didn’t want to hear that.”

The core problem that brought Nokia low is not unusual for successful public companies that have worked their way into a position of marketplace dominance over a period of years (see also: BlackBerry maker RIM, for instance). Nokia’s business was cooking on gas in the mid 2000s, with massive profits and phone shipments keeping their shareholders happy and clamouring for more of the same. But this success evidently made it harder for them to change their business to react to the looming threats from internet-focused companies. You could also argue their view of the landscape ahead was clouded by their “blinkered, phone first” view, as Leach puts it.

Point to the CEO — apart from Steve Jobs – who relishes telling the shareholders it’s time to retire the gravy train, and start out afresh on a hand-cranked cart. But that, in effect, is what Nokia needed to have begun doing in the mid 2000s to survive disruption by a new generation of web companies who understood the future was data, not voice.

“What Nokia was looking at was their feature phones, which were still selling healthily then,” says Leach. “That mid-range feature phone market was the sweet spot and [their view was that] Symbian had to, in some way, be a feature phone with a little bit extra. That thinking really stifled them. And the problem then, when they realised they needed to do more, was that Symbian was a bit too old and wasn’t extendable enough to do the things they really needed to do.”

IHS Screen Digest analyst Daniel Gleeson makes a similar point: Nokia wasn’t thinking big enough when it really counted – and without a grand plan they weren’t able to act decisively to fix the strategic weaknesses that were being exploited by others. “Their emphasis was on incremental innovation of existing products rather than aggressively pushing a disruptive innovation,” he says.

“Their smartphone strategy was muddled at the time to put it politely,” he adds. “Symbian was the principal OS, but with Maemo/MeeGo also in development; Nokia was far from clear in its long-term commitment to either platform. Even if it could execute well, overly risk-averse management prevented Nokia making this decision. By attempting to juggle both, Nokia showed another fundamental problem, it did not understand the importance of ecosystems.”

The Significance Of Software

Dig a little deeper, and Nokia’s problems with its smartphone OS strategy are evidently problems with software more generally. The company fundamentally didn’t get software, says Gleeson — so they didn’t understand the crucial significance of apps and building an ecosystem around apps. “Nokia has almost always produced high quality hardware; but it was its software that was the weakness,” he says. “Nokia vastly underestimated the importance of third-party applications to the smartphone proposition. Each Symbian UI required its own custom build of the OS which limited the addressable market of any third-party apps.”

“Furthermore, Nokia had a blasé attitude towards compatibility of apps; breaking backwards compatibility on OS upgrades on multiple occasions e.g. S60 third edition, Windows Phone 8; and developing phones incapable of using some games available for earlier devices (e.g. Nokia 500, Lumia 610),” he adds. “Consumers are attracted to smartphones for their ability to be more than just communication tools, and so the lack of apps hinders adoption. One can simply look at the lack of some key apps such as Spotify from Nokia’s latest flagship as a continuation of this problem (Spotify is available on the Lumia 800 and 900 however).


and it goes on and on....the problem is not ELOP, its NOKIA, its culture, its history, its priorities and its lack of attention to software details. pre-Elop nokia phones rarely worked out of the box. you needed to wait for various updates to make them functional. N8, N900, N9, all clear abominations created prior to Elop. .....

Anyways, you are a troll of the rarest kind.

@Lumiaman

And you are a fish out of water, trying to find relevance in a "Maemo" forum.

My N900 worked out of the box and it still does, it hasn't failed me once and everything I need it to do it does perfectly.

Clearly your findings are as usual false under even the lightest of scrutiny.

rgds.

ps. much easier to get someone else to do the Googling for me. thanks.

@Lumiaman
I actually asked for data not an opinion piece (that you have copied without citation) but anyhow...

If you reread the piece you have copied you'll see NOKIA's original plan of MeeGo, Symbian and Meltemi with Qt as a common framework much better addressed what this article identified as NOKIA's problem than a change to Windows Phone did.

Let me quote from your own post:
I haven't a clue who Daniel Gleeson is or even what IHS Screen Digest is but it's clear this guy either doesn't know or doesn't understand what Qt/QML was for. Qt addressed all the things he claimed were issues and clearly demonstrated pre-Elop NOKIA absolutely did get the importance of the ecosystem. Whoever wrote this article really should have interviewed better informed 'analysts'.

The irony of this fool saying: "The company fundamentally didn’t get software" when it's so apparent he didn't understand the significance of Qt actually makes me feel slightly embarrassed for him
Honestly, what a numbnut!


But wait, the foolishness doesn't end there:
Qt was to address compatability problems, changing to Windows Phone exaberbated them (incidentally how many of the devices referred to in that quoted passage were pre-Elop?). How can you claim this as an argument for Elop when Windows Phone 8 isn't even compatible with Windows Phone 7 never mind NOKIA devices running other operating systems?

Qt was to be a common framework across MeeGo/Symbian/Meltemi. Now what do we have? WP8/WP7/Series40 - all incompatible with each other. This would be a disaster for NOKIA's ecosystem if they still had one but of course Elop gifted that to Microsoft.

You are the biggest pre-ELOP apologist of all times and you clearly have no idea what was going on. You still don't get it that if everything was rosy, ELOP would not be in charge. Oh my, Nokia Stalinists all over this board