Anssi Vanjoki is resigning too. This is bigger cause for concern, imho.

why? no more anssi key now?

They'll do it, if necessary, to win in the mobile market.

Not in NA. In the rest of the world that perception can be changed.

All of which will apply to their WP7 push. Worked before to conquer the world, can work again.

Maybe me, you and many others in a forum like this. But not on about 95% of desktops and laptops worldwide.

Business lock-in to Windoze and Win software is exactly why most businesses, mine included, find it impossible to get away from running Windoze, not matter how badly they may want to.

Yes, absolutely. Most users are either ignorant or unconcerned about such things. It's not slowing down Android.

Even if the NA market shrinks a little as a percentage of worldwide sales, in terms of the public perception of mobile devices and services the NA market unfortunately rules and will as far as one can see. If you doubt it, think about the influence the iPhone and Android have had in the discussion and design of such things, worldwide.

But the gain of it would be huge, and in more ways than raw sales numbers.

I also don't like facebook, but I think fickr works just fine for photo upload. Also I think that the privacy argument will not convince many people to use ovi share instead of flickr. Also the fact that Nokia has shut down ovi mail and ovi files already will make new users hesitate to use ovi services for personal information storage.

Cancelling a product like the N9 that is scheduled for november/december would be an insane waste of money and resources for Nokia. The product is almost finished, most of the development cost has already been spent. They might as well release the product and see how well it does. Nokia doesn't have any other product in the high-end smartphone/mobile computing market planned this year that we know of.
The N8 is a very different product aimed at a totally different market (a little bit more trendy, and aimed at the photo/film camera enthusiast), and isn't a direct competitor to a Maemo6/MeeGo device.
If the Maemo 6/MeeGo N9 turns out to be an enormous commercial flop (like the MS KIN), than Nokia might reconsider the high-end smartphone platform choice (and go for Android or Windows Phone 7) .
Symbian will not disappear soon. Nokia makes her money selling low-end and mid-range phones. A huge amount of those run Symbian. A lot of people seem to like relatively cheap phones running Symbian. Switching platforms on the mid-range would be suicide for Nokia. Besides Windows Phone7 only runs on really high-end chips, Android does run on lower-end chips, but the performance is not very good, so Symbian is probably a better choice on the lower-mid range for the time being.

if Microsoft will really deliver a good mobile phone platform that has some innovative features (like a xbox gaming platform and good working exchange and office apps ), than why would it be a bad thing for Nokia to make a Windows Phone 7 device?

But Windows Phone 7 devices will probably be aimed at a very different group of customers than Maemo/MeeGo and even Symbian devices. So I think that Windows Phone 7 might possibly be an addition to the product portfolio, but a bad replacement for MeeGo/Maemo. Just ask yourself (as a N900 user) this question: "Would you "upgrade" to an Windows Phone 7 device?"
Thought not. Why wouldn't Nokia want to make a nice hackable linux phone for us? If Nokia can make some money doing so, of course they will! The mobile phone market is hugely competitive, no single player can make us buy a Windows Phone.

Out of the question. Development cycles for high-end smartphones are almost 2 years. Getting a new device through the FCC measurements alone takes at least a month. And if you look at Nokias History: it took over 6 months before all the major bugs were out of the software for the N97, and that was AFTER release. Unless Nokia has secretly been working on a Windows 7 phone, they will never be able to release a new device in 6 months.



No, not very likely that it can work again. The PC market was a fraction of the size of what it is now. And the mobile phone market is much larger than the PC market (more people use mobile phones, and they switch much, much faster when compared to laptops or PC's).
The mobile phone market is the place were a lot of big players collide. Apple (media players and mac), Sony (consumer electronics and content), Google (internet services and advertisement), Nokia (mobile phone manufacturer), Microsoft (operating systems and gaming), Samsung (hardware manufacturer), Dell, Acer, HP (computer manufacturers) etc. etc.

No, you can't. You need to use C# with Silverlight or XNA. Which is why Firefox for Windows Phone 7 is cancelled.

@Bernard: I could refute most of your points - if I had the time. But I'm covered up with work right now. I'm looking at a late night and early morning. Let's just say I really really hope I'm completely wrong.

I think in order to gain access to Nokia's massive market M$ might just be willing to provide a way around that problem.

It strikes me that it would be foolish for Nokia to hitch its wagon exclusively to WP7 (in the high-end smartphone space), especially without any reliable guarantees that it will succeed. It is a lose-lose proposition. If WP7 tanks, Nokia hardware sales tank with it, and Nokia is left scrambling to find a replacement. If WP7 is a runaway success, unless the initial licensing terms are EXTREMELY favorable to Nokia, the OS licensing fees will go up, and a larger percentage of future unit sales go to M$ rather than Nokia. And either way, Nokia inevitably must cede a certain amount of control to M$ with respect to things like OS architecture, fixing high-priority bugs, support for new/innovative hardware, software, services, etc. In other words, the very things that Nokia might use to distinguish itself from its competitors.

I COULD see the merits of developing hardware on parallel tracks--MeeGo plus Droid or WP7, or even both. That mitigates the risk in either direction, and increases leverage. If Nokia can walk away from WP7/Droid at any time because they have a fully-functioning MeeGo alternative, that provides Nokia with leverage to get the problems fixed, keep the licensing costs down, etc. Conversely, if the alternative operating system becomes a runaway success, Nokia is poised to cash in on the upside.

Somewhat ironically, I would hope that having a reasonably-intelligent former Microsoft executive at the helm would INCREASE, rather than decrease, awareness of the potential pitfalls of getting into bed with M$. At a minimum, he should be very cognizant of how to negotiate a licensing deal that is not ridiculously one-sided towards M$.

Not that I'm particularly eager to see WP7 on Nokia hardware, mind you. I'm optimistic about MeeGo, and if I had to choose an alternative it would be Droid.

you guys are speaking too much about WP7 on these forums.... *shivers*

(go meego! go linux! go opensource! )

WP7 won't tank. I don't think you all understand just what is being unleashed on the world.

OSS is nice and we can all dream about it, but the reality is WP7 isn't just an operating system. Its a a confluence of technologies and services the likes of which just don't exist under an open source license.