Nokia reaps the Dilbert years Nokia took a long, long time to turn consistent profits into a gigantic quarterly loss, but nobody can be surprised by yesterday's results. With so few (and such lacklustre) products in the pipeline for the past two years, it is remarkable how well it has done for so long, with so little. Last summer I was window-shopping in …
Errm, no, Nokia are partnering with the devil, who only looks after number 1....
If Nokia had problems before, they are 10x worse now, they are partnering with Microsoft and making smartphones running an ailing OS with no apps.
Out of the frying pan, into the fire...
So sad, had Nokia adopted Android, they worst would already have been over, and products would have already been on the market.
I doubt it. Their HW platform was no more suited to Android than it is to WinPhone, sure they might have had more enthusiasm from the engineering, but they've all been sacked anyway.
Also, M$ would still be winning, as Nokia would have to pay the license fees that have been reported on recently. At least this way, M$ is paying them to take it. For now.
Certainly if Nokia had gone Android it would not be paying anything to MS, in contrast to what it will have to do now, i.e. pay a license for WP on its handsets, as publicly stated.
Differently from other Android phone producers, Nokia's IP would have prevented it to pay any royalties to MS. Probably MS would own IP to Nokia on its WP as Apple did and would have settled to pay Nokia royalties as well. Remember Nokia invented the smartphone segment in the first place.
In reality Nokia's latest problems are totally related to Elop, who is carrying on a MS agenda and not caring of what Nokia's fate is.
A few examples:
1) Burning Platform memo: he practically stated current Nokia products were terrible and doomed. Without having any substitute in the short term! Isn't that crazy for a company's CEO to do? And he said he wanted to sell 150m more Symbian phones? Of course nobody is buying any longer products that its own producer is saying they are doomed!
2) Nokia N9 with Maemo Harmattan. Possibly the sexyest non Apple phone out of the market according to reviews from the blogosphere. Well, Elop said it will only ship in minor markets, in limited quantity, and that even if it's successful it will have no future (interview on Finnish newspaper). In practice Elop is burning everything else apart from WP, leaving no exit strategy if WP fails. Terrible risk management (unless you are covertly still working for MS)
3) The three ecosystems joke. What third ecosystem? Nokia had the FIRST ecosystem by size, and it was zapped by Elop in February. The three ecosystems were Nokia, Apple and Android. MS was nowhere in sight. It might one day become the 7th ecosystem, or roundabouts. Bada by Samsung is already much bigger, as RIM's is, etc. etc.. This third "ecosystem" bs can only make sense to MS, which dreams of creating a third ecosystem.
The problem is that MS's Elop (ex MS head of Business and current MS shareholder) was so aggressive in carrying on the MS agenda that he killed his pray much to early. Elop is a trojan horse and MS a leech.
RIP Nokia
You do pop up whenever you get a chance to slag off MS, eh?
Anyway, Nokia had dreadful problems before and no effective plan for turning the ship around. Without MS they would still be in the same position they are now - haemorrhaging cash with products no one wants to buy - but now they've at least got a plan and are implementing it.
We'll see if it works. WP7 is pretty good and Nokia can make good hardware, so maybe it will.
With Eric Schmidt predicting Android phone prices of US$50-70 soon, at Google's Mobile Revolution conference this Tuesday, by the time they shift old inventory Nokia will be priced out of even the low end of the feature phone sector.
They don't have a future, apart from being bought by Microsoft and consumed. As it is Microsoft will be making more on each WM7 phone by the time they ship, if priced to actually sell.
The first time I remember was when you pointed out Nokia's glaring failure to put cameras in phones and then make such a fist of it when they finally did arrive. No point in having a Zeiss lens if the camera is a bitch to operate.
For touchscreen phones Symbian + UIQ with a planned migration to a QT based platform would have meant beautiful phones with low power draw and great applications.
RIP Nokia
The camera in my N8 is fantastic. No question. 12 Mb. Beautiful quality.
The 'curate's egg' bit is simply....
Why do I want a camera in an "Edison Speaking Tube"
Add to that, why do I need an FM transmitter in the phone, when everyone's gone WiFi or DAB?
To quote the curate, "Good in parts..."
Not really, I just don't see masses of people all holding off buying a WinPhone because it lacks a Nokia badge.
What we're seeing here is Nokia's smartphone customer base trading out to something else, and in the meantime buying their partners/parents/whatever a Samsung Android handset instead of the mid range S60 they would have so readily recommended in recent years.
Nokia's traditional customer base have now left the building, and no amount of chair-throwing antics from the sweaty orang-utang is going to change that.
Those dual sim phones that Elop was taking about, you can't buy them unless you're in an 'emerging' market. The high end handsets like the n950 can't be bought and N9 is getting a limited production run and I haven't seen it on any coming soon lists on any of the websites for any of the UK based networks.. My brother has an N8 and he is still waiting for the new symbain update even though he has seen phones in showrooms with it over five weeks ago. If they stop selling phones in the markets were the high margins are they can't really blame anyone but themselves. Elop has stated his goal is to kill Nokia's previous stragety and he has done this but before he had something to replace it with. If anything they do before the new windows phone comes out has even a not too bad sales figure he's going to look like an even bigger dolt than he does now.
Fail, for obivous reasons.
Nokia's first Internet Tablet? The Nokia 770 in 2005.
Nokia's first touchscreen smartphone? The Nokia 7710 in 2004.
I actually own a 770 and a 7710, and they're pretty crap.. but then the technology in those days *was* pretty crap. However, they had the right ideas and had products to market years before the competition.
The world would have been different if Nokia had stuck to its guns with these products and invested some proper money and R&D. Instead, they killed the platform the 7710 was based on and the Maemo.. well you could write a book about what went wrong there.
The best thing that Nokia can hope for is to come out of these as a smaller, but profitable company. The worst thing is basically Armageddon..
Other manufacturers shouldn't feel too smug though. RIM is in almost exactly the same boat..
Nokia's big problem seemed to be that they both made the hardware and the software - or rather, that they had invested hugely in the software and to turn their back on it would have been unthinkable. When Apple introduced iOS it became obvious new software was going to be needed. For the other manufacturers that was relatively easy. All they did was make the hardware. What OS was running on it was irellevant. So, for most, they produced the same model with 2 or 3 OSs and let the market decide which they wanted - turned out it was Android but Smasung, HTC etc didn't give a damn as long as the phones sold.
Nokia, on the other hand, just couldn't switch from Symbian. It was only when things had become utterly retched that the unthinkable actually became thinkable. Things NEEDED to get that bad.
The thing is, Nokia aren't in that position now. Okay, they have committed their future to WinPhone7 and there are contracts in place but I'm sure, in reality, they could switch to Android in a year or two. Or, more likely, they could switch to whatever the hot new OS turns out to be in a few years time when the market suddenly changes again. In fact, there is only one phone manufacturer that couldn't do that now. Only one manufacturer is in the position Nokia were in 5-6 years ago in having the whole house invested in the hardware, the OS, the software development, marketplace etc....
Are Apple the new Nokia?
Maybe, but Nokia certainly look a lot like the old Apple.
1. A dated OS, overtaken by what you could get from commodity hardware suppliers.
2. A vast product range, with the winning features thinly spread across it, and no definable "best model" as the company tries to chase every niche
3. A vague advertising strategy, with lots of political correctness and feel-good, and little about why you'd want to buy.
4. A persistent hammering by the tech press, mostly justified, but with some outright hostility.
6. Millions of R&D months, and nothing much to show for it, as nothing good gets a green-light from the beancounters, for fear of "cannibalising" the core market.
7. Acting like they still own the market, and are entitled to an share.
The major difference I can see is that Apple was riddled with "Not Invented Here" disease (and it's gaining hold again), where Nokia have historically worked on, then adopted open standards. I think you're right about being locked in, but in Apple's case their huge margins mean they can afford the development costs... for now.
Your point about being ready for the "next hot OS" is a good one, and there's evidence to suggest that this "hot OS" for Nokia may actually be one they're already using... Series 40.
Qt is the key. It's not MeeGo that impresses about the N9 - not one of the videos, reviews and demos shows one single feature that is only possible because the underlying OS is MeeGo. Everything you see is Qt and Qt Quick used to implement a clean, consistent UI. Get that level of fluidity, and people won't care if it's running on Series40's "domestic" OS, Symbian or some generic embedded Linux. Qt is already on Symbian; much of the N9's UI is coming to Symbian "Belle" (and is available now to app developers); and Qt is moving down to Series 40 too. Nokia are consolidating their non-Windows phones into a single user experience, and a single API framework too.
App developers won't write directly against kernel or OS APIs very often, because Qt itself provides just about everything you need already for 99% of apps. The only major failing of Nokia's OS strategy now is that WP7 cannot be supported by Qt (WP7 doesn't allow "unmanaged" code libraries, and under the fancy syntax, Qt is plain C++).
Right now, though, Nokia can play the same game you've described above, and maybe N9 is part of that game. Elop keeps saying "plan B is making Plan A work", but there's always a Plan B. This Winter, they will offer what is effectively the same phone, with two different OS platforms, and let the market decide. Nokia's customers, the mobile networks, will ultimately decide which they want.
Remembering who Nokia's customers really are is important: if a particular country isn't getting the N9, that's because the network operators don't want to carry it, not because of some conspiracy by Nokia or Stephen Elop.
A smart-phone is really a small computer/phone hybrid. If you make computers, making a small one, putting a finger friendly interface and phone capability on is reasonably easy.
If you're a phone maker and are trying to make the phone grow into a computer then that is quite hard.
It’s a damn shame – Nokia make great phones, it’s just that they didn’t really step back and realise they actually needed to make computers that could also phone.
If you are a computer manufacturer, it is pretty easy to make a smartphone that drains it's battery in 3 hours.
Apple have done an amazing job in the last 4 years to achieve what they have: and old friends from Nokia who have done tear downs on the iPhone 4 still think the HW and OS is rubbish.
And that partly was Nokia's problem, and now it's now to late to do anything about the apalling user experience.
The other part of Nokia's problem was that there were about 8 various different flavours of manager for every engineer who was actually doing work, and they could all put their boot in to stop something from happening, but none of them could actually take responsibility to see something through to completion as an entire finished article. Nokia's organisation and structure was interesting to say the least... and particularly not amenable to being able to achieve anything.
"easy to make a smartphone that drains it's battery in 3 hours" - "old friends from Nokia who have done tear downs on the iPhone 4 still think the HW and OS is rubbish."
This is actually a sign of how out of touch with the market Nokia had become. While we all want longer battery life, all bleat about daily charging on our iPhone and Android phones, we still keep buying them. Seems the buying public prefer a device that burns bright and dies young over one that plods boringly along for a week.
Nokia engineers may know how to make a power efficient OS but if it ends up so deadly dull we don't want to use it, it's wasted effort. Bluntly, if it can survive a whole day and be recharged by morning no-one cares. Even the limited recharging cycles create a lifetime roughly in sync with the normal contract upgrade grind.
And however good Nokia engineers may be they also dismally failed to make an exciting OS with a decent battery life!
At one of electronics/IT most dark ghettos, I saw a clone of Nokia E71 with dual SIM and (believe or not) analogue (PAL) TV support.
I didn't want to get involved with the shop so I couldn't figure what it runs. Almost sure it is Android, possibly not licensed.
So, in some Chinese city, people made a dual sim/android running "nokia" and added freaking TV option. It is really sad, you see the clone guy in some remote China town achieve all Nokia fans wishes.
Normally when we hear about a company in trouble I feel a little bit bad. They made some mistake in marketing, they chose the wrong price point, basically I feel they would have been a contender, apart from some simple error they made and it seems a shame they got slaughtered for a mis-step.
Nokia is different. They were the leader in the market. I used to dutifully upgrade from Nokia to the latest Nokia... and then they completely lost the plot for what must be getting on for a decade.
If Nokia were to just shut up shop tomorrow, there's not a single thing left I'd mourn.
Actually, not entirely true. Nokia did (and I believe still do) reasonable battery life... There's an epitaph for them. "We made phones too dull to drain your battery"
That used to be a hallmark of a BlackBerry too. The old ones could run for over a week without missing a beat. And when they did run low, they'd shut down the radio first so you could still access emails it had downloaded for a little while longer.
Then they *also* lost the plot.
The secret of amazing battery life is the ultra tight coded Symbian kernel and its forcing of developers to write real mobile code.
No such thing on Windows phone. Thing runs interpreted code and forces all developers to code that way too. No "I do the UI in Silverlight but also do pure C under the hood" option.
When Nokia said "it is all about services now", people like me naively thought they will become IBM of mobile. For example release multi billion dollar Ovi maps to ALL smartphones.
They don't even support other brand symbian handsets on ovi app store. There is nothing stopping them. Can you blame Sony/Samsung giving up Symbian as early as possible? Even before this soap opera?
It is just Symbian UIQ I am sad about.
Really, what was Elop thinking?
When your OS is causing you to fail, why tie yourself to another OS that's failing? OK, so you want to make sure there's a 2nd non-Apple OS out there, but at least allow yourself the option of making phones with an OS people buy.
Nokia's hardware has generally been pretty good. In many ways, the much-derided N97 was a country mile ahead of the original iPhone - 3G, GPS, great camera etc etc - but it was let down by the screen and the dire OS.
If they'd put a better screen and Android on it, most of us probably wouldn't have heard of HTC.
So what's in it for M$?
Nokia and M$ don't have much of an overlapping product set, the only place they were really competing was in the ropey phone OS space, but still in different segments.
I can see that Elop would chose WM7 over Android having just come from M$ because it would be something he was familiar with and being entirely non-technical it would have looked to him like a 50/50 choice.
I don't like the idea of Nokia being a WM7 only house, but I see a lot of people claiming that Elop is still in the pay of M$/Balmer and I can't see a single reason for it.
Yes, Elop owns M$ stock, but he's getting rid of it as fast as he is legally allowed to and he's not allowed to buy Nokia stock himself because of insider trading restrictions - although I do expect he'll have stocks eventually as a result of his contract like many of his contemporaries do.
So, I'll ask again: What's in it for M$?
You forget that Nokia was churning out buggy phones for years before the N97, though - they had a history of buggy firmware. The problem was that as consumers became more sophistimacated, and Apple raised the bar for quality control in handsets, this slapdash approach to firmware wasn't good enough. But they just didn't learn, it seems.
but they totally misread the market, late to market and switched to WinMo. (You listening Nokia?) Palm only had high-tech, high-end products and were a great success with PalmOS. After they switched to WinMo, the phones became terrible. I had a Treo Pro. The hardware was the best they had made up to that point. But after turning it on and seeing how crappy WinMo was, I gave the phone to my daughter. (She's a little more tolerant than I am).
If they'd announced the Symbian 3 facelift was almost finished and that it would be receiving upgrades over time, MeeGo is almost ready and would be available with a Dalvik engine, that they were bringing WP7 into the fold, that Qt would unify the three platforms, that every OS had its place in the market and phones would appear over time with all three OSes (Symbian would replace S40 and MeeGo would replace Symbian and WP7 would also be available in the business/smartphone range to complement MeeGo) it would sound like they'd thought through a long term plan and they wouldn't be in this mess now.
As it is it's just a hatchet job which has completely removed confidence in the existing range and betted everything one horse 1.5-2 years in the future, by which time WP7 could have failed in the marketplace too.
It's the absolute worst way to go about it, you really can't have brought someone that incompetent in as a CEO which only leaves malice.
I must disagree. You've got the Nokia brand, which people aren't interested in, paired with WP7, which people aren't buying. Tying themselves to WP7 for their smartphones is probably about the worst move they could make (unless WP7 has an extremely unlikely surge in popularity in the next year or so). I think things are going to get MUCH worse for Nokia, and they may never get better.
Yes, they certainly can! Nokia will soon be out of business, just like Palm! Difference is that Palm usually made far better phones. I'm still using my 7 year old Treo650 and am now upgrading to the Palm Pre Plus.
Yep, M$ will eat the slim profit margins they manage to squeeze out of customers. When Nokia is dying they will leave them by the roadside to dry up and blow away.
Nokia globally licensed Birdstep Smartconnect, a tool/advanced utility does auto switching between wifi and 3G, much like iPhone but even more advanced (seamless roaming).
Guess what? It took 2 months for me to find such a tool exist and free. I must have needlessly switched between wifi (using horrible ui) hundreds of times.
A normal thinking, sane company would pay to Birdstep guys to build that functionality to phone OS or at least embed in firmware!
That company will team with Microsoft who are subject to ridicolous jokes (if they did a car etc.) and somehow be saved. Symbian users won't choose Android which has similar charasterictics but choose Windows phone.
Here is a hint: You can't even ship a browser for Windows phone but 90% Nokia users are Opera Mobile fans for very valid in addition to historical reasons. Nokia licensed Opera while it was a sane company, not trying to achieve most horrible use of webkit award.
Having used cellphones since Nokia was still called Mobira, I think Nokia deserves everything they have coming to it. Symbian was a political train wreck from day one, and it never really stood a chance even before the politics got in the way. The pre-symbian products were great, an 8210 I had is still going strong and loved by the person I gave it to when I switched to a WAP phone (remember WAP?). Essentially, since Symbian, Nokia lost the plot. As long as Nokia makes such crap, they will never make any headway, even among those who insist on a brand-name phone (surprisingly common in Asia, even if it costs more to buy, because spare parts are available for the brands but not for the clones/copies).
I have been using dual sim phones for years with both sims simultaneously active, and I can switch each sim on and off independently without a reboot too - that's the norm for these phones outside of europe, and there are now phones with triple sims that work the same. The new Android based 2-sim models are a huge improvement on the old chinese firmware, and would be perfect if Skype on these didn't get stuck in an endless signing-in loop that could probably be fixed really easily if anyone cared......
If Nokia thinks that Windows is the answer, it can't be any worse than what has gone before. But I really don't think it's enough to compete with Android and save Nokia from the inevitable. (although Android is a Geek's platform from A-Z, iOS is in a different league of usability)
I used Nokia 7650, it was absolutely like a device from future and its usability rocked.
S60 UI comes from that device and its generation.
What these idiots did is over extending poor devices UI to this date! It would be Apple iPhone shipped with Newton UI today.
Generation after generation, added menus, preferences, development style, failed promises including Python (yes!), WRT and now Qt.
Symbian wasn't the problem. It was plain insane like multiple personality disorder and passive agression. Trust me, Nokia story is more like a psychatric problem and if you read all his stories, Orlowski was among the first to say "patient is suicidal".
"After the 2009 disaster, Nokia decided it had made too many smartphones, so as a radical strategy, it wouldn't bother making any at all. Brilliant."
N8 kinda puts that into the long grass. So does N9, but, hey, don't let reality get in the way of a good story.
But, Andrew, the 2007 disaster of Nokia and Siemens takes the biscuit. Or at least should've slid the cheese off Beresford-Wylie's cracker.
Or maybe it did.
@JC_, I see no trolling there. Microsoft has "parnered" with companies then screwed them over again and again and again. Companies have short memories, so it doesn't seem to hurt Microsoft any.
Re: Nokia... it's too bad, but man are the mismanaged! Bought Trolltech for some QT lovin', waited until something nice for their phones was *almost* done and scrapped it. Kept using S60 well past it's "past due" date. Almost finished *several* replacements (Maemo etc.) and then scrapped them. The currrent "we'll sell no smartphones" is of course brilliant. And finally, deciding they'll sell WinMo phones -- why not at least sell WinMo *and* Android ones, if they are going to abandon their own software?
"(and such lacklustre) products in the pipeline"" Nokia phones have the best featureset of any featurephone. There's nothing lacklustre on it. Nokia has a problem marketing their good products but they have no problem creating good products.
"Vanjoki was showing off three lacklustre smartphones" Again The S^3 smartphones showed off are NOT lacklustre. They have a rich featureset set against an amazing low price. In fact a 250 euro C7 has full multitasking, copy and paste, webbrowser with RSS-feed, emailclient, CALL RECORDING!!!, games (the same popular hits as on iPhone yes indeed), very good media-player (with divx and subtitle support out of the box), a great camera etc... for LESS than 1/2 the price of an iPhone.
"and failed to address other critical issues such as the development platform." You;re contradicting yourself. In the line above you wote "the new Qt development strategy". THIS IS the development platform, you du*&%$%%!
"he midrange feature phones made by Samsung and sold into Europe destroyed much of Nokia's midrange." Yes for now. Because low-income cunsomers just buy cheap (and in Samsung's case also bad) doesn't mean they won't defect again to Nokia when their Samshit breaks down (and when they're fed up with Samsung goddamn awfull repair service as I have encountered with my +500 euro Samsung smartphone).
Nokia should just STIC AROUND. PPL will want to go back to symbian. My last Nokia was the 3330 ages ago, after samsung, acer,asus, Sony ericson I finally bought THIS year S^3 phone (only because it could record phonecalls and can be synchronised with my outlook software at home). And i love it! It came ridiculously cheap with an amazing featureset. It even has an FM TRANSMITTER, hell yeah!
So stop propagating Android. Because it's no more than a backdoor for Microsoft to fill their pockets and delude ppl with the idea that it's "open". It's sucks because every jbrand locks their bootloader, it sucks because it's a mess and every brand decides which OS you gonna get or not gonna get and I I can go on and on. There's too much reasons to dislike Android and I dislike it! It's not because they have succes today that they'll be successful tomorrow.
Everybody thinks short term strategy while Nokia used to think long-term. Apple a new iPhone every year (and they'll decide which of the new features you gonna get on the old device), Samsung a new phone every 3 months and they get one update out and thereafter it's screw you. Nokia at least has the decency to upgrade old 5800XM phones with new features. And guess what. The new features don;t slow down the old device (hey Apple) but make it FASTER! How's that for an upgrade. Sure it'll take longer to get it finished but the end result will be pleasing. Trust me. Customers will COME Back to Nokia!
is too uninspired, unimaginative, and, well, just true-to-form to be capable of achieving any sort of lasting legacy.
'cos really, the hip kids ain't gonna be buying t-shirts, Atari or C= style, 15 years down the road featuring http://images.google.co.nz/search?q=nokia+logo&tbm=isch&biw=1280&bih=648 , are they...
I think we should raise our pints in a final toast to the Nokia of old, back when text-messaging was for geeks, and Series 40 didn't have a name, let alone a meaningless multiple of 20. Because really, dear commentards and paper-space-plane-crafters - wouldn't it be kinder to look the other way during the inevitable decay, rather than have to suffer ongoing reportage of this drawn-out pre-mortem post-mortem?
Nokia produce the best phones and the worst software. Symbian has never even been an OK phone OS.
MS will drag them out of the gutter with Windows Phone 7 as it isnt half bad! and is still a baby. Slap it on the best hardware and you are going to have a damn good phone, they could take the business market by storm!
Has to be said if they slapped some android on there they would have the BEST phone on the market, its a shame but i would imagine there is some life saving deal behind them not using android MS probably giving them alot of cash i would imagine.
Nokia did NOT "graft touch onto Symbian."
Symbian had a touch API right from the start in 1998, only Nokia didn't use it (unlike Sony Ericcson)
And by the time Nokia finally got round to wanting to use it, they found it was now buried under multiple layers of S60 spaghetti, hacks, patches and other detritus.
As I've said many times before, don't confuse Symbian with the utter sh!t that is (was) S60.
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