Wake up, Uncle Fester! Huawei’s nattering about BUYING Nokia Chinese dragon Huawei says it has “no plans” to buy Nokia, Europe’s biggest technology company – but it didn’t challenge reports that triggered the story. The FT found Huawei’s consumer electronics chief Richard Yu musing on a takeover of Nokia. If alarm bells aren’t ringing in Redmond, they should be. Yu may think that – but …
And only minutes later, the WSJ announces that Microsoft is no longer interested in a takeover of Nokia.
Does this mean that, as far as Microsoft is concerned, they would not intervene when Huawei decides to put in an offer? If so, they must realise that under new ownership, Nokia is unlikely to remain a WP exclusive customer. If Nokia falls (one way or another), what future does WP have? I mean, it's one thing having an OS that people seem to like, quite another to not have any hardware to run it on.
So if MS is OK with NOK going AWOL, I guess it's FO for WP?
I remember hearing how Bill Gates was always paranoid about some competitor coming out of left-field and destroying Microsoft, at least in the early days. I guess he never saw phones as a risk until it was too late.
He never saw lots of things - the web, browsers, search engines, but to be fair they did a lot of work on early smartphones and tablets. Pocket PC was genuinely better I thought than the Palm (I could never take the monochrome over colour), but like IE 6, Windows Mobile and most of their established products, once they were in a dominant market leading position they left the product to stagnate and allowed the competition to easily pass them.
"I guess he never saw phones as a risk until it was too late."
"He never saw lots of things - the web, browsers, search engines"
Next fking obvious statement!
Of course everyone saw these things coming. Apparently everyone, except Bill Gates, can see into the future.
W O W!
Bloody Trolls. Stupid and stinky.
"Next fking obvious statement!
Of course everyone saw these things coming. Apparently everyone, except Bill Gates, can see into the future."
That's not fair.
When it was obvious to everyone else that the internet was going to take off, Gates still tried to push the closed MSN. Mosaic / Netscape had a big head start on the GUI browser due to that.
But there is no timestamp on that WSJ rumour. All it says that Microsoft were in talks with Nokia, talks broke down and hints at possible reasons but doesn't give anything substantial, every bit the rumour.
It could easily be the case that Microsoft did have talks but these talks were months ago, well before the Huawei news and that the Huawei news in fact might prompt Microsoft to do a 180. Currently keeping Nokia at arms length is the best thing for Microsoft and Nokia as it means they aren't sullied by the Surface debacle and still allows Microsoft to court other manufacturers.
That's what Apple had understood and never tried to merge OSX and iOS codebases and apps - a desktop system maybe with multiple large monitors is very different from a smartphone even with an 8" screen.
User expectation are very different. MS will just waste time trying to achieve it.
Err... They were not supposed to run on both Desktop and phone.
Microsoft's vision is that a tablet is a mini desktop screen, rather than an oversized phone. Thus you have Windows 8 running on tablets and desktops and Windows Phone 8 running on phones.
An iPad application is also different to an iPhone application. Just look at Facebook for the iPhone and for the iPad (I wish Android did this - Spotify and Facebook on my Infinity tablet are annoying as hell to use (to the extent that they are not used at all).
Whether it's better to treat a tablet as an oversized phone or an undersized desktop is open to discussion, but either way all companies know that there is a large difference between the desktop and the phone.
Maybe they will converge at some point, but no mater the OS it will rely on responsive design to get the interface flexible enough to work on all screen sizes (just like modern websites do...)
Which is why the UI on an iMac is not the same as the UI on an iPad and neither is the same as the UI on an iPhone. THREE classes of device, three different UIs. Not one size fits all, nor two sizes fit all. If Apple is smart, there's considerable amounts of common code underlying them, but the user doesn't care one way or the other. He just cares about having the right UI for the device and work to hand.
The mark for how badly MS has fscked up, is that I'm starting to sound like an Apple fanboi!
The comparison between Google buying Motorola and the possibility of MS buying Nokia isn't really a true comparison. Whereas Motorola were at the time (and still are) a niche player on the Android scene, Nokia accounts for Samsung levels of sales of WP handsets. This is why none of the Android manufacturers were that fussed by Google's acquisition, but I'm guessing HTC would be a bit miffed if Ballmer bought a large chunk of Espo.
"exploiting the market where you have leverage."
Actually I think you'll find in the case of Wintel desktops it was called corporate monopoly abuse. That's what various courts have said at various times anyway.
On the other hand, MS have little or no leverage to exploit in games machines, pocket computers, the server room, etc.
The thought that an app could be written to run on *any* Windows device is ludicrous.
It applies to pithy samples shown in Visual Studio demonstrations and really rubbish apps that want to be everywhere and don't work properly anywhere. For real applications, the entire U.I., at the very least, will have to be entirely redone.
You simply can't design an app for a phone and expect it to be useful on a desktop or vice versa.
Sure, have 3 different user interfaces to suit the form factors, but why does it need 3 different APIs?
What happens when someone comes out with a phone that can plug into a dock and become a tablet? Or a tablet that can plug into an external monitor, keyboard and mouse and become a desktop?
Do we install 3 different versions of the same application? Or just have one adapt its UI using a common palette of controls to the situation?
>...
Nokia has value to nobody now.
<
I think that you might forget that Nokia isn't just mobile sales. There's a lot of mobile-relevant IP laying around in their filing cabinets.
A bit like Phillips, who aren't a big apparent CE player these days; they still live off Audio cassette licenses and, together with Sony, off anything remotely CD-related.
Nokia's patent portfolio has come up in some recent spats and doesn't look as compelling as it once was, especially as we move towards LTE. Obviously, there is still a lot there but much of the useful stuff is already FRAND so trying to hold the competition to ransom is not really an option as many recent court cases have illustrated.
The maps business is still worth something and they obviously still have some great product designers and engineers.
Markets are all a bit frothy at the moment due to the money printing (credit is cheap) and financial repression (bonds have negative real returns). All told Nokia should be worth more than Skype but could find itself bought for around the same price especially if cash is in involved. Definitely make or break year for Nokia.
Nokia's patents they haven't let out to trolls are licensed to Microsoft on a binding, fully paid up perpetual license that survives a change in control of Nokia or the sale or transfer of the patent. In fact in a change of control Microsoft might get them outright as part of their partnership deal. Microsoft got that concession from Sendo, and with their own guy as signor on the Nokia side such a trivial term could be overlooked.
That means Microsoft doesn't have to buy Nokia to be safe from the patents, or maybe to get them. And since the point of buying them would be to sue Microsoft, Google or Apple, their value to any other buyer is nil. Google and Apple have enough patents to sue each other with unto the end of time - so much so that they're being told to reduce their patent claims to a few or get their whole suits thrown out, and nobody else has the kind of money for such a gamble, nor enough of a grudge.
Net/Net Nokia's patent portfolio is about as useful as teats on a boar.
Nokia's in the EU and it is not possible to ban foreign takeovers the way they are done in the US. That said some kind of joint venture is more likely than an outright takeover. At the moment it's all just posturing and rumours from Wall Streeters hoping for fat commissions.
I'll probably get abuse for this but the Lumia 620 that I've just bought my daughter is a brilliant little phone. I tried many android based phones around the £150 mark and none of them could match the slickness and more importantly speed of the Lumia. My daughter loves it and like many people doesn't care what OS it runs as long as it can run Skype and a few other essential for life apps. I would like there to be a Movie Star Planet app, but at least because of this I always know where to find my Nexus, it's under her pillow.
More importantly for her it came in pink.
Those nay sayers with no experience of the patform are the worst type to take advice from so are ignored.
However, winphone owners are not being supported properly and seeing as Apple wipes the arse of their iFolly owners, confidence in the winphnoe platform is diminished and sales will remain poor.
If MS want to play in the play ground, they need to go for it guns blazing and not dither around causing doubt. They need to get a broader range of apps to support other manufacturers products.
Until recently there was no iplayer for BEEB. And many apps are missing, (such as Philips TV Remote, Sky+, Sky Go,etc..)
Oi MS! Go hard or go home.
Absolutely 100% true!
Not only RT has been a massive distraction, but also it segments MS OS market into 3 incompatible layers, Windows Phone, Windows RT and 'normal' Windows, when there's (arguably) only established room for two.
Firstly, there's complete incompatibility between Windows Phone and RT apps, so instead some kind of windows synergy it actually hurts both. Many (most?) iOS apps work on both iPads and iPhones, same with Android. So why, when already coming late into the market with a massive handicap in app numbers, would anyone shoot themselves in the foot by providing 3 different incompatible overlapping OSes?!
(rethorical question - I'd guess it's because MS is led by muppets living in the past, with very unrealistic understanding of the modern tech world and their company's abilities compared to competition)
Then on the other side, there's Windows Phone which, contrary to what some would say, is a great platform with a potential to appeal to at least some part of the phone market segment, but it's hurt by the lack of apps and a horribly slow development cycle which leaves it wanting in some major areas compared to iOS/Android.
IMO, much better idea would've been to not have even bothered with RT. They should have concentrated on Windows Phone - for example, by now it could've had support for quad cores, 1080p and other basic phone OS features, which would have allowed it to be competitive with iOS/Android on smartphones but would have also made it viable for smaller tablets (with an addition of a RT-like Start screen). Yeah, that would have left some market gap unattended in the larger tablet market but who cares - it's not like RT is doing even remotely well there, and in two years that's going to be filled with cheap x86 Windows anyway.
In fact, there's still time to kill RT and move all the resources to expanding Windows Phone slightly up and Windows slightly down, but I suspect that's not going to happen because people in charge are too invested with it, and we'll have to wait one or two more cycles for it to die its natural death...
It is possible that MS management knows things that most of us don't.
Their national government could have issues with regards to a takeover by a foreign company, those issues could be much more serious if the foreign company has links to the China government instead of the US gov.
This is a question I was meaning to ask for a while now: are there (or were there ever) actual, honest-to-God Windows fanboys – in the same vein as, say, GNU/Linux or Apple zealots?
I always thought Windows was only praised by cynical IT pros with MCSE certifications. Are there people who actually go out of their way to use it?
Of course not. Before the arrival of tablets and mobile phones Windows was like your belly button, you got one either you want it or not. How many people have you seen having pride in owning it ? Now the situation has changed. Everybody wants to be different from the large mass of Windows users so they buy Apple or Samsung or HTC or anything that would differentiate them. It is a normal psychological reaction occurring in any post-totalitarian scenario.
I am fairly convinced that Microsoft should try their hand with a totally new and unrelated brand of mobile devices and allow the world to discover them freely. Maybe this would bring them more success than trying to corral us back into their dominance.
And exactly how long has Linux been available again?
Twenty-odd years, if we count from the date of Torvald's original announcement.
Your point?
"a very attractive proposition at the bargain basement end of the market today where it competes with Landfill Android™"
As opposed to the Toy Phone Brigade™ ? The "sales" of these bargains have been made on the pour souls of the salespeople of many companies...aaah, the good old days of astroturfing...
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