Re: Differentiating

> Also, Win Pho seems to have lower hardware requirements. Only single core last year, and it ran well on that.

WP7 was based on the old CE kernel that only supported single core (and max 800x480). When WP7 was released MS specified the handful of SoCs that were supported and so last year's models were, give or take, the same as 3 years earlier.

They 'ran well' because they had no real multi-tasking. Some MS software could steal cycles much like TSRs did on MS-DOS. Apps were tombstoned when put in background and restarted, the developer could code in a save and recover to make it appear that the app had survived in background.

> Now only dual core, when the best kit is quad-core. That gives Nokia a financial advantage.

Again only specific SoCs can be used. Newer SoCs, even quad core could be cheaper but Nokia will have to buy the supported ones at whatever the supplier feels is appropriate.

> They can get away with cheaper phones at the same margin.

As the 'margin' on Nokia's WP7 sales appears to have been -47% (ie a loss - the cost of running the division was greater than its revenue) then 'same margin' would not be a good thing.

Re: Untranslating the translation

I think you might be reading too much into a simple statement, I could see even 15-20% market share as being in balance with the competition - after all, what do Apple have currently, 25% or so?

GJC

Re: Untranslating the translation

'los otros dos grandes ecosistemas, Apple y Android.'

Spot the ongoing lie. It's the word 'otros'.

Re: Untranslating the translation

I think you might be reading too much into a simple statement

Welcome to The Register.

Re: Errm...

I think the HTC phones differ in their external looks(grey-ish two tone[HTC Radar]), compared to the Lumia 820. Also the intensity of the screen colour appears to be different. Other then that, the interface and how the phones work is pretty much identical. Although the Nokia one probably has a batch of Nokia related applications. No idea how HTC is trying to differentiate themselves from the other Windows Phone producers.

Disclaimer: I toy with both of them every now and then, my mother has received a Radar as a work phone and my brother owns a Lumia 820, and my dad a Iphone 3GS. I myself own a N900. So I have the chance to toy around with all of them and hear all the gripes people have with these phones. Its obviously all anecdotal evidence.

Re: "they adopted an OS that offers nothing in the way is differentiation"

I probably should have been a bit clearer: I dont see much of a differentiation between the WinPhone producers. Nor Android/Iphone to be honest. Most differences between the OS's are minor nowadays, as my mother is of the oppinion that she can pick up/use any of them with ease. I also know some elderly that happily use any of them that come in their hands. The only thing they dont understand is why application 1 does only function on device A and not on B or C. They always used Windows and any applications they would install would work, most people never run across binary's for Linux or MacOS.

Re: "they adopted an OS that offers nothing in the way is differentiation"

To be fair, they do also pack in PureView and Qi charging. Nobody was doing that on any kind of scale before Nokia.

Re: "they adopted an OS that offers nothing in the way is differentiation"

Dave Fox,

I don't think that's Elop's point at all. He doesn't need to differentiate Nokia from the others on Win Phone, because no other manufacturer is taking it seriously as an OS. Sammy and HTC (and LG?) have phones, but it's not their main effort. Although HTC seem to be trying harder with Win Pho 8.

Android is a crowded space. You need to shout really loud to get noticed above everyone else in that lot. Plus you've got Huawei, ZTE and maybe Lenovo all trying to break into the world markets and therefore sell at little to no profit to grow share. As well as Google themselves launching the Nexus 4 at a ridiculously cheap price.

Re: Errm...

Or without the spin, down from 2.7% to 2.4%

http://rcpmag.com/articles/2012/11/15/windows-phone-market-share-slips.aspx

It could have been so different. A Nokia running Android.... Ah well, goodbye Nokia, thanks for the fish,.

Re: Errm...

So they increased sales year-on-year by about a third, and you call that bad? If they fail to improve with Win Pho 8, they're probably doomed. A 0.3% sales drop off in one quarter before the release of a new OS they announced ages ago isn't exactly a disaster (especially with no updates possible). Not as bad as the sales drop Apple suffered pre the iPhone 5 for example.

If they can double again, and start selling 10m handsets a quarter this year, things will be looking OK. Assuming they can make a decent margin on them. That ought to be enough to push them into healthy profit and get some developers into the app store.

A lot of it is about getting the carriers to push your handsets. Many people don't choose their handset, they take the one they're offered. Win Phone is more limited than Android, but maybe easier to use. With the right incentives, they could get the carriers onside. Although that might mean persuading Microsoft to allow the carriers' crapware branding...

Hopefully you're right.

Its just a shame they weren't doing that 4 years ago and leading the way with android.

I'd love to see a Nokia Android phone, with a competently written but easily removable UI skin. That would give them some serious market differentiation, and could be a real winner.

GJC

Screw that. Get Nokia to work with Google on building a pure Nexus handset, and they will win.

Yeah, absolutely, I'd buy one, especially at the Nexus 4 £230 price.

GJC

agree totally. a nokia nexus would be a beast. especially if sold at normal nexus levels.

Elop would have to be tied, gagged and chucked in a fjord before that happens tho.

Re: Dying app store?

I like Windows Phone. The app store sucks. Really badly. And hasn't noticeably improved over the year I've had the phone. Worse, Andrew O says that there was very little new content for the launch of Win Pho 8. That's pretty piss-poor from MS.

I don't care. I barely use apps on my phone. That's all on the tablet. Even when I had Android I only used about 5 apps regularly. And 3 of those were to replace stock Android modules I thought were rubbish.

For £10m MS could pay some devs to write 50 apps. Just seed the market with a decent free torch app, that actually works and doesn't steal your data. Simple stuff like that. Spend another few million on helping the BBC get an iPlayer app out, and some of the big mainstream ones. It would be cheaper than spending the same cash on advertising, to have Sky, the BBC and other media companies saying regularly, "go to the Marketplace to download our application to your Windows Mobile phone."

Re: Dying app store?

> For £10m MS could pay some devs to write 50 apps.

Er... I think they already did.

Re: Comments about Symbian

By all accounts, Nokia Belle is a really polished revision of Symbian. But Symbian sales collapsed as soon as Nokia "dead-ended" the OS, which wasn't the plan at all.

I think strategically, Nokia made a mistake with Symbian. Instead of discontinuing it, they should have stuck with the previous plan to push it down into the Series 40 space, instead of trying to pull Series 40 up to fill the gap left by Symbian. Ditching MeeGo, for all its strengths, was the right call though.

Re: Elop's 3 strategy pillars for Nokia have all failed

Eadon,

There's some good points in that analysis. But also quite a lot of bollocks. Nokia was making barely any more profits from Symbian than it was from dumbphones. And that was a diminishing amount too, with massive competition from China. Nokia had brilliant supply chain organisation, and that kept the cheaper Chinese manufacturers at bay for a while, but not forever. That's barely discussed in the article, but visible from the charts. It needs a better break-down of smartphone sales, into Win Pho, high-end Symbian and cheap Symbian. With profits for each.

Nokia needed to move its sales to the high end smartphones. They probably had the in-house software to do that, but as they'd been failing to bring it to market for the last 5 years, Elop clearly didn't trust them to do it this time either, and so went for something outside that was already done. Whatever he did was a bet with the company's survival, and that wasn't his fault, but due to piss-poor past management.

Whether Elop has been rubbish at managing his sales channels is a matter I'm not qualified to judge. I've got no information. But given how poor the rest of the analysis is, I'm not prepared to take it on trust from that author.

Re: Elop's 3 strategy pillars for Nokia have all failed

I'm seeing a lot of downvotes, but not much in the way of actual arguments against the valid points in my post. I make no claims for having a monopoly on being right, but I'm not trolling. Does this mean perhaps that people can't come up with valid reasons for their prejudice, but just have to vote it anyway? Surely the downvote button is for trolls and idiots, not people you just disagree with?

Re: Elop's 3 strategy pillars for Nokia have all failed

"Nokia was making barely any more profits from Symbian than it was from dumbphones (sic)."

A categorically false statement. IIRC the Nokia smartphone division had returned the highest profitability and sales for any division in the history of Nokia immediately prior to the "burning platform" memo.

The rest of you post is flawed as well, buy hey, don't let the facts interfere with your rant.

Re: Elop's 3 strategy pillars for Nokia have all failed

Got any figures for that? That's not the way I read the ones I saw in that article, but I don't have the full information - so I'm happy to be corrected. I saw sales increasing and profits going down. Which isn't great. I think it reflects the market was getting more crowded. It may also be that Nokia were selling more low-end phones, at less profit. Also, they had a great Q4, in an otherwise lacklustre 2010, when profits were creeping down, on mostly stagnant sales in a market growing at a double digit rate. So they bled about 10% market share in smartphones (from memory).

Symbian was looking tired and outdated, and doing badly. Rather like MS with Windows Mobile 6, they'd sat on their laurels too long, not improving much, and the market was about to poo all over them. They'd been overtaken, but sales weren't yet reflecting that. Elop made that worse with burning platforms I'm sure. But I find it hard to believe that Symbian wouldn't have collapsed to around its current level anyway in not much longer.

I don't think you could categorise my posts as a rant. I'm no defender of Elop. But there's some absolutely bonkers criticism of him out there. As if Nokia were doing fine, and only he ruined it. Possibly as part of a conspiracy with MS... Nokia were not doing fine. They'd sat still as market leaders too long, wasted too much excellent R&D, and were heading for a fall of some size whatever happened. Android at the £100 price-point and £20 Chinese dumb-phones are a hell of a disruption to the market. Plus Apple at the top end, and Samsung everywhere.

But thanks for at least discussing with me. I'm happy to learn from people who have seen better figures than the crap that often gets posted online.

Re: Elop's 3 strategy pillars for Nokia have all failed

> The destruction of Nokia only makes sense if you realise that Elop is working in conjunction with his old employers, Microsoft.

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

Elop believed in MS, having worked there for many years and having been indoctrinated. The price that MS extracted from Elop was the dumping of everything else. Having worked at MS he thought that dealing with suppliers and resellers was simply a matter of bullying them to do as they are told. This didn't work and the result is as you see it.

Re: Elop's 3 strategy pillars for Nokia have all failed

> Nokia's share price has doubled in the last six months, interestingly.

If you look in your spam folder you might find a few other companies whose share prices have doubled in the last six months, and for more or less the same reason.

Re: Elop's 3 strategy pillars for Nokia have all failed

Well, the Nokia shares appear to be on the down again:

http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=NOA3.DE#symbol=noa3.de;range=2y;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=undefined;

Peaking in August and its been slowly on the decline again ever since. So yeah, you should have sold half a year ago when it peaked. Or, ride it out anyway ti'll the end, the shares arent worth much, and it they manage to turn around then your a happy camper, if they go down all the way, then well you lose.

Re: Ex-Nokia exec and mobile industry strategist Tomi Ahonen...

Although that is the article where he says Symbian was "winning", why dump it? Which someone damages his credibility...