SGS2 launch proves: selling the best hardware is the differentiator, not proprietary OS tiles.
The truly good news about the great SGS2 launch is proof that hardware is the commodity now and that sniffing Telco bum like Nokia has done for years has finally stopped cutting it.
See Sammy's giveaway of free Phones to custom Rom cookers. I feel confident in buying popular Sammy phones, cause I know there will be updated custom ROMs long after official updates stopped. AND Sammy won't be trying to screw people up who want to use those!
Samsung could care less what OS goes on it, they just want to sell phones, not philosophy. They suck at software, but they say: whatever customers want to use, we'll sell them a top-of-the-line device to run it on.
So why would Nokia go to the folly of trying to foist a single OS choice on their customers with locked bootloaders? Do it like HTC: Make one great Phone at each price point, toss Windphone7, Android and Megoo on it. Then allocate your software resources according to respective sales volume.
Nokia's new Smartphone looks great. I prefer the design over anything else I've seen, even though they don't use nice materials like HTC. But Symbian Anna? give me a break... WindPhone7? no way.
Megoo I'd buy. And your specs should be up to snuff. Can Nokia focus on hardware enough to get their specs to be competitive with Samsung?
Selling phones that don't compete on hardware won't go over well at any rate. Not on loyalty and not with Windphone7 either, if that's Elop's hope, he should hire a replacement for himself now.
Let customers vote with their money which OS wins. Nokia has done great selling Phones on making great hardware. They might have missed the boat on becoming a software company by being too slow. But Megoo had a lot of people waiting, some of us still want a cleaner Linux than Android is.
In the end, we just want to buy hardware from you, not OS philosophy. Give us a better mousetrap than the other guys, and an OS that won't annoy the crap out of intelligent people by trying to babysit them or by fencing them in. Should be much like the PC, You buy one computer, you can boot it into Leopard, Windows or Linux or all 3.
If M$ could return to the ways of the Lotus 123 takedown with a "hello customer: we solved your problems, we made extensive inquiries and we did it exactly the way you said you'd like it"... but now, they're just jockeying for more tollbooths without giving you any good reason to drive over their roads.
M$ is trying to emulate Apple, and where Apple looks like a fenced garden to a lot of people, with Microsoft, it looks more like a ghetto.
And M$ is trying to emulate Google too, just without trading you free stuff for the advertising dollars made on your back. No they want to charge on both ends... go away, Ballmer...