Windows Phone
Cue Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2
Nadella isn’t not done yet. Microsoft has made further redundancies in its the old Nokia phone division, as Finnish paper Helsingen Sanomat reports. The number is “dozens” according to the paper, and these are additional redundancies over the layoffs already announced, hitting the Lumia marketing teams. “The reduction is due …
OK, so they trashed Windoze, first with the "Ribbon", and next with (cracked) tiles, so a PC gets to play "phone" rather than do real work.
Next, they buy Nokia, and attempt to shrink a PC operating system onto it, so that a phone can (try to) run PC apps.
Because no one is writing phone apps for the Microsoft phones.
My son has a Lumia 630, loves it, would like to "graduate" to the bigger, better(?) Lumia/Microsoft phones (and their great cameras, etc.), but, what is there? A lot of apps that he wants/needs simply don't exist. Encapsulated Android or IOS apps probably won't help, but we're looking for options.
Nutella &co. have really lost track.
I'm beginning to doubt that M$ has any vision of where they want to go (remember "where do you want to go today?" ???) other than complete control of hardware that they didn't buy, and massive amounts of telemetry info that they can sell to others for revenues on top of those gathered by their unjustifiably exorbitant pricing SCHEME. M$ has no idea whatsoever of where they want to go, today, or any other day. (I can give them some suggestions...).
Nokia's hardware, and solid reliability are wonderful. I have an ancient 6210 (!) that has endured being dropped in (salty) snow, punted underneath my car, dragged back out, dropped, rained upon, and abused in a number of ways (no phone throw, though). And, like the legendary Timex watch(es), it takes a licking, but keeps on ticking.
Microsoft, on the other hand, only tick people off, and they can lick...................
Not even IBM in their greatest years, with their best developers, and their massive funding, could do a "one-size-fits-all-devices" OS. What kind of idiotic, astonishing hubris makes Microsoft think they can do it?
Yes, sorry - I phrased that badly. I meant that MSFT got (and has) access to Nokia's IP and all the cross licensing deals with Qualcomm, Apple, Google etc. Depending on how MSFT plan to play mobile[1] in future, that may still be worth something - though obviously not enough to justify the whole fiasco.
[1] By that I mean any battery powered and wirelessly connected gadgets.
All I know is that somewhere someone must be making money from this practice.
Yes, investment banks, accountants, lawyers and management consultants. It has been recognised for years that M&A destroys shareholder value, but for incompetent executives, M&A is a sexy diversion from the boring grind of delivering innovation, good value or great service.
Why bother growing the business that employs you, when you could just fritter your own shareholder's money buying some growth? If you're a UK reader, look at Sainsbury's trying to buy Argos. Sainsbury's can't run their own stores terribly well, have never been very good at supply chain management and stock availability. So heck knows why the idiot directors of Sainsburys think they will be able to run Argos better than its existing management. But the reason for this is that Sainsbury aren't growing. Rather than focus on why that is, and adapt their business model to the new reality, they decide that they will buy the turnover of a dissimilar business, and then try and integrate a general retailer into their grocery stores. It's a stupid, stupid, stupid idea, invented by idiots, with greedy advisors egging the Sainsbury board along.
>...a sexy diversion from the boring grind of delivering... great service.
?????????????????????????????????????????????????
????????????????????? WTF ???????????????????????
?????????????????????????????????????????????????
What century are you living in?
...and how can I get there?
It is more like "the painful realisation that a significant number of senior executives in tech companies are embarrassingly inadequate when it come to delivering either innovation or decent customer service so they want to distract shareholders and the general public from this humiliating truth" hence M&As aplenty.
I believe they thought they were buying themselves into owning the only real vendor shipping Windows Phones to protect themselves against defection, and from there use it to make Windows Phone a big thing.
Unfortunately for them, and me as I stupidly gave them my hard earned for a 950xl and regret it, they've failed.
In my view, Windows Phone 8.1 was actually just fine, stable, reliable, features worked, it just needed newer faster hardware (easy), and further software enhancement.
Instead they replaced it with the unfinished, broken, badly thought out Windows 10 Mobile or whatever it's actually supposed to be called, and made a fledgling system utterly horrible, unreliable and frankly not fit for purpose. I'm through with Microsoft's bull when it comes to phones now, they've changed direction 3 times, and never stop when they find the right combo.
Windows Phone 7... binned so fast my hardware still looks minty fresh.
Windows Phone 8... actually works.... binned
Windows 10 Mobile.... er... yeah.... it'll be ready later, with forced updates... maybe...
They made quite an excellent phone end proceeded to shoot themselves in the foot by putting horrendous software on it.
I'm starting to think Nadella is under orders to run Nokia into the ground. He's getting quite good at ruining perfectly good hardware with Win 10. I'm convinced they designed it for exactly this purpose.