Rumor discussion: Nokia and Microsoft to team up on Windows Phone 7
-
[quote author="ixSci" date="1297602709"]Do you really think you know better than Nokia CEO and key shareholders? [/quote]
I honestly believe they have a very US-centric view born out of hiring US execs and directors to recover their US marketshare. In doing so, they will kill their global market which is actually worth quite a lot more. All those US software companies can't penetrate Europe and Asia. Now Nokia is also US software. Europeans will flock to US products. Game over.If you look at global marketshare, Nokia has been doing very well with the competition from Apple & Google. You'd expect them to be demolished by such large companies. However, four years later and they are still outpacing growth of Apple and outselling Google and they are just one manufacturer. Take US out of the equation and Nokia is (was) way ahead. 76% in Asia, about 50% elsewhere.
I believe they don't understand their products whatsoever. If they did, they'd focus on something already.
-
[quote]I honestly believe they have a very US-centric view [/quote]
It seems so but whether an Apple strategy is different? If they bet on US market then it means something, don't you think?
[quote]In doing so, they will kill their global market which is actually worth quite a lot more.[/quote]
Could you please provide some digits? Your assert is a bit subjective -
It means they will now lose European and Asian market which is worth many billions more.
Sure, there are massive profits to be made in US as the average customer doles out $67/month for a smartphone plan but it will very soon crash as operators become dumb pipes. Apps like Skype, WhatsApp (available for everyone but Windows Phone) and Viber are making calls/text redundant. They've made me cancel my unlimited calls/text.
The entire culture of plans in the US revolves around ridiculous monthly fees and 'free' handsets while eliminating pre-paid (really, it's not possible to get your smartphones pre-paid -- I've tried [CDMA or more expensive than plan, etc]). It's very unstable profits that only require a shift in culture or an operator that attempts to undercut the competition to break this whole thing down.
Instead, in the future, people will hop on the increasing availability of cheap wireless data.
This, combined with smartphones becoming more affordable and the general trend of dumbphones->smartphones increasing will lead to a global market that is far more profitable than the US. Even more so than it already is.Right now, US is a hot centre and Nokia is trying to take it on. However, in doing so, it's alienating all its customers (no Meego, no Qt) and it appears it will lose its dominance in the long-term.
I'm sure they think they know what they are doing. And it's usually best to believe a company isn't making worse decisions than some armchair commentator. But in this case it looks quite dire to me.
-
Qt will continue to be the development framework for Symbian and Nokia will use Symbian for further devices; continuing to develop strategic applications in Qt for Symbian platform and encouraging application developers to do the same. With 200 million users worldwide and Nokia planning to sell around 150 million more Symbian devices, Symbian still offers unparalleled geographical scale for developers.
Extending the scope of Qt further will be our first MeeGo-related open source device, which we plan to ship later this year. Though our plans for MeeGo have been adapted in light of our planned partnership with Microsoft, that device will be compatible with applications developed within the Qt framework and so give Qt developers a further device to target.
Check this to see what other developers have to say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfWFvCJJaNs -
[NOTE: merged this in from separate thread "New ecosystem", Volker]
I was wondering how can Nokia and MS build an ecosystem with 1.5% WP market share. App developers consider a platform only if it has a considerable market share.A vast majority of 'Nokia developers' are either c++ or Java developers. I don't understand the Nok-MS thinking. Do they think that all of a sudden, these developers are going to learn .Net and write code for WP ? That is the impression I get from some of the discussions elsewhere. C++ developers are most likely to find other c++ jobs, either Qt (non-mobile, embedded) or others. Necessitas provide the Android path ( Thanks Bogdan, also to Nokia for lighthouse project ). J2me developers have S40 and other feature phones or they may move on to Android. Then Nokia will loose a vast majority of its current developerbase.
It will take years for WP, however good, to gain atleast some marketshare. WP, however good it may be, still will be just one among the many. I'am just wondering how all this will end, for Nokia. I really feel this is an attempt to rescue MS at the cost of Nokia.
-
Just ran up to "this":http://www.mobile-review.com/articles/2011/birulki-115-en.shtml news. More info about the phone they gonna use in the unexpected merge.