Can Android revive the corpse of Nokia brand?

[TemaseX]

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Microsoft-kill-the-Nokia-brand

Why did Microsoft kill the Nokia brand?
3 Answers

Adam Gering, cypherpunk, startup advisor, investor, founder.
Updated May 22, 2015 · Author has 1.7k answers and 1.8m answer views
Nokia lives on. Microsoft didn't buy Nokia, they bought Nokia's smartphone division. Nokia is still an active business, albeit one that no longer makes handsets.

Besides deciding the Lumia brand was sufficient versus the Nokia brand, they quite possibly didn't purchase the right to use the Nokia brand indefinitely.

Nokia's non-compete agreement with Microsoft (not to manufacture phones) expires in 2016. Nokia Denies Return To Phone-Making Business

The agreement was a save-face to avoid having a company that bet its fate on Microsoft's phone platform (and lost) enter bankruptcy, and to avoid disruption with a flagship line of Windows Phone devices.

The agreement was not entirely unlike Microsoft's rescue of Apple in 1997, although unlikely to end as successfully for Nokia; and moderately similar to Google's purchase of Motorola's smartphone division.
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Dion Guillaume, Tech Prophet
Answered May 11, 2015 · Author has 326 answers and 191.6k answer views
Microsoft didn't kill the Nokia brand. Nokia is still an independant company that sold it's mobile hardware division to Microsoft, who licensed the Nokia name on feature phones for a decade, but no on smartphones. As such Microsoft was obligated to manufacture smartphones under their own name.
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Aaron Nedumparambil, Nokia Fan. Lumia user.
Answered May 8, 2015 · Author has 310 answers and 205.1k answer views
Trojan horse theory is bullshit. Nokia was all ready sinking when Elop came in, though they were still making massive profits. Symbian was clearly aging and Nokia didn't have a strong replacement ready yet, meego the intended successor was going to be too late.
WP was virtually the only remaining option for Nokia cause they knew Android wasn't for them with allready Samsung and many others onboard engaged in a death battle. WP however couldn't prop up Nokia as WP with its obvious drawbacks couldn't increase in sales rapidly as much as Nokia wanted while Symbian was collapsing in all front. Nokia was leaking cash and had to sell the mobile unit realising that they didn't couldn't fight the ongoing smartphone market. Nokia sold their mobile phone unit to MS while still keeping their network and Maps businesses. MS didnt buy Nokia brand and has permission to use it only for 2 years untill 2016 for smartphones.
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https://www.quora.com/Did-Microsoft-destroy-Nokia

Did Microsoft destroy Nokia?
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3 Answers

Arno Brevoort, worked for Nokia when Elop sent the burning platform memo
Answered Aug 1 2015 · Author has 1.1k answers and 768.3k answer views
There's whole books written about this. Microsoft didn't help but arguably Nokia was on a path of self destruction too.

I worked for Symbian, which later became part of Nokia.
Symbian's business model was basically what Android is today -- provide and license a smartphone operating system that anyone can use, with the technical expertise for hire to get it working on your hardware. It was at the time fairly succesful in Europe and Japan. Licensees included Sony-Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, Nokia, Siemens -- basically every mobile phone manufacturer had a high end Symbian smartphone. You could get Symbian running on fairly modest hardware -- it is less hardware hungry than Android. The price to pay was that Symbian used a curious dialect of C++ to write applications, which, although efficient, caused new programmers a steep learning curve.

Nokia in those days was developing phones on 3 different operating systems -- Series40 (homegrown), Series60 (Symbian) and Maemo. Maemo was the new Linux+Qt based that could have become the future. Series40 was mainly used for cheap feature phones. Series60 was Nokia's bread-and-butter -- high end smartphones that made the most profit.

Nokia was the market leader in mobile phones, and Symbian was the market leader in smartphone sales. What could possibly go wrong?

Well -- Nokia figured that paying license fees to an external company that supplied the OS to it's main competitors wasn't a smart thing to do. So for about the sum of licensing fees due in 2-3 years, they gobbled up Symbian, and now owned it outright.

Nokia's competitors figured that having your OS owned and controlled by your main competitor possibly wasn't a good plan. If you're SonyEricsson developing Symbian phones and the Symbian guys are now Nokia guys instead, perhaps, just perhaps, some of your bugfixes might get a lower priority than getting Nokia product shipped out the door. True or not, the thinking was there, and one by one Symbian's licensees dropped out and moved on to pastures green -- mostly Android.

Apple had been succesful with a *single* model -- The iPhone. One model.
Nokia on the other hand believed in "variety is the spice of life" and I've seen a year where Nokia brought out 52 (fifty-two!) different new phone models. Some series 40, some series 60, some Maemo phones. There's a lot of duplication of engineering effort and not really the razor sharp focus that Apple could have on their single phone.

So, Nokia in their wisdom decided that they too needed "focus". 3 different OS's and 52 different phone models wasn't the way to go. They didn't want to drop the low-end Series40 phones for fear of losing the emerging markets. So they announced that they'd drop Symbian, their bread and butter phone OS that was selling well -- and would replace it with Windows Phone. Except that that wasn't ready. Or proven. Or known to work on Nokia hardware.

Nokia's old high-end customers *had* been using Symbian, for better or worse. There would now no longer be an upgrade path for them. And the future was unclear. So they started to look around and bought other phones -- if you've got to change your habits anyway, you might as well change them all the way.

Sales plummeted. From market leader, Nokia dropped down to an also ran. Apple and Samsung were the new top dogs.

Only then did Microsoft step in and bought Nokia out. I guess Nokia did an excellent job all by themselves.

... in an alternate universe, what could have happened would be that Series40 phones were replaced with Series60/Symbian phones. That would mean the whole line would be running the known quantity of Symbian. There could then be a number of experimental high end phones, perhaps the PureView Symbian phone, another Maemo phone, or maybe an Android phone too.
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[TemaseX]

Chow MS CB!


https://qz.com/1037753/the-windows-...e-but-microsofts-culture-made-it-unavoidable/

The Windows Phone failure was easily preventable, but Microsoft’s culture made it unavoidable

Murder most foul. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)
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Written by
Jean-Louis Gassée Editor, Monday Note
July 26, 2017


How could Microsoft’s Windows Phone licensing business model stand a chance against Google’s free and open Android? None of the Redmond giant’s complicated countermeasures worked—its smartphone platform is dead. And yet, inexplicably, Microsoft failed to use a very simple move, one we’ll explore today.

Just back from three weeks in France’s heartland, I see Microsoft’s fresh and well-received fourth quarter fiscal year 2017 results. The numbers acknowledge what was already notorious: Windows Phone is dead—“Phone revenue was immaterial and declined $361 million.”

This doesn’t come as a surprise. Despite Microsoft’s strenuous efforts to breathe life into its smartphone platform and devices, Windows Phone had been on an inexorable downward slope for several years, confirming a Horace Dediu theorem [as always, edits and emphasis mine]:

As far as I’ve been able to observe, any company in the mobile phone market that ended up losing money has never recovered its standing in terms of share or profit.

Let’s recall that, in Sept. 2010, Redmond employees held what CNET called a “tacky ‘funeral‘” for iPhone and Blackberry. One wonders how they’ll memorialize Windows Phone.

The gross failure of what once was the most powerful and richest tech company on the planet led to a search for a platform killer. Detectives didn’t think they had to go far to nab a suspect: Android. Microsoft’s Windows Phone was murdered by Google’s smartphone OS. How could Redmond’s money-making software licensing business model survive against a free and open source platform? Case closed.

No so fast.

Microsoft’s smartphone troubles started well before the birth of Android. In a reversal of the famous dictum “victory has many fathers but defeat is an orphan,” Windows Phone’s collapse seems to have had many progenitors deeply embedded in the company’s decades-old culture.

But before we look at facts, let’s engage in a bit of fiction—let’s imagine Microsoft decides to fight Android on Google’s turf. In this alternate reality, Microsoft easily kills Android with one simple headline: “Windows Phone now free.”

The rest of the pitch writes itself. Compared to Google, Microsoft has much stronger connections to hardware OEMs on the one hand and software developers on the other. Its products are widely used and respected by business and consumer customers alike. By offering the Windows Phone platform for free, the company sacrifices licensing revenue, but this unnatural act is more than compensated for by the expansion of the Windows ecosystem. Windows PCs become more attractive, more compatible with the outpouring of mobile devices and applications created by enthusiastic hardware makers and eager app developers.

A bit breathless, I’ll concede, but you get the picture. We can visualize Steve Ballmer pacing the stage in an updated rendition of his sweaty “developers, developers, developers” oration.

Microsoft’s might and tentacular reach make the Free Windows Phone an unbeatable proposition. When Android is revealed in 2007 and the first HTC-made G1 phone is announced in Sept. 2008, Google can’t match Microsoft’s ecosystem. As a result, Android never achieves critical mass. Just as it dominates the personal computer industry, Microsoft climbs to the top of the smartphone world. This is an updated application of the company’s “embrace and extend” strategy, this time turning Google’s idea of a free OS against it.

None of this happened. Why not?

Back in the real world. Microsoft made a number of bad decisions that stem from its hardened culture.

To start with, Microsoft was hampered by its success. When smartphone trouble started, Microsoft was at the height of its power. As a retired Bill Gates postsciently said: Success is a terrible teacher. (Francophone readers will delight in a translation equivocation: le succès est une terrible maîtresse. Here maîtresse is both teacher and mistress, felicitously adding a dimension of narcissistic infatuation to the misleading data dangled by success.)

Less poetically, Microsoft knew it owned the magic formula. Look at our numbers!
(We’ll note that Nokia and RIM/Blackberry were similarly blinded by their success.)

For a long time, Microsoft’s orthodoxy placed the PC at the center of the world. When smartphones took center stage, the company’s propaganda censured talk of a post-PC world. Smartphones and tablets were mere “companion devices.”

While Microsoft treated the emerging mobile devices as a sideshow, Google and Apple forged ahead with modern operating systems that ran circles around Windows Mobile, itself a Windows CE descendant. It took Microsoft several hiccuping transitions hampered by backward compatibility trouble to move away from the outdated CE foundation. Windows Mobile became the modern Windows Phone in 2011 or 2012 (depending on whom you ask) but it was too late. Licensees didn’t line up at the Redmond door. The platform was already dying.

Then came a series of desperate moves.

We need licensees? Let’s impress the world with a big win.

Nokia, once the king of phones (they shipped as many as 100 million devices per quarter by the end of 2010), had recently removed its CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (aka OPK). As luck would have it, OPK was succeeded by a former Microsoft executive, Stephen Elop. This made communication between the two companies much easier and quickly led to a Windows Phone licensing “win”…but the pretense was transparent: While Nokia paid a Windows Phone license fee, Microsoft balanced the transaction with “platform support” payments.

This may sound like “Windows Phone now free,” but it’s much worse in three ways.

1. It admits defeat—Microsoft had to “buy” the Nokia licensing deal.
2. It’s woefully late in the smartphone war—four years after the birth of the iPhone, three years after the first Android phone.
3. Instead of enticing handset makers to sign a license because mighty Nokia proves the platform’s strength, would-be partners feel they can’t compete while paying for a Windows Phone license that is effectively free to a big competitor.

How could Microsoft execs have imagined that the barefaced Nokia “licensing agreement” would attract new takers?

But, wait, there’s more.

Shortly after the Nokia agreement is announced and smartly defended by Elop as a victorious battle in the war of platforms, disaster strikes. Nokia’s CEO in effect kills his existing product line by announcing a new line of Windows Phone devices… that will ship the following year. Customers get the message. Nokia’s current business of Symbian-based handsets immediately collapses and never recovers. In industry parlance, this is known as the Osborne effect.

Once again, what were execs thinking?

The Nokia situation becomes so bad that, in 2013, Microsoft is forced to buy the company rather than letting its one and only Windows Phone vector die. Stripping away the verbiage, Microsoft now has an Apple-like vertically integrated smartphone business. The company’s Lumia brand of smartphones offers respectable devices—I bought one—but they come too late in a world dominated by Android and iOS products.

In 2015 Microsoft writes off $7.6 billion as a consequence of the Nokia acquisition and lays off 7,800 employees, mostly in its phone business, the one that, today, has become “immaterial.”

We know who/what killed Windows Phone, and it’s not Android. We could point fingers at one or more Microsoft execs as the culprits, but that misses the point: Microsoft culture did it. Culture is dangerous; under our field of consciousness, it sneakily filters and shapes perceptions, it’s a system of permissions to emote, think, speak, and do.

In the abstract, the Windows Phone failure was easily preventable. But Microsoft culture made it unavoidable.

Now, let’s look around. Are there successful companies soon to be victims of their own culture?

This post originally appeared at Monday Note. Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at [email protected].

 

[eatshitndie]

Sad story must start 1st actually with Motorola. They were 1st major GSM brand. They began BEFORE GSM. In the pioneer days of cellphones AMPS and ETAC days they started.

Pioneer GSM days, Motorola was THE brand famous for FLAP PHONE using GIANT SIM CARDS - like size of credit card!

The SG53 Ah Beng used AMPS Motorola as fighting weapons and hammer crab shells also.

Gone case.

not "flap" phone lah. flip phone.

 

[rectmobile]

Nokia has confirmed to me that old farts can't shed off old habits. Just like old farts here.
They even come up with the very old fart style banana phone. Yes, in the old fart era, that is a eye opening phone. Please don't revive old fartness, it doesn't work with the millennials.

 

[halsey02]

Nokia killed Motorola. Gay Phone killed Nokia. Samsung killed Gay Phones.

Samsung is killing themselves, what Apple?. Samsung market is the lower to the middle end of the cheap & affordable markets, that is where they are making money.

They are just following or copying what Apple does...that is why Apple, is slowly but surely weaning themselves off Samsung as contract manufacturer....all Samsung does is to copy & try to improve, what Apple & other does. Have they come out with something that is innovative?

 

[halsey02]

not "flap" phone lah. flip phone.

You open it is flip & you close, it flap...ha ha ha.. The first Flip mobile phone I owned was a Samsung, 3 days new, it was spoilt, brought to service centre, they gave one to one exchange; few days later, same problem, brought it back to service centre, again one to one exchange. By then, I lost faith in Samsung...sold the phone. Never bought any of their phones, only last year, when I needed a lower end, cheap & good phone, bought one as a second phone. So far, so good.

Recently bought the New Nokia 3310 in yellow for a family member, who does not need a phone with all the bell & whistles , only to make calls & receive call. It was the 3G model..prices I had just checked had came down to S$89. Not too bad a phone, if you, want to receive, & make calls & just SMS.

 

[eatshitndie]

You open it is flip & you close, it flap...ha ha ha.. The first Flip mobile phone I owned was a Samsung, 3 days new, it was spoilt, brought to service centre, they gave one to one exchange; few days later, same problem, brought it back to service centre, again one to one exchange. By then, I lost faith in Samsung...sold the phone. Never bought any of their phones, only last year, when I needed a lower end, cheap & good phone, bought one as a second phone. So far, so good.

Recently bought the New Nokia 3310 in yellow for a family member, who does not need a phone with all the bell & whistles , only to make calls & receive call. It was the 3G model..prices I had just checked had came down to S$89. Not too bad a phone, if you, want to receive, & make calls & just SMS.

eventually phones with up to 3g-only chipsets will experience signal degradation and finally little to no service as operators retire gsm, umts, cdma and hspa, refarm the frequencies for 4g lte and migrate all services to lte-advanced as they carrier-aggregate bands (combine legacy and new frequencies), do higher order mimo, and offer more than 1gbps speed. all from 1 cheaper chipset without the need for expensive 2g, 3g, pre-4g lte combinations. and flatten the core network to serve mostly data (>96% of traffic), remove all the old circuit-switched tech, and save on power and space. plus no more expensive maintenance on end of life equipment where spares are hard to find and replace. moreover, new smartphones with lte-advanced chipsets have features that are fully compatible with the new radios and baseband in the network, which are replacing the old (end of life) network. the notion of keeping old phones forever is bogus as operators will have to shut old networks and technologies down as they cost far more than running new networks.

 

[halsey02]

eventually phones with up to 3g-only chipsets will experience signal degradation and finally little to no service as operators retire gsm, umts, cdma and hspa, refarm the frequencies for 4g lte and migrate all services to lte-advanced as they carrier-aggregate bands (combine legacy and new frequencies), do higher order mimo, and offer more than 1gbps speed. all from 1 cheaper chipset without the need for expensive 2g, 3g, pre-4g lte combinations. and flatten the core network to serve mostly data (>96% of traffic), remove all the old circuit-switched tech, and save on power and space. plus no more expensive maintenance on end of life equipment where spares are hard to find and replace. moreover, new smartphones with lte-advanced chipsets have features that are fully compatible with the new radios and baseband in the network, which are replacing the old (end of life) network. the notion of keeping old phones forever is bogus as operators will have to shut old networks and technologies down as they cost far more than running new networks.

Aiyoh!...who don't know...the 3g phone is for a person, you are wasting money to get a Samsung J1 mini pro, now cost $98 as opposed to the Nokia 3310 3G; for that person, gets confused with smartphone. Someday...the 3G network, will go, when the 5G is implemented..until that day comes...the Nokia 3310 3G, you will be suprised, many out there..only knows how to receive & make calls...the 3G network, can do already!!

 

[tanwahtiu]

Apple entered the telecom biz on a biz plan to sell 50,000 iPhones a year. This was just sales projection only.

With the help of social media website Facebook where one can use Facebook anywhere on iPhone boost Apple sale. No need to stick to PC desktop to use Facebook.

Then came the phenomenon unprecedented and unexpected boom in simple pc games in iPhones boost the sales of iPhone skyrocket to 1 million iPhones.

In MS case there is no niche market IT products to boost MS Nokia phones..

As such Apple iPhones popularity came from social media websites like Facebook, and perhaps Sammy boy too, ang pc games caused the sales of PC/telecom phones to replace PC desktop.

Credit also goes to this Sammyboy social media website where u can kpkb, fuck PAP and oppies, and so on while u pang sai or fuck half way.

 

[eatshitndie]

Aiyoh!...who don't know...the 3g phone is for a person, you are wasting money to get a Samsung J1 mini pro, now cost $98 as opposed to the Nokia 3310 3G; for that person, gets confused with smartphone. Someday...the 3G network, will go, when the 5G is implemented..until that day comes...the Nokia 3310 3G, you will be suprised, many out there..only knows how to receive & make calls...the 3G network, can do already!!

3g in sg still has some life left, perhaps for another 6.9 years, but eventually it too will go away as it is phased out like 2g.

http://www.todayonline.com/singapore/mobile-operators-cease-2g-service-april-2017