Nokia appoints Stephen Elop (President of Microsoft MBD) to President and CEO
nokia.com
nokia.com
And I thought that Nokia was on the right foot finally. They seemed to have a coherent plan and vision. From the mess they were in they've slowly tried to push themselves out: buying Qt was a great move, imho, and focusing on the Meego (for the smartphone market) and Symbian (for the cheap, non smartphone) seem pretty good. They just had to wait a bit and I think they would have pulled through. :(
Now I feel they are back on square one: running around like headless chicken looking for a solution. They should have given their current solution a real chance. Apple didn't turn into what it was today in a month or a year. It took a lot of pain, cutting products, focusing, developing a new OS... I'd say it took probably around 3--4 years before Apple was a healthy company again.
Changing your CEO now seems pure panic and not a logical/reasoned response. Especially getting someone from outside the company??? Are they basically asking for the guy to come and throw what all the progress they had made on their new Meego/Symbian path?
Argh... bad move... bad move... I am getting really worried for Nokia... and I liked them back in the days for their phones.
They don't provide much support for the n900 users which was supposed to be a developer's phone but said "Maemo is dead, we're moving on to Meego". Some of those users are moving away to Android and it won't be easy to win them back.
Nokia can't wait an extra 3-4 years, they've already lost 2-3 years.
Transitions are hard though, so I am not surprised they are still in the middle of it. Such big changes take time.
But from all I've heard the Qt improvements they made and the IDE are very good and welcome. And the hardest choice---to drop Symbian for Meego to compete with other smartphones---has already been taken.
I don't think they'll be ready tomorrow, but I think with this plan they would have been ready in 2 years. Is that too much? Sure, but that's the panic talking: they've got a plan, they are in the middle of it, if they drop it and try something else... and maybe drop it again and try something yet again... and so on, they'll go nowhere.
As another example take Microsoft. They came up with Windows Phone 6.5, the two "trendy" phones that were discountinued in a couple of weeks, while they were working on Zune and Windows Phone 7. They kept moving from one to the other, always making great speeches of how they made this huge change and it will be great from here onwards. But it wasn't until recently that it felt like they had a coherent strategy.
Samsung is another company that seems to be running around like a headless chicken. (Though better than Motorola that seems to have thrown down the towel, and tried to squeeze as much value as they can from their brand until they become a anonymous Android clone, with nothing to make them unique.)
They are most likely to continue with their new products and solutions. I believe it is quite common for publically traded companies that have been having problems to switch CEO when things start getting better. The point of that is to restore the trust of the stock holders. Nokia stock gained 5% in Helsinki stock exchange after the news was published. Kallasvuo will even continue at Nokia-Siemens so one might think the change of CEO is mostly cosmetical.
The analysts think that it will happen in Spring 2011 at Nokia's Annual General Meeting.
Picking the guy who ran MSFT's business prodcuts division might help them compete with RIM in the enterprise, but it doesn't help them: - Sort out the Meego/Symbian mess, much less make it competitive with iOS/Xcode or Android
- Build the next-gen OS into something slick and sexy, instead of S60 reskinned time and time again
- Develop the kinds of tools, infrastructure and incentive Nokia needs to win developers.
All in all, I'm sure Stephen is a super smart guy, but he's not proven to have the domain expertise to solve Nokia's most pressing problems... which suggests that Nokia doesn't fully understand what their deepest problems are, meaning they really are finished.
"Build the next-gen OS into something slick and sexy, instead of S60 reskinned time and time again" They are supposedly doing this with MeeGo and Symbian^3/4.
"- Develop the kinds of tools, infrastructure and incentive Nokia needs to win developers." They are doing this with the Nokia Qt SDK and Ovi store. Both have issues, but they're heading in the right direction I reckon. They should work on the incentives.
Developer platforms: Nokia's owned QT for a while... what did they do? Nothing. Nokia had the WebKit WebRunTime years ago... what came of that? Nothing. Nokia actually enforced arcane third-party code signing/testing for apps on Symbian... who builds a developer platform and thinks that's a reasonable idea?
Ovi Store: Whereas RIM also does carrier-integrated billing for BlackBerry App World, RIM provides the developer with a consistent 70/30 split on app sales, and consistent payment intervals. With Nokia? Your split varies WILDLY from operator to operator, potentially being 35% of gross app price or lower on some operators, and you get paid depending on when those operators decide to remit payment. So, even with the most carrier relationships on earth, Nokia can't even do a decent job getting developers paid.
So, Nokia hasn't got an especially sexy UI w/ Meego, they've not got a great developer tools story (indeed with WRT and QT they have a history of screwing up even when they have a technology advantage), and they understand so little of the app developer needs that they can't even build a billing solution that competes with what RIM have built with App World.
Adding new themes on top of an S60 crap is still the same crap.
They had a very good attempt with N900, but some stupid management bet on N97 and lost.
Nokia isn't a software development shop and never was, and of course, they should learn from Apple (why experience is important) and from Google (how to create a developer-friendly framework).
Qt might be a good attempt, but someone should write a visually attractive (think Apple's animation library) and highly polished common stuff (Apple's attention to details), like contact list, settings, etc. They think a community will do the work, but that will never happen. No one would like to do a boring task for free.
Btw, Nokia already lost the game (To Apple and Google) the same way as MS did (to Apple). And it is rather funny to see that they hired an exec from another big loser.
"Qt might be a good attempt, but someone should write a visually attractive (think Apple's animation library) and highly polished common stuff (Apple's attention to details), like contact list, settings, etc. They think a community will do the work, but that will never happen. No one would like to do a boring task for free."
Luckily Nokia has done the work you describe. It's called "Qt UI Extensions for Mobile".
Only 3 OS platforms have survived in PC world. Windows (C#), Mac OS (Objective-C) and Linux (Java). IMHO in mobile space there is also space for 3 OS platforms only.
As a developer I am curious to learn what main development language Nokia has chosen for their platform. Symbian has lame C++ version and crappy IDE. I guess that Meego thing uses C++, right?
BTW that CEO replacement reminds me situation with coach search for Polish football team. We had Dutch for two years. Nothing changed. Players were the same, one naturalized Brazilian wasn't enough.
I'm afraid that little Finland has no enough talented developers to build something competitive to software written by world best developers gathered in SF area and Seattle. And it is so late.
There are rumors that many parts of Symbian code are highly unmaintainable, that they preferred cheap programmers over talented. If these rumors are true then Nokia is really doomed in smartphone market. And they deserve this.
If you don't know him, here's a video of Elop speaking at Web 2.0 Expo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHKMUHvb2iE.
http://conversations.nokia.com/2010/09/10/stephen-elop-to-jo...
Just yesterday I used the Ovi store to install Mail for Exchange to a E71, an that was a truly horrible experience; a reminder of how out-dated the Nokia services are. Doesn't help if the HW is top-notch.
The worst I had was when it wouldn't accept my CC. That was annoying, but buying & installing is pretty simple actually.
Next: I needed to start Download! in the phone, and install the Ovi-client. This went nicely, but is an extra step and took a few minutes.
Then onto the "horrible, awful and terrible" Ovi-experience;
1. The client is clearly built on the browser. It felt like browsing someones website rather than using an S60 app. Pressing up takes me to a random button somewhere above current focus. Almost never the previous button as you would expect. Down worked a bit better. It did not even feel like using a website someone designed for S60, those usually have well aligned buttons that clearly focus.
2. I managed to find Search-item, wait for a few screens to load (why can't the system load any data beforehand, does it need to reload the page for every action?!). I also realized I must separately click select to actually focus the text-field, instead of just starting to write after Options/Search (and waiting for page to load). So I found the app, and a link to it's info page. Finally, a download link. BUT: I must login, with an Ovi username, to download this free add-on! Why? So I go to my computer to figure out my credentials...
3. I enter my credentials, and the loading bar shows some action... I wait. I wait. Seems like it's not loading anymore, but still shows the same login form. Due to my understanding of how the system might be implemented, I figure a redirect has failed or something, so I press Back (like I might when browsing) to go to previous page and indeed: I am logged in!
4. Logged in and ready to press the link, I press it and it does indeed install the software. Once it has done that, the indication of "successfully installed" is not clear enough so I spend some time wondering about that.
5. I go trough a few steps of Menu to get to Installations, and indeed find "Mail for Exchange" there, ready for action.
So lot's of small annoying things that I think would have made a "normal user" quit the task. Admit I was tired, but the process put the thought "why does this have to be so hard" in my head all the time.
(Note: I may remember some details incorrectly, but this should be pretty accurate as I did this yesterday evening).