Microsoft just bought Nokia for $0

Nokia becoming a WP7 OEM does not make them relevant. They're going to go the same path as they would have had they gone with Android instead: just another phone OEM.

Though between WP7 and Android, WP7 is probably a much better choice for them.

The apparent indignation at them choosing MS is, in many cases, a bit of fanboy-ism. The average man in the street won't care, and those of us who would particularly prefer Android over Windows just won't be buying a Nokia phone in the near future, which depending on how big a demographic we are they may not care about.

I think going with MS makes more sense for them than following the Android path, despite my vague allegiance with the Android camp. If they went that way they would just be another Android phone manufacturer which could work well if the hardware is good and competitively priced, but by going Windows which is a small part of the market now they have a chance of being the leader of that pack if it grows to be the preferred alternative to Apple's output. And it may yet manage to become a bigger player than Android - the Windows phone platform has the advantage of not having any association with the many cheap and grotty devices that are being shipped with Android (this association could tarnish the public view of Android devices on the whole).

> It's like those people still using Windows XP because it's the best.

But always remember that there are people like me who are still using XP because they have no particular reason to spend money on an upgrade. No DX10/11? Not a problem, the games I do play (including those released in recent months) seem fine and if it became a problem (games requiring later versions of DX) then I'd just find something else to do with my time. IE9 won't work? No problem - the only thing I use IE for VMWare Server's console (which has issues with FF and C) and for is downloading Firefox or Chrome.

I'll have to upgrade in a while because security updates will stop. But until that time I'm unlikely to have reason to spend money and time on changing OS.

I didn't read that at all, what I read was someone saying that change is necessary, but that this change has huge benefits for Microsoft but questionable benefits for Nokia.

We should be wary of falling into the "politician's fallacy" from the delightful Britcom "Yes, Prime Minister:"

We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do it.

You clearly don't know http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jacquesm very well. He is not at all resistant to change. To the contrary he understands tech better that most of us can ever dream of.

Microsoft has been trying to figure out how to create a decent phone, and has been failing. There is no reason to believe that Microsoft's team has addressed the causes of their past failures, and therefore there is no reason to believe that they will suddenly, miraculously, start succeeding now. Theoretically Nokia can tell Microsoft how to do things better, there is a lot of expertise there. But there is every reason to believe that a lot of that institutional knowledge is about to be laid off. For better or worse, Nokia is now dependent upon a team with a history of failure.

I know you believe differently. You expect Android to take the role of feature-phones now, while MS and Apple control and split the high-end market. So I'll offer you a bet. In 2010 Nokia is estimated to have held 33.1% of the phone market. I'll bet you $100 that by 2015 either Nokia and Microsoft have parted ways, or else Nokia will hold under 15% of the phone market.

Care to take that bet?

Jerry's heart was in the right place, trying to be a rebel and avoid a big bad company coming in, but he completely ignored the business side. The truth was Yahoo! just had bad management, and it started with him.

But having said that, I hope Elop made the right move by putting all his eggs in one basket because they will be thrown back at his face.

is there really such differentiation these days? As every phone walks to become a smartphone, Android powers devices cheap and expensive and Apple plans on building cheaper iphones (at least according to the rumors), I'm not sure we'll see such a clear distinction in the future, as we saw in the past, when Symbian was pretty much the only higher-end OS in town...

Compared to what? I don't think the downside is greater than the downside of maintaining their own incredibly expensive and increasingly obsolete platform(s). This gives them their only hope of delivering a stable smartphones with a modern UI in the first half of this year (bonus: without spending tens-of-thousands of developer hours). I consider that "upside".

Nokia kept both MeeGO, Qt, and Symbian groups..

I wouldn't try to play something like this. I've done highly leveraged, highly speculative investing successfully in the past. But even then, I was making bets on the order of weeks and months, not minutes.

Do you think it is a sure thing that nokia will be down by %20 beyond the current price over the next year? IF you can make that argument mathematically, then it is soemthing worth investing in. (at least, this is the method I used. I can't say anything about nokia's valuation as I have never analyzed it. But I only invested in mathematically sure things that were consistent with the overall trend.)

PS- When I say "sure thing" I mean "presuming no black swan events". I know there is no really sure thing. I also used leverage and hedged to limit my downside.

App-less, you are nothing in this product segment.

Besides, their Mac support is not that great, no support for syncing calendars. This is not 90'ies anymore, you need Mac support at this time to get the teenagers and cool people to use your product.

     Windows Phone is now a lot better

Thing is, Android / iOS cover pretty much every need of the smartphone market right now. The iPhone a well made, high-end, kick ass, user-friendly and kind of expensive product with tons of third-party support available.

Android on the other hand is already selling big on cheaper phones, and although it is so popular and all the tools you'll ever need are open-source and well-made, still it doesn't have so many quality apps like iOS. But it's getting there.

This is not like the XBox versus the PS3. PS3 took a long time to market and was considerably more expensive (it has been gaining significant ground btw).

This is also not like Windows versus Mac OS or OS/2. At that time Windows was the cheaper and the more versatile one.

It is also not like IExplorer versus Netscape. Microsoft doesn't have much leverage on this industry, besides a handful of patents. And phone makers aren't stupid. They've been burnt already by mobile operators.

This is too bad actually. My first mobile phone was a Nokia 3310, which I loved. Now the brand is dying.

If Nokia phones are actually "the most reliable and solid, by far", they've got a serious perception problem in the marketplace, at least in these parts.

There's no way that Nokia can really own the platform so that the same stuff that runs on their phones won't run on other phones in the future. Microsoft owns it, period. With Android, being open source, they would have had a bit more leverage.

They're losing a few billion a year on their online division, yet still stay profitable overall, so $300M is really bus fare for a company that scale.

Perhaps enterprise adoption of .Net over Java is once such example. Can you think of others?

I'd probably put Microsoft and Nokia at even odds in the phone market, but I really don't expect them to pass Android with something non open-source.

Motorola finally realized that P2K and their other proprietary stuff wasn't going to cut it for the future. Most of these mobile phone OSs were designed for very small, resource-constrained devices. Which is fine... that's all that was viable in the market at the time. But they weren't designed to scale up.

For example: Android uses Linux, and it has had MP support for a long time (late 1990's?). Even as of five years ago, many people would have thought that a phone with a multi-core CPU is crazy. Why would you need all that power (and power consumption)? And here we are in 2011, with the Nvidia Tegra 2 and other CPUs in shipping phones. For most of those phone OSs, adding multi-core support would be a multi-year re-write. Linux? No problemo.

And beyond that, there is database support, and support for various Internet-based protocols (chat, radio, web, etc.). And what is needed for that is a really solid TCP/IP stack. I've seen (and done) things to a TCP/IP implementation to get it running on a small device. It wasn't pretty. Or high performance. It will 'work', but not for heavy duty use like you'd need on a smartphone these days.

Edit: grammar. Mention of TCP/IP stack.

My 6310 was the last phone I could use (as in, answer calls, dial arbitrary numbers, use the phone book, whatever) without actually looking at it. Damn, I miss that phone.

Consistently, for about a decade (from the mid-nineties), they made the most desirable phones, with the best combination of hardware and user experience. But the user experience just didn't keep up as phones developed more features.

To continue the Apple analogy, the current Nokia smartphone experience is as though Apple had continued to push OS9 while the rest of the world moved on around them. Symbian is Mac OS classic in 2011.

and nokia cannot make too many changes to functionality even if allowed as it would fragment the WP7 app-market. even gui based changes would kill the ui-consistency that MS is touting..

so i do not understand how nokia is differentiating itself by becoming a WP7 phone manufacturer...

Yeah I imagine this is likely to piss off Nokia's most loyal developers.

I doubt Linux distributions are going to notice. QT will continue to be a rock solid first class platform even with minimal new development. It already has more features than it needs. They could probably coast for a decade before it begins to hurt on Linux.

/nostalgia.