Is Nokia's CEO a Microsoft mole?
globalpost.com
globalpost.com
Understandably, these people are not particularly willing to admit that the software they spent years on wasn't good enough to keep up with Apple and Google, so the old conspiracy theory plops up: the Nokia CEO must be a "mole" who's intentionally driving the stock price down.
The root cause of this myopic idea is neatly summed up near the end of the article:
Linus Thorvalds, Linux’s Finnish founder, says that “Microsoft-hatred is a disease” among open source programmers, but in Tampere it’s more of an epidemic.
Elop's statements were understandable back then, when nobody had seen the N9.
"which is said"? Who said?
Or maybe I'm downvoted only because I insulted all iOS device owners by saying that their device is not coolest gadget anymore...
WP7 was late and less polished but also suffered from carriers-dont-push-it-itis.
Here is another thing that looks suspicious. New feature phones (that will run Meltemi) will have 1Ghz processor and as far as I'm aware N950 must have processor like this (at least I was hinted that it has slower processor than N9). Here I don't get why new OS is written when they have working one. As well it looks illogical to waste experience gained during Harmattan development (having in mind that Meltemi is developed in Germany and not Finland). It looks like not everything is revealed yet from Nokia side.
Meltemi is supposed to have different kernel, and it's really targeted at very low-end, in feature phone markets. Although, very low-end is 1Ghz in a couple of years.
It feels like the Harmattan team at Nokia really understood good UI and good design, and wanted to build a product around those ideals.
The N9 is also a really slick piece of hardware. Someone designed and loved this thing, and wanted it to be amazing. It doesn't have any weird bulges or outcroppings like all the Android handsets; the appearance of it is minimalist; even the camera module on the back looks like it fits the style. I always found the Android cameras to be just another annoying outcrop, never fitting with a cohesive design.
The N9, and Harmattan, have that cohesive design. It's a royal shame that it's the best phone no one will ever use...
I feel bad for most of the MeeGo devs though. Most of them were laid off or quit in frustration over having their baby flushed down the toilet. Quite a large number of them ended up with Intel to keep working on MeeGo, just to see Intel drop the effort as well. Must be incredibly frustrating.
Disclaimer: I work as a software engineer at Nokia in Australia.
I truly wish that Nokia had gone behind the N9 with everything it deserves. I feel it's the first time that Apple has actually been challenged in design, in integrity towards an ideal, in making something that exemplifies that internal drive. After seeing the WP7, even knowing it was coming, I know that their lovely design work was cheapened by that release. It's still good design, but it lost something tangible and wonderful, that sense of being something different and better. By shipping WP7, it became something that exists secondary to another goal, instead of a goal unto itself. Cheapened, as though a device that exists not symbiotically with the software designed to run on it, but any random garbage that can be sold with it.
It lost its soul.
Yet, even if the MeeGo mess hadn't happened and Nokia had shipped a Harmattan phone on the original Maemo schedule, would it have made any difference? It would have been hamstrung by Nokia's confusion over Symbian's direction, and steamrolled by iOS and Android just the same.
It's not Elop's fault that Nokia's software is in shambles. The damage was done years earlier.
Put yourself in Elop's shoes when he arrived a year ago. There's Symbian, an OS that has become extremely expensive to develop. It has been open-sourced and modernized at great effort, but the resulting product (Symbian^3) has critical bugs and a lackluster UI. The people in charge tell him that the big leap forward is just around the corner... But apparently that's exactly what they were saying two years earlier.
Then there's MeeGo, a Linux variant that used to be one VP's hobby project. Recently it has been promoted to become the company's new flagship -- except that nobody is quite clear on how it should be positioned alongside Symbian. There's a powerful Symbian lobby inside the company that's determined to see the "eternal upstart" MeeGo fail. The technical state of the OS doesn't inspire much confidence either: the UI framework has been reset several times in the past few years, so although they have a sprawling Linux distribution, there isn't really a phone UI yet. "Don't worry," say the people in charge, "this latest framework is so great that we'll whip up a smartphone experience in no time!"
Faced with these options and all their internal political baggage, is it any wonder that Elop went looking for an operating system outside the company?
What do you mean exactly?
The only thing I am afraid of losing if Nokia goes down is Qt.
If I'm correct, the Qt Lighthouse is integrated in Qt 4.8 (now RC1), which means easy porting for any platform, including Android. Remains to be seen if Nokia and Google come in terms with this officially though. Of course, you can already distribute Qt apps on Android, using third party ports like Necessitas: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/28/necessitas/ .
But, why announce when he did. The chosen OS wasn't out at the time, and Nokia had just gotten ready to ship their shiny new MeeGo flagship as well as a handful of new Symbian handsets. That announcement basically made all these new devices worthless. He could have at least kept the announcement silent for 6 months and see if the phones gained any traction. You can argue that they wouldn't have, but at least their sales numbers would have looked better. His timing was terrible; HP terrible.
And why WP? The OS wasn't finished and was missing some pretty basic features when it finally was launched. As countless people have said already, Android would have made a lot more sense here. They could have customized it and potentially even brought Symbian apps over and it had the added advantage of already having a solid foothold in the market.
For instance, I hate Android's built-in browser. The UI sucks. But the native apps for the online services I use, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype and Flickr -- are kick-ass. This happened slowly and for a looong time people complained how poor the experience is on Android with those apps. Heck, Flickr wasn't even available for Android 4 months ago.
But now they are. And I also replaced the browser with Firefox Mobile, which is very resource-hungry, but has a pretty sweet UI and syncs everything with my desktop.
I can do that because Android is freaking popular. And even in regards of polish and user-experience, Android 2.3 gets pretty close to my ideal and while iOS is still better, I prefer Android for a whole bunch of other reasons.
I AM pretty sad that MeeGo failed to get the traction and resources needed. Competition is good, but Nokia needed to do SOMETHING because they were clearly failing to deliver. I also think picking Windows Mobile was the dumbest move they could make, but whatever.
Palm? It has nothing on Nokia, 'Nokia' is synonymous for 'cell phone' in many countries.
I live in Australia, where this used to be true. It is no longer the case.
How do you think Symbian is still pushing so many sales?
Because it runs on very low-end hardware, which makes it cheap. That advantage is slowly dying as low-end mobile chipsets get more powerful (eg, Android phones are down to $80 here, with no contract)
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b42320567...
This guy has atleast a plan after Nokia realized it needs a big shake, unlike RIM which is in a similar situation but burning it's hands with 'me-too' tablets that no one wants and handwaving about the awesomeness of QNX instead of pivoting quickly before it's too late. How a QNX based OS will save them is beyond me, because 99.9% of smartphone buyers wouldn't even know what that means.
As Elop said, the mobile arena has moved from a battle of devices to a war of ecosystems. If you can't break past the chicken and egg problem of creating an ecosystem and court developers, it's a death sentence. Just see Palm, they had a nice product, but they never had a chance.
Sorry but if the richness of the ecosystem is the main reason for change, then the obvious answer is Android.
XNA is actually a decent toolkit, and the Visual Studio environment is way better than the Android Eclipse mish-mash.
What's preventing uptake is a complete lack of understanding in their market, an inability to take down even weak competition like RIM, and no clue how to leverage their success from the 360 on to a phone.
If they'd just called it the Xbox Phone it would've sold ten times better.
It's quite obvious that the Windows brand is burned; people hate Windows -- and Microsoft know it better than anyone else!
They had a campaign some time ago where they tried to demonstrate that people actually liked Vista, if only they didn't know it was Vista.
Of course, what it really showed was that people are incredibly prejudiced against the Windows brand.
Even as an Apple fan, I always thought the 8-core Mac Pro was expensive compared to the alternatives, yet the Dell equivalent is about $800 more.
How could he possibly be a mole?
Do you have any sources for that?
Contrast this with RIM, who just released a slew of stop-gap phones until QNX (BBX) is ready... but they still are promoting the hell out of those phones and are getting decent sales, keeping the company viable. And those aren't even world-beating phones.
Meantime, the N8 with its pentaband radio and Zeiss camera, and the N9 showing off the best of Meego, get no promotion at all... really does make you wonder. Microsoft-hatred might indeed be a disease, but Nokia threw out Symbian and Meego for an OS that is (for all its positive reviews) unproven.
Symbian Belle and Meego are definitely competitive options and offer a lot. Any tech site (engadget etc.) reviewing the N9 basically wound up mourning the premature death of Meego and wondering what might have been. In the case of the N8, the common assessment was it was stellar hardware with an OS that was almost there... well I think Belle pushed it over that line to being something competitive.
This is the same madness that Apotheker brought to HP, trashing established businesses just because they weren't sexy enough and then immediately trying to import the business model of the last company he worked at. I don't think Elop is a mole but he definitely has yet to do anything except destroy value at Nokia.
That OS was nowhere near the level of its competitors.
Better to be in Nokia's position and have a complete, focused operating system relaunch before the year end. Nokia will have a line of interesting, desirable products before the end of 2011 and RIM will be in serious danger of a buyout/reorganization.
Makes me wonder why they'd be bothering with throwing these advertising dollars around if the N9 ecosystem is pretty much doomed anyway.
They need to sell high-end phones to try to prop-up their revenue until the Windows phones are ready. It's pretty consumer-hostile, though.
My pocket review: absolutely not ready for prime-time - number pad shrank and grew a couple of pixels every time I touched it during a call, with associated delay for the redraw.
The hardware seemed ok (although I'm no fan of their design language now, and yet their first WinPhones will have the same?), the display crisp and the telephone functionality was entirely fine.
But the clunky software, as well as the user interface just reeked of something rushed out by amateurs in the mid 1990s. Competitive? Nope.
As a current Android user, I await with interest what WinPhone can offer. Nokia's homebrew? Not so much.
Here's what the editor of GSMArena wrote in a recent post:
http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_n9-review-659.php
"Not shown much love by its own maker, the Nokia N9 is embraced by the consumers. You won’t see Stephen Elop getting all too fired up about MeeGo and spending hours explaining how it’s the best thing since Santa, sauna and the N95. But if you care to look, you'll notice thousands of people hitting our site each day to just check out the Nokia N9."
That Wiki article seems to be a hit job. A few references:
http://www.msboycott.com/news/00_01_17.shtml
http://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=rick+belluzzo+%2...
And we have someone on HN here quoting the Urban dictionary reference. How long does it take to make a new entry for anyone or anything yourself?
Didn't know Google searches can be used as a reference on the Wiki.
>This article and talk page must adhere to the policy on biographies of living persons. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libellous. If such material is repeatedly inserted, or if there are other concerns about the biography of a living person, please report the issue to the biographies of living persons noticeboard. If you are connected to the subject of this article and need help with issues related to it, please see this page.
Anyway, I guess Linus was right, MS hatred is a disease, and one such manifestation is the people who wrote that Wiki article.
When push comes to shove, getting Nokia to treat WP7 as a first-tier platform would have bought Microsoft just as big a win as Nokia going all-in. I'd argue it might even have been a bigger win because Nokia would look much less like a rudderless ship about to crash. Maybe Elop didn't negotiate hard enough, maybe he didn't have the vision, or maybe he was too influenced by his time at Microsoft. We'll probably never know.
http://xcssa.org/pipermail/xcssa/2005-February/002587.html
I'm not sure if that was all there was to it and possibly there is room in there for a 'microsoft mole' somehow, but a single mole on the board of directors would be just a way to get information out, you can't destroy a company in a straightforward way.
And such a mole would have to be compensated very well indeed to survive the breach of fiduciary duty lawsuits that would be leveled at him/her if it ever came out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary
It's no joke to be accused of stuff like that.
I'm not sure there is adequate compensation for a risk like that. Being the 8th largest shareholder of MSFT might do the trick for some individuals but that's just another version of 'every man has his price'. For me I hope I'll never learn mine.
1) the N9 (the meego phone) will never be released in an english speaking country as marketing fears the tech blogger will write even more crap about their strategy change - as it is a quiete decent phone
2) even though the code for the N9 they do not get any test devices, the code in a very rudimentary ide only, as there is a no Meego phone for devs anymore policy
on the other hamd, he was quiete drunk and frustrated so i do not know how mich of it is true
Disclaimer: I work as a software engineer at Nokia.
Australia is very much an English speaking country (although we are at the ass-end of the world), and the N9 is getting a lot of active marketing here [1, 2].
I have also been working on the software for the N9, but most of my development has been on device, either on the N950 or the N9. We always grumble that we don't get enough devices, but these guys must have been frustrated about something else to go that far out.
There were a lot of problems developing for the N9, don't get me wrong, but they were not endemic to MeeGo over Symbian or S40 where I've also worked.
[1] http://press.nokia.com.au/nokia-n9-%E2%80%9Call-screen%E2%80... [2] http://news.softpedia.com/news/Nokia-N9-in-Beautifully-Simpl...
The ad is just a white background, a big blue Nokia logo, a stack of different-coloured N9s, and the text "beautifully simple."
It's pretty obvious they're trying to break the perception (here, at least) of Nokia only offering cheap phones.
I currently own an N900, so (a) I know what it's like being on an unsupported and unpopular platform (it sucks hard), and (b) I would buy an N9 in a heartbeat if Nokia had decided to stick with Meego.
I'm a Linux user and use no Microsoft online services, so Windows Phones aren't attractive for me at all. By dropping Meego/Maemo (hacker types) and moving to WP, Nokia is dumping its last remaining fanbase. It's starting from zero, on an OS that's also starting from zero.
My next phone will almost certainly be the Galaxy Nexus.
WP will probably earn itself a small niche in the no-man's-land of smartphones between iOS' simplicity and Android's customisability and personalisation (WRT phone choice), but lacking the universality of both. I can't see it achieving wider adoption. Nokia will claim a slice of this small niche, but that's all it will have.
WP can't survive on off-the-side interest from HTC and Samsung. Microsoft needs Nokia for WP to survive, so I fully expect Microsoft to purchase Nokia within the next five years.
I think Nokia would've been able to survive on its own had it gone with Android (earning a smaller slice of the Android pie, but still much larger overall). I think most technical-oriented people recognise that Nokia's expertise is in hardware - a quality that the Android ecosystem is still lacking. Samsung is getting there, but the N9's build quality is generations ahead of any of the Galaxy phones.
Nokia would always be my first choice in choosing an Android phone. It's a real pity.
I think there's a strong point to be made that Elop's biases towards Microsoft have impacted Nokia for the worse.
MS value has decreased at least a 3rd since Ballmer got control..is Ballmer a mole ?
Same exact logic problems as the article..except mine has more flair and imagination