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Comment by recoiledsnake | Hacker News Reader

This long article does a much better job of explaining matters than the link-bait here.

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.

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So for that reason they decided to go into the rich Windows Mobile ecosystem? What kind of installed base is there for Windows Mobile nowadays? 5.7% and falling steadily.

Sorry but if the richness of the ecosystem is the main reason for change, then the obvious answer is Android.

Multiple reasons imho: They got a great deal from Microsoft that Google wasn't willing to match, the OS is beautiful, plenty of existing Xaml developers, great platform + language and better tooling than Android or iOS.

Everyone is under the impression that the waters are poisoned or they'd be flocking to the platform.

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.

> 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.

To a degree Apple is a poisoned brand. "Everyone" thinks their products are way more expensive than the alternative. It's a mindset they've had to work to undo.

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.

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