Hacker News Reader

Comment by bnolsen | Hacker News Reader

"Nokia's challenges have been exacerbated by rampant competition - notably from Apple and Samsung who are extracting a disproportionate amount of margin from the industry at present,"

Disproportionately high or low ? I guess what they are saying is that smartphone profitability is falling due to lower margins.

MS/Nokia are in huge trouble, especialy after seeing that report that google makes almost no money off smartphones. It seems the only way for Nokia/MS to really compete with google is to also make no money. Sounds like Nokia is now in the wrong business.

View on HN

"competition" - that's the solution then. Once RIM have managed to destroy themselves in the corporate world you are left with the choice of buy Microsoft

MSFT's only hope in mobile, and their only reason for going there is to be the standard business solution - the only one that works with MS-exchange, MS-domain-emperor(or whatever it's called today) and MS-office cloud.

Once you ensure that corporates/government only allow MS mobile devices onto their networks you have a pretty nice market sewn up. And one that doesn't care about price and buys new kit regularly

The only tricky bit is persuading all those corporate and government customers that they haven't had a perfectly workable blackberry solution for years, and that they shouldn't save money by allowing workers to use their own iPhones.

You're thinking in terms of a 2005 business model.

Even government organizations are buying lots of iPhones, even though Apple is an obnoxious vendor for those organizations to deal with.

Microsoft sells stuff these days by bundling product licensing. So unless Apple does something really dumb, you're not going to see enterprises mandating anything Microsoft mobile other than ActiveSync anytime soon.

ehh, Microsoft will fall back on the old tried and true: Change apis for each successive version of Exchange, and make minor api changes during patches - just enough to cause Apple products to work inconsistently, and make sure Windows Phone X stays up to date with the changes. Corporations are too stupid as a group to see what's being done to them, so they will drop Apple like yesterday's news and join the Microsoft death-cult.

Or they could just change the license terms banning any non-ms product from connecting, for 'security reasons'

The only reason not to is a DoJ monopoly investigation - and Apple would have a task persuading the government that they are the victims of monopolies in the smartphone world!

Good luck telling corporate users that just a few years after you've allowed iPhones and/or Android phones as their devices on your exchange server, you're going to ban them.

It was easier for things like this to happen back when everyone was carrying a company-issue blackberry (because blackberries were too expensive for most consumers.)

These days, companies are increasingly just letting their employees connect personal devices onto their exchange servers (with policy management) and enjoying the savings from not having to pay for the device, data, or both. I can't see either group (companies and employees) being happy about reversing this trend.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com