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Comment by wuest | Hacker News Reader

> Nokia (with Microsoft) make beautiful hardware and Windows Phone is lush, but for some reason is not getting the market love its quality deserves.

Two points here:

First, it pains me to see MS lumped with Nokia. I'll be clinging to my N9 for a very long time yet (and probably only move on when Ubuntu or Firefox phones are compelling). I miss Maemo/MeeGo.

Second, the reason which MS doesn't get the love which its quality deserves (let's accept that it deserves a lot of love for the sake of this argument) is that Microsoft owns Skype. Telcos aren't huge fans of Skype, as a rule--it doesn't quite jive with their values. For Windows Phone, which integrates Skype by default, to really take off in the marketplace, we need to see the founding of a telco which doesn't do anything BUT data as their subscription model. With no voice fees to compete with Skype's inclusion on the phone, there will be no reason for telcos to marginalize the platform.

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  First, it pains me to see MS lumped with Nokia. I'll be clinging to my N9 for a very long time yet (and probably only move on when Ubuntu or Firefox phones are compelling). I miss Maemo/MeeGo.

Same here: I'm still clinging to my 2 year old N900, which I still consider a great phone. When I bought it I knew that the patform is in a dead end, but I got it anyway and never regretted it.

In fact I still have a brand new N9 in a box in reserve. That's in case that the current phone moves into a state beyond repair.

What is most interesting is that my pretty ancient clunker feels much more snappy then more modern smart phones after 6 month, apart from a couple scratches on the screen it looks and feels still rather fresh.

I love my N900! It's on my shelf as a backup phone. Ours aren't all that uncommon in terms of Maemo users' stories, as I understand it.

Yes, but you can easily install Skype on the other platforms as well.

Which any savvy customer will do anyway.

Plus Skype is not the only game in town, there are other apps offering VoIP services.

Was there any evidence at all that before they bought Skype MS had a snowball's chance in hell in the handset game?

I don't think so, personally. Skype just adds yet another factor to work against them.

If your second point were the dominant factor, then Android should been hit even harder( in the US), since Google Voice has been included since 2011.

Google Voice still uses regular old phone calls, unlike pure VoIP setups like Skype. A carrier agnostic phone number and free data-based SMSes must rankle carriers, but it does at least require voice minutes.

>For Windows Phone, which integrates Skype by default, to really take off in the marketplace...

If only this were true! I can't install Skype on my new Nokia 920 (maybe they'll give us the tomtom version eventually?). But Skype isn't really a good deal for anything but international calls....I'm guessing you are in Europe.

>Telcos aren't huge fans of Skype, as a rule--it doesn't quite jive with their values.

Values? You make it sound as if it's ethical values. It more like they're trying to stifle innovation instead of becoming dumb pipes like ISPs.

>For Windows Phone, which integrates Skype by default

How is Skype more integrated with WP, than say iOS or Android?

> Values? You make it sound as if it's ethical values.

One could make the point that I mean ethical values. Telcos' ethics are certainly at play here. The values to which I refer can be summed up as, "prioritize profit over a robust network and user experience, avoid empowering other entities to compete on even ground."

> How is Skype more integrated with WP, than say iOS or Android?

My understanding (disclaimer: as I stated above, I use an N9 primarily. I do own an Android and iOS device, but they aren't my primary handsets. I don't own a Windows phone) is that Skype (a) comes pre-installed on Win8 handsets, and (b) has its functionality integrated into the OS similar to the way SMS and cellular-network-phone applications are.

(a) It's not preinstalled.

(b) I can't place Skype calls from outside the Skype application, likewise for chats.

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