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Comment by sker | Hacker News Reader

Problem is, if MS hires Elop, the new Nokia CEO may embrace Android, as well as some of the other alternatives (Firefox, Ubuntu, etc.).

Microsoft needs Elop running Nokia as part of a bigger strategy.

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I doubt it.

Why would Nokia want to be another Android pusher with no competitive advantage? Value-adds on Android are all shit (crappy launchers and bundled shitware) and the platform is fragmented to fuck. Firefox OS isn't even off the ground and Ubuntu is dead as well.

Nokia hit the spot with windows phone. People will realise that in time.

The platform is worth it just for Nokia Here+ for a lot of people (myself included) and the fact that the hardware is decent.

>>Nokia hit the spot with windows phone. People will realise that in time.

Ohwaityouwerebeingseriousletmelaughevenharder.jpg

That's some great comedy material you have there. How many years before this happens do you think? They've already had several. Elop has been an MS stooge since the word go and nokia has paid the price for it.

Haters will be haters.

In 2016 I reckon the market will look like the following:

   25% - iOS     - Luxury/fashion sector.
   25% - WP      - business/teenage/student sector.
   40% - Android - Mainly generic landfill sector + Samsung
   10% - Everything else (probably still mostly S40)

Plenty of room for growth and a sensible return.

People used to take the piss out of me when I decided to invest in ARM Holdings, Microsoft, Apple and Raytheon. Who's laughing now?

I don't know why people would take the piss out of those fairly sensible investments, MS has been solid for decades, Apples rise has been unstoppable since the original iPod and ARM has been on the rise for decades too.

But your predictions for winphone are hopelessly optimistic, and MS has already lost the business sector for phones. They had a strong position a few years ago and threw it all away...

They took the piss because I bought on a low when the companies were in deep doo. Apple just started shifting Firewire Mac-only iPods and the buggy POS that was OSX 10.1 which were laughed at initially, ARM was still suffering from Intel's pull-out of the DEC purchased StrongARM product and Acorn fiasco and Raytheon was pre-911 and had fucked up several major contracts. MS was in a good position (as always) but they were riding low.

MS's business sector proposition had a reasonable position in the market. The market was fragmented to bits then as well. A lot of it was Symbian and WinCE stuff with some fallout from proprietary platforms and the POS that was J2ME.

They let that go with WP7 and to iOS a bit (c'mon it's a version 1 product) but are clawing it back now with WP8.

Not one business person I know uses Android anymore though citing it's unreliable. I see a rough distribution of 70/30 iOS/WP8 and that's falling because dropping an iPhone is an expensive problem to sort for corporate IT departments and individual users. You can afford to throw away a couple of WP8 devices a year for the same cash per user as a 4S and 4 WP8 handsets for the price of a 5.

I've never seen a business person use a WP phone. Never. And I do get to talk to quite a lot of them. It's iOS most of the time with very few Androids. WP is simply not a factor. There are markets/territories where WP is doing quite well, especially in low income countries because you get them quite cheap. But when I say 'doing quite well', I mean: You actually get to see them in 1 out of 10 phones.

WP7 was not a version 1 product. It says 7 right there in the name. It was a big departure from what went before, certainly, but it's not like they were new to the mobile business, or to smartphones. The hype around WP7 was sickening, with many tech sites filled up with glowing reviews months before even dev previews of the device were launched. The same then happened with 8, with the same lacklustre excuses when it failed to get any market share (It's a new product! Give it time!).

I haven't seen a single person with a winphone that likes it. I know a couple who were suckered into it and hate it, and a few more who were persuaded to take a trial of a lumia for a week and took it back in a day.

Let me quote another MS figure here: "developers, developers, developers, developers." I have yet to see an actual smartphone app, used in Real Life, which is for WP. On the other hand, everybody and their dog seems to be making iOS and Android apps. (Anecdote: on the occasion where we needed a mobile app, WP was considered as a target, and rejected - alongside BB and FirefoxOS - as marginal; the app is for iOS and Android).

IMHO, you pretty much don't need any apps to start with which is why you don't see them in the wild.

You've got built in: Word, Excel, OneNote, Powerpoint, a decent mail client, decent web browser, Facebook / Twitter client, Calendar, image manager, cloud sync, wallet, music player, search, music recognition, decent calculator, product comparison and turn by turn navigation.

You can't compete against that.

The only apps I've added are: ebay (because their mobile site is shit) and Weather.

Sure there are apps by the thousands developed by people but as per iOS and Android stores, most of them are buggy shite.

App usage count doesn't mean the device is useless.

Nobody wants office on a phone, and the rest of the features are present on all the other platforms.

So yes, you can compete with that, and do it much better.

Quite the contrary: people do want office on a phone. They don't want to write documents on it though.

They want Outlook to be the same as their desktop (which it is).

They want integrated calendars and contacts (which they are) so they can maintain their schedule on the road.

They want to view documents straight up without some third party piece of shit viewer that can't render anything properly (which they can).

They want their OneNote notebooks (which they can have).

Not only that the whole shebang actually works 100% flawlessly.

Seriously, I've never come across anyone that cares about document viewing on a phone, and I've worked in some huge enterprises.

All the rest can be and is done flawlessly by any of the other OS's out there.

Win phone has no killer feature. If it did we'd see people actually using it.

Well, now you have me as a data point, I care ;) Alas, I need to open "exotic" formats like OpenOffice spreadsheets as well (I don't really get a say on what format lands in my inbox): on Android, I have chosen amongst the 3 paid apps which can do this (yes, there are also 30 others, but as noted above, 90% of _anything_ is crap); on WP, I'd be SOL as _MS_ Word only handles...wait for it..._MS_ Office formats. Yay, vendor lock-in! (Although to be fair, since the last month, there _is_ now a rudimentary converter on the WP store)

Oh, okay, I get it now: One Microsoft Way - our way or the highway, no competition needed (or desired). Sure, that makes business sense to me (really); but this is also the reason I'm not using a WP - it doesn't make sense _for_ me (as I've been bitten by single-vendor lock-in too many times; diversity in software providers at least allows me to hedge my bets, in case a new leadership decides that e.g. cloud sync is an excellent cash cow, and that the text editor screen is an excellent place to put ads).

OTOH, developer engagement _with_ the platform eventually draws a user crowd to it - that's what the 4D motto means. I don't see any significant push in this direction (as opposed to, say, such past occurences with Win32API, or .net, or other MS technologies). If there's already "everything the user should ever need" (not to be confused with "everything the user needs"), then why bother?

Well let's see: Nokia instead choose to go into the WP market which back then was lingering at around 4% market share, and managed to get 70% of all WP sales which still is at merely 6% market share (while competing with samsung, htc, lg, etc.). Congrats, well done!

Imagine if instead they went for android, and took that 70% market share in the Android space? It was possible for them to do in the WP space, why should it not have been possible in the Android space?

As I see it, they wasted their engineering abilities to gain a big chunk of an unimportant market, rather than shooting for the big fish, because their idiotic CEO puts Microsoft's interests before Nokia's.

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