Microsoft to do away with "Nokia" and "Lumia" branding | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft to do away with "Nokia" and "Lumia" branding

haverzine.com

60 pointsderfbwh84 comments

Good. Any commercial I would see/hear about the Nokia Lumia 1020 Microsoft Windows Phone powered by Verizon Wireless LTE, it drove me crazy. Cell phone names are getting out of hand. Granted I love my Apple products, and appreciate their ads: iPhone 5--bam I know what I'm getting--fairly sure most ads don't even have to say "Apple". Why other vendors haven't followed suit, I have no idea. "Samsung Galaxy S III with Android on an LTE network" is a mouthful, and I have to think that your average person doesn't really hear anything there.

See also: HTC EVO or HTC One

If you count the HTC Ones on this page there are seven, and only two are device you are talking about. http://www.htc.com/www/smartphones/

I think average people tuned out everything aside from "Galaxy", which Samsung noticed and thus began Samsung Galaxy Everything.

I remember reading that Compaq considered using a different brand for its low cost PCs back in 1991 or so.

depending on who is sponsoring the ad, iphones have this sometimes. I know when sprint got the iphone, for instance, there were tons of 'apple iphone now on sprint' ads, which is exactly what you're talking about.

if a carrier runs an ad mentioning a phone, this is the end result.

I would argue that in Sprint's case it was less of a branding move than a "we have it too!"

One thing I have noticed is that every iPhone commercial I've seen, regardless of carrier, looks like its been approved by Apple in name as well as appearance. If you watch a commercial for almost any Android device, it looks like it could be either a carrier or device commercial. I remember when the Motorola Droid first came out seeing the 'energy core with static discharge' with a bunch of red hues and knowing immediately "oh, Verizon's got this". Sprint does the same by shoving yellow text anywhere that negative space hasn't yet been sullied. I find it oddly telling about the difference between the two camps, as having owned both Android and iPhones, the difference in commercial is roughly analogous to the user experience in terms of carrier integration.

One thing I have noticed is that every iPhone commercial I've seen, regardless of carrier, looks like its been approved by Apple in name as well as appearance

Those are ads that Apple is almost completely paying for it, but via a partner agreement rather than directly (which is how there can be many times more Apple ads in media, yet people talk about how little they spend compared to Samsung). Most carriers also have carrier-specific, and sponsored, iPhones ads, and they do all of the same things that every "Android" ad does.

As for Droid...yeah it's on Verizon, as that whole line exists only for Verizon. Not sure what the relevance of that is. If the name includes "Droid", you don't need to see red hues to know it's Verizon.

This is a selectivity bias writ large. It reminds me of conversations shortly after Apple releases a product listening to people declaring how wonderful it is that Apple focuses on experience and not specs...after a release that is a sea of specs.

> As for Droid...yeah it's on Verizon, as that whole line exists only for Verizon. Not sure what the relevance of that is. If the name includes "Droid", you don't need to see red hues to know it's Verizon.

And how else would you, as a consumer who doesn't spend their time on HN, know that Droid is from Verizon? Its like saying to someone who doesn't know much about cars "Hey you should buy an Elantra!" where the immediate followup from those who don't know as much say "well who makes that?". For a Mustang, Corvette, or something of similar ilk, the make is less important since its already icon. Apple has succeeded in making the iPhone an icon where others haven't.

> This is a selectivity bias writ large. It reminds me of conversations shortly after Apple releases a product listening to people declaring how wonderful it is that Apple focuses on experience and not specs...after a release that is a sea of specs.

How, exactly? Apple has maintained a strong enough brand control over its products that people are easily able to identify them. This has simply not been the case with the vast majority of Android OEM's.

On the topic of messaging in general, I heard that James Carville once told Bill Clinton that "if you said three things, you said nothing." Apparently that was the genesis of "it's the economy, stupid." That's always stuck with me as a salient pointer on communication.

Your comparisons are disingenuous.

If your point is that Apple is known and thus unspoken (though it always is spoken), then that has nothing at all to do with "cell phone names": AT&T calls it the Nokia Lumia 1020, while the iPhone is the Apple iPhone 5. Any baggage you put before or after that is almost certainly pulled from a selectivity bias. Sometimes ads mention Windows Phone, sometimes they don't. Sometimes ads mentioned the super advanced iOS, sometimes they don't.

The Galaxy S3 comment is another nonsensical comparison. I _do_ hear commercials say "Come to {PROVIDER} to get the Apple iPhone 5 with the fastest LTE network". What does that prove? How about nothing.

Seriously, the name griping is like a bad Seinfeld episode, only these are manufactured gripes rather than real world observations.

I'll counter with this:

https://twitter.com/thinkofthought/status/192967196413149185...

The problem is that Nokia has brand power. Microsoft is incapable of producing this in their new products because every product they've created in the past 15 years has been painfully short-lived. They create the Zune brand, tie it to the Windows Phone brand, then destroy it. Their various home apps like gallery in Vista get dropped for Windows Live in 7, which in turn is dropped in 8. Their near-constant ADD prevents them from creating solid brands outside of their trusty '90s-era products like Office and Visual Studio and Windows, and even then nobody loves these brands.

I don't trust Microsoft to be able to create a phone brand that has the kind of resonating name as Nokia.

"XBox Mobile" as a brand would be brilliant. Tie it into an XBox Live account... push services to your XBox (kind of like android + chromecast), and keep the "development" name Windows 8.x or whatever... sell it as the gamer teen/twenty something device to own.. get EA etc in on it for device specific games.. and throw in free X months of XBox Live sub when you sign in on your phone.

Microsoft’s Surface brand has had several hits over the last year

Uhh, such as...?

Ditching the Nokia name seems crazy to me: it's universally recognized, particularly outside the US. Any Indian slum or African village large enough to have a phone dealer will have a Nokia ad plastered on it, whereas outside our little incestous tech circles nobody has heard about the Surface.

I read it and thought of it as 'several hits' ie. 'taking a beating', but now I'm not so sure.

Article says they're ditching the Nokia name for smartphones - more specifically, the Lumia line of smartphones running Windows Phone.

Says nothing about ditching the Nokia name for the (much, much larger) Symbian-running feature phones lines, which have never used the Lumia branding.

Nokia has a huge presence in the LEDC markets you mentioned, but the phones they're pushing there were never Lumia Windows phones.

Lots of hate will come at me I'm sure, I think this is a good move for Microsoft. We need a more unified Microsoft branding push. What we don't need however, is more confusing unification (Surface RT will now become the Surface in the next generation apparently).

I think it will be interesting to see if Microsoft goes with a one size fits all model (ala Surface) or go with the lots of different form factors and sizes that Nokia currently produces. Another interesting concern is how Microsoft will attempt to leverage cell phone carriers. The Lumia 1020 is ATT only with Elop saying they "are very happy with their current relationship with ATT" and that the 1020 will not go to other carriers.

The cellphone market in the US is a weird one. With 2 out 4 carriers being CDMA, and VoLTE reasonably being several years out from ubiquity... I'm not sure how Microsoft will be able to force a carrier's hand like Apple did.

I'm looking forward to more thoughts on this. What does the rest of HN think?

I agree. If they don't do this now, they'll have many problems later. Maybe they could brand everything ARM-based Lumia and brand the x86/PC based devices Surface?

Now when they get rid of the "Windows" branding, they'll really be on to something.

They absolutely need to, one thing Microsoft is delusional about is the brand image/value of "Windows". Just because it's the most popular OS in the world does not mean all those consumers actively LOVE it. Branding everything the company does with Windows only serve to make people wary of the product. I'm glad they are switching away from "Windows Live" branding as well. Individual distinct names are much better for new services.

I may be biased, but I actually think "Windows" is a toxic brand name, too much bad legacy associated with the image from the past 20 years (monopoly, insecurity, instability, etc). Imagine if they called XBox "Windows Gamebox" instead.

Maybe in the consumer space. In the enterprise people seem to like Windows quite a bit (myself included). Code that youve written in the past continues to run without much drama and these days Windows just gets out of the way and just works.

Not a lot of people are questioning MS's strategy and execution in the enterprise space, but by large Windows Phone and most other high profile products they pushed recently are consumer oriented. Windows Azure is an exception, but even in that case I think it hurts the product more than helps.

If your brand name stands mostly for "backwards compatibility" instead of quality/innovation, then you are definitely gonna run into problems in the long run.

In my experience, the people who only feel like that are people who haven't used Linux. I'm not trying to be a snot, but I've never met IT people who liked Windows, or much of anything from Microsoft. Protip: Don't mention Exchange.

I know a few that loves Active Directory.

On the other hand, in my current job my desktop machine is an Ubuntu box and I still miss a lot of things from Windows. The only thing I like better in Linux is the terminal, everything else still feel like a hobby PC.

I guess is just a matter of taste

(Or imagine if they called it the "DirectX Box"!)

Actually, that's where the name came from!

What the heck did MS get out of this? A sales channel? They didn't get engineers (didn't most of them flee?). And they obviously didn't want the brand.

patents.

I don't think they even got very important ones. Nokia kept the most important ones for licensing.

... Patents.

For war.

Patents, supply chain.

Supply chain yes, but not the patents. Microsoft receives a 10-year license to Nokia's patents, but ownership of those patents will remain with Nokia.

Nokia sells a ton of phones, more phones than everyone but Samsung. Most of the phones Nokia sells are basic and are sold in markets that people on HN forget still exist. The developing world is where the mobile battle is headed (Facebook and Google are making a push, even Apple has been pressured to go for the lower end market). Microsoft now has a sales channel that put handsets in 60M hands in the past 12 months. I assume they want a lot of people's first smartphone to be a Windows Mobile phone.

New Unified Branding: Microsoft Surface Phone w/ Microsoft Windows Phone 8 Urban Professional Edition for Enteprises.

*64bit German

(Yes they do still release every language version separately with Windows. Not sure about Windows Phone. Welcome back in the 90ies)

The source article does not say this.

"Microsoft will purchase the license to use the Nokia brand on mobile phones for ten years. It will also buy the ‘Lumia’ and ‘Asha’ brands.

On smartphones, we’ll be seeking to create a unified brand across Lumia and Windows. But we understand that the Asha and feature phone range will carry on the ‘Nokia’ branding."

That is the totality of the text relating to this. The "unified brand" may very well be "Introducing the Nokia 1030, powered by Windows Phone" for all we know. Am I missing a piece of the discussion here? It seems like it would be massively wasteful and callous for Microsoft to throw away the cachet Nokia has established with its highly recognizable, warmly regarded smartphones.

Nokia ultimately own the brand. They could potentially enter the market again in their own terms in 2016. Kind of stupid for Microsoft to invest too heavily on the brand. I think they should buy Jolla and have another crack at it in 2016!

This is pure speculation on the part of the author. I have no idea how this even made it to the front page.

It makes sense for MS to buy Nokia. They've had pretty good success with their products:

http://www.phonearena.com/news/Nokia-Lumia-520-owns-27-of-Wi...

"According to the latest data from AdDuplex's mobile advertising network, the entry level Nokia Lumia 520 handset currently accounts for 27% of all Windows Phone 8 models being used. Throw all Windows Phone models into the equation and the Nokia Lumia 520 still accounts for a rather hefty 18% of Windows Phone units in use today. In India, the Lumia 520 owns a whopping 36% of the Windows Phone market while the high end Nokia Lumia 920 has just 4%. Low-end Windows Phone models remain the majority of the phones outstanding. 57% of Windows Phone 8 models currently in users' pockets sport only 512MB of RAM."

I'm hoping they keep the Nokia engineers. They're the ones who made the Lumia phones as good as they are right now.

It's not speculation. If I recall, the deal detailed exactly what MS had bought and what they hadn't. The Nokia name is licensed, but only for "dumbphones".

specifically, it's the Asha brand, not the Nokia brand, that they got for feature/dumb phones. Microsoft will not be selling anything with a "Nokia" label

>>>> It's not speculation

"Rytilä says the move will be done in order to unify all of Microsoft’s branding, which I’m personally translating to only one thing – the Lumia line will become the Surface line, and Microsoft is absolutely planning on releasing an actual, honest to god Surface Phone. By name.

Of course, that’s not really confirmed – that’s just an assumption"

So when the author admits it as their own assumption, that's not speculation??

There isn't a brand in the whole world with such negative aura than microsoft.

what world is that? I use Windows and I'm extremely happy. I know what MS dd but then I know what Apple is doing, what Google etc are doing and what they could do if they were in Microsoft's shoes.

You mean the Hacker News world, right?

The sort of booby who thinks Microsoft is evil has obviously never heard of Enron, Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, Halliburton, BP etc etc.

It's perfectly fine to use children as slave labor, destroy the environment or actually kill people (eg Dow in Bhopal).

None of these is anything like as bad as paying American workers to write useful software and sell it.

Your point would come across better if you had mentioned monopolizing markets illegally and other MS actions rather than the silly straw man there.

Straw man? You think these examples are not literally true?

Not sure if you have a clue what Microsoft actually did more than 15 years ago, but if you think it was worse than using children as slave labor, destroying swathes of the environment or killing people then I have pity on your soul....

No, I don't think what MS did is worse. But "writing useful software" was not the reason they were hated. That's the strawman, and it detracts from your argument.

Point taken, but it seems to me the thing that open source fanboys are actually complaining about. Almost none of them knows what Microsoft is supposed to have done.

Some worse things:

Microsoft's OEM deals to throw out Netscape.

Bundling IE with their monopolistic OS to kill Netscape

Disallowing OEMs to sell computers with any OS but Windows (or demanding 3x the price for Windows licenses).

Killing DR-DOS by having Windows refuse to start if it detects DR-DOS.

Funding and encouraging SCO's baseless lawsuit to create FUD around Linux.

And various other scandals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

None of which ranks up there with killing people, or mass financial fraud, even if they were true. Which several of them are not.

I agree, but they are pretty bad. My point was specifically about underplaying their illegal and immoral practices as "building useful software" which is not conductive to useful discussion.

Which ones do you believe aren't true?

You mean like Google is now with search (let's be real) and how they are tying their products into search (which they are).

> There isn't a brand in the whole world with such negative aura than microsoft.

Which of course might be right for you, but for the rest of the world is provably flat out wrong:)

http://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/

http://brandirectory.com/league_tables/table/global-500-2012

When I think of Nokia - I think of a solid, well-engineered device with attractive Scandinavian styling that's going to last a long time. When I think of Surface, I think of nothing in particular. Microsoft should let the Nokia designers & engineers rework the Surface and RT as a Nokia device.

That's the brand association though. Surface by itself is a well engineered product.

I have one (the RT)... it's well-engineered, but it doesn't hold a candle to the fit and finish that I've come to expect from Nokia. Personally I'd rather they kept the Nokia branding, it's IMO stronger in the phone space than MS is.

Just clear up all that Lumia crap, the model numbering is insane and impossible to figure out. I had to wiki it just now.

The original piece in Nokia Conversations blog says: "On smartphones, we’ll be seeking to create a unified brand across Lumia and Windows. " [1]

"Nokia" brand won't be used with smartphones but my understanding is that the fate of "Lumia" is not yet decided. Personally I think it would make sense to have "Lumia" smartphones and "Surface" tablets.

[1] http://conversations.nokia.com/2013/09/04/whats-next-for-lum...

If they call it the Microsoft Surface Windows Phone 8 (Home/Professional/Student) then I'm done waiting for Microsoft to right the ship. Naming is hard, but keep it simple stupid.

I tend to think -- and I believe lots of HN people agree with me -- that sticking a Microsoft on anything "solid" but an XBox has been quite a failure. Good luck, Redmond!

Of Course, HN crowd will agree - most of them are a weird version of Linux fanboys - the Linux fanboys at least know some *nix commands - the HN news ones hate microsoft on their windows 7 desktops.

I once described AntiTrust as being a movie intended for people who browse Slashdot from Internet Explorer.

I doubt that makes up the bulk of HNers.

Most of them probably use Macs.

Obviously keyboards and mice are not solid. Either that or you're not really a deep thinker, eh? ;-)

I must be the only one who liked the Lumia name brand, and I use an iPhone. Maybe it's because it doesn't sound techy (Galaxy, One X) or trendy (iSomething).

You're not alone! It's got a lovely ring to it. I've been using iPhones since the day they came out, but have been seriously considering getting the Lumia with the awesome camera.

I'm not going to buy a Microsoft phone though (as unreasonable as that may sound).

Headline is misleading. They're only ditching Nokia and Lumia for smartphones - isn't the healthiest chunk of Nokia's business still feature phones?

I understand the Nokia going away but I really liked the Lumia name. I find it very fitting for a series of phones although obviously the numbers are just silly.

I think "Lumina". A mediocre Chevy car.

Alternative headline: Microsoft throw away bathwater, baby

"Duh" Microsoft has been moving all of their brands to "Xbox" Zune Music, games in the App Store. I think this is the bigger story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6337218 as it outlines what MSFT needs to do to get its $7 billion worth.

From a reboot perspective, I think the name Surface is actually quite amazing. It's a name that is both descriptive of the object but also a verb that describes how information bubbles up and is delivered. The glass on your phone is the surface underneath which is a world of information waiting to be surfaced at your command.

I know I'm the only one, but every time I see "Lumia", I think "Lamia": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Topsell-91.jpg

So this time next year we will have the Microsoft Surface 4, the Surface 4E (or some other letter that really means "the cheaper one" and comes in fun colors), the Surface 10.1, and the Surface 10.1 Professional Edition.

You forgot Surface 10.1 Home and Student, which reserves the top quarter inch of the screen for a message reminding you that you're not allowed to use it for work.

Don't forget the Surface Starter version that only lets you run 3 apps at once... wait, that would be a step up.

Microsoft has been desperately trying to consolidate their product line branding for the last few years. it's not a surprise that they would bring in a new device acquisition under their existing Surface brand.

My guess is they will create a whole new brand for their mobile devices and shed the Microsoft name completely for anything but their software businesses.

yes, like Surface Phone?

Right now Surface refers to a model line. I suspect they'll go a step further and create a whole brand called Surface.

If they're smart, they'll consider spinning it out of Microsoft completely (while still holding a majority stake).

Though note that per the deal, after 2015-12-31, old-Nokia will again be allowed to offer phones with the 'Nokia' name. Weird, huh?

Seriously? Then why bother with the whole thing at all?

Uh... for the rest of the company?

That's ridiculous. Nokia is an excellent brand and should be retained.

It's also helping teach American students Finnish geography.

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