

Nokia’s Suicide Note - cwb
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2931

======
raganwald
Excellent analysis: Nokia has effectively announced that they have no focus
and plan to spend three quarters losing money in the hops that in 2012 or 2013
WP7 is going to be a big hit for them.

It's a shame Elop doesn't take a page out of Jobs' book instead of Ballmer's.
Rather than announce a strategic blah blah direction blah blah partnership
blah blah, he could have called a press conference, walked on stage, and
showed them a Nokia running WP7, announced a date you could buy them, and
invited the heads of the world's biggest carriers on stage to announce cut-
rate deals and plans for them.

p.s. I meant to write "hope," and not "hops," however considering what we make
out of hops and the kind of decisions we make after drinking too much of it,
I'm leaving it uncorrected.

~~~
qjz
Agreed. And in even less time, he could have walked on stage with an unlocked
Android-based smartphone. What would Nokia have to lose from offering such a
device? Does the new partnership with Microsoft prohibit such a move? If so,
it seems like a limiting move for a hardware manufacturer that harkens back to
the early days of Windows.

~~~
moomba
I agree. I keep hearing comments about Nokia being late to the game...
blalballba ...if they decided to use android instead of WP7. I don't see how
that is an issue. As has been stated by Nokia, this is going to take 1-2 years
to make the switch to WP7. Why don't they spend 1/2 of that time switching to
a popular platform instead of an unpopular platform. I guess I'd have to be an
ex Microsoft employee (like the CEO) to understand any of this zaniness.

~~~
dfox
I assume that they want to keep their hardware platform. And porting Android
to that would almost certainly require opensourcing their baseband
implementation and thus enable everyone else to build phones with similar
architecture (ie. without dedicated baseband CPU).

~~~
rbanffy
I don't think being able to go without a dedicated baseband processor will be
an advantage for more than one hardware iteration. It may be useful in
featurephones, but not that much with smartphones.

~~~
dfox
It enables Nokia to manufacture cheap smartphones with good battery life. Some
Chinese Android-based phones are starting to have comparable prices, but
certainly not battery life.

~~~
rbanffy
For how long will that advantage exist? Would you like to lose performance on
your game because your phone wants to chat with the cell towers?

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daeken
Ok, I have a lot of respect for esr, but all this talk of "porting" makes me
think that no one knows how any of this works. "Porting" Android or WP7 to a
new phone consists of: write drivers, write userland apps that give your users
the experience you want, and possibly modify your existing bootloader code.
They have documentation on their hardware, they have existing BSPs to
reference, etc. This is _not_ a hard problem. Getting this up and running with
basic functionality would _absolutely_ take no more than a month. Period.

~~~
metageek
And then there's this bit:

> _History matters; the Android codebase is designed to be ported in ways
> Microsoft is probably culturally incapable of even imagining._

NT is portable. It's been ported to at least four CPUs that I know of (x86,
Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC), and MS has announced that they will deliver it on
ARM.

I don't much care for MS, but pretending that they're incapable of writing a
portable OS is nonsense.

~~~
redrobot5050
Um...you do know that all the non-Alpha/x86 ports were considered failures in-
house and dropped, right?

Portability was one of the first things Microsoft sacrificed to get things
"working right".

And the OS engineers who wrote the "portable" NT code have long since vested
and moved on. The new kids on the block have probably never seen their code.

~~~
danieldk
Right, and this is why my Windows NT 4.0 CD contained x86, Alpha, MIPS and PPC
versions. I had never tried anything but Intel, but it was certainly not just
in-house.

~~~
redrobot5050
Right, and how many Windows NT apps were there for MIPS and PPC? If Developers
still have too much trouble creating "universal" apps, your port is
effectively dead. Outside of x86 and Alpha, NT was never used.

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tarvaina
Smart devices is Symbian, Meego, WP7.

Mobile Phones is S40 (not Symbian). This is the ancient Nokia platform, which
is the only part of Nokia that is currently competitive in its price bracket.

The intention is to kill off Symbian as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Good riddance. It was not a realistic smartphone contender to begin with.
Finally Nokia stops throwing good money after bad. Only it may be too late.

One of Nokia's systemic problems is its uneven software culture. Nokia's
diffrentiator was hardware. When competitors surpassed Nokia in software it
was fighting a losing battle. From this point of view the move makes much
sense. Remove the software that don't perform well: Symbian and Ovi service
"platform", developer tools. Keep and streamline the parts that have a chance
of success: S40, MeeGo.

The transition will be painful and success is far from certain, but the
obvious alternatives would be even worse.

~~~
rbanffy
S40, IIRC, _is_ Symbian. It's related to the S60 that powered lots of Nokia
smartphones, mostly the ones that actually work. Keeping to it and ditching
the newer versions would be clever.

~~~
tarvaina
You remember incorrectly. See e.g. <http://www.forum.nokia.com/Devices/> for
comparison.

~~~
rbanffy
It's a marketing barrier, not a technical one. The core is very much the same.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_40#Operating_system>

~~~
tarvaina
Sorry, but your link doesn't support your assertion. It only says that S40 is
simpler than S60 and that S60 is based on Symbian.

With a bit of googling I found this quote from a Forum Nokia champion: "Series
40 (S40) is not based on Symbian at all, but a Nokia proprietary real-time
operating system. Series 40 does not allow any native (C/C++) development
(with or without Qt). The primary app development for Series 40 based phones
is Java (JME, J2ME, MIDP/CLDC), or Flash Lite."
[http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?21666...](http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?216661-Why-
Qt)

Here's another link: <http://eve-c.org/2011/syskwyawan/>

~~~
rbanffy
Interesting. The use of the word "variant" on Wikipedia misled me.

------
nobody_nowhere
Splits nokia in two? What a load of crap! Nokia is currently split into four,
or five, or ten, or worse. When you consider the platforms, the hardware
streams, ovi, qt -- it's a total mess of competing agendas.

I've been in the belly of the beast, and aside from having a very nice sauna,
it's really ugly in there. There's total paralysis, as evidenced by the lack
of competitive produts. OPK was fond of saying how nokia needed to reinvent
itself, but he lacked the willpower to make any meaningful changes.

When I was there we used to say "it's hard to fire a Finn." Now some heads are
finally rolling. Shaking it up like this is their only chance.

------
tommi
Eric totally forgot about S40. It's a platform which sells very well.

~~~
gonzo
He didn't forget about it. It's presence ruins his argument, so he didn't
mention it.

There has been a side-conversation between Eric, Doc Searls and I for days on
this subject.

The 'other shoe' will shortly drop when Nokia sues Google for infringement of
many of the patents it holds.

Nokia also just radically cut it's R&D spending. Payments for WP licenses are
being offset with payments from Microsoft for things like the Nokia Maps and
'other' items (likely: Nokia patents). Elop essentially ended up with an
effective $0 WP license.

------
stcredzero
"Porting?" As I've noted already, this move sounds like he's trying to follow
a script for corporate meltdown drawn from Smalltalk history:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2206788>

Congrats. "Porting" enters into the plan!

If the CEO follows that script, he will have damaged employee relationships to
the point that Nokia won't be able to execute some of the difficult goals he's
set going forwards.

Seriously, he needs to look up some old ObjectShare alums to get some
historical perspective on what he's trying to do and how it can go seriously
wrong.

------
innes
Opinion from Robert Scoble:

<http://scobleizer.com/2011/02/11/dear-nokia-fans-youre-nuts/>

~~~
drdaeman
Compactified version: "I prefer Windows Phone 7 and consider it much better
than the rest, so it was a smart move. It's just that WP7 has no apps now, but
you'll all see it'll rock."

He says that platform with no apps doesn't matter at all, then believes apps
will magically come out of nowhere (uh, reminds me of
<http://twitter.com/RovioMobile/status/35985499667562496>), so the platform
will shine and become an ecosystem. Sure, this is probable (especially after
the agreement), but they'll have very tough time making it so. We've already
seen lots of great platforms failing for about the same reasons and WP7 may as
well become another one.

Time'll show the real outcome, and we could only wish Nokia+MS to success.

Personally, I believe Nokia would've in a better position if they put all
resources on MeeGo development and ability to run Android apps on it (which
was already shown recently). This way they'd profit on two already strong
ecosystems at once, yet won't become yet another Android vendor. But that's
just my own thoughts.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Microsoft has many weaknesses, but attracting and supporting a substantial
developer community has NEVER been one of them. Look at the speed with which
developers adopted XBOX360 on the back of Microsoft's toolchain.

There are millions of developers across the world with Visual Studio on their
machines, who are VERY comfortable with The Microsoft Way. Their resistance to
downloading the Android SDK and using Eclipse to write a Java app is high.
Their resistance to buying a Mac to do iPhone development is higher. Their
resistance to downloading the WP7 SDK and writing an app in a language
familiar to them is VERY LOW.

It may be harder for them to attract the cutting edge startups... the Paths
and the Flipboards... but Microsoft is not Palm. They are not Google. They are
not Blackberry. There will be apps. Particularly with respect to business
apps, there will be MANY WP7 exclusives.

And for the big, 90-percent-of-all-app-use apps, like Facebook and Angry
Birds, Microsoft will either write the apps themselves, or court the shit out
of the companies who make them to get them to do a port. They will give them
direct lines to WP7 engineers who will fix their bugs.

They'll have a developer horde, no question. They'll screw up a lot of things
about WP7, but I'm baffled that you think nurturing a developer community is
one of them.

Remember: "Developers! Developers!"

