Engadget does an amazingly bad job of linking the original article. You would think that the sentence 'Bloomberg Businessweek just published an amazingly thorough piece on Nokia' would have a link in it, but it doesn't.
No where on the page do they link to the start of the original story. The 'source' button links to the page/paragraph that the quote is from, but that isn't exactly the same as linking to the front of the other article.
The only links in the content go back to other Engadget stories. I'd say its bad etiquette.
Engadget always has a source link at the bottom of the article. They don’t link to anything but themselves in the article text for SEO reasons. Also note that the word “Source” at the bottom of the article is not text but an image – also for SEO reasons. (I don’t, however, know what that’s supposed to help.)
This is a truly disgusting practice. The good thing about it is that once you know what’s going on, it’s relatively unproblematic. Whenever someone directs me to Engadget I know where I have to click. (In a funny twist, once you know where it is, finding the source is actually easier than when it is hiding in the article text.)
I will tell you how that practice might help for SEO purpose. A page has a limited link juice which gets distributed more or less equally to all links on the page. So if the article links to external page, some of that link juice flows to it. Why not rather limit it to your own internal pages?
This is absolutely a ridiculous practice. I cant recall any other tech blog who follows this. Even big time news publications like Nytimes etc, wont do this. I unsubscribed to their RSS feed, just for this one particular reason alone.
I honestly don't know why they feel like need to release a huge number of devices to compete against Apple and Android. Apple releases one every, what, 15 months? And for Android, it seems you really only need ~3 devices (one with a keyboard, and two without at different prince points) to make a dent into the target market for Android.
It maybe that MeeGo was going even slower than that, but that's also their fault for deciding to more or less completely ditch Maemo instead of investing resources into that back from 2008 onward. If you look at what they had with the 770 a year and half before the iPhone, and the N800 5 months before, Nokia could have been huge. Instead they stuck with Symbian without really putting the correct work into it. And now they're stuck with Windows Mobile it seems.
I'm not sure what it all really means, besides a reminder it really doesn't make sense to attach yourself too much for companies. What they do can change on a dime.
Completely disagree about needing devices. Apple only makes one [phone] device per year, but Apple is losing market share to Android every month. Having a single device might be a good formula for profitability or user experience, but it's not the road to an empire.
Compare to Android. It's not just about form factors. It's about hardware freshness. Android has had dual core, LTE, and double the ram for months. There are Android phones with 3D screens and 3D cameras. The iPhone 4 is looking long in the tooth. And the iPhone 4S will just be catching up to the Galaxy S 2.
If I had to point to one reason why Apple is trading at such a low multiple it's because Apple is making too few devices to maintain leadership. Apple's market share has peaked unless it starts acting very un-Apple.
I mean, it's not that Nokia was only going to be releasing three devices before 2014, it was three MeeGo devices. I guess you could argue one/year is too slow to keep up, but they were going to continue to release Symbian phones.
And I'm not sure if much of that "hardware freshness" is really what's getting Android market share. Are there (sizable numbers of) people buying a phone because it has a 3D camera?
It may have made sense for Nokia to ditch MeeGo, but I think I was actually intending to mostly complain about how they got themselves into the corner.
Are people buying Android over iPhone because of a 3D camera? Probably not. Because Android is the only way to get LTE? Definitely, this is a big one. Because Android is the only way to get a dual core CPU? Definitely.
Not to mention the form factors which are also pretty important. Some people demand a keyboard. Other people want a huge screen. That's just not an option with iOS. There's also brand momentum. Everyone that isn't Apple has loaned Google its brand by putting Android inside.
As for MeeGo's viability I think it's a moot point. Even if MeeGo was perfect Nokia would be in an uphill battle. Look at webOS, critically regarded as the best competitor to iOS. HP has a near zero market share. You either need to be the very best by far, i.e. Apple, or you need to have the rest of the industry behind you, i.e. Android.
The fact Nokia looked at Windows Phone 7 and Android considered them equals makes me question Elop's decision making. The article also has a telling quote when Elop says he couldn't reach someone because the other guy was "probably testing an Android device that day."
Elop might as well have decided to build personal computers with OS/2 Warp in the 1990's because IBM gave him a big check and Windows is humorously unreliable. I'm sure that would have been a great business decision.
This, is a classic management lesson. Take stock. Confer with key stakeholders and the engineers. Draw a composite picture of the state of the system. And take a painful decision to abandon your approach, hopefully in time.
Much as I liked 'Meego' as an idea, and much as I like Nokia as a phone company( Symbian phones were incredibly useful. And the hardware and design is always top class.), this was a correct decision. I hope Nokia can find its feet again and dazzle us with some amazing phones again.
Symbian phones were incredibly useful. And the hardware and design is always top class.
What's keeping Nokia from playing the same game that HTC is? Is it entirely manufacturing/labor costs?
From the article: "MeeGo had been the collective hope of the company," he says, "and we'd come to the conclusion that the emperor had no clothes. It's not a nice thing."
Maybe the culture and social organization of a company is analogous to its autonomic nervous system? A shock to that is very risky and not to be undertaken lightly.
Sez BusinessWeek: "[Elop] tried to negotiate a deal with Google to run Android, but Google refused to give the world's biggest phonemaker any advantages over its smaller partners, meaning Nokia's corps of 11,600 engineers would have next to no ability to add their own innovations to Google's software. 'It just didn't feel right,' Elop says to the crowd [of Nokia engineers]. 'We'd be just another company distributing Android. That's not Nokia! We need to fight!'"
This is, at best, a half-truth --- Nokia would have the same freedom to tinker, reskin, and add their own apps as any other Android maker, which has so far been considerable. With Windows Phone, being able to reskin is a special favor, but with Android, it's part of the package.
What's believable here is that Nokia wanted _some_ kind of special favors from Google, and Google didn't want to play that game. Microsoft did. And it isn't clear from the outside what all those special favors were --- we'll have a clearer view, perhaps, when the first devices ship, though we still probably won't know the size of the "marketing payments" --- or how the other manufacturers will react, long-term, to being relegated to second-fiddle status on the platform.
Because Nokia R&D spend is 8 times that of HTC, and 5 times of Apple for that matter.[1] Nokia needs the flexibility with the OS. In an ideal world, Nokia most certainly should make an OS by themselves, but clearly that didn't happen, so they choose the one that gives them the most flexibility to do what they want, much more than just putting a custom UI on top.
And yes, the shock is risky. But the way things were going, very necessary.
Judging from the Symbian phone I'm typing this on, Nokia is actually incapable of writing a decent phone os. The hardware is great (after four years the corners of the case have a few scratches from falling out of a shirt pocket on the concrete pavement several times and the chome color on the D-pad is mostly gone) but the software, ah, how to say it, less so. The browser randomly reorders all bookmarks every time you open the mail client, sometime the phone will stay offline after you have left cell coverage in the wrong moment and ever so often you have to use the hardware garbage collect button (the one with the circle with the small vertical bar within) if you want to keep using it. I'm mostly using third party software now (opera mini for the web and mutt in a putty session for mail).
So in a way it is fitting that they go with Microsoft, Microsoft has a reputation of being a better hardware than software manufacturer, too (at least for keyboards and mice, which cannot RROD).
From the article, "To that point, Microsoft had forced handset makers to obey strict rules about how they could customize Windows Phone 7, and they wanted the same from Nokia. Not only did Nokia respond that it wanted the right to innovate freely, it asked Microsoft to commit to using Nokia technology as a foundation of the Windows Phone platform, particularly its detailed Navteq maps database."
I've never heard a Linux distro, especially one based on an existing distro, and made by people who have already made one before, only working on 3 pieces of hardware in 4 years. Could anyone explain this?
I suspect the answer is some combination of (a) getting device drivers to work on highly specialized hardware in spite of extreme memory/CPU constraints; (b) developing a user interface (and the widget toolkit for developers to use, etc.) that doesn’t suck.
When my company was acquired by Nokia we had a choice of company-issued phones, and of course most of the geeks picked N900s (which ran Maemo, a Meego predecessor). After a few weeks using the N900 I was like “well, as a handheld Linux computer, it’s OK, but as a phone... meh.”
I have been using an N900 for almost a year, and I think it's a great "phone". Excellent voice quality, great microphone, easy to call people, and the best reception I've had with any device. It works well with all my hands-free stuff, and it works very well as a "phone".
Posting this on an n900... Very low battery life, bad touch screen, sluggish ui. Why on earth did they cripple the default shell?
The keyboard is pretty nice. When someone is calling you, the answer and decline button jump around in the screen, and I always hit the wrong one. This is because of the orientation sensor and the slow ui rearrange.
Most browsing frustrations go away when you start using Opera as the browser.
Most of the bugs in the builtin apps could have been fixed relatively easily, but I guess they restarted with a different ui paradigm after N900.
Never used android or iphone so don't know how bad they are.
Ah, I forgot about that! I originally fixed that by installing a modified hildon desktop, but that's been incorporated in the community SSU: http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_SSU
EDIT: I also had to force the phone-ui to landscape mode so it wouldn't jump around on me.
Yes, this is a rather strange thing to say. I do know that they rebooted maemo/meego architecture multiple times, losing independent devs and also didn't give it resources, symbian was the thing... Think what would have happened to microsoft if NT hadn't worked...
Shades of SGI getting killed off due to the actions of Rick Belluzzo; this was after he scotched the development of PA-RISC because of his view that Microsoft was going to take over the world... the difference being that Belluzzo joined MSFT after proving his ability to destroy MSFT's competition.
The only surprise there is that it took a whole day and a meeting with the new CEO to work this out.
It was common knowledge amongst anyone who tried it that MeeGo was no where near ready for consumers, and it was reasonably clear that the hardware platform they were aiming at wasn't 100% sure either.
It's often surprising in a large organization how much goes on that upper management is unaware of, either through incompetence or malice. I don't know enough about the specifics of this situation, but sometimes "everyone" knows that a product isn't going to ship in time, but maybe the product manager doesn't want to broadcast this fact for fear of his job. If his manager is asleep at the wheel, this kind of thing can happen. I'm guessing that the new CEO simply did something the previous CEO didn't do: ask the right questions.
"Nokia is now on track to release at least one Windows Phone handset in 2011 with a dozen more in 2012."
A dozen!
With a dozen models on the market how are customers supposed to choose?
Nokia should slow down and put as much TLC as possible into 1 or 2 products next year. Make each immaculate instead of figuring you can fix your mistakes in next month's model.
Are you suggesting that the number of models of an item that a company produces should in some way be comparable to the total number of models on the market?
I don't understand this article. It's claimed that the company realized they cannot meet their scheduled goals with MeeGo, so instead they switch to Windows Phone. Yet the article call the latter "an OS still struggling to find traction in the heated smartphone market."
If that is true why would they think it could solve their problem?
Because WinPhone is a finished operating system, unlike MeeGo.
Nokia's problem was they couldn't get a competitive product out quickly enough. WinPhone gives them a chance, MeeGo wouldn't have shipped in decent numbers until 2014.
What I often wonder is why didn't Nokia decide to try its hand on both Android and Windows Phone 7? Samsung has managed to do this while keeping its in house platform intact. Experiment and see what finds uptake rather than bet a huge corporation on a single platform.
Elop is a former employee of Microsoft and has huge share in that company. His reason to be at Nokia was to bring it to Microsofts lap and so destroy MeeGo and Qt.
