I disagree. They had the N9 which was/is a superb device. If they had refocused on migrating their Symbian existing ecosystem around that platform then I think they would been in a much better place today than they are.
The risk Nokia has with Windows Phone is it ends up being one vendor of many and doesn't control the software. It means that they can't amortize their costs across the ecosystem as full stack vendors can which makes them very vulnerable to other vendors bleeding them on the hardware margins.
It also risks that Microsoft might Surface them with their own device leaving them ultimately with nothing.
Had Nokia refocused their smartphone efforts towards Maemo/Meego back in 2008, they would have had a chance. But they were hopelessly late in 2011.
What killed both Symbian and Meego was all the petty internal turf wars. Divisions inside Nokia spent years fighting over control of a hill that was about to be bulldozed to the ground.
The Symbian people fought particularly hard to keep their preferred status within Nokia. Their plans to rewrite the Symbian UI and reconquer the high-end smartphone market from Apple were completely unrealistic, but upper management didn't understand software and allowed Nokia's Linux-based efforts to be suffocated while enormous resources were poured into Symbian.
Those are minor risks. The real risk Nokia has with WP is that it'll continue being a marginal platform that can't support a company with Nokia's ambitions even if they got 100% of the WP market. There is reason to believe that in the unlikely case where WP actually takes off, Nokia have real competitive advantages over other vendors. (License fees for all WP devices from mapping, a lump sum OS cost rather than per phone fees).
> I disagree. They had the N9 which was/is a superb device.
Maybe so. But then they would be fighting against the ecosystem of iphone, andriod, AND windows phone. It would be a huge uphill battle without a strong ally. They would be on their own for all the marketing as well, AND making less money per unit since we know Microsoft is paying Nokia a large sum of money for their deal.
For the ordinary user, the N9 doesn't have any of the niceties that you see on iPhone or Android. It was going to remain that way; there was no way Nokia would have convinced people to write software for it. Also, the tooling around Maemo/Meego+ and Symbian doesn't compare to what iOS, Android or even what Windows Phone has.
I have owned half a dozen Nokia devices, and really I want them to succeed. They really didn't have a choice.
True, it's unfinished and the recent update for PR 1.3 is probably its last. The development environment is not as mature as iOS, since the Qt SDK didn't have as many years of use.
On the other hand Qt and QML are in a completely different league compared to the primitive way of building UIs in Android or iOS. Nokia hit the jackpot with declarative UIs, and then completely failed to build and support a product around them.
e.g:
Think about iOS - you either code your UI in Objective-C or use a designer. Borland was doing this with its C++ Builder and Delphi lines in 1996.
On Android you had to edit XML files by hand for the longest time.
WP tooling is the most modern of the three you've mentioned. C# is much nicer that the aged Obj-C and XAML is also a declarative language, but the XML format is bloated and completely uneditable outside of specialized design tools.
I completely agree here about QML. While Visual Studio allows to make drag-and-drop development what is very nice for beginners but you should support your apps as well and QML wins here.
Apps on nokia phones and on other platforms have been primitive because there isnt a widespread use of app stores on those platforms. Without a money trail, the company pushing the platform can only do so much. Even on android and ios its not the app guidelines or the dev stack thats made the applications stand out - its the third party developers working hard for the money made available by the app store.
The risk Nokia has with Windows Phone is it ends up being one vendor of many and doesn't control the software. It means that they can't amortize their costs across the ecosystem as full stack vendors can which makes them very vulnerable to other vendors bleeding them on the hardware margins.
It also risks that Microsoft might Surface them with their own device leaving them ultimately with nothing.