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Nokia acquired by Microsoft

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531–540 of 573 posts

Re: Nokia acquired by Microsoft

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am being reasonable. I'm saying Elop will be the next CEO.

Are you a Bayesian? If so, what's your actual probability estimate? I think people are objecting to "will be" which indicates 100% certainty, and 100% certainty is not a rational position for anything, much less predicting a company's future CEO. To put it in context, even if this is exactly MS's plan, you're stating that within the next 12 months, there's a 0% probability he'll have any sort of accident. Wikipedia s…

You must be tons of fun at parties.

Re: Nokia acquired by Microsoft

#532
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, please, we have such hard time moving MS out of the hot field, don't bring them back! Remember when everyone feared MS? I mean, that was really terriying time for our industry. How forgetful is it to "wish" MS could gain a third of the phone OS market shared... Apple and Google conjugated efforts kept the wolf outside and you want to open the gates? However, I agree that a domineering Android/Google or Android/Sa…

> just like Linux forked Unix Darl McBride? Is that you?

Lol! Not sure why anyone would downvote you for that gem!

Re: Nokia acquired by Microsoft

#533
post #425
post #21

That kills my hopes for a Nokia Android phone. Also, Elop seems like the least interesting character to succeed Ballmer. What does he bring to the table? What has he done? Guy looks like a careerist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#Career

Oouh.. that reads like he managed to get every company he worked for to fade away, go bancrupt or loose competitive strength in a very short time. This. Or he was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time, very often. * DEAD: Lotus Development Corporation * DEAD: Boston Chicken * SOLD: Macromedia's * ALIVE: Juniper Networks * DECLINING: Microsoft Dynamics I don't know this guy, but if that's the best they can get..

I don't know of anyone who blames Boston Chicken's IT on it's bankruptcy. He was their CIO and I doubt he had any influence on their notorious franchising strategy. Plus they're also still alive after rebranding as Boston Market, and while I couldn't find any location numbers, they boast of serving 15 million pounds of mashed potatoes and 80 million pieces of cornbread a year.

He was per Wikipedia "a director of consulting" at Lotus ... again, not an area that determined their decline and fall.

Re: Nokia acquired by Microsoft

#534
Anyone else see this and think of their Nokian Tyres? Nokia has an interesting history, including owning Nokian which makes some very good winter tires.

Re: Nokia acquired by Microsoft

#535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nokia was massively larger than Motorola. (Look at historical market cap data. In year 2000: Nokia > $200B vs Motorola ~$80B). Nokia was the market leader in smartphones before they went WP. They were larger than Apple and Samsung combined and then some more. Motorola wasn't a big factor in the smartphone business. Google bought them for their patents, certainly not for their mismanaged smartphone strategy. So, Motor…

Installed base became meaningless after the iPhone changed the game. Everybody started out at 0% of a brand-new market -- including Nokia. That's why it's known as disruptive innovation. Nokia's mistake wasn't in killing Symbian for smartphones in 2011. It was in not killing Symbian in 2009 or 2008. But it's hard to give up that market share and start from zero. In cases of disruption, high market share is actually a…

I appreciate your engagement in this discussion, but you can't be serious now: Of course the iPhone was a game changer, but that doesn't reset everything to 0. Nokia's brand recognition, Nokia's relationships with telcos and their vast distribution channels... these things don't go flying out of the window just because of the iPhone, and it certainly wasn't a disadvantage.

As for Nokia killing Symbian: To publicly announce a year before you actually ship the next product, that your current products are now obsolete - huge mistake! I don't think there is any dispute on this.

But we digress: I strongly believe that if you do it right there is money to be made as an Android vendor (don't forget those emerging companies from China, Huawei, xiaomi,...), but there is no money in WP. Nokia did a brilliant job with their Lumias, but they just won't sell without the right OS.

Re: Nokia acquired by Microsoft

#536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was based on the Strategy Analytics report? That was a little dubious, as it was based on saying that (a) half of Apple's profits are from the iPhone and (b) Samsung makes no profit on its desktop, laptop or tablet divisions at all. There was also some confusion over net vs gross.

If you don't like that report you can check out two others that are provided by sources that most would describe as "rabidly pro-Apple". The trend is pretty clear and has been for a while so I'm not sure why everyone seems so suprised by this. Though given Apple's yearly cycle which has a slump in Q3 and a big spike in Q4 they may briefly reclaim the crown in Q4 if their next launch does well. Strategy Analytics: htt…

Not sure how you're getting that from the Asymco one... The Canaccord one does seem to note that Samsung's "handset" division incorporates tablets and PCs, and that their estimate for the iPhone's share of Apple's profits is fuzzy (we know Apple's revenue per division, but not profit; Strategy Analytics and Canaccord seem to have decided that profit per division is proportional to revenue, which is a bit of a leap...)

Re: Nokia acquired by Microsoft

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Nokia had more to do with Nokia's decline than iOS or Android. They had the hardware and software to do what Apple and Palm did at least a full generation before iPhone 1.

Nokia didn't have the software, that was the problem. Symbian was as dead-end of a technology as classic Mac OS was. After the iPhone was released, Nokia scrambled around with a number of different alternative operating systems because they knew they didn't have the software. Unfortunately, they didn't commit to the future. By the time Elop came in and committed to Windows Phone, it was already far too late.

They didn't have the software or the hardware figured out. Before the iPhone came out, Nokia has 40+ phone models that were barely different. It was like they took every permutation of hardware options and created a new device. It was so refreshing when Apple came out with 1 device and it was better than all of Nokia's combined.

Re: Nokia acquired by Microsoft

#538
post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, firmware upgrading has a chance it will brick the phone. That didn't stop me doing it 10 times, after the nerves of the 1st time go away it's easy. What do you mean "branched" version of Ace? nothing comes up on google :s

I mean a different sub-model (I guess...). Mine is a GT-s5830 instead of a s5830. All of the ROM updates I found made reference to the latter only so, again, I decided to not take any chances while it is my primary phone. By the time I buy a new phone, I'll sure update the old one and see how it goes.

AFAIK "GT-" is just the Samsung prefix. My S3 is a GT-i9300.

Re: Nokia acquired by Microsoft

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple didn't always have a low market share and built up a huge importance for developers before their share started to slide. There are still millions of iPhones sold every year, even if they're a smaller piece of the overall pie. Contrast to Windows Phone which never had any kind of market share or importance, and has to fight up from absolutely nothing. That's the difference between iPhone's small market share and…

Actually, Apple's share of the mobile phone market is still growing, as it has been since 2007. It just isn't growing as fast as Android's.

Market share vs units sold. One is sliding down (market share) while units sold are still going up as the pie gets larger.

Re: Nokia acquired by Microsoft

#540
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a brilliant strategy to have an aging company buy a device maker that markets to an aging customer base.

No, it would have been brilliant. Microsoft is horrible at personal interfaces and trying to deal with actual people. But they are wonderful at enterprise. If either Microsoft or RIM had been able to say "Fine, we'll let Apple and Google play with their fancy new devices - we'll make products that let people actually get work done" that would have been a brilliant strategy. They could have completely dominated corpor…

Back when Blackberry was king, quite a few people carried a phone that was provided / paid for by their company, and they didn't have a personal phone. This is because cell phones / plans were expensive (remember 45 cents per minute?). Then, once the family plans started to become popular (it took a while, as it had to wait for people with company-provided phones to switch jobs to a company that didn't provide phones), more companies started to switch to BYOD. And I don't know about anyone else, but once I was able to choose my own device, it WAS NOT going to be a limited functionality stripped down corporate phone.
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