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About LinkBacksRead more.Make or break time for the mobile phone giant as market share losses accelerate.
Read more.Make or break time for the mobile phone giant as market share losses accelerate.
They should. They are like the powerhouse of mobile phones and they keep stuffing up with their smartphone offerings.
The fact that HTC can get so much market share shows they have lost direction.
The thing is, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo is an accountant, as such he has been very good at cutting waste and inefficiency, but rather bad at the necessary blue sky thinking to drive the business forward.
In the past 3 years or so, Nokia has saved an enormous amount of money, both by reforming internal practices to cut waste, and by closing some smaller Nokia sites and making thousands of redundancies. The cost cutting was so effective that the company actually made a profit in 2009 Q4.
On the other hand, Nokia's efforts to develop new and exciting stuff that will excite end users has faltered. The Ovi store was buggy and unreliable when it first launched, and still does not work very well or have many worthwhile apps on it. (If you discount ringtones & wallpapers). The core Series 60 operating system looks the same as it did 5 years ago, when the competition is full of eye candy. Maemo/Meego/<insert the latest name here> is promising, but should be driven forward to all mid to high end phones, rather than a few experimental and expensive models.
About the only area where Nokia is doing well is at the low end. Series 40 is reliable, but unexciting so works well on cheap phones, and Nokia has a very efficient supply chain that enables it to sell millions of bargain basement phones a week to the developing world, and still make a slender profit. The problem with the low end is that it is a race to the bottom, and as those markets mature, they will want to upgrade, and Nokia won't be able to compete with the likes of HTC and Samsung, who can produce basic touch screen smart-phones, that are better and cheaper than Nokia.
The bottom line, is that Nokia never really understood the threat from the iPhone and Android, and has managed to continue so-far on momentum and cost cutting. I don't think that will be sustainable over the next few years, and I think Nokia and it's employees (many of whom are still my friends) will have a very tough time.
NB: I was a Nokia employee, but I quit in April.
Scott B (20-07-2010)
Yea, I agree and that's because Nokia is a more of a communications company than a computer electronics company in the sense that Nokia knows how to make reliable communications. I.e. you won't get stupid designs like Apple from Nokia (Nokia was the FIRST to come up with internal antennas).
But the problem - Apple, an bloody amateur, came along and changed the landscape. They told people that phones are not just for calling but for more important things.
In fact, phones now are like mini computers and that's where Nokia stuff up. Nokia doesn't know how to make that. They still think phones the old school way and that's why they are so crap at the smartphone market but still good in normal phone market. They still keep making good reliable phones but that's not the future.
I mean the fastest growing smartphone companies (HTC, Apple, Android) are like little kids compared to Nokia.
Hope Nokia can break into the smartphone market. You can see I quite like Nokia
Nokia makes the hardware but can't keep up with the software.
Nokia + Android would make a great handset.
Lets see a new N900 released with Android, or a new N97
It has already been done:Originally Posted by Brewster0101
http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/23/a...of-two-trades/
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/27/h...through-froyo/
Needless to say these are not officially supported releases, but as a proof of concept, it shows that the hardware could support Android if Nokia wanted it to.
Agreed. The problem with Nokia software development, is that it is done by a huge and many layered bureaucracy, which is dominated by deadlines rather than quality. Everyone has a deadline to meet and if the code is not ready they will fudge it somehow and deliver incomplete or buggy code to the next step in the chain, rather than miss their deadline.
There are dozens of development groups spread around the world each of which develop different components (such as the browser) and releasing new versions every week or so, Each feed into integration groups which pull together sets of components, which in turn are fed into the core platform groups (one each for S60, S40 etc), who also release every week or so with major "stable" releases twice a year. Remember that all the code they receive was developed to tough deadlines, so the quality won't be great in a lot of areas.
Phone development programs, each take branches from these stable releases and start customising them for the product they are working on. They end up doing a lot of bug fixing that should have been done at the component development level, many of these fixes don't make it back to the component teams or the core platform for various political reasons. Worse a lot of bugs never get fixed, especially minor ones which can be swept under the carpet indefinitely. Remember the deadline over quality culture exists in product development teams as well, so it is better to get a phone out of the door on time with only "minor" bugs, than to delay and get it right.
While that could be done, I don't think it is the solution. If Nokia sold Android phones, then they would be just like all the other Android partners who are subservient to the mighty google. Also they would not be able to compete on features, only on price. Finally Android is a fairly ugly hack that is deliberately incompatible with mainstream Linux and Java in order to force users to use Google services and the Android marketplace.
Instead, I think Nokia should produce a runtime layer that allows future Meego phones to run Android applications in a separate sandbox. That would solve the App store problem and allow Noka to sell future smart-phones "With access to 100,000 apps" while at the same time retaining independence.
I don't actually think an Android runtime layer would be that hard. Android is already open source, and Google already offer an Android emulator as part of their SDK. If you remove the parts related to debugging Android applications, then you would be left with a runtime system that would allow you to run Android on any linux computer, including a Meego phone.
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