Better silent than stupid - German proverb
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Nokia shares plunged as market realised Windows Phone calamity
THE IGLOO BUNKER that must be Nokia headquarters could be experiencing a febrile atmosphere by now as the shareholders have voted with their brokers and sold shares in the Finnish firm in droves.
The pre-announcement buzz for the trailed 11 February strategic Nokia announcement saw the Finnish firm's shares increase in value from $9 to nearly $12. Big things were clearly expected of ex-Microsoft executive and now Nokia CEO Stephen Elop.
But it's not even a week later and it has all gone horribly pete tong. With claims of product launches this year that then slipped to 2012, the general reaction to Nokia opting for Windows Phone since last Friday had sent the shares back down to $9 by 15 February. The Wall Street Journal's Big Charts website shows how bad Nokia's share price has been hammered since the Windows Phone announcement.
The onslaughts of Apple's Iphone 4 launched last May and Andriod's many different versions and handsets selling well saw Nokia's shares plunge to $8 last July. Since then the share price had slowly recovered as disgraced executives departed and Stephen Elop arrived as the new CEO in October.
Previously Elop had been involved in a 2009 deal between Nokia and his then employer Microsoft to bring Office to Nokia's handsets. This agreement clearly developed into the announcement that arrived on 11 February. But The INQUIRER wonders if maybe this analyst's claims at the start of February that Nokia would opt for Windows Phone wasn't a way to test the waters.
The fact that Elop is ex-Microsoft and did a deal with his former boss Steve Ballmer makes it all smell very fishy to The INQUIRER. The launch of Windows Phone 7 last year did not go well. LG has since said sales were a tad light and Ballmer never gives a retail sales figure, he only talks about the Vole's handset OEM partner shipments. For Elop, helping out his old chum might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but it's clear that beyond the confines of Apple's church, the closed OS world can't compete with the fragmented ecosystem of open source software, to use Steve Jobs' description of Android.
Sitting in the second row, almost spitting distance from Ballmer and Elop, it was easy to see panic pass across the Nokia CEO's face when the audience burst out laughing about his plans for Meego. Elop intends to produce a single Meego device "to learn" about open source and then the OS will be rolled into a long term R&D project.
However news that Fujitsu had launched a Meego netbook and Intel's involvement in showcasing the open source OS at Mobile World Congress could mean that the apparently abandoned OS is in fact a backstop option when, as it will, the Windows Phone effort dies on its feet. µ
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Meego is cannot act as a backstop for Nokia. By the time Nokia reach for it, they've lost the game.
That assumes that Nokia's management see any value in Meego at all. Meego was Nokia's main game in developing a competitor to iPhone & Android, but they never had the management focus on getting it out the door in a phone that was needed for success. Rather they treated it exactly like a R&D project. And their attitude doesn't seem to have changed.
No, we don't "love" or Xboxes. We just don't have options. I have a PS3 too, and that's it. The whole world isn't capable of providing alternatives.
But that's not the case in the mobile context...
Has been? Hard to see that, given that is is far and a away the largest handset manufacturer on the planet, by some very, very considerable margin.
Most of the world does not give a toss about "smartphones" or which OS they run. You need to get out a bit, trust me, large swathes (ie. the largest installed base of users, greater than all others combined - ie. NOK customers) of the global population are very happy with their handsets. Most of those handsets are not "smartphones".
That NOK is about to be gutted by MSFT has everything to do with MSFT, US based funds and their lackeys and NOKs IP portfolio - actually very little to do with NOKs financial or market position. So, a bad quarter was what, .88 billion € profit. Man, I would love to fail that badly. Actually, let's look at the published figues.
Let me see;
Last quarter.
Revenue growth 23%
Revenue €12.65B
Income growth 119%
Income €.88B (including an unusual ie. one-off expense charge of €1.5B!!!)
Last Year
Revenue €42.4B
Income €2.07B
Sorry, I do not have the year-to-year at hand for growth rates.
Anyway, what you can learn is that analysts and IT journalists and most people on IT forums are almost totally clueless of the facts and have zero interest in actually knowing them, or it might upset their position
I'm not surprised that Nokia and Microsoft teamed up on this. In the mobile phone market, they are both has-beens. The only difference is that Microsoft hasn't figured out that that it is road kill yet, whereas Nokia has.
"...unfortunately all the Nokia management and other employees were caught holding their pink-slips, realizing too late that he (Elop) was in fact a "Suicide Ballmer", being remotely operated by the real Ballmer, wearing his usual demonic grin..."
Windows phone: A scroll heavy, info light, ugly piece of crap.
An ailling, but still market leader, who's handsets out sell any other competitor -joins forces with a company who has failed once in the mobile space, and is losing ground again. Make sense to you?
"Anyone saying different has never used one your only screaming because Microsoft's name is on it but I bet half of your complainers love your X-Box 360's too"
Make sense will you? If they complain because it has MS on it, why do they have Xboxes? Do they carry the Xbox in their pocket to make phone calls? No,they don't.
Windows Phone is great and will only be better with every update. Anyone saying different has never used one your only screaming because Microsoft's name is on it but I bet half of your complainers love your X-Box 360's too.
INQ Be sure to ignore the horrendous iPhone 4 sales on Verizon.
The major problem is that nokia's current users will not wholey move over to winmo just like that.
This is a major oversight and something that will be addressed shortly i believe, by repositioning the nokia winmo handset and also same with symbian and meego.
Really Nokia only needed the services side as it wasn't executing well on that side. Plus alot of it is outsourced and again much was nearly cringe worthy.
515 N8 variants for instance is ridiculous and thats the real problem with symbian, massive forking and bugs repeating itself over handsets and variants. Thus Symbian is massively bogged down.
Put winmo on a level footing to meego and symbian and let the users decided which os they want.
It's sad to see a once-leading company like Nokia stumble so badly. Choosing Windows Phone as an "OS" to help get out of the Symbian doldrums is akin to a ceremonial disembowler asking for "assistance" from a second.
Whoever on Nokia's board approved of this former Microsoftie will deservedly pay for it through the impact that it has on the company's share price.
Sadly I don't expect any of this to trigger the appropriate response of associating solid software (and hardware) at reasonable prices with market success. This used to be Nokia's hallmark, but somehow it was forgotten and set aside over the past decade.
It will all be up to the PR firms employed to convince the general public. There are pros and cons to every phone OS and windows mobile is no different.
Bada has mostly pros!