I’m dubious this will go anywhere.
Oh, those are very pretty.
I have to get a new phone eventually, and I’m torn.
Either I go down the android route and will actually be able to customize things (maybe?)
or I can support my national economy and buy a phone whose hardware I know I’ll like.
Wow, those look really nice.
Nokia, RIP.
Well, if they somehow manage to sell cheaper low-end smartphones in Europe than those of the Korean and Chinese Android vendors, they may do okay as just another random hardware vendor, but they will be unable to compete on the high end because, you know, Windows. And it seems unlikely they can seriously out-compete the Asian vendors on the low-end, so they will likely just fade away, at least as a phone vendor.
Meanwhile, they’ll fire their R&D department except for a few sad little case designers and lo, the mighty inventor of the ring-tone is brought low in a few short years by a series of bad OS decisions.
How do you sell short on a long-term basis? I bet that they are in the Finnish equivalent of Chapter 11 in 5 years.
Meaningless, since high-end Nokia phones have always been very pretty (even when they were bogged down by S60).
I think Android would have been a healthier direction (unless Nokia is reeeally strapped for cash right now? I know nothing about that aspect) simply because Android seems to have a very keen eye on the tablet market. A market which is currently booming, and a market Nokia was already heading towards even with the first i386-based Communicator in a kinda-sorta way. And they’ve already dipped their feet into the Linux pond with the N800+ line. Of course, Maemo never took off because timing was just not right (and who even cares about Europe?), but to buddy up with Microsoft NOW… ehh. They are not exactly D0MED just yet, but it’s a disappointing move to say the least.
Google are doing a great job of creating fragmentation even without the handset manufacturers being involved. I mean - consider that there will soon (in practice), be two parallel Android OS “flavors” - Honeycomb for tablets and Gingerbread/Ice Cream for phones. Honeycomb introduces a whole radical new GUI framework (fragments). Lots of talk from Google that they were going to reduce fragmentation issues with Gingerbread, but so far all I’m seeing is more of it…
Not fragmenting the OS for phones and tablets would be doing a disservice to the users.
The GUI should be different for those two.
I hated working on those things.
What kind of phones they develop is irrelevant, as is Google’s focus. The current state of the universe is that apps are the name of the game. The old world – think the 8-bit PC era –*where you could have a bunch of platforms with varying strengths of first-party support, is gone. The new world is all about tapping into this mass of third-party developers. And third-party developers only have the time and energy to develop for a couple of platforms, unless they’ve developed a truly massive hit (think Angry Birds) or are already a massive company (think ESPN). .NET is irrelevant as well; you have to feed the iOS and Android beasts before you even consider something else, and it doesn’t matter how many .NET developers are willing to give this small-market handset a go.
“Fragmentation” is a word that ultimately means “consumer options.” In other words, it’s a word people use to try to spin a massive installed user base into a negative.
What you see in that blog is evidence of what I’m describing. It’s Microsoft desperately trying to buy/trick as many handset manufacturers into partnering with them, in a vain attempt to avoid the obvious.
I keep on wondering why people say that this is a “good move” for Microsoft. They’re still making the same mistakes; just because they happened to trick yet another company into falling with them doesn’t make it a good move.
Microsoft has done nothing but lose money hand over fist in a variety of vanity ventures, from MSN to Xbox, for the last 15 years. They do make tons of money, but it’s hardly the result of laser focus.
Some of them are vanity ventures. But their attempts at entering the mobile phone and cloud services markets are attempts to keep the company relevant; if people can use computers without without a PC, they’re in trouble.
I rather disagree.
There are many issues with the Android ecosystem for developers. On the Android market, for instance, between 10%-20% of all transactions from the US to foreign developers fail due to Google Checkouts implementation. It has taken years to develop a simple web front end to the market (and let’s not discuss the rather spartan result). The ridiculous search algorithms used in the Market, all the more shameful considering that this is supposed to be a search company. I could go on…
All the developers I know of who do both platforms still report massive differences in revenue on iPhone over Android. Part of the reason is Google’s unwillingness to focus significant resources on the Android platform.
The current state of the universe is that apps are the name of the game. The old world – think the 8-bit PC era –*where you could have a bunch of platforms with varying strengths of first-party support, is gone. The new world is all about tapping into this mass of third-party developers. And third-party developers only have the time and energy to develop for a couple of platforms, unless they’ve developed a truly massive hit (think Angry Birds) or are already a massive company (think ESPN).
If tapping into the third-party developers is so important, one would think that Google would treat them better, and do more to help them make money for Google. That doesn’t seem to be the case, though.
As one developer recently commented on the possibilities of getting Google to fix the broken search in the Android market: “the Android Market team works at Google’s
lunar base, where not even anyone else at Google hardly talks to
them.”
.NET is irrelevant as well; you have to feed the iOS and Android beasts before you even consider something else, and it doesn’t matter how many .NET developers are willing to give this small-market handset a go.
Nokia is still the world’s largest handset manufacturer, and lots of people buy their phones because they produce quality products. Assuming Microsoft/Nokia do this properly, there is plenty of potential in this alliance.
It wouldn’t take a lot for Microsoft to provide a more developer friendly ecosystem than Google does. If they would do that, I don’t for a moment doubt that a lot of Android/iPhone developers would look to develop apps for Windows/Nokia - more so because the real chances for app developers of hitting the big jackpot rely as much on being first with an app as it does with building the best apps.
“Fragmentation” is a word that ultimately means “consumer options.” In other words, it’s a word people use to try to spin a massive installed user base into a negative.
It’s a loaded word, for sure. At the core of the negativity, though, is the very real fact that development of anything but simple apps on the Android OS has issues due to running on very heterogeneous hardware. Splitting the Android eco-system into multiple versions is not going to help that. Google promised that coming OS versions would improve the situations. That hasn’t happened yet (Honeycomb seems to promise the opposite). Google promised to slow down new versions of the OS. That also does not seem to be happening (we will have at least two new major OS releases this year).
I absolutely do not want to exaggerate the issues here (after all, my own apps seem to do pretty OK across most devices), but when even guys who make a living from running Android courses raise their eyebrows at some of the Honeycomb features, I think alarm bells ought to be ringing somewhere.
Heh. What would you call Google’s various projects, then?
Allying with Nokia is certainly not one of the “same mistakes”. As far as I can see, Nokia and Microsoft bring to the table strengths and weaknesses which complement each other well.
Sure - they can still make lots of mistakes (and if they continue some of their old policies, they certainly will do so) to mess up this opportunity, but the important thing is that they do have a viable chance to make this a three horse race. That is why this is a good move.
Also unfocused and probably money-losing. Giant companies that make massive amounts of money in one or two areas are constantly blowing money trying to expand into different areas. Sometimes it works (GMail, SQL Server) sometimes not so much (Orkut, PlaysForSure).
Heh; I was more thinking of the “vanity” part - a description that somehow really fits many Google projects to a T.
The reason why I consider Microsoft way more focused on earning money than Google, is that the former certainly have a plan for how to earn money on WP7 (it may not be a good plan, but they certainly have a plan) and other project. Google, on the other hand, often seem to launch products without a specific profit-making plan. Android being a fine example - seeing as how it is actually possible to take the Android framework, replace Google Search & Maps with Bing and replace the Android market with a proprietary app store; net benefit to Google = zero. There are probably already millions of Android phones in China which earn Google no money whatsoever. Another example is that it is only in the last few of months that Google has begun to support monetization of apps beyond ad revenue. It’s difficult to imagine any other company being so cavalier about revenue generation as this. I think it is something that sets Google apart from many other companies - and not just in a good way.
Google’s various projects do have the benefit of maybe working, and also giving them a nice public image.
If google just did search, people wouldn’t think about them too much. Things like streetview get people talking.
Mostly about how Google doesn’t care about people’s privacy, it often seems…
Only you crazy euro hippies care about that ;).