Nokia Has a Billion Reasons To Love WP7 318
theodp writes "A report from Bloomberg notes it ain't easy, or cheap, to outbid Google. Microsoft has reportedly agreed to pay Nokia more than $1 billion to 'promote and develop' Windows Phone devices under the agreement between the companies. Bloomberg says the agreement for the payment was 'part of a campaign by Microsoft to keep Nokia from choosing Google's Android operating system.'"
Re:Nokia has amazing hardware, but not software (Score:5, Insightful)
No shit, 1 minute after the story is posted no less. Saw something similar happen around the end of last year too, but it probably happens more often than that and I just have missed it.
If it wasn't for the "best possible tools" crack then it wouldn't have been quite so obvious, but the rest of it is just another "part of a campaign by Microsoft to keep Nokia from choosing Google's Android operating system" as the summary says. Interesting that they'd rather see people buy iPhones than Android. And that they think that they can change our opinions just from some noob saying how great MS is. Slashdot does have a lot of groupthink, but it doesn't quite work like that.
don't flame me (Score:1, Insightful)
While, I know it popular to Flame MS. If Nokia isn't just taking MS's money, and is planning really throw everything they have into it. This "may" just save MS(mobile) and Nokia. Nokia has a history finding and growing niches and finding what customers want. As long as they don't just play follow the leader to what Android and Iphone do, AND (this is a big if) MS listens to them when the need want changes to WP7. I think may at least be able to compete. I don't see them taking over but they may put up a decent showing.
Re:Nokia has amazing hardware, but not software (Score:3, Insightful)
Ha! Anyone who has anything positive to say about MS is a shill! Everything is black and white! Ha!
Re:Might not be a horrible mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
The next version? It took them years to develop this and it didn't even have copy/paste at launch. They will have minor updates periodically but the next major version is long off. They are so far behind on mobile they don't know what to do.
The problem with WP7 is... (Score:5, Insightful)
that it could be the single best operating system on the planet that is superior to every other system in every possible way, but...
It's still A Trap(tm).
Microsoft has a very long history of blatantly destructive behaviour. They have a lot to make up for before they should be considered trustworthy enough to rely on.
Anyone who willingly buys microsoft products should be pitied, because clearly they're trapped in an abusive relationship. "Oh! He's not like that anymore! He's changed! Oh no, I got that black eye from falling down the stairs!"
MS 1, Nokia 0 (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes yes, I know we all hate Microsoft, but on the face of it this was a very shrewd business decision. Nokia was getting killed by the fact that people now want their phones to do such exotic things as email and Web browsing. They had no real internal direction in terms of software development, as evidenced by the schizophrenia of Symbian and Maemo, and the fact that they were trying to do it all in-house wasn't helping things any.
Meanwhile, Microsoft comes along with a ready-made solution to Nokia's woes in the form of a pretty complete mobile platform and a $1 billion payout to help with the transition. To Nokia's idiot board of directors this probably looked like a no-brainer. Meanwhile Microsoft gets amazing value in the form of a very, very large company now pushing out its software products worldwide. This isn't going to put WP7 ahead of Android or iOS, not by a long shot, but it will do wonders in terms of shoring up their position.
On the flip side of things, consider Motorola. At one point they were kind of in the same boat as Nokia, having missed the first wave of the smartphone epidemic, and went from being the company that had it all with the once-super cool RAZR to an also-ran. They got behind Android in a very complete and enthusiastic way and the results have really paid off for them. I'd venture to say that they make some of the best Android phones out there, and they're taking a great stab at the tablet market. And no one had to pay them $1 billion to do it!
In short, this is great news for MS, bad news for Nokia fans. I always thought the path to Palm's demise was paved by Windows Mobile ending up on Treo smartphones. They just couldn't be bothered to invest in an innovate mobile OS of their own until webOS, and that was obviously a day late and a dollar short...
Re:Nokia has amazing hardware, but not software (Score:2, Insightful)
He's not a n00b, he's a highly trained and experienced marketing person, selling the same old 'viral memes' that they think is a good way to get "mindshare" for a dud product.
They do give themselves away by banging on about the developer experience, when its a product aimed at consumers who don't give a fig about development. you could program the things using goats blood sacrifices for all consumers care, and someone trying to explain how good the product is should really be describing how intuitive it is to use, how its a new design of interface to help you organise your stuff. (too bad it appears to be so Facebook centric)
and definitely do not talk about silverlight! (besides, most phone devs want C/C++ development, not to rewrite everything they do for other platforms in .NET). If MS really was interested in "developers, developers, developers" they'd realise that devs want a common platform upon which to code so we can reuse code and don't have to write the same damn thing several times. And definitely not in Silverlight - you were right to ignore it at the PDC, go open standard HTML5 (or even Qt, go on MS, do a Qt port to WP7 like the projects for Android and iPhone). Ignore the vocal minority who demanded to keep their Silverlight skills, let that platform stagnate and slowly die.
Re:Nokia has amazing hardware, but not software (Score:2, Insightful)
Some of us actually quite like Microsoft's dev tools. We're familiar with them and they do the job they do fairly well.
Re:Nokia has amazing hardware, but not software (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not that at all, it's just obvious. 1 minute after the story was posted. At least this time they didn't make it quite so obvious. Last time I saw it they had several large paragraphs of pro-MS sentiment in the first post - again posted 1 minute after the story was up. The "best possible tools" line is a complete give-away though, seriously who outside of a marketing department would even say that? I certainly don't think that any programming tools available today are the best possible.
Re:MS 1, Nokia 0 (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think the iPhone revolutionized the space by offering email and web browsing, it just means you have missed the entire picture. What Apple brought to the table is *much* more than a featureset. It brought an experience. It's the glue between the features that got them ahead of the competition - even if the features were way ahead of the competition as well.
Re:Clearly Microsoft can do no right (Score:2, Insightful)
Dear Microsoft: if you're going to shill your dev products on /., maybe you want to not be so obvious about it.
I'm a C freak, my first word was "ifndef" and my first book was Kernighan & Ritchie, and about the last thing I would ever say about any Microsoft dialect of the language is that it plays well with others. From incompatible bullshit like CreateFileMapping to linguistic trash like explicitly allowing casted lvalues to the endless parade of pointless clutter macros, MS was probably singlehandledly responsible for creating the perception that C and C++ are somehow hard to use or esoteric. Maybe that's changed and maybe it hasn't, but for Microsoft to claim that standard C runs better on Windows than on NeXT/Mac OS is insane.
Apple uses pretty well bog-standard C in both ANSI and C99 dialects. Their compiler is good old GCC, which they tirelessly support. I don't know what these quick and shoddy decisions you're referring to are. Granted they do change the Objective-C language standard more often than most geeks change their underwear, but at least it's well-documented and submitted to standards bodies for approval. I don't like that they abandoned both Cocoa Bindings and the garbage collector on iOS; the latter was for performance reasons and I don't for the life of me know why they did the former. But at least all this is well-documented, and none of it's going to affect your C/C++ code one bit.
Maybe I'm not the "standard" C guy. I'll take Automake and Eclipse over Visual Studio any day of the week. But I've survived Microsoft crapware from Win32 to MFC to GDI and I have to tell you I am not eager to repeat the experience.
[PS. I'm going to take it as prophetic that the Captcha for posting this comment was "blunders."]
Re:Nokia has amazing hardware, but not software (Score:5, Insightful)
Because no one wants a web controlled by MS technology. You laugh now because competition exists with Flash, etc. But what happens when MS starts throwing around billions of dollars for exclusivity on major sites? MLB comes to mind.
It's not about technology. It's about a company that thinks in terms of total control, not competition.
Re:Nokia has amazing hardware, but not software (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I realise that this is either astroturfing or a troll, but responding to it still makes sense. This post essentially represents both Nokia's and Microsoft's best hopes for success from this partnership, and it is pretty clear that it is a very slim hope.
The major problem with the partnership is that Nokia doesn't have a Windows Phone to sell today. The best that they can do is sell people on the idea of a cool new Windows Phone that *may* be available before Christmas (not likely). Current Windows phones are getting slaughtered by everyone right now, and this announcement is only going to make things worse over the short run.
Think about it. Microsoft's current Windows Phone partners have just found out that Microsoft is willing to pay Nokia over $1 billion U.S. to compete with them. If Windows Phone sales have been poor to this point imagine what they are going to be like over the next year as all of the current Windows phone manufacturers begin their marketing campaign against Windows. Microsoft has just pushed everyone that isn't Nokia into the Android camp. Unless, of course, Microsoft is willing to make similar deals with other handset manufacturers (even less likely).
Not to mention the obvious fact that Apple and Google are both going to widen their developer lead over Microsoft while Nokia gets up to speed. Android and iPhone have tons of developers. Windows phone has almost none in comparison. A year from now the situation is going to be even worse. That means that when Nokia finally does launch its phone it will primarily launch with software Microsoft and Nokia have paid to develop internally, with a few 1.0 ports of popular software titles that Microsoft and Nokia have bribed independents to offer. Even if the hardware is sheer genius Nokia's phone is not going to be competitive on the software side.
Plus, all this assumes that Nokia's first Windows phone won't suck. I think that's a long shot. Microsoft has a long history of sucky phones, and Nokia has no history of dealing with Microsoft's idiosyncrasies. Those consumers brave enough to buy a Nokia-Microsoft phone are going to be beta testers, and if the phone is not flawless the blogosphere is going to crucify it. Not that it really matters. When it comes to phones Microsoft's brand is probably already toxic. The current WinPhones reviewed very well. That did *not* translate into sales. There are simply too many people that wouldn't buy a Windows phone if Microsoft paid them. The early adopters already have a smart phone, and they are happy with it. Heck, they probably have even invested a considerable amount of time and money in the software for their smart phone. Luring these people (and those people that invariably follow their lead) to a new platform is going to be very hard, especially considering Microsoft's history in the mobile sector.
Both Microsoft and Nokia needed to do something to remain relevant. From that perspective this deal makes sense. After all, they could hit the ball out of the park and become an actual contender. Their phone is going to need to be something special, however, or it is just going to be the smart phone without useful applications.
Re:MS 1, Nokia 0 (Score:2, Insightful)
Right. The android marketplace is ridiculously full with all sorts of "me too" phones. I don't see why we need yet another lazy Android vendor who will put in basic UI tweaks, crapware, etc and delay updates.
I'm looking forward to competition from WP7. Competition will help the tech industry deliver better phones, especially since WP will be a lot more controlled by MS than Android is by Google. MS will be pushing out updates, not Nokia. I hope the Android vendors start upping their game. The status quo of months late updates and phones abandoned to 1.6 is unacceptable.
As an owner of a Vibrant, which is a nice phone but suffers badly from uninstallable crapware and slow updates, I'm looking forward to more pressure on Android vendors to get off their asses and do more than a half-assed job.
Re:Nokia has amazing hardware, but not software (Score:4, Insightful)
No shit, 1 minute after the story is posted no less. Saw something similar happen around the end of last year too, but it probably happens more often than that and I just have missed it.
If it wasn't for the "best possible tools" crack then it wouldn't have been quite so obvious, but the rest of it is just another "part of a campaign by Microsoft to keep Nokia from choosing Google's Android operating system" as the summary says. Interesting that they'd rather see people buy iPhones than Android. And that they think that they can change our opinions just from some noob saying how great MS is. Slashdot does have a lot of groupthink, but it doesn't quite work like that.
See http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/03/08/1424243/Why-Do-Videogames-Struggle-With-Sex [slashdot.org]
See his/her first comment and the time and the time of posting the article. I guess you're just paranoid.