Wee hours Tuesday in Britain, it’s announced that Microsoft is buying “virtually all of Nokia’s devices and services”.
So - Microsoft’s ballyhoo’d restructuring as a “devices and services” company is now showing the (trap)door under the Microsoft Phone Divison.
The writing was on the wall for this one when Nokia inexplicably hitched their wagon to Windows Mobile. I’m surprised it took this long.
Nokia at the moment is a minor player in the world’s smartphone market. It is rather unimportant whether Microsoft buys Nokia or not. The Greater China area contains at least three to five companies that can and do make better - in terms of performance against cost - phones though they are still regarded as “emerging” at best in many European and North American markets. Just like iPhone and BlackBerry, Nokia phones were destined to remain niche.
I have had Nokia phones off and on for the past 15 years. They make decent phones from a hardware aspect. I currently have a Lumia 900 and while I have little issue with the hardware, the phone’s OS sucks. Now that Nokia will be a shill for MS they have a dismal future ahead of them.
(Alan, thanks for bringing this one back…)
I’d meant to discuss Nokia with Ken and how it probably was relegated to the non-Asian markets simply because China, Taiwan, SK and Japan probably have those areas locked up or so inundated with device-makers that ‘one more’ probably will never be noticed.
I still don’t have any sense for the Good or Bad of this deal. Nokia may have been facing a long struggle uphill by themselves but I’m not sure that Microsoft’s “Device Team” is going to change this future. It does offer a buy-out ‘parachute’ for Nokia, I think. I’m not sure which company is the bigger albatross around the other’s neck.
Ken, is there any way that the Lumias were going to make a dent in your part of the world?
I’m trying to think if a Good WinPhone OS would seem more appealing to me - so far, no, but I simply don’t use the smartphone that way. I am trying to imagine the day that it will be My CPU-Of-Choice, where I’ll set it on the desk and it will bring up the day’s activities, needs and tomorrow’s. All I can think of is Tom Cruise with his fancy gloves, shifting maps and criminal locations around… and James Bond, sending TXTs because everyone knows he saves the world with his.
[QUOTE=ChristineBCW;2700341]…
I’d meant to discuss Nokia with Ken and how it probably was relegated to the non-Asian markets simply because China, Taiwan, SK and Japan probably have those areas locked up or so inundated with device-makers that ‘one more’ probably will never be noticed.
…
Ken, is there any way that the Lumias were going to make a dent in your part of the world?
…[/QUOTE]
Japan still has many great electronics manufacturers able to design and produce classy and powerful smartphones. Sony is just one of those, and that is why Samsung and Apple have relatively small, if not negligible, marketshare in Japan.
Taiwan has HTC and more and those vendors offer far lower prices than Samsung and LG.
China was once a large cheap source for Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea to produce motherboards, laptops, mobile phones, etc. But while other East Asian nations still depend on the mainland China for cheaper land and labour, Chinese hardware and software companies founded and managed by Chinese born in Beijing and Shanghai are leading their domestic market which is vast and growing fast. One of them is Tencent, the software company of the world’s largest and most influential mobile messenger. It’s difficult for any Chinese smartphone manufacturer to enter South Korean market, but it’s also difficult for any South Korean smartphone manufacturer to compete against a successful Chinese vendor in their domestic market. Since Samsung makes most of their profits out of expensive models like Galaxy S4 and Note 2, most Chinese consumers will buy from much cheaper devices from domestic vendors.
South Korea has Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, and Pantech of Hyundai and SK Telecom. Though they are outsourcing to China, South Korea still has a lot of factories and workers to make phones.
The United States market is owned by Apple and no other company can threaten Apple’s ecosystem in the foreseeable future because more than half of the US voters PAID to own Apple proprietary contents - music, ebooks, applications.
Nokia never was good at design and marketing to enter any of the East Asian markets.
I’m not sure why Google really bought Motorola. The patents might have been helpful, but those alone couldn’t have justified the cost and distraction. I thought Google could try to make better phones out of Motorola. Motorola’s Atrix was my first Android phone. Google failed, and why would Microsoft succeed with Nokia? HP bought Compaq many years ago. I had at least one of HP’s Compaq laptops, a very nice tough one with good keyboard and speakers. It would have made much better results if HP’s shareholders just gave Compaq US$100 billion in cash so that the latter could buy HP later. There are books on why M&A on a very large scale often results in disaster for everyone involved.
During the past few years, I read thousands of articles on Nokia and BlackBerry on hundreds of dedicated smartphone websites and others targeting investors and industries written by reporters and analysts partly because that was one of my jobs. Two things were common in all of them: 1. They were concerned and worried. 2. But not about products and productivity.
Ken, on a side-note. you wrote “half the US voters…” which isn’t a very large number. Most elections have very small numbers of the population actually voting.
Thanks for all of this.
[QUOTE=ChristineBCW;2700552]Ken, on a side-note. you wrote “half the US voters…” which isn’t a very large number. Most elections have very small numbers of the population actually voting.
Thanks for all of this.[/QUOTE]
I thought most people vote at least once in a life. I did once. Maybe it was the 1997 presidential election, not thoroughly sure, but I must have chosen DJ if I did.
