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Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo DiasporaBergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo DiasporaPosted Jul 9, 2012 20:06 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)In reply to: Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora by mjg59 Parent article: Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora
No it's perfectly irrational, because Nokia is not a platform vendor it's a phone vendor. A Nokia Meego phone sale is not stealing Lumia sales it's stealing Samsung/Apple/HTC/LG/Motorola sales. Nokia hardware is not here to sell software platforms it's an end in itself. Every Nokia competitor understands this and will use any software platform that will help it sell its hardware, platform purity be damned. None is single-platform (except for Apple, but then Apple controls its software well enough to make sure it will fit its future hardware products).
That's why Nokia is on a death march today: Elop decided it was more important to sell the products of its partner than to sell its own.
Windows Phone is not developed at Nokia but at Microsoft. No amount of Meego/Symbian killing was going to make Windows phone improve faster. OTOH the direct result of this killing was Nokia's inability to deliver differentiated phones (a must for a mass-market vendor, not for a niche player like Apple that focuses on the high-revenue segment). There is little difference between Lumia models because they are all declinations of the same Windows reference platform, that is too immature to permit much hardware differentiation (or even to keep compatibility with older hardware platforms, see how the current Lumia line has been obsoleted by Windows platform changes).
On a PC platform it does not matter much what the hardware is because of wide compatibility. In the embedded world if software and hardware do not fit you have nothing to sell.
The Series 60/Meego was not massively hipped but it *was* a massively profitable. The Lumias have been massively hyped (with record marketing expenditures and astroturphing) and try to emulate another massively hyped product line (Apple's) but they're not bringing any revenue. Now if you want to measure success in app store submissions Lumia is a stunning success. I'll take real users and real money any time.
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Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 9, 2012 20:18 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
(to give an idea of the massive idiocy at play at Nokia in Elop years: they had to close factories and dump whole supplier chains because Microsoft had no drivers for the chip families Nokia was used to work with; they had to drop phone features because the hardware Microsoft had drivers for was less capable than their usual hardware; they broke with their main carrier partner in China because it had been sold on Meego and saw no future on a Microsoft platform – and all this to see global windows phone market share shrink even lower because carriers and users do not want it)
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 9, 2012 21:50 UTC (Mon) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
I'm not sure how you're drawing a line between the change from OMAP to Qualcomm, and factories closing, but that's so far from correct I'm not really sure where to start.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 10, 2012 4:32 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
IIRC it was not just a change from OMAP to Qualcomm, they had to drop chips at every level
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 10, 2012 7:38 UTC (Tue) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
Still makes no difference. If Nokia factories could only handle one variety of display controller / power regulator / USB controller / etc, they would've been out of business long ago.
This is a company who had probably the single most diverse product portfolio in the entire industry, stretching to at least hundreds of products. Throw in the prototypes and you're up to thousands. And this is going from the very very cheapest 1110, right up to the N9 and other smartphones.
What you're saying makes absolutely no sense, sorry.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 10, 2012 8:30 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
It's one thing to handle different parts from the same supplier it's another to switch suppliers completely. Completely messes up supply lines, part stocks, procurement handling, logistics, tooling, etc. We're talking about hardware here, it's not a relink away.
IIRC (and please correct if you have any proof to the contrary) it went like this:
1. New CEO decides to partner with Microsoft. Winphone requirements demand massive hardware reorientation
2. Nokia can't produce winphones at once. To held self-imposed deadlines Lumias needs to be subcontracted to one of the usual taiwanese winphone producers. It wraps an N9-derived shell around something very close to the Microsoft reference design
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Lumia_800
What madness is that? You don't externalize your core business ever. That's a basic rule. And if Lumia production was not Nokia's core business at this point why did it kill everything else?
3. Nokia publicly disparages its old product lines, tries to strong-arm all its parters (carriers, resellers) to accept winphones instead of what was previously agreed. Refuses to sell other lines if the partner doesn't push Lumias
4. Everyone switches to Android, Symbian tanks, Nokia does not want to sell Meego
5. Consumers recognize the taiwanese winphones they didn't want last year under the new Nokia cover and don't buy them
6. Nokia closes factories
I don't know if between 2. and 6. Nokia made any serious effort to re-internalise production, and even if they did (and taking into account that Compal almost certainly insisted on some volume commitments before producing) Lumia sales are so underwhelming they can't justify retooling most existing factories nor retraining the workforce.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 10, 2012 9:56 UTC (Tue) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
> 1. New CEO decides to partner with Microsoft. Winphone requirements demand massive hardware reorientation
It's not a massive hardware reorientation. Remember that Nokia had one of the most diverse product lines in the world, and I can assure you that they weren't reliant on a single supplier.
Even when they were, yes that does take time to ramp up in terms of sourcing and logistics, but it has absolutely nothing to do with shutting down factories. Zip, zero. The plant tools don't care whether the chip came from TI or OMAP or Sharp or Toshiba or Samsung.
Yes, it does take time, but Nokia - for all its strategic faults recently - has long been praised as one of the best handlers of its supply chain and logistics in the world.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 10, 2012 10:59 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
> The plant tools don't care whether the chip came from TI or OMAP or
> Sharp or Toshiba or Samsung.
Really? Are not the test processes vendor-specific?
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 10, 2012 11:01 UTC (Tue) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
Part-specific, but a lot more of it's done in software than you'd think.
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