Nokia wasn’t in on WP7 at the start. Samsung and HTC were and were dominant, relatively speaking. Nokia came in with the Lumia 800 and later the Lumia 900 and battled with them for the small WP7 marketshare. By the time WP8 was in the market Nokia had the momentum, and now they’ve basically run away with it.
Now you might argue that MS made it impossible to compete by allowing Nokia to sell exclusive apps. You also could argue that Samsung and HTC never really leaned into the WP market, but that would ignore the fact that they sold devices that were WP clones of their flagship Android devices in the ATIV S (Galaxy S III) or new, premium designs in the HTC 8X.
At the time Samsung and HTC were the biggest and baddest OEMs in the market and Nokia schooled them by leveraging the MS-Nokia partnership and putting out kick-ass hardware.
License fees didn’t scare off vendors, they were there. It was Nokia and a small remaining market to capture that scared them off.
Not sure why I should burn any calories responding if you aren’t going to try, but I just can’t help myself.
Nokia just released a top of the line Lumia 1020 with the best camera tech available, and also just trotted out the Lumia 520 for around $100 off contract with features and style that Android doesn’t match. In the last 3 months Nokia has put out 5 different brand new devices (all different, not just carrier clones). Not even Samsung has done that if you exclude tablets.
Ya’ll do know that WP market share is growing pretty steadily, though moreso outside the US? It’s especially strong in LatAm. The U.S. is actually something of a weird outlier in the mobile market in many ways. Nonetheless, WP is growing here, too. This doesn’t mean that Microsoft made a wise move - but they definitely have a pan in mind and I wouldn’t assume it’s a bad one.
Sorry guys. I just don’t see it. Out in the real world there are two contenders for top dog in the mobile device arena, Apple and Android. Anything else is such a distant third that it is virtually a nonentity. One of my clients, a 900 employee company, recently dumped Blackberry, swapping them out for Samsung Android phones. Another client consolidated its IT platform around Apple, providing iPads and iPhones to all 230 of its sales reps.
No one I talk to, and I mean no one, is considering a Windows phone…at all. Yeah, yeah, anecdotes mean nothing, but I simply don’t see how Microsoft comes from where it is with no one taking it seriously, to being a mobile device contender. I think it is just too late for them.
I predict by the end of 2014 Microsoft will be exactly where it is today marketwise with their mobile devices. They don’t offer much that appeals to those who are not already invested, or at least enamored, and those Surface ads did them no favors, let me tell ya.
The Nokia Windows Phone may be a solid device with a solid MS OS, but you know what? In 2013, no one cares, grampa.
That is only true from a certain point of view. IMHO a more accurate portrayal is that WP Market share should be taking 100% of the nokia replacement market and maintain the same market share for nokia, since nokia is all in on windows phone. But instead, they aren’t getting even close to that. The most accurate way to look IMO at it is as a huge loss of market share for Nokia, and by extension a giant failure of Windows phone (Sizing up the mobile handset market in Q2).
Edit to add, its as if Apple changed from selling the Iphone to the, oh I don’t know, Blackberry Q10 - it replaced all the iphones in the Apple store, all the cell phone companies replaced the iphone with it in their lineup and all their advertising says the Blackberry Q10 is the greatest thing in the world. If Apple’s market share was almost cut by a third in a single year, you’d have to say the Blackberry Q10 was a giant failure vs the iphone it replaced.
I’m in the game in Australia and this holds true for us as well but we are now seeing a huge swing around in Windows phones going into corporates (tripled over the last 3 months from 5% to 17%). The ability to work with Lync etc are big selling points.
I think that’s how it normally works. In fact there are merger arbitrage etf’s that try to use this to their advantage. I was just happy to ditch Nookia for a small profit after holding that dog for the past 2 years.
What features does the 520 have that Android phones don’t? Releasing a few products in a short spam of time is not innovating. If they were indeed “on par with or better than”, they wouldn’t be in this trouble now.
Many Android phones at that price level tend to be of the ‘Galaxy Ace’ ilk - underpowered, running an older release of the OS, with no upgrade path. The 520 is not a bad spec - it has a dual core processor, for example.
Google has said it will use Motorola’s patents only for defensive purposes, i.e., companies suing them. They won’t sue other companies with their patents. There were some other companies that said the same thing.
Reading the reviews it looks like the 520 has some pluses and some minuses compared to android devices in the same class.
I think the net result is that the 520 is a solid competitor, but given some of the drawbacks (no youtube, must use IE, multitasking is broken, doesn’t have a unified notification center, can’t create folders, doesn’t have universal search, etc.) you couldn’t really say it stands above the others.
I think Omniscient was overstating the case of the 520 by saying it has features android doesn’t (implying the opposite wasn’t true also), but again, it appears to be a solid phone.
The DEVICE is better than anything the competition has at the same price point. That’s all Nokia has control over and that’s all I asserted. You’ve outlined a bunch of shortcomings of the WP8 OS which I don’t quibble with, but that wasn’t the point.
My statement was:
Note there there’s nothing in there about WP8 or Android.
I’m not sure, I’ve heard they’ve made as much as $800m/in a quarter from Android licenses (which are in the low teens per handset sold for any of the handset makers that have settled with Microsoft on the patent claims.)
Recently they’ve sold 35m WP8 licenses in a year, making about $10 per license sold. When they own Nokia, they’ll make $40 per handset sold because they make profit on the hardware and software, so if sales remain flat revenue goes from $350m to $1.4bn. But according to Microsoft’s projections when you factor in the increased costs that come with actually being fully in the hardware end of it to break even Microsoft will need to sell 50m handsets a year.