Just like with your last article, check the date. In this case, that was about the same time of the WP8 launch. Saying WP8 is going to be a failure because they liquidated some assets before WP8 devices were in customers' hands...it doesn't make sense. Since that time, their stock value has steadily climbed; it's now nearly twice what it was at that point in time.
You don't seem to understand the situation Mitlov. WP8 even if it does well will not turn things around for Nokia on it's own at this stage. They're in a much deeper hole than they're letting on. When a company like Nokia starts laying off most of it's staff and then sells it's HQ building something is very wrong. This is more than just liquidating some assets. This is a bid to survive. On January 10th Morgan Stanley seemingly downgraded Microsoft shares from overweight (buy recommendation) to Equal weight (hold recommendation) in response to the poor performance of Windows 8. So far as I understand his argument, holyheadjch would have us believe WP8's future depends on the performance of Windows 8 in sales. The logic being WP8 is a companion to Windows 8 providing some sort of application compatibility across platforms. Well Surface isn't selling well. Windows 8 PCs are also not selling well. So Nokia who are fighting for survival are selling a phone that is a companion to a struggling tablet/desktop platform. Microsoft can't even rely on large corporate deployments to boost interest and adoption. Businesses are still wrestling with Windows 7. In fact my own employer is still using XP with no published upgrade plans. Most businesses skip a version of Windows in their upgrade cycle or upgrade a version behind the latest version. It's looking increasingly like Windows 8 will be skipped and those still using Windows will opt for Windows 9. Which is another 2 - 3 years down the road at the earliest. So what's going wrong for Microsoft other than bad timing? Well how about a total lack of understanding of the market? http://www.examiner.com/article/mic...tall-analysts-say-the-public-isn-t-interested
Hmm, I think there are issues here beyond Microsoft's current mobile/tablet/gadget marketing push and uncertainty about the general desktop/PC platform evolution. 1) I simply don't believe in the current economic climate (which could be with us for a damm long time)that folk are going to endlessly waste money and time constantly upgrading and experimenting with endless new gadgets and OS versions - regardless of iPhone/Android/MS/embedded Linux/otherwise. That said there may well be niche market areas to significantly capitalise on. 2)Internet security is big enough a problem on conventional IT, but is much more of a headache in the mobile world - and MS do not have a good reputation with regard to security - until they seriously address this, i just cannot see them getting beyond marketing contender in the mobile/tablet arena - especially wrt business/corporate clients. 3) There are other technology factors that may complicate the success of all players in the tablet/mobile arena - functional programming (which makes for much simpler development) and parallel processing (which can, but is not guaranteed) to significantly improve performance - and hence enhance battery life. In summary, the area is to diverse, to state with any certainty "what will happen" - and there has been little or no discussion of the Cloud integration factor.
All good points embra. Another good point that you missed though is, there is a lot of turmoil going on inside Microsoft right now. Which hasn't done their Windows 8 campaign any favours given the guy in charge of Windows 8 left Microsoft with no warning just after it's launch. When internal disputes spill out into the public domain they can really damage a companies credibility. And Microsoft's credibility is already suffering. These internal power struggles take creative energy and focus away from producing top quality products. They force bad compromises which ultimately damage the brand as a whole. The economic climate is exactly why Microsoft need to make massive gains in WP8 market share this year. The longer it takes Microsoft to establish their Windows Phone concept, the more invested their potential customers become in other platforms. Schools and businesses are now handing out iPads to students and employees. I think your dead right in saying Microsoft need to be seen to be taking security seriously. While Microsoft has taken steps like adding free anti-malware applications to Windows. These applications don't do anything their commercial alternatives weren't already doing. And that sort of security measure is reckoned to only reliably stop something like 20% of malware threats. It's a sticking plaster approach that isn't working. Secure Boot is something that should have been welcomed. However Microsoft's execution of it's deployment has led to accusations that it's nothing more than a tool to protect their market share. And while secure boot might protect against a small subset of infections. It does nothing to protect against the much larger body of threats faced by users. So in effect it's another sticking plaster that doesn't really live upto the hype. Not to mention it's also been something of a PR disaster for Microsoft.
Then you don't understand my argument. Stated simply: You cant tell if an OS is a success or not within 3 months of its launch. Win8 phone is entering an increasingly crowded market, which makes it near impossible for them to suddenly take over the market, but exactly how it is performing will not be clear for at least a few more weeks - until those Q4 figures come out, you're just trash talking Microsoft, which is all you seem to do on these threads. As for Nokia - they're predicting that Q4 exceeded their original expectations thanks to strong sales of the Lumia.
Wolfie, A bit more on some of these points and a question at the end:- 1) I wasn't aware of the internal MS disruptions (I don't follow this type of stuff much) - but I take your point. However, as almost everywhere that I go to work has various permutations of XP fat/thin, Citrix Metaframe, Win 7, Win2k8 server, Linux, Mac-OSX; and then ssh to Solaris/Aix/Linux, the whole MS aspect is basically just a complication for me (I probably need Word but thats about it.) All this is a headache - and I haven't even gotten onto my work development tooling and personal mobile dev tooling i.e. to me MS is simply a complicated (but currently necessary) irrelevance. 2) My hunch/thinking (and its not much more than that right now) is that the ease and sophistication of development for tablet/mobile will pull developer mindset. Right now, Android are well out in front with their Java dev over Apple's Objective-C (but it does link with C++ a lot more reliably than Java with C++) - which sucks - big-time. Why link to C++? - performance - to save battery life. All of this gets pretty complicated once C++11 ( a big improvement over previous specs), Parallel programming dev tooling (most noticeably from NVIDIA Cuda) and Functional Programming (Scala is the one that really takes my eye) comes into the pie. And this is where MS may have an angle inwards - .Net Enterprise Dev is a whole lot more contained and simpler than Java Enterprise Dev. Java is somehow becoming feasible for Parallel programming (mostly through functional languages - which can result in faster sequential and Parallel code) - but not with the same pace as MS are developing and exploiting their AMP (C extensions) and AMP++(C++ extensions). MS have always been more compact in their Development Tooling than the alternatives, and its in this respect that they start to gain traction - if they can get the mass of .Net developers to a) migrate to Windows8 tablet/mobile development - and make better exploitation of Parallel processing than the major opposition (Java/Android and Objective-C/ios). in my mind the above is still a bit too new to really sense decisive directions. 3) My question - which has nothing to do with any of the above. One of my endeavours (there are others) involves working with fairly heavy-weight technology applications (mostly from IBM and Oracle) for which I need to build my own dev environments and realistically this requires virtualisation on laptops via VMWare (though Im open to alternatives). For windows XP/7 this is ok(just), but for Linux its more of a headache. So any tips for which Linux distros will work best on what hardware? The corporate worlds of IBM and Oracle seem to be converging on Ubuntu and RHEL, so these would probably be my preferred choice (but I need to look into this a bit more). I found Toshiba about the best in times gone by but the support sucked. Dell provided basic support - as long as you dont install Linux, but the keyboard drivers seem to lock up. Also, open source tooling seems to work well on Linux, but commercial software with less success.
But you can write one off before it's even on the market? Interesting logic there. My opinion is based on the publish analysis and information made available. Windows Phone 8 just isn't gaining the traction it needs. Windows 8 sales be it on Surface or Windows 8 PCs is weak. Consumers aren't buying it. Businesses won't buy it because they're still upgrading to Windows 7. So where are all the sales going to come from that's going to make this a success? Nokia Lumia sales figures for Q4 2012 are out. They sold 4.4 million Lumia devices. Which their budget phones outsold by a margin of 2 to 1. All I can say is their expectations must have been very low. Perhaps they've learned something from their WP7 experience. It's not especially hard to exceed expectations when you set the bar so low. A company like Nokia shouldn't be sweating over selling a million units. In contrast Samsung were selling close to 500 phones every minute in Q4 2012 according to some reports. Which by my own very basic calculations is 22,320,000 for December alone. http://androidheadlines.com/2013/01...-billion-profit-on-sales-of-53-6-billion.html
What OS have I written off? Ubuntu Phone - it's the concept not the execution I doubt in that case. It's not Windows 8 that's not selling - it is PCs in general. No OS is going to reverse that trend. Have Microsoft actually released Surface sales figures yet? But it's not surprising when it is expensive as it is - that's not a criticism of the software, but of the cost of the thing itself. It's basically competing in a class of its own because of that high price point. There are a bunch of Win8 tablet/hybrid things arriving in the market at the moment with more sensible price points, so it will be instructive to see the Q1 2013 tablet sales figures to see if any of those offerings are making headway in the market place. You're comparing chalk and cheese. 4.4 million is a very solid start and Nokia's budget phones have always been crazy popular. A few years ago they were outselling everyone and I bet there were people like you saying that the iPhone was never going to work because Nokia's cheap handsets were outselling it by 10 to 1. Let's see what happens when the full Q4 results are released.
Indeed. The inertia Microsoft and Intel have built up is what keeps this going. The fact that some businesses can't seem to do without Microsoft is what annoys me so much about the way they operate and the quality of their products. Microsoft for the past few decades have basically been in a position where it hasn't had to compete with quality products that integrate well with other systems on the market. They've been able to dictate terms and are now losing that control. I'm not a fan of Java either. It's turning into another security quagmire which Google are going to have to adress if they're going to keep using it as a basis for Android. And if Mono was anything to go by then .Net is massively bloated. But that's relative to the number of applications you have that are actually using that frame work. Personally I feel Canonical's Ubuntu Phones solves many of these problems. It gives you the same OS on your phone as it does on your desktop. It supports both HTML5 apps and native apps. Which completely cuts out the need for Java. And cloud integration is a key priority for Canonical. So their should be excellent support on that front. The problem Microsoft have with getting .Net developers to migrate to Windows 8 is their total PR fumble when they basically said "all your .Net, C, C++ skills are now redundant". And even if Microsoft didn't mean for their message around HTML5 Metro apps to be taken that way. That is how it was interpreted. In the push to get Windows 8 adopted they've upset more than bloggers who don't like the GUI being changed. Linux has it's own kernel based VM and their are plenty of free alternatives. I use Oracle Virtual Box. It's very simple to use. Supports all versions of Windows and a wide assortment of Linux distributions directly as well as having generic Linux support. In terms of hardware I've always built my own or bought from Dell. Dell will install Linux if you insist on it. Although I don't know how much of a fuss you need to make. But Dell like HP and a few other OEMs have a whole team devoted to Linux development. They are heavily invested in Linux on the server side. So I find it surprising they make it so hard to get support. Could be why they've gone from 2nd biggest OEM to 3rd or 4th. Dells XPS line generally speaking has always had good compatibility with Linux. But that was when they were based on the Dimension line. I think they have been phased out now. Your best bet is to have a look and see what models Dell are selling in Asia. Ubuntu seems to be Dell's distro of choice for Desktop Linux there. RHEL is basically the de-facto standard for commercial enterprise based Linux. Their focus is on the server side. Where Canonical are focusing more on the desktop and cloud services. Microsoft even had to capitulate to their users demands and support Linux on their Azure cloud platform. And in particular Ubuntu. My only real issue with RHEL is it uses the RPM package management system. Years ago when I was using SuSE I got stuck in RPM hell. Which was basically a never ending nightmare of unresolved dependencies. Which left a lasting bitter taste. The Debian packages Ubuntu uses seem to be more reliable. Although I'm not entirely sure what the differences are. And of course Debian it's self is often said to be worth while looking at if you want stability over cutting edge. Personally I think Ubuntu will likely give you better compatibility if you're going for a laptop or desktop install. Otherwise go for RHEL. It is the industry standard of server side Linux. Canonical also have a database of compatible hardware.
So even though you have touted the advantages of having contiguous applications support across phone, tablet and desktop, you doubt people would be much happier with one device instead of 3 or 4? Well I hate to break it to you. But most OEMs only pre-load Windows on consumer PCs and laptops. So if PCs aren't selling in general. Windows isn't selling. What is selling though are tablets. Most of which don't run Windows. Indeed it will. What do you call sensible in terms of price? No people like me didn't say the iPhone would "never" work. People like you, Microsoft die-hards like Steve Ballmer said it would never work. $500 was too expensive for a phone. Steve Ballmer was wrong and Microsoft are now paying the price for that gamble. Now if Nokia's own platforms have always been "crazy popular". Why then push a totally unproven platform alienating your core user base in the process not to mention your own engineers? That just seems like corporate suicide. Windows Phone doesn't offer anything Nokia didn't already have on their high end smart phones. In fact, they had to re-engineer features they already had working on their own platforms to make them work with Windows Phone. That's just insane.
i'm now confused on whether i should hold out for an ubuntu phone, since i haven't exactly been in a hurry to get a smartphone but meant to buy a better cameraphone. the htc titan 2 seemed to be the one but apart from it's great 16mb camera it doesnt even feature in CNETs best mobiles of 2012, while nokia's lumia 910 does
The Titan II, despite its respectable camera, had all the shortcomings of a WP7 phone: low-resolution screen and single-core processor (required by the OS). WP8 phones have neither hold-up, and the flagships from HTC, Nokia, and Samsung all have great high-res screens and dual-core processors. The Lumia 920 is the one to look at if you like great cameras (arguably the best camera on any modern smartphone), and the HTC 8X is the one to get if you like svelte size and weight.
iPhone, iPhone, iPhone! Spex's really don't matter, they do what they say on the tin & everybody else copies. Forget the rest.......etc:...
Sixty million Windows 8 licenses sold since launch. That ten-week figure is identical to Windows 7's. Windows 8 is actually doing just fine. The Surface hardware is tanking because Windows RT is a complete bust, but Windows 8 itself is doing quite well. Slow acceptance by corporations is nothing new. That happens every single generation. That said, the US Department of Defense just signed their biggest Microsoft contract ever converting the vast majority of their machines to Win 8 in the next three years. Windows Phone 8 has corporate-appropriate security features unlike WP7. It's also being sold extensively in China unlike WP7. And it's got high-end hardware for consumers in the US and European markets that WP7 lacked. Those are three areas where WP8 is going to do better than WP7. Pooh-pooh those sales numbers all you want. Shareholders spoke and their share price tripled. Samsung is the biggest phone OEM on the market. EVERYONE is smaller than them--Sony, HTC, Apple. What you're arguing is that we should count a company out because they're significantly smaller than the leading company. Which is kind of like saying we should ignore OSX and Linux because they're smaller than Windows. You can't possibly believe that, can you?
Depends on how much of a hurry you're in. Ubuntu Phone was built using the Samsung Galaxy Nexus as a reference. But I'm guessing the camera is what is more important to you? I think these are likely your best choices. http://www.e2save.com/community/reviews/best-camera-phones-2013/
Minor correction to that article: the Lumia 920 does not have a microSD slot. That's the Lumia 820, Nokia's midrange phone. Despite that, I agree with their conclusion that the Lumia 920 has the best smartphone camera on the market right now, thanks in large part to being the only smartphone with optical image stabilization.
Licenses sold to OEMs don't equate to actual deployments. Microsoft are keeping very quiet about actual activations. Which when Microsoft are keeping quiet only ever means one thing. It's not good. Every OEM in the market has said Windows 8 PC sales are poor. How does that equate to doing well? One more time, licences sold do not equate to deployments. OEMs buy Windows licences in bulk. Please stop falling victim to these very shallow face-saving marketing ploys. Not entirely surprising. The US military has a long standing relationship with Microsoft. Which is an example of the inertia I was talking about earlier. Unfortunately it's not WP7 WP8 has to beat. As I've already pointed out. WP8 isn't doing badly because it's a bad product. It's doing badly because Microsoft missed the boat, because Microsoft is dysfunctional, because Nokia scared away all their traditional die-hard customers. WP8 could be the best platform on the market right now and it wouldn't matter. What exactly is a "corporate appropriate security feature"? One of the reasons Windows became such a massive target for malware in the first place was because security on consumer systems was so slack. The industry thinking at the time was that consumers did not need the same security as corporations. And to a large extent that thinking persists. The truth however is that consumer systems need to be just as secure if not more secure than corporate systems. Simply put consumers don't have a team of knowledgeable IT professionals reviewing security logs and spotting threats before they become a problem. According to this article while security is better on WP8. It doesn't compete with iOS. In particular it can't be used in environments which need to meet high levels of regulation and security. Which was backed up by your own link. Where it was stated Microsoft were "working towards" the US Military's gold desktop standard for Windows 8. Which means it doesn't have it yet. Beyond that I'm having a hard time pinning down any actual detail on WP8's security features. What are they? Secure Boot seems to have been re-branded to SafeBoot. I don't think we need to talk about that any more. The OS and data will be encrypted with Bitlocker. Which is great. But it's really only of use if the physical device is stolen. Removable SD cards however will not be encrypted. There's an unknown issue that creates performance problems. Of course WP7 didn't support removable SD cards at all. So that could be seen as a massive improvement. Apps will be sand boxed. This will have limited value for security. Modern malware can detect and circumvent sand-boxing already. http://www.wpcentral.com/microsoft-beefing-security-windows-phone-8 LOL share prices are subject to reactionary trading. The fact is the advice is currently to hold on buying or selling Microsoft shares based on Windows 8 performance. Nokia were the largest smart phone OEM before the iPhone came along. [ Isn't that what you've been arguing in relation to Canonical and Ubuntu Phone? It's certainly not an argument I would make. Android started life as a small start-up, Android.inc, before Google bought it.
Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. Here's the user interface of Windows Phone 8: Here's the newest Android flagship, the HTC One with Sense 5.0 (skinned Android):
i'm liking the look of the camera on the HTC one M7, its still as big as all the other handsets tho, as if this is now the default for all smartphones, and i liked my folding phone even if it is now falling to bits and buying a new phone is imminent
