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Outgoing Nokia Exec's Take on Android

Nah, he makes a good point, its just not from the perspective of the phone users.

If all phone makers go the android route, the handsets become commodities and price pressures become the main focus of development. Phones get cheap, but manufacturer margins are badly hurt.... but they get to ride a wave of growth in the short term.

Pee your pants in winter, its warm for a bit, but gets really cold after a while.
 
rfound said:
Nah, he makes a good point, its just not from the perspective of the phone users.

If all phone makers go the android route, the handsets become commodities and price pressures become the main focus of development. Phones get cheap, but manufacturer margins are badly hurt.... but they get to ride a wave of growth in the short term.

Pee your pants in winter, its warm for a bit, but gets really cold after a while.
Click to expand...

I understand your points and appreciate your take on things. I submit that the demands of the marketplace (witness the incredible growth of Android-based devices) will force Nokia into signing on to Android - shrinking margins notwithstanding. Maybe not tomorrow, but they can ignore the great unwashed for only so long.

We'll see how responsive they prove to be in the coming months/years. They certainly haven't been agile since the iPhone established smartphones as the de facto personal communication tool years ago.

P.S. I owned Nokia phones exclusively for 15 years. It likely would've been 16 had they offered a competitive Android-based unit.
 
Jack45 said:
I understand your points and appreciate your take on things. I submit that the demands of the marketplace (witness the incredible growth of Android-based devices) will force Nokia into signing on to Android - shrinking margins notwithstanding. Maybe not tomorrow, but they can ignore the great unwashed for only so long.
Click to expand...

Maybe so... but this is the MAC vs WinPC debate. Both models work:

You're eventually going to have the OS that anyone can use (Windows/Android) on their hardware... and the hardware becomes commoditized (Dell, HP, Compaq, and more/HTC, Samsung, Moto, and more), leading to high Volume, but extremely thin margins.

And you Also get the All-in-one manufacturers, that do the OS and the hardware (MacOS/Blackberry-Apple-Nokia-[HP/palm?]), at higher prices and higher profit margins, but much lower volumes.

The tricky part is that A couple of the "All-in-one" Manufacturers in the mobile space are already in the high-volume mode.... meaning they are likely to lose marketshare, and it will be up to them to decide if they are going to hold on to marketshare and get in the commodity game, or lose marketshare but hold their profit margins.

There is no easy answer.
 
If you agree with the former CEO of Nokia, then you believe that the Samsung Captivate is no different than any other Android phone. Just like every PC can be customized, so can every phone, hardware wise. When Samsung stuck their neck out and decided to make the best damn screen you can get on any phone available today, they made the phone different from other Android phones. But, there are some people that don't like the Samsung Captivate, or other Galaxy S Android phones because they want a smaller phone, or a hardware keyboard on a phone that is not a Sprint phone, etc. The Android phones are different for a reason, and those differences will make different Android phones favorites for different people.

I am also a former Nokia exclusive user since 1999, but I went with the Captivate because of the screen and the speed of the phone. Android 2.2 will be the cherry on top.
 
mnemonicj said:
If you agree with the former CEO of Nokia, then you believe that the Samsung Captivate is no different than any other Android phone. Just like every PC can be customized, so can every phone, hardware wise.
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Oh, I don't mean to say that's where it is now... just that's where its headed.

There will always be differences between the manufacturers, but for the Average Joe consumer, as the technology matures, the differences will be less substantial.

I don't mean to imply that I agree with the nokia guy, or that I think android is a dead end, I just mean that its not very attractive in some ways to businesses, as it takes away some of the ability to differentiate from your competition.

This Open platform is great for consumers, but i do believe the nokia guy has a point, in that the Manufacturers who do both sides of the equation have the opportunity to make higher margins, we've all see this with Apple Computers.
 
The Nokia exec isn't considering things from the POV of end users and developers.

Yes, Nokia can go it alone with their own OS. Like Palm did. But where are they going to get the apps?

Developers have only a certain amount of time, effort, money and brainpower to spend on learning phone OSes. You can learn one OS deeply, or two but not as well. If it is two, it is most logically Android and iPhone. If a developer plans to learn 3 or 4 completely different API's (and also development tools, languages, etc) then don't expect to have mastery of any. Why would any developer focus exclusively on Nokia's OS? Or even as a 2nd OS to either iPhone or Android?

Conclusion: Nokia won't have an army of developers building apps. And those developers they have won't be top notch on the platform.

What does this mean to you as an end user?

End users don't know it, but they really should consider the factors that concern developers. Those are the factors that determine how many apps you'll have 15 months from now.

At least Nokia is not following Apple by having a "war on developers".
 
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