Excellent analysis: Nokia has effectively announced that they have no focus and plan to spend three quarters losing money in the hops that in 2012 or 2013 WP7 is going to be a big hit for them.<p>It's a shame Elop doesn't take a page out of Jobs' book instead of Ballmer's. Rather than announce a strategic blah blah direction blah blah partnership blah blah, he could have called a press conference, walked on stage, and showed them a Nokia running WP7, announced a date you could buy them, and invited the heads of the world's biggest carriers on stage to announce cut-rate deals and plans for them.<p>p.s. I meant to write "hope," and not "hops," however considering what we make out of hops and the kind of decisions we make after drinking too much of it, I'm leaving it uncorrected.
Ok, I have a lot of respect for esr, but all this talk of "porting" makes me think that no one knows how any of this works. "Porting" Android or WP7 to a new phone consists of: write drivers, write userland apps that give your users the experience you want, and possibly modify your existing bootloader code. They have documentation on their hardware, they have existing BSPs to reference, etc. This is <i>not</i> a hard problem. Getting this up and running with basic functionality would <i>absolutely</i> take no more than a month. Period.
Smart devices is Symbian, Meego, WP7.<p>Mobile Phones is S40 (not Symbian). This is the ancient Nokia platform, which is the only part of Nokia that is currently competitive in its price bracket.<p>The intention is to kill off Symbian as quickly and painlessly as possible. Good riddance. It was not a realistic smartphone contender to begin with. Finally Nokia stops throwing good money after bad. Only it may be too late.<p>One of Nokia's systemic problems is its uneven software culture. Nokia's diffrentiator was hardware. When competitors surpassed Nokia in software it was fighting a losing battle. From this point of view the move makes much sense. Remove the software that don't perform well: Symbian and Ovi service "platform", developer tools. Keep and streamline the parts that have a chance of success: S40, MeeGo.<p>The transition will be painful and success is far from certain, but the obvious alternatives would be even worse.
Splits nokia in two? What a load of crap! Nokia is currently split into four, or five, or ten, or worse. When you consider the platforms, the hardware streams, ovi, qt -- it's a total mess of competing agendas.<p>I've been in the belly of the beast, and aside from having a very nice sauna, it's really ugly in there. There's total paralysis, as evidenced by the lack of competitive produts. OPK was fond of saying how nokia needed to reinvent itself, but he lacked the willpower to make any meaningful changes.<p>When I was there we used to say "it's hard to fire a Finn." Now some heads are finally rolling. Shaking it up like this is their only chance.
"Porting?" As I've noted already, this move sounds like he's trying to follow a script for corporate meltdown drawn from Smalltalk history:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2206788" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2206788</a><p>Congrats. "Porting" enters into the plan!<p>If the CEO follows that script, he will have damaged employee relationships to the point that Nokia won't be able to execute some of the difficult goals he's set going forwards.<p>Seriously, he needs to look up some old ObjectShare alums to get some historical perspective on what he's trying to do and how it can go seriously wrong.
Opinion from Robert Scoble:<p><a href="http://scobleizer.com/2011/02/11/dear-nokia-fans-youre-nuts/" rel="nofollow">http://scobleizer.com/2011/02/11/dear-nokia-fans-youre-nuts/</a>