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September 18, 2012
Juhana Peltonen kommentoi Nokian irtisanottujen tilannetta TV:ssä
  • Posted By : admin/
  • 1 comments /
  • Under : News , Nokia

Aalto-Yliopiston tutkija ja Gearshift Groupin analyytikko Juhana Peltonen kommentoi Ylen TV-uutisissa 6.9. Nokialta irtisanottujen tilannetta Aalto-yliopiston toteuttaman ohjelmistoyrityskartoituksen perusteella. Uutisleike on nähtävissä täällä (kohdassa 4:20).

Ohjelmistoyrityskartoitus on seurannut Suomen ohjelmistoalan kehitystä vuodesta 1998 lähtien. Kartoitus on viime aikoina saanut paljon julkisuutta tutkittuaan Nokian tilanteen vaikutusta Suomen ohjelmistoalaan.

Kesän 2012 tutkimuksen perusteella pienet ja keskisuuret ohjelmistoyritykset ovat palkanneet 650-850 Nokian tilanteen vuoksi vapautunutta osaajaa samalla, kun Suomen suuret ja perinteikkäät ohjelmistoyritykset ovat pääasiassa vähentäneet henkilöstöään.

Lisätietoja tutkimuksesta löytyy osoitteesta softwareindustrysurvey.org.

 


September 14, 2012
Why Windows Phone will succeed?
  • Posted By : admin/
  • 2 comments /
  • Under : Android , Apple , Blog , iPhone , iPod , Microsoft , Mobile phones , Nokia , Opinion , trends

Posted by Jussi Autere: A year ago I wrote on this blog (http://www.gearshiftgroup.com/why-windows-phone-will-fail/) about the reasons why Windows Phone will have problems in gaining popularity. As parts of the initial difficulties have been won, it is time to tell why Windows Phone has possibilities to win.

There are currently two visible trends in the use of ICT. The one that is approaching its highpoint is so popular that is has been given own acronym, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). The second that is still emerging has multiple names depending on the background of the person speaking about it. It is the need to provide consistent user experience on a service independently on the device that the user has.

The consistent user experience covers both inside the corporate services like shared calendars or CRM systems, but more importantly also the services that a company provides to its customers. For instance, a company selling books wants its appearance to be the same across the platforms, and book buyers to be able to change a device while they are in the process of selecting a book.

BYOD has been driven by cool Macs, iPhones, and iPads. Highly paid executives and professionals have used them for working, even though they had been given corporate standard tools. The corporate IT departments have decided that it is better, from security and minimizing wasted working time standpoints, to support the BYOD devices instead of suffering the problems caused by smuggled-in devices.

But the very reasons that have made Apple the winner in the BYOD trend are going to be sources of problems for it in the consistent user experience trend. Even though the user interfaces in Apple devices resemble each other, and the user can share data across the devices all by him/herself with the help of iCloud, from a service provider view each of the Apple devices is a separate empire. The user has to download a service provider’s app separately to each device and the service provider has to cope with different rules of providing apps on different platforms. If the service provider chooses to use a Web browser instead, Apple environments do not offer any specific advantages for him.

Microsoft has approached the challenge differently. It aims to provide a consistent user interface across the platforms for basic services. Corporates can then build their own user experience by using HTML5, which works also on Apple and Android phones.

During recent years, while Apple has been conquering the end-user mindshare, Microsoft has quietly won an increasing position in the plumbing department. For instance, telecommunications operators have taken Microsoft technologies like LYNC as part of their offering. Thus, when the corporate IT guys want to improve the security and management over the BYOD devices that the users have selected, they tend to lean on Microsoft approaches.

Even though right now Microsoft appears to be a good guy using standards based solutions like HTML5, the history has shown that they know how to build a hidden agenda to gain long term competitive advantage. We will start to see it only in a couple of years.

To put money where my mouth is, I have purchased Nokia shares this fall.

 


December 13, 2011
What if Nokia’s strategy makes some sense?
  • Posted By : admin/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Blog , Mobile phones , Nokia

Posted by Antti Pekkanen:

Nokia’s epic fail with Symbian, Elop’s ineptness to communicate a new smart phone strategy and a general slowness in operative execution in all fronts, has left the outside observers in a state of full and total confusion. What is happening and why this ‘fly-or-die’ WP strategy were chosen even though many other less risker, but still potential strategies would have been on the table.

Situation goes even more twisted now, when the only Meego phone, N9, has been recently launched and almost all reviewers has given it a very postive feedback – even Engadget.com, which is well known of its biased and patriotic views. User experience based on buttonless swipe action has been described as – really intuitive, natural, fluid, fresh, completely and utterly irresistible and, as natural as anything the smartphone world has yet introduced.  Clearly Nokia has created something that would be far too stupid to just throw away.

Fortunately, there is path that can make sense and explain at least some of these oddities. What if it is so that that the increased R&D efforts in low end mobile phone range, the propriatery S30/S40 OSs, are related Meego or better to say Maemo 6 and its next versions. Namely,  N9 is not actually a Meego phone, it is Maemo 6 with a very distinctive separation with Meego OS. Instead of it being Fedora based and having an RPM package management like the true MeeGo OS, Nokia N9′s Meamo 6 OS uses a Debian-based linux with DEB package management just like the N900. This means that Meego never reached commercial level, N9 is just a next version of Nokia’s Maemo Linux project which started already five years ago. So if Meego was too late and too little for smartphone segment and therefore deserved a death sentence, why not to keep Maemo 6 and make it the next low end segment OS. Meego is dead, long live Maemo!

Maemo could replace S30/S40 operating systems while HW performance are increasing and low end phones are able to run it. This is not in a distant future but is here today. Nokia just revealed new Asha series which runs on S40 with 1GHz processors, just like N9!  Low end mobile phones are more like smartphones very soon. Maemo is a license free, lightweight and easily down- and upscaleable for each and every HW setup and price point.  Qt development tools would be ready to compile Symbian and linux apps, forming already a sizeable low end application ecosystem. A simple fact is that WP7 can never be really profitable in sub 100$ phones. Already Microsoft licensing fees make sure of that in addition to resource requirements and processor architecture restrictions WP7 puts on mobile phone hardware.

This would also really leverage Nokia’s undisputable asset: Clearly over 1 billion daily Nokia users, a number that will easily be 2 billion by 2015. Recent 3Q2011 figures show that Nokia’s low end phone business is running strong. It is selling in high volumes, with a very low average price point (32eur) but still making over 10% net margin. That is something Chinese copy cats can’t do.

There are already some hints to this direction. Nokia is porting a very popular maps applications to S40 making it more like smartphone kind of OS.

However, the ‘project Meltemi’, which leaked out lately, shows that Maemo adoption to the low end phones is really strongly on cards. Meltemi is most probably Maemo 7, just like Harmattan was a code name for Maemo 6. That way Nokia could utlize all remarkable R&D efforts they put on N9 development, like the praised swipe UI, and really leverage it through “next billion” users.

This strategy is wise also in terms of competing against Apple IOS and Google’s Android. As it is well known, it is much easier to move up from low end market than to move down from high end market, basically in every high technology sector.

What about WP7? Honestly, I don’t know. It’s entirely different story and just as risky as market currently considers it.


October 3, 2011
Why Windows Phone will fail?
  • Posted By : admin/
  • 3 comments /
  • Under : Blog , Innovation , Microsoft , Mobile phones , Nokia

Posted by Jussi Autere:

The verdict is still open, whether Windows Phone will become a success story or not. But the reasons why it will fail, if it fails, are already visible. Unfortunately, the reasons are the very familiar ones for all the large, mature organizations pursuing innovation.

A week ago, I was in seminar organized by the Finnish Software Entrepreneurs Association to present Microsoft-Nokia ecosystem. In the presentation of the concept of the ecosystem, there was striking but at the same time expected phenomenon. The figure presenting different players in the ecosystem obviously had all the important players like carriers and application developers presented. It obviously presented the view of the important parts of the ecosystem by its sponsors.

There was still one player vital for the ecosystem that was not presented in the figure. This, obviously not so important player, was—the customer.

The fact that the understanding of customer needs is not in the driver’s seat for the builders of Windows Phone and Microsoft-Nokia ecosystem is already producing consequences.

One example is the data protection policy of the operating system. The different applications have direct access only to data that is produced the application itself. If the application wants to access data belonging to other applications, it has to ask the user explicit permission, always. This will mean that the user becomes a rubber stamp giving Oks, if someone does not develop an illegal bypass for that.

Another example is the certification principles of software developers. As its common practice has been, Microsoft is building different certification processes for its partners to increase their sunken investment, and mental barriers of exit for developers. The applications will be checked and accepted by Microsoft or Nokia before they can be published.

What is currently lacking in the mobile world is a way for smaller companies to present their services and products. The teenaged nephew of a small business owner should be able to produce it and publish it immediately. The planned certification and acceptance processes do not address this need.

If Microsoft and Nokia want to improve the success probability of Windows Phone, they should put their focus on the area that is always the key source of innovations and growth: understanding customer needs better.

 


September 9, 2008
Nokia Don’t Know Services
  • Posted By : admin/
  • 0 comments /
  • Under : Alexa , Blog , failure , Nokia , Ovi , ranking

Nokia is the indisputed leader in mobile phones.

However, their track record in the services business (that Nokia stresses as a major growth avenue) is rather sad.
Case in point: the much hyped Ovi portal.
Latest Alexa rankings place Ovi as the 17.840th most popular web site globally. Such Finnish language giants as www.kuvaton.com, www.nettimoto.fi, www.aapeli.com and www.riemurasia.net handily rank higher than Ovi.
Surely, given the amount Nokia has invested in Ovi, this has to be one of the worst bang-for-the-buck cases in the history of the Internet.

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