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Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.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.

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Agreed. And in even less time, he could have walked on stage with an unlocked Android-based smartphone. What would Nokia have to lose from offering such a device? Does the new partnership with Microsoft prohibit such a move? If so, it seems like a limiting move for a hardware manufacturer that harkens back to the early days of Windows.

I agree. I keep hearing comments about Nokia being late to the game... blalballba ...if they decided to use android instead of WP7. I don't see how that is an issue. As has been stated by Nokia, this is going to take 1-2 years to make the switch to WP7. Why don't they spend 1/2 of that time switching to a popular platform instead of an unpopular platform. I guess I'd have to be an ex Microsoft employee (like the CEO) to understand any of this zaniness.

I assume that they want to keep their hardware platform. And porting Android to that would almost certainly require opensourcing their baseband implementation and thus enable everyone else to build phones with similar architecture (ie. without dedicated baseband CPU).

I don't think being able to go without a dedicated baseband processor will be an advantage for more than one hardware iteration. It may be useful in featurephones, but not that much with smartphones.

It enables Nokia to manufacture cheap smartphones with good battery life. Some Chinese Android-based phones are starting to have comparable prices, but certainly not battery life.

For how long will that advantage exist? Would you like to lose performance on your game because your phone wants to chat with the cell towers?

I'm not so sure that would be good for Nokia.

This decision is an admission from Nokia that they aren't good at software.

If they went with Android they will need to write software to differentiate themselves from the myriad of other Android handsets.

By going with WP7 they are immediately differentiated (there simply isn't a flood of WP7 handsets out there) and Microsoft handles the software side.

EDIT: edited so it reads better.

That's not very viable at Nokia. The news would have been out roughly 15 minutes after they started working on the phones initially. Nokia is really tightly ingrained into Finnish life at this point. It's a huge part of their economy, and these sort of moves won't escape a leak.

They have to go this route. Pre-announce... and build like crazy.

> The news would have been out roughly 15 minutes after they started working on the phones initially

Don't develop top secret projects internally. Develop them in a separate office. In this case, since it's more of a software project, you can leave designers thinking they are designing a Symbian or MeeGo phone, engineers using a current N8 hardware and ship your programmers to Redmond so they can work on their port from within Microsoft.

That's what I think is scary about the deal. Without a clear date. It's just vapor. And it they don't bring a solid device to the market fairly quickly, it would be a bad deal for both NOK and MSFT.

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