Elop's choice: Microsoft and Nokia take a bruising
What now for IE9 on mobile?
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MicroBite Stephen Elop's decision to make Windows Phone the Nokia smartphone operating system of choice could be rationalized, even defended, right up until the point where Microsoft's new phone platform bricked Samsung Omina 7 phones.
Suddenly, and without any real explanation, Windows Phone 7 couldn't be updated on 10 per cent of phones. Imagine if a Windows Update wouldn't update 10 per cent of the Windows PCs out there.
Now, there's are questions over the operating system's reliably. And the incident highlights the hoops customers must jump through simply to update their phone's software.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is putting Internet Explorer 9 on the Mango release of Windows Phone later this year. That's right - IE 9, not something that's "IE-like". How will getting rid of Microsoft's creaky old browser for mobile change the browser market-share war? Will it mean Microsoft can shift attention from talking about Javascript, HTML5 compliance, and privacy?
And where, oh, where is Microsoft's Windows Azure appliance, promised with such fanfare last summer? The thing was supposed to arrive by now, from Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Fujitsu. And could the device's future be threatened by the new executive Steve Ballmer picked to lead Microsoft's business group responsible for Azure?
Join Reg software editor Gavin Clarke and All-About-Microsoft blogger Mary-Jo Foley on the latest MicroBite as they assess the impact of the Microkia Samsung bricking, look at where IE is headed, and put the microscope on Microsoft's new Azure man.
You can listen using the Reg media player below, or by downloading the MP3 here or Ogg Vorbis here. ®
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COMMENTS
Couple random comments
You know, I just occurred to me that for various reasons, smartphones need far more updates than "regular phones", but for various reasons, micros~1 needs even more than that, just to function without getting rooted at all steps of the way. So, yeah.
The major difference with iphone is that the iphone comes with a data plan. Even in traditionally much more sim lock freed Europe, there's very few iphones without a data plan. This allows them to leverage that fact, and being apple, they ruthlessly do. Nokia probably should basically insist that redmond make available updates any way at all. It's more work to make sure any delivery is good delivery, but they practically have no choice. Neither nokia nor redmond nor any other other manufacturers really have room to try and pull an apple here. The Danger product might've attained such a position, but we all knew how that fairy tale ended.
As to standards, well, redmond basically doesn't do those. Even the whole ooxml farce was an 11th hour excercise to try block odf from gaining traction. I find it interesting that it was osi that came up with the initiative to start developing ODF into an open standard and apparently _didn't ask micros~1_ for that dance. They tried to ignore that, but decided they couldn't after all, then did what any self-respecting bully would. And they did get away with it, even if the product is a complete dud. At least at our office everyone knows to refuse .docx from clients and ask for a non-x version of same.
It's not surprising ie9 is another excercise in catching up again. I notice a lot of "when it's there, it'll be great!" astroturf again, which frankly tires me out. Their installed base is still largely either corporates with an enterprise-y policy (hope they've learned something from ie6, but probably not), or the people that just take whatever comes standard with their system, preferrably what looks most like what they had previously. And you can't really blame the latter. What really should be the case is that browsers are indifferentiable on html features, but for a myriad reasons aren't, that in turn being a bad thing for interop.
Would be interesting to take an inventory to see how OSI survived after the generous helping of astroturf that redmond used to shoo their fasttracked-in-from-ecma standard-without-any-conformant-implementation through. Given that a lot of new members turned out to be shills with no interested in standards in general, "not very well" would be my guess, but I haven't kept up.
"right up until the point where Microsoft's new phone platform bricked"
And of course, no other phone OS has EVER had update failures.
Oh wait.... silly me.... of course, I forgot the RULES.
Rule 1) Anything that goes wrong at MS is uniquely bad, and proof that the company can't possibly last much longer without killing itself and everyone who has ever dealt with them.
Rule 2) Anything that goes wrong at Google is merely a blip in their path to global domination of every market in the world except those that Apple wants.
Rule 3) Anything that goes wrong at Apple DIDN'T HAPPEN.
How has Elop survived the value loss?
I continue to be amazed that major and minor Nokia shareholders haven't yet made the kind of fuss that would get Elop kicked out his CEO's office due to the simply huge loss in value that they've experienced from his announcement of the pair-up with Microsoft.
Looking at Nokia's (NOA3.DE - Yahoo's UK Finance chart) share price today compared with 9 February immediately before the announcement, the loss has been about 24.8%. When you combine that with the (admittedly sunk-cost) value thrown away with the effective dumping of Symbian (estimated at a value of $50Bn on it's own), MeeGo & Qt, the scale of the loss in shareholder value is just staggering.
Paris because like her I just don't understand...
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