Strange article as technically now Nokia doesn't sell any phones
Quote:
Originally Posted by Emes
Nokia isn't selling phones anymore, so this article is titled incorrectly
This story covers the last quarter of sales, January to the end of March when Nokia was still selling phones. After the end of March Microsoft will take over and rebrand the phones with some really stupid name and do to Nokia what Google did to MotoMo... I hear a big lumbering aircraft going into a power dive...do you hear it too? God! The dynamic forces are incredible! Will it crash and burn or just break up in the air? It's a race to lose altitude... will Blackberry smack the dirt first? Or will Microsoft get there first? Stay tuned.
My money's on Blackberry crashing and burning first, only because they had a head start, but Microsoft has experience at this, they may use it to beat Blackberry to the "FINISHED" line.
However this ends up Google's stock will rise and Apple's will fall, because that's just the way the game is played.
What are you expecting? Sometimes a design is the best it can get. How many things do you use daily whose design is pretty much the same for the last 100 years?
Sometimes a design is only the best anyone can imagine it can get...
Sometimes a design is changed badly - change for change's sake...
And sometimes a design is a disruptor, and nothing after that is ever the same...
Wow in not a fan of the Samsung phones but selling more than Nokia and Apple combined is seriously impressive! 2 companies that together you would think would dominate from cheap to high end phones beaten by one company.
Apple made more money than Samsung and Nokia combined... I think that's the metric that counts, especially when Apple is not trying for market share but dominance at the high end with only three phones - two of which continue to out-sell any other smart phone on the market.
The real test is whether Samsung would switch their sales numbers for Apple's profits...?
Wow in not a fan of the Samsung phones but selling more than Nokia and Apple combined is seriously impressive! 2 companies that together you would think would dominate from cheap to high end phones beaten by one company.
Apple makes more in profit than Samsung (all divisions and products) and Nokia do combined.
Apple made more money than Samsung and Nokia combined... I think that's the metric that counts, especially when Apple is not trying for market share but dominance at the high end with only three phones - two of which continue to out-sell any other smart phone on the market.
The real test is whether Samsung would switch their sales numbers for Apple's profits...?
Depends on what each of their aims are. For the last few years Nokia have been spending to try and come in just under break even. Profit hasn't been a large aim of theirs as they need to get market share back on an upward trajectory and to do that they need to invest everything they can.
Who knows what Samsung targets are, at the end of the day though they've built their share of the market up to be bigger then Nokia, Apple and LG combined. And its not like they've done it by having cheaper phones, there all similarly priced and that is seriously impressive.
Who knows what Samsung targets are, at the end of the day though they've built their share of the market up to be bigger then Nokia, Apple and LG combined. And its not like they've done it by having cheaper phones, there all similarly priced and that is seriously impressive.
According to most evaluators, Samsung's smart phones are cheaper then Apple's 5c and HTC's M8, even if they cost the end user about the same.
According to most evaluators, Samsung's smart phones are cheaper then Apple's 5c and HTC's M8, even if they cost the end user about the same.
What do you mean by cheaper if your not talking about what the end user pays. Do you mean manufacturing cost or the price a retailer pays Samsung for them?
What do you mean by cheaper if your not talking about what the end user pays. Do you mean manufacturing cost or the price a retailer pays Samsung for them?
People who compare products find that Samsung's products are made crappier and are not as durable as Apple and HTC's products. A good part of Samsung's cell phone cost is advertizing and kickbacks to the sales force of Verizon, AT&T, et al. Over ten billion USD went to this use instead of improving the product. So much so, that Samsung damn near reported a loss on the division this last quarter.
I worked at Symbian when the iPhone came out. We had a company meeting about it, and a lot of people thought it wouldn't succeed because Nokia had the ecosystem and an established mobile business, and hey, everyone wants a physical keyboard, right?
Lots of ideas and talking points were raised, and the management did *nothing*.
I spent the next year working on a version of Symbian OS that was so very obviously years behind iPhone OS 1.
While I was there I watched Symbian go from a marketshare of about 74% to a little over 40%. Symbian messed up. Nokia messed up. I'm amazed Nokia are still selling their feature phones.
The Symbian "ecosystem" was rife with piracy, there was tons of ok software, the problem was no one wanted to pay for it.
Paying for things was one of the things Nokia's substantial fan base at the time, used to deride the iPhone.
When the App Store came along and developers started making some serious coin, Symbian became the burning platform Nokia had to leap from.
That and Symbian was like DOS, a lurching stumbling platform with so much tacked on and shoehorned in order to compete with more modern operating systems it eventually fell over.
Nokia's early touchscreen phones, the N97 and N97 Mini, the 5800, the N8 were absolutely awful.
The Apple hating Nokia fanboys drifted to Samsung...
I worked at Symbian when the iPhone came out. We had a company meeting about it, and a lot of people thought it wouldn't succeed because Nokia had the ecosystem and an established mobile business, and hey, everyone wants a physical keyboard, right?
Lots of ideas and talking points were raised, and the management did *nothing*.
I spent the next year working on a version of Symbian OS that was so very obviously years behind iPhone OS 1.
While I was there I watched Symbian go from a marketshare of about 74% to a little over 40%. Symbian messed up. Nokia messed up. I'm amazed Nokia are still selling their feature phones.
Thx for sharing. Very interesting to get first hand perspective. Sad for Nokia. But as u say, they were complacent.
The article does not speak high of Apple by comparing it against Nokia which is obviously not doing well in the market. The author should instead compare against the numero uno Samsung which is eating into Apple's market steadily!
Apple made more money than Samsung and Nokia combined... I think that's the metric that counts, especially when Apple is not trying for market share but dominance at the high end with only three phones - two of which continue to out-sell any other smart phone on the market.
The real test is whether Samsung would switch their sales numbers for Apple's profits...?
So, here's the problem with that: Apple was here before.
Back in the early '80s, Apple had damn close to 50% marketshare in microcomputers. But this funny thing happened, prices for other computers started dropping. Apple said "that's ok, we'll take the high end" and kept prices high. By the late '80s, Apple was building the best, most innovative computers out there, and losing marketshare like crazy. People weren't only ok with "good enough", they were buying absolutely unusable garbage, because you could get a PC clone for under $2k, but the cheapest Mac was nearly $3k. And they bought a lot of that unusable garbage. When we hit the mid '90s, it was even worse. Apple had moved to the PowerPC, had the best operating system out there, and marketshare had dropped like a rock. "Apple is dying" articles were everywhere, you could spend over $2k on an entry-level Mac system or under $1k on a PC.
What turned Apple around wasn't just innovative design and the best operating system out there, it was price cuts, especially at the entry level. The iMac sold for as little as $699, and the iMac was a complete system. A G4 tower started at about $1500, and outran anything x86. Apple computers were not only reasonable, they were a great value. Sure, you could spend more on a high end machine, but the low end was there, and was accessible.
Today we're dealing with the too expensive problem again. Apple could sell a $300 phone, and could do it easily. Apple could sell a $1000 tower Macintosh, and could do it easily (I know that one with absolute certainty, since I've built nice Hackintoshes for less. Apple can get much better part prices than I could ever hope to get buying retail). But Apple can't see the long term importance of marketshare, even though it damn near destroyed the company once.
So, here's the problem with that: Apple was here before.
Back in the early '80s, Apple had damn close to 50% marketshare in microcomputers. But this funny thing happened, prices for other computers started dropping. Apple said "that's ok, we'll take the high end" and kept prices high. By the late '80s, Apple was building the best, most innovative computers out there, and losing marketshare like crazy. People weren't only ok with "good enough", they were buying absolutely unusable garbage, because you could get a PC clone for under $2k, but the cheapest Mac was nearly $3k. And they bought a lot of that unusable garbage. When we hit the mid '90s, it was even worse. Apple had moved to the PowerPC, had the best operating system out there, and marketshare had dropped like a rock. "Apple is dying" articles were everywhere, you could spend over $2k on an entry-level Mac system or under $1k on a PC.
What turned Apple around wasn't just innovative design and the best operating system out there, it was price cuts, especially at the entry level. The iMac sold for as little as $699, and the iMac was a complete system. A G4 tower started at about $1500, and outran anything x86. Apple computers were not only reasonable, they were a great value. Sure, you could spend more on a high end machine, but the low end was there, and was accessible.
Today we're dealing with the too expensive problem again. Apple could sell a $300 phone, and could do it easily. Apple could sell a $1000 tower Macintosh, and could do it easily (I know that one with absolute certainty, since I've built nice Hackintoshes for less. Apple can get much better part prices than I could ever hope to get buying retail). But Apple can't see the long term importance of marketshare, even though it damn near destroyed the company once.
Except that the market share in the 80s wasn't of millions upon millions of devices. Very few people had a use for a computer back then.
If their market share is shrinking now it's not because they're selling less but because the market has out paced them in growth. Yes many people are settling for 'good enough', but that hasn't hurt Apple in any way. What happened in one era doesn’t necessarily mean it'll happen in another.
So, here's the problem with that: Apple was here before.
Back in the early '80s, Apple had damn close to 50% marketshare in microcomputers. But this funny thing happened, prices for other computers started dropping. Apple said "that's ok, we'll take the high end" and kept prices high. By the late '80s, Apple was building the best, most innovative computers out there, and losing marketshare like crazy. People weren't only ok with "good enough", they were buying absolutely unusable garbage, because you could get a PC clone for under $2k, but the cheapest Mac was nearly $3k. And they bought a lot of that unusable garbage. When we hit the mid '90s, it was even worse. Apple had moved to the PowerPC, had the best operating system out there, and marketshare had dropped like a rock. "Apple is dying" articles were everywhere, you could spend over $2k on an entry-level Mac system or under $1k on a PC.
What turned Apple around wasn't just innovative design and the best operating system out there, it was price cuts, especially at the entry level. The iMac sold for as little as $699, and the iMac was a complete system. A G4 tower started at about $1500, and outran anything x86. Apple computers were not only reasonable, they were a great value. Sure, you could spend more on a high end machine, but the low end was there, and was accessible.
Today we're dealing with the too expensive problem again. Apple could sell a $300 phone, and could do it easily. Apple could sell a $1000 tower Macintosh, and could do it easily (I know that one with absolute certainty, since I've built nice Hackintoshes for less. Apple can get much better part prices than I could ever hope to get buying retail). But Apple can't see the long term importance of marketshare, even though it damn near destroyed the company once.
In the 80's I spent $3000 on a 20 MB hard drive now I could buy hundreds of Terabytes.
So, here's the problem with that: Apple was here before.
Back in the early '80s, Apple had damn close to 50% marketshare in microcomputers. But this funny thing happened, prices for other computers started dropping. Apple said "that's ok, we'll take the high end" and kept prices high.
Actually Apple had close to 100% of the microcomputer market share in the very early '80s with the Apple Iie. THEN what happened was IBM entered the microcomputer business. The general saying back then was "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." The name IBM was spoken with a bit of awe in one's voice. The IBM PC was 16-bit to Apple's 8-bit architecture and could address more RAM... but most of all the outside of the box said IBM. The price was didn't begin until (1) Brand X computers became IBM-compatible, and (2) brand X computers began to outperform IMB computers, and (3) a price war broke out among Brand X computer vendors. The big problem with Apple was that they had nothing that was IBM compatible. It didn't matter what the price was, overnight Apple wasn't compatible. Then, during the IBM-compatible cat fight there was no advantage to building a computer that was as fully tricked out as a basic Mac. Everything was priced bare bones, and then plus a sound card, plus a hard disc, plus this and plus that.
By the late '80s, Apple was building the best, most innovative computers out there, and losing marketshare like crazy. People weren't only ok with "good enough", they were buying absolutely unusable garbage, because you could get a PC clone for under $2k, but the cheapest Mac was nearly $3k. And they bought a lot of that unusable garbage. When we hit the mid '90s, it was even worse. Apple had moved to the PowerPC, had the best operating system out there, and marketshare had dropped like a rock. "Apple is dying" articles were everywhere, you could spend over $2k on an entry-level Mac system or under $1k on a PC.
Thank God for the education market, because Apple's networking could be set up and maintained by a classroom school teacher... not so with the IBM-compatible. The school system saw the advantage of the Mac and has been fairly loyal to the brand. Even today, the mac is easier to set up and run on a network than a current IBM-compatible. The difference in cost of the hardware was more then saved by not requiring an IT person on every site. (IT kingdom-building was rampant in the corporate world and aided by Microsoft's buggy networking software, is still a safe profession)
What turned Apple around wasn't just innovative design and the best operating system out there, it was price cuts, especially at the entry level. The iMac sold for as little as $699, and the iMac was a complete system. A G4 tower started at about $1500, and outran anything x86. Apple computers were not only reasonable, they were a great value. Sure, you could spend more on a high end machine, but the low end was there, and was accessible.
No, no, a thousand times, NO. Hardware costs never was a saving aspect of Apple's success. It was the COST of ownership and the EASE of setup and use. The tag-line, "It just works," was what was Apple's constant user experience... and STILL is. Yes, Apple makes a headless Mac Mini, which is especially useful for users coming over from the dark side and want to use their monitor and keyboard from their old system, but long-time Ma users will buy the all-in-one iMac or a Mac Pro if they don't buy an Apple laptop of one kind or other. Apple's never been the low-price hardware leader in portable computers — ever.
Today we're dealing with the too expensive problem again. Apple could sell a $300 phone, and could do it easily. Apple could sell a $1000 tower Macintosh, and could do it easily (I know that one with absolute certainty, since I've built nice Hackintoshes for less. Apple can get much better part prices than I could ever hope to get buying retail). But Apple can't see the long term importance of marketshare, even though it damn near destroyed the company once.
You are only partially correct here. Apple's price keeps them from having more of the market then they now have. I don't argue that. However, Apple's prices also prevents their iDevices from being thought of as a "commodity" product. Apple is clearly thought of as a prestige product (Prestige refers to of a good reputation or of high esteem) by it's customers and of the general population. A company can't buy that mantle but a company can sure lose it by letting their brand stand for cheep in price or quality.
What we've seen happening since 2007 is that ALL of Apple's products carry the aura of a prestige product, so while the PC industry sales have been in a tail spin, Apple's Mac sales have generally increased. Price has not been a driver to Apple's sales numbers, people buy Apple products because they have an expectation of having a better experience. As a long-term Apple customer I have been bewildered by the kinds of problems PC owners are faced with regularly. Even very experienced PC owners fussing over their recalcitrant PC which suddenly stopped recognizing to a printer it can see attached to itself.
Comments
Strange article as technically now Nokia doesn't sell any phones
Quote:
Nokia isn't selling phones anymore, so this article is titled incorrectly
This story covers the last quarter of sales, January to the end of March when Nokia was still selling phones. After the end of March Microsoft will take over and rebrand the phones with some really stupid name and do to Nokia what Google did to MotoMo... I hear a big lumbering aircraft going into a power dive...do you hear it too? God! The dynamic forces are incredible! Will it crash and burn or just break up in the air? It's a race to lose altitude... will Blackberry smack the dirt first? Or will Microsoft get there first? Stay tuned.
My money's on Blackberry crashing and burning first, only because they had a head start, but Microsoft has experience at this, they may use it to beat Blackberry to the "FINISHED" line.
However this ends up Google's stock will rise and Apple's will fall, because that's just the way the game is played.
What are you expecting? Sometimes a design is the best it can get. How many things do you use daily whose design is pretty much the same for the last 100 years?
Sometimes a design is only the best anyone can imagine it can get...
Sometimes a design is changed badly - change for change's sake...
And sometimes a design is a disruptor, and nothing after that is ever the same...
Wow in not a fan of the Samsung phones but selling more than Nokia and Apple combined is seriously impressive! 2 companies that together you would think would dominate from cheap to high end phones beaten by one company.
Apple made more money than Samsung and Nokia combined... I think that's the metric that counts, especially when Apple is not trying for market share but dominance at the high end with only three phones - two of which continue to out-sell any other smart phone on the market.
The real test is whether Samsung would switch their sales numbers for Apple's profits...?
Wow in not a fan of the Samsung phones but selling more than Nokia and Apple combined is seriously impressive! 2 companies that together you would think would dominate from cheap to high end phones beaten by one company.
Apple makes more in profit than Samsung (all divisions and products) and Nokia do combined.
Apple made more money than Samsung and Nokia combined... I think that's the metric that counts, especially when Apple is not trying for market share but dominance at the high end with only three phones - two of which continue to out-sell any other smart phone on the market.
The real test is whether Samsung would switch their sales numbers for Apple's profits...?
Depends on what each of their aims are. For the last few years Nokia have been spending to try and come in just under break even. Profit hasn't been a large aim of theirs as they need to get market share back on an upward trajectory and to do that they need to invest everything they can.
Who knows what Samsung targets are, at the end of the day though they've built their share of the market up to be bigger then Nokia, Apple and LG combined. And its not like they've done it by having cheaper phones, there all similarly priced and that is seriously impressive.
According to most evaluators, Samsung's smart phones are cheaper then Apple's 5c and HTC's M8, even if they cost the end user about the same.
According to most evaluators, Samsung's smart phones are cheaper then Apple's 5c and HTC's M8, even if they cost the end user about the same.
What do you mean by cheaper if your not talking about what the end user pays. Do you mean manufacturing cost or the price a retailer pays Samsung for them?
What do you mean by cheaper if your not talking about what the end user pays. Do you mean manufacturing cost or the price a retailer pays Samsung for them?
People who compare products find that Samsung's products are made crappier and are not as durable as Apple and HTC's products. A good part of Samsung's cell phone cost is advertizing and kickbacks to the sales force of Verizon, AT&T, et al. Over ten billion USD went to this use instead of improving the product. So much so, that Samsung damn near reported a loss on the division this last quarter.
The Symbian "ecosystem" was rife with piracy, there was tons of ok software, the problem was no one wanted to pay for it.
Paying for things was one of the things Nokia's substantial fan base at the time, used to deride the iPhone.
When the App Store came along and developers started making some serious coin, Symbian became the burning platform Nokia had to leap from.
That and Symbian was like DOS, a lurching stumbling platform with so much tacked on and shoehorned in order to compete with more modern operating systems it eventually fell over.
Nokia's early touchscreen phones, the N97 and N97 Mini, the 5800, the N8 were absolutely awful.
The Apple hating Nokia fanboys drifted to Samsung...
...and that my friend, is now ancient history.
Thx for sharing. Very interesting to get first hand perspective. Sad for Nokia. But as u say, they were complacent.
Apple made more money than Samsung and Nokia combined... I think that's the metric that counts, especially when Apple is not trying for market share but dominance at the high end with only three phones - two of which continue to out-sell any other smart phone on the market.
The real test is whether Samsung would switch their sales numbers for Apple's profits...?
So, here's the problem with that: Apple was here before.
Back in the early '80s, Apple had damn close to 50% marketshare in microcomputers. But this funny thing happened, prices for other computers started dropping. Apple said "that's ok, we'll take the high end" and kept prices high. By the late '80s, Apple was building the best, most innovative computers out there, and losing marketshare like crazy. People weren't only ok with "good enough", they were buying absolutely unusable garbage, because you could get a PC clone for under $2k, but the cheapest Mac was nearly $3k. And they bought a lot of that unusable garbage. When we hit the mid '90s, it was even worse. Apple had moved to the PowerPC, had the best operating system out there, and marketshare had dropped like a rock. "Apple is dying" articles were everywhere, you could spend over $2k on an entry-level Mac system or under $1k on a PC.
What turned Apple around wasn't just innovative design and the best operating system out there, it was price cuts, especially at the entry level. The iMac sold for as little as $699, and the iMac was a complete system. A G4 tower started at about $1500, and outran anything x86. Apple computers were not only reasonable, they were a great value. Sure, you could spend more on a high end machine, but the low end was there, and was accessible.
Today we're dealing with the too expensive problem again. Apple could sell a $300 phone, and could do it easily. Apple could sell a $1000 tower Macintosh, and could do it easily (I know that one with absolute certainty, since I've built nice Hackintoshes for less. Apple can get much better part prices than I could ever hope to get buying retail). But Apple can't see the long term importance of marketshare, even though it damn near destroyed the company once.
Except that the market share in the 80s wasn't of millions upon millions of devices. Very few people had a use for a computer back then.
If their market share is shrinking now it's not because they're selling less but because the market has out paced them in growth. Yes many people are settling for 'good enough', but that hasn't hurt Apple in any way. What happened in one era doesn’t necessarily mean it'll happen in another.
So, here's the problem with that: Apple was here before.
Back in the early '80s, Apple had damn close to 50% marketshare in microcomputers. But this funny thing happened, prices for other computers started dropping. Apple said "that's ok, we'll take the high end" and kept prices high. By the late '80s, Apple was building the best, most innovative computers out there, and losing marketshare like crazy. People weren't only ok with "good enough", they were buying absolutely unusable garbage, because you could get a PC clone for under $2k, but the cheapest Mac was nearly $3k. And they bought a lot of that unusable garbage. When we hit the mid '90s, it was even worse. Apple had moved to the PowerPC, had the best operating system out there, and marketshare had dropped like a rock. "Apple is dying" articles were everywhere, you could spend over $2k on an entry-level Mac system or under $1k on a PC.
What turned Apple around wasn't just innovative design and the best operating system out there, it was price cuts, especially at the entry level. The iMac sold for as little as $699, and the iMac was a complete system. A G4 tower started at about $1500, and outran anything x86. Apple computers were not only reasonable, they were a great value. Sure, you could spend more on a high end machine, but the low end was there, and was accessible.
Today we're dealing with the too expensive problem again. Apple could sell a $300 phone, and could do it easily. Apple could sell a $1000 tower Macintosh, and could do it easily (I know that one with absolute certainty, since I've built nice Hackintoshes for less. Apple can get much better part prices than I could ever hope to get buying retail). But Apple can't see the long term importance of marketshare, even though it damn near destroyed the company once.
In the 80's I spent $3000 on a 20 MB hard drive now I could buy hundreds of Terabytes.
Times change.
Actually Apple had close to 100% of the microcomputer market share in the very early '80s with the Apple Iie. THEN what happened was IBM entered the microcomputer business. The general saying back then was "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." The name IBM was spoken with a bit of awe in one's voice. The IBM PC was 16-bit to Apple's 8-bit architecture and could address more RAM... but most of all the outside of the box said IBM. The price was didn't begin until (1) Brand X computers became IBM-compatible, and (2) brand X computers began to outperform IMB computers, and (3) a price war broke out among Brand X computer vendors. The big problem with Apple was that they had nothing that was IBM compatible. It didn't matter what the price was, overnight Apple wasn't compatible. Then, during the IBM-compatible cat fight there was no advantage to building a computer that was as fully tricked out as a basic Mac. Everything was priced bare bones, and then plus a sound card, plus a hard disc, plus this and plus that.
Thank God for the education market, because Apple's networking could be set up and maintained by a classroom school teacher... not so with the IBM-compatible. The school system saw the advantage of the Mac and has been fairly loyal to the brand. Even today, the mac is easier to set up and run on a network than a current IBM-compatible. The difference in cost of the hardware was more then saved by not requiring an IT person on every site. (IT kingdom-building was rampant in the corporate world and aided by Microsoft's buggy networking software, is still a safe profession)
No, no, a thousand times, NO. Hardware costs never was a saving aspect of Apple's success. It was the COST of ownership and the EASE of setup and use. The tag-line, "It just works," was what was Apple's constant user experience... and STILL is. Yes, Apple makes a headless Mac Mini, which is especially useful for users coming over from the dark side and want to use their monitor and keyboard from their old system, but long-time Ma users will buy the all-in-one iMac or a Mac Pro if they don't buy an Apple laptop of one kind or other. Apple's never been the low-price hardware leader in portable computers — ever.
You are only partially correct here. Apple's price keeps them from having more of the market then they now have. I don't argue that. However, Apple's prices also prevents their iDevices from being thought of as a "commodity" product. Apple is clearly thought of as a prestige product (Prestige refers to of a good reputation or of high esteem) by it's customers and of the general population. A company can't buy that mantle but a company can sure lose it by letting their brand stand for cheep in price or quality.
What we've seen happening since 2007 is that ALL of Apple's products carry the aura of a prestige product, so while the PC industry sales have been in a tail spin, Apple's Mac sales have generally increased. Price has not been a driver to Apple's sales numbers, people buy Apple products because they have an expectation of having a better experience. As a long-term Apple customer I have been bewildered by the kinds of problems PC owners are faced with regularly. Even very experienced PC owners fussing over their recalcitrant PC which suddenly stopped recognizing to a printer it can see attached to itself.