The fact that a lot of people would have bought the phone doesn't mean it would result in profit. Lots of people by HTC phones, but that company is circling the drain. The problem is that an Android phone is a commodity. Its hard to differentiate yourself on the product side. That means you're in extreme price/specs competition. That drives profits towards zero, just as they are on other commodity platforms like the PC (Acer and Lenovo, for example, have abysmal margins). With Windows phone, Microsoft mostly keeps the spec war in check, and WP8 runs fine on 1G/dual 1.5 Ghz on a "flagship" phone.
You are misunderstanding his use of the word commodity and hence his point. He is using commodity in the sense that to satisfy the demand of the item the manufacturer is irrelevant to the buyer. Clearly not all phones as commodities. An iPhone is not the same as a Chinese knockoff.
Exactly, smartphones were relatively rare before 2005 or so, but even before the iphone there were a lot of people with symbian, BBs and treos, and now dumbphones are mostly of the disposable kind.
>>>> Exactly, smartphones were relatively rare before 2005
Actually DoComo pretty much made the smartphone what it is today. Japan was selling "smartphones" way back in 2001. It was the incredible revenues they generated that got the attention of US carriers.
What would you choose: small profits, or no customers? That's the choice.
Android was "IBM PC trick", and competititors trying to preserve high margins and differentiate their products will end like Amiga, Commodore or Atari.
What would you choose: small profits, or no customers? That's the choice.
Of course it isn't. What about "the potential for a great deal of customers"? I'm certainly not suggesting that MS has executed on this, but they're in the best position out of any second-tier OS. They have huge resources, the Xbox, a music subscription service, the whole suite of Live services, Office...
Like I said, they haven't exactly been successful despite these advantages. But if I were a failing handset manufacturer that had to tie myself to one available ship...
That seems rather shortsighted. Its not immediately important, but if Microsoft can establish and dominate in the Latin American market, then when that market begins to bring all of their citizens into the smartphone era (they're moving rapidly this way), Microsoft will be well positioned.
In fact, were they clever, MS would position themselves well in all of the non-1st-world markets (Indian sub-continent, Central America, South America, Africa, Asia). Its like playing Risk, they've got America, Europe, and Australia, but you can still hold on with the others.
I would have thought what is more important than market share in the developed world is good market share in the emerging economies like Latin America.
Strangely every report I see of this (also in e.g. Vietnam) stresses that it's due to the strength of the Nokia brand in these regions. A brand that Microsoft apparently didn't buy the rights to for use on smartphones.
Are you sure? I've read that old-Nokia is banned for two years from releasing phones with that brand but Microsoft-Nokia will not release any more smartphones with the Nokia name.
It still baffles me that it's so hard for anyone other than Apple to make a single well-polished device, all the way through. If someone gets the casing right, they'll still mess up UI transitions that are meant to be seamless, create laggy or inaccurate touch input, fail to run at 60 or 30 fps, or make hilariously ill-informed UI decisions in the most frequently used apps (clock, settings, camera, ...). What's the explanation for this phenomenon?
I think culture is a big part of it and promoting the right people. Most companies when it becomes the size of apple are riddled with politics and the people on the top get there not because they create/design great products but know how to play the "game".
One thing that strikes me about apple is their culture of secrecy. There are departments within the same company that are not allowed to talk to one another. When you have no idea what other people are doing, it's very hard to play politics and the only thing you can do is just do great work.
I think this is what Microsoft is trying to do by buying Nokia. It does fit with the Surface, which seems to have spurred OEMs to do a little better. It's hard for Microsoft to go to an OEM and critique the way they implement Windows without a functional example.
