Ratings agency Moody's has lowered its debt rating for Nokia to near junk status, and warned that the company is facing even tougher times ahead.
Not exactly a shocking news.
That phone also runs the Mango operating system and it’s a gorgeous device, with an elegant shell beautifully crafted from a single piece of polycarbonate plastic. The operating software is smooth and fast. In many ways the Lumia 800 was the nicest phone I’ve ever used. It makes the iPhone seem old and outdated, and makes Android phones seem big and clunky.
I'm happy to learn that soon after I left Nokia it began to slowly recover from the crisis that started roughly at the time when I joined the company.
Designers are also, by training and predilection, inclined to design for the usual, where engineers are taught a kind of rigor that compels them to account for, and overweight, low-probability events.
Lots of interesting observations on Nokia culture from a former employee.
But my favourite is quoted above: it perfectly explains most of the conflicts between designers and developers I've witnessed (or participated in), ever.
Nokia’s basic OS strategy is sound, it’s the execution that’s severely flawed. MeeGo will make a good high-end OS, Symbian will be relegated to the lower end, and Nokia will be back in the race.
PPK's speculations on upcoming announcements from Nokia's CEO.
To relate the $3.9 billion for Devices into head count, they estimate that Symbian projects employ 6,200 people; MeeGo and Qt 1,800; Services 1,800; and S40 1,800. Hardware headcount is assumed to be 4,700 and 900 more for fundamental research.
What Nokia's money goes in comparison to Apple. Nokia puts much more into R&D, but it's also much less focused with its vast product lineup.
Now, take a look at China, which now has over 400,000,000 users on the Internet. As of June 2010, it also has 277,000,000 mobile Internet users, and almost all of those are Nokia/Symbian OS users. The chart above comes from a recent study by iResearch, and it shows that 65% of mobile Internet users visit the Nokia OVI store, and 58% visit the China Mobile-operated Mobile Market.
In case you wonder where the money come from.
Since 2006, Nokia brand development has been a playground for marketing people and some fashion designers based in Soho, London. At the same time external marketing offices from London have been creating campaigns and Web visuals for Nokia basically without no relevant definition or guidance from Nokia's side. Nokia brand directors, under SVPs and VPs, are from Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Disney and Nike, from companies without any connection to technology, gadgets, functional products or 'rocket science' visions - without competence, visions and customer understanding.
Good article for those who care.
"I don't want to hear any crap about something magical that the fine people of Yahoo are supposed to do in this short time, so fuck off," Bartz told Michael Arrington, editor of the influential blog TechCrunch, in front of an audience of technology gurus at the annual TechCrunch Disrupt gathering in New York.
In not totally unrelated news, Yahoo! will team up with Nokia.
