Well, Plan A seems to be hitching their wagon to the richest and most powerful software company in the world who has pledged to give billions of dollars plus rights to customize a modern mobile operating system. So comparatively, Plan B is just sour grapes.
> Plan A seems to be hitching their wagon to the richest and most powerful software company in the world
... the same company that has been trying for more than a decade to produce a marginally adequate phone experience and has been consistently failing, with great comedic value, in each and every attempt to challenge whoever is the market leader at a given point. Nokia, who was the leader of this market on more than one occasion, is hitching their wagon to a goldfish who seemingly can't learn from past experience.
Sadly, this Plan B has zero chances of flying. The board is on Elop's side because they are betting Nokia is doomed and the billions Microsoft will inject will give them both time and some added value when they gut the company to sell its parts a couple years from now.
Remember the old adage about Microsoft: "It take them 3 god to get something right"? (1) Windows Mobile, (2) Kin, (3) WinMo7
Have you used WinMo7? It's really nice (and this from an Android fan).
I'm not sure it will save Nokia, but read a few reviews of WinMo7 ans go and have a play before you dismiss it entirely.
(Edit: WinMo7's biggest problem is it's name. "Windows" is a huge liability because everyone associates it with desktop windows even though it shares no common code at all)
[Edit: reading further I've found Windows Mobile 2003 (and, I assume, 2003 SE) was based on CE 4.2, so numbers 5 and 5.5 should become 4.x and following numbers reduced by one]
sorry if I've touched a nerve there. I've never said (on this forum or elsewhere) a bad word about WP7. I've never seen one but I'm quite willing to believe all the positive things I've read about it. I was just having a light dig at your '3 attempts' remark, that's all
The problem is that people think WinPhone7 competes with Google/Apple. It doesn't. It competes with Blackberry and will eat their lunch. If they can get some consumers to go along for the ride too it will be great but WinPhone7's differentiating feature will be a decent UI (better than blackberry and on par with Apple/Google) and excellent enterprise integration (which will be on par with blackberry), as well as leveraging the enterprise developer toolchain (Visual Studio). Once those are in place it's just a matter of offering incentives to get enterprises to ditch Blackberry. Blackberry is the next Lotus Notes.
People here (many/most of whom fall into the minority of people not using Windows as their exclusive OS) also seem to think that the Windows association is a bad thing, or that the average user is savvy enough to realise that the phone and desktop OSs have virtually nothing whatsoever in common under the hood.
If I were MS I'd double down on the association and launch a massive campaign based on their Office Win 7 phone apps, ensuring they enable a few token features that the Blackberry apps don't. Even if the extra "integration" is really superficial, enterprise IT purchasers aren't known for making the best decisions.
And this is exactly why MS will eat blackberrys lunch. Just wait until enterprise clients can order the Dell optiplex win phone 7 that acts just like a desktop as far as the IT staff is concerned. The first VS dev that shows a dashboard app that displays KPIs from the CRM to an executive will seal the fate of blackberry in that company. The only really powerful lockin that BB has is Pin to pin or BBM as I think they call it now. Phones arent yet powerful enough that a phone from 3 years ago still performs adequately, there are probably 3 or 4 cycles left to really change hardware/OS market share.
the difference between Blackberry and Lotus Notes is that Notes is and has always been universally despised whereas Blackberry has always had a very loyal following
I think the previous Microsoft phone efforst have been abysmal. The thinking was along the lines of 'windows is great, let's make a mini version'. That led them up a garden path, at which point iOS came along and blew everyone away.
However, the thinking coming from MS now is 'iOS (& android) are great, lets build one of those with a windows flavor'.
The resulting phone is actually rather good, and brings some genuinely new ideas that make an iPhone look a bit clunky and hard to use for some tasks.
I think the Nokia/Microsoft matchup is about the best both can do in a difficult situation. There are still a lot of Nokia brand loyalty out there, and having an as-good smartphone with MS software on it is going to convince a lot of people. I know I'd be serious about looking at it when it comes time to trade in my iPhone.
If that were true, you would see 90% of Mac users running Windows. Since that's not the case, and many Mac users bought their Macs in order not to run Windows, I'd say their OS has some weight in this.
I think you could equally argue that the hardware is given away to ensure that the software works in a consistent way - they are a full service company, they do both hardware and software, they offer [consumer] products that are ready to use.
