"If you’re going to kill someone, there isn’t much reason to get all worked up about it and angry. You just pull the trigger. Any discussions beforehand are a waste of time."
--Jim Allchin, Microsoft's Platform Group Vice President
Summary: The latest Vista Phony 7 problems show why Microsoft's Stephen Elop had Nokia commit suicide (for the interim elevation of Microsoft)
WE probably do not cover the Nokia story as much as we ought to [1, 2, 3, 4]. We foresaw the situation since the very first day when Elop entered Nokia and we wrote over a dozen posts on the subject before Elop made it all official, e.g.:
Several people have adopted our playful name for WP7, Vista Phony 7. "Vista Phony 7 Pay per Weight Edition launched," dented several people in recent days. They were referring to the bricking of phones [1, 2], which also resembles the 'bricking' of Vista-running machines following 'bad' patches (the machines would no longer boot, as we covered at the time). Microsoft's spin has begun to come out and Microsoft boosters like Peter Brightdo their thing while OpenBytesoffers a sanity check and Andrew Orlowski, a longtime MAFIAA and Microsoft apologist, says that "Microsoft bricking lesson bodes badly for Elop's Brave New Nokia" [via Homer et al.]
Earlier this week Microsoft issued, and then withdrew, a software update for its Windows Phone devices. According to Microsoft it affected "a small number" of users of Samsung WP7 phones. For some users the consequences were serious - the phone was "bricked", meaning it was not only non-functional, but couldn't be restored into a working state by the user.
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It's a nightmare for the manufacturer, because it requires an expensive return to a repair centre, and the customer, once burned, is much less likely to become a repeat purchaser. That "small number" may be as high as ten per cent.
Bizarrely, the patch didn't contain any new features. It was a notification about new features to come, the equivalent of that little alert you get in XP telling you that there's a new version of Software Update available - which really means you're several hours (and reboots) away from having an update to the system.
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He evidently has a low regard for Nokia's ability to get things done quickly, and so has handed Nokia's WP development to small teams, to work closely with Microsoft and in isolation from the juggernaut of the bureaucracy he inherited. In essence, he's created a skunkworks within Nokia, while the old company is destroyed around it.
Jobs did something similar when he returned to Apple. Elop's conundrum is that he still needs a large, complex administrative apparatus to produce modern phones.
Nokia is exposed and naked in the storm and has several open source technologies in its care. Nokia's agreement with Microsoft and the subsequent downgrading of MeeGo will have knock-on effects for the Linux ecosystem. Many smaller companies have been funded by Nokia to work on MeeGo, and withdrawal of funding could be damaging in other areas.
So yeah, there's just a little venting of frustration there but the final word is in where we've come TO and not where we've come FROM. Each app gets a little easier, we make fewer mistakes and we learn more tricks. More to the point – we keep on submitting apps, which should be filed under "actions speak louder than words."
Windows is just a mess and Intel knows that too. Nokia did not need Windows. Over the years it deliberately avoided Windows because it realised that it needed to have some control over the operating system and its features/cost. Elop has just bricked Nokia for Microsoft's benefit and we'll continue to deliver updates on the subject on a daily basis, under "Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo" in our lump of links. It is a serious case study demostrating Microsoft entryism. Elop even had a lot of Microsoft shares when he did this, and none of Nokia's. ⬆
The use of dark humour there hopefully helps illuminate what a lot of "modern" technology became like and how it interacts with human civilisation (to what ends and whose gain)
