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More on Windows Phone 8: AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have promised to support WP8, and...
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Wednesday, June 20, 2012, 6:23 PM ETMore on Windows Phone 8: AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have promised to support WP8, and Samsung, HTC, and Huawei are joining Nokia as initial hardware partners. Also, Zynga (ZNGA) says it will develop games for WP, and Qualcomm (QCOM) boasts all WP devices currently available run on its processors, while adding WP8 models will use multi-core Snapdragon chips. Broad industry support for WP8 could leave little room for BlackBerry 10 (RIMM) to emerge as a "third ecosystem."
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This news story has 38 comments:
I can't wait to see Nokia WP8 phones and tablets. Yes, Nokia will make tablets that run WP8. Why not is's now a full blown W8 OS core with phone functionality.
It fits right in to the XBox home server with Smart Glass media app and Verizon's one data plan mutilple devices no messaging or voice charges. That'll be a Nokia Fluid tablet for each member of the household to play games and watch their own TV shows.
Are you surprised to see Mr. Softy sign up these big phone OEMs without giving NOK more time and air under its wings for NOK WP offerings? What exactly did MSFT pay its $1B for? An advance against royalties? At least this announcement should once and for all kill rumors that MSFT was going to buy NOK.
I'm actually starting to think that MSFT might actually have a compelling ecosystem that will certainly be attractive to two huge audiences -- the corporate crowd and the gamers around their Xbox. Apple will continue to grow its base and win big in China if NOK does not get China Mobile -- but you can make a pretty decent case for MSFT in North America... I'm probably going to start accumulating some MSFT (currently hold both AAPL and NOK)...
All the very best,
Don
I'm probably over thinking.
Nokia does sell the Lumia through China Telecom: http://bit.ly/LiYeQu
No, WP has been open to any and all ODMs that play by Microsoft's rules. That's always been the case. The WP brand needs all the recognition it can garnish to reach critical mass. I still have a lot of questions about Samsung, Android and Bada and I'm sure MS does too. We have to see how Nokia's cash flow looks in next earnings on 7/19/2012. I think their cash burn rate show go down to about $150-250m a quarter; -.04 to -.07 EPS. Hopefully Lumia units will come in at 6-10m units. Afterwards it's all about waiting for WP8 devices and announcements.
Oh, an $0 debt. I know I work at a company that used to have 2k employees and we never made $1 billion in a year.
RIMM is still the preferred platform for most corporate IT folks who support large on the road contingents. Imagine a small island in the sea... "Damn, what a large moat we have!"
(We can't grow much, but we are safe... Fortress England!)
The problem for RIM is that, while the subscriber base is increasing, the sales of new Blackberries is falling. Perhaps fewer subscribers are upgrading to new Blackberries. I've seen reports about companies whose employees carry Blackberries only for corporate communications and use iOS or Android phones for everything else. Those employees don't need new Blackberries unless theirs becomes unusable.
One also needs to put these numbers into perspective. RIM has 78 million subscribers. Apple sells that many iPhones in about 7-8 months. There are over 350 million iOS devices (iPhones, iPads, iPod touches). Apple has over 400 million "subscribers" to the iTunes Store. As of the end of April, 125 million users had signed up for iCloud. These aren't directly comparable to RIM's subscriber base, of course, but they put the 78 million number into perspective.
To put this more into perspective, when RIMM shares were this low previously, they had barely 500thousand users on their system in 2003. In 2010, when they started adding employees, they had 45miilion users on their system.
http://econ.st/FQeqcK
Further perspective, there are more BlackBerry users than there are Mac OS X desktop and laptop users. If you want an even bigger base and faster growth, look at where Google Android is on the chart in that article.
The suggestion that in order to be viable or profitable, a company must beat Apple, is ridiculous and meaningless. Samsung already passed Apple in smartphones as of the last quarter of 2011, yet Apple is still pulling in huge profits. Nokia still has a larger overall mobile phone share than Apple, yet struggles for profits. Market share is meaningless, unless the market is saturated, and it is not yet at that point. Facebook has over 900 million "subscribers".
http://seekingalpha.co...
I already went over many of these things in this article, and I don't want to re-type that here as a comment. Apple is expected to have 17% to 20% of the overall smartphone market by 2015/2016, which implies more than double the volume of iPhones now being sold as an annual sales volume. Beyond that point is market saturation, and customer retention will be more important.
Ask yourself why Sony, LG, HTC, Motorola and Nokia all continue to make smartphones, when they cannot sell as many each year as RIMM. My feeling is that when you see these companies disappear, one by one, then that will lead to very few vendors left on the market. We may reach a day when you walk into a store for a new smartphone, and your only choices are Apple and Samsung, but we are certainly not near that day yet.
I think the American view of BB is distorted. BB is or never has been nowhere near as important a player on mobile market in other parts of the world as it has been in US. I personally have never even seen a BB phone in flesh even if I've been using smartphones from day one when Nokia introduced the original Communicator 15 years ago.
Well, they're "growing" at a negative rate--sales are falling, as are revenues. As for "profit," last quarter, they didn't make any--they had a loss. RIM has predicted another bad quarter or two--i.e., more losses. Don't confuse "profit" with "cash." For example, a company can dump inventory at a low price and increase their cash while recording a loss on the inventory sold and any inventory left. (RIM did exactly that with the Playbook and, more recently, with older Blackberries.)
Suppose your car was supposedly worth $10,000, but, in order to raise cash, you sold it for $5,000. Your cash has increased but you have lost money.
Wouldn't it be one of FOUR ecosystems?
Remind me again...how many subscribers does Windows Phone have?
RIM is very sucessful in countries like England, South Afica, India, Thailand and Indonsia do to the low cost of owning a BlackBerry.
MS has to show what they have so far very little on the mobile front.
http://bit.ly/LGyONv