The most amazing feeling, yesterday evening, of having fallen through the mirror into a bizzaro world where America is Europe, Apotheker is Elop and HP is Nokia. It's as though the Americans, unwilling to countenance a strong European player in the mobile phone industry, sent in Elop to administer the coup de grâce to Nokia, and now the Europeans have done the same to one of their industry giants in retaliation.
The feeling only intensified as I read through the details, noting the similarity of the arguments advanced for the decision, and the strange way that they both actually seem to be doing the very opposite of what they are saying. Let me explain.
With regards to Nokia, I was struck by Elop's statement that he wanted to move to a software platform that had a large "ecosystem" — shorthand I suppose for a large developer base *and* a large user base. Struck, because he promptly ignored the platform that had the largest ecosystem, Android (iOS not being an option for him, naturally), and chose the one that had if anything the smallest ecosystem, Winpho 7. Similarly, he said he wanted the platform that would best allow Nokia to distinguish its offerings from the herd — by which he undoubtedly meant the host of manufacturers offering Android based phones — but he ignored the fact that one of the reasons that those manufacturers love Android is precisely because it is so customisable, being open-source (think MotoBlur, HTC Sense, TouchWiz, ...), whereas Microsoft puts stringent compatibility and design requirements on manufacturers who want to use Winpho 7.
I still think that Nokia might have done better to dump Maemo/MeeGo while retaining its Qt-based presentation layer (the GUI, Touch UI, whatever you want to call it, and the user-facing apps), and to graft that onto Android, completely replacing Android's current, Java/Dalvik-based presentation layer and apps. That way Nokia would be absolved from any responsibility for developing the lower layers of the stack, which clearly Google are making a very good job of, and could concentrate their efforts on the UI layers and on tying the apps to Nokia's services. Indeed, given their current woes with Oracle, Google also might one day have been better off if Nokia had done that, since they would presumably have open sourced the code as they were doing with MeeGo. But I digress.
With respect to HP, Apotheker says he wants to move away from hardware and towards software as an engine for growth. So ... he dumps their biggest software asset, the proprietary WebOS...??? He blames the slowdown in the PC market on what he calls the "tablet effect", but clearly it's not just any old tablets, otherwise HP's own offerings would be doing much better: it's just *Apple's* tablets that are doing so well, and Apple's tablets run ... the proprietary iOS! And what was it, Leo, that has made Apple's operating system such a big deal? Why, it's the number of phones and tablets they've sold that run it! HP's PCs represented an excellent vector for insinuating WebOS into the market — as a quick-boot solution for those wanting just to browse the web and do emails for example — and WebOS represented HP's best bet for locking users into its software and services, as well as its hardware.
It's very odd. In the past decades, HP has steadily moved away from anything that required unique or original abilities in its labour force. It makes standard Windows PCs, and it's outsourced their manufacturing to the Far East. In recent years even the proportion of HP-specific design in its products has gone down — Asus design HP's PC motherboards for example. Apple on the other hand has gone in just the opposite direction. After the debacles of the old Mac OS and the Power Macs, Apple had to violently alter course and jump onto a bog standard Unix-like OS and bog standard Intel chips. Since then they've added customisation after customisation to their OS, moving it ever further away from its open source roots, and now they are designing their own ARM-based processors which it looks very likely they will soon be using in desktops and laptops. Every move they make is designed to increase user lock-in to their platform, while reducing the likelihood that their suppliers will be able to reverse engineer and mimic their offerings.
At least I have something to thank HP for. No one has less confidence in Autonomy than the UK stock market's institutional players, and my 125 shares were showing a rather large net loss at close of business last night, after the general market landslide during the day, and on top of accumulated slippage over the past few months. Now that's all transformed and my investment is showing a lovely 55% gain. Thank you so much HP, may your every endeavour be crowned with success!
No comments:
Post a Comment