On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 10:17:17PM -0400, Brad Alexander wrote: > I offer, as a case in point, Nokia. It just seems too coincidental that > they hire a former MS exec in the person of Steven Elop, and within 3 > months decide to re-close-source Symbian, scale back their successful > Linux smart phone line, scale back their Linux offerings to R&D > only...Which includes dropping out of their alliance with Intel on Meego. The two scenarios aren't the same in my mind. In the case of Skype, a company was purchased by Microsoft. In the case of Nokia, they remain a separate entity, not purchased by Microsoft. However, I agree with Stephen Elop- their platform was burning. They had their hands in so many baskets, it's hard to believe they were still surviving. Even before the announcement to close shop on Symbian, depart from QT, drop MeeGo and go practically entirely Windows phones, many people I talked with, wondered what the goal of Nokia was. I think the switch to Windows Mobile 7 is suicide to the dying company, but that's my own opinion. > Their Mac support used to include MS office, back in the mid 90s. I know > IT people from that era that said the Mac version of Office was so buggy, > thanks to their putting the Intel debugging symbols into the Mac version, > that entire IT departments switched from Mac to PC running Windows. Microsoft continues to ship Mac versions of Microsoft Office, and from my limited experience, I find it behaves better on Mac than on Windows, and there are features in the Mac version that don't exist in the Windows version. So, I don't know what you're driving at. Microsoft is continuing to support Office on Mac OS X, a platform they certainly don't need to support, with barely 12% of the desktop market share. > I can believe this in the short term. Why lose half of your customer base > out of the gate? 1/2 of their customer base? Are you implying that of all the subscribers to Skype, 1/2 of them are on GNU/Linux? Even knowing that the GNU/Linux desktop market share is less than 2% of the total worldwide? That's a bold statement to make. Have something to back that up? I would imagine instead that the GNU/Linux users of Skype is less than 2% of the total, as would be on par with the desktop market. -- . o . o . o . . o o . . . o . . . o . o o o . o . o o . . o o o o . o . . o o o o . o o o
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