Unfortunately he tied it to "Windows Phone",
a.k.a. Zune.net phone,
which cannot run real (native)
programs, cannot run programs written to Nokia's
multi-OS Qt
API, doesn't allow easy porting of 3rd party App code from
any
previous Nokia phone etc.
Windows Mobile, the last official phone
release of
which was version 6.5 could do all of these things. Windows
Embedded Compact (formerly Windows CE) can still do that but
no longer
includes all the phone components and is no longer
marketed by MS for use on
phones.
Even more ironically, Zune.net phone is implemented on
top of
Windows Embedded Compact, with the 3rd party App APIs
removed or disabled, so
it would be fairly easy for MS to
simply have said: "As a special feature
for Nokia's large
pool of existing App developers, the Nokia version of
Windows Phone will provide full access to most of the
Windows Mobile 6 APIs
and a preinstalled copy of the Nokia
Qt library and Nokia's licensed Java ME
engine, thus
allowing developers to quickly fill the Windows Phone
Marketplace
with ports of their current offerings for
Windows Mobile, Symbian, Meego and
Nokia S40, Nokia will
also provide Windows Phone versions of their many
original
Smartphone technologies. Such as the legacy Nokia formats
for
ringtones, rich text SMS etc."
Such an announcement would have been
much more profitable
for both Microsoft and Nokia.
But they made the
opposite announcement "The Windows
based Nokia phones will be artificially
limited to ensure
that none of the investments in supporting existing Nokia
technology will be worth anything, even the promises made
just weeks before
the change of leadership about how to
ensure that apps would run on future
Nokia phones no matter
what the OS will be kept. (expletitive) all of
you.".
That sent the entire industry running away from
Nokia:
- App developers (like me) lost real money instantly, and
felt we could no longer trust any promises from Nokia.
- FOSS people
lost access to the recently open sourced
Symbian OS (there has been little or
no work on a fork of
the last free version because patent lock-in clauses
prevent
other phone makers from picking it up without a license no
longer sold
by Nokia, and hardware keys prevent installing
modified code on existing
Symbian hardware).
- Telecoms, beside their own development investments
also
got the message not to trust Nokia to live up to any past or
future
contracts, which is not good when making long term
billion dollar investments
in infrastructure such as cell
towers, telephone exchanges, DSL rollouts,
truckloads of
cable TV decoders with built in PVR and other Nokia
products.
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