11.2.11 announcement concerns

[intellsys]

I have closely followed all the declarations and reactions since the Friday announcement and I must say I do have a couple of serious concerns:

In short, what I see ahead are quickly erroding revenues from existing Nokia platforms and nothing to replace them. Nokia CEO says the future is bright, but the question is how do we survive as Nokia developers until the future becomes pesent?

Our latest application launced in January sold very well till Friday and since than sales declined constantly : Saturday to 67%, Sunday to 55%, Monday to 34% and Tuesday to only 22% of Friday's volume. And Friday's volume was not the heighest of the previous week!

Has anyone else noticed such down slopes in sales? I do not think it is related with 11.2.11, it is too soon. But a major concern is at some point, before new WM7 Nokia phones are released we shall see such a decline. How can we compensate it?

On Nokia conversations I noticed a lot of Nokia employees requesting people to contact them and discuss. I really do not get it. Obviously most of the complains came form developers, you have our contact details, some of us are enroled in your programms, why don't you make the first step? Why don't you communicate us the important things directly? If developers are important to you why don't you address them directly?

The concern here is that we are in fact not such important to you as you say.

Is there somone at Nokia capable to resonable explain why support for all existing Nokia platforms has been retracted so sudden, before a viable solution is in place.

Do we have a Nokia WM7 SDK? Do we have DDP for WM7 devices?

In the last years I have wrote more than 100,000 lines of code for Nokia platforms, mostly Symbian, Java and some Qt. What Nokia expects now? for us to drop everything, buy a HTC device and go on Microsoft website and register as WM7 developers? As Mr. Elopp said , "emotionally" it is difficult, right. But we are professionals and we write code not only for fun, but also for proffit, so we shall do it. But I do not see any profit in it, maybe is just my lack of vision, or maybe not

[da32x]

Here are few thoughts from me (I am a Symbian/Qt developer):

1. I don't think that the sales are going down because of the Friday announcement. It is not very plausible. I do not have direct Ovi experience yet but I do have a lot of software selling experience and I can tell you that there are ups and downs, which are of random nature and are sometimes quite big. With that being said, I agree that the announcement was poorly handled and can have a negative impact on the future Symbian sales but not that big.

2. While it is certainly a bad news for Qt developers, at least Nokia had the decency to tell us up front so that we can react. For the time being I intent to continue developing for Symbian/Qt until there is no further market value and it may be years before this happens.

3. Of course Nokia cares about its developers. The problem is, that they think that the company survival is more important than the hurting the developers and they are absolutely right. I may not agree with the path that they have chosen but I do not have all the data or the expertise to judge it and obviously I am not objective on this matter because of time and money invested in Symbian/Qt.

I am sure that Nokia will do everything possible to help us with transition to Windows Phone when the time is right but right now it is too early for this. When Windows Phone captures some respectable market share the developers will come. Until then, their interest may be increased by contests, marketing help, etc. if it is deemed necessary.

[pixsta]

Has anyone else noticed such down slopes in sales?

The overall sales suddenly dropped for all products (~10) last week, but not on Friday but on Monday. I suspect that this is NOT related to the announcements but due to some reporting problem again. From time to time there seem to be problems with the reporting tool.

Regarding WP7: I hope and expect that there will be special SDKs from Nokia. Because at the moment WP7 is exactly the opposite of Symbian (many important APIs such as deep access to Camera or Sensors are restricted, thus not allowed in the Marketplace) and the overall system looks like in alpha-stage. If there is not a steep improvement in the SDK, then we developers will face a similar situtaion to 2-3 years ago with Symbian (were many APIs were only available for partners/money).

[Sasler]

I've have noticed similar dramatic drop in our sales in the past few days. Let us hope this is only temporary fluctuation.

Cheers

[OviStewey]

Hi

With over 200M Symbian devices in the market and and another 150M to be shipped, it makes good financial sense to continue to support the platform.

Thank you

[proberts]

With over 200M Symbian devices in the market and and another 150M to be shipped, it makes good financial sense to continue to support the platform.

Hi OviStewey-

Is there any announcement yet of which territories, which models, and over what time frame Nokia expects to ship the additional 150M Symbian phones? If not, do you know when such an announcement might be made?

[petrib]

Hi OviStewey-

Is there any announcement yet of which territories, which models, and over what time frame Nokia expects to ship the additional 150M Symbian phones? If not, do you know when such an announcement might be made?

Nokia may have an intent to ship an additional 150M Symbian phones, but it really depends on whether people will buy. As most of Nokia's phones is sold through operators and distributors, they must also convince them to keep buying, as well as the having to also convince the consumers. No buyers, no sales.