Stefan Mileschin

Bernstein Research analyst Pierre Ferragu, has been consulting his Tarot cards and become convinced that Nokia's second big Windows Phone push is doomed.

In a warning to shareholders, he said that Nokia's stock had almost doubled since 2Q results, but nothing at the company was particularly good.

Ferragu said that it was the right time to have a short position in Nokia, with Nokia World next week and a risk of a warning in September.

He said that the big problem is that people do not want Windows 8 phones.

Ferragu said that research shows that for many years, poor sales of Windows-based phones stem from a deep and stable lack of consumer interest for the product.

He said that despite numerous and repeated efforts of manufacturers Nokia, Samsung and HTC to establish an alternative to Android and Apple based on Windows, they had not worked.

This was not the fault of the technology or the software. In fact Ferragu said the phones had strong features, good reviews and marketing support. But they only managed to corner to less than five percent market share.

Ferragu claimed that the lack of interest for Windows-based phones has been consistent in marketing surveys we have carried out across the globe over the last several years.

He believes that the situation of Windows in mobile phones is now very unlikely to recover.

Despite new developer opportunities presented by the coming Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 platforms, Microsoft's mobile "egosystem" will never catch up with iOS or Android.

This will be bad news for Nokia, which bet the farm on Microsoft's Windows 8.

http://news.techeye.net/mobile/peopl...windows-phones