The tarnished Microsoft brand is exactly why it's the "Nokia Lumia", not the "Microsoft Lumia".

Assuming Microsoft do buy Nokia, as many people have speculated, I'm pretty sure they'd retain the Nokia brand for all mobile phone hardware.

>Toyota has an strong brand

Microsoft could do like Datsun and change to a better brand name. Meet the Nissan Phone 7.

>I find it hard to understand how people don't see the importance of brand loyalty in the face of Apple's extreme success.

That's not brand loyalty, that's marketing. The next company to market and design like/better than Apple will gobble that "brand loyalty" right up. Unfortunately that likely won't be Google or Microsoft.

Exactly correct on the brand loyalty, for example Motorola won the "loyalty" of virtually the entire mobile phone market in North America twice, once with the Star-Tac generation of phones and again with the Razr generation.

We all know what happened to them wen their products sucked too much for too long.

See, this is why Apple is winning. Because their competitors, analysts and other blowhards think it's just "marketing".

It isn't. But as long as people don't figure that out, Apple will continue to reap their rewards.

>market and design

Said blowhards have an equally shallow understanding of what design is.

I have wondered whether sales of WP7 would be better had they either named it something else (without the word windows) or have it owned by a separate/new company/subsidiary. Though I suspect that, for the time being, their lateness to market is the real killer (and the brand issue the ongoing on).