Originally Posted by
independentvolume With Verizon's 822 outselling the AT&T 920 one would think Nokia would realize that giving AT&T any more exclusive phones would be a big mistake. Am I missing something here, or am I just using common sense like I think I am?
I think you are missing quite a few things.
While optimal situation for Nokia might have been to offer Lumia 920 for all the major US carriers, the market conditions didn't allow that option this time and compromises had to be made. Because of that fact alone it can't be said that the AT&T exclusivity has been a big mistake. It was the best choice that could be made in a very non-optimal situation.
The situation I'm talking about is how Nokia is currently supply constrained in Lumia handset production them being unable to meet the total market demand for Lumia devices. Basically this means that Nokia is selling every Lumia device they are able to produce and they could probably sell even more if they could actually manufacture more of them. While the situation is slowly improving, Nokia is still expecting it to continue for the whole duration of 2013.
So, Nokia was in a situation where they knew that they can only produce a limited number (let's say 1M, a nice round number) of Lumia 920 units for the whole US market. After contemplating the conditions, instead of trying to offer some stock for each major carrier they decided to go with a exclusive deal with AT&T that would get all of those 1M Lumia 920s. Nokia probably felt that they would be able to sell all of those devices anyway, so they just went for the carrier that gave them the best deal for them. Given how even AT&T as the only carrier for Lumia 920 has had some serious supply problems with them, I can't even think how bad it would've been if the limited stock would have been divided between several carriers.
tl;dr Nokia would not have sold a single unit of Lumia 920 more if it would've been available for Verizon and T-Mobile too.