Nokia and Microsoft have announced that they are joining forces to take on the established leaders in the smart phone marketplace.In a joint event on February 11 in London, the chief executives of Nokia and Microsoft announced a new partnership, in which Nokia would move to Microsoft's mobile platform as its primary smart phone operating system and contribute its expertise in mobile to make Windows Mobile better.
This is something I like to refer to as "irony".
In all the conversations about smart phones here in the US, you seldom hear the name of the company that has been the world leader in cell phones for years. Recently, it seems, Nokia finally realized that nobody was talking about them—at least in a good way.
At the same time, Microsoft—which dominates the personal computer market, has been struggling to gain a foothold in the cell phone space again. Despite spending millions on marketing and advertising to pitch how much simpler the latest edition of Windows Mobile is to use than "other smartphones" (as in Google Android and Apple iPhone phones), Microsoft's Windows 7 Mobile is still just barely a blip in the consciousness of most smart phone buyers, lost in a sea of Android smartphones and Apple's arrival on Verizon.
Nokia's CEO, Stephen Elop, recently wrote in an internal memo to Nokia employees that the company was in the same position as a man on a burning oil platform facing a 100-foot jump into icy water: a choice between certain death and possible death. "Nokia, our platform is burning," Mr. Elop wrote, as the the Wall Street Journal reported. "It will be a huge effort to transform our company."
Elop, who was recently hired away from Microsoft, decided to turn to his old company for help. Nokia's own smart phone operating system, Symbian, has been abandoned by other phone makers over the past few years, and recently lost its leading position worldwide to Android.
What does this mean to you? Well, for one thing, it means better choices the next time it's time to upgrade your smart phone. And with Nokia focused on Windows Mobile, Microsoft's biggest problem—an absence of "apps" for Windows Mobile—may quickly evaporate.
But Nokia and Microsoft face the same problem Hewlett-Packard does: they're not just facing competitive phones, or competitive software. As Elop himself put it, they're facing competitive "ecosystems." Apple and Google have created a new universe of "app" makers around their platforms, and have already put down deep roots with wireless network providers.
If you're already the owner of a Nokia smart phone — and there are very few of those in the US — you're kind of out of luck, since the well for Symbian apps is about to run completely dry. Nokia had been planning to make Symbian completely open-source to take on Google, but was still the main company doing development work. Now, it looks like Symbian will be an orphan.