Rumors of a Nokia-Microsoft-Gang-up have been all over the place in the last few days…and have just been confirmed.
Nokia has now issued a press release, the core parts of which are below:
Nokia plans to form a strategic partnership with Microsoft to build a global mobile ecosystem based on highly complementary assets. The Nokia-Microsoft ecosystem targets to deliver differentiated and innovative products and have unrivalled scale, product breadth, geographical reach, and brand identity. With Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform, Nokia would help drive the future of the platform by leveraging its expertise on hardware optimization, software customization, language support and scale. Nokia and Microsoft would also combine services assets to drive innovation. Nokia Maps, for example, would be at the heart of key Microsoft assets like Bing and AdCenter, and Nokia’s application and content store would be integrated into Microsoft Marketplace. Under the proposed partnership, Microsoft would provide developer tools, making it easier for application developers to leverage Nokia’s global scale.
With Nokia’s planned move to Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform, Symbian becomes a franchise platform, leveraging previous investments to harvest additional value. This strategy recognizes the opportunity to retain and transition the installed base of 200 million Symbian owners. Nokia expects to sell approximately 150 million more Symbian devices in the years to come.
Under the new strategy, MeeGo becomes an open-source, mobile operating system project. MeeGo will place increased emphasis on longer-term market exploration of next-generation devices, platforms and user experiences. Nokia still plans to ship a MeeGo-related product later this year.
Long-term mobile market pundits will probably remember the Microsoft-Palm-deal, which – back then – permitted the company wide-ranging customizations of Windows Mobile. Unfortunately. it looks like Nokia wasn’t able to get Microsoft to agree to that – Qt stays off Windows Phone 7.
This means that Nokia is an ordinary licensee just like all other WP7 heads: which puts them into the same issue pit of lack of differentiation.
In the end, I (like many other Nokia developers) am not too happy about this situation. But, fortunately, other platforms like RIM and Samsung bada remain…
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